Cosmocopia (2 page)

The capacious studio’s glass ceiling with its adjustable shades revealed only night sky prinked with stars. Lazorg flicked on a light. A chaise lounge draped with a silk sheet spoke of past living models, the creases of the sheet almost calling forth the impress of the flesh that had molded them. In the middle of the room stood an easel bearing a large framed canvas, shrouded now with a paint-spattered cloth. Lazorg’s eyes darted to the easel, then quickly away. A broad, waist-high worktable offered room for spreading out sketches, and assembling frames. He moved to a tall messy workbench where he was wont to mix his own paints: pigments, oil binders full of dopants (linseed, hemp, poppy, calendula), thinners—The colorful panoply released mingled heady scents that spoke to Lazorg of all he had once had, all he had since lost.

Lazorg rested his butt on a high stool, able thus to dispense momentarily with his cane. Irritably, his joy at receiving a surprise now diffusing, Lazorg swept aside some clutter and set the package down. He retrieved a magnifying glass from across the room and studied the postmark. The name “Santa Lucia” leaped into focus.

Santa Lucia. That visit had occurred ten years or more ago, when he had been fixated on the disturbingly lush and overripe tropical landscapes of Martin Johnson Heade. He had gone to that Central American country seeking similar founts of inspiration. But the visit had devolved to a perpetual bacchanal, native women, potent rum. And then there had been the baffling incident with the curandero and the thugs …

Lazorg tried to summon up the details, but found them hazy at this remove, blurred by his constant drunkenness at the time.

Could this package possibly be from the old sorcerer? What had his name been …?

Fulgencio.

Yes, Fulgencio.

Wielding scissors, Lazorg snipped the binding strings. White paste of the kind used by children sealed the seams of the craft paper. Lazorg slit along those lines. The paper came away.

Now he confronted a brick sealed with aluminum foil, inside clear plastic wrap. The aroma from the brick was more powerful, now that a layer of wrapping had been removed. It mingled with the familiar odors of the workbench in intriguing ways.

Taped to the exterior of the brick was a folded square of coarse paper.

Lazorg removed the note, opened it, and saw Spanish.

But the next moment the words resolved themselves as English. Lazorg rubbed his eyes with the backs of both hands—must be getting tired—then read the note.

Mister Frank,

You will perhaps recall how our paths crossed some years ago, and you were instrumental in saving my life. I swore then that I would repay you somehow, some day, and now I can finally make good on my debt.

You have now at your command the powder obtained from ten thousand vision scarabs, the
escarabajo psicodélico
, a beetle unique to Santa Lucia. It has taken me all this time to collect and prepare this number of bugs, but I did not want to deliver to you any less than this fair amount. With what you now have, you may mix up the most beautiful crimson paint you have ever used—paint of a living sanguine hue—to paint the most wonderful scenes imaginable, and you will have enough for the rest of your life, which, Jesus and Yemaja willing, may be long indeed.

Please accept this humble gift, the smallest repayment for the immeasurable one you gave me.

Go with God,

Fulgencio

Lazorg sat quietly for a few moments, contemplating fate and chance. Then, using the scissors, he opened up a small slit in the top of the package.

As if he had sliced into the veins of his own wrist, a seam of crimson leapt up into his vision against the surrounding dull silver of the foil, accompanied by a burst of the characteristic scent. The fine-grained powder, compacted for transit, seemed almost epidermal in its composition, the cosmetic-dusted porous skin of some exotic maiden.

Not cinnabar, nor alizarin nor vermilion, but some shade hitherto unknown.

Feeling slightly dizzy, Lazorg next did something spontaneously and almost without volition.

He dug up a few grains of the ruby powder with the tip of the scissors and placed it upon his tongue.

The taste of the powder derived from the myriad crushed bodies of the vision scarab was both metallic-mineral and citrusy-agave, like biting into a pulpy cactus covered with road dust.

The aroma-taste of the powder immediately expanded to fill Lazorg’s mouth and nasal passages—and seemingly his skull and lungs—before fading away to a sharp memory. It seemed to have no other immediate perceptual effect.

Lazorg got off the stool, leaving the package where it sat. Suddenly he was sleepy.

He made it to his bedroom without trouble. He doffed his outer garments, keeping on just his underwear, and climbed into bed.

Only on the point of falling asleep, did he realize he had left his cane in the studio.

His dreams were many, and vivid, and exciting, but unrecoverable upon awakening.

After dressing his complaining, noncompliant body with the usual difficulty, Lazorg proceeded downstairs (caneless, moving precariously from one piece of furniture to another) to enjoy his bland, approved, oatmeal-and-fruit breakfast.

Thoughts of the strange powder drifted in an out of the forefront of his consciousness, but he felt no immediate compulsion to rush back to his studio to investigate further the odd gift from his past.

Instead, he spent the day with his secretary, Roy Isham, answering letters from museum curators, agents, and prospective buyers. Dark-haired, thin, and punctilious, Isham struck Lazorg as being indubitably gay, although the employer had never queried his employee. Lazorg, ever the ladies’ man, had no brief against gays, regarding them in the past as simply less competition for him in the arena of sex.

Brian Foss interrupted after lunch to inquire about Lazorg’s dinner preferences. Short and stout and bearded, the chef plainly indulged in more decadent fare and in greater quantities than his client was allowed. Restraining himself from ordering some of the desirable forbidden foods Foss could doubtlessly prepare, Lazorg settled on pea soup, spinach salad and poached fish.

Eventually the dull day passed, and Lazorg found himself alone again in the big empty house that his art had bought for him.

Suddenly, with nightfall and solitude, the presence of the Central American powder in the house exerted a compulsive pull. Experiencing trepidation and eagerness in equal measures, Lazorg hastened to his studio.

None of his staff were permitted entrance to this room, and so Lazorg naturally found the brick of powder exactly where he had left it the previous night.

This time, using his longish pinky fingernail, he deliberately took up a larger quantity of the granular stuff and placed it on his tongue.

The same burst of flinty odor, aloe taste—and Lazorg felt himself invigorated, his mind preternaturally clear and alert. None of the dimensions of reality appeared to alter, no phantasms manifested, but the world did acquire a luster or charm it had lacked since—since Lazorg was young and whole.

Lazorg, smiling, moved confidently about his studio, picking up with renewed interest dried crusted brushes, old sketches, various trinkets and curios and souvenirs that had formerly served as inspiration, until finally he approached the unfinished last painting on its easel.

He put his hand to the cloth covering the work, hesitated, then whisked it off.

The canvas was intended to be an homage to Courbet’s
The Origin of the World
. That still-shocking canvas, as prurient as any centerfold, represented a naked woman, her head concealed by a cloth, viewed almost along the plane of her recumbent body, with her bushy crotch and quim occupying the focus of the composition.

Lazorg’s version—barely begun, mostly still a sketch—distorted the female form along novel fractal dimensions, and utilized a non-representational color palette. Still, despite the unreality of the mode, the force of the woman’s sexuality would be undeniable. That is, if Lazorg could ever finish it.

And surely part of the power of the finished image would derive not from Lazorg’s talents, but directly from the impressive woman who served as Lazorg’s model.

Velina Malaspina.

For twenty years now, since she was barely of legal age, Malaspina had served as Lazorg’s primary female model. Her body and face graced dozens of book covers, CD jewel cases and movie posters, in various guises. In Lazorg’s whole career, she was as close to a muse as he had ever had.

Of course they were lovers.

Or had been, before the stroke.

Sex was the only way Lazorg had been able to penetrate to Malapina’s essence, to capture her in ink and paint and charcoal. He had seduced the voluptuous, willing teenager when he himself was in his still virile mid-fifties, and continued to plumb her—admittedly less and less frequently—right up till his debilitating stroke.

But the relationship between them was hardly what could be called emotionally intimate. Malaspina, although suitably athletic and aggressive in the bedroom, had always exhibited a certain coolness or reserve. She presumed nothing of her carnal connection with Lazorg, made no demands, accepted gifts dispassionately, did not cling or cajole or caress. She showed up at the assigned times, performed her duties as both model and lover, and disappeared without looking back, until the next occasion for her services arose.

At first her indifference had been galling to Lazorg, but he had come to see it as either a kind of protective armor or genuine constitutional incapacity, and grown to accept her for what she offered.

But after his stroke—

Velina Malaspina had visited Frank Lazorg precisely once in the past year, shortly after his cerebral incident, when he was still hospitalized and at his worst. She had entered his room, bearing no flowers or gifts, and strode with her lithe grace to his bedside. She had contemplated his stricken face and frame for a punishing minute, her beautiful countenance an inscrutable mask. Then she had uttered a phrase conveying more judgment and verdict than sympathy: “Too bad.”

And with that she was gone from Lazorg’s life, seemingly forevermore.

The blow of her cruel departure was almost more devastating than the stroke.

Now Lazorg threw the covering sloppily back over the nascent painting. An iconography of Velina Malaspina rioted through his brain. Her touch, her scent, the curvilinear lines and intersecting planes of her lush body. The neurons of his brain seemed alight with renewed desire and ambition, crimson fires flickering down his dendrites.

He must get Velina back, for his art and his personal satisfaction—

Suddenly Lazorg slumped, all energy draining from his limbs, his mind shutting down its frenetic overdrive. Ennui and drowsiness threatened to leave him zoned out on the floor of his studio. What would Mrs. Compton ever say to that self-neglect? Lazorg winced at the imagined shrill rebuke.

Lazorg tottered back to where he had propped his cane, retrieved it, and stumped toward his bedroom.

The drug. The vision scarab. Certainly that alone could explain his sudden access of energy and clear thinking, and his equally sudden crash. That substance alone held the possibility of his recovery and final triumph over fucking mortality! He would exit this life on a high note, instead of as a pitiable shadow of his best self.

But what if the drug were harmful, like cantharides, another beetle-born substance, the Spanish Fly of his youth? Fulgencio had said nothing about its properties if taken internally, but only its suitability as a pigment. Yet what further significant harm could Lazorg do to his raddled body? If he died after finishing even one more painting, then so be it. The achievement would be worth the cost. Nothing could be worse than this pointless death-in-life, without the art that had granted his existence meaning.

But he must proceed sensibly and slowly. Learn his limits, and the limit of the powder. Overdosing on the very next trial would be an ironic and futile fate.

Thus began a week of nocturnal experimentation. Flake by flake, grain by grain, mole by mole, Lazorg applied the fragrant, aluminal, cochineal-colored substance to his tongue. He discovered the various grades of increased mental discernment and bodily strength that the drug could bring, their duration and repeatability and terminal stages.

Once he pushed a little too far and entered a realm of metallic paranoia. He became convinced that Fulgencio intended him harm with this malign gift. Old memories seemed to sharpen. Had he truly rescued the ancient curandero from thugs, or had he, Frank Lazorg, actually been one of the party of drunken revelers who had taunted and accosted and roughed up an elderly stranger in the town square as a cruel lark? Was this the foreigner’s revenge? But surely Fulgencio’s friendly note had spoken of gratitude and favors …?

Lazorg tore his studio half-apart, looking for the square of coarse paper that had accompanied the brick. But it had vanished, never to be found.

(Contrariwise, the brick of powder seemed almost self-replenishing to some degree, diminishing in bulk, yes, but not commensurately with Lazorg’s intake.)

At last the derangement passed, and Lazorg managed to recover by morning. Now he knew his upper bar with the organic drug.

By day he remained his old doddering self. None of his staff suspected his nightly experiments, he was certain.

But by night he rehearsed his return to potency, bolstered by the ingestion of the scarab crumbs. He cleaned brushes and unstoppered caked-shut paint tubes, stood with dry palette and brush in hand before the
Origin of the World
canvas, trying to feel the kinesthetics of the masterpiece lying in wait at the interface of man and medium.

At last he arrived at a point of confidence where he felt equal to contacting Velina Malaspina.

That night, his voice strengthened by the drug, his nerves emboldened, Lazorg punched up the entry for Malaspina in his cell-phone and triggered the call, knowing that he would in all likelihood get her voicemail. Often quite busy socializing, Velina disdained accepting calls directly, preferring to compose her reactions ahead of time before responding to any importunings.