The City in the Sky

I.

1.
How many were there?  Anthony, Jose, Oscar, Aarao, the Brazilian – all killed by dysentery with bloody flux.  Freddy and Jorge fever-mad, too weak to walk, abandoned (I am sorry to remember) and, now, presumably, dead.  Carlos shot in the eye by a poisoned dart, Diego and Lautaro killed by spear and arrow, Luis dead from snake-bite, Macute run away into the bush, Juan abandoned due to parasitic infection that blackened his foot and caused his toes to fall off (also a sad thing to recall) and presumably dead, fat Tony, the cook, drowned, William and Hans killed by inanition (exhaustion and starved to death).  So four of us remaining, too few to manage the two pirogues and, so, easy enough to barter for this skiff, a fishing boat, now plowing across the brackish waters of Lake Macaraibo, a sort of hot soup brimming with leatherback turtles and crocodiles and shoals of floating vegetation, logs festooned with mushrooms and fungi the size of a baby’s skull, bobbing in the shallows of the vast lagoon.

Far enough from shore now.  No land in sight.  Lightning flashing like howitzers of the Great War over the jungle upriver.  Enraged sky – at first, we hoped it was flare of the gas burned-off over the oil patch, but no, just lightning cannonading the flood plain where the river opens up onto the vast lake.

Fifty miles across the Lago to Cabimas.  Sprawled on deck scribbling in the survey journal.  Wilhelm puking over the gunwale, wet steamy wind shivering in the sails and the motor coughing and stuttering, and, then, Wilhelm calls me: “come here! Come here?”  Blood in the discharge from his mouth and guts, worms too writhing in effluent.

This is oil’s price: Bataafsche Petroleum Maaschappij sends its regrets, will compensate the widows and orphans according to some schedule maintained in the Hague.  There were riverside seeps in the jungle, recorded in the ledger by geographical coordinates written out as clearly as trembling, fever-wracked eyes and hands might allow, but these seams of bitumen, iridescent ooze into water like the colors on the wings of a fly, are from hell, within hell, surrounded by hell, bubbling from one inferno into another: Nature, Heraclitus says, loves to hide – and here, I am sorry to report, in Hell.

2.
In those days, oil people married oil people.  One side of my family (my father’s) was business, accounting, finance.  But my mother’s people had been geologists and oil explorers.  On the business side, stress and booze killed them off in their fifties.  My father’s mother was a pallid, skeletal torso, demented and confined to a bed in a wing of the house given over entirely to servants.  We ventured into her sick room only on major holidays, mostly religious that my family was too progressive to otherwise celebrate.  My business grandfather was long dead, apoplexy or gout or something on that order, a rich man’s disease.

My mother’s father was a little wry old man.  He was loveable, so loveable that my father, at least, suspected him of being some kind of charlatan.  My maternal grandpa’s father had been some sort of great explorer, an adventurer in the jungles of Venezuela and Colombia, the discoverer of an oil field that bears his name even today.  My oil-field great-grandfather was from Holland or, perhaps, Belgium – none of this is clear.  My explorer grandparents lived in a castle overlooking the Hudson.  Grandpa was more of an Arctic explorer – he had lived with the Inuit (you shouldn’t call them Eskimos) and mapped fjords in Greenland and Svalberd.  When I was a little boy, my explorer grandpa sometimes took me on walks in the woods, skirting the bluffs over the deep valley where the river flowed.  We saw deer many times and interesting insects and birds.  My explorer grandpa was missing two fingers and the tip of his nose was rounded unnaturally where skin had been grafted to replace flesh and cartilage destroyed by frost-bite.  Once, we saw a red fox crouching under a bush laden with wild black currants.

“Be careful,” my explorer grandfather said, “don’t scare him.  Nature loves to hide.”

Whenever we saw a wild creature, for instance a garter snake, wriggling off the sunlit path, my grandfather put his finger to his lips and whispered: “See, nature lives to hide.”

It’s interesting that I knew what both grandfathers had done for a living: explorer-grandpa searching in the ice and granite for oil deposits and business-grandpa managing the trade in oil and gasoline for Dutch Royal Shell and, then, Standard Oil of Ohio.  But I wasn’t sure as to how my father and mother were employed.  I know that they traveled much in Europe, collected art, and participated in various political causes, some of them involving banquets or testimonial dinners at our family home in Westchester County, others at the homes in Los Angeles and on San Marcos Island.  Often they took meetings downtown, somewhere in Manhattan, generally conveyed to their destination by long-black limousine sent up from the City.  But what exactly happened at those meeting was unclear to me.

3.
Before dawn, we saw the towers – black scaffolds billowing fire skyward.  Sun rising behind the derricks burning off the gas. Smoke spilling across the first light of day.  It was the oil patch at Mene Grande and, therefore, those of us left alive were saved, survivors.  But it wasn’t so easy reaching the edge of the Lago because there was no edge, no clear demarcation between lake and shore – hectares of mangrove intervened.  The fisherman stalled the motor and, with long poles, urged the skiff through the drowned forest.  The foliage of the trees was supported by pale, writhing tangles of stilt-roots – each bush and shrub was a kind of medusa, a knot of impermeable tendrils sunk in the black water.  We were becalmed among the mangroves, lost, although we could hear the rhythmic thud of the big pumps just beyond the maze of trees.  The sun rose up high overhead and the heat smothered us and I could see strange fish, white as corpses, bomb-shaped in the dark water.

Heat and thirst made Wilhelm delirious.  He began to drink the water in the lagoon.  “It’s full of oil,” he cried.  The sun stood pasted directly above us, motionless in the sky, and the air stank of rotting foliage and petroleum.  I saw a scum of oil iridescent in hot radiance bombarding us.  At first, Wilhelm only sipped the water, but, then, he took a bucket and drank whole mouthfuls of the stuff, greedily smacking his lips, eyes rolling in his head, and, then, the seizures began.  At the end of a canal of greasy, green foliage squatting atop cantilevered tangles of root, I saw a dock.  Some ragged men were standing there.   Behind them a forest of derricks, in the white light, faint blue banners of flame flying over pipes where the gas was burned-off...

4.
Of course, I started out at Phillips Exeter, but got into trouble (beer and dope) and was expelled.  This was too bad because, then, I was sent to Shattuck Academy in Minnesota, a place that was pretty far away from anywhere you would want to be.  Somehow, I survived the Winters up there, and, because temptations in the far north were few and far between, I improved my class standing, did well on the SATs, and, after a couple false starts – pre-med and accounting -- enrolled in the study of Art History at Cornell.  This was a natural fit because, of course, my mother was something of a collector.  My senior dissertation was called Body of the World: Sexual landscapes in Egon Schiele and Alfred Kubin – the subject matter was near at hand: at our Manhattan townhouse, a tubercular-looking nude by Schiele greeted visitors in the sitting room across from the elevator.

Family connections resulted in a junior/assistant curator position at the Neue Galerie up at 86th Street.  I have no illusions about personal merit.  From the outset, it was pretty clear that the Galerie hoped to parley my employment into acquisitions from my family’s collections – particularly, the A. R. Penck and Baselitz paintings, several of these inverted figures and, therefore, well-known, canvases that my mother had purchased during a sabbatical from her marriage a couple decades earlier in Berlin.  I’m not a hard-worker – the courage and industry and, even, fanatical self-sacrifice in the family genes had all been used-up, more or less by the hard and dangerous labors of our great-grand and grandfathers.  It’s best to follow the path of least resistance.

Of course, there was a significant other, Esther, also in the museum business, a curator of early medieval art at the Cloisters and, sometimes, we lived together, sometimes not.  Once I proposed marriage to her, but she turned me down.  Later, she asked me to marry her, but the timing wasn’t right for me.  I had few flings, usually with interns at the Neue Galerie;  after all, I was foot-loose and fancy-free.  When Esther spent part of January and February in LA, studying conservation techniques at the Getty, we weren’t together for Valentine’s Day – the first time for several years.  I offered to fly out to Los Angeles – after all, we had a house there.  Esther said she had made other plans and, so, I asked an intern at work, Monica from Cape Town, to go skiing with me in Banff.  She said that she knew how to ski from girlhood excursions to Tiffindal in Drakensberg and also Lesotho’s Afriski.  My invitation to Monica was on a whim – I was pretty sure that there was no place to go downhill skiing in South Africa, and that she would turn me down because she didn’t know anything about the sport.  But her pretty face brightened when I suggested the trip and she said that she would gladly accept my invitation on one condition only – there was to be neither sex nor romance involved.  Women have gone with me all over the world and, always, on that one condition and, of course, also always had sex with me and, even, become involved in romances.  The no-sex condition is the one condition that men and women will never abide – simply saying that there will be no sex means necessarily that sex will be involved:  after all, the subject has been broached.

I called Esther and told her that I was going to take off a week or so and do some skiing at Banff.  I saw no need to mention Monica.  She professed indifference.  But she also repeated something that she sometimes said, namely, that she loved me.

And, so, Monica and I flew to Calgary, took a half-day shuttle into the mountains, staying in separate rooms, at first, at the Banff Springs Hotel.  In fact, Monica was poor skier – after all, she was from Africa – but enthusiastic and fearless.  On the third night, the sex began.  Of course, we were skiing Sunshine.  I planned to downhill the Delirium Dive, encouraging Monica to ski easier runs.  But she was bold and persistent and, so, I booked a guide to take us up to the basin and down the Dive.  Halfway through the run, the slope and speed overcame her and she plunged out of control, surfing a mini-avalanche as she toppled end over end into the valley.  For an instance, I caught sight of her, untethered from the slope, upside down like one of the figures in a Baselitz painting, her face flashing pink as the sun goggles detached and catapulted down the side of the basin beside her.  Her right leg was very badly broken and we had to locate her by using the avalanche transceiver with which she was outfitted.  The ski patrol took her down the hill on a toboggan.  The fracture was open and comminuted with her leg twisted outrageously to one side – people turned pale and nauseous when they saw her injury.  A helicopter took her to the small hospital in Banff where the doctors took one look at her leg and, then, dispatched her, again by whirly-bird, to Foothills in Calgary.  I rented a car and reached the hospital a couple hours later.   

4.
A pretty girl in peril will always have a rescuer.  That’s an axiom baked into relations between the sexes.  Some guys, like me, are constituted to put pretty girls in peril.  Other guys rescue them.

Of course, Monica had a rescuer, the intrepid Derek from Johannisberg.  Before she went into surgery, Monica sent me a text-message alerting me that help was on the way.  I saw her groggy, without make-up and decidedly plain, accessorized by catheters and IV tubes in the hospital room.  Nervous-looking nurses hovered near her bedside and ominous-sounding alarms squeaked and buzzed in other rooms in Intensive Care.  The injury was terrible – the complete disarticulation of her knee with concomitant damage to nerves and blood supply.  Her elevated foot below the shattered knee was plump as a cantaloup but blue and seamed with incisions to prevent edema from blowing apart her toes.

“Now, you’re going to cut and run,” Monica told me.  I sat at bedside.  Her window looked down on a parking lot where people were hobbling about, tiptoeing, it seemed, over slanted aprons of ice.  The sky was congested with black, shapeless clouds.

“You’re insulting me,” I said, smiling at her to show my indifference.  “Some guys always cut and run,” she said.  I nodded.

The sedatives and pain-killers made her drowsy.  The injury had revealed her face to be something that I couldn’t bring myself to admire.  Her lips were very thin and seemed dry and her blonde hair looked stringy to me.  I took the elevator down to the lobby where there was a gift shop, purchased a “Get Well Soon” card, inscribed it and, then, went back to Intensive Care where I left the envelop with a nurse.

I used Google Maps to find the car rental place in Calgary and drove there. The return charge for the one-way trip was several hundred dollars, an annoying additional charge, and so I inquired as to what the return fee would be if I drove the car cross-country to JFK in New York.  It was only a few more dollars.  The ski trip was supposed to last ten days and, so, I decided to drive back to the City.  I didn’t know much about geography, but I thought that I could return via Minnesota, stop in Shattuck where I knew some teachers and, even, might look up a local girl that I had once dated.  The distances didn’t really mean anything to me – after all, how much empty and featureless land could there be?  I had five days and, so, I drove the car through the toll-gate at the rental log, angled down on the freeway, and set out east across Alberta. 


5.
I don’t want you take away the impression that I care anything about art.  That’s a subject on which you would have to do some studying and, of course, with respect to modern paintings, it seems, that the uglier they are, the more valuable – at least, that’s the rule that I think applies.  But, who knows?  As I said the subject requires study and I’m no student.

The stuff hung on the walls in my townhome in Gramercy Park, paintings inherited from my grandfather who had been a very fine man, so they say, and studious, exactly unlike me.  He had been a famous lawyer as a young man, made a fortune, and, then, was appointed to the Federal Bench.  I think he heartily disliked my father, his own son, the only aspect of his personality on which I might, I suppose, reproach him.  Family should stick together through thick and thin – at least, that’s what I think and so I blame grandpa for the way that he treated his only son, my father, who was also a lawyer, albeit an attorney less than wholly reputable, who also made a fortune but through buying and selling taxi cab medallions.  (To this day, I won’t use Lyft or Uber.)  My mother wasn’t much in the picture.  There had been a divorce with some messy allegations and my father had custody since he was the one with the money and the influence and, in the end, my mother didn’t make it – the trials of life, as they say, were too much for her and she had too many bad habits (my father had met her at CBGB’s) and, in the end, she was found dead, too young to be sure, found dead as we will all be found dead one day.  “This will happen to you too,” my father told me during my dissolute youth.  I replied that I hoped so, and, indeed, back in those days, I thought that I would follow my mother into oblivion and, somehow, be reunited with her in that way – the reunion would not involve holding hands or playing kissy-face or anything like that; rather it would be submersion in the same conditions of nonexistence in which she had been lost and many others as well.

But it didn’t happen.  I attended Yale, mostly by virtue of family connections with my grandpa, but was expelled (cocaine and statutory rape).  My grandfather blamed my father’s mistreatment and the divorce for my failings and it was a convenient excuse for me so that whenever I got into serious trouble, I could count on grandpa to rescue me from the disgrace into which I had fallen.  He was a fine man and very generous and I will tell you outright that he showed me what “unconditional love” meant.  I went to Columbia after the debacle at Yale, kept my nose, more or less, clean, and graduated with a degree in Public Administration.  Grandpa found me a job in an advertising firm on Park Avenue and I did well enough to support myself and, when my father was indicted, the family wealth, such as it was devolved to me.  My first marriage collapsed but it was relatively painless – no children were involved.  I used Trust Fund money to pay her off and nothing bad happened.  The second marriage was different.  Adele was French-Canadian – I had met her in British Columbia skiing at Whistler.    My Grandpa admonished me to be prudent and businesslike and secure an enforceable pre-nuptial agreement with her.  But I was impulsive and we eloped to Vegas where we were married.

A little later, my Grandpa died and I inherited his Gramercy Park townhome with the familiar paintings that he had collected.  None of them were to my taste, but what do I know?  In the hallway, leading to the upstairs toilet, there was a five-foot tall painting of a soup can – it was bright red and white and the can was labeled bold block print Green Pea Soup.  In the library, a smaller painting showing a woman’s profile was displayed over the fireplace.  Evidently, it was an important picture because a small light was bolted to the ceiling above the canvas so as to bathe the thing in warm yellow light.  I disliked the picture and, in fact, remembered being afraid of it when I was a little boy: the woman’s face was the color of a pink carnation and she had an eyeball where her ear should have been – the ear was lower next to her red-lipsticked mouth.  In the Great Room, my grandfather displayed a picture of some kind of flower with big wet-looking petals floating in a lagoon all soupy with cum-colored clouds – it was also a big, indistinct thing and you could bust your eyes trying to focus on it.  This picture also was crowned by its own special light, a thin flourescent rail bolted to the ceiling that cast light down on the swampy image.  There were other pictures as well – abstract paintings that made no sense to me at all:  a pinkish field in which red blobs were suspended and a sort of jigsaw made from strokes of thick paint that had dried to have a kind of leathery texture.  People told me that paintings were valuable and that, if I didn’t like them, should be loaned to a museum.  But the pictures reminded me of my dead grandpa and, particularly, inspired in me thoughts of the fine qualities that he possessed that are lacking in me and I would always respond to suggestions that I donate the pictures or loan them away by saying: “I don’t appreciate them yet, but, some day, I’m pretty sure I will grow into them.”

Things didn’t go well with my second wife.  She talked me into beating her and, then, there was the incident with the screwdriver and it suffices to say that Adele didn’t make me a better man, as I had hoped, but a much worse fellow than I had been before.  She betrayed me in every possible way, looted my bank accounts, and, then, stole the child not that this mattered really to me except on principle.  By what right did she do these things to me? – of course, I had been an awful husband, but she was an awful wife as well and, when she was drunk or high, she ranted at me, harangued me and said that I would end up in the penitentiary just like my father, a prophecy that enraged me to the point that I became violent and almost acted so as to make her prediction come true.  After a few trips to jail, and several restraining orders, it became apparent to me that she was trying to goad me into killing her, that this was her objective, because, I suppose, she still loved me in her way and did not desire to escape my influence, but, instead, wanted us to perish in some sort of mutual death pact.  But I wasn’t going to kill her – no, I wouldn’t give her the pleasure.  Instead, I plotted with some gangsters that I knew – our family has connections with all sorts of people – and arranged for a contract on her life.  (You know, of course, that I’m just kidding: I had all sorts of insane fantasies at that point in my life and I was using methamphetamine and heroin frequently; thus, as you might expect, things are sort of a blur.)

The plan (which was sheer fantasy) was to lure her into the townhome at Gramercy Park, arrange for a home invasion when she was present, and pay off the perpetrator with one of the paintings – thus, establishing a motivation for the robbery gone so terribly wrong as to result in a bloody homicide.  Ms. Adele took the bait exactly as I thought.  I told her that I would settle the divorce with respect to property issues by just deeding over to her my grandpa’s old townhome, lock, stock and barrel (including the art) in exchange for a stipulation that she would make no future claims against my income or family wealth.  She sniffed at me and said that she thought the art in the apartment was just junk, “forgeries and counterfeits,” she said, and, I thought that on account this disrespect (for paintings that I didn’t give a shit about), I would arrange to have her eyes gouged out as a good measure.  (Recall that this was all just drug-crazed fantasy.)  But she said she would be at the townhouse at the appointed time and place.

In any event, the guy that I didn’t hire to do the job that I didn’t actually plan called me from the Townhome.  He said that Ms.  Adele was nowhere to be found, that she had flown the coop and that I should hustle over to the townhouse.  And, so, I did. 

The doorman tried to look stricken, although he had obviously been bribed.  He cracked his big lips and sprayed his Dominican smile all over the lobby, but he was clearly nervous, pacing back and forth on the Persian rug, and muttering to himself.  (My guy had entered through the garage, using a key-fob that I had provided to him and, therefore, bypassed the lobby.)  Upstairs, the apartment had been defaced – the art was all stripped from the walls.  Someone had ostentatiously jimmied the door and sliced open the security system – there were slashes and pry-marks everywhere.  My accomplice was nowhere to be seen.  He had made himself scarce after discovering the townhome had been robbed and Adele nowhere in sight.   The paintings were gone as if they had never existed, yellow pools of zone-lighting illumining squares and rectangles where the wallpaper wasn’t quite so bleached because once protected by the canvases now missing.  The rooms looked curiously vacant without their painted adornments, denuded and abject.

Of course, I made a police report, but the cops sneered at me, subtly but with clear enough intent that I felt humiliated.  It was the ex-wife; she had outsmarted me again.  A couple days later, I visited the doorman in his apartment up in Washington Heights.  You might suspect me of violent, not to say, murderous intent, but, in fact, I was calm, rational, soft-spoken – I matched my ex-wife’s bribe, surpassed it, and the fellow, Jimmy, was quite willing to confess (in exchange for certain promises) and, even, provide me with an affidavit duly signed and notarized as to Adele’s plot to steal my grandpa’s collection from the townhome. 

Restraining Orders prevented me from confronting Adele about the missing art.  So my lawyer wrote to her lawyer and there were even several expensive hearings on the subject, but the proceedings were inconclusive.  Adele denied any involvement and, even, intimated that I had tried to entice her to the townhouse so that the theft could be attributed to her.  Of course, we had contact all the time – it’s impractical to deal with an ex-spouse through lawyers (trust me, I’ve had experience with this) and most negotiations are best accomplished in person even though strictly speaking this might violate applicable restraining orders.  So my suggestion that she confer with me at the Gramercy Park home was problematic.  Ultimately, I had to deny that I had invited her to a meeting – it’s unpleasant to lie under oath, but, necessary, sometimes.  The hearings were futile and, ultimately, I had to offer her several thousand dollars as a ransom for the paintings.  Her lawyer wrote to my lawyer: “How can she produce pictures which have gone missing?  She has no idea where the pictures are presently located.”

This was unsatisfactory and, so, I had to consult with another specialist with the aim of retrieving what was mine.


6.
I took a wrong turn somewhere.  There are only about five or six roads in Canada but, somehow, I ended on the two-lane highway to Saskatoon when, in fact, I was aiming for Regina.  Although I own plenty of cars, I don’t really drive that often – it’s inconvenient in Manhattan and I have an employee who manages my transportation in Los Angeles as well as on San Marcos Island.  The Maserati is made for speed; that kind of driving won’t work in Canada, although the road east from Calgary was mostly flat and empty, running through country where snow nested in the shadow of buttes and in the gravel ravines scoring the terrain.  It was hard to drive the speed-limit but advisable in a foreign country and, besides, I wasn’t comfortable with the rental – a somewhat bulky and underpowered SUV – and so I found myself fumbling with the controls and, then, fighting the wind which seemed to howl out of the northwest so that the vehicle shivered on its wheels.  My Lincoln is built for comfort but the SUV felt gawky and uncertain and I’m not that good of a driver so that pretty soon the empty landscape and the distant horizons and the little herds of small deer with pronged horns prancing through the snowy grasslands exhausted me.  I came to a valley where the hills overlooking the river were grotesque with chiseled turrets and chalk-colored mushrooms.  All the signs showed dinosaurs.  Beyond the bridge, a fiber-glass T Rex tall as a skyscraper leaned over some motels.  I picked a place to stay.

I was restless.  I smoked in the room, although this was strictly forbidden.  If they added a 200 dollars Canadian surcharge to the room rate, then, the cost would be about what I would have expected to pay at a decent hotel in a real city.  On TV, a newscaster said that animal rights activists had torn down a fence at an emu ranch and that about thirty big flightless birds had escaped, darting across the barren land to hide in the badlands.  The newscaster, a young woman wearing an unflatteringly tight dress, seemed uncertain as to whether the story was supposed to be serious or some kind of comic relief.

My great-grandfather, the explorer of the Macaraibo basin, was supposed to be looking for oil.  But he was an amateur naturalist and, apparently a bird-lover as well because his notebooks contain long lists of fowl that he saw in the jungle, sometimes accompanied by sketches delicately tinted with water-colors.  Half of the birds were identified, either with English or Spanish common names or, sometimes, with Latin nomenclature.  Others are simply marked “unknown species”.  My great-grandfather’s handwriting is legible, steady, utilitarian – only toward the end of the last notebook does his hand begin to waver.  Then, it seems that the notebook paper itself and the ink had become resistant to his intentions, as if the tools for writing had rebelled against him, the paper becoming raw and abrasive and the ink clotting like blood on the page.  The last page inscribed in the notebook lists those on the expedition who had perished.  It was all quite poignant and heroic if you are sensitive to these values and the notebooks brought into school for show-and-tell when I was eleven or twelve were a big hit both with the other students and the teachers – instructors even came from other classrooms to pore over the old papers.

On one of the yellowed leaves near the end of the last journal, my great-grandfather sketched several figures.  The preceding pages were marked with survey coordinates, a few profile sketches of rocky hill-tops and mesas, and, sometimes, a word or two rendered illegible by time and the hardship required to make the marks.  The figures crouched at the edges of the page, as if invading the notebook from somewhere beyond the sheet, apes of some sort with small, dark faces malevolent with fear and disgust: fangs beneath flaring nostrils and staring black eyes.  The beasts’ features were enclosed in a fur hood shaped like an old-fashioned nun’s wimple.  The animals had human hands and long, shaggy tails shaped like question-marks.  My great-grandfather drew squiggly lines emanating from the monkeys’ tails and brow.  The aquarelle had long since been lost and the creatures were blurred a little as if their constant motion made them difficult to see and depict.  For a long time, I had puzzled over the words scribbled under the sketch: something-monkeys.  The first part of the word was indefinite, but seemed to be “rainbow.”  When I showed the sketch to my teachers and other students at school, they agreed that the figures had been labeled -"rainbow-monkeys".  The more you scrutinized the letters, the more definite the conviction that my great-grandfather had drawn some kind of simian, probably a spider-monkey, but labeled the animal as a “rainbow-monkey.”  I supposed the squiggly lines around face and tail were supposed to indicate some kind of radiance.

According to family legend, just about everyone on the expedition to the Macaraibo basin had died.  The sketches were made in a state of panic and delirium.  I was a sort of explorer myself, crossing the barren land in Canada, abandoned by my companions.  At this encampment, the cold seeped into the motel room and, when I turned up the wall-heater, it fired with a sound like a waterfall, a loud noise that kept me up most of the night.  The place was a cowboy-town and, outside of my room, I heard hooting and hollering, pick-up trucks gunned to roar against the night, some sort of party expanding through the motel.  When I pried open the black-out curtains, I saw trucks and cars under yellow-orange lamps, banks of dirty snow next to the sidewalk, and a crowd of Native Americans hauling cases of beer into a room across the parking lot.  It seemed that there was sleet in the air.

I hadn’t thought about those notebooks for many years and I wondered whether they were still intact.  When you have several houses, it’s easy to misplace things.  I imagined the vellum-colored notebooks on a shelf somewhere, could visualize the shape of them, but couldn’t exactly place the location of the shelf:  was the ambient air cold and grey, the color of New York sidewalks at down or bright with sea and sun as in Los Angeles or, perhaps, honey-colored and humid, the texture of sunset at San Marcos Island?  I didn’t know.  What had I lost?  Nothing?  Everything? 

The night was a dull implement grinding down the hours and minutes.  I couldn’t get warm and wondered if I was coming down with a bad cold or the flu.  The noise around me, raised voices in other rooms, glass breaking, tires squealing in the parking lot, didn’t subside but, in fact, worsened.  Then, I glimpsed flashing lights and it was silent except for the periodic snore of the wall-heater blowing luke-warm air over my bed.  I remembered the class room in the private school, the ivy on the walls and the dim toilets where the tap water smelled of rotten eggs and the lacrosse fields filling up with amber falling leaves.  Everyone crowded round to see my great-grandfather’s notebooks and I had brought to this show-and-tell a theodolite, as well, and a wooden mask rimmed with rattan and, also, a bull-roarer that I tried to demonstrate before the teacher stopped me from whirling the thing over my head.  No doubt, the notebook contained detailed sketches of birds, their tail-feathers and breasts tinted in water-color.  But “rainbow monkeys”?  That was something I must have dreamed.  At home, I would have to look for those journals. In a forced trek, many things are lost along the way – but I didn’t want to lose those artifacts, although, perhaps, they had already been irrevocably misplaced.

Dawn was bright red seeping up over the eroded ridges streaked with coal seams.  Mining trucks rumbled over the highway.  The night-clerk was disheveled, a fat brown woman with a long, braided pony tail and gold-rimmed glasses.  She apologized to me for the noise: “It’s a small town,” she said, “ and the kids don’t have much of anything to do.”  I nodded.  The woman had a turquoise ring on one of her knuckles.  “A stormy day,” she said.  “

Carrying my gear to the rental SUV, I saw a con-trail arrowed into the red sky.  Rescue.  I wondered about Monica’s night in the hospital.  Broken bottles were scattered across the parking lot.  The shadow of the T Rex loomed overhead, gnawing at the scarlet dawn.  An antelope with a white breast stood along the road studying my car as I passed.
 

7.
I’m discrete.  Affordable is another thing – but when you need my services, you need them so badly that the price-point is generally of little concern.  Long ago, I closed my offices downtown.  Manhattan is insular, literally, I suppose you could say, and everyone in the tribe down there knows everyone else and, so, when privacy is a concern it’s best to conduct business from the outer boroughs.

My best clients, that is to say those most concerned about discretion, usually send someone by subway.  Take the E or F lines out into Brooklyn to the Briarwood Station.  The neighborhood is residential: Jewish once but, now, transitioning to Haitian and Dominican.  My place is suburban, unmarked, along a leafy boulevard where you are apt to see kids playing in yards and smell barbacoa on the grill.  The older boys rap and dance in the alleyways in this neighborhood and you can’t see the towers and lights from downtown except from the upper windows of the old houses and, then, it’s like glimpsing a distant sierra, another country with its own lingo and weather.  My place is an old duplex, without a sign just a security entrance, with big numbers displaying the address.  It’s peaceful in the house – I even have a aquarium stocked with fighting fish. 

If your dad was a high-roller, he probably knew me.  Look in his Rolodex under E for emergency.  Someone might say that my listing should be a little deeper in the alphabet: G, for instance.  I don’t let that kind of slur bother me.  I do what has to be done and run a nice clean ministry of information, which is, after all, a ministry of mutual obligation: I know something and that creates an obligation and, when the debt comes due, I collect although never on my own behalf, but always for the benefit of my clients.  I can keep things quiet if that’s in your best interest, or raise a false flag if required – if need be, I can spread money around and, then, of course, I know a guy who knows a guy (if you catch my meaning)...

So, one afternoon, a man comes up to my stoop, no appointment (that’s how you know the wealthy ones), wondering if he can discuss some business with me – “it’s all sort of impromptu,” he tells the intercom and, on my monitor, I can see that he has perfect teeth and clear skin to complement his wild eyes that show more than a hint of substance abuse, an expensive haircut, casual-elegant clothes, that well-tuned boyish look despite the fact that he’s pushing forty.  I buzz him in and, since my assistant is at lunch, come down the steps to greet him.  He’s distraught, shooting off sparks in all directions.

“This is way out in the boondocks,” the man says.

“Discrete,” I reply.

It’s a warm day and there’s a hint of sweat on his forehead and, as we sit down in the conference room, I offer him a bottle of water, tap that I’ve decanted very nicely into a Fiji container.  He shrugs, drinks deeply, and, then, tells me about some marital strife.  At first, I don’t take notes – this is just background: the restraining orders and court hearings are routine stuff, lawyer-work.  Then, he comes to his point: the woman absconded with a collection of valuable art.  The man grunts with disgust as if  he can’t quite process the grievous wrong done to him, although I note that he’s more than a little vague about the individual art-works that have gone missing.  Fortunately, he has a sort of ledger, an attachment, it seems, to a Last Will and Testament because the paintings were inherited – this makes sense: on the evidence of his appearance, this guy is no collector.

The man is working himself up into a rage.  This is beneficial to me – the higher the stakes, the more fee I can charge.  Finally, he beats the table with his fist.  The Fiji bottle gets overturned and a puddle of Brooklyln’s best potable spreads out across the table-top.  He shakes his head as if the wife’s got a leash around his neck that he’s trying to slip.

“Sooner or later, this kind of art surfaces,” I tell him.  This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve got connections, a couple art dealers on Manhattan, an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum, a half-dozen others as well.

“What about her associates?”

Not involved, I think.  This was a one-off, a specialist hired to perform services, a professional like me.  But I write down a list of names.  The man defames each person identified.  I get addresses, phone-numbers, associates of associates, email addresses.  I’ve got Lexis “People-finder” on my internet and can track down just about anyone with a couple keystrokes.  It’s like a party-trick, something to impress my clients.

“I’ll go to work on this,” I tell him.  We discuss fees.  As I thought, money is no object – hourly work with a per diem and, then, a commission based on percentage of value once I have the goods in my possession.  He purports amazement at what I propose to charge but I know his type: secretly, he’s relieved – the more something costs, the better it is, this is his value system.

We go to the door.  How did you happen upon my name?  He mentions his father, a famous wastrel and lay-about.  “He had an index with names for everything,” the man tells me.  “I found you under ‘G’.”

“G?”

“Gangster, maybe,” he says winking at me.

“Goon,” I say.  “It’s generally ‘goon’.”

He asks me if the walk back to the train-station is safe.

“It’s a family neighborhood,” I tell him.  “Anywhere you got kids and women on the street is okay.”

He nods.  “I live in the city,” he says.  “I know.  But I was just checking.”

“I’m surprised you came by train,” I tell him.

All of a sudden, he’s hysterical.  He’s sobbing with big oily tears in his eyes.  It’s quite the display.  “She’s got me...” he says.  “She’s got me by the balls.  She’s taken everything.”

“Well, I’ll get your things back,” I promise.

“You have to make her pay.”  Then, he repeats: “You have to make her pay.”


8.
I wished I were a better driver.  When the snow kicked-in, all sorts of difficulties ensued: the road was icy and, if I tapped my brake or swerved, I felt the SUV slipping under me, skating between lanes, and, then, the wipers couldn’t keep the windshield clear and I had to stop amidst the flailing wind-driven snow several times to scrape peep-holes through the ice on my back window (the wipers there frozen down completely) and, then, the wind dragged the snow over the highway, pulling shut a million white-curtains ahead of me through which I blindly plunged – oncoming trucks cast clouds of snow over my vehicle, drowning me and, when I surfaced (after ten seconds of panic) it was hard to see the road ahead, although I surmised that it was probably flat and probably straight because the prairie here was featureless and empty except for the howling storm.  If there were towns that I passed, I didn’t see them in the chaos of snow and wind – the road was one long white tunnel continually overflowing with blowing snow.  A big vehicle passed, plowing through the opposite lane, and I almost skidded off the road, but, then, the tail-lights of the semi-truck were ahead of me and I navigated by those two red pinpoints for a long time, until, at last, the truck began to pull ahead, driving far faster than I dared on the roadway that was, now, intricate with crescent-shaped drifts, and I thought I will be left all alone here, unable to go back and equally unable to advance against this storm and, then, what?  The snow closed over the front of my car:  now, the blizzard’s veils looked like innumerable masks, grimacing white faces with wide-open howling mouths and I drove into those jaws and the sinister slit eyes above them,  and, then, there would be another mask full of malice forming immediately ahead and rushing toward me like a banshee.

Somehow, I made Saskatoon:   an overpass and ramp in the pelting snow, then, a boulevard that passed housing subdivisions concealed behind wooden palisades, a convenience store at an intersection where the traffic light swung like a chiming bell over the wind-swept pavement, then, more open ground – a golf course, perhaps, some lanes curving toward a landlocked lighthouse with rotating beam, (maybe, an airport) then, streets and trees and buildings closed in around the road and my SUV wallowed in drifts as I entered town.  A causeway crossed a river, black where open channels jostled big floes of ice, and a Canadian Pacific railroad hotel rose over a bend in the stream spanned by a trestle.  The hotel was ornate, like something that you might find abutting Central Park, with a heavy-gabled roof, pointed finials atop corner towers with Gothic windows and a green belfry enclosed in clouds of blowing snow.  Valet parking – who knows where they put the SUV? These places were built before people had cars.  The lobby was slick with marble, the stink of pomade from a barber-shop on the lower arcade, dim stained glass windows over a reception desk shaped like heaven’s throne of judgement.  I expected the place to be crawling with refugees from the storm but the corridors were curiously empty, a few Japanese couples listlessly reading newspapers in the gloom.

It was the kind of place where you go mad or inflict serious harm upon yourself.  The storm was trapped in the walls and stairwells where echoes reverberated.  The steakhouse in the cellar smelled of death.  I thought of Monica in her hotel bed with Derek from South Africa beside her, possibly reading from a Bible.  There would be a mess when I got back to New York.  Esther didn’t pick up when I dialed her cell-phone.

The road and the blizzard must have affected me more than I expected.  I woke up several times in the darkness, startled by dream-trucks skidding across the center-lane, every collision always ending in a suffocating white-out.  Somewhere, a big bass drum boomed out a message, thuds resounding in the corridors outside and the grim stairwells.

In the morning, the city was blue with cold, ramps and pyramids of snow casting cobalt shadows everywhere along the sidewalks and in the centers of the thoroughfares.  Snow plows chugged forward like orange-yellow tow-boats.  A magazine welcoming me to Saskatoon urged that I tour its art museum.  Apparently, the place was a dozen blocks from the hotel, perched on the banks of the frozen river.  The municipal zoo was nearby – a ticket to the museum admitted you to the zoo as well.  The family that owned the brewery in town had endowed both places, contributing a collection of beasts and what were hopefully called “Old Masters” to these attractions.

The TV told me that the roads were impassable.  It’s good policy to tour local art museums – you never know whether the local beer baron hasn’t acquired, by accident, some Gothic masterpiece or once-discredited modernist work now back in vogue.  When Abstract Expressionism was fashionable, a clever collector could acquire paintings by Georgia O’Keefe or Grant Wood for next to nothing.  So it pays to take a quick look.

The Uber driver wore an turban the color of a pumpkin.  “Sikh?” I asked.  He nodded his head.  The car sweltering, the heater firing hot air in my face.  “What is the art museum like?”  I asked.  “Very good,” he said, “one of my cousins is a guard.”  The man skillfully piloted the car around ridges of snow that the plows had pushed into the center of the broad streets.   The buildings downtown were old and heavy with massive walls and doorways like the entrances to caves.  In a small park, I saw lodgepoles tilted up to form the skeleton of a teepee.  The heros on a war monument wore cloaks of snow.

“The zoo is very good also,” the driver told me.  “One ticket gets you into both places.  Many comical animals in the zoo.”

He drove me to the door of the museum.  A sculpture shaped like a silver candelabra stood against the wall of a windowless cube sheathed in brushed zinc.  When I opened the door, I could smell the gamy odor of the zoo, a sharp fragrance carried on the wind.   River ice gnashed like teeth.     



II

Cloak room, restrooms behind white doors, gift shop in a bright alcove beside the toilets, lobby with chest-high admission desks, a drowsy-looking gay man behind the computer there with slight lisp, tattooed forearms, hoop-gages in earlobes, nearby a fountain with shallow tiled basin in which there is set a cairn of irregular stones stacked to make a crude arch, some sort of Arctic monument, I suppose, jazz playing in the gift shop or, perhaps, the little dining room, also white as a hospital cafeteria, on the cantilever above the museum entrance – no one visiting the brewer’s galleries this a.m.   The ticket would cost 10 dollars Canadian, but it’s free to me by virtue of my MOMA membership card (North America Reciprocal privileges) – thus, my MOMA card also gets me into the local zoo at no charge since the gay guy is quick to remind me that I can see the animals as well as the art with my museum admission: Masterpieces of Art/Wonders of Nature the ticket tells me.

“Cold today,” I remark.

The man at the admission desk nods.

“Probably not many animals outside.”

The man shrugs: “The bears and wolves, the moose, I think, they like it cold.  Most of the habitats are in the buildings.  The sidewalks might be icy.  Take care.”

The museum is a skewed cube, mostly windowless – after a quick ascent by elevator, you start on the fourth floor and wend your way down on pale, gently sloping ramps.

Pretty much as you would expect: Emily Carr landscapes, Canadian Fauvist work later refined to fern- green forests full of purple shadow, paintings of trees and surf by the Algonquin group, several polite and unassuming abstractions, some Pop art, then, a gallery with austere-looking masks behind glass, carved walrus tusks, several stolid wood idols, apparently ancient and shaped like trolls, more elegant Inuit work showing shamans becoming wolves or bears or ravens, then, a ramp down to several white galleries hung with Georgia O’Keefe, Marsden Kelly, American landscape artists and modernists, two Abstract Expressionist works by Philip Guston and, then, a couple of his figurative paintings, the collection, all more or less predictable for time and place.  Another ramp to some Academic landscapes from the 19th century (views of Palestine and Banff), folk art in the form of tavern signs and stiff, primitive portraits, more landscapes from artists no one teaches about – the curse of a provincial museum: perfectly estimable work by perfectly estimable mediocrities, paintings too pretty to be discarded and, yet, unimportant and completely forgettable, generic, second- or third-class canvas one after another, each the product of careful labor, intense, if formulaic, composition, tastefully restrained color schemes, brush-strokes daubed against stretched linen almost apologetically.  The art world is full of this stuff, canvases made for the walls of mansions owned by rich businessmen and their pale, refined wives, patrons of the arts, benefactors of the local symphony and the regional theater – little works of genius, I suppose, but so little that they shrink into insignificance and, by the time you are touring the zoo, the roar of a lion or a monkey’s easy trapeze swing, leaping from branch to branch, or the peacock’s unfurled fan of feathers -- any of these will wholly erase from your memory every trace of the paintings in the nearby museum.

But an exception: the ramp tilts down to a gallery with walls painted Pompeii red – Old Masters from the Collection of Herman Seim: two or three portraits in massive burnished gilt frames, purchased, no doubt, in the hope that these mud-colored blurs, almost too dark to be seen, were by Rembrandt (they are not), a pale blue Italian work, most likely sold as Tiepolo, several Russian icons, a German altar showing kneeling women in white frocks being beheaded, the sort of image that the Taliban might enjoy, a wan and insolent Cranach nude (how many hundreds of these paintings did the Master execute?) and, then, next to several stormy landscapes in the style of Ruisdael, an odd painting executed on what appears to be wood, unlike anything else in the galleries, an image that I can’t categorize and that doesn’t assimilate to anything I know about art history.  The painting is taller than it is wide, almost five feet in height and, perhaps, four feet across.  At its upper center, amid dark wind-roiled clouds, a city is floating in the air.  The sky is stormy, full of banner-shaped pennants of cloud and the city is the color of a marigold, bright yellow, a dome-shaped tower with pendant piers and staircases hanging like a great, bright balloon over a blue sea.  The sea is wild with waves, painted like locks of disheveled serpentine hair and small figures are diving and lunging through the water as acrobatic as porpoises.  On a small peninsula thrust into the sea, another city with saffron-colored towers rises among noble-looking trees tinted red-gold by autumn.  A dozen men and women, painted with identical lily-white faces, stand outside the gates of the town, looking upward, enthralled by the city in the sky.  On the edge of the sea, black bears are ambling toward the water.  A cluster of grey monkeys with reddish faces sit at the very tip of the promontory also gazing upward at the sky-city.  As I look more closely, the figures in the sea show themselves to be monkeys, disporting themselves playfully in the flood.  Within vaulted archways on the lowest level of the floating city, I make out more bears squatting on windowsills that seem to be decorated with pearls and gems.  Above those bottom levels, monkeys occupy colonnaded arcades that girdle the city’s mid-section.  The dome-shaped tower surging upward like a rocket springing into the heavens is ornate, a filigree of open buttresses and balconies and finely arched windows carved in some weightless honey-amber substance. Tiny human figures, all with the same mouse-like features, look down at the earth from which they have been liberated – some of them wave and others cast down garlands of flowers.  The furious sky is adorned with bouquets of birds, most of them long-legged storks and herons.

The iconography is obscure to me.  I have no idea what event or legend or sacred story the painting commemorates.  The label is no help at all: it says – mid-17th century, Flemish? School of Bosch.  In fact, the vaguely Oriental architecture of the floating city and the town below with its onion-domed steeples looks a bit like the buildings in Brueghel’s paintings of the Tower of Babel. The monkeys could be cousins to the two chained apes painted by Brueghel (I think the painting is in Berlin). The mice-people with their curiously inert white faces and button eyes are, indeed, similar to Bosch’s figures in his hellscapes or “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, but I have no idea why crowds of monkeys and bears have been admitted to the celestial city hovering over the blue waves.

For a long time, I stand in front of the wood panel, peering at its details.  The perspectives in the painting clash with one another – the sea and the village on the shore with the ambling bears and the amazed people are painted from an aerial perspective, as if seen from a hill overlooking the promontory, but the sea is visualized as if we are peering straight down into the water, as if the painter’s eye is aboard a drone and aimed directly into the waves on a sort of tabletop where the monkeys are cavorting.  The artist has painted the marigold city in the sky according to rigid one-point perspective a bit like an Italian primitive, archways and palisades and arcades all aimed at a vanishing point on the panel’s upper left, an effect somewhat similar to that in Giotto or Piero della Francesca.  The whole image glistens like a tear-drop, executed in transparent glazes.  What is this picture?  What does it mean?  Why is it here?

My black moleskin is tucked in my breast pocket, next to a pen from the hotel, and so I write a few notes.  Then, I take my phone from my coat pocket to photograph the strange painted panel.  Of course, I look around.  I am alone in the Pompeii red gallery.  The city in the sky hangs near the threshold of another gallery, antiseptic with white walls on which I glimpse a Warhol beside an Impressionist blur of blues and greens.  Another handsome Sikh with a cream-colored turban and wearing a navy blur blazer stands sentry in the room.  I don’t see anything forbidding photography.

I step back to photograph the whole canvas, then, approach to take pictures of its four quadrants – on the screen of the phone, the floral colors on the canvas pop out at me and the surfing monkeys seem particularly festive, a generous detail that should make you laugh out loud.  The school of Bosch is eccentric and grief-stricken, perplexed by sin and doom, but this picture shows no sign of melancholy; it’s all exuberant improvisation.  (Of course, caution must be exercised: what looks like improvised fantasy might well be programmatic in every respect  – I just don’t know the program.)  Provenance is sometimes established by tiny and incidental details.  I zoom in close to surface of the picture to record it’s craquelure, the network of tiny fissures in its pigment, the technique used to apply the oil paint, the jewel-like enameled glaze catching and storing light, it seems, like a battery stores an electrical charge.

How is the thing framed?  I step to the side of the wood panel and aim the camera at the frame supporting the painted image.  After my third picture taken from this angle, the handsome, turbaned guard is stirred from his reverie and pounces, hurrying from the hospital-white gallery to confront me.

“No pictures, sir,” he says emphatically.

“I’m sorry,” I reply.  “I didn’t see any warning.”

“No worries in this room,” he advises, gesturing at the warm red walls and the paintings installed against them.  “You can take pictures here.  Just not into the next gallery, not where I was standing.”

“I’m trying to photograph this painting.  The monkeys and the bears.”

“That’s no problem,” the Sikh guard says.  “You just can’t take pictures of the things in the next gallery.  Those are on loan from a private party and we don’t own the rights.  This picture – no worries.”

“What do you know about this picture?” I ask, pointing to the wood panel of the floating city.

“Nothing, really,” the guard says.  “My uncle told me once, but I forgot what he said.  It’s an old story.”

“I wasn’t interested in taking pictures of the stuff over there,” I tell him.  I wave toward the white room where he was standing.  From my vantage, I can see what looks like a Picasso in the next room, the hieratic diagram of a woman’s profile.

“I’m trying to document the way the wood panel is managed,” I tell him.  “But I’ll take the picture from the other side.

H nods, bows slightly, and, then, returns to his duty in the gallery decorated with the loan paintings.

I turn my back to that room, take several more pictures of the side of the panel, and, then, stroll through the white gallery.  As the Sikh guard advised, the pictures are all labeled “On loan – Anonymous”.  Next to each canvas, there is an emblem showing an old-fashioned camera with a red bar across its lens: No Photography Allowed.

There’s no postcard of the city in the sky in the gift shop.  Through the wall-sized windows near the admission desk, I see the wind blowing wobbly pennants of snow off the top of the drifts along the sidewalk.  It looks too cold to go outside and so I buy some tea and sit in the café overlooking the lobby.  Below, some visitors arrive, except for me the first of the day, and they shake the cold from their shoulders, spraying flakes in all directions as they forge forward to buy their gallery and zoo tickets.

I have a friend, Willard, an assistant curator at the Brooklyn Museum.  If I recall right, he wrote his dissertation on Jan Brueghel.  I’m curious what he thinks about the painting.  I text him some pictures with this message:

I’m in Alberta, Saskatoon of all places, and here is a picture in the local museum.  Freezing my ass off.  What do you make of this picture. Oil on wood panel.  Labeled “School of Bosch” – my ass!  Looks like Chromium Green Oxide – two-hundred years later, maybe.  Give me your opinion.

Willard texts back – Interesting.  Send more pics, dude.

I send a text message to Monica wishing her well.

No response.



III.

1.
In 1665, the English scientist, Robert Hooke, published Micrographia.  This book is ekphrastic – that is, descriptions of objects as seen through the scientist’s microscope.  Observ. XXXVI is entitled “Of Peacock, Ducks, and other Feathers of Changeable Color.”  Through the lens of his instrument, Hooke saw that the iridescent feathers on a peacock’s tail were comprised of intricate structures: the veins of the feathers extruded “sprigs” and, these, in turn branched into “congeries of small Laminae”.  These tiny, replicating planes acted as mirrors, creating what Hooke called “alteration of reflection & refraction.”  The effect was that light penetrating the peacock’s feathers was reflected in such way as to create rainbow patterns of color.  The tint and configuration of this color varied according to the angle of the incident light and the position of the eye observing the feather.  It is characteristic of iridescence to be goniochromatic – that means, the colors observed and their brightness will vary depending upon the location of the observer’s eyes.

Hooke discovered what is now called “structural coloration”.  Most color in the world is based on pigments.  A pigment, such as Pompeii Red or Chromium Green, reflects incident light organized into a single wave-length or closely aligned wave-lengths.   When this light, all reflected within a tight range of frequencies, impinges upon the eye, we see color.  “Structural coloration” does not rely upon pigmentation.  It is not intrinsic to the color of the thing perceived.  Hooke verified this by altering the reflective and refractive characteristics of his peacock feathers by dipping them in water.  This dulled the sheen of the tiny barbel’s that created the rainbow color-effects.  Viewed in water, a peacock’s gaudy tail-feathers are a consistent and drab dull red-brown.  Isaac Newton took note of Hooke’s work and, in his Opticks, refined this analysis: structural coloration in feathers or, for that matter, soap bubbles arises from “thin-layer interference.”  Consider the example of the soap bubble: the membrane of the bubble is a “thin-layer” that alters the wave-length of light depending upon whether reflected from the inner or outer layer of the bubble.  Since the distance separating the two layers is a fraction of the light’s wavelength, the reflected light waves, depending on the angle of incidence either cohere (that is multiply the light’s intensity, the two beams matching crest to crest and trough to trough) or interfere with one another (one beam’s trough coinciding with another wave’s crest).  The vagaries of interference and coherence created by the light’s incidence and reflection from the thin-layer creates color patterns, typically reds and blues, but with various spectral frequencies between those colors as well.

We can create iridescence by devising nano-structures comprised of tiny slits.  These structures are called “diffraction” grating.  Light waves passing through these slits are diffracted into rainbow colors.  This also results from interference and overlap between waves transmitted through the grate.  A good example of diffraction grating iridescence can be seen by holding a CD up to the light.  By contrast, the iridescence that creates rainbow patterns associated with oil slicks on water is an example of thin-layer interference – light, consisting of a wide range of frequencies, reflects at different wavelength from the surface layer of the slick and the bottom layer floating on the water.  Thus, the colors visible where gas, for instance, has spilled onto a puddle of rain water.

2.
Back at the hotel, my cell-phone buzzed.  Perhaps, it was Monica responding to my message.  A man’s voice told me that he was calling from the art museum.  He told me that my moleskin had been found on a gallery floor.  “I didn’t even know it was missing,” I replied.

The man said that the notebook was at the “lost and found” desk.

I supposed that I had fumbled the moleskin when putting it back in my breast pocket.  Presumably, the sharp-eyed Sikh standing guard over the paintings had noticed it.  My phone number is written in the front of the notebook, along with my name.

I told the caller that I would retrieve the notebook the next day, on my way out of town.  The wind was subsiding and the white snow-torch flaring over the river seemed smaller and less fierce with each hour.  The forecast was for still, bright skies and melt-water.

The light reflecting off the million mirrors of snow and ice outside, by contrast, made the crypt of my room seem particularly gloomy.

After breakfast the next day, I drove over the bridge and was half-way to the outskirts of the city when I remembered the notebook at the museum “lost and found”.  I drove back and parked in an empty lot marked with a sign showing a cartoon giraffe.  The zoo pavilions were still swathed in snow, but stalactites of icicles now adorned the eaves and the ice on the sidewalks had melted to puddles.  In a sort of open garage, I saw three men in grey coveralls working on an elephant as if the animal were a big truck in need of maintenance.

I was tempted to show my MOMA card and go up the ramp to see the strange floating city painted on the wood panel.  But I had a long drive ahead of me and the morning was already half consumed and, now, I was behind schedule.

3.
Human ingenuity first created iridescence in a black alloy that the Corinthian Greeks called kuanos.  Ancient writers recount that the alloy was comprised of copper, silver and gold.  If properly made, the metal’s patina was pitch-black with a shimmer of iridescence.  Kuanos identifies this alloy but also means furrow, moat, the shimmer of a snake, mighty river.  No examples of this substance have ever been found, although the third-century AD Egyptian alchemist Zosimos of Panoplis claimed that he had mastered the technique of forging figures from Kuanos, reclaiming the lost technology of the Corinthians.

Nature is replete with iridescent organisms.  The sheen inside the shell of a pearl-producing oyster has this characteristic – “mother of pearl” or “pearlescent”.  Morpho butterflies shimmer as do many other insect species.  The colors that play across the wings of dragon-flies and house-flies are an example of iridescence resulting from “thin-layer interference”.  The throats of humming birds are iridescent as are the fins of some fish.  Beetles display emerald iridescence.  The abdomen of the Australian peacock spider is replete with rainbows.  Until recently, only one mammalian genus was known to exhibit iridescent qualities – these are the so-called Golden Moles (Chrysochloridae), animals that are distributed across desert and savanna habitats in the south part of Africa.  The creatures are not true moles, said to be more closely related to elephants than to the common burrowing animals in America and Europe.  The moles spend their lives under ground, plowing through sand in search of insects.  They are formless, roughly spherical, with powerful forepaws.  Golden Moles have a stiff, but silky, coat of fur, adapted for “swimming” through soil – their fur, under microscopic lens, is comprised of flat paddle-shaped strands that alternate between dark and light.  This fur is iridescent – viewed from various angles the featureless blobs of fur iridesce purple, blue, red, and violet.  The iridescence is an evolutionary accident, the result of fur streamlined to repel sand and earth.  The eyes of the Golden Mole are covered with skin and fur – they are completely blind.  Seldom seen, these animals are critically endangered – by the time, you read these words, the last of the iridescent moles living in the wilderness may have perished.  They are an ancient breed, sometimes described as transitional between mammal and reptile – the Golden Mole originally thrived in the deserts of the lost continent Gondwana.


4.
Spring: the window’s cranked open: down the alley, someone is singing in Spanish and the smell of frying chicken and empanadas fills the air.  It’s all sunny and sweet, except my client is crying, actually shedding hot tears over the laptop open to the two photographs.  When you’ve lived free and easy all your life, no regrets, and nothing standing in your way, I suppose it’s hard to come to terms with... what do you call it? – nemesis.  That is, the opposition of another human being, someone convinced of her rights and her rectitude and, even, stubbornly vindictive.  To a wealthy lad like my client, I suppose the whole thing is simply hideous, a nightmare that subverts every principle inherited as part of the lifestyles of the rich and famous – so, here he is on this pretty afternoon, weeping outright in my conference room so that I am looking about for a box of kleenexes since things promise to be moist and, even, moister as our discussion proceeds...

But at first, he was defiant: tossing his head back, clipping his sunglasses to the lapel of his polo shirt – “So you have something to report?”

“Yes, indeed,” I said to him: “here are two pictures.  They aren’t very good – they were taken for a different purpose than what I am going to show you.  But, I think you will see –“

“See what?”

“Just wait for it,” I counsel, opening up the lap top, waiting for the screen to refresh, scrolling down to click on the jpeg. images.

“Where did you get these pictures?” he asks.

“Sources and methods,” I tell him.  “I don’t want to disclose sources and methods.”

“Is this some kind of CIA operation?”

“Maybe,” I reply.  “In fact, we’ve got an international border issue.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Not at all.”

The pictures are on the screen.  At first, he doesn’t comprehend: “It’s some kind medieval altar or something: marigolds in a pot?”

“That’s not what I want you to focus on,” I say.  “Look in the background.”

Then, he sees: “The soup can.”

“And nearby?”

I expand the image.  At the edge of the picture, a frame protrudes brimming with blurry blue and green.

“Your Monet?”

“Could be,” he says.

“I’m going to presume that the Picasso is somewhere in the same gallery.”

Then, the faucets are open and his fingers on the table sharpen to claws and a tremor convulses him for just a second.  His face is red and wet.

“So she put them in a museum somewhere?”

“Saskatoon.  Apparently, a loan.  Hiding in plain sight.”

“Saska -what?”

“Canada.  It’s a city up on the tundra.  In Manitoba or something.”

The sheer injustice squeezes more tears from his eyes and he is muttering something under his breath.  He makes a fist and punches his chest first and, then, the conference room table.  I withdraw the laptop from the danger zone.

“I’m going to get them back,” he says.  “You know that I’m going to get them back.”

A skateboard coasts down the alley.  I hear the little wheels click and spin.  Somewhere, a car door is slammed shut, a fatal deep boom echoing off the houses.

“That’s the objective,” I say.  “We’ll make a plan.”

“Fuck, yes!  We’ll make a plan!  She’s gonna suffer ...”

“Patience,” I tell him.  “Be patient.”

He mops at his eyes with his sleeve.

“Here’s the first step.  You have to go to the museum.  I have the address written down here.   Then, you have to eyeball the pictures and make a positive ID.  If possible, you should try to get some pictures, take your cell-phone and get pictures.  Write down what it says on the wall next to the picture.”

“But she sold them, she must have sold them.”

“I don’t think so,” I tell him.  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter.  A thief can’t give good title.”

“I’ll get a gun.  I’ll take a gun,” he’s happy with the idea – the tears stop and his eyes glint with a hard, deranged brilliance.

“Bad idea,” I say.  “You won’t get across the border with the gun.  And you won’t be able to buy a weapon in Canada.  They have different gun-laws.”

He looks disappointed.

“You don’t want to do anything to attract attention.  The first step is fact-finding. You need to look at the pictures, identify them, and, then, we’ll have to engage a Canadian lawyer and...”

“I should just go up there with a spray-can of paint and a screwdriver and shred those things.”

“That would be pointless,” I tell him.

“I can get some paint across the fucking border and a phillips-head screwdriver and I’ll just cut the canvas to pieces.  What do you think of that?”

“Pointless,” I repeat.  “We can get the goods back.”

“I just want to see them shredded.”

I ask him if he wants a drink.  He nods.  “Let me make you a drink and we can figure out what next to do,” I tell him.

The drink is sedative.  He leans back, sniffs the Spring air, hears the birds and someone singing in Spanish on a balcony overlooking the alley.  The day is like a parade that has paused suddenly in the bright sunshine.

“First, go up there and establish that these paintings are your property.  Then, we’ll get a lawyer and take action.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Don’t do anything to get yourself in some kind of trouble.  We’ll need your affidavit that you have seen the pictures with your own eyes and that you have made the identification.”

“Okay,” he repeats, massaging his forehead.

5.
Needless to say there was a fuss and a ruckus when I got back to NYC.  Monica was subordinate to me and, of course, I had used bad judgement in our relationship and, notwithstanding the influence, and Schiele’s cachetic nude (much coveted by the Neue Galerie) on the wall of my upper East Side townhouse  – the girl’s pale stringy body like something squeezed out of a tube of toothpaste – the proverbial writing was on the wall.  The women sniffed at me when I entered the room, wrinkling their nose as if at a bad odor and management was decidedly standoffish, feigning a sort of indifference that I knew presaged no good at all.  The best thing was to withdraw before the scandal tainted me and, with it, I suppose, the Neue Galerie and, so, everyone seemed highly relieved when I tendered my resignation.  The boss took me out to a nice (if inconspicuous) place for drinks and dinner and, post-prandial, gave me a brotherly hug.  Then, I was on my own.

I went west to the house in Briarwood on a hilltop in the Santa Monica mountains.  From my swimming pool deck, I could see the honey-colored facades of fossilized travertine at the Getty Institute, cubes and curved walls like a fortress on the crest of the mountain overlooking the 405.  Sometimes, when there was a temperature inversion, the smog filled the basin and the Getty seemed to float in mid-air, a city in the sky.

After a while, I negotiated a truce with Esther.  She came to LA as well and, after several weeks, took a a job as a set decorator at one of the studios.  A degree in art history is a plus when you are designing interiors for films set in the past.  I drank more than was prudent and spent some times in the clubs on Sunset Boulevard.  During the day, I sunbathed beside my pool, gazing across the lush canyons toward the Getty.  Sometimes, great birds circled overhead, noble and aloof, but I assumed they were vultures, scanning the landscape for something dead.

Esther met Mr. Right at the studio and, after some embarrassing quarrels, moved out of the Briarwood house.  It didn’t matter that I was alone.  No one seemed to know where I had gone.   – Nature, as they  say, loves to hide.

6.
You won’t believe this shit: Canadian customs detained me at the Regina Airport.  Seems that they don’t want tourists in their country convicted of domestic abuse or DWI back in the States.  I kept my cool, zipped my lip, and let them hold me in a cramped office with a poster of ski resorts at Banff on the wall, nothing much to drink but a bottle of water.  No one frisked me and, so, I had the phillips head screwdriver in my travel vest, and I could have made trouble for the fucking Mounties, except that I was on a mission and thought it best to cease and desist while my fixer in Brooklyn placed a few calls and, maybe, posted some kind of bond so that I could be admitted to this shit-hole country above the Arctic Circle as far as I know, for Christ’s sake...

After a couple of hours twiddling my thumbs, a guy comes by in a suit two or three sizes too small for him, a beefy fellow with a tomato-red face, and he makes me sign a few documents that he produces on a clipboard, glares at me as if I were a major pain-in-the-ass, but, then, politely shakes my hand as I am ushered through security, past the guards, and, then, set free in the Great White North.  I make my way to Hertz, rent a car, and, then, drive out of town, following my phone over the tundra to Saskatoon – the freeway is straight out to the horizon, a yellow-green plain in all directions that looks hot in the bright sunlight, but, then, cools to shadowy blue when the sun dips down far to my left where there are supposed to be mountains, although I can’t see any trace of them.  It’s the kind of road that whispers in your ear that you should speed and, sometimes, when I look down at the console, I am going fast, scary-fast, although I suppose you would have to translate kilometers per hour to miles per hour, an equation that I don’t know and don’t care to master.  For most of the way, the road is empty and the sky vast overhead and I have the uncomfortable feeling that all of this useless, wasted open space is somehow keeping me under surveillance.

The lights of Saskatoon flare up over the prairie and I can see the glow ahead of me for fifty miles, at least, and, then, there are some interchanges, freeway exits, and I am passing suburbs, and running parallel to a river that seems to be twisting like a snake in a hollow place gouged down into the plain.  The built-up area is small, compact, glass towers with the names of oil companies and banks on them clustered around a big hotel with castle-turrets and sheer walls, dark and ancient like some sort of haunted theme-park.

I demolish a steak (absurdly expensive) in the restaurant of the hotel, drink enough beer to feel numb, and, then, toddle off to my room somewhere above the gloomy, mausoleum of a lobby.  In the hallways, it seems that closing and shutting doors are weirdly amplified – I can hear the dull thud, like a great drum being beat or a howitzer firing on the horizon.  What made Adele hide my paintings in this place: Butt-Fuck, Alberta, an utter backwater far from ordinary human eyes?– that’s the answer, I suppose.

Restless night, the beer simmering in my belly, then, the dawn and, from my window, the river under the escarpment of the hotel wall, flowing over shoals of sand, bright in the early light, the leaves glistening with dew in trees along the undercut clay banks.  A canoe glides by, oars piercing the water – what do you expect?  It’s the back of beyond, the wild, wild west.  In fact, at the Art Museum there’s a zoo crouching right under the walls of the gallery and, even, a teepee pitched in the yellow grass of the steppe.

The parking lot is big and empty – it’s all open range up here.  The wire fence around the zoo is draped with banners showing circus animals and the quadrants of the parking lot are monkey, lion, elephant, zebra.  The sun is hot and bright, ten-thousand searchlights boring down on the asphalt under the monkey sign where I have put my car.  There’s tall crested prairie grass and sage along the walkway to the tilted cube of the art museum.  My heart is thumping in my chest and there’s a billowy feeling in my belly.  When the wind pushes over the zoo fence, I can smell the animal shit there and a raw feral stink like a cat litter-box tipped over on the floor.  At the edges of what I’m paying attention to, some girls with dark skin and Navajo braids are pushing babies in strollers and men in shorts are laughing and shouting and on the sidewalk ahead of me, a couple of old people are cautiously navigating the flat pavement in front of the sliding museum doors.

Then, it’s cool inside:  A life-size portrait of a fat man holding up a mug of lager and a fountain in a shallow basin where two stacks of irregular rocks are heaped up support a sort of stone lintel.  The toilets are near the gift shop in which a skinny man is sitting on a stool behind the credit-card reader, music playing: a recording of a Mickey Mouse band playing Dixieland jazz, accompanying the soft splashing of water under the heaps of stones.  I have my ticket but my guts are churning and so I sit for a while in a stall in the toilet – the screw-driver is in my vest: the garment is canvas with many pockets in which I can hide useful things.  Things are swirling around me now and I’m not so confident as I was even an hour ago – I can feel my mood on the verge of crashing and burning and my fingers are trembling a little.  But there’s nothing for it, but to flush the toilet under me, zip up, square my shoulders and go out to face the world.

There’s a ramp well-suited for skateboarding, a restaurant sitting on an overhead ledge like a potted plant, some galleries that open into one another, and, then, a hall full of pictures hanging on a wall the color of pale ketchup.  Old junk, dominated by a picture of a palace levitating over stormy seas full of tiny swimming beasts, but, from a stance in front of that picture, I recognize the next gallery, white walls quivering under florescent lights: the painted lady with the peach profile and eye where her ear should be, the blue swamp reflecting floating clouds, the barrel-sized soup can labeled Green Pea Soup.  It’s all there, exactly as I was told to expect, bare floor and mostly bare walls but my stuff, my grandpa’s paintings put on display to shame and humiliate me.  A strong surge of feeling, unanticipated, the sense that my ex’s eyes are focusing upon me, that she is hiding somewhere in the museum, that she has been following me and gloating over my misfortunes, crazy thoughts since I know that Adele is in Switzerland at this very moment, a world away in Zermatt, but it’s an affliction for me to be possessed by these notions and I feel quite dizzy, everything spinning a little so that I retreat from the gallery containing my stolen goods and sit for a while on a bench in the ketchup-colored room next to the picture of the yellow city hovering in the clouds.  After a while, my head clears and I am conscious of my surroundings once more and can hear people whispering in that annoying soft tone that everyone uses in art museums – through the threshold opposite to the room where my paintings are on display, a man and woman are muttering cheek-to-cheek, and there is a Muslim security guard standing in the corner of the red room, a big guy with a Taliban beard and Taliban turban, dressed in blue navy blazer and looking at me without curiosity or human warmth, indeed, with complete and naked indifference and that’s just fine with me, okay, because I don’t need to draw attention to myself on this mission.  I take a deep breath and stand up and stride, then, amble because I want to seem nonchalant, in the direction of the picture of the marshy lagoon.  I come within five feet, survey the picture and notice, for the first time in my life, that it is actually quite beautiful, a wonderful thing to admire and love – strange, how I never really saw the picture before this moment, never paid much attention to it at all, but now that it is lost to me, the painting has become a fabulous thing, unique and beckoning.  Then, I take my notebook from one of my vest pockets – I have so many of them – and write down what is marked on the wall next to the picture.  I circle the room, making notes about the Warhol soup can and the painting of the woman with the misplaced ear, and, at each station, I curse myself for not previously realizing how fine these paintings are, how intricate and, even, thoughtful their making.  A great hush has descended over the gallery and I feel almost calm now.

The notebook and pen go back in my pocket and, then, I am fumbling among the many hiding places in the vest for my cell-phone.  Suddenly, the Arab takes notice and struts toward me – his turban is so white it gleams above his brown forehead.

“I’m sorry, sir, no photographs allowed in this gallery.  Everywhere else okay, but not here,” and he gestures at a placard on the wall showing a bar across a stylized camera.

“These are my paintings,” I say.  “I can take pictures of my own property.”

“I don’t think that’s the case,” the Arab responds.

“No I own these,” I reply.

“That’s not the case.”

I can’t find the cell-phone.  I don’t recall where I put it.  Too many pocket.  The phillips-head screwdriver keeps coming to hand. I can feel its cold shaft and, even from other pockets, its form presses against my fingers through the cloth.

“You can’t stop me from taking a picture of my own property.”

The man looks confused: “I think there’s some misunderstanding.”

“There’s no misunderstanding,” I reply.

The cell-phone is in my hands.  I aim at the green-blue lagoon with the floating flowers.  The Arab steps between my phone and the picture.

“Please don’t do that,” he says.

“You’re gonna stop me, you fucking towel-head.”

The Arab looks hurt and shakes his head, apparently baffled.  He steps aside and I take several pictures.  He strolls to the center of the gallery, takes out a sort of radio, and whispers something out of the side of his mouth into the black receiver.

Here, thresholds open upon galleries where the next threshold is aligned and, so, I can see two men in identical navy blue jackets advancing from the other end of the building.

Electric rage surges through my body and my hands are fumbling for the pocket with the screwdriver.  The cell-phone slips from my fingers and clatters on the wood floor.  Then, I have the screw-driver out and it waves in the air like the baton held by an orchestra conductor and, suddenly, the thing is no longer guiding invisible musicians, but ripping open the belly of the soup can, tearing the canvas so that I expect green split-pea condensate to spill out on the floor.  There’s a shout over my shoulder and I whirl and see the men standing beside the Arab who is pointing at me with his lips moving.  I decide to cut them with the screwdriver and lunge, but they elude me, and so I have to be content with slashing the cheek of the malformed painted woman.  More people also are coming – I can see them sprinting through the ketchup-colored gallery.

The ramp is slippery underfoot and where it doubles back on itself, I can’t stop and crash into the balustrade, rolling sideways to plunge down the rest of the ramp into the lobby with the gift shop in the alcove and the pile of wet rocks, the skinny man standing in front of his wares, cell-phone raised to his mouth, the faggot behind the admission desk, suddenly, jumping up and over the counter to pursue me.

I’m out the door, down the sidewalk where I can see cop cars skidding into the parking lot and, so, I turn and run in the shadow of the museum’s tilted cube to the kiosk where some people are waiting to be admitted to the zoo.  I jump the line and run between cages imprisoning bears and baboons.  The animal stink rises into my nostrils and I have the screwdriver in my fist, brandishing it like a gun, as sirens wail.  I’m blocked by a moat with concrete platforms where seals and walruses are wallowing.  Here the air smells of rotting fish.  Over my shoulder, I can see several men in dark uniforms zigzagging among the pavilions, splitting up to corner me among the habitat buildings ahead.  I run along a structure with cast-iron bars where lions and wolves seem to be sleeping on shelves.  An elephant trumpets somewhere, a loud bellow that seems directed toward exposing me, and so the bright sunshine and the concrete sidewalks are suddenly unendurable.  Somewhere in the distance, there is pounding, like a big drum being beaten.

I crash through a door into an oval-shaped space with tall windows such as you might see in a cathedral.  Some birds flutter in the aviary overhead and the cages are full of shrieking monkeys.  The clamor rises up to disconcert the parrots and they cry out accusations.  The wire walls of the cages are behind steel fences that are wet from cleaning, cold with droplets, and there are puddles on the floor. Outside, I can hear someone shouting to the police, directing them to this monkey-house that seems to have no outlet – the high wire-walls rising up to the vault overhead where netting confines the parrots and macaws.  The monkeys sense that I am an intruder and they are screaming –  the din floods over me and I can’t hear myself think.  I try a door marked Staff Only and am surprised that it gives inward.  A dark corridor opens before me, tools of various sorts hanging on the walls, nets and hooks, and some buckets under bins full of what looks like dog kibble.  Another door closes off the corridor.  Perhaps it leads to the outside.  I dash up to the door and try the handle – again it opens and, so, I slip inside, drawing the door shut behind me.

There’s a flare of light all around and, at first, I think that I am outside, but the floor underfoot is concrete,  strewn with mounds of shit, and there’s a big barren tree hung with swings and trapezes bolted to its branches and, looking upward, I can see a multitude of black faces glaring down at me, lips contorted and fangs exposed.  I’m in the monkey cage and the animals are all around, howling and darting to the corners of the enclosure like waves spreading away from where a rock has dropped into a pond.  Several of the monkeys are underfoot and they hiss and snarl knocking me back in a recoil to the door.  But the door has locked behind me.  I can’t turn the handle and so I am trapped in the cage.

A cop is standing beyond the wire wall, screaming at me to show my hands.  The screwdriver is still in my fist.  I raise the screwdriver and decide that I should plunge it into my throat and, so, with my other hand I am feeling for the arteries under my skin, but it’s like the vest-pockets, I’m fumbling for something that I can’t locate and, so, I squat down on the concrete floor, little mounds of black monkey shit on all sides, more and more people gathering in front of the cage to gesture and point at me.  I don’t have the courage to stab blindly at my throat and, so, I hold the screwdriver limp at my side.

After a while, a big monkey walks toward me on all four legs, approaching gingerly like a cat.  The monkey has a little face like a shrunken head – a black withered-looking nose and lips beneath large eyes,  an expression of affront and indignation.  The monkey’s fur is grizzled and rust-red.  Some other monkeys approach me, sniffing and, also, walking carefully like long-legged cats.  Some of the shrieking overhead has subsided.  More and more people fill the vault of the monkey-house.

I wonder if I can climb the barren tree, yank myself up among the blank branches, where the choirs of monkeys are squatting.  Is there a way out overhead?  I look up and see that the light is spilling through the cathedral windows, a bright yellow glare, and, then, my eyes must be playing tricks on me, because there is a certain improbable radiance among the monkeys.  Rainbows glitter in the fur of their throats, on their hairy jowls, around the hoods of hair encasing their small black faces.  As I move my head, the rainbows coalesce and divide, faint blue and red and violet colors glistening in their fur.  From far away, I can hear the police shouting commands at me, but I don’t hear their words – I am transfixed by the phantom colors moving among the monkeys.

The screwdriver clatters across the concrete.  The handle of the locked door behind me rattles.  I bow my head and stoop to recover the screwdriver.  The monkeys howl again and the macaws make a din far overhead and, in the distance, I can hear more sirens approaching. 
 

7.
The Regina solicitor who handled the contretemps with airport customs emails me a media link.  With the link, he writes: “Better look at this.”  I click on the link and, voila!, see my client behind bars among monkeys of some sort.  Astonishing!  A newscaster announces: “Stand-off in Saskatoon Zoo” .  But it doesn’t look like much of a stand-off to me – the guy is squatting amidst puddles of pee on a concrete floor while raccoon-sized apes cavort around him.  Now and then, he flails around with a big yellow-handled screwdriver.  Some of the apes warily approach him, snarling and with fangs bared, but most of them are too dignified to indulge in these antics – they sit wearily on the limbs of dead tree, surveying the interloper with ill-disguised disgust.  Sometimes, one of the apes on the tree will excrete a brown-black tear-drop-shaped clump of monkey shit in his direction.  The broadcaster says that the unidentified man threatened guards at a nearby art museum and, then, fled into the zoo, taking refuge in the monkey house where the stand-off occurred.  “The man’s motives for the assault are unknown.”

Time for a quick inventory of my own works and deeds with regard to this file– of course, the trail will lead through the solicitor in Regina back to me.  But I can’t imagine that I’ve done anything illegal, no extortion, not even a whiff of any threats made, after all, I sent him to Saskatoon to verify the identity of the pictures, not to chase people around with screwdrivers or trespass amidst the local primates.  I expect the phone calls will come within 24 hours, probably primarily from my client, but this is now pretty much out of my hands – nothing to do now but retain competent local counsel.  I type an email back to the lawyer in Regina expressing my bemusement and ask him for a criminal defense referral – you’ll need a forensic psychiatrist as well, I warn the Canadian solicitor, “this guy is crazy.”  “Understood,” he emails back.  He’s expressing worry about his fees.  I assure him that I have sufficient funds in trust to cover expenses and, even, to pay the retainer for the criminal defense.  This seems to cheer up the Canadian lawyer.  He sends me another link emailed under the subject: “Interesting!”

The link consists of some shots of the monkeys, apparently called “Lion Tamarins.”  Although it’s not easy to see on my laptop, the tamarins apparently glisten with rainbow-like iridescence.  A side-line of the whole miserable escapade is that several primate biologists, after seeing the newcasts about the so-called stand-off, have contacted the Saskatoon zoo with inquiries about the monkeys and there’s a print article accompanying the video.  Iridescence in mammals is exceedingly rare – the only other example, according to the text, being some sort of rat that lives in the deserts in Namibia.  Beyond any doubt, these Golden or Lion Tamarins have fur that emit faint rainbow colors and this is an extraordinary thing.  The question, then, raised is the source of these monkeys and how they ended up in the zoo in Canada.  The article explains that zoo records are not entirely clear, but it appears that the original family of Golden Lion Tamarins was donated to the park in the 1920's by the Pegasus Oil Company, a firm now merged with ESSO but, then, involved in petroleum exploration in the Amazon basin in South America.  It seems that one of the directors on the Board of Pegasus Oil was a prominent local brewer, the owner of a Saskatoon factory producing lager and whiskey.  It is surmised that the brewer, who founded both the art museum and the zoo, paid members of the expedition to export jungle creatures from the Amazon to Saskatoon.  In fact, records show that the zoo received a half-dozen macaws, six Tamarin monkeys, an ocelot, and a eleven-foot anaconda from Pegasus Oil around 1924.  The ocelot and anaconda, of course, are long dead, but the descendants of the Lion Tamarins and the macaws remain resident at the zoo.  It seems odd that no one noticed the Tamarin’s iridescent fur (or, if they noticed, paid no heed), but, then, winters in Saskatoon are long and dark and, for much of the year, the rainbow-monkeys were confined within the gloomy primate house, lurking, it seems, in shadow.

There is no doubt that the Saskatoon primates are Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus chrysomelas),  a well-known species of New World monkey.  There are four separate species of Leontopithecus and, although zoologists are awaiting DNA confirmation, it appears that the primates in the Saskatoon Zoo are a new, and hitherto undescribed, subspecies, now, most probably, extinct in the wild (habitat depletion).  The article concludes: “Several animal biologists have called for the species presently confined in zoos world-wide to be inventoried in the hope of discovering new creatures not hitherto known to science.”

What do you think?  Pretty amazing, no?   


8.
Gury was shocked by the woman covered in fur.  “She is like a wooly lamb,” he told his uncle.  Sorahb shrugged.  “Her name is Mary Magdalene,” Sorahb said.  “She was bare-naked, but her hair grew to  cover her body.”  A few people were whispering in the next gallery where some paintings had been recently removed from the walls.  Sorahb heard gossip about the bare spots on the walls that he did not think very edifying.  The boy tugged at his hand and they walked to a box surmounted by a glass case in which there was a man’s head made from silver, the effigy wearing a brass crown.  “There is a piece of the saint’s skull inside the head,” Sorahb said.  The boy opened his eyes very wide as if trying to x-ray the beaten silver face.  The reliquary’s eyes were indifferent, carved from carnelian agate.  Gury kept casting his glance over his shoulder to look behind him at the slender naked lady with a smirk on her face, her lily-like fingers dandling a translucent veil that fell over her bare shoulders.  “She must be Mary before her hair grew,” Gury said.  “Not at all,” Sorahb Singh said, tugging a little at his beard, and, then, pointing to the big picture hanging on the tomato-colored wall, near the entrance to the gallery from which the pictures had been taken.  Sorahb thought it more beneficial that his nephew focus his attention on that painting.

They stood in front of the panel.  The bright yellow city floating in the sky seemed to irradiate them with its floral glow.  Sorahb pointed out the red-faced monkeys diving and, then, breaching the grey-green waves.  “Those are soldier monkeys from the army of Hanuman, the king of the apes,” Sorahb said.  He gestured at the causeway between the point of land and an island where bears were sitting on the green grass in a dark and solemn conclave.  A cub rolled on his back and wiggled all four paws in the air.  The bear army was marching across the causeway to the honey-colored city on the promontory – the way was crowded and a couple of the animals had fallen into the water.  Several bears extended their paws down to retrieve the fallen animals from the sea.  “You will observe,” Sorahb Singh said, “that the bears avoid the water.  That is their nature.”  Gury asked him why the city was floating in the sky.  “It is the vimana – the celestial chariot – that carries Ram and Sita with Lakshmana to Ayodha.”  He paused.  The boy said that the golden tower with arched windows inlaid with pearl and its delicate balconies did not look anything like a chariot.  “It has no wheels,” Gury said.  “It needs no wheels,” Sorahb told the boy.  “It will carry Lord Ram, the 20th avatar of Vishnu, to Ayodha, the invincible city.”  The boy turned his head to look at the four corners of the painting.  Some storks with long legs were flying through the stormy skies.  “Why are there armies of monkeys and bears?” Gury asked.  Sorahb Singh wasn’t sure about that detail.  “It’s an old story, from the Ramayana,” he said.  “It’s part of scripture.”

Gury looked skeptical.

“Are they gods?” he asked.  Sorahb Singh shook his head but answered “yes.”  “They are like gods,” he told the boy, “but all subject to the noose of death.”

The little boy bit his lower lip.  He was anxious to see the famous rainbow-monkeys in the zoo nearby.  But his uncle was a cultured man and insisted that they first look at the art-works in the museum.

There was some kind of scandal about the paintings missing from the next gallery.  Sorahb Singh hurried the boy through that exhibition space.  They stopped at a large abstract painting at the end of the gallery.  The canvas was bright with swirls of paint that made a mist of color before their eyes.

“Do you think it is beautiful?” Sorahb asked the child.

“I don’t know,” Gury replied.

“We will go to see the elephants and the other animals now,” Sorahb said.  Gury did a little dance of joy.

9.
After Esther left, I lost a few months to booze and drugs.  I went into Rehab and, then, I recovered enough to apply at the Getty and was hired.  I supervised some conservation work on a half-dozen big paintings by Richard Diebenkorn.  In addition, I did some editorial work on a catalogue raissone indexing the ouevre of Wayne Thiebaud.  Work on the catalogue raissone was a little bit morbid – a list of this kind becomes most relevant after the artist has died and, so, every morning, I checked the news in the arts community to determine whether Thiebaud, who is very elderly, was still alive.  Those of us who worked on the catalogue, I’m sorry to say, had placed wagers on the year and month when the painter would, once and for all, become his admirers.  (As I write these words, he is living yet.)

California is relaxed and luminous.  I didn’t really encounter much disapprobation about my former relationship with Monica.  Of course, I supposed that everyone knew about the affair and was whispering  maliciously behind my back, but that was narcissism, pure self-regard – we always give ourselves too much of a leading role in the hearts and minds of others.  In fact, no one seemed much to care about my background so long as I did my job and didn’t offend anyone.  I let the Upper East Side townhome go.  Some of the furnishings were auctioned, but I had the Schiele canvas shipped cross-country and installed the emaciated naked girl with her pink nipples and impassive Barbie Doll face in the great room of the Briarwood  place.  I also retrieved my Great-Grandfather’s exploration journals and planned to restore them  – the stained notebooks had brittle pages and the embattled handwriting was fast fading.   Someone said that I should option the notebooks for a feature film and I considered hiring an agent for that purpose. 

At the Getty, a group of us sometimes ate lunch together at the terrace café.  One day, I mentioned the painting on the wood panel that I had seen in Saskatoon.  When I mentioned that the palette included Chromium Green Oxide and Cobalt blue, Saachi, an intern on loan from London’s Courtauld Institute, said that she had seen something similar.  “It’s likely from a workshop in Mandi, up in Himalcha Pradesh,” Saachi remarked.  “Where is that?” someone asked.  “Extreme northwest India in the mountains, near Lahore, Kashmir, Pakistan, places like that,” she replied.

Saachi said that the Rajah of Pradesh was an enlightened man and that he had sent craftsmen to London,  Copenhagen, and Rome to study European painting.  When the artists returned, the Rajah commissioned a series of paintings depicting scenes from the Ramayana – the pictures were displayed in the  ruler’s summer palace in the mountains.  “The pictures were on wood-panels. I have seen several.  They were thought to be the marvel of the age,” Saachi said.  She was a graceful girl with a beautiful accent, part British and part Hindi.

Later, I emailed a message to my friend at the Brooklyn Museum telling him about the Rajah of Mandi.  He wrote back and said that my discovery was very interesting.  “Keep the pictures coming,” my friend’s email said.  “Those photographs turned out to be lucrative for me.”

“What?  You should cut me into the profits,” I emailed back to him.

“We’ll chat about that when I see you next,” my friend responded. 

I had business in Santa Barbara.  The autumn day was windy and gusts almost blew my car off the road.  Returning over Sepulveda Pass on the 405, I glimpsed some trash burning in a dry ravine next to the freeway.  The cars and trucks were roaring by the fire and didn’t pay much attention.  If the Summer has been dry, parts of California burn in the Santa Ana wind.

At home, I called Saachi to see if she wanted to meet me for supper.  She told me that she was busy.  We had become good friends and I had hopes about the relationship developing into something more.  A little before sunset, I heard sirens and stepped out into the driveway looping up through my porte cochere.  The air was hot with blowing smoke and ash.  Looking down the hill, I saw a red wall of fire coalescing and, then, dissolving again in the brush.  A loudspeaker on a cop car was blaring commands.  The fire toppled over a nearby retaining wall and, then, sprinted toward my neighbor’s house.  I saw the surface of his pool suddenly livid with glowing embers, an armada of them floating on the water.

Some people ran up the lane outside the gates to my property.  Red lights flashed there and thick, twisting coils of smoke spilled out of the blaze, blown sideways by the hot wind.  A deep boom, like a bass drum, echoed over the  fiery canyons – there were more thuds at intervals: exploding propane tanks, I supposed.

My phone rang.  There was a text message: YOU MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY.   I went  toward the house.  The fire was so close and violent that it seemed dangerous to turn my back on it.  I thought that I should dart into the home, rip the Schiele nude off wall, and flee in my Landrover SUV.  Then, I heard whining and saw a black dog, probably a labrador retriever, stumbling footsore through the haze of smoke.  The dog’s ears were chapped by the fire and its red tongue drooped from its jaws.  The animal  trotted toward me, tail tentatively wagging.  The wind flared and the air was alive with scalding cinders.

The dog’s approach was instinctive.  I was a human being and, therefore, a friend.  As the fire advanced, it shot upward, a wave of flame collapsing over its own fiery front and spraying embers in all directions.  There wasn’t time to save both the painting and the dog.  I opened the back door to my SUV.  The dog was hobbled and couldn’t manage to climb into the vehicle and, so, I had to stand behind the labrador and shove the whimpering animal upward into my backseat.

I escaped with the dog in the nick of time.  The smoke rising overhead made black-ash minarets in the sky. The painting of the scrawny girl burned with the house.  It didn’t matter.  The canvas was well-insured.

10.
Fortunately, my great-grandfather’s exploration  diaries were at the Getty, locked in an acid-free lignin-free Hollinger archive box.  The pages were brittle and the ink faded, even though the old paper was cotton-based and relatively resilient.  Each night, after work, I digitally scanned a few pages from the notebooks.  I stored the file in a thumb-drive and the “Cloud” – a swarm of data hovering overhead like a helium balloon or the city in the sky.  When I thought back to “show and tell” at school when I was eleven, I shuddered to think of the boys and girls handling those pages, just after lunch, with their acidic  dirty paws, feckless teachers standing by, also with hands oily with acid.  Beautiful things are always threatened by fire-storm of this world.  I know that now.

11.
We had two skiffs, then, when they took Lautaro.  I was behind the first bateau, only a hundred yards upstream at first, but the channels were intricate and mined with deadheads and some of us on the second skiff were very sick at that time.  By mid-day, we had fallen about a half-mile behind the lead vessel, although we caught up when pausing for lunch on an undercut, muddy bank that angled out into the murky river.  As I sat on the bank eating moldy biscuits, a centipede the color of ox-blood emerged from within a hollow log.  The centipede moved blindly and seemed to be intolerably long, segment after segment slowly emerging into the sunlight. The antennae on the creature’s head were silvery and sampled the air with gestures that seemed intelligent to me.  I called Hans, the naturalist, and he squatted by the hollow log, probing at the centipede with a reed that he plucked from the swampy edge of the river.  Lautaro had made a small smoky fire and was cooking filets of some small fish that he had netted the previous afternoon.  The fish  meat was spiny with small needle-like bones and I couldn’t eat it without choking.

After our wretched repast, we set out again, Lautaro and the others on the first skiff and our pirogue following.   The lead vessel moved more efficiently and so was out of sight around the bends of the river – here the stream seemed coiled like a spring.  After a couple hours, we came to a bar of black sand oozing  flares of iridescent oil.  The skiff was beached there and its party squatted on the sand, some of them wailing.  Lautaro was gone, taken by aboriginals.  Some tribesmen had come from the brush down to the sand bar and beckoned as if they wanted to parley.  Aarao, the Brazilian, said that the men were wearing their best finery, mother of pearl gorgets on their red and white painted breasts and high pointed hats plumed with brilliant feathers, javelina tusks thrust through their lower lips.  Aarao said that when these fellows dressed in this elaborate way they intended to kill you and that they should keep their distance.  But William, who was the captain of the skiff, overruled him and they cautiously approached the party of savages standing along the edge of the  river.  Perhaps, William said, we can barter for food.  As the boat embedded its prow in the sand and mud,  one of the aboriginals lunged forward with a sort of hooked lance, caught Lautaro by the throat, and pulled him off the boat.  As the war party began to drag Lautaro away, thrashing on the barbed lance, William laid about him with his machete and cut off the fingers of one of the men.  He pointed at the black sand  reef where I saw the severed fingers lying like maggots in the mud.  The brush around the little beach was silent and empty.

Three days later, a dart came out of the shadows and wounded Carlos in the eye.  Then, we heard the thudding sound of a drum being beaten.  Someone asked why they had waited for three days to attack us.  Aarao, the Brazilian said that the Indians had flayed Lautaro alive and stretched his skin over a frame to make a big drum.  It had taken three days for the human hide to dry enough to be used as a drum’s membrane.  Now the Indians were taunting us by pounding on a drum that was made from our comrade.

I wrote some of this down after nightfall with the sound of the drum booming in the darkness.  I am quite sure no one will survive this expedition and that my notebooks will be lost.  We should never have come to this place.  The drum sounds again like a faint explosion in the depths of the jungle.