Bare of place and time, the maroon envelope displayed neither a return address nor his own address. More mysterious, he could find no trace of a postmark, which could only mean someone had hand-delivered it. On the back, Lake discovered a curious seal imprinted in an orange-gold wax that smelled of honey. The seal formed an owllike mask which, when Lake turned it upside down, became transformed into a human face. The intricate pattern reminded Lake of Trillian the Great Banker’s many signature casts for coins.
“Do you know how this letter got here?” Lake started to say, turning toward the desk, but the attendant had vanished, leaving only the silence and shadows of the great hall, the close air filtering the dust of one hundred years through its coppery sheen, the open door a rectangle of golden light.
From the broadsheet on the desk the name “Voss Bender,” in vermilion ink, winked up at him like some infernal, recurring joke.
* * *
With only this feeble skeleton of a biography as our background material, we must now approach the work that has become Martin Lake: “Invitation to a Beheading.” The piece marks the beginning of the grotesqueries, the controlled savagery of his oils—the slashes of emerald slitting open the sky, the deft, tinted green of the windows looking in, the moss green of the exterior walls: all are vintage Lake.
The subject is, of course, the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office, truly among the most imposing of Ambergris’s many eccentric buildings. If we can trust the words of Bronet Raden, the noted art critic, when he writes
The marvelous is not the same in every period of history—it partakes in some obscure way of a sort of general revelation only the fragments of which come down to us: they are the romantic ruins, the modern mannequins, or any other symbol capable of affecting the human sensibility for a period of time,
then the first of Lake’s many accomplishments was to break the post office down into its fragments and re-create it from “romantic ruins” into the dream-edifice that, for thirty years, has horrified and delighted visitors to the post office.
The astute observer will note that the post office walls in Lake’s painting are created with careful crosshatching brushstrokes layered over a dampened whiteness. This whiteness, upon close examination, is composed of hundreds of bones—skulls, femurs, ribs—all compressed and rendered with a pathetic delicacy that astounds the eye.
On a surface level, this imagery surely functions as a symbolic nod to the building’s former usage. Conceived to house the Cappan and his family, the brooding structure that would become the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office was abandoned following the dissolution of the Cappandom and then converted into a repository for the corpses of mushroom dwellers and indigent children. After a time, it fell into disuse—as Lake effectively shows with his surfaces beneath surfaces: the white columns slowly turning gray-green, the snarling gargoyles blackened from disrepair, the building’s entire skin pocked by lichen and mold.
Lake frequently visited the post office and must have been familiar with its former function. When the old post office burned down and relocated to its present location in what was little better than an abandoned morgue, it is rumored that the first patrons of the new service eagerly opened their post boxes only to find within them old and strangely delicate bones—the bones Lake has “woven” into the “fabric” of his painting.
Lake’s interpretation of the building is superior in its ability to convey the post office’s psychic or spiritual self. As the noted painter and instructor Leonard Venturi has written:
Take two pictures representing the same subject; one may be dismissed as illustration if it is dominated by the subject and has no other justification but the subject, the other may be called painting if the subject is completely absorbed in the style, which is its own justification, whatever the subject, and has an intrinsic value.
Lake’s representation of the post office is clearly a painting in Venturi’s sense, for the subject is riddled through with wormholes of style, with layers of meaning.—From Janice Shriek’s A Short Overview of the Art of Martin Lake and His Invitation to a Beheading, for The Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, 5th edition.
* * *
Lake lived farthest from the docks and the River Moth, at the eastern end of Albumuth Boulevard, where it merged with the warren of middle-class streets that laboriously, some thought treacherously, descended into the valley below. The neighborhood, its narrow mews crowded with cheap apartments and cafés, was filthy with writers, artists, architects, actors, and performers of every kind. Two years ago it had been resplendently fresh and on the cutting edge of the New Art. Street parties had lasted until six in the morning, and shocking conversations about the New Art, often destined for the pages of influential journals, had permeated the coffee-and-mint-flavored air surrounding every eatery. By now, however, the sycophants and hangers-on had caught wind of the little miracle and begun to masticate it into a safe, stable “community.” Eventually, the smell of rot—rotting ideas, rotting relationships, rotting art—would force the real artists out, to settle new frontiers. Lake hoped he would be going with them.
Lake’s apartment, on the third floor of an old beehive-like tenement run by a legendary landlord known alternately as “Dame Tuff” or “Dame Truff,” depending on one’s religious beliefs, was a small studio cluttered with the salmon, saffron, and sapphire bluster of his art: easels made from stripped birch branches, the blank canvases upon them flap-flapping for attention; paint-splattered stools; a chair smothered in a tangle of shirts that stank of turpentine; and in the middle of all this, like a besieged island, his cot, covered with watercolor sketches curled at the edges and brushes stiff from lazy washings. The sense of a furious mess pleased him; it always looked like he had just finished attacking some new work of art. Sometimes he added to the confusion just before the arrival of visitors, not so self-deluded that he couldn’t laugh at himself as he did it.
Once back in his apartment, Lake locked the door, discarded his cane, threw the shirts from his chair, and sat down to contemplate the letter. Faces cut from various magazines stared at him from across the room, waiting to be turned into collages for an as-yet-untitled autobiography in the third person written (and self-published) by a Mr. Dradin Kashmir. The collages represented a month’s rent and he was late completing them. He avoided the faces as if they all wore his father’s scowl.
Did the envelope contain a commission? He took it out of his pocket, weighed it in his hand. Not heavy. A single sheet of paper? The indifferent light of his apartment made the maroon envelope almost black. The seal still scintillated so beautifully in his artist’s imagination that he hesitated to break it. Reluctantly—his fingers must be coerced into such an action—he broke the seal, opened the flap, and pulled out a sheet of parchment paper shot through with crimson threads. Words had been printed on the paper in a gold-orange ink, followed by the same mask symbol found on the seal. He skimmed the words several times, as if by rapid review he might discover some hidden message, some hint of closure. But the words only deepened the mystery:
Invitation to a Beheading
You Are Invited to Attend:
45 Archmont Lane