Weird Tales, Volume 352

by Ann VanderMeer

  Yours sincerely,

  ________

  Eric Lis is the undisputed despotic ruler of the Aerican Empire (www.aericanempire.com) and his great joys in life include reading and writing fantasy and horror. Eric's fiction has appeared in such prestigious magazines as The Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience.

  * * *

  THE MAN WITH THE MYRIAD SCARS

  by Ben Thomas

  He finished each of his performances by seeming to die.

  When his skin was a wild landscape of gashes and bruises and more of him lay on the floor than on his bones, he would collapse onto the concrete stage. His assistants would shroud him in a tarpaulin and remove him from the room before any questions could be asked. But he always reemerged for the next show as a whole man, ready once again to receive the adoration of his audience, and a fresh set of wounds.

  I had first come to know him, or at least to know of him, when I was teaching an unspeakably dull class entitled Postmodern Theory and Current Trends in Performance Art, or ART3075, as the registrar had coldly termed it.

  The evening's lecture was on performance art of the 1970s, such as the life-threatening pieces performed by Burden and Abramovic. Afterward, I opened the floor for questions, and called on a junior photography major named Emily. She mentioned a current artist whose work reached well beyond the limits of the pieces I was describing.

  “His name's Judas,” she said. “Or, that's what they call him. He performs at a few venues around here.”

  “You've seen him in person, then?”

  She paused. “Well, no, actually. I've heard it's tough to get through. Sick shit; really violent.”

  “Your own work is hardly Rococo,” I replied. “How can you be sure it's not just publicity?”

  I turned to the class. “This brings up an interesting point,” I said. “A lot of shock artists will use word of mouth to spread horrible rumors about their shows. It's a technique that dates back to the old traveling freak shows: ‘Dare you look upon these horrors?'”

  Emily frowned, and bit her nail.

  “That's what I meant,” she shrugged. “He's probably just a worthless hack.”

  “And you can say this without having seen his show?”

  “I have a show-card,” she fished it out of her bag. “You're probably a better judge than I am.”

  It was a white index card, with the name “Judas” scrawled across the top. Beneath the name was an address. If memory served, it was in an industrial district that had lately been appropriated by the crowd of hipsters and self-proclaimed hierophants who descended upon such blocks.

  So it was that I found myself cruising cluttered one-way avenues at twelve-thirty on a Thursday night. It turned out to be a tiny brick front bearing only the address. A squat, sour-faced scenester sat in a folding chair out front, and dragged on a dark cigarette.

  He hardly acknowledged my presence, so I asked him if this was the place to see Judas.

  “Ahh, ‘What's the only thing a man can do,' right?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “First time? It's a riddle his disciples pass around: ‘What's the one thing a man can do that God can't?' Sort of a secret handshake.”

  “And what's the answer?”

  He grinned and gave a half shrug; as if to say it was all so much publicity patter to him.

  “Fifteen,” he muttered.

  He counted my money and held the door for me.

  Before and beneath me was a narrow staircase bordered by brick walls, their chipped paint giving way to a spattering of gray concrete, a rash of neglect and poverty. The music that drifted and echoed upward toward me reflected a sensibility for Gregorian chant, underlain with strains and drum-lines of tribal inspiration.

  At the bottom of the staircase, I stepped into an ocean of churning red lights. Bodies were packed in the tiny space like meat in a warehouse, dripping sweat and reeking of the diverse scents of flesh. The mass of entwined limbs and rocking torsos showed no reaction to my presence. Pulsing, swaying, they beat like cilia to the deliberate rhythm of the dance.

  They were all tripping on something, I thought. The song was reaching a climax, driven by increasingly intense drums and wailing strains of bleating horns. Dripping with sweat, the participants bent and twisted with a passion approaching agony.

  Weaving a path around the back of the room, I discerned a clear area at the opposite side of the crowd. A waifish, androgynous figure, clad in leather, was setting a glass bowl atop a wooden stool, while his burly counterpart opened a canister of cleaning solution.

  At last, the drums crashed into silence, and the masses stood still.

  From somewhere indistinct, he appeared.

  The man might have emerged from the crowd, or from the shadows surrounding the stage; to this day I'm unsure how he achieved his entrances. One can hardly explain the sensation that somehow, one's eyes have somehow misconstrued the sight before them, and transmitted to the brain that a man has materialized in plain view, from nowhere, or from no distinct point. It hardly looked like a magic trick; it appeared natural in its way, but I doubt I could explain why.

  Clad in a shabby robe that shrouded his face, he shuffled to the center of the clearing. The area was small enough that he stood no more than five feet from the nearest audience members. They did not press inward or jostle each other; their attention was serene, almost worshipful.

  Surrounded by this silent admiration, he drew back the hood of his robe, and let it fall to the floor. His head was shaved, bathed in crimson shades from the lamps above. Scars of varying sizes and shapes covered his skin, from the nape of his neck to the angular clefts of his hips. He wore a pair of low-slung pants sewn of some rough fabric; they hung to his knees and frayed into tatters at the cuffs.

  He closed his eyes. In a smooth, meticulous motion, he lifted the bowl to his colorless lips, and sipped the fluid. The sharpness of his Adam's apple bobbed in his craned neck as he gulped.

  And still he swallowed, until he began to gag and splutter, but his arms remained raised, and the solvent poured in rivulets from the corners of his mouth, pattering and spreading on the floor around his bare feet. After an interminable period of such choking, the last of the contents of the bowl slid down his throat, down his chest, and onto the stone around him. He gasped; deep, liquid breaths intermingled with hacking coughs.

  He gently returned the bowl to its wooden stool. He froze, his eyes still shut, swaying slightly and clenching the corners of his mouth in a nearly imperceptible wince. Without warning, he bent over the bowl, grasped the seat of the stool from both sides, and voided his stomach into the container from which its contents had spilled. His vomit was pure, clear liquid; no other substance had mingled with the chemical in his belly.

  Up to this point, I experienced only the mildest sense of surprise. I was, in fact, growing irritated with myself that I had wasted my night on such a clearly childish shock piece. The atmosphere of the dance had claimed me, I thought, but my jaded emotions could not be manipulated so easily.

  Then one of his assistants passed him the hooks.

  With a look of what appeared to be genuine terror on his face, the performer thrust the six-inch rods into his abdomen, and pulled outward. The crowd gasped in a collective ecstasy of stunned horror. I instinctively turned away, but I forced my eyes back to the performance. I had seen men hang themselves from crosses; I had watched women walk on broken glass. I would not be conquered by a masochistic stunt.

  But the scarred artist had only begun his ritual. For the next ten minutes, he inflicted agonies, abjections, and sufferings on his body for which the terminology of art has no descriptors. Perhaps there were analogous procedures in medieval surgery, or in the chambers of Mengele and his butchers.

  I cannot fathom how a mortal body could have withstood the hells the performer visited on himself that night. Standing no more than fifteen feet from him, I watched as he flayed his skin to ribbons, filling the air with the salty tang of sa
nguine mist. My stomach lurched as, with a revoltingly deliberate series of scrapes, he parted muscle from bone, and his viscera finally bulged like some malign and tumescent birth from the orifices he had lacerated into existence.

  At some point, whether from exhaustion or completion I cannot say, his wretched form collapsed to the floor with a nauseating, liquid thud. The crowd remained motionless, as silent as the object on the floor, which must surely have been a corpse by this point.

  I felt obscene; not offended at the performance, but ashamed of my eyes for wandering through the glistening mess of tendon and muscle on the floor; abashed that I should be allowed to so frankly appraise the undressing of the substance of this man. It was the most extreme striptease imaginable; it was the true and final realization of all pornographic vulnerability. It was for this reason, and no other, that I fled up the stairs.

  When I returned to my apartment, I flipped through coffee table books of my favorite Baroque and Rubenesque forms, hoping to lose myself in their livid vitality, but beneath each plump breast and every set of parted lips, I saw only gasping lungs and sneering teeth. I dove frantically into magazines of less artistic photography, but in every gaping orifice and dripping organ I saw wounds and dissections; blood and bile, marrow and phlegm. In defiance I gripped my dead prick, but it refused to respond to my own touch.

  Something thick and harsh rose in my throat. I stumbled into the bathroom, and soon after, I plunged headlong into unconsciousness.

  My dreams were filled with landscapes of rippling muscle and wrinkled skin; across these fleshy fields crept thin, buzzing, twitching forms, taller than myself. Their outlines never quite resolved; when I approached them I felt overcome with shame. I fled across hills of gelatinous tissue, and cowered in the caverns there.

  If I was to dispel these visions from my mind, I had no choice but to find him; of this I became utterly certain.

  My anatomical nightmares had not ceased when I woke from my fitful sleep; they penetrated and interwove their greasy fibers throughout every moment of my days. Beneath the skin and smiles of my students, I perceived rotten, cadaverous things, shaved away in layers and floundering in ragged, leaking piles.

  Each interaction impressed its temporality and insignificance on me to such an overwhelming degree that at last I took a leave of absence. I paced the apartment; I lay in bed; I did every possible chore. I drank a glass of orange juice, but failed to keep it down; I tried vodka and fared even worse.

  My mind slid through sleep on saw-blades; I dreamed of Dore, and of Beksinski, and above all, of the unavoidable mutability of flesh. And presiding over this visceral carnival, as always, were those sliding, shivering forms; even in my own dreams they hid themselves from my view, projecting an invisible but tangible gaze of superiority. Under their gaze I felt ashamed, without knowing why.

  Three nights after I had first watched Judas butcher himself onstage, I returned to the club just after eleven o'clock. Shaking from exhaustion, dry-eyed from lack of sleep, I assaulted the doorman with what must have seemed like a half-mad interrogation. Judas had not performed there in several days, I learned, but he presented a new piece every few nights. His next performance, in fact, was later tonight; it began in two hours at a club called The Gibbous Moon.

  I spent the intervening time planning how our meeting would unfold, as best as my strained mind could accomplish such a task. I bought a coffee from a drive-thru, smelled it, and decided not to push my luck. By the time twelve thirty arrived, I had formulated a vague idea of what I would do. I drove to The Gibbous Moon, paid my cover, and descended.

  The room was large enough for perhaps thirty bodies, but it held at least fifty. Some folk piece involving a sitar drifted through the musky air, offset by a constant murmur from the milling dreamers below. Many held stemmed decanters filled with red wine, though they were doubtless under the influence of various other substances. They were no more than sacks of sinew and fat in motion; their noises and their heat were dizzying.

  Once again I took a position near the back, scanning the shadows for some movement that would indicate his emergence. I was not disappointed; as the song drew to a close, all heads swiveled towards the stage, if such a term could be applied to the spotless rubber sheet cast on the floor at the opposite side of the crowd.

  From the neglected gaps in my vision he appeared, dressed as before in his tattered sackcloth robes. He dropped them to the floor, revealing his shirtless frame. I nearly gasped: he wore not so much as a bandage on his wounds; he was covered in scars that could have been decades old.

  Wide-eyed, I watched as he took a carving knife from his assistant. His expression was clearer to me this time; he wore a distinct look of apprehension, if not outright dismay. But without hesitation, he sliced into his cheek, parting skin from musculature, spilling thick, brownish blood onto the rubber sheet. A few in the audience gasped; more just fixed him with their fish-like stares, likely too far gone to really comprehend the situation.

  I knew that no mutilation could be worse than what I already perceived behind every coat of skin. As he peeled that coat from his face, from his shoulders, from his scalp, I saw my visions given weight and presence. Before these onlookers, a man undressed, stripping down to the naked creature wrapped in each of them. Perhaps I wept; I certainly wanted to.

  When his assistants came for him, I maneuvered around the edge of the dispersing crowd, making sure to stay out of their sight. They wrapped him in the sheet and carried him into a hall behind an unmarked door. I noted their direction, cut out through the entrance, and ducked around the back of the building.

  I found myself in a rotten-smelling alley, lit near its entrance by a fluorescent streetlight. I scarcely had time to crouch behind a dumpster before light spilled from the doorway, and my quarry emerged into the foul night air. Without so much as a flashlight, they laid the artist on the filthy pavement, letting his robe fall next to his prone form.

  A few seconds later, he sat up with a gasp.

  “Someone is here,” he said.

  He rose to his feet.

  “It's all right. I can send them after you, but I'd much prefer you come forward of your own accord.” His voice was like the thrum of a heartbeat, bottomless and vibratory.

  There was no sense in fleeing; besides, he hardly seemed angry, if it was possible to tell such a thing. I stood and approached his assistants, whose postures indicated they bore little good will for an unexpected guest. Judas stepped toward me, into the illumination of the streetlight. His hood was drawn over his face; his hands were covered in dried fluids: crusty patches of yellow, brown, and red.

  “Did you enjoy the performance tonight?” he asked me.

  I had no response prepared for this; “Very much” was what came out.

  “Was it your first? No, it wasn't, was it? It usually takes one or two before the-ah-paradigm shift sets in.”

  “So I'm not the first?”

  “To be so affected by my work?” He smiled gently. “Of course not.”

  He turned to his assistants, “Voss, Cumberland; I believe you'd best break open that absinthe; I'll join you down the line.”

  With a final sharp glance at me, the androgynous wisp and the hulking golem nodded their assent, and ambled out of the mouth of the alley. When they had vanished around a corner, Judas turned back to me.

  “This is why I do what I do, you see. It was easier back when they were smoking opium and reading Baudelaire, of course; these days, most of them are on acid, or DMT, or just plain jaded, but every so often someone will come seeking, asking the solution to the riddle, and that's why I'm here: to answer.”

  We began walking, in the shade of overhanging awnings and walkways, out of open spaces. Occasionally we passed a group of nasty-looking kids, or a bum, but mostly people gave us a wide berth, as if by instinct.

  “Have you heard my riddle,” he asked, “about God?”

  “Mentions of it.”

  “Despite his omnipote
nce, there is one act, just one, of which he is totally incapable. Yet all men are quite able to accomplish it, and indeed, some succeed. Do you know what this act is?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted, “but I was never much of a theologian.”

  “Well,” he sighed, “I will tell you that for most of my life I was a man, and at one point, I very nearly did achieve this act. But now its comfort is closed to me; I have become, in a way, like God. And God, I now understand, must inhabit his own sort of hell.”

  “I'm sorry, but if that's the answer, I don't think I follow at all.”

  “Then I will make it clearer to you.”

  “And the riddle's answer explains how you accomplish—what you do?” I pressed.

  “Oh, it explains much more than that.”

  When I first came to the city (he said to me), I wasn't what you'd call an artist. Of all things, I was a chef, renowned in the culinary school from which I'd emerged, but still working my way up from an assistant cook at a prestigious Italian restaurant downtown.

  God, how I loved food! Just the smell of it each morning was all I needed to get down to business. I grabbed my fair share of samples, but the head chef looked the other way as long as every table got their orders in time. Before long I had become his heir apparent, and was given the privilege of freely sampling from the freezer and the cellar, so long as my indulgences were reasonable.

  Of course, I was carrying around more than a few extra pounds in those days. I became a bon vivant, in every sense of the word. If it wasn't chicken parmigiana, it was red wine, or opium. And you'd be surprised at the number of women who find a well-connected man with access to a wine cellar to be quite alluring. Or perhaps reservations are just easily washed away with a glass of 35-year-old Merlot. Whatever the case, my weight never proved much of a barrier to such pursuits.