Word Made Flesh

22

Wylie climbs out of the red cab, hands money through the front window, ridiculously overtipping the driver. And this after the initial bribe that convinced the fleet-boy to ignore the company regs and take her into Bangkok Park. But he went all the way to the edge of the Vacuum, and for a corporate weasel that’s as close to bravery as you’re going to get.

Heronvolk Road is deserted, as usual, but tonight the street has somehow managed to outdo itself and evoke an even more desolate atmosphere than is the norm. It’s as if the Vacuum in general and Heronvolk in particular were a setting from one of the pirated comic books that Kroger markets, one of those ultra noir bandes dessinées in which doomed schlemiels wander through urban wastelands attempting to impose concepts of logic and ethicality in a hostile place where those ideas no longer have any meaning. And maybe never did.

It’s not just the decay, the adamantly worn-out and brokendown milieu that permeates every surface here. Not just the tangible evidence of violence and poverty and isolation, the fire-destroyed buildings or the gutters filled with putrefaction. It’s the ethereal sense of omnipresent absurdity, a feeling that there is something in the air itself, some single, guiding impulse that makes the organic want to recede and die, something chronically seeping into one’s pores that makes every living organism genetically incapable of hope. This is an environment that radiates its dwellers with the purest nihilism, mutates its inhabitants until they are infertile in the crucial area of faith, barren of any trace, of any type, of belief. The Vacuum is where one comes not to dread annihilation but rather to embrace it like a redeeming lover. And this kind of world will always make people despise themselves just as much as, if not more than, the landscape that perpetually defiles them.

Wylie Brown knows, as she approaches her place of recent employment, that she might always hate herself just a little for coming to work here, for being August Kroger’s flunky. For succumbing to the cheap and relentless addiction to the text. The unfortunate are born screwed in this kind of cesspool, but Wylie willed herself into a toxic resident. Made a conscious choice to move here. So how do you forgive a betrayal that turns you into the most cynical monster of all, the breed that can always successfully lie to itself and then take pleasure in the deception?

She stands across the street from the Bardo and looks up at the building, trying to get a fix on how it stays upright, how it prevents itself from cascading earthward into a pile of broken masonry, what ugly architectural magic keeps the mill ensconced on the block while looking every second as if it were about to dissolve into fallen chaos.

As she studies the structure for a clue to its logic, she becomes aware of someone approaching from the opposite end of Heronvolk, a child or a dwarf hobbling slowly forward with a limp, swinging a cane or walking stick as if parting a crowd.

At first, the figure gives no indication that it sees her. Then it begins to move toward Wylie, speed and cadence never changing. And halfway across the street, Wylie realizes it’s Kroger’s foreperson, the manager of the labor force, the woman August refers to only as the hag, but whose name is actually Mrs. Bloch.

Mrs. Bloch comes to a stop directly in front of Wylie, leans forward until their faces are uncomfortably close, the patties of tough skin sealing in Mrs. B’s eyes almost grazing Wylie’s cheek. They have never spoken before, though Wylie has seen the old woman several times in the corridors. And there was one awkward occasion when they shared the freight elevator, rode up to the penthouse together, both silent through the trip, Wylie pretending to study the cartoon forgeries on the cage walls, Mrs. Bloch imitating the sighted and staring at Wylie the whole time. When they reached Kroger’s lair, Wylie got off and Mrs. B rode back down to the sweatshop without explanation.

Now Mrs. Bloch comes up on the sidewalk, stands next to Wylie and asks, “Ahr du der vitnis?”

“I’m the librarian,” Wylie says.

Mrs. B’s head pivots up and down slowly on the neck, mechanically, as if she can see through her tumors and was appraising Wylie’s face for evidence of a lie.

“Teik der ahrm,” the hag commands, sounding like an emphysematous prison guard from the Balkans.

Wylie chokes off an impulse to resist and cups the woman’s elbow with her hand. And though the request would seem to indicate that Mrs. B wanted assistance crossing the empty street, it is the old woman who takes the lead, pulling Wylie along.

She steers them toward the service alley to the right of the factory’s main entrance, and when they swing around the corner and come to a stop in the mouth of the alleyway, Wylie finds it filled with the entire crew of child artists. There must be a dozen or more of them, ranging in age from maybe five years up through the late teens. They’ve erected a makeshift staging against the side wall of the Bardo, a monstrosity of fruit crates and fence posts, garbage tins and stacking pallets and broken street signs. The kids have fashioned the staging into platforms of varying heights, all of it connected with baling wire to the precarious fire escape.

There are children perched at every level, each equipped with a tin can of paint and some form of brush. They’re collaborating on a mural of some sort, an enormous tableau, a picture that when finished will cover the entire side of the building, transforming the sagging red brick into a hyperreal scene that appears to be constantly dripping. The essence of the mural is already roughed out in white and blue chalk lines and Kroger’s little slaves have begun filling in the outline with a variety of colors.

Mrs. Bloch turns her head from the building to Wylie.

“Du ahr laikink?” the voice seeming to edge close to threatening.

“Shouldn’t they be sleeping?” Wylie says.

Without moving the rest of her squat little body, the crone’s left arm comes up and a finger points out accusingly toward the mural in progress.

“Du laik der piktr?” she asks.

Wylie just nods and turns away from the pancake tumors to study the collaboration. And is horrified as it all comes together for her.

“Eet ist der kuvr,” Mrs. B says.

“The cover?” Wylie repeats.

“Uf der ferst issu.”

“Issue?” as she watches a child of perhaps eight years, kneeling on the top stair of a waggling extension ladder, filling in the pupils of the painting’s central figure. “I don’t understand.”

“Uf der neu buk,” Mrs. Bloch tries to explain. “Der neu komik. Der ferst issu. Eet vill bie vert der muni sem dei. Vot ist der verd?” straining, seemingly in pain with the rigors of pronunciation, “Col-lect-ors i-tem?”

Though Wylie has no direct involvement in the workings of Kroger’s publishing business, she hasn’t heard of any new projects being launched.

“There’s a new title?” she asks.

Mrs. Bloch nods.

“Another Menlo knockoff?”

“Dis ist aen urij’nul.”

Wylie is stunned.

“Mr. Kroger commissioned an original?”

Mrs. Bloch shakes her head no furiously. Her voice loudens up and she shouts, “Krueger haez nicht tu du vit dis!” Then she immediately gains back some control, lowers her voice and adds, “Aend Krueger ees naht hiz neim.”

The children all stop painting for a second and look down to the alley until Mrs. B makes a hand gesture and they return to work.

“Der piktr bilenks tu der kinder. Der chilten.”

Wylie finds this unlikely at best.

“The children did this? On their own?”

“Eet ees beisd an der ould mithus. Bet dei hev meid eet deir oun.”

Wylie stares at Mrs. Bloch, then turns and stares at the children working together perfectly like bees, fully synchronized, each concentrated on his or her own small task but conscious of and tied into all the work proceeding around them. She takes a step backward and tries to get a new angle on the mural. The wall is illuminated by the moon and the dim glow of one yellow street-lamp.

The painting is given a strange aura not only by the lighting but also by the children moving here and there in front of it, always some children blocking some section of the picture with their bodies. It’s a bit like trying to watch a movie with a swarm of insects hopping along the screen. Adding to the discomfort is the fact that half of the mural is done up in vibrant paint and half of it is still living in the ghost-lines of the chalk marks. As if part of the scene is forever fading even as the rest is being born.

But none of this obscures the subject matter. The mural is a depiction of a heinous act of barbarism, an inventive if sickening display of atrocity. One end of the brick wall sports a machine of some sort. It’s a worrisome apparatus, big and bulky and outfitted with engines and tubing and chrome valves. The artists have managed to present the machine as if it were in motion. It’s spewing gusts of steam and one gets the impression that it’s emitting a loud and grinding noise. But the focal point of the machine is the aperture at its front end, the mouth of the device. This portal is enormous, stretching out as wide as the body of the entire monstrosity. And the interior has been intricately rendered with the precision of an old-world draftsman, showing two huge rollers, two spinning drums fitted on axles and studded with cutting blades and hooks. The machine resembles a tree shredder, but a tree shredder as envisioned in the nightmares of a sadistic and maybe insane engineer.

Spreading out from either side of the shredding machine and eventually forming a large circle that runs the length of the entire wall, the children have drawn a net of wire fencing, a combination of barbed cattle wire and the cyclone webbing used around construction sites. And massed within the fencing the children have placed themselves. There are thirteen self-portraits, each done in a different style and yet all of them sharing the same posture — cowering in a crouch on the ground, squatting in place with arms raised in terror and attempting, futilely, to ward off an approaching danger.

But the showpiece of the entire mural, the eye magnet, the point of the piece, is not the shredding machine and not the fencing and not even the children’s self-portraits. The thing that demands the witness’s attention is the man shown standing on top of the shredder, drawn and painted in larger-than-life scale, made into a superfigure. übermensch. He must be the owner and operator of the awful machine. Perhaps the designer and manufacturer.

Not quite cartoonish and yet not completely realistic, the image is drawn out of proportion to the imprisoned and cowering children. The man’s head is made huge beneath a military-like cap. His body is infinitely muscled beneath a generic but sharply pressed uniform. And his face is that of August Kroger. The children couldn’t have created a more perfect likeness if they’d used a camera.

But it is Kroger as icon. Kroger as myth figure, elevated to a status where he is immune to death and the forgetting of history. It is Kroger depicted in the same manner that Wylie has seen Stalin and Mao and certain fanatical religious leaders depicted, as a kind of semimortal god, part man and part force of nature. Someone who could alter the course of the world a degree or two.

Wylie is looking at a mural in which these prodigies have imagined their own execution by industrial evisceration at the hands of their slaver and boss. And she wants to pull one of them down from their perch and ask why she has done this. Because there is something both more and less than metaphorical about this work of art. Even in its most expressionistic excess, there is something paradoxically mimetic at the heart of this painting. As if the children were working on a billboard rather than a brick canvas, something with a crude and immediate purpose. An advertisement rather than an interpretation of their deepest communal fears and hatreds.

And all at once Wylie is filled with a resentment that’s building fast toward a simple anger.

“You told them to paint this, didn’t you?” she says to Mrs. Bloch.

“Eet ist deir—”

“Bullshit,” Wylie says. “You told them to paint this thing. You’re a goddamn pornographer.”

“Der laibrerien ist anoit?”—a smile breaking underneath the tumors.

“You kept them up all night to make this thing.”

Mrs. B nods, squares back her shoulders and says, “Der bosse vill bei houm sun—”

“I don’t work for Kroger anymore.”

“Hiz neim ees naht Krueger,” yelling again, and again the yell halting the work on the painting. “Hiz neim ees Meyrink. Der Zensor uf Maisel.”

Then the voice drops and she adds, “Mai houmlaent.”

Wylie looks from Mrs. Bloch up to the mural and then, helplessly, to the artists frozen in place on their roosts. She suddenly realizes that she has no idea what’s going on here but that, once again, she’s in over her head and the thing to do is retreat.

For some reason she touches Mrs. Bloch on the shoulder and says, “I have to get my things.”

But Mrs. B reaches up and grabs the hand, twists it backward into a position that doesn’t cause any pain but warns of a terrible consequence if Wylie moves at all.

“Du ahr leavink der Bahrdu?”

Wylie nods for a moment before answering, “Yes.”

Mrs. B releases the hand and says, “Den pik vun.”

Wylie hesitates and Mrs. B repeats, more loudly, “Pik vun.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Uf der kinder. Pik vun uf der chilten. Tu teik vit du.”

“I can’t—”

“Teik vun. Dei vill giv du der stury. Uf Meyrink der Zensor.”

“I’m sorry but—”

Mrs. Bloch turns away from Wylie and takes a step toward the mural.

“Jiang,” she calls and a small Asian boy immediately puts down his paint can and brush and begins to climb down the staging, careful not to look at his fellow artists.

The old woman turns back toward Wylie and says, “Gou paek der tinks. Jiang vill bie veatink.”

As if a spell has been cast, Wylie takes a final look at the mural and then runs as fast as she can for the entrance to the Bardo, rushing inside and, unable to wait for the freight elevator, taking the fire stairs up to her room. Where she finds the creature Raban stretched out on her bed reading a comic book that he doesn’t understand.

And back outside, Mrs. B, already impatient, squats in place and puts her arms around the little boy, brings her mouth to his ear and begins to whisper her final instructions, maybe a bit too fast, regarding the redemptive methodology of storytelling.