Mixed Media
By Béla Selendy
Copyright 2012 Béla Selendy
Smashwords Edition
Cover design by Ancha Ahlbertz
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Chapter 1
Bagberd strolled with a light whistle on his lips and a heavy dog on his leash. The evening breeze carried a pleasant chill, a light foretaste of winter spiced with hazy droplets of what may or may not turn out to be an oncoming drizzle.
"Come on, Edgar," he called. Edgar continued vacuuming the strewn autumn leaves and microscopic specks of fragrant residue that lined the gutter, wagging his tail ecstatically as each morsel imparted new and intriguing twists and turns to a plot line that had clearly been developing with increasing tension and mystery ever since they left the house a few hundred feet back.
"Edgar!" Bagberd yanked hard on the leash, budging Edgar not an inch, but provoking him to lift his head and ears inquiringly, then trudge grudgingly forward.
Bagberd strolled on, fingers wrapped lazily around the leash, enjoying the evening air. He moved with a hint of haste as he knew a nicely poured glass of rather good whiskey squatted on the living room coffee table awaiting his return, and wanted that return to occur before anything untoward happened to it, such as precipitous evaporation. He strongly suspected that a glass of whiskey, if left ignored and unattended, would begin to evaporate at an escalating rate, most likely out of spite.
They reached the edge of the woods, now a tangle of blackened trunks and cavernous shadows, and plunged in. Bagberd enjoyed the slight feeling of loss, the temporary distancing of self from routine, the activation of latent senses that an unlit tramp in a dark wood could conjure.
Edgar evidently enjoyed it too. His entire body vibrated with the piston-like action of his ungainly tail as he forged and foraged.
"Come on, Edgar. Anywhere," urged Bagberd.
Edgar ignored him. He whuffed and snuffled and continued his rounds. A painstaking effort involving the weighing of numerous deeply mysterious but no less vital parameters was required to find the perfect spot on which to relieve himself, and he was not to be hurried.
"Edgar!"
Edgar strained at the leash up a slight incline. Here, perhaps, a new note of history's grand symphony could be written – here, he could be immortalized. He circled unhurriedly, made to raise a hind leg, then froze in mid-lift, every muscle vibrating slightly like a half-plucked cello string, and stared into the gloom beyond the bushes.
"What do you see there, Edg—" Bagberd began, but was unable to complete the sentence as Edgar abruptly turned himself practically inside-out, reversing direction and charging past Bagberd at an entirely unexpectedly high rate of speed. Bagberd barely had time to register the flashing blur of yellow that was the dog shooting by before the leash snapped taut behind him, he was whirled in a semicircle and brought crashing to the ground, his right foot buckling beneath him with a distinct snap.
"Fucking hell, Edgar," Bagberd said, as everything went black.
* * * *
A few moments later, everything remained black. Bagberd realized he was lying face down in a pile of sodden leaves and dirt. Judging by the acrid odor, it was a pile of sodden leaves and dirt that had been earlier visited by some other canine keen to inscribe his own fragment of personal history.
"Arghh. Oh. Ew. Grrar," said Bagberd, a shred less eloquently than he might have liked. For no good reason, it began to rain.
He realized his arm, which appeared to be sending rather plaintively urgent signals indicating pain, was still entangled in the leash, at the other end of which wagged a cheerfully apologetic Edgar.
Bagberd tried to struggle upright, then realized that something was awry with his right foot. He hopped up onto his left, disentangled his arm from the leash and tried gingerly to put his right foot down.
The sharp shudder of pain that began at his ankle, shot up his leg, hip and spine and jabbed him in the brain advised him that this course of action might be less than advisable.
"Fucking hell, Edgar," he repeated. Edgar perked up his ears, wagged his tail and sat down, expecting a treat. "My ankle."
Bagberd balanced precariously on his left leg in the muck of mud and damp leaves and briefly considered his situation. He was about three hundred yards from the house, he judged. He tried an exploratory hop and nearly fell down again, his arms flailing comically like a stuttering semaphore.
Hmm. This might be a little difficult. He tried another hop, this time giving vent to a heartfelt "Fuck!" at the same time. The expletive seemed to function as a mild, short-term anesthetic, distracting him from the pain of hopping for the exact instant of the hop. There we go.
Roughly six hundred hops and a half hour later, he leaned against the front door, panting stertorously, and began exploring his coat pocket for his keys. Moments away, he knew, were the remains of his whiskey which he fervently hoped had had the good grace not to evaporate, at least not completely.
No keys. He checked his outer pockets, he checked his inner pockets, checked the pockets of his pants. Not a jingle.
"Jesus," he sighed, and sank down on the rusted wrought-iron chair that adorned the stoop. Six hundred hops back to the woods, who knew how long crawling on his knees looking for the key chain, six hundred hops back. Not a chance. Not a chance.
"Go fetch, Edgar," he said. Edgar sat down, stood up, sat down again and looked around inquiringly. "Go fetch the keys. Go on, now." Bagberd unhooked the leash from Edgar's collar and gestured vaguely in the direction of the woods.
Edgar shot to his feet, tail abuzz and galloped off in the other direction.
"Edg-. Oh, hell."
A short while later, as Bagberd leaned against the doorframe, his right foot gingerly suspended, left leg straining, and reached around through the broken window to unlock the door, noting with some displeasure that the ornamental garden gnome he had hurled had not only broken the window but also a large glass lamp on the hall floor he had been planning to hang the next day, and a moment later registering that the gnome itself had been very satisfactorily decapitated, he was moderately surprised to see his shadow cast on the far wall in a halo of blue and red flashing lights.
Chapter 2
"Don't move. Police."
Bagberd didn't move. Then he moved slightly.
"This is my own house," he said. "I lost my keys. I also broke my ankle, I think."
"Just stay put." A large uniformed officer cautiously exited the passenger seat of the patrol car and began walking up the drive, his hand hovering near what Bagberd presumed must be a weapon of some kind. The other officer remained in the driver's seat, passing the time by shining a powerful lantern in Bagberd's face. Bagberd squinted.
"Do you mind?" he said.
"Let me see some identification, please," said Officer Number Two.
"My identification is inside. I was just out walking my dog. I fell down, broke my ankle, and lost my keys. Now I'm trying to get into the house. My house. Perhaps you could help me."
"I don't think so," said Officer Number Two. "I don't sniff at a little friendly bribe now and then, but I'm not about to accessorize a B and E. Where's your dog?
"He ran off."
"Right. Put your hands up."
"Just a minute ago. Edgar, come, dammit! If I put my hands up, I'll fall down."
"So fall down."
Bagberd put his hands up. He fell down. The officer leapt forward, yelling something. This time, everything really did go black.
* * * *
Bagberd awoke in the back seat of the patrol car.
"What's going on?" he said.
The officers seemed to be engaged in an animated conversation in the front seat, but Bagberd couldn't catch a word they were saying. He wondered if the fall had damaged his hearing. Then he noticed a thick wall of something like Plexiglas dividing the front and back seats.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Where are you taking me? Am I under arrest for something? It's my own damn house."
Officer Number One glanced at him briefly in the rearview mirror, but neither did nor said anything that would indicate he had understood.
"Christ," muttered Bagberd.
The Plexiglas barrier slid squeakily down.
"No blasphemy in my roller, God damn it," said Officer Number Two. "I hate blasphemy."
"Damn right," said Officer Number One. "Christ Almighty. Fucking pagans think they can blaspheme whenever they want. Jesus, that burns my britches."
The barrier squeaked up.
Bagberd used the ensuing quiet to begin exploring his injuries. He flexed the arm a few times, wincing, before determining as best he could that it was merely bruised, not broken. A large red welt around his wrist showed where the leash had become entangled and stretched by the gregarious Edgar.
"Damn dog," Bagberd whispered, but with a touch of affection.
He then struggled to lift his right leg up onto the seat beside him, grunting and wincing with pain. He shoe felt extremely tight, as though his foot and ankle were being slowly inflated from within, and he could wiggle his toes, but barely. Any rotation of the foot was excruciating.
He turned and tapped on the Plexiglas.
"Hey! I have a broken ankle. My foot is broken. Are you taking me to the hospital?"
The two officers continued chatting in the front. Bagberd's voice echoed dully back into his ears.
All right, Bagberd, let's just see where this takes us, he thought, and closed his eyes.
* * * *
"What'd they deliver here, damaged goods?"
Bagberd opened his eyes to find himself staring into the neatly chiseled goatee and glinting eyes of a small, grinning middle-aged man.
"Come on, I'll help you in." The man motioned to a wheelchair next to the opened door of the patrol car. Officers One and Two were nowhere to be seen.
"Where'd the policemen go?" Bagberd asked. "Where am I?"
"Hop in, we'll get you fixed up," said Goatee.
Bagberd hopped in, albeit slowly, carefully, and not a little painfully.
"Don't forget your coat," Goatee said, gesturing toward a long, brown leather jacket draped in the back seat of the vehicle.
"That isn't mine."
"Sure it is. I'll grab it for you." Goatee draped the coat over Bagberd's shoulders, who now noticed that his own coat was missing.
"Where's my coat?" he said.
"Right here. You almost forget it in the cruiser. Come one, let's go get you patched up."
Bagberd looked up and for the first time noticed that they were in a low-ceilinged, aggressively anonymous parking garage, apparently underground. There did not appear to be any exit signs or anything else that could give him a clue as to his location, beyond a bright green notice indicating that the cruiser was parked in "K22, Yellow". He also noticed that the police car, for some reason, was not carrying a front license plate.
"You have health insurance, don't you?" asked Goatee, then burst into laughter before Bagberd could answer. "I'm just kidding, of course. We don't give a hoot about your health insurance. Not a hoot."
Goatee swiftly wheeled Bagberd down a lengthy row of seemingly identical grayish-blue sedans, flickering through rapidly alternating pools of shadow and light cast by strangely stylized cast iron light fixtures in the otherwise featureless grooved concrete ceiling. They turned a corner at the end and crashed into a low curb. Bagberd yelped.
"I'm terribly sorry," said Goatee, and seemed to mean it. He reversed Bagberd in his wheelchair and gently lifted him over the curb, then swirled him around again and marched swiftly down a lighted corridor toward an open elevator. The doors slid shut as they rolled in.
Bagberd had always thought of himself as someone who not only did not possess a rich internal life, but as one who had never felt any need of one. He generally either keenly admired or roundly despised whatever it may be that passed his range of vision or filtered into his ears, then let whatever sensation it generated dissipate and sink into a swamp-like memory that served him reasonably well in his not particularly challenging profession, but that was clearly not meant as a repository for great thoughts, world-shaking ideas, in-depth analysis, or long-drawn periods of contemplation.
He wondered, now, whether that agreeable approach might not have been a mistake.
Chapter 3
"Amp. Clip."
"Nozzle. Plug."
"Clamp. Snip."
"Poodle. Pug."
"What?"
"Poodle. Pug. They're my dogs."
"Would you keep your damn dogs out of this? I'm working here. Tamp. Flip."
"I'll keep my dogs out of it if you will stop singing."
"I'm not singing."
"Where the hell am I?" said Bagberd.
"Setter. Shitzu."
"God damn it."
"Excuse me?" Bagberd hazarded. He opened his eyes, then closed them quickly when his retinas squealed in pain. Something very, very bright was shining in them.
"Scalpel. Sponge."
"…"
"What the hell was that?"
"I was humming."
"Don't."
"You want me to sing instead?"
"Would you like a scalpel through your forehead?"
"No. I don't think I would. Not particularly."
"Then shut up."
"Excuse me?" Bagberd hazarded again. "What's going on?"
"I told you to shut up."
"Oh, sorry. I thought you were talking to the other doctor."
Bagberd heard twin peals of hysterical laughter, coupled with what sounded like falling surgical instruments and tipped over trays.
"Other doctor?"
He faded out again.
* * * *
"One pill makes you smaller, and one pill makes you tall."
"Hrmfh?"
"The pills mother give you do nothing at all. Here, have some."
Bagberd sat up, then flopped down again.
"What the hell is going on?" He turned and shook his head. Goatee smiled and removed his fingers from Bagberd's eyelids.
"Nothing. You're all fixed up. More or less. That was a pretty nasty break. Here, have some pills. They're painkillers. You must be in pain."
Bagberd smacked Goatee's hand, sending the pills plopping neatly into a glass of green liquid beside the bed. Goatee quickly fished them out with a small spoon he pulled from his back pocket.
"Why would you do that, nincompoop? These will make you feel better. Now they'll be a bit minty, of course."
Bagberd groaned and lay back. He hoisted his leg an inch or so from the bed, then immediately regretted it.
"Arrgh. Pills, please."
"Certainly. Why on earth didn't you take them before? I told you you have had a nasty break. It should be all fixed up now, though. More or less. Just lie perfectly still, and everything will be fine. Eventually."
"Lie still, hell. Where the fuck am I?"
"You're perfectly safe. I'm also pleased to be able to tell you that your dog has been found and is being well cared-for. Are there any special dietary requirements for the animal?"
"No. Steak, shoes, whatever. What are you talking about?"
"You will be our guest for a short while. Just while your ankle heals. We have been looking for someone like you."
Goatee's voice was the epitome of reasonableness and candor. Bagberd loathed and distrusted it instinctively.
"I don't think so," he said. "Look, if I'm not under arrest for breaking into my own house, which would be ludicrous, I would just like to say thanks for the ankle repair, and goodbye. I have a whiskey still waiting for me on the coffee table, I hope…"
Bagberd jumped up from the bed and instantly flopped to the floor, banging it hard with his forehead. This didn't seem to bother the floor at all. His ankle, now sporting a heavy plaster cast, remained on the bed. Bagberd fainted. When he awoke, what he presumed to be no more than a few seconds later, he noticed from his upside-down position a small chain emerging from the cast around his leg and connecting fairly permanently to a handcuff around the steel bedpost.
"Now why would a more or less rational creature like you make such a foolish and precipitous move?" tutted Goatee, helping him back into the bed. "You foolish man. As I was about to explain, you are to be our guest here for a short while, and to facilitate our hospitality we have taken the liberty of chaining you to the bedpost. Handcuffing, actually. The other ring of the handcuff is around your broken ankle. Inside the cast, of course. It wouldn't fit around the outside," he chuckled.
"Why didn't you bastards just handcuff the other leg?" Bagberd grunted, now sweating profusely and wheezing with pain. Goatee ignored him.
"We require a service of you," said Goatee. "It is a small service, but it is one only you can perform. Well. That is, you're the only one here, at the moment, who we think can perform it. We are far too highly qualified to do it ourselves."
"What service? Who's 'we'?"
"You'll be told in a little while. Now rest. Have some mouthwash."
Goatee pointed pointedly at the glass of green liquid on the night table, then left the room with a slight flourish. Bagberd was left alone with his thoughts, a position he never found particularly agreeable.
Chapter 4
A thin, black-haired woman wearing a black blazer over a black button-down shirt and black pants, neatly spiked with a black bow-tie and accented by black sandals that entangled her black-toenailed feet like two coiled litters of black baby snakes clacked into Bagberd's room a few hours later together with an orange-haired man clad in a tight t-shirt and baggy pants, both in blaring green horizontal stripes. They stared at Bagberd's sleeping form in distaste for a few moments before the woman wrapped the end of her blazer around her hand and poked him in the temple. He grimaced.
"Wake up," she said. "I am Zelda, and this is Pouillet. What is your name?"
Bagberd struggled to his elbows and eyed the two newcomers warily and blearily.
"Bagberd."
"Bagberd? What kind of name is that?"
"I don't know. I think it's Nordic. Doesn't Pouillet mean chicken?"
The orange-haired man hopped in a brief apoplectic circle, biting the back of his wrist, then replied in what was almost certainly, even to Bagberd's untrained ear, an assumed French accent: "Non, you eediot. Poulet is cheecken. I am Pouillet. Not filthy cheecken. Pou-i-llet! Merde."
"Sorry, whatever. Pouillet, whatever. What do you want?"
"We are here to instruct you regarding the service you will perform for us. Are you ready?"
"No. Can I get a drink of something?"
"Shut up. This is what we want you to do. You will paint a painting for us. A forged painting. A very special forged painting."
Bagberd collapsed back on the bed, snickering hollowly.
"Oh, fuck. I can't paint, you morons. Can't paint, don't paint, won't paint. Never painted, never will. You got the wrong guy. Jesus."
Officer Two poked his head around the door and hissed "No blasphemy, God damn it!"
"Christ, is that guy still here?" sighed Bagberd.
"Rufus, put a sock in it," barked Zelda, glaring at Officer Two, who scowled and withdrew.
"Exactly," she continued, turning back to Bagberd. "We specifically need someone who cannot paint. You see, we are all far too highly trained to achieve the level of primitiveness we need to duplicate. Try as we might, we can neither conceive nor execute an unsophisticated line. Even our facial tics and unconscious hand movements are steeped in centuries of art history. I'm a neo-modernist, by the way."
"I throw food," added Pouillet. "And weld."
"So you see, our aesthetic sensibilities are far too highly developed for us to be able to perform the task we need performed. That's why we need you."
Bagberd stared at her in complete disbelief for a few moments, then stared in complete disbelief at Pouillet for another few moments. Their completely blank faces did nothing to dispel the disbelief.
"Are you two completely nuts?" he offered.
"No. At least, I'm not," said Zelda, shrugging.
"Me neither," Pouillet asserted, with an inappropriate "z" in "neither".
"We are businesspeople. Arty businesspeople. And this is simply a business proposition."
"I'm going to be paid for this? How generous."
"Don't be ridiculous. We are going to be paid for this. You, I'm afraid, have no choice. You are in our custody. There is no way for you to escape. Your wife will not be looking for you, because – I suppose it's simplest that I just show you."
Zelda pulled a lime-yellow binder from the folds of her black blazer and painstakingly fiddled with the gold and purple striped ribbon that held it closed. Her knuckles clacked together as she grew increasingly frustrated.
"Shit. Poulet?"
"Pouillet. Pouillet! Merde," said Pouillet, taking the binder and biting the ribbon in two with one snap of his teeth, several of which, Bagberd noticed, appeared to be gold. Or perhaps only painted gold. Pouillet tossed the binder on the bed, picked up the glass of green liquid and sipped it, scowling.
"Open it," said Zelda, simply.
Bagberd tugged it open and several large, glossy photos of himself posing al fresco together with one of his more buxom colleagues from work tumbled out.
"Alicia, I think her name is. You recognize her?"
"How the…?"
"Photoshop. We are very skilled, as I told you. Your wife will, of course, not know the difference. By now she will have received the Federal Express package containing the images—what is it, Poulet?"
Pouillet had put down his glass of mouthwash and was eying the floor guiltily.
"Don't tell me—"
"I am sorry. I send them regular mail."
"You idiot. I said—"
"Eediot," he corrected automatically. "No one told me to send them priority."
Zelda stamped her black sandals and clenched her bony fists, then turned back to Bagberd.
"Whatever. She will receive them..." she glared at Pouillet, "...eventually, and when she does she will of course assume that you have run away with this woman, whom we know to be on vacation in, I think, the Caribbean for at least two weeks. That will be sufficient."
Bagberd opened his mouth, then shut it again.
"Also, you are a fugitive. You broke into a house last night…"
"That was my own goddamn house!"
"…and stole a valuable painting. A Kandinsky, actually. Bauhaus period, very nice. You were arrested, fingerprinted, and somehow escaped. It would be inadvisable for you to be running around on the streets now, what with the police looking for you and all," she smirked.
Bagberd looked at his fingers for the first time since he had awoken, and noticed the tips were blackened and smudged. He flopped back on the bed, muttering.
"So, shall we tell you what we want you to do for us?" Zelda inquired, shifting effortlessly from smug to efficient. Bagberd waved his arm noncommittally. "Fine. We need a cave painting."
Bagberd stopped waving his arm noncommittally and sat up. "A what?" he said.
"A cave painting. We need a genuine cave painting that can be transported to France and discovered."
"A cave... What the hell for? You can't sell it. What?"
"Oh yes, we can. It will be a very special cave painting, very unique, and we are receiving a very, very nice price for it. Very nice. We won the contract precisely because we are so artistic. And we cannot execute the contract precisely because we are so artistic. Here's roughly what it should look like."
She pulled another binder, this time puce with magenta overtones, from her jacket and wordlessly handed it to Pouillet, who bit it open. Various sketches and what appeared to be drawings of animals spilled out on the floor. Zelda sighed through her teeth, picked them up, and waved them in Bagberd's face.
"See? These are cave paintings. 30,000 years old. You see the hunters, the arrows, here? The untutored two-dimensionality of the composition? The complete inattention to perspective and shadow, not as some sort of cubist statement but solely as a result of unadulterated representational naivete? That's what we need."
Bagberd just shook his head, bewildered.
"And there's more." Zelda spread the animal pictures out on the bed. "We need these – representations of these, in the same unschooled style. In the same drawings."
Bagberd stared at the drawings, then slowly swiveled his head as comprehension slowly filtered through it.
"Dinosaurs?" he said.
Chapter 5
The sun shone in a solid beam through the small rectangular windows placed high on the walls of the warehouse, made stars of gently spinning flecks of dust, carved shadows of the hefty pillars of concrete that supported the roof, and finally glowed on Bagberd's strangely glowing features as he stood, leaning on a crutch, and painted. He was mystifyingly happy. He was a natural, they loved him, and he was, for perhaps the first time, deeply contented.
Bagberd had never had much use for art, just as he had never felt like much of a natural at anything, beyond possessing a certain proficiency in the timing of short-term commodity options trading.
He remembered once having been tormented in college by a course entitled "Aesthetics Without Fine Art", thinking at the time that the "without fine art" part sounded just perfect, and neglecting to notice that there was no "n" juxtaposed between the opening "a" and the following "e" of the first word, as he had first thought, until it was too late and all the remaining electives were filled.
The dreadful Zelda and the despicable Chicken were beginning to grow on him as well, once he had overcome his distaste for their affectations and the minor annoyances of being kidnapped, framed, and blackmailed. He'd known them, now, for a little over a week.
Eager to acquaint him with all the movements and traditions that he must avoid replicating, and obviously reveling in the golden opportunity to display their certainly impressive range of knowledge of the subject, they had initially launched him on a crash course in art history before setting him to his task, until he pointed out that, in this case, the less he knew was probably the better, to which they eventually enthusiastically agreed.
He had then set to work on a slab of butcher's paper with a lump of charcoal, drawing small erratic stick figures with triangular bodies and pointed spears. When he felt he had mastered that art, he moved on to the dinosaurs. He spent days practicing childish line-drawings of Triassic Pterosaurs and Cretaceous Tyrannosaurs. He lovingly doodled bikini-clad primitives standing on water-dappled rocks and hunting Jurassic Ichthyosaurs with bows and arrows; small cave people chasing Compsognathus with a rock and a sling; bands of three and four sneaking up on and surrounding slow-footed Diplodocus as it stood and chewed on a palm frond.
He particularly loved his dramatic rendition of the Tyrannosaurus hunt – the crowds spreading war paint on each others' faces, the stalk through the forest, the many-speared kill; and the fanciful lassoing of a baby Triceratops by a triumphant, youthful hunter. Zelda and Chicken were ecstatic, cooing over his efforts and expressing their admiration for his enviable and unattainable artistic innocence.
His practice sessions complete, he had now been set free to begin his opus. They had lengthened the chain around his ankle and attached the other end of it to a steel pipe jutting out from one of the concrete columns. From here, he had access to a small kitchen and bathroom, and could clank freely around what he now loftily considered his studio, the high-ceilinged warehouse with, at its center, a gigantic and clearly very ancient boulder that had apparently been transported, God knows how, from a remote French cave for the purpose of having primitive art forged on it.
Zelda had given him a collection of painting materials, including fragments of partially petrified charcoal ("from an ancient forest fire – buried in a swamp," she had said), materials with which to mix the carbon black, umber and ochre pigments he would use to color his artwork, and more paper to sketch on until he felt ready to begin.
He had a small radio that he could tune to any channel of his choosing. Mostly he kept it turned off, as he felt the commercial interruptions spoiled his concentration. At the other end of the warehouse, Chicken alternately splattered plywood and canvas with dribbly things from the refrigerator and blew off his eyebrows with a welding torch. They would lunch together most days, each usually lost in disparate silences of aesthetic contemplation.
Now Bagberd stood, leaning on his crutch and considering where to place his first brush stroke. Zelda had instructed him to "seek his inner eye", but he wasn't quite sure where to start looking. "Just go with it," Chicken had offered before returning to his corner to load a small catapult with marinara sauce and meatballs, preparatory to assaulting a canvas already soaked in consomme.
Bagberd dipped his brush hesitantly in a bowl of yellow ochre on the table beside the boulder, pondered for a moment as brownish-yellow rivulets dribbled from the bristles onto the floor and the tip of his cast, and began.
Chapter 6
"Outstanding!"
"Superb!"
"Genial!"
"You're not French, Pouillet."
"Bite me. C'est magnifique!"
"Glorious!"
"Will it work?"
"Of course it will. The man's a natural. He's a genius."
Bagberd slumped in a chair in a state of utter creative exhaustion, his first, and basked in the praise. He flipped idly through a telephone book on the small table beside him as the artistes effused.
"We must contact the Enlightenment Institute immediately. We can deliver three days ahead of schedule."
"We are brilliant. We are stupendous."
"We are rich."
"Very rich."
"At last I can afford the proper materials for my art. Real ground beef. Fresh tomatoes."
"You should stick to scrap metal, Pouillet. Your canvases bring the flies."
"Philistine."
"I'm not quite finished."
"But of course you are. It's perfect."
"I have one or two small finishing touches. Please. It's important. It won't feel finished if I don't do it."
The ebullient gaggle of Zelda, Pouillet, and Goatee fell silent, turned from the now richly decorated boulder, and stared happily at Bagberd.
"Of course," Zelda said, after a moment. "You're the artist. We have a telephone call – is that the phone book? Thank you. We'll be back." The three scurried away rubbing their hands together.
I'm the artist, thought Bagberd, and smiled to himself. He hobbled back to the boulder. "Just one more little detail," he breathed with a glint in his voice, and picked up a brush.
Chapter 7
Monday. Traffic. Bagberd hummed and drummed his steering wheel while his car inched forward in a polychrome monoxide morass of swearing, grunting, honking and thumping, and smiled to himself.
The conditions of his release had been surprisingly simple. Zelda and Goatee retained the retouched photographs – they had never been mailed, after all – and the trumped-up arrest record, admonishing him sweetly that they held the only marginally explored boundaries of his newly tapped creative potential in the highest esteem and wouldn't like to, but if he breathed a word of what he had helped them do, they would have to use them. Bagberd had managed to soothe the initially frantic inquiries of his wife, who had been traveling out west for ten days, with the explanation that he had fallen into a slight coma after his accident, which was why he hadn't called or tried to contact her, but was feeling a good deal better now and hoped she had had a good trip. She had, had a fine bronze tan and two new real estate clients to prove it, and thought no more about the incident.
They had both puzzled, one more genuinely than the other, over the broken window, but patched it up easily enough and were pleased to find nothing had been stolen by what they presumed were either easily startled thieves or minimalist neighborhood hooligans. A neighbor had knocked on the door with Edgar, having discovered him tied to his front doorknob earlier that day, apparently healthy and well-fed and with a shoelace dangling from his jowls.
Bagberd's ankle had healed nicely over the past six weeks. His cast was off, and, apart from some painful stiffness, he could flex and move his foot again almost normally. During his convalescence, his wife had thoughtfully rented Misery, Rear Window and Career Ending Football Bloopers, so he'd had no shortage of restful entertainment.
He'd been back at work for a month now, and although the adrenalin highs and lows of commodities options trading still provided somewhat of a fleeting kick, about the equivalent of a cup of good espresso, he was beginning to feel that he no longer held altogether the same gusto for the occupation. He looked on his colleague Alicia in an entirely new light, certainly, despite the fact that he knew the voluptuous body he had seen entwined with his wasn't hers, just as his wasn't his. Food for thought, nonetheless.
Still, insouciance was his watchword, even though he was a little uncertain how to pronounce it.
His car was at a complete standstill now, along with, as best he could guess, about 30,000 others, all trying to inch their way down the main street of the city at the same time. Bagberd glanced over at the newspaper he'd plucked from the front lawn on his way to the car, and chuckled again.
He stopped chuckling a moment later when his car unexpectedly coughed, wheezed, shuddered, jolted, and died.
"What the hell?" he said aloud. He bonked the dashboard, fiddled with the gear shift, jiggled the steering wheel and twiddled the key, but none of these time-tested mechanical remedies had the slightest effect. The car refused to budge.
"Shit," he said. The exclamation was drowned in a roar of honks and toots and curses from the cars in the lane behind him. He noticed that traffic ahead had started moving.
"Fuck," he nearly added. However, glumly aware that sitting in the driver's seat saying "fuck" and glaring at the dashboard wasn't in any way going to help extricate him from the situation in which he currently found himself, he instead popped the hood, got out of the car, and walked to the front to stare blankly at the engine. Traffic was completely socked in on all three lanes, with the exception of his, the middle one, which was miraculously clear. From his car forward, that is. He squirmed uncomfortably and wished he'd remembered his cell phone, which he knew for a fact was sitting in its little charger on the beside table, winking slyly.
The engine reminded him vaguely of a merger of some of his recent friend Pouillet's creations, a hideously convoluted potpourri of steel and spaghetti. He jiggled a couple of the more prominent wires with no real sense of hope, and whimpered softly.
Why not a flat tire, he thought. A flat tire he could fix. Tire iron, spare, jack, all neatly tucked away in the trunk.
He curtailed this line of thought when he realized he hadn't actually explored the trunk in any great detail for some time, and didn't wish to wish any new calamity on himself that he couldn't be sure he could actually handle.
A short "whoop-whoop" rose above the cacophony of car horns and captured his attention. He looked up from the labyrinth of vehicular intestines to find a patrol car alongside, stopping traffic in one of the two remaining lanes. The cacophony immediately doubled in intensity.
"Car trouble?" droned the patrolman, whom Bagberd was shocked to discover was none other than Officer One.
"Officer One!" he shouted.
"Who?"
"Oh. Sorry. I've always thought of you as… never mind."
"Name's Peat."
"Hi, Pete. Yes, my car—"
"Peat, not Pete. As in peat moss," said Officer One, whose sensitive ear immediately discerned the difference.
Bagberd stared at him for a moment.
"Peat."
"Right."
"Okay. My car just died, Peat. I have no idea why."
"Too bad," commiserated Peat. "Yeah, cars will do that," he added philosophically. "I think a lot of them just hate us. Resent us, maybe for having legs and feet. Joints. Ever see a car try to climb a flight of stairs, ha ha?"
Bagberd could find no immediate response to this, and therefore did not respond immediately, or indeed at all.
"We'd better get it off the road," said Peat, gesturing toward the lengthening clot of traffic behind them.
Bagberd accepted the wisdom of Officer Peat's proposal and together, with a good deal of grunting and slipping, they maneuvered the car past Officer Peat's patrol car and to the curb.
"Thanks a lot, Peat."
"Not a problem. Need a lift anywhere?"
"Well, I was trying to get to work. I need to do something about this, though. This can't be a legal place to park."
"Don't worry about it. Here, I'll give you a ticket right now and save you the anxiety."
Officer Peat pulled a pad from his coat and painstakingly wrote out a parking ticket, checking carefully to ensure he had Bagberd's correct license plate number, while Bagberd simply stared at him, his mouth twitching. The policeman tucked the ticket under Bagberd's windshield wiper, clapped his hands together, then walked back to his patrol car and said, "There we go. Hop in, I'll drop you."
There didn't seem to be anything else to do, so Bagberd did.
"It's about eight blocks up," he said. "You need to take a right on Forest Park."
Officer One – Peat – nodded. They inched along for a minute or two.
"Pretty mean traffic, eh?" Peat said.
"It's always like this," Bagberd replied, shrugging. "You get used to it."
"I hate traffic." Peat hunched further over the steering wheel and glared at the traffic ahead and to the right of his vehicle. At the next turn, he abruptly yanked the steering wheel and veered in to the left.
"That won't work…" Bagberd began.
"Don't worry about it," said Peat. "I know a shortcut."
Peat pulled the car through a series of turns that Bagberd was fairly certain were taking him, if anything, farther away from his office. He made a couple of feeble protests, but Peat ignored him as he jerked his car around and through the clogged lanes. Finally he spoke.
"You know something?"
"What?"
"You look like a pretty smart guy. Good suit, I guess you have a pretty good job."
"It's all right," replied Bagberd warily.
"Well, you know something?"
Peat made one additional turn and pulled onto the highway leading out of town toward the countryside.
"What?"
"You're a little stupid. You know that?"
Peat pulled a gun from his holster and aimed it casually at Bagberd with his left hand as he steered the car into the fast lane with his right.
For fuck's sake, thought Bagberd. Not again.
Chapter 8
Bagberd and Officer One – Bagberd had almost immediately decided to stop thinking of him as Peat, which sounded too friendly to his ears, considering the repeated kidnappings and other inconveniences Officer One kept putting him through – rode for a while in a fairly grim silence. Officer One hummed quietly to himself, and Bagberd counted cows. Who knew the outskirts of the city were dotted with so much livestock, he thought. He eventually grew weary of this simple diversion and decided to break the grim silence.
"Peat?"
Peat grunted and hummed some more.
"Where the hell are you taking me this time?"
Peat waggled the revolver menacingly, humming.
"I'm not permitted to pose questions, is that it?"
Peat hummed and shook his head. He was evidently reaching the dramatic climax of whatever song it was he was humming, and didn't wish to be interrupted. Bagberd cocked an ear and heard the last nasal strains of "Born to Be Wild" fade in a buzz of teeth.
"It's a sort of headquarters," Peat said at last. "We'll get there in fifteen minutes or so. Just relax."
"Relax. Thanks, yes, good idea." Bagberd crossed his arms and fumed. "I need to call my office."
Peat waggled the gun again. Bagberd fumed. They continued thusly, waggling and fuming, for another few miles until Peat abruptly crossed two lanes of traffic without activating his blinkers and shot off the highway onto an exit ramp in a chorus of angry car horns. Bagberd was just quick enough to catch a sign labeled "Crow Lake" before they were bouncing swiftly along a secondary road.
As they bounced, Bagberd mulled over a minor epiphany he'd experienced during the time he was hobbling around in a cast, which was that during that time there had suddenly seemed to spring into his unaccustomed view dozens, even hundreds of similarly disabled people. Everywhere he looked there had been people on crutches, people in wheelchairs, people slowly hobbling across the street with the assistance of canes and walkers. He also remembered that the moment he put his crutches away and could get around on his own feet again, the hundreds had spontaneously evaporated. He wondered briefly whether there were anything to be learned from those observations, then banished them from his mind and resumed fuming.
In a few minutes they turned off onto a smaller road, then a tiny dirt track winding through the middle of what looked, to Bagberd's untrained suburban eye, like cornfields. The track ended at a rusted aluminum gate that hung open on one hinge, followed by a long driveway lined with white-painted wagon wheel halves that cut between a wide, unkempt yard festooned with rusted bits of misshapen scrap metal.
"…?" was all Bagberd could say. Peat waggled.
The patrol car pulled up in front of a large, somewhat dilapidated red farmhouse with white shutters, dotted incongruously with purple, green and orange mottles, and fronted by a small lemon-yellow porch featuring a porch swing made, as best Bagberd could tell, of barb wire. Peat honked the horn and a few moments later the front door opened, disgorging in quick succession the scowling and highly stylized faces of Goatee, Zelda and Pouillet.
Zelda pointed a craggy finger at Bagberd, crooked it at Peat, and went back inside, followed by Goatee and Pouillet.
"Let's go," Peat said to the protesting and suddenly panic-stricken Bagberd, and hustled him in after them.
Chapter 9
The three sat silently arrayed around one side of a wide zebra-striped wrought-iron table in the center of the farmhouse kitchen. Zelda gestured toward the single chair on the other side, and Peat shoved him in that general direction.
"Sit," he said. Bagberd sat.
"You wait outside, Peat," said Zelda. "We'll let you know if you're needed."
Peat waggled the gun one last time at Bagberd and withdrew humming. Something unpleasant from Billy Idol, Bagberd thought. He cleared his throat. Zelda, Goatee and Pouillet merely glared at him in silence. Bagberd was annoyed to discover that Billy Idol music was now running through his head. He tried to think of an alternative song to replace it with, but couldn't. He cleared his throat again.
"So, Bagberd. Mr. Artist," Zelda hissed. Bagberd didn't think much of the way she had hissed artist. It hadn't sounded friendly at all.
"Er, hi guys," Bagberd stammered. "Wasn't expecting to see you again. Um… so how is every—"
"So," interrupted Goatee. "You have no idea – no idea – why you're here?"
"Well, Officer One – Peat – seems to have kidnapped me again, so—"
"Silence!" shouted Zelda. She stood and reached into the recesses of her signature black blazer, which Bagberd was beginning to think must contain some sort of advanced hidden filing system.
"So you know nothing about why you're here. And I bet you have a perfectly simple explanation for…" she removed something from the jacket and threw it on the table with a decorative flourish of both hand and voice "…this!"
Bagberd glanced at the table. His skin crawled involuntarily – not that it generally crawls voluntarily – as he immediately recognized the morning paper, a copy of which lay on the passenger seat of his now sadly ticketed and defunct automobile.
"Um," he murmured, suspecting his response to be somewhat less than the situation demanded.
"Perhaps you could be so kind as to read the article on the front page. Second headline on the right, below the fold."
"Er," Bagberd continued, again possibly a shade inadequately.
"Fine. Pouillet, would you do the honors?"
Pouillet, who had been eyeing Bagberd like a hungry bear – an orange-haired hungry bear, that is, in a tight green-striped t-shirt – confronted with a temporarily bee-deprived hive, lurched into action, picked up the newspaper, and began reading in his affected French accent:
"Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, France. The archeological, anthropological, scientific and religious communities were shocked today by the discovery that the remarkable Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave painting find, itself an international sensation discovered only last week, may in fact be a hoax perpetrated with the intention of furthering a questionable ideological agenda. The find, which includes a collection of stunning, never-before-seen cave paintings clearly depicting early man interacting with numerous species of dinosaurs spanning the full range of the dinosaur era, was initially interpreted to be proof of man's coexistence with dinosaurs. Continued on page D19."
Pouillet stopped and wrinkled his nose and forehead. Zelda sighed.
"Flip to page D19, idiot, and keep reading," she said. After some fumbling during which several pages were torn and various sections spilled to the table and the floor, Pouillet continued:
"The argument that man and dinosaurs existed concurrently has been frequently predicted by quasi-scientific bodies such as the Seattle-based Enlightenment Institute, which promotes the agenda that creationist doctrine be taught alongside evolutionary theory in public education systems. Spokesmen for the Enlightenment Institute were quick last week to seize upon the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc find as scientific proof that their doctrine is correct, and that rather than merely being taught in addition, creationism, also known as intelligent design, should replace evolution altogether as the one true explanation of man's emergence on the planet.
"A close examination of the cave paintings by archeologists, however, revealed yesterday a faint, but no less unmistakable, series of numbers running up the shaft of one of the early spears depicted in the artworks."
Pouillet paused and glared at Bagberd. Zelda and Goatee were glaring at him too. He shifted uncomfortably in his uncomfortable zebra-striped wrought-iron seat.
"On further investigation," Pouillet continued, "the numbers were determined to correspond exactly to the telephone number of the main headquarters of the Enlightenment Institute, the one group most likely to benefit from the acceptance of the cave paintings as real."
"Erm," hazarded Bagberd. Pouillet growled and continued:
"The cave paintings have now been denounced as an elaborate hoax. An outraged coalition of evolutionary biologists and other scientists have called for criminal prosecution of the Enlightenment Institute, which is presumed to be complicit in the alleged fraud. A team of forensic investigators from Interpol have been dispatched to Seattle to investigate the incident in collaboration with American authorities. Spokesmen for the Enlightenment Institute were unavailable for comment at time of writing."
Pouillet stopped reading and tossed the newspaper at Bagberd.
"Well?" said Zelda in a grating monotone. "What do you have to say for yourself?"
Bagberd wasn't quite sure where to start. All he knew was that he had been struck by a strange and powerful whim near the conclusion of the project brought on by a sudden, unexpected and unfamiliar feeling of pride, and had acted on the impulse with little thought for the consequences. He hadn't intended any particular malice, rather thought of the telephone number as a secret, private signature that he alone would know about, and that it had somehow imbued him with a sense of ownership and accomplishment in a work of art, his first, that he would otherwise never be able to tell anyone about or claim as his own. He wasn't quite sure how to put all this into words, however, particularly with the heavy atmosphere of menace that was trundling around the room and chilling his ankles.
"I…" he haltingly began.
"…am a brilliant, brilliant man!" completed Zelda unexpectedly, with a smile and a whoop. Goatee and Pouillet, Bagberd noticed, were suddenly standing up and beaming.
"Erm?"
"Stroke of genius, Bagberd. Pure," giggled Goatee. "To sneak that telephone number in there when no one was looking. I'm still chuckling about it."
"Great job," said Pouillet. "Superbe."
"And that was the missing ingredient, the elusive spice we didn't even know we were looking for," said Zelda. "Bagberd, we want you on board."
"On the team," added Goatee.
"Our team," Pouillet filled in unnecessarily.
"The which?" sputtered Bagberd. He now felt completely off-balance. As if sensing this, the zebra-striped wrought-iron chair on which he was perched chose that moment to give way beneath him. He rose and disentangled himself from the wreckage.
"What are you talking about?" he queried, feeling that the inquiry was becoming repetitive.
"We want you to join us," said Zelda.
"Work with us," said Pouillet.
"Forge for us. Forge art for us," clarified Goatee.
"Our art," continued Zelda. "You already know how we feel about your natural abilities. Your hand, guided as it is by pure instinct rather than weighed down by centuries of artistic tradition, doesn't have any boundaries to break out of, any movements to escape from. It's pure."
"Untainted," said Pouillet, tentatively testing the word to see if it fit.
"Exactly," confirmed Zelda. Pouillet beamed. "You can do what none of us can. Any longer, that is."
Bagberd tried to compose his face into an expression reflecting something other than an uncomprehending vacant stupor, but it was beyond his power.
"I still don't quite—"
Zelda sat down again, and motioned the others to do the same. Bagberd, now lacking a chair, remained awkwardly standing in wrought rubble.
"Look, it's very simple," Zelda said. "You probably look at us and think you see three brilliant, creative, enormously attractive and successful cutting-edge artists, right?"
Bagberd wisely kept the response that leapt to his mind to himself.
"But – and I know this will surprise you – we're not. That is, not anymore."
"We're has-beens," said Goatee, stroking his goatee sadly.
"Washed up," added Pouillet.
"We've descended to the level of that which we most hate – dried-up, untalented poseurs," Zelda mourned. "Hardly any of us ever sell anything anymore. Once we had widely known names. Our gallery openings were swamped with the shiniest stars of the international artistic intelligentsia. Musicians, movie actors, bloated plutocrats with no sense of shame were snapping up our works."
"Even my food art," Pouillet added brightly, then lapsed into disconsolate silence again.
"But somewhere along the way, we lost it. We lost that spark, that innate fire that imbues a work of art with a uniqueness, an individuality, a cutting-edgity, if you will."
"Cutting-edgity?"
"Yes. A cutting-edgity. We don't have that any more. You do, even though you're too aesthetically dim to know it. And that stunt you pulled on the Enlightenment Institute proved something else. You have a spark of mischief, a certain…"
"Je ne sais quoi?" Pouillet offered.
"…sociopathic streak together with that natural ingenuity. Telephone number on the spear shaft. Ha. You were born to work with us."
Bagberd started at the reminder of the trick he had played on the creationists.
"But what about those Enlightenment people. Won't they be angry? Are you… aren't we in danger?"
Zelda laughed.
"Don't be ridiculous. They're unscrupulous zealots, not murderers or anything like that. Besides, they paid us in cash. And we have the goods on them. And if any of them come calling by, Pouillet will know how to deal with them."
Pouillet inflated his green-striped chest.
"Not a problem," he said.
"Hmm," mused Bagberd. "I still don't understand what you want me to do."
Zelda sighed heavily and cracked her knuckles. The inability of others to readily comprehend her inadequately articulated ideas was clearly a burden to her.
"Art, dimwit. We want you to make art for us. You make art. We sell the art under our own names and split the profits with you. That's it."
"Simple," Pouillet explained.
"Let's face it," Zelda continued. "You're a nobody. A natural, but a nobody. Do you have any idea how hard it is to break into the professional art circuit before you've made a name for yourself?"
"Practically impossible," intoned Goatee.
"That's right. It's a catch-22. We, on the other hand, already have names. We've just been in, well, slumps."
"Long slumps," said Pouillet.
"Yes, long slumps. Decades-long slumps, some of us." Pouillet hung his head. "But, with your help, we'll make a comeback. A brilliant comeback, all three of us."
"You've got nothing to lose," added Goatee. "Admit it. Wasn't the cave painting project more fun and fulfilling than your regular job?"
Bagberd had to admit that it was.
"But why the kidnapping, for God's sake?" he asked. "Do you have any idea how annoying that is? Why didn't you just phone me up and ask me?"
Zelda flicked her black lapels and jangled her black bracelets. "Look at us," she said. "We're incorrigible drama queens. Up to now, that's about all that's been keeping us going."
Chapter 10
Officer Peat dropped Bagberd off at his office a half hour or so later with a cheery wave and a squeal of engine parts. Bagberd pushed through the building's revolving door with his head spinning. He muddled his way up to the eleventh floor and scurried into his office, a long, narrow, beeping and bustling landscape of cubicles, telephones, and blinking screens.
"Bag, you're late, God damn it!"
No blasphemy, Bagberd thought to himself and chuckled silently.
"Sorry Bill. Car broke down on Grand. Hell of a time getting out of there."
Bill Roakin, Bagberd's immediate supervisor and a gruff, slick, stocky, short-tempered salesman who liked to think of himself as a guru because he was slightly older than most of his peers, growled and returned grumbling to the glassed-in corner office from which he'd popped like a cork when Bagberd walked in. Bagberd sighed and continued to his cubicle, actually a half wall he shared with three other traders near the center of the elongated room. All three of them were busily typing, yelling into headsets and peering watery-eyed at scrolling numbers on their screens.
"Coffee?" queried Bagberd as he slid into his seat.
"Down a nickel," yipped Steve, the closest one, covering his microphone for a moment, then continued shouting and peering.
Bagberd sighed again and got up to fetch some coffee. Along the way to the little galley kitchen he passed Alicia, who worked as a vice president of some description, and had to remind himself that the hidden body contained in that shapeless tweed suit she was wearing didn't necessarily resemble the retouched version he had seen, which, as far as he knew, had probably been downloaded from some sort of web porn site.
Back at his desk, he lobbed a few orders back and forth for an hour or two, thereby increasing the value of his clients' portfolios by a few hundred thousand dollars or so, at least until the next day when they would most likely sink again, but his heart wasn't really in it.
He sank back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his neck, and let the hubbub wash over him. One of the three colleagues at the desk, Jordan, perspicaciously observing that something was somewhat out of the ordinary with Bagberd, delicately inquired, "What the fuck's with you?"