He stopped and stared at a small outbuilding tucked into the trees. A modular utility shed, its doors flapping in the wind.
“That shouldn’t be open.” Toby walked over to peer inside. “Huh. He took the tractor out too.”
He shut the doors and fastened them with a padlock. “Okay. Now we can get inside and maybe get you warm again.” He pulled out a key ring. “Eureka.”
After the onslaught of wind and cold, inside was eerily silent, save for a soft, rhythmic ticking sound.
“Solar batteries,” said Toby, shucking his rain gear.
We were in a long, open room, its vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by steel I beams. The polished wooden floor shone like bronze. No rugs, no cushions, but a lot of 1980s furniture made of welded copper and steel. The standing lamps resembled carnivorous insects. A Viking stove lurked behind a wall of industrial glass, along with a free-standing wine closet. The effect was of being on board the battleship Potemkin.
“So.” I wandered over to the window. “Did he really build all this? Or was it delivered directly from the gulag?”
Toby dumped his toolbox on the floor. “You wouldn’t believe what this place cost.”
“Yeah, I would. Taste this bad, you have to be so rich no one ever argues with you.”
“It’s very fuel efficient. See that south-facing window? You get incredible passive-solar gain from that.”
“When? On the Fourth of July?”
“No, really—it stays pretty warm in here, relatively speaking. Speaking of which, I got to go drain the water tanks. You try and warm up, I’ll be back up in a bit.”
“Here.” He fiddled with a dial on the wall. “That’ll make it easier. Heat.”
He got his tools and went downstairs. I peeled off my anorak, then my boots and wet socks. My feet felt like frozen lumps of meat. I warmed them as best I could with my hands, found some dry socks in my bag and put them on. I stuck my boots on top of the heater and set off on a quick circuit of the house.
It wasn’t exactly a party pad. The wine closet was locked. Other rooms contained yet more minimalist furniture, a plasma-screen TV, small recording studio. A powder room—no medicine cabinet—where I tried to clean myself up. The water was brackish, but it was warm. Right then I wouldn’t have traded warm water for the best sex or drugs I’d ever had.
I emerged feeling, if not appearing, a bit more human. I forced myself to stand in front of the mirror, staring at a face that looked more like Scary Neary than it ever had. I resembled my own skeleton, tarted up with bloodshot eyes and wind-burned skin.
I bared my teeth in a grimace and wandered into the master bedroom suite. It seemed to float among giant pine trees. Lucien Ryel had sunk a ton of money into building this place and heating it all winter long, not to mention keeping a caretaker on retainer.
Now I understood why.There was a fortune in artwork on those bedroom walls. And not the usual stuff your aging rock stars collect, Warhols and Schnabels and Koons and Curtins.
Ryel had a taste for the art equivalent of rough trade, or what had been considered rough trade up until about ten years ago, when, like bondage equipment, outsider art became mainstreamed. There were two Chris Mars canvases, a Joe Coleman, paintings by artists whose names I didn’t recognize but which were the sorts of things that would give you bad dreams, if you’re susceptible to them.
The stuff was amazing. Some, like a Lori Field collage of women with animal heads and pencil-thin limbs, were ethereal. Others, like a Nick Blinko drawing of a skeleton eating its own skull, were nightmarish.
There were photographs too. A couple of eerie Fred Resslers where you could faces in the trees. An early Mapplethorpe portrait of Patti Smith. A vacant lot by Lee Friedlander. Works by Brian Belott, Branka Jukic … I would have been happy to take whatever could fit into my pockets, if I’d had room.
Then I saw the photos beside his bed.
There were three of them. Oversized color prints, handmade frames, no glass. Monotypes, like the photos at Ray Provenzano’s place and Toby’s apartment. All three had the same childish signature.
S.P.O.T.
Nothing else to identify them. No title. No song lyrics.
Yet I knew they formed a sequence with the others. And even though I still couldn’t pin down what these were photos of, I knew they were linked, somehow, with the older photos I’d seen in Aphrodite’s room—those crudely manipulated SX-70 prints—and Toby’s picture of Hannah Meadows.
I couldn’t tell how they fit. The pattern was there, but because it wasn’t my own craziness I couldn’t put a finger on what held them together. But I knew they were all images of the same thing.
What?
From some angles it resembled a body, from others an island, or the humped form of some kind of animal. The colors were murky greens and browns and viscous blues, shot through with glints of red and orange. Like the others, these used handmade emulsion paper distressed with a needle or fingernail. In spots the dyes had flaked or been rubbed off. Stuff was embedded in the layers of pigment—a fly’s wing; hair; shreds of newsprint. Messy, but it gave the prints a strange depth, as though they’d captured some of the real world the photo sought to hold on to.
They reminded me of daguerreotypes. When you look at one of those head-on, even the darkest parts throw light back at you, so you get a reverse image. It’s like a photographic negative and positive, all in one.
But then you tilt a daguerreotype just right, and the shadows and light fall into place, and what you’re looking at becomes a 3-D image. It’s an effect impossible to reproduce in a book or print, or even with computer imaging technology: the purest example of generation loss I can think of. A daguerreotype portrait always seemed like the closest you could come to actually seeing someone who had died a century and a half ago.
I tried to puzzle out the scraps of newsprint embedded in the photos.
U S T 2 SEE
EN
The letters reminded me of the ransom-note typography on 1970s album covers and band posters.
ST 29
Street 29? Saint 29? Maybe it wasn’t an address. Maybe it had some bizarre religious meaning. I took the first photo from the wall and sniffed it.
I gagged. That same sick, rank fishy odor combined with the worst dead skunk you can ever imagine.
“Uh, Cass?” Toby stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?”
“Come here. I want you to smell this.”
“What?”
I handed him the photo and went to the next two.
“Whoo boy!” Toby thrust the print back to me. “That stinks!”
“No shit. These do too.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” He tugged his pigtail. “Did they go off or something? Can a photograph go bad?”
“I don’t think so.” I hung them back on the wall. “I think it’s something in the pigments he used to make the emulsion.”
“Do they use stuff like that? Stuff that spoils?”
“Not usually. Not at any photo lab I ever hung out at, anyway.”
Toby peered at the prints, his nose wrinkling. “It smells like, I don’t know—cod liver oil or something. Only worse. Like a skunk.”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“Is there a kind of fish that smells like a skunk?”
“You tell me.”
He wandered the length of the room, looking at the other paintings. “I forgot he had this stuff. Kind of dark for my taste.”
He stopped by the window, stared out at the sea then glanced at his watch. “It’s getting pretty late. We’re not going to make it back tonight, not if we don’t hurry. I still have to check a few things here. And I need to go see Denny…”