The atrocity exhibition (11 page)

Pressure Points
. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams.

Central Casting
. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of
The Minotaur
. In a sequel to
Faustus
and
The Shrew
, the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived.

An Unpleasant Orifice
. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting.

‘Alternate’ Death
. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.

Geometry of Guilt
. Later, when the studio was deserted, Dr Nathan saw Talbert standing on the roof of the maze, surveying the contours of the sloping basin below. His dark-skinned face resembled that of a pensive architect. Once again Karen Novotny had died, Talbert’s fears and obsessions mimetized in her alternate death. Dr Nathan decided not to speak to him. His own identity would seem little more than a summary of postures, the geometry of an accusation.

Exposed Placenta
. The following week, when Dr Nathan returned, Talbert had not moved. He sat on the edge of the water-filled basin, staring into the lucid depths of that exposed placenta. His emaciated figure was by now little more than a collection of tatters. After watching him for half an hour Dr Nathan walked back to his car.

The Great American Nude.

‘The Great American Nude’ is the running title of a series of paintings by the Pop artist Tom Wesselman, which rework the iconic possibilities of the commercial nude. As with much of Pop art, the bland surface defuses the subject, making an unsettling comment on our notions of fame and celebrity.

A Diagram of Bones.

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or ancient Egypt, is reassimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality in attractive and instantly appealing forms.

Profane Marriage.

An imaginary Segal, as far as I know. His plaster figures scarcely lend themselves to sexual activity, perhaps because they have effectively died under the ash of their future Pompeii.

Landscapes of the Dream.

The many lists in
The Atrocity Exhibition
were in effect free-association tests. What I find surprising after so many years is how they anticipate the future themes of my fiction. Item 1 shows my wartime experiences in Shanghai surfacing briefly, before disappearing again for nearly two decades. Heaven alone knows what will surface in the future.

Baby Dolls.

Hans Bellmer’s work is now totally out of fashion, hovering as it does on the edge of child pornography. Yet it’s difficult to imagine any paedo-phile being excited by his strange dolls and dainty, Alice-like little girls with their reversed orifices and paradoxical anatomy. But his vision is far too close for comfort to the truth.

‘Not in the Literal Sense.’

‘Needless to say . . . ’ Certainly needless by this stage, if the reader has been giving even a tenth of his attention to the text. Dr Nathan represents the safe and sane voice of the sciences. His commentaries are accurate, and he knows what is going on. On the other hand, reason rationalizes reality for him, as it does for the rest of us, in the Freudian sense of providing a more palatable or convenient explanation, and there are so many subjects today about which we should not be reasonable.

The Sex Kit.

Sex, which many enthusiasts in the 1960s thought they had invented, then seemed to be the new frontier, though AIDS has recently cooled our ardour. Even so, the mass media publicly offer a range of options which previously have been available only in private. Thanks to press, film and television, sex has become a communal and public activity for the first time since the Edens of a more primitive age. In a sense we now all take part in sex whether we want to or not. Many people, like the characters in
The Atrocity Exhibition
, use sex as a calculated means of exploring uncertainties in their make-up, exploiting the imaginative possibilities that sex provides. Any sex act can become a nerve-wracking psycho-drama in which one is recruited into someone else’s company of players. Dimestore de Sades stalk the bedrooms of suburbia, re-enacting the traumas of weaning and potty training. The test of a language is how well it can be translated into other tongues, and sex is the most negotiable language of all.

Central Casting.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had appeared in stage versions of
Faustus
and
The Taming of the Shrew
, typecasting for both, especially Burton, who had the look in his last years of a man who had made the devil’s bargain and knew he had lost - but drunk or sober, he was always interesting and sympathetic.

‘Alternate’ Death.

‘Alternate Deaths’ occur again and again in
The Atrocity Exhibition
. By these I mean the re-enactment of various tragedies staged by Traven and his many selves. They take place partly in his own mind and partly in the external world, and represent his attempt to make sense of these unhappy events and attribute to them a moral dimension and even, perhaps, a measure of hope. In Traven’s mind Kennedy and Monroe have ‘died’, but not yet been laid to rest.

Locus Solus
. Through the dust-covered windscreen she watched him walk along the beach. Despite the heat he had been wandering about by himself for half an hour, as if following an invisible contour inside his head. After their long drive he had stopped on this isthmus of clinker only a few hundred yards from their apartment. She closed the novel lying on her knees, took out her compact and examined the small ulcer on her lower lip. Exhausted by the sun, the resort was almost deserted - beaches of white pumice, a few bars, apartment blocks in ice-cream colours. She looked up at the shutters, thinking of the sun-blackened bodies sprawled together in the darkness, as inert as the joints of meat on supermarket counters. She closed the compact. At last he was walking back to the car, an odd-shaped stone in one hand. A fine ash like milled bone covered his suit. She placed her arm on the window-sill. Before she could move the hot cellulose stung her skin.

The Yes or No of the Borderzone
. Between the aluminium grilles of the balcony he could see the banks of the drained river half a mile away, piers of collapsing sand like the ruined columns of an ornamental canal. He turned his head on the pillow, following the white flex of a power cable as it angled its way around the bedroom door. A manoeuvre of remarkable chasteness. He listened to the water jet against the frosted panes of the shower stall. As the door opened the blurred profile of her body took on a sudden liquid focus, moving across the bedroom like a pink meniscus. She took a cigarette from his packet, then flashed the lighter in her preoccupied eyes. Head in a towel, she lay on the bedspread, smoking the wet cigarette.

B-Movie
. He sat at the glass-topped table beside the news stand, watching the young woman pick through the copies of
Oggi
and
Paris-Match
. Her face, with its unintelligent eyes and pearl lips whispering like a child’s, was reflected in the stereotypes of a dozen magazine covers. He finished his drink and followed her through the arcade, curious to see her reaction. In the deserted open-air cinema she unlatched the door of the pay kiosk and locked it behind herself with a rusty key. Why on earth had he followed her? Suddenly bored by the young woman, he climbed the concrete aisle and walked among the empty seats, staring at the curved screen. She turned the pages of her magazine, watching him over her shoulder.

Love among the Mannequins
. Unable to move, he lay on his back, feeling the sharp corner of the novel cut into his ribs. Her hand rested across his chest, nails holding the hair between his nipples like a lover’s scalp brought back for him as a trophy. He looked at her body. Humped against his right shoulder, her breasts formed a pair of deformed globes like the elements of a Bellmer sculpture. Perhaps an obscene version of her body would form a more significant geometry, an anatomy of triggers? In his eye, without thinking, he married her right knee and left breast, ankle and perineum, armpit and buttock. Carefully, to avoid waking her, he eased his arm from beneath her head. Through the apartment window the opalescent screen of the open-air cinema rose above the rooftops. Immense fragments of Bardot’s magnified body illuminated the night air.

A Confusion of Mathematical Models
. Holding her cheap Nikon, he led the young woman down the bank. In the sunlight the drained river stretched below them, a broken chequerboard floor. At its mouth a delta of shingle formed an ocean bar, pools of warm water filled with sea urchins. Beyond the silver span of the motor bridge lay basins of cracked mud the size of ballrooms - models of a state of mind, a curvilinear labyrinth. Handing her the camera, he began to explore the hollows around them. Images of Bardot’s body seemed to lie in these indentations, deformed elements of thigh and thorax, obscene sexual wounds. Fingering the shaving scar on his jaw, he watched the young woman waiting with her back to him. Already, without touching her, he knew intimately the repertory of her body, its anthology of junctions. His eyes turned to the multi-storey car park beside the apartment blocks above the beach. Its inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness.

Soft Geometry
. The audience’s laughter drummed against the walls of the cubicle behind the pay kiosk, dislodging a carton of automat tickets from the shelf above his head. He pushed it back with one hand, finding with the other a small mole on her left shoulder blade like a minuscule nipple. Strangely surprised by even this blemish on her otherwise under-pigmented skin, he bent down and touched it with his lips. She watched him with a tired smile, the same rictus that had fixed itself on her mouth during their afternoon in the dusty heat trap below the bank. Was he playing an elaborate game with her, using their acts of intercourse for some perverse pleasure of his own? In many ways her body retraced the contours they had explored together. Above the window of the cubicle fluttered the reverse image of the cinema screen, Bardot’s translucent face twisted into a bizarre pout.

Non-Communicating Dialogue
. As he entered the apartment she was sitting on the balcony, painting her nails. Drying in the sunlight beside her was the novel he had thrown into the bidet, its pages flowering into an elegant ruff. She looked up from her nail file. ‘Did you enjoy the film?’ He walked into the bathroom, wincing at himself in the mirror, that always more tired older brother. The half-hearted inflection of irony in her voice no longer irritated him. An enormous neutral ground now divided them, across which their emotions signalled like meaningless semaphores. If anything, her voice formed a module with the perspectives of wall and ceiling as abstract as the design on a detergent pack. She sat down beside him on the bed, splaying her wet nails in a gesture of intimacy. He stared at the transverse scar above her navel. What act between them would provide a point of junction?