Fossiloctopus (6 page)

He moves like a dynamo through the molasses masses, a man alive, animated, sharply aware of the mind-numbed insensates that surround him.  His bare skin glistens, as if the black cowls and misshapen shawls of the onlookers serve to insulate his naked torso from the frosted night air.  But the heat that causes his perspiration comes from within – from within turned without in magma and white fireballs flared past the pair of burning sticks that he wields in a frenzied dance, trying to keep his spectators at bay.  His is the only true illumination.  Bright clouds, fiery jets, burning ovoids burst beyond his lips.  He is the Cassanova of Vulcan.  Prometheus’ Lover.  The Tongue of Flame.

And in the light of the performance they see – you see – the seven tattoos of Inisto Cantaglia:

THE SALAMANDER  - Over his left breast – over the region of the heart – writhes the salamander.  The demonic serpentine bottom half undulates in the glow of the flames, reaching out to escape its epidermic prison and return home to the plane of fire.  Atop the fire-adder’s hocks are a trunk, a head, and two arms of human appearance, but devilish provenance.  The mustachio face might be that of Saint Pol-Roux or Comte de Montesquiou – black whiskers sharp as a scalpel, pointed as a syringe needle, every hair of the head waxed into its proper place.  In his immaculately-manicured hands he holds a flamethrower, pointing the dragon’s mouth toward the viewer.  The pilot-flame that peeks out of the weapon’s muzzle in anxious anticipation serves to darken, rather than illuminate, the salamander’s ebony eyes.  The malice-filled orbs glitter with emptiness, sparked by something more searing than flame, yet darker than the abyss.

THE JONGLEUR – Opposite the salamander, on the right breast, the Jongleur.  He is a plump wag, his wide blue eyes and jaw-gaped smile full of élan.  He is a Disney Bacchus in renaissance garb.  A black and white checkered cap replete with two belled horns balances atop his foppish Ringo mop, and beneath the goateed double chin a frilly, laced jabot attached, in turn, to a once –piece harlequin suit in black and white stripes.  Below the Goliath Beetle (
Goliathus regius Klug
) corpulence, a pair of bell-tipped genie shoes in red.  The Jongleurs face might be the salamander’s, sans sinistry, and fattened on the paychecks of his audience.  He laughs aloud, surrounded by generic stick people, empty heads with drawn-on smiles and inexpressive eyes.  He juggles five fuse-lit cannonballs.  The crackling of their sparkling wicks stops the sound of laughter from reaching the un-ears of the stick people crowd.  Had they heard through the fizzle, they might have realized the danger they were in, for his laughter was less mellisonant than maleficent.  The crowd laughs ignorantly.  The joke is on them.

KNUCKLEBONES – Two pairs of knucklebones in three chronological stages on the inner left forearm.

Stage I: Four knucklebones reading 2:2:6:4 or 4:10 by the pairs.  This is the oldest and purest of the three stages, the cubes clean, white, dots clear and distinct.  Read the pairs – Song of Solomon 4:10: “How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse!  How much better is thy love than wine!  And the smell of thine ointments than all spices!”

Stage II: A touch-up job in reverse. The crispness of the initial tattoo has faded and wear has appeared – hand oils and nicotine stains smudge the skin inks, and two dots have appeared on the first die.  Let him who hath eyes read.  Psalms 6:10: “Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly.”

Stage III: More dots, 7:11, and things have become unclear.  The knucklebones are gnarled, cracked, grooved, dirty, used, worn smooth on the vertices from obsessive rubbing, smudged with soot, and burnt.  Interpretations diverge.  One – Genesis 7:11: “In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.”  Or, two –the old books are decontextualized and, thus, defunct.  A new book has superseded the old, and a one-letter deviation in its prologue can lead to drastic results in the denouement.  Events are nudged by even the slightest punctuation error, the resulting plot line careening out of control.  Chance has taken over in the fractal interstices.  Cracks infinitely deteriorate, and chaos spreads like a cancer through the history of the man who wears the dice.  The empty shell of the knucklebones barely hides the rot within its crumbling ivory veneer.

BARBED WIRE – “The Devil’s Rope” wrapped crosswise over the biceps, rusted spikes digging into the veins and arteries flowing between heart and hands.  They simultaneously protect and entrap, snagging the flotsam of his squalorous urban habitat: matted rat’s fur; smells of dog food cooked over a 50 gallon drum; unheeded screams of domestic beatings and marital rape; droplets of gin, cheap wine, smack, urine, and a twenty-nine-ingredient cocktail of industrial toxins, rheum from the bloodshot eyes of the unsleeping; knife-hole-riddled tatters of Mafioso dress suits and gangland bandanas; wisps of shredded dreams; evaporated aspirations.

THE ALL SEEING EYE – Hidden away at the juncture of neck and skull, medula oblongota, impossible for him to see unless he shaves his long, greasy black locks and stands in the midst of a mirror-filled room.  The ritual act of revelation would represent his thoughts, were he to carry it out:

“I am the stage.  The world is always watching.  An eye is never not upon me, though I am powerless to know which one and when.  And who.  Or why?  I am the center of the Panopticon turned inside out, the guard become the prisoner.  There can be no escape for I am always watching me and always seen by myself.  There can be no alone moment.  The mask cannot fall, must not fall.  And what if it does?  What if Punch and Judy let slip the porcelain visage that hides my true self, and beneath the scaramouche is another, and another, and yet another?  An infinite layering of facades that lead to a core of no substance?  Who am I then?  Again, I am the stage, to be acted upon.  Unless I act first.  Unless I act . . . decisively!”

BELLI NOSTRO . . . – A fragment, incomplete.  A long-decayed or never finished Venus statue for style and content.  Sandal-clad, perfectly-manicured toes sprout into tight-muscled calves half-hidden in Greek robes.  The dress climbs up sleek thighs, flat belly, and firm breasts like linen ivy, clinging to the frame, hinting at a ripened sexuality beneath; curved, dipped, and cupped with the mysteries of life in its hollows.  She holds a thin white taper with her long, smooth fingers.  Candle wax drips over the pale digits, bonding her to the phallic light-giver.

Above the flame – nothing.  A flesh-tone, ink-blanked void.  The promise of Hellenic beauty disappears; the incomplete name above the un-head belies the mid-stream cessation of representation.

The dye has set and faded too much for this to have been a merely temporary stopping point.  This tattoo will not be completed.  Ever.  Never.  Forever.  The platonic face will remain inviolate, unlike Inisto Cantaglia’s own burn-scarred neck and face.  And yet, the maiden’s spectral head and the fire-eater’s half-molten visage share the same fate of never being quite whole.  One by a failure in addition, the other by the success of subtraction.

One wonders – you wonder, do you not? – how this void must gnaw at the man.  Has this headless maiden moved on since his face-altering accident?  Does she live somewhere cool, wet, and gray – The Hebrides, perhaps – where she need never see the sun again, like the vampiric Lamiae of legend?  Does she shroud herself completely in black, avoiding flame, lest it burn off her soft-featured cipher of a face as well?

And how will Inisto Cantaglia find a sense of purpose leading to completion?  How best to finish the mask of flesh?  Or the gap in his heart?  Air is too ephemeral.  Water simply runs off or evaporates in the heat of his passion.  Earth crumbles to dust.  But fire!  Fire engulfs, invades, cleanses, with burning, the impure vessel!

SOL(OCAUST?) – Your first blinded impression is that of a massive sun, type G, burning yellow-green across the man’s back.  On closer inspection, after your eyes have become accustomed to the glare careening off his skin, you see an almost-invisible dusting of magnetic lines forming the faint amoebic outline of a continent, pseudopodical arms like puddles of coronal plasma reaching into oceanic space.  And at the center of the fiery landmass, a tiny figure or figures, features visible only with the aid of a microscope.  This homoncular sunspot, on closer examination, is composed of a Trinity of SALAMANDER, THE JONGLEUR, and INISTO CANTAGLIA, the trio back to back with arms outstretched.  From their fingertips fan a holocaust of flame, consuming the earth in its entirety.  The heat buckles the very foundations of the planet, boiling its nickel core and ejecting its inhabitants in apocalyptic waves of carbonized dust, flames thrusting out into the void of space, there to finally be extinguished by cold eternity.

Strange Fruit

Blue Oranges

A crate of oranges, otherwise. Blue as the sky they were, and skin thinned, still pitted, outside, as if removed, under-shaved, reattached. Pierce the skin and juice the navy veins, indigo bleeding and tasting of desert relief, undehydrated. "Where?" we asked the salty old sailor. "The spindle fell aleph up," he said, voice hoarse as sand, "and the golem died."

"Excuse me?" I said, confused.

"Oh, it's not your fault," he said with a horizon-sighting seaward look in his one good eye, voice trailing off into the deep, "not your fault at all".

Apple Fly

Janice giggled, holding tight, as the apple struggled to break free. "It tickles," she smiled, that perfect-teeth-all-in-a-porcelain-white-row-smile, as the dragonfly wings fluttered against her fingers and wrists. She squeezed tighter. She . . . desired. I had seen that look before, the flip of the hair, the cocked hip, languid eyes, the bitten lip.

Now I desired.

She looked beyond the apple, into my eyes, as she brought the fruit to her mouth and bit in, hard, fast, devouring the fruit so quickly that she was wiping her dripping face with the back of her arm before its convulsive death-throes had subsided, twitching wings tensing in a final paroxysm, then drooping down like a quickly-wilting flower.

She smiled, picked the bits from her teeth, and offered me the remainders, but all that was left was pit and wings, lolling at the mercy of the autumn breeze.

The Ogling Lime

Something reptilian about the thing, I thought. Not just the dark green, coarse skin or the associative citrus scent of things tropical. The eye that looked out from behind the rind was lizard-like, crocodilian "Those customs agents really need to look harder," I muttered as it rolled onto the counter top. Being a bachelor, no one answered, though the green eyelid lowered in one corner, insulted, angry.

I turned around, bent over to put some food in the fridge. I had to rearrange leftovers to fit it; China, India, New Orleans, Buffalo all juggling geography above the empty crisper. When I turned again to the lime, I caught it half-open, leering at me, lecherous.

The hint-of-smirk left it as I reached back to retrieve a chef's knife from the cutlery magnet. The self-satisfied expression turned to a series of furtive glances left, right, up, down, as if seeking a means of escape, terrified.

"Nothing personal," I said to no one, "just thirsty is all".

It looked up at me with great pathos in its . . . eye and everything, pleading, pitiful. I couldn't be sure if it trembled or if the sensation was merely the rough texture of its skin as I rolled it over the countertop to position it for the final cut.

It cried. Tears of citric acid. Crocodile tears.

I was really, really thirsty. Best limeade I ever had. Nothing personal.

Submissions Status

“Scaramouche Unopposed” (papier-mâché masque; sheet music [Arvo Pärt,
Pro et Contra
, 1966]; gold leaf; lapis lazuli accents).  Submitted to Shriner’s Hospital 21 January.  Rejected 5 February with note claiming that the object, while entertaining, could not be considered either art or helpful to the terminally ill, much less a terminally ill child.  Resubmitted 7 February with edits to the darker portions of Pärt’s piece, along with fluorescent hi-lighting of warmer, more comforting notes.  Returned for insufficient postage.

“Malformed Puppeteer” (Punch puppet; wood; cloth; acrylic paints; pig’s blood; swazzle; string; small sock monkey puppet).  Submitted to Oakview Cemetery/Glory of the Sun Crematorium, with attachment, 19 April.  Received response 27 April: “. . . The passing of your mother was difficult for all of us and your unresolved concerns regarding issues of control could be mitigated by a consultation with a professional trained in such matters.  Thus I am retuning [sic] your parcel immediately . . .”  Rejected 29 April, returned with a business card advertising a “Doctor Susan Lemansky, MD”.  Card, box, and Punch puppet smelled of cigarette smoke (likely menthol).  “Oooh, what a pity”!  Submitted to Shriners’ Hospital 30 April.  Rejected 15 May.

“Tiger, Tiger” (automata; porcelain; bonsai trees; Swiss gears; glass beads; genuine tiger hair).  Submitted to movie director Hector Elman 20 April.  Got a response 19 August!  He says he likes it and can he, in fact use it in one of his movies?!  Of course, the answer is “yes”!  Queried 9 December.  No response as of 16 January.  Saw preview for movie
Beast-Machine of Prey
5 March.  Not bad.  “Tiger, Tiger” is clearly visible in the opening credits as a back-lit silhouette, the Tiger’s leaping timed to coincide with the fade-in of the copyright date.  Roman numerals, Bengal tigers, German directors.  Submitted further query 13 April.  No response by 30 June.  Sent invoice 3 July.  Received photocopy of cancelled check (#3014, dated 27 August, amount $750.00, signed by Hector Elman, written out to Jack Bingham).  Sent a letter explaining that I had not yet seen this check and that it must have been lost in the mail somewhere.  Finally received check (as above, but #3245 and amount $850.00) 11 October.
Beast-Machine of Prey
has grossed around $3.4M as of most recent figures, per
Entertainment Industry Insider Magazine
(May issue).  Cover price of magazine is $7.95.