Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

After a snack that was more expensive than airport food and only a little tastier, we spent the rest of the day wandering through the museum looking at room after room of paintings and sculptures. There really were an awful lot of them, and by the time we finally stepped out into the twilit courtyard again my formerly magnificent brain had been pounded into submission.

“Well,” I said as we sauntered across the flagstones, “that was certainly a full day.”

“Oohhh,” she said, and her eyes were still large and bright, as they had been for most of the day. “That was absolutely incredible!” And she put an arm around me and nestled close, as if I had been personally responsible for creating the entire museum. It made walking a bit more difficult, but it was, after all, the sort of thing one did on a honeymoon in Paris, so I let her cling and we staggered across the courtyard and through the gate into the street.

As we turned the corner a young woman with more facial piercings than I would have thought possible stepped in front of us and thrust a piece of paper into Rita’s hands. “Now to see the real art,” she said. “Tomorrow night, eh?”

“Merci,” Rita said blankly, and the woman moved past, thrusting her papers at the rest of the evening crowd.

“I think she probably could have gotten a few more earrings on the left side,” I said as Rita frowned at the paper. “And she missed a spot on her forehead.”

“Oh,” said Rita. “It’s a performance piece.”

Now it was my turn to stare blankly, and I did. “What is?”

“Oh, that’s so exciting,” she said. “And we don’t have anything to do tomorrow night. We’re going!”

“Going where?”

“This is just perfect,” she said.

And maybe Paris really is a magical place after all. Because Rita was right.

TWO

PERFECTION WAS IN A SMALL AND SHADOWED STREET not too far from the Seine, in what Rita breathlessly informed me was the Rive Gauche, and it took the form of a storefront performance space called Réalité. We had hurried through dinner—even skipping dessert!—in order to get there at seven-thirty, as the flyer had urged. There were about two dozen people inside when we got there, clustered together in small groups in front of a series of flat-screen TV monitors mounted on the walls. It all seemed very gallery-like, until I picked up one of the brochures. It was printed in French, English, and German. I skipped ahead to the English and began to read.

After only a few sentences I felt my eyebrows climbing up my forehead. It was a manifesto of sorts, written with a clunky passion that did not translate well, except possibly into German. It spoke of expanding the frontiers of art into new areas of perception, and destroying the arbitrary line between art and life drawn by the archaic and emasculated Academy. And even though some pioneering work had been done by Chris Burden, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, David Nebreda, and others, it was time to smash the wall and move forward into the twenty-first century. And tonight, with a new piece called Jennifer’s Leg, we were going to do just that.

It was all extremely passionate and idealistic, which I have always found to be a very dangerous combination, and I would have found it a little funny—except that Someone Else was finding it so, more than a little; somewhere deep in the dungeons of Castle Dexter I heard a soft and sibilant chuckle from the Dark Passenger, and that amusement, as always, heightened my senses and brought me up on point. I mean, really

; the Passenger was enjoying an art exhibit?

I looked around the gallery with a different sort of awareness. The muted whispering of the people clustered by the monitors no longer seemed to be the hush of respect toward art. Now I could see an edge of disbelief and even shock in their near silence.

I looked at Rita. She was frowning as she read, and shaking her head. “I’ve heard of Chris Burden, he was American,” she said. “But this other one, Schwarzkogler?” She stumbled over the name—after all, she had been studying French all this time, not German. “Oh,” she said, and she began to blush. “It says he … he cut off his own—” She looked up at the people around the room, staring silently at something or other on the screens. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Maybe we should go,” I suggested, as my inner friend’s amusement climbed steadily up the scale.

But Rita had already moved to stand in front of the first screen, and as she saw what it showed her mouth dropped open and began to twitch slightly, as if she was trying and failing to pronounce a very long and difficult word. “That’s … that’s … that’s—” she said.

And a quick look at the screen showed that Rita was right again: it really was.

On the monitor a video clip showed a young woman dressed in an archaic stripper’s costume of bangles and feathers. But instead of the kind of sexually provocative pose the outfit might have called for, she stood with one leg up on the table and, in a short and soundless loop of about fifteen seconds, she brought a whirring table saw down on her leg and threw her head back, mouth wide open in anguish. Then the clip jumped back to the start and she did the whole thing again.

“Dear God,” Rita said. Then she shook her head. “That’s … that’s some kind of trick photography. It HAS to be.”

I was not so sure. In the first place, I had already been tipped off by the Passenger that something very interesting was going on here. And in the second place, the expression on the woman’s face was quite familiar to me from my own artistic endeavors. It was genuine pain, I was quite sure, real and extreme agony—and yet, in all my extensive research I had never before encountered someone willing to inflict this much of it on themselves. No wonder the Passenger was having a fit of the giggles. Not that I found it funny: if this sort of thing took hold, I would have to find a new hobby.

Still, it was an interesting twist, and I might have been more than willing to look at the other video clips under ordinary circumstances. But it did seem to me that I had some kind of responsibility toward Rita, and this was clearly not the sort of thing she could see and still maintain a sunny outlook. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go get some dessert.”

But she just shook her head and repeated, “It HAS to be a trick,” and she moved on to the next screen.

I moved with her and was rewarded with another fifteen-second loop of the young woman in the same costume. In this one she actually appeared to be removing a chunk of flesh from her leg. Her expression here moved into dumb and endless agony, as if the pain had gone on long enough that she was used to it, but it still hurt. And strangely enough, this expression reminded me of the face of the woman at the end of a movie Vince Masuoka had shown at my bachelor party—I believe it was called Frat House Gang Bang. There was a gleam of I-Showed-You satisfaction visible through the fatigue and the pain as she looked down at the six-inch patch between her knee and her shin where all the flesh was peeled off to reveal the bone.

“Oh my God,” Rita murmured. And for some reason she moved on to the next monitor.

I do not pretend to understand human beings. For the most part I try to maintain a logical outlook on life, and this is usually a real disadvantage in trying to figure out what people really think they’re doing. I mean, as far as I could tell, Rita truly was as sweet and pleasant and optimistic as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The sight of a dead cat beside the road could move her to tears. And yet here she was, methodically moving through an exhibit that was clearly far worse than anything she had ever imagined. She knew that the next clip would be more of the same, graphic and appalling beyond belief. And yet, instead of sprinting for the exit, she was calmly moving on to the next screen.