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  He seemed satisfied with that—or at least mollified—and we finished the trip in silence except for a few directions. Turn here. Pull in there.

  Below Sunset off the Strip there existed a number of big-ticket hotels not on the paparazzi map, hidden-panel sybararies that catered to a clientele who paid large for guaranteed privacy and excellent room service with no questions asked and no request too outrageous. Security was plainclothes and omnipresent.

  As we debarked in the parking garage my captor advised: “Signal. Shout. Do anything and you’re all done. Be businesslike.”

  I nodded. Without a title or pseudonym to mark him, I had shortformed him in my mind as Gun Guy.

  Suite 240 rated a presidential subtitle and came with polarized blackout glass. You could fire up a searchlight inside and no one outside the building would see a hint. My new crew and I entered the largest room of four in the suite, lavishly appointed. Cigarette smoke unreeled in lazy webs across the air. The occupants of the room had butted about half a pack in waiting.

  Gun Guy steered me around for introductions.

  “Elias, say hello to Cognac.”

  Seated on a wingback sofa was a brassy, implanted redhead who resembled whats-her-name, that British soft-core celebutard. She had on steel-tipped spike heels, about two parallel miles of nylon stocking, a garter belt, an extremely constrictive bustier, and little else except her work smile. I noticed her jade-green eyes were contacts. Several pounds of burnished hair like a four-alarm blaze. She waved perfunctorily. “Meetcha.”

  With an exaggerated stage whisper my keeper added, “I don’t think Cognac is her real name, do you?”

  There was also a birdy older man wearing John Lennon spectacles. Hair plugs marched in a straight line across the top of his face like a row of shoe polish–brown cornstalks.

  “Cognac there is a prostitute,” said the gunman, “and this fellow here we’ll call the Professor, because he’d pop a clot if I mentioned his real name.”

  Indeed, the Professor immediately turned crimson at the fleeting notion of exposure, and coughed artificially to cover his panic. I realized I was probably looking at another ten grand each, for these two.

  “And in here, you’ll find our special guest star.”

  He led me into the master bedroom. On the California king was a large vinyl body bag containing either a person or two hundred pounds of really expensive appetizers. He unzipped it and unfortunately, shazam, dead man. My gut plummeted.

  Nobody I knew, but somebody I could recognize, and put a name to.

  * * *

  You’ve seen Clavius’s work everywhere. If you lived in New York City, you might decide to attend a party or elite gallery function based on whether Clavius might actually show up. If you worked in an upscale office there was probably a Clavius print on the wall, framed in brushed aluminum, and if you’re upscale enough, it would be numbered and signed with his distinctive scrolled “C.” Celebrities queue to his favor. Sous-chefs fawned and prepared off-the-menu vegetarian dishes for him. He occasionally surfaced among luminaries on the news; more rarely on pop rot like E! or Entertainment Tonight.

  Touching the finer things by proxy has always been a big deal in America. Who’s-who has cash value, like getting your hair chopped and dyed at Talia’s in the 90210. Bonus points if Talia comped you.

  Of course, Clavius wasn’t his real name, but that was de rigueur for men of his stature. His few approved photos depicted him as a florid Teuton with a severe crew cut and the penetrating gaze of an ocean carnivore. We met about five years ago at a place called the New World Inkworks, which no longer existed in Los Angeles … as did most things in Los Angeles.

  New World Inkworks was not one of those 24/7 Xeroxeries, but an actual publishing time warp that reeked of the old school: hot glue guns, rubber cement, rubyliths, pasteups, X-Acto knives, and real, live physical layout done on light boards. Its professed specialty was high-end lithographs and limited edition art prints on special acid-free stock, many done for the Getty Museum’s gift shop. The owner, kommandant, and chief ramrod was a man straight out of a Broadway road show of The Front Page named Harry “Boss” Wiley who—yes—actually wore the visor and arm garters you’re thinking of right now.

  Due to the looming specter of digital everything and the need to keep the lights on at New World, Boss had neatly divided his profession to address both high culture and low. He had doggedly cemented a reputation as the go-to guy for artsy-fartsy print work while cultivating an after-hours relationship with more mainstream media. In other words, by day he actualized canonical art for the masses, and after dark he kept his staff comfortably busy with porn, for the real masses. More American than Boss you just didn’t get, as an entrepreneur.

  My own lack of a studio, facilities, portfolio, repute, and walking cash brought me into Boss’s orbit. In one of three back rooms Boss kept a behemoth of a retired Linotype machine, despite the space it absorbed, purely in honor of his romance with print. Next to that Linotype I humped many graveyard shifts running off-color folio pages for the likes of Pubes!, Just Past Jailbait, FunBag, Foxy Moxie, Drip Groove, Nipplemania, Sluts ’N Tarts, Gashette, Hollywood Loaf, Spankers, Grease Man, 2 Young 2 Date, Hot Trotting Tots, Cave Boy, Wet ’N Squishy, Yeast Beasts, Fistful of Udders, The Diary of Gloria Hole, Muff Divas, Great Big Onez, Marine Discharge, Blood Vamps, Gooey, and a variety of their high-quality sister publications. The sheet stacks were a never-ending catalogue of artificially moistened vaginae, peter-pumped cocks, leering browneyes, and glassy mannequin stares in ceaseless aggro recombination. You get inured to the flood tide pretty quickly if you don’t want to start dropping letters from the alphabet soup made of your brain by the busywork or the Mandarin hours.

  The payoff, for me, was the serviceable darkroom Boss also maintained. It was all mine when the adult entertainment portion of my shift was completed.

  I’d never liked color photography much, although I’d done my share. Attenuated night vision heightens your discrimination of gray tones, not color, which is why I keep the vitamin A in my medicine chest—to encourage more rhodopsin in the rods of my retinas.

  Clavius, as it happened, was attracted by the angle of having a porn sweatshop grind out the posters and prints for a show planned at a West Village gallery called Beneath 5th Street. His highbrow reputation was in no way compromised by his excellent nose for sleaze and he needed a confluence of the two in order to maintain street cred and his cachet as an edgy innovator. So Clavius approached Boss with nearly all the ancillary work for the show whose title won him his big-time sobriquet—“C.”

  It was a gathering of earth-toned, biomechanoid photo studies, post-Expressionist, post-post-Industrial, pre-Millennial; a style that has since become known, in our new century, as Meltdown, to predate it from “mashup.” Now, today, Clavius had left all that far behind in the quaint past. I looped all of it in the darkroom at New World Inkworks, and since Clavius was so fussy about quality control, he hung around while the waterfall of porn flew from the presses. We got to talking and it wasn’t long before he said, “I’ve got something perfect for a fellow like you, if you think you’re game.”

  I told him what cameras I had, what equipment. Showed him some samples of my own work. He was already sold—more or less—due to a conflict of schedule, and I was an at-hand solution. He pulled a couple of four-by-fives out of his Halliburton case. Hot-lit full bodies of a woman with bangs, long, straight, flat hair that looked to be the color of café crème, and huge luminous eyes, almost like a siren from Japanese anime brought to physical life. The eyes were the thing. They commanded your attention, sucked you in, and dealt no mercy.

  “This is Skorpia,” he said, then laughed. “No shit, that’s really her name; she’s Greek. My problem is that I have to be at ‘C’—my show—at precisely the same time as her surgery is scheduled.”

  I was supposed to ask, but I just raised an eyebrow.

  “She’s having a couple of ribs removed,” he
told me. “A little brow work and some butt implants to round her off—see?” He flipped up another full-length shot from the rear. Skorpia was nude and about as unsexually posed as I’d ever witnessed. “That’s a problem with the taller ones—no ass. Her ass is like the line between two of my fingers when I clench my fist.” He demonstrated.

  I asked how tall she was.

  “That’s the miracle. Six foot five, barefoot.”

  Barefoot and buttless, I thought. Poor baby.

  “With the ribs removed she’ll be able to corset to fourteen inches; can you imagine how she will take the world by storm?”

  I was supposed to agree, so I did.

  “I need you to photographically document her surgeries,” Clavius said. “Every stage of every procedure. I need to see inside her as much as possible. What do you think?”

  I was supposed to show no more adverse reaction than if he had just offered to open a door for me, which he had. So I nodded. Fine, good.

  He clapped me on the shoulder, a conspiratorial brother now. Then he offered the boon he knew I expected: “Do this thing, and a year from now, you will be famous, yourself.”

  There it was, and I didn’t have to sign in blood, or anything.

  * * *

  Now do this thing, and presumably, I got to live.

  The dead guy in the body bag was not Clavius, which I will admit was a flash-forward brought on by paranoia and my own retroactive guilt about getting jiggy with his recently discarded wife … even as he was probably dancing a similar mambo with my girlfriend-of-record.

  The dead guy in the body bag was Dominic Sharps, whose face I knew from TV whenever the news was about the Los Angeles Police Department. There was no mistaking his identity; even the news was in hi-def now. I was pretty sure that yesterday, Mr. Sharps had been breathing. His gray eyes were wide open and unseeing.

  “That crap you see in the movies where the bereaved survivor honorably closes the eyes of the dead person with the gentle touch of two fingers or the palm of the hand? Total bullshit. Never happens.” My captor, Gun Guy, seemed proud of this knowledge.

  Dominic Sharps had not been dead for very long. His skin had gone waxy but there was no smell of rotting meat; not yet. His fingernails were white from the blood evacuation; lividity had probably begun on his back and buttocks. His eyes were starting to sink into their sockets. If this was the pre-rigor mortis state, he had only been dead a couple of hours.

  “We’ve got to move before he stiffens up any more,” said my gunman. “Set up your lights. Professor, get your ass in here and finish what you started!”

  With his makeup and bronzer and hair plugs, the Professor didn’t seem that far away from corpse land, himself. He brought in a case full of cosmetics and I realized why Sharps looked so … odd. He had been partially made up already by the Professor, which accounted for the weird skin tone. Dead people first turn grayish, then slightly violet. Sharps’s dead flesh had the simulated glow of living tissue.

  “I want this lighting dead natural,” Gun Guy directed me, missing his own irony. “As though the only source is that lamp, right there. Fire it up.”

  The Professor fully unzipped the bag. The late Mr. Sharps was naked. The cosmetology was to be full body. Then he withdrew a thin metal rod about five inches long with one knobby end. It looked like a surgical tool.

  He must have seen my eyebrows go up.

  “This is really inconvenient,” the Professor said in a reedy voice, almost introspective. “At the moment of death, an erection is natural. That has already subsided. Too bad we couldn’t get him sooner.”

  “I threw this together as fast as I could,” said Gun Guy with a snarl. “Get past it.”

  I think I fumbled my film load when I saw the Professor slide the rod into the dead man’s penis, as easily as you’d replace an oil dipstick.

  Now the naked, dead Dominic Sharps had a fake erection to go with his fake complexion, I thought, devoting the rest of my energy to not losing my mind, or gibbering, or bumbling my lips with one finger like an imbecile.

  Cognac was standing behind me, also naked except for the stockings and heels. She obviously spent a lot of spin class time keeping very fit.

  She squirted a generous amount of Astroglide onto her palms and moved past me, saying, “Excuse me, sweetie.”

  She greased up and squatted down after the bullyboys removed the body bag and patch-glued Dominic Sharps’s hands in place—one on her thigh, one on her forearm, the same as positioning a mannequin. The Professor zeroed in to do touch-ups on the fingernails.

  “How’s my hair?” said Cognac, looking back over one shoulder at me.

  “Ah … good,” I said.

  If this was a real photo shoot, I would have had her comb it straight back and add just a little powder to cut the shine to emphasize a “wild” aspect. I would have ditched the incandescent lighting. I would have dashed to my bathroom and started searching for hemlock.

  The Professor pushed the physiognomy of the late Dominic Sharps into different expressions for each photo. The face stayed in position like clay.

  “Start shooting,” said the man with the gun. “They don’t all have to be masterpieces.”

  It will always be difficult for me to describe the ensuing half hour, even though I was thinking, Well, this isn’t the weirdest shoot I’ve ever done.

  * * *

  Clavius’s first assignment was for me to photograph Skorpia’s surgeries. Right before my eyes and lens, she was reduced to a mere poundage of raw flesh. Thank the gods her face was covered for most of it. That way she was without identity, the way the mutilations of a splayed car-crash victim are masked by blood. The slicing and dicing of her glutes were yet to come. The main attraction of the first workday was a single marathon session—rib removal, breast augmentation, and brow job. There was so little actual blood flow that, through the lens, it looked surreal.

  I had two digital video rigs for coverage on the blow-by-blow, and moved in close with a Hasselblad or one of my Nikons whenever I was permitted. Clavius had specified fast film, high grain, almost no depth of field—no peripheral detail was wanted here. I myself was without identity as well, smocked and filtered, my hands in latex, my feet sterile-bagged, perspiration darkening the HEPA cap that prevented any wayward hair from escaping into the operating environment.

  It was almost loving, the way the specialist slit her open and yawned her wide and took things out and put in other things. Certainly intimate. Most major organs inside your body are a sickly pink or a jaundiced ochre, except for the dark purple and bluish vasculature. Other mystery components looked startlingly inappropriate, like bundled white tube pasta. No matter how sweet you smell on the outside, on the inside you stink like a slaughterhouse or killing field. My lenses fogged up more than once.

  I shot the row of autoclaves, too. In one stainless steel dish, saline bags with serial numbers. In another, two short ribs, pitted and porous like big fossilized fingernails. In a third, mounds and scraps of shining tissue limned in bright red oxygenized blood. Each stage of Skorpia’s transmutation was labeled in black pen on cloth tape. Before, during, after.

  The anesthesiologist—the gas passer—was bored to begin with, and nearly nodded off in the middle of the carving and resectioning. I saw his head bob. Skorpia’s monitor emitted a dire flat beeping noise and I could sense one of the nurses getting ready to ask me to leave the room. I documented it all. This team was hot, and Skorpia was stabilized immediately. She would wake up in pain, mummified in a chrysalis of bandages from which it was hoped a rare beauty would emerge—rarer still, because it had been created with a knife, like sculpture. So rare that it was a million-to-one impossibility in the real world. In turn, she would inspire millions to covet things they could never achieve, not that it would stop them from buying an array of pricey consumer products based on her physical say-so.

  Later, Skorpia married a tycoon of paper products—bathroom tissue, nose-blow, burly towels—and de
voted her time to a great many charities. She shunned the limelight because she was getting on in years; christ, she was nearly thirty-five when Clavius threw her back into the pond, and consumers certainly didn’t want to look at a spokesperson that old unless it was to siphon off money to save dolphins or build puppy shelters or feed retards in Africa with no fingers or toes.

  For an hour in the historical time line, she had been a goddess.

  Then, in the hospital, she was my key to the future.

  After Skorpia came Nasja, about eighteen months after my first meeting with Clavius. He asked me to shoot the removal of Nasja’s breast implants, making a sidelong joke about how it could be another triumph in my “series.”

  Nasja was packing old-school silicone bags that had ruptured and migrated, the material intermeshing with fat and muscle tissue to produce ungainly lumps that were gathered by gravity into the undercurve of each breast. Excision of this annoyance was very time-consuming, very cut-and-paste; the threat of metasticization was very real. What concerned Clavius was not the issue of survival, but the sculpting of the beautiful, or in this case, the resurrection of beauty as he defined it.

  Hence, the scarring, which I could not unsee through my lens, earlier today. The skin under her breasts was as taut and furrowed as beef jerky.

  Clavius next sent me to the city morgue to photograph dead people, which is where I learned what little I knew about how the dead should look.

  I embraced digital photography at the same time as everyone else, but I maintain my love affair with photochemical processing—light and alchemy versus pixels. Silver gelatin positives from mystic broth rather than output from a printer. Clavius liked that. He introduced me to some people, I got a loft and a studio and a minor reputation, I did some arguably successful shows, and I branched into style spreads for commercial advertising clients, but all of it in Clavius’s shadow. I was, at best, a protégé, not to become a fully formed human in my own right until the Master died, or had a gender reassignment, or gave up his materialistic life for Buddha, or something.