She hadn’t seemed to mind his blatant staring at her scars, though she had to have noticed. Then, maybe she’d even wanted him to stare. Now that her scars were back, so was the idea that she might be a hooker. Not necessarily. What constituted beauty for one person, group or culture might represent hideousness to another. Monty had read about the ancient races and peoples of Earth having bound women’s feet to keep them from growing, binding their heads to shape their skulls, stretching their earlobes, stretching their necks ridiculously with stacks of rings, stretching their lips with huge plates in their mouths, impaling their noses with bones, becoming ritually tattooed or scarred, suffering clitorectomies and circumcisions and castration, swallowing tapeworms to keep from gaining weight, becoming anorexic in the obsession to remain fashionably thin. And the most extreme of these measures usually seemed to be reserved for the women of these peoples.
Maybe she’d had herself scarred like this for the sake of her own aesthetics…or, having been maimed, had decided that she accepted or liked herself this way.
He had been just a little bit unnerved by the sudden appearance of her marred face so close to his, even with his excitement and his embarrassment. He couldn’t help but think how she must have bled, how the wounds must have gaped in a hideous imitation of a Choom. He was very sensitive, lately, to deformities of the face. A few weeks ago he’d seen a woman with the top front of her skull flattened at a radical angle, her brow pressed in accordion folds down into her slits for eyes, her ears barely formed and her lips immense and purple-blackish. A pretty tame kind of mutation, common enough, but he didn’t see many mutants in Blue Station, and that night as he lay reading in a drowsy bubble bath he had become strangely nervous about suddenly looking up to find that flattened-headed woman standing in the doorway.
Some nights he awoke with a jolt or a gasp or a cry. He’d taken to sleeping with a dim light on in his bedroom at night…for he had been able, in his dreams, to gaze longer and more clearly at Opal Cowrie’s face than he had during the message she’d made for him.
Sometimes, crazily, he even dreaded looking into a mirror, for a brief moment. Afraid his face would have been transformed. He had confronted the instability of the flesh, face to face. His own. And he couldn’t forget that. Was that so crazy?
Still embarrassed about the teen mag he’d been paging through (“Dora and Topaz—Who is the Queen?”), Monty idly flipped through the paper the scarred woman had bought, idly wondered what kind of things in it would draw her attention, what she cared and thought about.
In her early to mid twenties, he ventured. The scars kept coming back, a focal point. No accident, he felt sure. She hadn’t looked ashamed. Maybe it was a fashion statement. Caucasian warriors had shaped their heads so as to slant their eyes and widen their noses to resemble their Mongolian comrades, and later Asians had had their eyes operated on to resemble Caucasians. Blacks had once straightened their hair and narrowed their noses to look “white,” and whites had tanned themselves dark, while sometimes hating blacks. No, no accident. Whether by surgeon’s scalpel or madman’s blade, those scars—so symmetrical, their effect in conjunction with her beauty so designed—were an act of someone’s expression.
Friendly, natural…not overtly flirtatious. She hadn’t been trying to “wow” him; her beauty, at least then, hadn’t been flaunted at him. The scars humbled her, maybe, made her more human.
But why? Was she a prosty or not? And what about those Stems? Too many frustrating questions. He mustn’t let her get away again.
He welcomed a nice, compelling infatuation. It was something to think about during those endless hours in his little fish bowl.
“Someone threw up—I could smell it,” said a sharply-dressed woman to another as they neared his bowl.
“Well, they should know better than to go to a show like that. There was a sign out front warning people and a warning on every ticket.”
“It was still hard to watch even when I expected it and had read all about it…I felt terribly woozy.”
“I thought it was powerful and brilliant.” This second woman bought from Monty a copy of the paper the scarred woman had purchased. The two women wandered away.
The rest of the night remained busy enough that Monty could avoid visiting Midge, and thus be left alone with his new focus. He didn’t even notice when that girl from the food stand went home.
*
The next night he saw her face again…this time in the trash barrel in the men’s room. Midge had taken over at his booth for him. He had to use the toilet, and liked to read and take his time, but he had brought his own clean magazine and put clean paper towels down on the seat. He was an ex-health agent and knew better than to handle a newspaper in the trash and then clean up after himself.
But he saw her face, and the scars like centipedes crawling on it, and for a moment thought it must be a story about how she had originally been attacked; the paper must be a week or so old, at least. The scars were prickly black with stitches (of all things, in this day!).
As it turned out, it was last night’s paper, the same one she’d bought, the one he’d flipped through. But he hadn’t gotten as far in as this. It wasn’t up front with the other crimes, but in the entertainment section.
The photo was large, hard to miss—a big story. He had seen only part of her face, one eye and one scar, peeking out from around the sports section, but that had been enough. He had been so close last night…but now he read and all his questions were answered.
The photo attended a review of a play, and the review had been written by Yancy Mays. Monty’s eyes zoomed past this name but screeched to a halt and flew in reverse. He remembered that name. He had never heard or been told whether or not the critic, whose scathing review of Toll Loveland’s Pandora’s Box he had read, had survived or died from the disease he had contracted at that same show Monty attended.
Yancy Mays. So he had survived, God bless him. Monty remembered how he had dumped on Loveland’s The Godfucker as well, and that other play by some other artist…Shit for Breakfast, that was it…in which a goat was hung upside-down by its legs and had its throat cut while naked actors basked in the hot pouring blood. Yancy Mays had helped shut that nightmare down. Monty hated some critics with a passion, thought that there were too many of them (one for every movie, it seemed), hated the very word critic (“movie reviewer” was vastly preferable), and wasn’t crazy about any form of censorship. But so far he liked this guy Yancy Mays.
Let’s see what he had to say about Monty’s mystery girl.
The name of the review was: Meatheartlessness.
“If you’ve come for thrills, you don’t have long to wait: in the opening scene of director Ferule Cangue’s production of Meathearts, a scene not present in Josh Reymeffat’s original play, a beautiful woman in a white dress in a white room has her face slashed by a man with a scalpel. Later we will find that this is the woman’s boyfriend. As the lights go down the other half of the stage is illumined and we witness a woman in a white dress on a white set attacked and viciously raped by two thugs as she is attempting to unlock her (white) car. She is raped atop the car’s hood, and then her right arm is hacked off with a machete.
“These two violent acts are not special effects. The blood and mayhem in this piece of not-so-Grand Guignol are authentic acts of violence.
“The next half-hour of the two-hour play focuses on two mutant hookers played by actual mutant actresses who are seen chatting after hours in a brothel which deals in deformity and disfigurement. Then return the two victimized women, stitched and partially healed backstage, who turn out to be hookers now also. Both traumatized, degraded by men but trained by a patriarchal society to be victims, they have surrendered themselves to utter degradation; in becoming prostitutes, using the very disfigurements which have reduced them to this point. The remainder of the play consists of the four women sitting and talking of their lives, opening up to their hidden emotions. At the end, one of them who ha
s confronted herself finds the strength to leave…a triumphant climax, perhaps, but no doubt an anticlimax for the thrill-seekers.
“Josh Reymeffat’s original play, previously staged elsewhere to less success, was a brilliant and poignant portrayal of women’s submission to man’s timeless domination of them through victimization and humiliation…but as translated by Ferule Cangue, it has become exactly that which it was meant to attack: a horrifying degradation of women, reducing the actresses involved to the level of the disfigured prostitutes they portray, freakishly exhibited for the morbid interests of the audience, with the heinous opening scenes resembling nothing so much as scenes from a snuff film…and no more redeeming.
“For every performance the rapists are ‘played’ by different ‘actors’ not previously known to the actress whose arm is hacked off, so as to keep the actress’s reaction authentic and to make the scene all the more realistic and terrifying. I’m impressed. Of course, the audience is warned of the authentic rape and violence on the posters and signs outside the theater. Warned—or enticed? That the rapists are different every performance has been publicized to a sufficient extent to convince me that the motivation for this little bit of gritty realism is purely one of cunning and sleazy titillation.
“The actor who portrays the slasher of the first woman is an uncredited surgeon, due to the greater precision required for the mutilation of that actress (Mauve Pond). Our mystery surgeon is also responsible for partially repairing his handiwork backstage. The actresses have previously been administered drugs to prevent pain throughout; nevertheless their courage and enthusiasm for their roles is extraordinary. Their performances (particularly by Aurora Lehrman, whose arm is severed every show) are highly commendable…if not their judgment in contributing to such an exploitative, drooling piece of gleeful sadism, hiding its ugly face behind the mask of art. With all respect to the skill of these women, this reviewer cynically ventures that the attention they knew the play would receive for its violence was as much an attraction as the challenge of the roles. But that’s show business.
“The play is performed only once a week on Sunday nights at the Jason Scarborough Theater. It takes a week for Lehrman’s arm to be cloned back and Pond’s pretty face made smooth. There have been two performances as of this writing, and the box office has been so good that the show is already booked solid for the next four months (that’s at least sixteen more right arms for the plucky Aurora). Already a movie is being discussed—but how well would that fare, I wonder, when the action is primarily limited to talk in one room, and the thrill to which the play owes its new success is to be there when the blood is spilled?
“Director Cangue has previously staged in Punktown the rather less sensationalistic but similarly mean-spirited musical Jack the Ripper; after this perhaps he’ll update his interpretation and mutilate women on stage for real once more (I shouldn’t give him ideas if it hasn’t occurred to him already). He also directed Some Black Girls Sittin’ Around Talkin’ About Life, Love, And the Way Their Men Snore, very similar to this play in approach and subject matter, without the blood. Somewhere along the line he was no doubt bizarrely inspired to combine these two previous efforts within the vehicle of Reymeffat’s play, much superior to LaShawna Tempest’s pretentious and self-conscious Black Girls. Why Cangue was attracted to Black Girls in view of these other two major projects seems mysterious—until you remember that for the sake of ‘earthy gritty naturalism’ Cangue had his five black actresses perform naked. He was praised for symbolically baring the hearts and souls of the women, at that time. Quite impressive. That he also bared (un-symbolically) their breasts and pubic regions was of no consideration in his motives, naturally. Thus do some artists lie to themselves. Thus do the audiences of such artists lie to themselves, enabling these artists to go on as they do. Not that a sexual element in itself is wrong. I don’t feel ashamed of admiring the physiques of ballet artists in a less than professional way, and ballet is very consciously sensual, erotic. But you realize that. No one is exploited. You can sense exploitation. At least, you should. (And if a ballerina lied to me that there was no sexual element in her work I’d be critical of her, too.)
“And finally, back to playwright Josh Reymeffat. Reymeffat wrote his play with the intention and assumption that the roles would be played by actresses in makeup. There is no reason but for the sake of exploitation that this production has sought to ‘capture a powerful sense of raw realism as these acts are committed before the audience’s eyes,’ in the words of the publicity people. If it were economically feasible I wouldn’t doubt that Cangue would have a woman beheaded in a play and cloned for the second act—all for the sake of the violent pornography he disguises as art. Ferule Cangue would, if he could paint, copy a Renoir nude but position her in a gynecological beaver shot and call that art as well. A slight reinterpretation of Renoir’s intentions.
“So how does Reymeffat feel about the liberties Cangue has taken with him? In a recent interview he said that while his play was not meant to be presented this way, he finds it interesting. This is greatly disturbing and disappointing to someone like myself who respects his work, and even shocking. Can’t the man see how his play, intended to criticize the victimization of women, has been distorted into just another weapon against women? Perhaps he is drunk on his new success…but his credibility, in my eyes, has been done much damage.
“For this execrable production is of the Toll Loveland school of art. But then some are still calling him a genius, aren’t they?”
Whew, thought Monty.
Mauve Pond, huh?
All the rest had engrossed him just as much, however. He knew he had to see this play, but Christ—booked four months solid! Who did he know who could help him? He didn’t really have much in the way of contacts of any kind, anymore.
That explained the vanishing scars. He’d first seen her on a Monday night, her wounds still fresh from Meathearts’ opening night. By the middle of the week they were gone. And then he’d seen her again on a Sunday, going home from her second performance, stitches out but her flesh still undergoing its accelerated healing process.
He absorbed the large close-up of Mauve Pond more intently, now.
The caption read: “Actress Mauve Pond, now starring in Meathearts Sundays only at the Scarborough Theater, has her lovely face sliced on stage and then stitched for the rest of the play. Here she is backstage, minutes before going back on. The play has opened here to much success, but critic Yancy Mays isn’t in stitches (see review).”
In the photo, she looked too exhausted by her ordeal already to go on for the remaining hour and a half of the play. Her eyes appeared puffy, tired, but she was wearing no makeup and that was part of it. She couldn’t be in pain, but surely the ordeal itself was unsettling. How many dress rehearsals had there been? Monty couldn’t imagine that the first time she was slashed, and Lehrman hacked, had occurred on opening night…but then again, after reading about Ferule Cangue, maybe it had—for the sake of realism. Her slender face looked swollen and battered, the lines of black stitches trailing from her ears into the corners of her mouth like strands of barbed wire. Her hair was mussed. She looked very young, vulnerable and weak. Suitably victimized. But she was smiling, her weary eyes narrowed as when she had smiled unabashedly at Monty.
She wasn’t weak—she was strong. He wouldn’t be able to let anyone do that to him.
He kept the picture and review.
At the booth he scoured the ephemeral library around him for more. Last week had been opening night and the fanfare had rushed by behind him like a train. Then again, the play had been picking up more attention since then through word of mouth and in response to its box office. His boss had tossed out all of Sunday’s papers, and evening papers replaced morning papers, but he still found a review in a magazine—favorable—featuring a photo of Aurora Lehrman on stage, her stitched stump of a right arm poking out of a T-shirt. And he found plenty of printed ads for the play in the theater s
ections of papers, the artwork featuring a severed arm holding a teacup. Monty stacked his collection under the counter for later snipping.
Booked for four months already, huh? Unless Yancy Mays helped shut this production down, also…but it looked too big for that. Monty smiled, less frantic now inside. He was confident he would see her again.
THIRTEEN
When he did, he was ready with a half-dozen witty, just flirty enough ways to get a conversation flowing should she buy a paper at his stand. He’d thought about having a flower ready, too, but he didn’t. As it was, however, she didn’t approach him to buy a paper, or even glance at him, as far as he’d seen. He had come up with a few ideas in case of this, but none of them seemed good now, and the confidence he’d found began to look a little frayed around the edges.
It was Sunday, eleven-fifteen, close to the end of his shift—midnight. He’d been looking up alertly at every footfall, every peripheral movement, for hours now. And there she was at last, her high heels telegraphing her arrival—and what an entrance, as if this were her stage for him. She wore a tight black miniskirt, baring long slim legs encased in black nylons, black heels, her black jacket square-shouldered and the blouse underneath black, too. She wore a red flower in her lapel, the red of her lipstick shining like a petal from that flower on the snow of her face. Snow etched with a stick to make the scars he briefly saw.
He considered asking her if she had the review that he’d found two days ago; he had a copy of it with him. It was in a Miniosis newspaper, said her work showed “impressive dedication.” She must already have it, he rebuked himself disgustedly…if I walk up to her she’ll think I’m just some drooling fan…
Aren’t I? he countered.
It was the Stems who inspired him to action.
The woman stood at the platform edge, toes to the safety line, lighting a cigarette with her back to Monty, alone there but for a female Choom dwarf lost in a huge man’s coat. She handed the croaking dwarf a cigarette, and then the peripheral, stealthy approach of the Stems made Monty turn his head. Like red mantises they moved, all but soundless. As in the past, they wore small black pouches for belongings.
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