Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking (21 page)

Excellent. Why don’t you go and lie down on that gurney in the center of the room? That’s where you’ll be posing. Oh, you’re feeling a little light-headed and woozy? That’s weird, perhaps you’ve caught that cold that’s going around Thundermist as of recent. Now if you’ll excuse me for just one second, I need to go turn on my iPod. Yes, I always like to listen to music when I work. Oh, by the way, could you also take off your clothes, please? I insist that my models be nude when I do their portraits. Nude as Father Adam in his prime. You can just leave your clothes on the floor. Very nice, very nice. I’m sure you’ve heard this before, Adrian, but you have a very beautiful body. Truly callipygian. Trust me, that’s a compliment: it means you have shapely buttocks. Of course, you know what they say, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. One of those rare clichés that happens to be true, by the by.

The music? It’s a song called “Rabbit Snare” by a British group named Throbbing Gristle. I see by the face you’re making that you’re not too keen on it. Or perhaps you’re still feeling unwell? Don’t panic... yes, it seems as if you’re rapidly losing your ability to move your muscles. Almost as if you’re becoming paralyzed. Oh dear, maybe it is that nasty cold that’s going around after all. Or it might have something to do with the fact that pipes all over the interior of this house have been emitting a paralyzing nerve gas ever since you stepped through the front door. Yes, that’s probably the most likely reason. It won’t affect me because I’m wearing this handy mask, and I’m immune to the stuff anyway, but you’re not quite as lucky. You need not worry, it’s only temporary, it won’t last. Let me just strap you down on this gurney and get you as comfortable as possible. Oh, please don’t put up a struggle, even one as feeble as this, it’s very unattractive and completely a waste of energy. See, already your body is becoming comfortably numb. Soon you won’t be able to feel a thing. In a way, I envy you, as my pain is
constant
. You don’t mind if I run my hands over your torso, do you? I like to get a feel for my clay before I start working with it.

Let me just tilt your head so you can see the TV on that wall. In a few minutes I’m going to let you observe Mabel Osterman’s portrait session, as I videotape all such sessions. This session which we’re doing right now will be also recorded. Actually, the recording
is
the portrait. But I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. Before we can begin I feel the need to further explain my philosophy, which I hope will enlighten you about my working methods. And I apologize for the hoarseness of my voice: I spend so much time in communication with the spirit world, with the invisible Cobwebbed Ones, that it tends to put quite a bit of strain on my vocal cords. I also apologize for my somewhat extensive vocabulary. I adore archaic and antiquated words, and in my more delusional frames of mind I prefer to see myself as not only an artist but also as a necromancer of dead languages. My favorite word of all time is “thanatoskiankomorphic.” I won’t tell you what that means, though. I will only say that its definition reveals all there is to know about me. Or maybe I’m just lying. If some of what I’m about to tell you doesn’t make much sense, bear in mind that the gas you’re inhaling at the moment also causes the occasional audio (and visual) hallucination.

Now, earlier I was telling you about my fascination with things that are hidden, with the occult. As a child, I used to always take things apart, to see what they were like inside. My parents thought it was cute when I disassembled their VCR. They didn’t think it was as cute when I did the same thing to the family parakeet, named Napoleon, of all things. Please don’t misunderstand me, it had nothing to do with mere sadism. It wasn’t as if I was also wetting my bed and setting things on fire, like so many other little budding Bundys. It was simply that I found surface
boring
. It was at some point during my teenage years that I determined to become an artist. Hence my years at the Rhode Island School of Design. The real reason I was kicked out of the school was because I drugged a model with formaldehyde and tried to turn her vagina inside out. But the dosage was wrong and she ended up awakening halfway through the operation. Her screams alerted the campus police, who thus interrupted my work of art. I tried to explain to the Dean my philosophy, but apparently the college frowned on genital mutilation. The story never made it to the papers as the school didn’t want bad publicity: I was simply expelled. I went through another depressive period, which was followed by a phase in which I studied a large number of religions, spiritual belief systems, Eastern philosophies, you name it. Yet I found every single one of them lacking. During this period of my life, I also began a new career, that of a psychiatrist, and I started seeing patients, many of whom ended up becoming the test subjects of my future experiments.

One evening a couple of years ago, I went through a dark night of the soul, and at one point cursed the God who had created this world, who had hidden the most interesting things behind dull walls and tedious flesh. I was in such a state of despair that I considered taking my own life. As I sat in my bedroom with the razor in my hand I prayed, and I prayed, and I prayed... until He came to me: the man with the starfish head. Some would call him a demon, but to me, he was my savior. It was He who made me pick up the razor and slice open a finger on my left hand. I saw the blood begin to seep out, my own blood, and I felt dizzy, as if I were witnessing something unreal. It made me think: why do people sometimes get dizzy or light-headed when they see their own blood? That evening, I had a revelation: it’s not due to a fear of the sight of blood,
it’s because we’re seeing something we’re never meant to see
, something that has been hidden away from us, like the face of God. I began to think of the inside of the human body, and all the organs that keep us going, how one never gets to truly see one’s own skull when he looks at himself in the mirror. This was the conclusion I came to: that our true selves can only be found
within
us, literally, that the ultimate occult grimoire cannot be found on any bookshelf but underneath our skin.
We need to read ourselves to truly reach enlightenment
. The haruspices who tried to divine the future by inspecting the entrails of sacrificed sheep were on the right track, and I foresaw a new brand of theology: the study of the divinity of the human organs.

“In the heart of every human being there exists a haunted house, a dark forest, a pagan temple, a crumbling Gothic castle, and a desecrated church. It is within these ruins that we find our true selves, it is through these dark nights of the soul that Nature is unveiled.” I wrote that, many years ago, when I was a pretentious teenager. Little did I know, back then, how true those words were. So... where was I? Ah, yes, my life following the revelation. First, I began wearing my clothes inside out, as an outward display of the dedication I felt towards my new purpose in life. I then began carefully studying nature, seeking out animals that were capable of turning themselves inside out. Sadly, I was only able to find but a few examples, such as the starfish, which can turn its stomach inside out. Did you know that? And, of course, my beloved Vampire Squids. Once I discovered them, my metamorphosis was complete. I created this mask and gave myself a new name: Professor Noe, you see. I began practicing my art, gradually perfecting my technique. Granted, a few of my early models died, but these were regrettable casualties of art. Eventually, I saved up enough money to move to this fine city of ours, and I proceeded to build this house, a house that reflects my unique philosophy. And then, my career as an artist began in earnest.

Are you familiar, Adrian, with the term “Aphotic Zone?” Ah, forgive me, I had forgotten that you are unable to speak at the present moment: or do anything at all, for that matter. Back to the Aphotic Zone. Now there’s a term you won’t come across on a daily basis.
Aphotic
is a Greek word meaning “without light.” The Aphotic Zone, then, is the portion of a lake or ocean where there is little to no sunlight. Less than 1% of sunlight penetrates this zone, and as a result, bioluminescence provides the only light source in this area of the ocean. Of course, there are layers even further below the Aphotic Zone, such as the Bathyal Zone, the Abyssal Zone, and the Hadal Zone. But I’ve always found the Aphotic Zone to be most fascinating because it’s the natural habitat of the Vampire Squid. As I formulated my new philosophy, I began to see the innards of the human body as a metaphor for the Aphotic Zone, that is, we carry within us the darkness of the deepest depths of the ocean, and one must never forget that water makes up a significant portion of the human body. Science and technology have given us bathyspheres to explore the lowest depths of the ocean, but have failed to properly equip us with a similar device for plumbing the alien seas beneath our skin and muscles. Ufologists have it backwards: why look to the sky for alien life forms when the ultimate UFO is our own body? The drowning king of alchemy is nothing more than our own unconscious desire to map out these unknown waters, our
mare nostrum
. As Saint Yoko Ono once said, in her “Seven Little Stories,” “Listen very carefully and you will hear the sea in your body. You know, our blood is seawater and we are all seacarriers.” To shed light on the Aphotic Zone inside the human body: this became the aim of my philosophy, the goal of my art, for there is a darkness within us as tenebrous as a Crater of Eternal Darkness, those areas of the Solar System which are untouched by light (one such example: Lovecraft’s Crater, near the south pole of Mercury, but again, I digress).

Before I begin working on your portrait, let me show you Mabel’s session. Now, let me think, where did I last leave that video? Probably with my collection of previously taped portrait sessions. Let me search the “O” list: Olafson, Ondic, Orton, Orwig, ah! Here we are. Mabel Osterman. Let me just get this started up now. Okay, from the beginning. There’s Mabel Osterman, strapped down to the very same gurney on which you now rest, paralyzed, naked, just like you. And now there I am, hovering to her side, scalpel in hand. Do you see? Accompanied by that old song by R.E.M., “Turn You Inside-Out,” I’m cutting her chest open now, as if I were performing an autopsy on her. I hope you don’t find all of this dull. It picks up once I reach her interior region, her glorious subterranean ocean, her darkly shining world. Ah! There... see how gingerly I handle her insides, how delicately I hold them up to the camera, how lovingly I caress them? Oh, how I love to whisper noctivigant nursery rhymes to the organs of my models. Adrian, my boy, if you only knew the scandalous things her liver told me: I will never tire of hearing tales from topographic organs.

Have you ever wondered what your jealous organs daydream? Starved of attention, they fantasize about nothing less than the desecration of our beloved surfaces. The flawless faces of innocent babies and beautiful children covered with foul saprophytic maggots. Supermodels losing their minds as the skin starts to flake off their faces, before their horrified eyes. Our lovely lakes and oceans befouled by enormous anuses shitting torrents of fecal matter into once-pristine water. Trees covered with festering sores and bubbling ulcers. Noble animals melting and mutating into horrific new forms, their outsides suddenly resembling their insides. The young turning into the old, their bodies crushed by time, their skin rotting away: this is pornography for our organs.

A confession: even though I depend on people such as yourself and Madame Osterman to fund my experiments, and even though your very existence is necessary to provide a reason for my art to exist in the first place, it’s a symbiotic relationship I find nauseating, as narcissists like yourself make me sick to death. You’re just like everyone else in the world, concerned with outer appearances only. All you care about is your face, your muscles, the flatness of your gut, perhaps even your genital area. Meaningless! Meaningless! Vanity of vanity, all is vanity. Do you ever stop and think about the organs keeping you alive, the organs that never get to take a break, never get to go on vacation, never even get to rest? Maybe you think of them only in rare moments of morbidity, or at those periods in life where after decades of wear and tear they finally start to break down and rebel. What is cancer but a violent insurrection against a despotic tyrant? What is a heart attack but a noble suicide? Do you know that every organ is like a snowflake, something totally unique and with its own individual personality? Yet no one cares, except I, the man who has given them a voice, the artist who listens to the nightmares of tissues, the agony of the plasma, and the lamentations of the blood. As I turn you inside out, I plan on reading your insides like a novel, and what I’ll discover will be a trillion times more interesting than any words that could come forth from your pretty mouth, for within each of us is an alien landscape as divinely weird as the mystical paintings of Nicholas Roerich.

Sorry about that, sometimes I like to get on my high horse. Ah, here’s the part of the video where I hold a conversation with Mabel’s kidneys. Don’t worry about infection, as you can clearly see in this video, I’m wearing gloves, and I would also like to let you know that I always sterilize my surgical equipment before doing the portrait. In addition, my little dark elves will put you all back together once I’m done far more skillfully than any mere surgeon could do. Listen to me, surgical equipment, as if what I was doing was mere surgery! No, the scalpel is my paintbrush. Oh, this is a good part: it’s very exciting when I cut open the skull and expose the brain to light. How many people can claim to have seen their own brain, I ask you? If only I could find a way to peel off one’s face to reveal the skull beneath, then somehow attach the face back on... but my art technique has not reached that level yet. Perhaps in the future I shall achieve that height. Maybe I’ll even try it out on you.