Oh, the computer age. It’s been good for me, in a way. I used to write my notes on scraps of paper and lose them in the landfill on my worktable. Now everything’s tidily laid out in my Investigator’s Casebook spreadsheets, which automatically updates my handheld. Something’s missing, though: the personal touch on archives. You see things when you’re handling documents that you miss on the World Wide Web.
The winter evening had closed in on the city hours ago. I felt cold and lonely in my office, although my leasemate was still hard at it with a blowtorch across the hall. If we still lived in caves, we’d be asleep, not driving ourselves to work in the dark.
I logged on to the Body Artist’s website, embodiedart.com. It opened to the slide show I’d seen on the screens at Club Gouge—the eye winking down at her vulva, the jungle scenes up her spine. The Middle Eastern music twanged with the changing screens.
The text, which was also disquieting, changed along with the pictures:
What, is thy servant a dog that she should do this thing?
My eye winks at my muff, my beaver, my little animal
The Female of the Species is Deadlier than the Male
The bashful audience member, drawing a few squiggly lines, a few people attempting actual figurative work with varying degrees of success, were staples of the shows. And so was Rodney. You didn’t actually see him stride up to the stage, his paunch swaying slightly with his rolling gait, but you almost always saw the crude sets of letters and numbers on the Body Artist’s buttocks.
I found one of Nadia’s drawings, the pink-and-gray scrolls, the woman with a slash down the middle of her face, and tried to print out a copy of that, and of Rodney’s crude work. Unfortunately, the Artist had a slick print-protection feature built into her site: all you got was the text around the edge of the page, not the picture itself. You had to pay fifty dollars to print your own version; seventy-five would get you a signed print from the Artist. Two hundred, and it would arrive framed.
I copied down Rodney’s contributions. “C-I,” he wrote on one occasion. “3521986 !397844125” on another. “L-O 6221983 !4903612.” I looked at five different examples of Rodney’s work. Each entry had a set of numbers separated by an exclamation point, but, other than that, I couldn’t see what they shared. The strings of numbers weren’t the same length from entry to entry.
I wondered if they might be phone numbers, perhaps for disposable phones in an overseas market. Europe doesn’t share our fixation with the ten-digit phone number. Or perhaps Rodney was a spy for a burglary ring and used the Body Artist to broadcast safe combinations. Or he’d picked pockets at the club and was relaying credit card numbers. No matter what he was transmitting, why do it like that at all? In an era of instantaneous communication, this was incredibly cumbersome. The only thing he really seemed to gain was a sense of power over the Body Artist, and over Olympia.
Before I left embodiedart.com, I looked again at the changing images and captions on the home page, stopping each slide to study it more closely. Many of the pictures were overtly cruel: The Hind at Bay, for instance, showed dogs mauling a deer that had a woman’s face. Crucifixus Est depicted a woman on a cross, a spike hammered through her vulva. Her face was divided in two, one side expressing bliss, the other agony.
As I went through the exhibit, I realized I’d misread one of the captions: “Deader than the Male,” it said, not “Deadlier than the Male.” And the face was the one Nadia had been painting on the Body Artist, a young woman with curly dark hair, her face cut in two where Nadia had sliced it with the palette knife.
I found myself shivering. Women savaged by dogs. Women crucified through the vagina. Women with their faces slashed. It was horrible and horrifying. If a man had done these paintings, I’d say he hated women. What was going on with Karen, that she hated other women, or hated herself so much she had to dismember her female body? And Nadia Guaman—was that what had drawn the two women together? Slasher art?
I rubbed my arms and got up to walk around the room, trying to dispel the images, or at least push them far enough away that I could think. I needed human company. I crossed the hall to see if my leasemate was willing to be interrupted, at least for five minutes. Tessa was hovering over a steel bar with a blowtorch, her dark face wet with sweat underneath her protective eyewear. She looked up at me briefly, continued her work until she’d finished the cut to her satisfaction, then turned off the flame and came over to me.
“I need someone alive and wholesome for a minute before I go back into my computer.” I explained what I’d been looking at.