chapter thirty-two

Drawings of Shoes

“See a shoe and pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck,” struck Frank as being an absolutely infantile caption for the beautiful drawings of footwear that he was considering in the Bodely Gallery. Here he found crass consumerism and delight in form engaged in a mutually debasing act of desperate onanism. At least he was aware of the uses to which he was putting his bio-chemical artistry. He took a long draught of the fizzing champagne offered by the gallery and noted the pale image of the artist himself distorted in the base of the fluted glass as it emptied. Warhol was propping himself against a fire extinguisher and opening a pack of Luckies, his eyes down, avoiding contact. Frank felt the urge to talk to him, misanthrope to misanthrope, but then realised he had nothing to say.

“Isn’t this hot, hot, hot?” Spong tapped Frank on the ass and went directly to Warhol, offering him a Chesterfield. Frank watched the cigarette being accepted, Spong providing the light. He wondered what they were talking about and then dismissed the subject as he turned his attention to another image. Warhol was, like himself, a hot property amongst the ultra wealthy of New York, and it was hardly a duty to enjoy the graphic delights presented in the gallery.

Frank had purged all thoughts other than those of line, colour and composition when he felt another pinch on his left buttock. “He wants to film me! He has a film project; you could be in it too. Why don’t you chat to him?” Frank wanted to turn and put his father’s impossibly sharp rock probe through Spong’s chest, but instead smiled. “I might well do that. How’s Jack?”

“Jack is Jack. This is the new thing! Who cars about pictures of the flag any more? Shoes are the new flags, consumers are the modern Medicis. Wealthy or not; although we prefer wealthy of course,” said Spong, and he pinched Frank’s ass again. Frank took a deep breath and blew the carbon dioxide out upon his fingernails. Spong’s end would be slow, painful and humiliating.

Frank watched Warhol leave with Spong, but not before he had an invitation to the filming session. After meeting Spong in Central Park he had conceived of a terrible vengeance, and he now had forty eight hours to perfect it. He could no longer take in the drawings; his mouth was dry and his fingers shook, crumpling the cigarette before letting it fall into the ash tray. He ignored several of his most illustrious female clients as he made his way to the street and had no recollection of the short walk to his Manhattan apartment.

Focussing the microscope brought calm. Now he was operating on a biological scale; a chemical scale, hearing the same internal clock that had begun to tick in the cavern some eighty-eight years earlier. He looked at the cells, his own cells which he had placed in the nutriment a few days earlier and noted how they had already multiplied at an astonishing rate. The power of the nutriment to foster life and promote growth was always remarkable, but this time he was not interested in progressing life; that was a gift he had reserved always for himself. Right now he was interested in inhibiting the power of the nutriment, and he had a virus which he hoped would stop the inexorable vitality it contained, and leave cells open to any of the millions of pathogens which fill the natural world. He carefully introduced the virus to the culture; saw it large dark and initially spherical amongst his rapidly replicating cells. Quite soon, although he had no idea how much time had passed, he noticed filaments joining the healthy cells to the larger dark mass. He left his laboratory and went out onto the balcony, where New York had achieved a brief impression of peace before dawn.

From somewhere came a cry; female, and the rattle of sheet metal. He looked for the moon, and found instead the full yellow circle of a clock on a nearby office-block. He let the night absorb him and imagined several million human actors frozen in whatever small screams their existences at that moment, required. He lifted his gaze to the stars and found them few and distant and infinitely cold.