Authors: Mark Nykanen
The razor reminds me again of how sculpting a body encompasses so much more than the feeble minds of my contemporaries could possibly contemplate. I have cut away a good deal of June over these final weeks of her life, and now I cut away the last vestiges of her womanhood. I see this most clearly as I dab away the last few flecks of cream with a towel. She looks like a girl again, a little girl, yet she is a woman, and the tension of this vision will arouse others, or disgust them, but it will
move
them all. I stare at her sex and consider again the violation, which feels to me as duty does to a soldier. What will generate the greatest edginess in the eyes of a patron: a girl’s vagina on a woman’s body that has been violated, and reveals all of its naked folds? Or a girl’s vagina on a woman’s body that has not been violated, but suggests through its unveiled appearance a virginal
vulnerability
, or is it a harlot’s brazen
availability?
This, too, will plague patrons, the delectation of their own indecision, for it will speak to them of their own agonizing desires.
This dilemma is ennobling, because it is so completely uncoupled from any base considerations. They do not enter my calculations for even a moment. At last I decide that she will remain inviolate, that for most patrons the tension between appearance and possibility is so great that it will prove far more arresting than the fait accompli of intercourse. I bank, once again, on the power of the imagination’s most sordid machinations.
My decision also conforms most closely to my initial sense of June, when she was simply June Cleaver, the might have been Mormon in the dress.
She has come so far for so much.
I spread alginate over her feet and calves, rubbing it in, making sure to create the overlap with the “skin” I peeled from her back yesterday. I smooth it over her thighs and into the creases that separate her bottom from her legs. When I press it against her bare vagina, she shudders. I do not kid myself, this is not from pleasure.
Half of her body is now a greenish gray.
I press it into her belly button and come to her breasts. The nipples look like they are trying to dive back into her bosoms. She is, I would guess, experiencing the antithesis of arousal. I’ve yet to meet a woman who enjoys this, but that’s the point, to make them endure what they never thought they could endure; and then, just when they are fighting the hardest for breath, for a few more seconds of consciousness, to snap the illusion of life into pieces, the body as a vase that has fallen from an endless sky to a shattered earth, though at the time of its arrival I suspect that most of my subjects long more for death’s final sedation than for the life they are leading.
The alginate covers her to the neck. I won’t continue in such a linear fashion. That would be such a waste of anticipation. Instead, I encircle the instrument of breath until only it protrudes, making sure to smooth over the creases in the cheeks from the mouth-plug straps. I ignore the hair, it is not so interesting as most women think, not in their final repose. And then I dab alginate onto the bridge of the nose and down to the nostrils.
Already her breath has become ragged. The fear that grips her has extended its reach from her limbs to her lungs.
“Yes, June,” I coo, “it’s your turn now.”
I am about to become truly cruel to her for the first time, but I must be blind to kindness if I am to achieve the sculpted effect of bottomless fear.
Into her right nostril I insert a plug of alginate so thick, so viciously viscous, that she suffers immediately; but not, as you might suspect from the halving of her breath, because this is not the cruelty of which I speak. This is:
“At least you can die a happy woman, June. You’ve lived a full life. No regrets, right? I want you to think about that now. You’ve achieved your dreams, haven’t you? You’ve had a family, a
good
family, and a good husband in Jolly Roger. You’ve had everything a good American girl could possibly ask for: husband, home, happiness with children.”
I’ve said all of this before to other women, but never has it proved so effective, never have I been such a provocateur. June twists her body, tensioning it like a screw boring into the hardest wood, a hickory or mahogany rail, contorts her face until I know that this will be a fine mask for my private collection, that it will capture not just horror but the grisly nightmare of becoming no more than you are for now and forever. But what bellows most loudly are the legs, the belly, the breasts and arms, the hands and fingers straining, scratching, thrashing as if each of them were an animal, a rodent left to claw its way out of a glass cage on the blood-raked backs of its brethren. This is delicious. She beats the table with her elbows, the back of her hands and wrist. Her head thumps dully, her heels too, a hopeless defeated dance of defiance. All this because the words I offer provide no comfort; they are incitement to the most agonizing realization: that her life as she lived it was the worst of all possible mistakes, and that now, in her final moments, she is forced to relive them with the full and terrifying recognition that she could have done so much better. Oh, how she knows this. I see it as clearly as she does. I have sculpted her body, and with my words I sculpt her mind, give form to all the misgivings, all the mistakes, all the madness she has known. I am but patina to her pain, the copper solution that turns her green with envy for the lowest of all life still crawling unfettered through the jungle slime. She really could have done better. This is not illusion. Not for June the Cleaver. Though I have abominated her, loathed her to my core, she
could
have done better, much much better. She has the body, and enough of the cold calculator about her to have risen far beyond her humble rank.
What
does
she see as I slip the tiniest ball of alginate into her left nostril, blocking but a fraction of the passageway with a bitter intimation of the final closure?
Does her life pass her by already? Does she remember the doctor or midwife handing her baby girl to her? Does she remember Diamond Girl resting on her chest? And if she does, and I know she does because I am urging these memories on her with whispers, does she recoil from the bullet of bad memories that this little baby brought to her in all the years that followed? The girl who only days ago sacrificed her mother’s life and her father’s, and even her little brother’s, to the icy game she’s playing?
No, the memory of her baby girl cannot bring her peace, it can bring her only more agony, more remorse. I hear this in the greatly muffled
oompf-oompfs
, for she speaks the language of the dying as she struggles for a lasting breath.
Perhaps she remembers her wedding day, the flowers and the bridal train, the bridesmaids and the best man who looked at her with longing, and flattered her with the knowledge that she could have had so many, but she chose her one and only.
“Your one and only,” I repeat with my laughter barely disguised because Jolly Roger poisons the whole conceit of a “one and only.” He is as common as sand, as common as dust, and doesn’t she know this better than anybody on the entire planet?
“You’ve got half of one nostril left, June.
Half
. Breathe too hard and you’ll suck it all the way in, and then that’s it.”
But she’s a smart one, she is. She draws in a long steady breath, quieting her arms and legs, and then exhales harshly, expelling the dull green ball from her left nostril as she would a blockage of phlegm. But the effort at controlling breath, parcelling it out so closely when it’s in such short supply, costs her dearly, leaves her tortured for more air, trying to make up what she has missed. Her body thrashes about as she loses the last degree of control.
“Look at you,” I say to her, but she doesn’t hear, can’t hear, not with the struggle to breathe growing feverishly frantic. She is a dull green creature from head to toe with nothing but one small dark hole connecting her to life, a single dot in the only universe she can call her own. Her entire existence reduced to this speck of emptiness that can be squeezed shut in an instant. But does she give up? No. She’s an inspiration. She’s managed to buy a few moments more. I admire her. I really do. Go, girl, go. But I have to confess that I’m laughing. I am laughing so hard that I can hardly catch
my
breath. I tell June to stop it. Stop it! You’re killing me, June. You really are. And this makes me laugh even more. One tiny hole, and with that she engineers all she needs of hope.
“Breathe, June, breathe,” I mock her, perhaps by bringing back the dull face of Jolly Roger by her bed, aping all the men he’d ever seen in movies who urged their wives to breathe during birth, as if this could lift them past the greatest pain they would ever know. Except it isn’t the greatest pain they’ll ever know, not for the women fortunate enough to have met me. For them the memory of childbirth becomes a holiday, a festive retreat. June, I’ll bet, never thrashed like this, not even with Diamond Girl poking her bubble head out, tearing apart her body’s tightest cords.
“Breathe, June, breathe,” I repeat as I pass the alginate that will kill her over the tiny opening, a threat that can’t last a second longer, for I have milked her death dearly and can’t possibly squeeze out one more bead of anguish. She has entered the birthing room of her new life, the one she’ll live forever in bronze. I jam a large plug of alginate into her left nostril, pack it in and smooth over the surface. I imagine her left in the darkening silence to remember Jolly Roger’s words,
Breathe, June, breathe
, and the birth of Diamond Girl. Both tear at her now. Both rip open her lungs, her body, from the inside out, for the birth of death is mired in the worst understanding of life, and all who doubt this have only to wait for their own demise to learn that in the final moments they will not relive all the years that have passed, but all the regrets they have known. This is our one true horror, not that we die, but that we never really lived.
I peel the alginate from all but her nostrils as her struggle turns heroic. Yes, June, you are my hero, you and all the others. I will honor you well.
The green reflection of her body lies beside her now, and after a greatly weakened spasm she quiets. I picked the right moment, I can see this in the terror of the skin. Only now do I hear the screams that rise from the cage. They have been present through all of this, but dimly so. Such is the power of concentration. Such is the power of art. It is Jolly Roger, wailing on his knees. His fists have beaten two bowls into the earth, and his face is awash in tears. He surprises me, and I can see that my story of the eunuch might not be enough to quell such rage, even in a man, if a man he has become.
I lay June’s second skin, the one cloaked in the greatness she could never have known in life, on a length of Plexiglas, and carry it out to the foundry as if on a giant serving platter.
The air is abundant with memory, for I’ve made this trip so many times, and each step has been graced with its own reward. I place June on a long table where she’ll await her family, and my own labors later. Maybe I’ll have Ry Chambers help me build the molds. I revel in the thought of him observing June and Jolly Roger and Sonny-boy in this state, a newsman who won’t see the most amazing story in the whole of art history when it literally stares back at him.
Much as this tickles me, I know in my heart it’s a disgrace, an utterly contemptible disgrace. There’s no other word for it. I will never escape this judgment, no matter how hard I might try. I’ve waited years to have a book written about me, and what do I get for an author? Some ring ding of a TV reporter. But that’s not the worst of it, the most
disgraceful
part of it. When he showed up, he told me with a smile (no less) that he’s including four other sculptors. Lesser artists all. Am I supposed to be pleased? Am I supposed to feel
complimented?
That I have to share the first book of its type with a Lauren Reed? He’s determined to mix the burnt wicks of four tiny candles with a klieg light. It’s sickening, but I tried to appear flattered, showed him my work, my notebooks no less (the heart of my art), tried to show him without saying so directly that the work of the others—and that’s all you can call it,
work
, because it’s like pounding rocks to look at it—is tripe.
I feel fallen into some arid Oz to have to share a book with the likes of them. I hadn’t even heard of Reed until Ring Ding came along. No, that’s not true. I had
heard
of her. I’d seen her show at the Jenson in San Francisco several years ago, enough to recharge my arsenal of disgust for all this crap that passes for art. A whole century of it, starting with the modernists and their self-lauding abstractions, Mondrian lines (an inspiration to linoleum everywhere) and Kline’s
gestures
(now there’s meaning for you). Sculpture was far, far worse. Try Rauschenberg herding his pathetic goat through a tire (How very homoerotic,
Bobbie
). Or that impossible woman with her fur-covered coffee cup and saucer, much praised for its lesbian overtones. I wish I were exaggerating, creating hooey out of honor, but I’m not. These are but two examples of highly praised modern sculpture, and every first-year art student knows this is so.
June stares unblinkingly into the lone light that hangs above her. She is perfect now, the embodiment of all that should be held dear. Perhaps when Ring Ding sees these skins he’ll understand why my greatness can never suffer so much as the shadow of these other so-called sculptors. My art and their work can’t mix, any more than the day can embrace night, light its absence. Perhaps June and her family will provide the insight he so vitally needs, the one that will let him see what a waste it is to force me to share pages with a plasterer. That’s what Lauren Reed is, a plasterer, and all the glowing reviews in the world won’t change that at all. “Challenging the hierarchal importance of bronze.” Another toady critic. When I read that I wanted to scream, “No, she’s not, you idiot. She can’t handle bronze so she’s working with plaster.” Making me share space with her is no less crude an insult than suggesting that the peasant who plastered the walls of Rodin’s studio shared an artistic currency with the master himself.