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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters
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“You’ll have a chance to see his work later if you wish,” Lethe went on. “Personally, I don’t like the man’s company—it’s his painting that interests me. As they say, the work is the thing.”
Locke’s thoughts seemed to yawn.
The work is the thing…
Lethe referred to this painter—this post-neo abstractionist, whatever that meant—with an edge bordering on disrespect, yet was paying nonetheless for the man’s work.
I wonder what Lethe thinks of me. Not as a poet but as a person…
 Just another creative hack? A work-for-hire?
Locke wasn’t sure but he didn’t think so.
“Martin’s art examines one theme and one theme only. I suppose that’s why I admire him; he will not divert from his focus.”
“What’s the theme?” Locke asked.
“Terror.”
Terror? “That sounds interesting, but…how do you paint that?”
“With the power of the muse, of course,” Lethe returned.
Locke tried hard not to appear bored. He stole a quick glance high to the left; on the wall hung a tarnished coat-of-arms: a viper being pecked at by a sparrow. “What’s that up there?”
“The family seal of the so-called White Prince, John Hunyadi, the Count of Timisoara and the governor-general and regent of Hungary. And speaking of painters, the Prince was quite creative in his manner of dealing with Turk spies lurking about in his court. He would drain them of their blood and order the palace artisans to paint pictures with it. Then he would dispatch the canvases to Sultan Murad II, his arch enemy. And behind you—”
Locke glanced around to see a stained, glass hookah.
“Supposedly the same apparatus with which Coleridge smoked opium while he wrote
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
 Though he publicly excused his drug use as therapy for his rheumatism, to his friends such as Kant and Wordsworth, he confessed that the ‘sweet succor of the poppy is the poet’s only true path to the muse.’”
“I think I’ll stick to alcohol,” Locke awkwardly jested.
“But who was it that said ‘all true art must fail’? Blake? Poe? It’s interesting how many masters produced their finest work while they seemed to deliberately demolish their lives with spirits or drugs.”
“And debauchery, too,” Locke added without knowing quite what would spur such a comment. “You mentioned de Sade earlier. What do you think of
him?
”
“A petty fool and lunatic who spent most of his life in prison,” Lethe replied with a queer interest. “It’s most regrettable that he didn’t spend
all
 of his life incarcerated—then he would’ve been able to write more.”
“So you like his writing, then.”
“Not what he wrote but how he wrote it. As a poet—a word mechanic such as yourself—I’m sure you follow me.”
“He was a prose-master who wasted his talent on smut,” Locke prattled. “Some of the finest prose I’ve ever read, but—”
“No genuine creative vision to implement that talent.” Lethe set down a splintered chicken bone. “Wasting a talent strikes me as the greatest of all crimes.”
An odd point of view, but Locke had a notion now that Lethe was an odd man. He could even appreciate the subjectivity of the statement. “Except for, like, murderers and stuff, you mean.”
“Oh, not necessarily. Take a killer like a Gacy or a Bundy or a Lucas. I don’t think you can disagree, these were
pre-eminent
 serial-killers. They utilized their ‘talents’—if you will—to the furthest extremities of their creativity. Yes or no?”
Locke’s face widened. “Well, yes, I guess you’re right. But—”
“Who cares if they were evil—I mean, at least in the context of your mentioning it. That’s not what we’re talking about. Certainly, most will concur—they were madmen who are served well by execution, but…
ideally,
from their points of view, they did what they did because they felt
compelled
 too, correct? And they did it with alacrity, with zeal, and with passion. They killed, Mr. Locke, with the same fortitude that you write. Yes, or no?”
Locke was duped. “Well…”
“A difficult task, my asking you to compare your own creative mechanics to those of heinous killers. But I think it’s all the same in a way.” Lethe sipped more wine, and when he saw that Locke’s goblet was empty, a quick jerk of his glance brought the masked driver out to pour more.
“Really, Mr. Lethe. This wine is great, but I don’t want to scarf it all. It’s your best stuff.”
Lethe threw his head back and chuckled. “Drink! It’s not my best ‘stuff’ by any means. We’ll drink that next, to celebrate.”
Celebrate? “Celebrate what?” Locke asked.
“Why, our arrangement, of course.” Lethe got up and walked to the other end of the table. The driver appeared at his side as if by magic; then the white-gloved hand passed an envelop to Lethe who then passed the envelope to Locke.
The envelope contained $10,000 in cash.
“To celebrate our deal,” Lethe continued, “and the honor I will receive in having my favorite poet write a book for me.”
(iv)
Encryptions. Puzzles. Sometimes you know that the piece will fit even before you really look at it. You know it even before you press it down into gap in the jigsaw. I should have known—that’s what this is all about. It doesn’t matter that they’re ancient and almost timeless.
These ciphers of the human soul…
What drives the salmon upstream to their death? What leads the lemmings over the bluff? Instinct or foreknowledge? Or does one mean the same as the other. Old and young, black and white, life and death. Life is death, for death’s products give life. Except, of course, when that death just keeps walking, keeps changing and growing. Into what, only time will tell.
The only universal element is love. The only true human gift, the only thing that sets us apart from the chaos of cosmic soup. That’s why life never let me go.
The poet is the piece. I knew that if I’d consumed him in the dead church, it would’ve been no different from eating air. He’s poison to my being, a dinner plate piled high with something spoiled.
But to my equal, he is a bowl of chocolate-dipped cherries, an oven-baked, sugary creme custard on the verge of being spooned out of its crust.
More things opposite that are also the same.
Do you see?
Evil exploits weakness. When one weakness is strengthened, another weakness is sought.
Yes, the poet is the piece. I didn’t need to follow him. Instead, his vision found me.
He is the convoluted cardboard cut-out destined to fill the puzzle’s final gap.
FIFTEEN
Transpositions
(i)
“But what is art, really?” Lethe asked. “To myself, as a layman, I feel urged to collect it because it occurs to me that I’m collecting the ultimate in the human pursuit to create that which is beautiful.”
Locke disagreed but was too busy getting used to the idea that he had ten grand in his pocket. He was also too busy sampling the next wine—a Charoliase bottled in 1760.
That’s good vinegar,
he thought. After a luscious desert of Pots de Creme Javanaise (oven-baked coffee custards), Locke had retreated with his host to a dark, richly paneled parlor adorned with original oil paintings from the Rococo Period and an array of display-cased pepperbox pistols and match-locks. A Montaigne cocktail table separated the two men; yew-wood sconces supported hand-forged silver candlesticks. The thin candles themselves were flax wicks hand-dipped into beeswax, which tinted the small parlor with a sweet, licorice scent. Locke was working on a good buzz now; the wine helped him get some of his doubts behind him.
All right, Lethe’s eccentric, he’s an art collector, and he likes rare things. That doesn’t mean he’s a crackpot.
Correction, an art collector and a
patron.
Lethe’s indulgences were Locke’s good luck. And to keep that at his own side
,
he supposed he better indulge the host.
The guy just put ten large in my hand. The least I can do is talk some poet talk.
In truth, Lethe was probably nothing much more than a rich, lonely old man pining for someone to gratify his interests. Locke decided to gratify him.
“That’s more of a populist definition, I’d say,” Locke remarked to the comment.
“And why is that?”
“Because art isn’t always beautiful. Art is the product of an introspective resource, don’t you think? But it’s a rare resource because it demands the total truth of its creator. Sometimes truth is ugly.”
Lethe wanted conversation, that’s all. He respected Locke’s work, and now he wanted to hear about it. This could even be fun: parlor-talk with a millionaire…and some
really
 good wine.
The elegant man nodded. “All right, and if that’s the case—and I don’t mean to quote Pilate—then what is truth?”
“Truth is nothing more than reality. The artist’s job is to communicate that reality—the vision in his head—by
re-
creating it with the tools of his or her art. When Monet looked at those haystacks, he painted them in the truth of what he saw. It’s all abstraction, sure, but that abstraction is more important than the paint, or in my case, the ink in my typewriter ribbon. If you don’t do it honestly, then it’s not art—it’s a lie, and a lie is the artist’s worst enemy.”
“But didn’t Nietzsche postulate—in his doctrine of nihilism—that there is no objective basis for truth?”
“Yes, he did,” Locke agreed.
“And conversely, didn’t Sartre assert that truth—though only and specifically via the individual’s acknowledgment of his or her place in the universe—was very real?”
“Yes, he did.”
Lethe ran a finger down his face. “These are clearly two of the most paramount intellectuals of your time, perhaps of all human history.”
“Yes. They are.”
“So…how do you explain the contradiction?”
“That’s easy,” Locke said. “Nietzsche was schizophrenic, and Sartre was wrong.”
Lethe nodded through a smile, sipped the wine and seemed to stare at Locke’s words as though they might be smoke rings or moths. “Such a pompous claim, but a claim full of what? Conviction?”
“I’ll take that,” Locke said.
“So what you’re actually hinting at is something spiritual? Motivation?”
“Yes, you could call it that, but I prefer to think of it as—”
“Passion,” Lethe intoned.
Locke stalled in his half-drunk rant. “Yes. Passion. I guess that’s why Monet painted canvases instead of houses. Back then he’d have made more money painting houses.” Locke knew he was talking about himself, but he eluded that self-acknowledgment.
There were ten thousand reasons.
“As we mentioned earlier,” Lethe said. “The passion of the true artist may well be part of the same mechanism that fuels the passion of a Peter Kurten, a Gilles de Rais, or a Jack the Ripper.”
“Well, that or insanity.”
Lethe gave a slight laugh.
“It’s also the most selfish thing in the world,” Locke ventured.
“Selfish? I would think the exact opposite. The notion of sacrifice for the sake of the muse.”
“No. The true artist doesn’t care what anyone thinks of his muse. He does it anyway, because he
has
 to.”

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