‘God, I feel like such – fool!’ she sobbed, words and syllables being sacrificed as she struggled to get the sentences out. ‘I’d heard – so much – you. I wanted – impress you – you think I’m – stupid ninny. Well, I’m gg – bb – m m – h g...’
‘Please don’t cry, Cressida. Please, look, come here, let me get you a drink.’
Oscar glanced over at the bath – it had just emptied itself soundlessly since he’d forgotten to replace the plug. He was loath to run another – perhaps to punish himself for his ineptitude. I can’t even run a bath. Taking her hand he led her back to the living room and set her down on the sofa. He went over to the bar, momentarily stymied by the wealth of choice there. His eye scanned the assembled bottles of whiskey and stopped at a bottle of Talisker single malt. He poured her a glass. Then he poured himself one, threw in some ice and brought the tumblers over, swirling them around easily.
‘There you are. Drink this; you’ll feel better.’
‘Thanks,’ she sniffed. Oscar plucked some tissues out of a silver box and dabbed her eyes with them – a repetitive, nervous movement.
‘You’re very kind. I’m sorry; I don’t know what came over me. I’ve had such a terrible day.’
‘Let’s have some music.’
‘Ooh – that would be nice.’
Oscar walked over to one of the zinc-galvanized steel lamps, switched it on, and drew the curtains. The walls grew muted and mysterious; the alcoves melted into shadow. Sounds became more defined and an indeterminate blend of excitement and stillness was formed. The room’s vast dimensions, so clearly discernible in daylight, were muffled, rendered less indigestible. Watching Oscar through the tranquilizing prism of the fiery whiskey she noticed how confidently, how purposefully he moved and orchestrated his remedy. He was like his voice, she thought. Supple yet strong. Unhurried. He drifted toward a stacked-up stereo sound system and found the disc he was after.
‘I hope you’ll like this,’ he said in a low voice. ‘For a long time whenever I heard this music it left me cold. I don’t know what it was – I just didn’t care for it. Then, one day – this was when I was living in Elephant and Castle – I listened...and it was...amazing.’
Then – from the depths, almost imperceptible at first but gradually rising, the first notes of the prelude to Tristan were exhaled. Oscar sat back next to Cressida and closed his eyes. From the start, with those opening chords, the world slipped away, and he was immersed in the music’s soundworld, and the incessant striving of life was stilled.
‘Gosh,’ Cressida whispered.
But she wasn’t really listening to the music – she was aware of it, and it made for a pleasant backdrop. What really struck her was his willingness to reveal something about himself, something other than the size of his waist or the fact that he preferred corduroy to denim. After sniveling like that, she thought, after that pathetic display, he hadn’t grown stiff and formal and awkward as most men would have done. His words gave her back some of her dignity, and made her feel valued. She tried to picture him as a boy, with a mop of dark hair, discovering girls. And then, adrift in the room’s incantatory light and shade, seated next to someone willing to be nice to her, she felt, in spite of all the bruises, the sweetness of life after all.
They stayed like that for a while, not speaking. He didn’t feel like speaking for a while.
*
From where he squatted Ryan Rees studied the intricacy of the cathedral’s facade: its lofty bell tower, its alternating bands of sandstone and red brick (forming a texture which reminded him of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice). As an architectural achievement the cathedral was not very impressive, he reflected, but it was a welcome, surprising injection of color alongside the grey bureaucratic buildings framing the piazza. Here is history, tradition, Rees thought, and I shall shortly be thumbing my nose at it. There were still a few people dotted around, walking to and fro, placing the building in its historical context, admiring it, ignoring it. It was getting dark but Rees knew that the floodlights weren’t due to go on until later.
The sturdy transit van he and his employees were currently squeezed into was parked on the curb directly opposite Westminster Cathedral. Inside, while Rees exuded his customary Olympian calm, two scruffy men in dungarees scurried around and searched for light meters, arranged slides, acted as if they knew what they were doing which was only partly true. One of them repeatedly failed to strike a match until Rees obliged with a single stroke; a memory stick was extracted from an aluminum case; a lever was yanked violently. A source of power came on, humming with oppressive life.
Outside, stray tourists continued to take photos, munching hamburgers, relishing the gherkins especially. A man held a mobile phone in front of him, filming the transit van, hoping he was about to catch the opening moments of a heist. He preferred the image that shook and hovered in front of him to the reality firmly grounded around him. Some pigeons in the square took flight with sudden synchronized ease. A lady rocked her pram back and forth mechanically, and from within, at regular intervals, howls were heard. A girl sucked on her lollipop, then plopped its sticky disc onto her little brother’s nose where it hung ignominiously. He started crying. The girl started laughing. A man in a teeshirt, seated on one of the bollards, tried to clear his sinuses and triggered a violent nose bleed instead. He pressed buttons fitfully on his phone and tried calling his GP. His GP was in his consulting rooms telling a patient that everyone coughs blood every now and then and it was perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. The double-decker buses toiled onwards. Society kept up its dull, plodding rhythm.
Glancing up at the sickle moon Rees considered the folkloric connection between full moons and madness. He had read somewhere that obstetricians tended to believe pregnant women were more likely to deliver during full moon cycles than at other times during the lunar cycle. These thoughts suddenly brought back memories of a bizarre passage from The Golden Bough that an unhinged, misogynistic school teacher had demanded all his charges learn by heart: “According to Pliny, the touch of a menstruous woman turned wine to vinegar, blighted crops, killed seedlings, blasted gardens, brought down the fruit from trees, dimmed mirrors, blunted razors, rusted iron and brass (especially at the waning of the moon), killed bees, or at least drove them from their hives, caused mares to miscarry...” The passage’s blend of magic and insanity instantly appealed to the pre-pubescent Rees and he began to entertain fantasies of bringing about similar ruination at his boarding school. Shortly afterwards he established a reputation as a formidable and elaborate practical joker – passing oranges around under the desks during the senile Mr. Wiseman’s history lessons, setting nails down on teachers’ chairs, gluing coins to the pavement and watching passers-by struggling to retrieve them, and majestically breaking wind during assembly. These triumphs left him breathless and euphoric. In a sense all his subsequent enterprises had been an attempt to re-capture the intoxication of those first heavenly coups. At that time he had been known universally as “Orley,” after his then-name of Donald Chorley. He changed his name at the age of twenty-one when he landed his first job in advertising.
It was getting darker. In the square, standing somewhat apart from the others were three or four impassive, smooth-looking men. They were editors: features editors, literary editors, arts editors. Ryan Rees had invited them along – a friendly gesture. He strategically wanted to keep them sweet and happy, as they might prove useful to him at a later date. Rees regarded the editors very much in the way he might have regarded a screwdriver or a hammer: They simply had their uses; they were tools which could facilitate the assembling of something far grander and more important than they were.
Inside the van was a piece of equipment whose most vital part was worth £100,000: the lens. This piece of equipment could project an image of up to one hundred feet square. It was about two feet high and five feet wide. It ran out of a diesel generator, the source of the relentless hum.
‘Mr. Rees, we
’re ready to go in five,’ said one of the men in dungarees. ‘Terry, get the door.’
The laser projector was so powerful it needed fifteen minutes to heat up and twenty to cool down. Its lens was aimed directly onto the timpanum and central facade of the cathedral.
Ryan Rees rubbed his hands together.
‘This is going to be beautiful.’
The sliding doors were opened and Rees stepped outside, strode up to the editors’ corner and handed them all in turn some Brazilian cigarillos (palomitas) he had recently had shipped in from Sao Paulo. Their sweet chocolatey smell not only lent the scene a certain aromatic exoticism, it also seemed to act as a tonic on the editors: their manners changed; they became friendly, deferential even. Though none of them trusted Rees, they all had a certain grudging respect for him, considering him a dangerous man to cross. Not only could he manufacture reputations; he could destroy them. As they puffed, the editors were obscured by thick smoke until a slight breeze gradually carried the clouds across the square, thinning them out.
A mighty beam of light from the van cut through the central limbo of smoke and smashed into the cathedral’s facade. Everyone in the square stopped what they were doing, stopped their rocking of prams, their licking of lollipops and dialing of numbers, and stared with dropping jaws at the fifty-foot square of gaudy color, bathing the cathedral in strange light. It was simply gigantic. Those parts of the facade which weren’t completely flat caused the image to bend. Along the bottom of the square ran a black strip about as tall as a person. There three separate massive sub-titles flashed up and alternated with each other in an unending cycle.
Is love a fairytale or the wailing of the damned?
Oscar Babel has arrived and it’s time to wake up.
This journey terminates at Enlightenment Junction.
Oscar was speaking, but what he said remained deliberately inaudible, his lips moving fluidly, about the size of a canoe. His face was pinned to the facade, brilliantly lit, filtered through greenish-blue filters, shot on 16-millimeter, which had been transferred onto beta-tape, the sub-titles inserted in post-production. This gargantuan face speaking to no one, and for no one, its eyes as big as portholes, the cavities of the nostrils like entrances to vaporous caves; it was horrible and beautiful. Those few whose eyes were currently popping would have uneasy dreams tonight populated by giant things – massive tables and oversized chairs, scurrying, gigantic spiders, lips like boa constrictors on the run from faces which squelched up behind them in flapping confusion. Oscar had been turned into a behemoth. A freak created by technology.
Those inside the van weren’t sure how they felt about the loquacious and yet silent icon they had constructed, striking, yes, it was certainly striking; but there was no denying it was also a little eerie. The human face could not possibly withstand such magnification – faces were not meant to be that high or wide. Subtlety was shredded, Oscar’s sanguine eyes became oppressive, his lips turned to rubber, his teeth into ivory weapons.
The editors were oddly impressed – they sensed the story’s strange potential. They said ‘Shit!’ and ‘That is big!’ every now and then. Small children darted up to the cathedral and pawed at spots within the square of light, half-expecting to be turned into frogs or pillars of light. They ran away and shrieked in delight. Rees, for his part, was tentatively pleased. Judging by the members of the public’s faces three things had probably been accomplished so far. Oscar’s face had been ingrained in their minds, curiosity about him had been sparked, and controversy was assured. How dare they defile one of London’s houses of God? Why oh why? He could already hear the voices of dissent. He chuckled happily.
But the show wasn’t over yet. Out of nowhere, a freelance photographer rolled on like a bowling ball hurtling toward its skittles, his body apparently undaunted by the shipment of cases and paraphernalia he had slung around his bull neck. He moved with profligate energy, darting this way and that – taking long shots, medium shots – like someone who had just swallowed a dose of amphetamines (which he had), shooting the image from every conceivable angle, bending over backwards, standing on steps, ensuring the face was snapped to death. On finishing he strode up to Rees to have a few words. While Rees confined himself to monosyllables, remaining perfectly still and impassive, his mask-like face giving nothing away, his interlocutor jittered and twittered, touched Rees’s arm, his elbow, his hand (all of which contact Rees found revolting), and spoke in sentences jostling with meaningless jargon. At last the photographer, with diminishing energy, carted himself and his gear away. The photos would be printed, syndicated to the press, cropped and published. (Rees’s copywriter had written a modest press release to accompany them: “Now the words can be fitted to the face. For this is Oscar Babel, spiritual teacher and enemy of pretension, the man who recently exploded the London art masquerade. If you want to hear what it is he’s saying all interested parties will have the chance shortly at the Grosvenor Hotel during a series of innovative lectures. For further information contact Ryan Rees Publicity.”)
Meanwhile, on Victoria Street people were shoving and pushing their way out of buses to try and see what all the fuss was about. Wallets and purses slid out of pockets and became irretrievably tangled up. Arguments started as elbows accidentally collided with groins. Those who elected to stay on board took pictures from the top; others wished they would stop blathering on and sit down and shut up. Civil servants, rushing toward the Tube and the bus stops were stopped short and wondered who it was they were looking at. They concluded it was some pop star and marched off. It was at this point that a helicopter, which had been gradually approaching, finally coincided with the piazza’s latitude and longitude, and out of it, like shards of hope to lost souls, dozens of leaflets spiraled, swam and rocked downwards, so in seconds the ground was covered with tokens of rhetoric: “Oscar Babel’s here. It’s time to wake up.” Then, as an encore, a cargo of small red balloons stamped with Oscar’s face were ejected and as they began their celebratory descent they created a beautiful effect, irradiated in the beam of projector light. Some got caught in the wind and drifted toward Pimlico. (One of the balloons steered itself, with great skill and tenacity, all the way toward an Italian restaurant in Rochester Row, and came to rest, without fuss, on the plate of a solitary customer dining al fresco. His back was turned since at that moment he was admiring the swaying bottom of a woman walking her dog. As he turned back to his plate of tagliatelle ai funghi porcini and jabbed automatically into it the balloon popped, his body spasmed, and he and his chair lurched groundwards. He didn’t even bother to pick himself up from his crumpled position, his legs threaded through the chair’s, his head resting on the concrete. He lit a cigarette, resigned to his fate. Passers-by stared at him disapprovingly.)
Some way back, leaning against Victoria House – the chilly steel building directly opposite the cathedral – watching through dark glasses, wrapped up in a cream-colored raincoat, was Oscar, his head tucked into an uncomfortable corner. As he watched from this shrouded spot, it seemed to him the face he was staring at was not his; the face up there was really that of an actor’s who resembled him, an expert mimic perfectly able to reproduce his facial expressions. But after he had stared so hard that the image burned itself, like the imprint of the sun, onto his retina, he had to accept it really was his face up there. His consciousness grew numb and he felt as though everything around him – the buildings, shops, commuters, cars, the station, coaches, buses, the newsstands, the people selling the newspapers, the newspapers in the newsstands, the faces on the newspapers – had been fatally diluted, abdicating their capacity to exist as signifiers of reality. It was only by keeping his eyes pinned to the nothingness of the sky that he was able to stop this feeling of unreality from engulfing him completely.
And now as people picked up the flyers and waddled off with them, fanned themselves with them, scrunched them up and kicked them, and as the children claimed the balloons, and the rest bobbed and stirred all o
ver the square, the cathedral floodlights winked on, thereby swallowing up the face which nevertheless persisted as a faint, ghostly form.
*
From The Independent
10 August 200 -
Oscar Babel projected in silent PR stunt by EMILY EVANS
OSCAR BABEL, who recently came to prominence for insulting the nominees of the Duchamp Prize, has now succeeded in offending the Church. Last night an image of him was projected onto Westminster Cathedral. Though Mr. Babel’s lips moved what he had to say remained tantalizingly off-screen.
Cyril Vixen, who is recovering in hospital for injuries sustained during the Duchamp banquet, has denounced Babel as a charlatan. After being informed, the Archbishop of the Diocese of Westminster, who had just attended the premiere of a new West End musical about the story of Christ, described it as “an act of blasphemy and barbarism.”
*
From The Daily Telegraph
11 August 200 -
Altar Ego
SIR - As you know, my church, Westminster Cathedral, was recently subjected to what amounts to an act of metaphorical rape. The image of Oscar Babel’s face was projected onto its facade for nearly an hour. I am the first to appreciate publicity stunts, but institutions like the Church are sacrosanct symbols of authority. In this age of the image and the Internet, it becomes increasingly easier to build a monument to oneself, but I need scarcely remind you that the infamous dictators of the last century were all masters of the art of self-aggrandizement, surrounding themselves with blind followers. I would urge Mr. Babel to curb his narcissistic enterprises before he trades in his soul for the sake of being grotesquely visible.
MICHAEL ENGLAND
The Fabrications Page 27