With great energy, and with a confident smile, he sent two cans into the cardboard. Such skill, he thought, was rarely seen.
Skizzen clipped a few local items, but his harvest was mostly taken from the New York Times and the weekly newsmagazines. He ignored most crime and ordinary malfeasance. Occasionally he would include a shooting on the subway or the theft of donor organs, but he felt that you had to discount things done on account of poverty or madness. Actually, human stupidity was his principal target. Stupidity was shifty. It often pretended to be smart. For instance, the other day, he had saved yet another article on the preservation of small vials of smallpox — on the off chance, just in case, for scientific use, with the understanding that no species should be intentionally lost. In the same spirit, he ruled out the petty suborning popular with politicians, but he carefully saved accounts of elections in which a blatant scoundrel was voted into office by a smug, lazy, or indifferent electorate. He scissored when he spotted superstitions singing like sirens or when he caught stupidity fleeing the scene of one of its debacles, stupidity that especially embodied willful blindness or was an instance of greed or one of the other deadly sins overcoming weak reason once again. Judgments could be dicey. Dust Bowl pictures were included because it was Skizzen’s conclusion that human mistreatment of the soil, not Nature out of whimsical meanness and acting alone, had made the plains barren, wasted the cattle, and scoured the barns to their bare boards. Hoof and Mouth were the names of two instruments in his orchestra. Mad Cow a must. Anthrax had no alternative. AIDS, of course, was easy, ignorance and stupidity fed and spread it, but river blindness, say, was a close call, and he ultimately rejected some very moving photographs of scar-closed eyes.
On the walls of his attic area were everywhere pinned atrocity pictures, some of them classics: the weeping baby of Nanking or the wailing Vietnamese girl running naked amid other running wailing children on that fatal Route 1 near Trang Bang (even the name a mockery); numerous sepias of dead outlaws with their names on crude signs propped beneath their boots; clips from films that showed what struck the eyes of those who first entered the extermination camps — careless heaps of skins and bones, entirely tangled, exhibiting more knees and elbows than two-pair-to-a-death ought allow — amateurishly aimed shots of the sodden trench-dead as well as bodies hanging over barbed battlefield wire; the bound Vietcong officer, a pistol at the end of a long arm pointed at his head, a picture taken in the act of his execution by a so-called chief of police; then, to add class, the rape of the Sabine women, etchings of chimney sweeps, delicate watercolors of sad solitaries and painted whores; or, for the purposes of education, the consequences of car bombs, mob hits, informers with their genitals wadded in their mouths, traitors hung from lampposts — Mussolini among the many whose bodies were publicly displayed — as were niggers strung, as a lesson, from the limbs of trees; but most were images transient for readers who saw, now with only a slight shock, countless corpses from African famines, African wars, African epidemics, ditto dead from India, ditto China but adding bloats from floods; there were big-eyed potbellied starvelings, wasted victims of disease, fields full of dead Dinka tribesmen, machine-gunned refugees on roads, misguided monks who had set fire to themselves, ghoulishly smoking up a street; and there were lots of Japanese prints that seemed to celebrate rape, paintings and pictures that glorified war or sanctified lying priests, flattered pompous kings and smugly vicious dictators; still others that celebrated serial killers and tried to put a good face on fat ward politicians or merely reported on the Klansmen, dressed like hotel napkins; the Goya etchings depicting the Disasters of War, in poor reproductions to be sure, were all there, as well as Bosches xeroxed in color from an art book, a few stills from snuff films, violent propaganda posters, numerous Doré’s, Grünewalds, a volume of images devoted entirely to the crucifixion, saints suffering on grills or from flights of arrows, details from Guernica, examples from Grosz, close-ups of nails penetrating palms, then boards, illustrations in volumes of the Marquis de Sade (one, particularly prized, of a vagina sewn up like a wound); lots of photographs of the dead on battlefields or in burial grounds from Gardner’s Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, many of them tampered with and staged, which created an added interest; there were drawings of medieval implements of torture, each aspect and element precisely labeled, as well as photographs of instruments of persuasion — the iron maiden, thumbscrew, rack — from the collection kept in the Tower of London; paintings of autos-da-fé by the Spanish master, firing squads by Monet, cavalry charges and combatants at the barricades by Delacroix; the guillotine with several of its severed heads was there, as well as emasculations, circumcision ceremonies, buffalo hunts, seal cubs as they were being clubbed, executions of various kinds — by knife, by fire, by gas, by poison, by lethal injection, by trap drop, by jolt, by shot — Indians massacred, natives forced over cliffs, notable assassinations — but only if the victim wasn’t deserving — scalp and shrunken-head collections — as well as wall after wall, not in Skizzen’s room but those depicted out in the world, where rebel soldiers or Warsaw Jews were lined up to be gunned down and photographed after, during, and before by the documentary-minded; close-ups of scattered body parts, many of them less identifiable than steaks or chops, including abattoirs in operation, fine watercolors of slave ships under full sail, a clutch of Salgado gold-mine prints depicting humans toiling in holes more horrible than Dante had imagined (and then had imagined only for the deserving); children huddled in doorways, on grates, coal miners in blackface, breadlines and beaten boxers, women working in sweatshops or shrouded in worshipful crowds, torch-lit Nazi rallies or the faithful as they were being trampled on their way to Mecca, six volumes of tattoos; and the professor’s prize, an original Koudelka picturing a tipped-over tortoise, dead on a muddy Turkish road, handsomely matted and framed and hung center stage.
With great energy, and with a confident smile, he sent two cans into the cardboard. Such skill, he thought, was seldom seen.
Mostly, though, from every place not already tacked or pasted, clippings were loosely pinned or taped so that they would have fluttered had there ever been a draft, as they did wave a little when Skizzen passed or delivered one of his kicks, dangling for quite a ways down the wall in overlapping layers sometimes, even stuck to flypaper Skizzen had cannily suspended from the ceiling; the whole crowd requiring him to duck if he didn’t want his head and neck tickled; and giving to the room a cavey cachelike feeling, as if some creature, fond of collecting, lived there and only sallied forth like the jackdaw to find and fetch back bright things; or, in this case, cuttings from the tree of evil, for which purpose paper shears had been put in every room of the large house, every room including entry, bath, and laundry, because you never knew when you might come upon something, and Skizzen had learned not to put off the opportunity, or delay the acquisition, since he had, early on and before this present remedy, forgotten where he had seen a particular picture or news item and was sadly unable to locate it again. He vividly remembered, too, how he had lost an image on a handout by postponing its extraction when he should have scissored it out while he was still standing on the front stoop holding in his shocked hand a leaflet bearing a grotesque beard and a text attacking the Amish because they were receiving special privileges, which allowed them their own schools; when children, whose God-loving parents were faithful members of the Church of Christ’s Angelic Messengers, were called truants when kept from class and made to study — by a sick and godforsaken society — demonically inspired views of the development of life.