Ah.
He fired up the Mac and told the SyQuest to present the image bank of his latest project: a modernization of some classic Dutch stuff of the early part of the century. It was all black and white and the backgrounds were indistinct, plus the girls themselves had a dated, frankly hokey look to them no matter what they were doing. It was the kind of stuff you could pull off the Web any day of the week, the kind of bread-and-butter images the p’philes started out with, before they got educated in the kinds of things they could get from people like him. He’d spent the last week coloring everything, then brightening up the backgrounds and inserting some modern touches — a digital clock in one, a stereo CD system with bookshelf speakers in another, a personal computer in still another. He’d updated what little clothing the models were wearing. Small things, but they brought the images out of the twenties and thirties and into the nineties very convincingly. Then he had started replacing the girls’ faces with those of models in magazines, but none of them really looked right. So today he would start creating his own from scratch, give to each of these little angels a face that today’s man would just look at and drool over. Innocent enough, and all just for a buck, Hypok thought: he could sell these as originals by the time he got done with them, and it was one-tenth the work of getting a true original. And about one one-hundredth the risk.
He chose a Photoshop brush of narrow gauge and started sketching. Brain to hand. Eye to brain to hand. Someone young. Someone healthy. Someone innocent of sin but instinctively knowledgeable. The girl next door, the little niece you haven’t seen in two years, your best friend’s daughter. But something extra about her, something in her that understands. Something that desires. Eve as a girl, before God and Adam tamed the fun out of her. Leave it to a snake to find the opening.
When Hypok contemplated an image like this his mind wandered, because every decision he made about her was based somewhere in his own history and it was impossible to separate himself from himself when he was working from scratch, inventing, reaching deep inside to find his own rib. It was such a difficult bone to locate.
So as he began to create this girl from himself, he wondered solemnly at the selfless thing he was, at his many names and many homes and many appearances, at his corelessness, at the nothing that he often seemed to be. By birth: Eugene Earl Vonn, a name given to him by his mother, whom he hated, in keeping with her latest marriage to one Everett Vonn. He came to hate Everett, too, who was stupid enough not only to marry Wanda Grantley (her fourth of five such promises) but to believe the boy born eight months later was his own son.
As he drew the new girl, he thought of the sorry tale of his genesis, told to him years later when he was nine by his real father, one Michael Hypok, former itinerant roughneck, seducer of women, alcoholic and methamphetamine freak who skipped out in a big way — as Eugene feared he would — shortly after young Eugene had finally tracked his father down. It had taken him a month just to find him. But Michael had left him with three things: the truth of Eugene’s nativity; a wallet containing two dollars, a driver’s license and a tattered Social Security card; and a clot of blood that he blasted onto his son’s shirtfront at the moment of his convulsive overdose of a death.
Hypok studied the image taking form before him and ruminated again on the death of his father and the true beginning of himself. Sometimes you had to reiterate the same history to make sure it was still true. And it was still true. The name, money and identification had begun a new life for him. Especially the name. He thought back to when he used the lighter fluid to ignite the damp and reeking sleeping bag in which his father lay, hitchhiking the eleven hours back to the hated Wanda, and never telling a soul about any of it. It was the beginning of his secret self. He was born with the flame. He had changed. He had shed. He was new — a process that thrilled him in a way he had never been thrilled before.
Gene Vonn. Michael Hypok. David Webb. David Lumsden. Who was he, really? Well, it wasn’t that simple. His only hard rules were these: he would never be Gene Vonn again because he hated the source of that being; and he would never speak out loud the essential name Michael Hypok because it was his secret name, his secret self, his unspeakable and authentic center. Those rules aside, you just became whoever you needed to be for people you met. Same for the government, DMV, banks, merchants, service providers, neighbors. Everyone. Changeable, obscured, multifaceted, occult. And the documentation if you needed it was a snap for someone who had a valid Social Security number and who could build a young Eve from the marrow of his own secret rib.
Two hours and four stout tequilas later he had a beautiful little creation on the screen before him. Just her face now, disembodied completely from any body, as well as from any rules and laws governing her behavior. A girlish face, with a bit of plumpness around the dimples. The eyes just a little older than the rest of her, and a sense of carnal wisdom in them. Mouth open wide. Somewhat like his older sisters, Collette and Valeen, might have looked not long after he was born. Collie and Valee, his craven mavens. He saved the image and shrunk it down to fit one of the Dutch girls. Using the Blur command under the Filter heading, he gave her just a bit of dreamy distance. Click. He integrated the colors. He used the Sharpen button to strengthen the jaw and lip lines. Click. Then he used Pixilate to even out the grain of the whole image before he enlarged it, Despeckled the pixels just a little, then took it back down to a 5 by 7. Click.
Not bad.
Not bad at all.
Fifty bucks times however many copies he could sell before they got into general circulation on the Web. Fifty, maybe seventy-five. Then, they were worthless.
One down, ten to go.
Time to get cracking on the next Eve, he thought. He stared at the screen and rubbed his fingers over his new, whiskerless cheeks. He felt weary but nervous; spent but eager. Like he always did when a shed was coming on.
Sunrise began. He turned off his machines, then the fluorescent lights and poured a generous tequila as a nightcap. He locked the workroom door and padded in his slippers down the hall, past the kitchen and through the door to the backyard. Under the dark canopy of sycamores unsullied by stars he stood and listened, then let himself into the guest cottage. Incandescent twilight welcomed him. He shut the door and breathed deeply the scent of sawdust and serpent and fresh water. The cages lined two of the walls, each now lit by a UVA black heat bulb that cast a soft lunar glow into the room. Blue, almost silver.
The vipers looked as they always did, stoic and resentful. The cobras moved efficiently. Hard to believe the male ophiophagus is eighteen feet long now, Hypok thought. The harmless little colubrids were shy as usual, looking at him from beneath water dishes or decorative rocks as he passed their glass like a general inspecting ranks. Cute little soldiers, he thought: jewels. He stepped closer to look at the big Crotalus horridas horridus he’d collected in northeastern Texas many springs ago. About this time of year, he thought. What a severe beauty: gold and olive, black and pearl, like old leaves on rich soil, countless epochs of genetic mystery engraved on its skin. Five feet long and bigger around than his arm. Don’t tread on me.