Goldenhands
Chrysocheir turned, all elegance in his vintage Edwardian smoking jacket, and smiled a smile of such good nature that it almost distracted Hays from the ghastly organic sculpture at his host’s right shoulder. Hays tried not to pay any attention to the thing but he was beginning to sweat and the swinging movements of his vision had started to make the thing seem alive.
Why in the name of God had he ever taken up this story? As if he didn’t have enough issues with sleep, anxiety and all the rest. His breathing eased a little.
“Doctor Chrysocheir, the story I am doing will question your motives in using human remains for the purposes of art.”
“I look forward to discussing my work with you, Mister Hays, but I suspect that you are not comfortable with your assignment.”
For the first time in almost an hour Hays managed a genuine smile.
“Doctor, I have a horror of corpses which I cannot explain. I have seen people die and I have been at several wakes, none of which bothered me but this…”
For the first time Hays looked directly at the thing that had once been a man but was now just bits stretched out and extended from a fully exposed spinal column that now served to support the whole horrible exhibit.
“…is beyond me.”
Chrysocheir turned and looked up at his work.
“My original thinking with this one was to demonstrate the centrality of the spine and how all movement, extension and support comes from that long, beautifully curved piece of machinery. The head was a later idea.”
Hays felt his guts turn cold as he looked at the head, sliced as neatly as bread and stacked as neatly as toast in a rack, the cold grey of the brain slices showing subtly between the narrow gaps illuminated from behind by the brilliant sunlight outside.
“Mister Hays, perhaps it would help if you were straight with me about how you intend to represent my work. I assume that your editor does not approve either.”
Hays shook his head.
“Oh, no, she is a tougher piece of work than me, but she left the emphasis to me and it’s either a piece dealing with the unique beauty of the work or it’s a piece dealing with the ghoulish doctor who panders to the dying wishes of freaks and mutilates their corpses before displaying them in shocking poses.”
Chrysocheir pointed at him, with hands surely too beautiful to ever handle bleeding, cold body parts, and smiled again.
“Then, my friend, it is my job to convince you of the beauty of my work.”
Hays returned the smile nervously.
“Please don’t tell me your laboratory is in the basement, Doctor.”
“I am an artist. We have studios, not laboratories.”
Hays stood and followed Chrysocheir.
“I don’t think that was the answer I wanted.”
The studio was in the basement but it proved to be a model of hygiene and tidiness. Along two long walls were stainless steel freezer cabinets and at the far end glass fronted cabinets containing a terrifying array of surgical and DIY equipment.
“Perhaps it would help if we started with something not too disturbing, Mister Hays.”
He pulled open the first freezer cabinet. Hays prepared to close his eyes but was instead greeted with the sight of a beautiful girl, lying back at a 45 degree angle and packed in with ice. Apart from her skin colour she seemed to be asleep.
“Alice. Aged 23 and victim of a fatal congenital condition. She wants her beauty preserved forever and that is what I will do for her. When I have completed the technique she will look even better than she does now and she will look that way forever. I refer to the technique as freezing but it is really a chemical process.”
He closed the door reverently and moved to the next cabinet. The occupant was a middle aged, overweight and astonishingly ugly man.
“Stan. Aged 42 and victim of a heart attack. His appearance scared people, so he said. Personally I think he could have done with just losing a couple of kilos but Stan wants to really scare people now so I will prepare him and then take him apart. When he is finally displayed he will scare people, believe me.”
Chrysocheir closed the door.
“These people volunteered for this process and none of them is used by me for anything they would have objected to. Alice did not want cut up so I will not put a scalpel anywhere near her. Stan wanted butchered so I will bring out the biggest saws I have. My name means Goldhand, Mr Hays but in relation to my work I like to think of them as golden hands.”
They returned to the lounge.
“Doctor Chrysocheir, may I have the addresses of the families of the people you have downstairs at the moment? It would add something to the piece to have their thoughts on what is going to happen.”
“I doubt you will get much from them, but the deceased all signed documents permitting free enquiries into anything about them.”
All in all a pleasant enough first interview even if he had to walk past the guts and brain-rack exhibit when leaving.
~~~~~~
As he had been told the families were either unwilling to speak with him or had lost touch with the deceased years before. All except Alice’s mother whose drunken contribution fell into three highly unequal parts. Great heaving sobs were alarmingly replaced by screaming anger, but eventually Hays struck gold and Alice’s mother calmed down for a few minutes.
“Beautiful healthy girl, Mister Hays. Bad enough she just dropped down dead but to discover that she knew that ghoul and had signed her body over to him.”
Hays was sitting in a dirty armchair that had lost any sort of support decades before. For the first few minutes he had been genuinely concerned that, if this insane woman attacked, he would never be able to get out of the fabric bucket that the seat had become.
“Did you say Alice was healthy?”
The mother stopped babbling and looked at Hays with an almost charming look of wet eyed innocence.
“Of course. She died from a drug overdose. The police found her after someone phoned and they found the papers signing her body over to that Christo-whatever his name is.”
Hays did not bother asking if Alice had been a drug user. Most parents either did not know or were in basalt hard denial. He stood up.
“Thank you for your help. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Can you stop him cutting her up, Mister Hays?”
He didn’t look back but it was the first time she had sounded fully lucid and the note in her voice was the ultimate despair of someone who had hit rock bottom only to find that, even there, the ground was unsteady.
“I’ll try,” he said quietly and left, clicking the door gently shut.
~~~~~~
Hays stepped out of his car and looked over to the left where Chrysocheir’s neighbours were having a children’s garden party. Could anything be more normal? Hays had briefly considered that Chrysocheir might be killing his exhibits but the whole idea seemed so absurdly melodramatic that he had rejected it immediately. And why bother when there were so many weirdos prepared to hand over the goods without a struggle.
Chrysocheir was clearly not expecting visitors and the suave smoking jacket had been replaced by a grubby dressing gown and a half empty beer bottle stood on the fireplace. Somehow the casual domesticity made the spine and brain exhibit in the room even worse.
“Mister Hays.” He stood up and extended an elegant hand completely unfazed by being caught out of uniform. “You must excuse me. On Tuesdays I tend to slob out and watch TV.”
Hays did not take the offered hand.
“I know Alice did not have any congenital problem, at least nothing her mother knew about.”
Chrysocheir dropped the hand.
“Ah. Well not all congenital problems are physical. She was a very disturbed young woman. I have never met her mother but, if what Alice told me about her is even half true, then you would understand why she saw the world the way she did and why she chose the way she will exist in it for the rest of time.”
Hays sat down. “Doctor Chrysocheir, did Alice kill herself after signing her body over to you?”
Chrysocheir shook his head immediately and emphatically and stood up from his armchair.
“Look, Mister Hays, I do what I do for many reasons. I hoped that the piece you are writing would either shed some light on why I feel there is beauty in it but, at the worst, it would be another ghoul piece which is always good for selling out my touring exhibitions.”
He stood and walked to the exhibit.
“Come over here, Mr Hays. I want to try to show you something beyond the meat on this pedestal.”
Hays approached the thing slowly. He looked up at this ghastly travesty of a human body and saw only horror; the horror of the flesh exposed. The horror of the hidden workings which only God should see.
“Believe it or not, Mr. Hays, I am deeply religious. I believe in God and I believe in life, to such an extent that I see no sanctity in the body at all. It is a machine, a device to process nutrients or to deliver reproductive material. It is a distraction from any genuine spirituality and even in death there is just corruption.”
Hays sighed wearily and went back to his seat.
“What is happening to me, doctor? I want to do the lazy thing and go home and write up the ghoul version of your story but that’s the cowardly thing to do, to write you up as a ghoul just because I am afraid of you and your creations.”
Chrysocheir nodded, his face all gentleness.
“I don’t think you are scared. Perhaps just a little weary with life. Do you think you could cope with something truly terrifying if it helped you to see better?”
Hays looked up from his own lap.
“I don’t know”
“It will help but it will be something you have to deal with alone. And like so much of the truth it doesn’t make for a good magazine piece, but I’ve read your stuff and it’s good. You’ll be able to cobble some satisfactory story or other together”
~~~~~~
Alice stood in a steel brace that covered most of her body apart from the shoulders and head. Hays had expected the smell of preservatives but there was only an impossibly deep cold.
“Alice is, as you have so cleverly ascertained, in perfect health. The only pain Alice ever suffered was from life itself and she was referred to me by a friend who knew how suicidal she was becoming.”
Chrysocheir stepped back a little.
“This is art, Mr. Hays. Whether you like these creations or not they are my art and there is more, much more, to them than just physical exhibits. Real art, the sort of art than can reduce a grown man to tears is more than just paint, or clay, or flesh.”
He stepped out of Hays’ line of sight.
“Look into her eyes.”
Hays slowly looked up and into Alice’s shining, clear eyes. Ghoulish, ghastly but the job Chrysocheir had done was perfect.
“Look, damn it!” hissed Chrysocheir. He now held Hays’ shoulder firmly. “Look!”
Hays looked and looked into the deep reflections in Alice’s brown eyes. Frozen and empty and then, for the briefest moment, a flicker somewhere deep inside.
Hays stepped back so suddenly that, had it not been for Chrysocheir’s hand on his shoulder, he would have fallen.
“Sweet Jesus. She’s alive.”
Chrysocheir patted Hays’ shoulder gently, ensuring he was steady.
“Alive indeed and once the process has been completed she won’t need the freezers to maintain her beauty while she thinks her thoughts, safe from the ravages of time and the abuses of the world.”
Hays felt his mind recoiling from what he had seen even as Chrysocheir gently led him out of the studio and back up to the lounge. As they entered the room Hays caught sight of the first exhibit he had seen in this house. Totally numb he walked up to it and looked into the eyes, each one neatly segmented into three. It took a moment but he saw the same flicker he had seen in Alice. Part of him simply wanted it not to be alive, another knew that the little emotional peace he had ever had was gone forever.
~~~~~~
Chrysocheir stood in the gallery and took the applause of the crowd with gentle charm and good humour. The controversy over this exhibition had been more than drowned out by the involvement of the respected journalist David Hays and Chrysocheir was overwhelmed by donations of money as well as promises of corpses when the owners had finished with them.
Today’s centrepiece was attracting interest and ridiculous financial offers. As he turned down the latest seven figure sum (in pounds sterling) he took a moment to explain to the disappointed would-be owner.
“No. David was a disturbed man but he was a friend. Such a shame he only lived a few months after sorting out his emotional problems, but his wishes could not have been clearer in his will.”
Chrysocheir smiled and turned to the squatting figure behind him. With arm outstretched in the search for understanding, and back brutally ripped open by the scourges of life, David Hays had come to represent pretty much anything any visitor might be looking for. Chrysocheir leaned down and gazed into the living eyes of the man who had finally seen that there was a better way than despair, oblivion or suicide.
Then he returned to his audience.
End
Why in the name of God had he ever taken up this story? As if he didn’t have enough issues with sleep, anxiety and all the rest. His breathing eased a little.
“Doctor Chrysocheir, the story I am doing will question your motives in using human remains for the purposes of art.”
“I look forward to discussing my work with you, Mister Hays, but I suspect that you are not comfortable with your assignment.”
For the first time in almost an hour Hays managed a genuine smile.
“Doctor, I have a horror of corpses which I cannot explain. I have seen people die and I have been at several wakes, none of which bothered me but this…”
For the first time Hays looked directly at the thing that had once been a man but was now just bits stretched out and extended from a fully exposed spinal column that now served to support the whole horrible exhibit.
“…is beyond me.”
Chrysocheir turned and looked up at his work.
“My original thinking with this one was to demonstrate the centrality of the spine and how all movement, extension and support comes from that long, beautifully curved piece of machinery. The head was a later idea.”
Hays felt his guts turn cold as he looked at the head, sliced as neatly as bread and stacked as neatly as toast in a rack, the cold grey of the brain slices showing subtly between the narrow gaps illuminated from behind by the brilliant sunlight outside.
“Mister Hays, perhaps it would help if you were straight with me about how you intend to represent my work. I assume that your editor does not approve either.”
Hays shook his head.
“Oh, no, she is a tougher piece of work than me, but she left the emphasis to me and it’s either a piece dealing with the unique beauty of the work or it’s a piece dealing with the ghoulish doctor who panders to the dying wishes of freaks and mutilates their corpses before displaying them in shocking poses.”
Chrysocheir pointed at him, with hands surely too beautiful to ever handle bleeding, cold body parts, and smiled again.
“Then, my friend, it is my job to convince you of the beauty of my work.”
Hays returned the smile nervously.
“Please don’t tell me your laboratory is in the basement, Doctor.”
“I am an artist. We have studios, not laboratories.”
Hays stood and followed Chrysocheir.
“I don’t think that was the answer I wanted.”
The studio was in the basement but it proved to be a model of hygiene and tidiness. Along two long walls were stainless steel freezer cabinets and at the far end glass fronted cabinets containing a terrifying array of surgical and DIY equipment.
“Perhaps it would help if we started with something not too disturbing, Mister Hays.”
He pulled open the first freezer cabinet. Hays prepared to close his eyes but was instead greeted with the sight of a beautiful girl, lying back at a 45 degree angle and packed in with ice. Apart from her skin colour she seemed to be asleep.
“Alice. Aged 23 and victim of a fatal congenital condition. She wants her beauty preserved forever and that is what I will do for her. When I have completed the technique she will look even better than she does now and she will look that way forever. I refer to the technique as freezing but it is really a chemical process.”
He closed the door reverently and moved to the next cabinet. The occupant was a middle aged, overweight and astonishingly ugly man.
“Stan. Aged 42 and victim of a heart attack. His appearance scared people, so he said. Personally I think he could have done with just losing a couple of kilos but Stan wants to really scare people now so I will prepare him and then take him apart. When he is finally displayed he will scare people, believe me.”
Chrysocheir closed the door.
“These people volunteered for this process and none of them is used by me for anything they would have objected to. Alice did not want cut up so I will not put a scalpel anywhere near her. Stan wanted butchered so I will bring out the biggest saws I have. My name means Goldhand, Mr Hays but in relation to my work I like to think of them as golden hands.”
They returned to the lounge.
“Doctor Chrysocheir, may I have the addresses of the families of the people you have downstairs at the moment? It would add something to the piece to have their thoughts on what is going to happen.”
“I doubt you will get much from them, but the deceased all signed documents permitting free enquiries into anything about them.”
All in all a pleasant enough first interview even if he had to walk past the guts and brain-rack exhibit when leaving.
~~~~~~
As he had been told the families were either unwilling to speak with him or had lost touch with the deceased years before. All except Alice’s mother whose drunken contribution fell into three highly unequal parts. Great heaving sobs were alarmingly replaced by screaming anger, but eventually Hays struck gold and Alice’s mother calmed down for a few minutes.
“Beautiful healthy girl, Mister Hays. Bad enough she just dropped down dead but to discover that she knew that ghoul and had signed her body over to him.”
Hays was sitting in a dirty armchair that had lost any sort of support decades before. For the first few minutes he had been genuinely concerned that, if this insane woman attacked, he would never be able to get out of the fabric bucket that the seat had become.
“Did you say Alice was healthy?”
The mother stopped babbling and looked at Hays with an almost charming look of wet eyed innocence.
“Of course. She died from a drug overdose. The police found her after someone phoned and they found the papers signing her body over to that Christo-whatever his name is.”
Hays did not bother asking if Alice had been a drug user. Most parents either did not know or were in basalt hard denial. He stood up.
“Thank you for your help. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Can you stop him cutting her up, Mister Hays?”
He didn’t look back but it was the first time she had sounded fully lucid and the note in her voice was the ultimate despair of someone who had hit rock bottom only to find that, even there, the ground was unsteady.
“I’ll try,” he said quietly and left, clicking the door gently shut.
~~~~~~
Hays stepped out of his car and looked over to the left where Chrysocheir’s neighbours were having a children’s garden party. Could anything be more normal? Hays had briefly considered that Chrysocheir might be killing his exhibits but the whole idea seemed so absurdly melodramatic that he had rejected it immediately. And why bother when there were so many weirdos prepared to hand over the goods without a struggle.
Chrysocheir was clearly not expecting visitors and the suave smoking jacket had been replaced by a grubby dressing gown and a half empty beer bottle stood on the fireplace. Somehow the casual domesticity made the spine and brain exhibit in the room even worse.
“Mister Hays.” He stood up and extended an elegant hand completely unfazed by being caught out of uniform. “You must excuse me. On Tuesdays I tend to slob out and watch TV.”
Hays did not take the offered hand.
“I know Alice did not have any congenital problem, at least nothing her mother knew about.”
Chrysocheir dropped the hand.
“Ah. Well not all congenital problems are physical. She was a very disturbed young woman. I have never met her mother but, if what Alice told me about her is even half true, then you would understand why she saw the world the way she did and why she chose the way she will exist in it for the rest of time.”
Hays sat down. “Doctor Chrysocheir, did Alice kill herself after signing her body over to you?”
Chrysocheir shook his head immediately and emphatically and stood up from his armchair.
“Look, Mister Hays, I do what I do for many reasons. I hoped that the piece you are writing would either shed some light on why I feel there is beauty in it but, at the worst, it would be another ghoul piece which is always good for selling out my touring exhibitions.”
He stood and walked to the exhibit.
“Come over here, Mr Hays. I want to try to show you something beyond the meat on this pedestal.”
Hays approached the thing slowly. He looked up at this ghastly travesty of a human body and saw only horror; the horror of the flesh exposed. The horror of the hidden workings which only God should see.
“Believe it or not, Mr. Hays, I am deeply religious. I believe in God and I believe in life, to such an extent that I see no sanctity in the body at all. It is a machine, a device to process nutrients or to deliver reproductive material. It is a distraction from any genuine spirituality and even in death there is just corruption.”
Hays sighed wearily and went back to his seat.
“What is happening to me, doctor? I want to do the lazy thing and go home and write up the ghoul version of your story but that’s the cowardly thing to do, to write you up as a ghoul just because I am afraid of you and your creations.”
Chrysocheir nodded, his face all gentleness.
“I don’t think you are scared. Perhaps just a little weary with life. Do you think you could cope with something truly terrifying if it helped you to see better?”
Hays looked up from his own lap.
“I don’t know”
“It will help but it will be something you have to deal with alone. And like so much of the truth it doesn’t make for a good magazine piece, but I’ve read your stuff and it’s good. You’ll be able to cobble some satisfactory story or other together”
~~~~~~
Alice stood in a steel brace that covered most of her body apart from the shoulders and head. Hays had expected the smell of preservatives but there was only an impossibly deep cold.
“Alice is, as you have so cleverly ascertained, in perfect health. The only pain Alice ever suffered was from life itself and she was referred to me by a friend who knew how suicidal she was becoming.”
Chrysocheir stepped back a little.
“This is art, Mr. Hays. Whether you like these creations or not they are my art and there is more, much more, to them than just physical exhibits. Real art, the sort of art than can reduce a grown man to tears is more than just paint, or clay, or flesh.”
He stepped out of Hays’ line of sight.
“Look into her eyes.”
Hays slowly looked up and into Alice’s shining, clear eyes. Ghoulish, ghastly but the job Chrysocheir had done was perfect.
“Look, damn it!” hissed Chrysocheir. He now held Hays’ shoulder firmly. “Look!”
Hays looked and looked into the deep reflections in Alice’s brown eyes. Frozen and empty and then, for the briefest moment, a flicker somewhere deep inside.
Hays stepped back so suddenly that, had it not been for Chrysocheir’s hand on his shoulder, he would have fallen.
“Sweet Jesus. She’s alive.”
Chrysocheir patted Hays’ shoulder gently, ensuring he was steady.
“Alive indeed and once the process has been completed she won’t need the freezers to maintain her beauty while she thinks her thoughts, safe from the ravages of time and the abuses of the world.”
Hays felt his mind recoiling from what he had seen even as Chrysocheir gently led him out of the studio and back up to the lounge. As they entered the room Hays caught sight of the first exhibit he had seen in this house. Totally numb he walked up to it and looked into the eyes, each one neatly segmented into three. It took a moment but he saw the same flicker he had seen in Alice. Part of him simply wanted it not to be alive, another knew that the little emotional peace he had ever had was gone forever.
~~~~~~
Chrysocheir stood in the gallery and took the applause of the crowd with gentle charm and good humour. The controversy over this exhibition had been more than drowned out by the involvement of the respected journalist David Hays and Chrysocheir was overwhelmed by donations of money as well as promises of corpses when the owners had finished with them.
Today’s centrepiece was attracting interest and ridiculous financial offers. As he turned down the latest seven figure sum (in pounds sterling) he took a moment to explain to the disappointed would-be owner.
“No. David was a disturbed man but he was a friend. Such a shame he only lived a few months after sorting out his emotional problems, but his wishes could not have been clearer in his will.”
Chrysocheir smiled and turned to the squatting figure behind him. With arm outstretched in the search for understanding, and back brutally ripped open by the scourges of life, David Hays had come to represent pretty much anything any visitor might be looking for. Chrysocheir leaned down and gazed into the living eyes of the man who had finally seen that there was a better way than despair, oblivion or suicide.
Then he returned to his audience.
End