Schopher's eyes were the color of desperation, a gray metallic sheen of planned obsolescence that matched the ruined parody of a sky. It was the first sight to greet me on the day of my birth, when he found me on the fire escape of his loft.
"Do you know me?" He asked pensively after an eternity of silence (or was it a mere ten seconds). His hands trembled in the cool breeze of night town. Below us a congregation of Japanese tourists snapped photos of the gaijin and the naked girl beside him.
"Should I?"
Of course I knew him. But I couldn't bear to let him know it. His liver spotted hands guided me back into the loft. After he shut the sliding glass door, he handed me a white terry cloth robe that had lain discarded across a metal folding chair..
"You are not ashamed?"
I put on the robe. It was damp and smelled of mildew.
"Why would I be?" I said. That made him laugh.
"You haven't changed; you still answer all my questions with questions."
I pulled him into an embrace, but he pushed me away. He stood at the threshold of the studio with his back to me.
"But you have Alex, you have gotten old." I said, instantly regretting my words.
"I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled." He said, laughing mirthlessly.
"At the end of the corridor is the bedroom, I will take the couch. We can finish our conversation tomorrow." The strangeness of his request, the formality with which he was handling me, as if I were simply an old acquaintance that was passing through town, put me off. I said something about having slept long enough but he let it pass, telling me I might do as wish. Though it was the last thing I felt like doing, I went into the bedroom, lying in the dark listening to the dopplering sirens, and the sound of his labored breathing in the next room, until sleep overtook me.
When he awoke the next morning he found me in his office, just outside of the studio, a pile of sims on the desk top before me; the look, as he later told me, of a born voy-r junkie collapsing my typically animated expression into one of somnolent vacuity. He pulled the circlet of scarred plastic from my temples, brushing his hand through my hair.
"So now you know."
I nodded without knowing why, pretending that I knew what he was talking about.
He made a comment about my dress; a black silk number I had unearthed during my initial investigation of the cube. It was there, perfectly preserved as were most of my old clothes. He poured me a coffee, still in his bathrobe, motioning for me to take a seat.
"You've become sentimental," I said.
He scratched at his graying beard. I had told him often enough how I despised him in a beard.
"Not sentimental, just forgetful."
He gestured toward the tall lacquered cabinets, temperature controlled to protect their contents from inevitable degeneration. Thousands upon thousands of small metal cartridges.
"The tech was undeveloped when you left. I only have a few ..." He paused as if he forgot what he was going to say. Perhaps he saw my expression change when he said that I had left.
"Most of them are the only surviving remnants of my work," he said finally.
I nodded absently.
"I found the one we made in Madrid, before what ever it was happened."
I paused and then added, "You loved me then."
I said it in a contemptuous whisper hoping he would take the bait.
"And I love you now."
"So I am not like the rest of them? Your artworks?"
"You don't know what you're talking about."
I grabbed him by the arm and led him into the studio proper. The flesh on his arm was withered and useless and offered me only token resistance. The largest area of the loft was taken up by huge tanks, somewhat similar to those you would find in an aquarium, filled with his 'sculptures.' As we entered I felt their gaze fall upon us accusingly. They rose and stretched themselves lazily like housecats. Some were as still as statues, unblinkingly fixed toward the noon day sun.
"What are they."
He refused to look at them, pulling me off into the corner of the room, out of their earshot, or so it seemed to me at the time.
"They are my tragedy. If I had been a painter or a poet I would have left something behind. I am eighty three years old, Beth. And I have wasted my life."
He didn't have to finish. I knew then why he ignored them, why they followed his progress from cage to cage as a condemned prisoner follows the executioner. He was an artist who made people, and people as any small child could tell you, die.
Saying that he made people was a bit of an exaggeration. Rather, It would be more proper to say that he created automata; genetically engineered structures that could resemble living beings (they all underwent the chemical processes associated with living things, but few of them could be called by any extended definition of the word alive) lacking in most instances independence of thought and action. They ranged from creatures which were nothing more than living statues, to individuals of rare and exotic ability. For example, he had made for the Metropolitan opera, replicas of 18th century castrati singers, which could, like their historical brethren, sing with the range of a soprano, retaining in adulthood the unique sonorities of the boy child. For the avant garde Theatre Mecanique, he had created dancers whose gymnastic abilities went well beyond the limitations of human performers. That had been in the early days, (though well after the time of our marriage) before his real innovations. They were living exhibits of exquisite, unearthly beauty, mutations the likes of which natural selection would never have produced. He had been universally hailed as a pioneer, but within he felt as empty as the charactures he molded. Year after year, he received commissions for his work and invitations to lecture both from the scientific and art communities. Now even these momentary diversions from his melancholia had dwindled as the world celebrated his imitators. It was by his own admission, a result of his own hubris. He had had followed a certain eccentric line of thought when it came to selecting subjects. Modernists ideas concerning representational art dominated his output at the expense of his checkbook. Why recreate what has already existed in nature when you could create something that has never existed before? This extraordinary artistic conceit (to quote one of his many critics) had eventially alienated him from all but his most staunch and fanatical supporters. Most of the commissions he received requested historical portraits (which he would, in accordance with his rather devilish sense of humor, render in the most bizarre manner possible) of deceased loved ones.
Since he rejected, with few exceptions such offers, his would be benefactors went to other, less scrupulous men who would never let artistic integrity interfere in matters of commerce. In retrospect, he regretted being so hasty. Yet for him, there was no art in these faithful reconstructions. Usually, all it required was a replication of existing genetic material demanding no real input from the artist. It was like comparing a "Ken" doll to Michelangelo's David. The few historical subjects that he had undertaken in earnest had been in circumstances in which there were no cell samples of the original available. This at least presented a challenge. Now the situation was even more distressing as the art form, of which there were only a handful of practitioners in the world, was succumbing to the pressure of mass production.
I discovered most of this during my perusal of his sims, but none of it threw any light on his peculiar reticence toward me, or the reason for my rebirth.
"Why am I here Alex? What am I supposed to be? Am I to be put in one of your glass cages?"
His brow furrowed.
"You are not like them! You are a human being in every way in which it possible to be, and a great deal better in several crucial areas."
I felt an overwhelming despair creep over me. "How did I die?" I asked him simply.
He averted his gaze, directing his eyes toward the wall. "There is no reason for you to worry about it."
He launched into a highly technical discussion of cellular regeneration and the aging process but I couldn't understand what he was saying and I was becoming enraged by his detachment.
"How can you treat me this way? I'm not one of your students anymore, fawning over your every word?" I broke down and started crying hysterically. "I love you and I thought you loved me. Why go through all the trouble of bringing me back?"
"I love you, but it is too late for us," he said, but it just made me angrier. I pulled on his overcoat and started toward the door. He made no attempt to stop me.
I wandered the New York streets for several hours, unaware of course, that New York as I had known it no longer existed. The streets were more crowded than I had ever seen them before and I felt strange and out of place in the city in which I had lived most of my life. My antiquated clothing raised nary an eyebrow as, it seems everything from Victorian top hats to Roman togas were back in fashion. The 'scrapers of my youth had been replaced by huge pyramids of glass; their peaks obscured by evil clouds of smog. It was then that I silently began to calculate the amount of time that had passed since my marriage to Alexander something on the order of 50 years ago. I don't know how long or how far I walked before finding my way into the small arcade, a sort of 21st century version of the opium dens that had existed in the very same area of Chinatown, replaced by its post modern technological equivalent. I had Alex's cash cards but I didn't use them and the attendant at the door did not give me any trouble. I watched them on their velvet couches reclining in the embrace of their artificial dreams, pondering my own essential fakeness. Was I that woman that I believed myself to be, or the ephemeral remnant of a dying old man's imagination? It was then that I felt Alexander's eyes on me. Not the Old man I had fled earlier that afternoon, but the man that I had married, and I knew then, as his arms enfolded my own what the old man had been planning all along.
It was a fashionable Soho gallery, furnished in the anachronistic manner that seemed to be the only salient characteristic of this new world, my adopted world. One could have almost mistaken it for a museum, though the artworks which casually dotted the rooms and hallways were too few and incongruous to give the impression of unity. Ancient Greek and Chinese pottery engaged in exotic dialogue with medieval Russian icons, renaissance sculpture, Impressionist and Post Impressionist masterpieces as well as Kandinsky abstractions and Warhol soup cans. The unifying factor, which I had of course been unaware of, was that they were all frauds; the work of several skilled forgers whose works were considered more valuable than the originals on which they were based.
Most of these works were ignored by the hundred or so faces of the New York Glitterati, clotted together in groups of mutually exclusive twos and threes, oblivious to the presence of their orbiting neighbors; the cutting edge trendsetters of the last three decades, come to pay belated homage to the old master, Alexander Schopher, whose passing was noted the previous week. This retrospective of his work had enjoyed an almost unprecedented run and only a few of his newer works remained unsold, among them his last, a self portrait. My knowledge of the art world being virtually non existent, I was thankful that while I had been named the executrix of his estate, the majority of the actual duties were being carried out by my new paramour. The day after Alexander's 'death,' in accordance with his wishes, the remaining pieces of his collection had been shipped to the gallery and the loft put up for sale. The rest, including the collection of sims that he had preserved with such care, were incorporated into his final piece.
My new friend helped me make my way through the crowd, toward the centerpiece of the exhibit, but we were unfortunately intercepted by the gallery owner, a corpulent man in his mid fifties with watery bloodshot eyes.
"Beth I'm so glad you could make it." He pressed his cheek to mine.
"It seems to be going very well."
"Going well, that's the understatement of the year. I wanted to give you the good news in person. Every piece has been sold." He named some number that meant absolutely nothing to me before he caught the eye of some potential client, and excused himself.
"Well that was a close one."
"I can't wait until this whole thing is over."
Alex cradled me protectively under his arm and cleared away a path through the crowd toward the self-portrait.
The exhibit was in stark contrast to Alexander's previous efforts, consisting of a replica of his studio. As they approached, the artist himself rose from his leather chair padding over to the glass barrier that separated the exhibit from the outside world. He regarded the two of us: his young wife and his younger counterpart, with a warmth that had been markedly absent from the man I had met less than a week ago. I mouthed the words "how are you?" through the sound proof glass but he didn't answer. The younger Alex, who seemed uncomfortable in the sight of his 'father,' said nothing.
A thin, severe looking man, apparently a caretaker of some sort, obviously unaware of our connection to the exhibit, stepped between us and the old man. "I am sorry, but we do not allow any interaction with the exhibits."
Alex opened his mouth in protest, but I gestured for him to be quiet. I raised my hand in farewell and he pressed his hand to the glass, an unreadable expression crossing his face, before he returned to his seat and we began to work our way to the exit. It was the last time I saw him.
I have had many years to ponder these events, and though at the time I believed the old man to have gone senile, I have since changed my opinion. I no longer think of reality in terms of absolutes. I believe it is possible to manipulate it in subtle and amazing ways. Alexander Schopher realized that anything he created was essentially fraudulent. A work of art, however cunningly contrived, is still unreal. When he created me he was aware of the distance between us that could never be bridged; that of creature to creator.
In order to give us life he had to invert the equation. By becoming one of his own artworks he became unreal, and bestowed his former reality on us. This was his first gift to us. The second was something he shared with all of his last creations. It took me many years to realize it, years in which I had waited for old age to overtake me, though it seems I have waited in vain.
Bio:I am at work on a second novel (while revising the first) Any comments or criticisms would be appreciated.
E-mail: Pennaddict@aol.com
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