In Extremis Read online

  In the forested foothills of Mt Feldberg, in the southern reaches of the Schwarzwald mountain range; above the realm of ancient oaks and within the shadowy recesses of the dark pine forests; on the melting cusp between dusk and sunset: they stood on the broad porch of the Black Forest Schloss. So someone had called it—but what was this architectural grotesquerie? A confabulation of dark whimsy, this place, with its absurdly clashing mixture of medieval castle and German-gingerbread country house, its four-storey volcano-glass facades and dark wooden turrets, its crockets and louvers, its multifoiled panes and quatrefoils and lancet windows, its ornamental molds that seemed as Tantric as Germanic—

  Hell, Sterno thought, the place had all the architectural integrity of miniature golf. But that’s what made it so glorious.

  And there were the living gargoyles, mounted on the eaves of stained-glass windows above the encircling porch. The “mountings,” Vreedeez called them.

  “Please,” Michael Jackson sobbed pipingly. “Please . . .”

  “Ja, mein King of Pop,” Vreedeez murmured soothingly. “Ja ja.”

  “My family thinks I’m dead!”

  “A comfort to them. Und end to zuh embarrassment. So much more money from you now, ja?”

  The forest around the contorted edifice seemed to engorge with shadows as the sun sank, the trees became fuller and grimmer as they became darker; the mountains deepened their blues and the snowy peaks soaked up sunset oranges and pinks, merging them to tincture blood-red . . .

  Sterno couldn’t suppress a shudder.

  He had only arrived that morning, on assignment for the Stark Fist of Removal Magazine. He’d had the usual First Class plane accommodations, the almost intrusively comfortable five-star hotels. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be here, amusing though it was to see the erstwhile pop star in this predicament.

  Sterno hadn’t known Idi Amin would be here—Vreedeez had faked Amin’s death too—and the former Ugandan dictator, famous for his brutality, made Sterno particularly nervous. Amin’s hair had gone white, the whites of his eyes yellow as egg yolk. Most of Amin’s teeth were gone; his hands trembled. But the dictator who’d butchered thousands of his Ugandan subjects for his own amusement, was still alive, still feverishly vibrant in that decaying flesh.

  And what could Sterno say? Amin had departed his sanctuary in Arabia, was the permanent houseguest of the so-called Doktur Vreedeez. The story was, Amin had financed the Doktur’s investments in Microsoft and certain other key companies that were the source of the Doktur’s billionaire status, and the Doktur felt obliged to entertain Amin, despite the fact that, now and then, the Doktur’s house-servants would go missing.

  Vreedeez’s majordomo, factotum and chief sustainable-taxidermist, P’uzz Leen, was presumably in no danger from Amin, if that could be said of anyone in proximity to the erstwhile dictator, because of Leen’s importance to the doctor. The swarthy P’uzz Leen almost never spoke.

  “Please,” Jackson piped, in his Mickey Mouse voice. “I’m a very rich man. Let me go and you can have it all.”

  “Ach, I love it when zay say dot,” Vreedeez chuckled, as P’uzz Leen sprayed the oxygen-permeable flexishellac over Jackson’s mouth. Jackson’s piping cries became muted, barely audible squeaks.

  “This is authentic Michael Jackson?” asked Amin.

  “Ja ja, zat es der Michael, not an impersonator. Seventeen million dollars for der kidnap, nine more to pay off bodyguards, frame zah doctor—ja, vus vort it. Worth it fer sure.”

  Hmmm, Sterno thought: “Worth it fer sure,” Vreedeez had said. Vreedeez affected a burlesque Bavarian accent—like Mel Brooks doing a Nazi—but flaunted his lapses into a Western American accent. Sterno suspected Vreedeez of actually being an American and, despite the unlikely German accent, he was not trying very hard to conceal it. And like P’uzz Leen, Vreedeez looked eerily familiar though he was sure they’d never met before.

  Vreedeez was stocky, dressed in black; mustachioed, curly haired, dark eyed, fifties—though some say that his apparent age was fifty years behind his real age, thanks to growth hormone treatments. Now he turned to Sterno and said, “You vould like to see der other mountings?”

  “Does a damn prairie squid lie in wait fer a face-fuckin’ bat? You bet your ass.”

  “My donkey? I haff no donkey for gambling.”

  “Come on, man, I don’t believe you’re not familiar with that expression, we’re a global shit-culture now, and this veneer of—”

  “Speaking of veneers,” Vreedeez said, interrupting him calmly but with a distinct note of warning, “haff you seen our complete collection? Mr. Jackson is of course only der newest . . .”

  “No, I haven’t. I have to ask - are these the real thing?”

  “Mm ruh meee . . . !” Michael Jackson whined.

  “You haff not read the papers?”

  “Yeah, sure, man, but . . . okay, all those people disappeared or died—Jackson ‘died’—sure ’nuff, but you might’ve taken advantage of that disappearance trend—I mean, everyone assumes it’s some kind of massive publicity stunt—and you might’ve just, you know, made the mockups . . . maybe it’s part of the publicity stunt put on by the real Michael Jackson and whoever . . . I mean, otherwise why would you invite me here? I mean, shit, if I report on this . . . of course it’s a so-called underground magazine but it’s read by all the key World Leaders anyway . . . and you’d have cops swarming here from every damn country missing its celebrities . . .”

  “As for taking a chance on dot, vell, it is important for me dot a representative of der media see what I haff here, but not necessarily dot it is, finally, reported in der media . . .”

  “It’s enough I just . . . see it?”

  “Ja. To ask vhy, consult mit der Carl Jung books.”

  Sterno’s shudder, then, had a different quality to it; less frisson and more fear. How was Vreedeez going to prevent it from being reported ‘in der media’?

  “Und now . . . I present, around und ziss side uff der schloss, as you zee . . .” They strolled around a corner, Sterno and Idi Amin and P’uzz Leen.

  “Whoa!” Sterno burst out.

  Lit from beneath by the soft floodlights that had come on when the ambient light dropped, were four slightly-wriggling, transparently sheathed, gargoyle-mounted internationally known . . . figures. Megan Fox, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and—

  “Madonna ! Bitchin’!”

  “Melph meeeee!” Madonna whined, from within the sheath of oxygen permeable shellac. Under the shellac she wore a bit of filmy black lingerie and a lot of jewelry.

  “That’s got to be her for real,” Sterno breathed appreciatively. “She’s getting kind of old but . . . still makes a nice display.” He wondered at his own lack of sympathy for the kidnap victims; but then they’d long ago voluntarily abdicated their own humanity, so it all seemed very natural somehow . . . naturally unnatural . . .

  “Zis spot over here is being prepared for Beyoncé,” Vreedeez said, losing his accent halfway through the sentence.

  Madonna quivered within her sheath of semiflexible shellac . . .

  “Ach! Madonna is jealous!”

  “She looks sick, poor Madonna,” Amin observed. “Maybe you take her out a while, give her to me, I keep her a pet.”

  “We discussed that before, Idi,” Vreedeez gently chided. “You’d only kill her, and it’s too hard to get them sheathed and unsheathed . . .” He’d discarded the “German” accent entirely for the moment. “. . . if they die we simply open up the abdominal zipper and complete the taxidermization . . . But you are right: She does look under the . . . under der wezzer . . . a bit zick . . . P’uzz Leen, are der intravenous and extravenous tubes functional for Miss Madonna?”

  P’uzz Leen stroked his black mustache thoughtfully as he opened the Sustainability Panel and checked the various feeder tubes. Then he nodded. Said only, “Yes.”

  “Gut, gut . . . Vell, monitor her clozely . . .”

  They paused for refres
hments, brought by a mute (literally tongueless) tuxedo-dressed waiter. There was, Sterno noted, an electronic monitor anklet locked onto the waiter’s right ankle. Eyes deadened by despair, he offered them brandy and canapés on a silver platter.

  “Now over here, ve haff zuh Array uf Writerz . . . Michael Chabon . . . Stephanie Meyer . . . As you see ve haff and across from her, in rather, may I zay, very uncomfortable proxzzzzzimity, Mr. William Gibson . . .”

  “Hiya Bill,” Sterno said.

  Gibson—replete with his glasses and Arrow shirt—regarded him owlishly but didn’t try to reply. He at least had the dignity not to beg for a release that would never be forthcoming. Robbins by contrast whined piteously, making Amin laugh.

  “I vanted ve get William S. Burroughs or Thomas Pynchon, instead of Mr. Gibson, frankly, but Mr. Burroughs died before we complete zuh sustainable taxidermy process, und Mr. Pynchon . . . well, we went through four zeparate kidnapees zupposed to be Mr. Pynchon, but none of zem were really him . . .”

  “Over here looks like a kind of mixed bag . . .”

  “Ja, ve haff, Nicholas Cage und over here Brad and Angelina . . . here is Richard Simmons . . . it’s very funny, even in zuh sheath he tries to make der aerobics, very cute . . . und here ess David Letterman . . .”

  “No shit! Dave! Love this here ‘Stupid human trick.’ Dave!”

  “. . . und Arnold Schwarzenegger—he cry for a very long time, begging us much, Mr. Schwarzenegger . . . Dick Cheney, also whines very much . . . mixed bag as you zay . . . but over here ve haff Mr. David Copperfield, the magician . . .”

  Sterno had to laugh. “David Copperfield! Hey my man! David! Work out that Houdini escape thing yet?”

  “Here zuh fake guroos, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Deepak Chopra . . . Ah, observe . . .”

  Vreedeez reached out and unzipped the sealant over Chopra’s mouth. Chopra responded predictably, “You . . . you have my body but my soul roams free . . .”

  “Bullshit,” P’uzz Leen said, surprising Sterno.

  “. . . and I am sending vibrations into the quantum-uncertainty realm which will miraculously cause the destruction of this abomination . . . look to your Karma my friend . . .”

  P’uzz Leen reached up to zip Chopra’s mouth shut again and just before it closed Chopra burst out, “I am a very rich man! I will give you anything if . . .” Zip. “. . . Mumph merf yuff!”

  “Now that don’t break my heart,” Sterno said, chuckling.

  But something was bothering him . . .

  It bothered him increasingly, despite his mental rationales . . . that none of this bothered him.

  Just Assholes? Maybe. But these were people, after all.

  Vreedeez was smiling at him as he took him around to the rear of the house; the porch ran all the way around. “I veel you are . . .”

  “Could you, seriously, dispense with the fake accent?”

  Vreedeez shrugged rather sulkily. “If you like. You have your own . . . veneers. Sterno is not your real name and you are not the bad-ass you pretend to be. You’re a family man. And as for my accent—we’ve already taken a psyche-impression of me as the ‘Herr Doktur’ so it’s not necessary to continue it—we’ll edit out everything after that . . .”

  “What the hell are you talking about, man?”

  Vreedeez ignored the question. “You’re from Arkansas, by the way, aren’t you?”

  “Gotta problem with that?”

  “No, not at all, Mr., ah, ‘Sterno.’ It’s just data. As I started to say, a minute ago . . . you are having doubts about your own reactions to what you see here. It is written quite clearly on your face. I have read your sneering blog! You play-act, like so many fringe artists, at enjoying the suffering of fools, but real, high-intensity suffering, right here, in-your-face, is more than unsettling. And yet you are not as unsettled as some fragment of conscience in you tells you that you ought to be. And is that really any surprise? You’re an American. You take part in all sorts of butchery and cruelty routinely . . .”

  “Hey man that wasn’t my doing, none of it.”

  “No, no it wasn’t your doing, not directly. But you are a cell of the organism that did it although you and your friends pretend otherwise. And what did you do to stop it? Oh but I forgot: it’s hopeless, no? It’s all hopeless. And hopelessness is every cynic’s excuse for his enjoyment of his nation’s cruelty . . .”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on there, old pard—”

  “Don’t take offense. It’s just talk. More brandy? Good brandy, isn’t it? I see you’re wearing Nike tennis shoes?”

  “What? What the fuck difference does it make what tennis shoes I’m wearing?”

  “Adidas, like Spaulding, like many other American companies, sub-contract the manufacture of their products to sweat shops staffed by starved, enslaved, badly mistreated children. Small children.” He sounded more entertained by this fact than outraged. “Sometimes - surprisingly often - the children are tortured to get more production out of them: this happens in South America, in India, in Pakistan, in Malaysia, in other places. The American companies who subcontract to these foreign sweatshops, they of course know full well what is going on, and they make their excuses, but they really don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  “I heard something about it but . . .”

  “But you didn’t bother to find out more. You are insulated from the issue by your convenient sense of ‘hopelessness,’ by the cynical posturing that makes it easy for you to numb yourself . . . and hence you can look at my exquisite little atrocities here and feel more or less nothing. It is enough to take part in the organism, the big machine, that feeds you, that sustains you—”

  “Now wait-a-minute, when did you, a fuckin’ billionaire, suddenly turn into a Marxist?”

  “I advocate no political ideology. I see what is, I take note, it becomes data I use or discard. I am untouched by it. I am quite above politics. We all are.”

  “We? Who’s ‘we’? Sounds like there’s . . . an organization back of all this, somewhere . . .”

  “But of course there is . . . You may call us the Masters of True Will. We are those who use the chaotic magic of the world’s uncontrolled, blind outpouring of psychic bile, and what you call suffering, and through a kind of ritualization you cannot comprehend—as for example, this time, by turning internationally known figures into living gargoyles—we transform it all . . . into energy; and the energy we turn into . . . whatever we wish. For example, you have noticed that I somewhat resemble a friend of yours. But this is not my true appearance at all. Or is it? Was I that person all the time—undercover, so to speak, arranging deeper and more subtle levels of hypocrisy in the so-called ‘fringe art underground’? Who knows. I will say this: the ‘underground’ art scene has much more impact on the zeitgeist than it realizes . . . It is a back door into the collective unconscious—we find it quite useful.”

  “I . . . uh . . .” He looked at P’uzz Leen, who only shrugged, and then at Idi Amin.

  “Don’t look at me for answer,” Amin said. He had pulled his penis from his pants and was absent-mindedly massaging it. “I don’t understand him when he talks like this . . .”

  “Many are the rituals of mass chaos magic,” Vreedeez was saying. “Sometimes, for example, we arrange a small war, so we can transmute the massive outpouring of hypocrisy around the war—as well as, of course, take our part of the financial profits. I myself am a major stockholder in a company that is one of the world’s foremost manufacturers of landmines. Did you know that there are more functional, deployed landmines in Cambodia than there are people? Did you know that most landmine victims are civilians and a large number are children? I adore that! These are matters of personal pride to me. And of course the manufacturing of landmines and armaments is very important to the American economy—in which you take part. And you see some part of you knows this. Hence you must become numb to suffering, even when you see it in front of you, as you have today. Not all suffering is easy to shrug off
, wouldn’t you agree? You are disturbed by what you see—yet the relentless irony is this: All these ‘stars’ of the world stage, in our display—they are, as Lou Reed said, a ‘temporary thing,’ quite ephemeral, as in the famous Ozymandias poem, but in this case we can savor their significance in the media overmind, which is one layer of the energy structure that we manipulate through what is both art and ritual, to create a—”

  “You’re telling me way too much, man,” Sterno interrupted. He was looking at the forest, wondering if he could sprint into it before . . .

  Before what? P’uzz Leen didn’t look armed but probably was. He had the look of quiescent lethality about him.

  “Too much, Mr. Sterno? Too much what?”

  “I mean—you are planning on letting me go?”

  “You will go as free as a man ever does. Now then . . . Here you see—”

  “I don’t know if I want to see any more . . .”

  “Don’t be rude, Mr. ‘Sterno.’ Here you see—”

  “And listen, there are lots of people who know I came here.”

  “To be sure. As I was trying to say, here you see Tom Cruise and Stephen King—combined into one living-gargoyle-sheath—and if you’ll step closer . . . you see they’re still alive . . . Just a little closer, Mr. Sterno, look here—”

  Sterno stepped close—caught up by curiosity. Was it really Cruise? Tormented, half crushed, sallow, quite insane, the side of his face chewed away by Stephen King but yes—

  As he was looking at Cruise and King he was vaguely aware that P’uzz Leen was doing something—

  Something seen from the corner of his eye—

  Unzipping the—

  Tom Cruise’s finely-muscled arm drooped down, and twined ’round Sterno’s neck and pulled him up, off his feet; one of King’s arms was free now, too, grabbing Sterno by the jacket collar; Sterno struggled and screamed.