After our mysterious encounter with our art history professor, we broke off and scattered about the museum to select a painting or statue to write about. I chose a large canvas by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) entitled Cotopaxi (1862), a large tableaux that filled up an entire gallery wall, or so it seemed to me, featuring a volcano erupting. Smoke billowed up into the stratosphere, creating a blood red sky around a setting sun, with lush, colorful jungles stretching toward you in the foreground. There was even a little South American man and burro on a path watching the whole thing. Ever since school trips in childhood, it had been my favorite painting in the whole museum; I could stand in front of it and have it fill my whole field of vision for hours at a time. I remembered a teacher in grade school telling us it was an allegory for the Civil War that was waging in the American South when it was painted, so I threw that in my paper, although my guess was Professor Joshua bar-Joseph, whom his teaching fellow Michele Selket referred to by the mystical nickname Doctor Messiah, would consider such pedestrian interpretation overly-determined and literal-minded.
I’m sure my paper wasn’t going to be as fancy or jargon-laden as the ones Nancy or Avie would be able to write—they were artistes. Nancy chose a piece by Marisol Escobar, a female sculptor born in Paris in 1930, but who lived most of her life in New York, Los Angeles, and Caracas, Venezuela. The work was a kind of assemblage statue—I wouldn’t know what else to call it—a combination of painted and pencil-drawn areas on gessoed wood (Nancy had to explain to me what gesso was) with some carved, dimensional areas called Double Portrait of Henry Geldzahler (1967). He was some funky curator and critic known for chronicling artistic “happenings,” which were get-togethers like the one my mama and Clyde Pflug met at in the early sixties. Nancy, who mixed media and tore apart house and all, really responded to this piece, and for a while after that visit to the museum Marisol became a big influence on her.
Hadleigh wrote about The Nightmare (1781) by Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), maybe the most famous painting in the museum. It shows a sort of plump woman in a white gown lying back on a couch with a gargoyle sitting on her belly and a fearsome horse looking on from behind a curtain. It was in a gallery that wasn’t always open—the museum was so big they seldom had enough guards to have all the galleries open all the time. But I guess Hadleigh—who’s tall and blonde and pretty enough to be a model—flirted with somebody and got into that wing to see it. Hadleigh said it reminded her of a dream she had in which she was the Frost Queen of the Northern Elves, based on some book she’d read in junior high school. What an airhead; she was destined for a C in the class, I was certain.
Chas had found some gelatin silver print on display in the Works on Paper gallery (of a naked lady, naturally), and decided to write his essay about that. Like everyone else, Chas had just heard the professor denounce photography as a technology that had completely corrupted our modern ability to see, or at least weaken our ability to think or make us lazy or whatever, and I’m sure he’d chosen to write about a photograph just to see what trouble he could cause and piss off the teacher. Although the teaching fellow for the course, Michele, hadn’t given any instructions explicitly forbidding us from talking about a photograph. Anyway, Chas is an art student and art students are born trouble makers.
When the group of us met again in the central court, Avie joined us too. She said she’d spent the hour looking at a lot of works of art, mostly the Diego Rivera mural of the automobile industry, but since she wasn’t actually in the class, she hadn’t selected one or taken any notes or anything; she’d just let the art wash all over her—which was our preferred mode, me and her. In fact, she said she kind of disliked the teacher’s style and probably wasn’t going to bother to tag along for any more field trips to the museum after this.
A few nights later, while I was off from waitressing at the Union Stripe Café, I wrote up my reflection exercise on my chosen work of art. I typed it up on my portable typewriter that I had set up on my drawing table Nancy had given me last summer, which I set up flattened and used as a desk in the bedroom of my new apartment. It was good having Avie around as a roommate now to immediately proofread it; she handed it back to me with a few things circled and underlined in red pen for me to retype, and suggested a few art historical terms that might make my paper sound a bit more snobby.
“What are you planning to do for your term paper for Mister Messiah?” Avie asked.
“Doctor Messiah,” I corrected. “In any case, I have few ideas. I thought maybe I’d take my cue from the professor and write about how art history has gone off the rails in the age of modernity. Maybe there’s some way I can put some of my architectural knowledge from city planning to use, too, because we’ve studied a lot about how modern technologies have changed perceptions and so on. I’m not sure yet; it’s not my only class this semester, you know.”
“You might want to take advantage of Michele’s offer and discuss your ideas with her,” Avie advised. “Chas says he knows several students from the Kirby Center for Visual Studies who took bar-Joseph’s class, and he was real tough of them for not picking topics that were sufficiently intellectually rigorous. I think Chas is already counting on failing the class himself.”
“Well, yeah, if he’ just going to write about naked ladies,” I said.
Over the weekend, I scribbled some notes in the library and even between waiting tables at the Union Stripe on topic ideas. I was more or less guessing as to what the professor was getting at when he said that cameras had made us lazy, but I surmised that people were no longer bothering to learn the difficult skills of drawing—I certainly wasn’t—to record reality. I thought of my sister Avie’s struggles to get a nose to look right when she was trying to achieve a likeness, or to get the proportions of a horse or whatever. Who would go to such trouble when all you had to do was pull out your Land camera and take a snapshot?
I wanted to be sure I was on the right track, so I followed Avie’s advice and dropped by the office of the art history department at Warren Woodward, such as it was, ensconced in the crowded Studio Fine Arts Building, to drop off my finished Cotopaxi reflection and see if I could get in to see Dr. bar-Joseph during his office hours. Only, I had no idea when he held office hours, so I just took a stab one afternoon. I hoped at least that Michele, his teaching fellow, would be in; since she was the one more or less managing the course—and would likely be grading all the papers—it was probably better to talk to her anyway.
The secretary in the office pointed me toward the professor’s mailbox; she informed me that Doctor Messiah—this was his accepted nickname—almost never appeared in his office; rather, that he kept an office on the top floor of the Wardell Building. I happened to know exactly where that was—it was a big apartment-hotel next to the museum, although I’d never been further inside than the first-floor restaurant on the Woodward Avenue side where Nancy, Avie, and I liked to have brunch on Sunday mornings. Instead of dropping off my paper in the mailbox, I told the secretary I would drop in on Doctor Messiah at the Wardell, and see if I could catch him in.
“Not many students succeed in getting up there to see him,” she warned me.
“Not to worry,” I said. “If the elevator doesn’t work, I’ll just fly up and in through a window.”
The elevators did work, although the directory in the lobby of the Wardell listed only something called “The Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute.” When I got off on the top floor, I found what looked like a darkened library, with rows and rows of bookcases. The shelves were filled with what appeared to be fine, old, leather-bound books, only they weren’t cracked nor decrepit with age; rather, they were like brand new. Dictionaries and Bibles and other more formidable tomes sat open on stands for easy reference; slide-out shelves held rarer manuscripts. The place reminded me a lot of the stacks of reference libraries I had visited in Ann Arbor, only without a trace of dust or a cobweb to be seen, and everything smelling as if it had just been printed and bound in hand-tooled leather.
There were oriental rugs all over the floors—these were also fresh and crisp—and leather-upholstered sofas and oak tables and chairs spaced out between the bookcases, presumably for researchers to sit. But these were empty. There seemed to be several locked closets and enclosed offices on the perimeter, along with a restroom. The Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute must have taken up most of the top floor of the Wardell. I had to worm my way around the bookcases like a maze toward bright daylight coming from elsewhere on the floor. Coming out on the other side of the stacks, I found myself in the western part of the room overlooking Woodward Avenue.
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This area was illuminated by windows looking out in three direction over midtown Detroit. There were bookcases around the perimeter, but the feeling was more open and spacious, less claustrophobic than when I first entered. Michele Selket, the teaching fellow, sat at a large, wooden desk, clacking away at a vintage black Woodstock typewriter. Not surprisingly, Professor Joshua bar-Joseph sat in the middle of a large oriental rug in the middle of the floor, meditating. I noticed the sunlight diffused by a light, smoky haze, and was struck by the smell of incense coupled with Marijuana wafting through the air.
Michele was facing me but didn’t look up from her typing. Professor bar-Joseph was sitting with his back toward me, and he remained motionless. I supposed I was still in the shadows of two large bookcases on either side of me and couldn’t be seen, and perhaps they hadn’t heard me. In any case, I stopped in my tracks and smelled the aroma.
Michele said something to Doctor Messiah, and he said something back, but it was garbled. My ears felt stuffy, like I was sitting underwater in a pool, and their speech was muffled. What little I could make out sounded like a recording running backward.
Then I noticed that as Michele was typing, the paper was going through the carriage in the wrong direction. She was typing furiously, but in reverse. From a finished stack of pages she scrolled in completed sheets filled with words, and after she was through, she pulled out a sheet of paper that was clean and white and completely virginal. Then she set the virgin sheet of paper on as stack of other clean white sheets, forming a ream.
I tried calling out to her, but my voice sounded as muffled as if I were underwater too. Suddenly, the sunny skies outside the windows grew dim. On the horizon all around the city, dark, stormy clouds rushed in; day became as dark as night. The entire room was as gloomy as the part I had entered, as if a thick, black, velvet drapes had been dropped around the entire building. The only illumination was the tiny desk lamp Michele clicked on, and a candle burning on a side table I hadn’t noticed before.
For some reason, I noticed a wall to my left where some tiny, framed pictures hung. Most of these appeared to be historical photographs of Detroit—a bit unexpected, given Doctor Messiah’s views on photography. Others were old maps or postcards. One eight by ten photograph looked like a class photo of some kind in black in white; there was a small electric lamp, like musicians put over their music stands, on the wall above it that shone on it.
I was surprised to see myself among a group of megaheroes, most of whom I didn’t recognize. There was me in the center in my Ms. Megaton Man uniform—I looked a bit older, more filled out, more mature—standing next to the Slick on one side of me and Doctor Messiah and Michele, in a golden Egyptian costume like Chas had sketched, on the other. Stella Starlight was in the picture, in a jumper with a small “e” insignia across her chest, and B-50, the Hybrid Man—the robot I had helped free from Megatonic University—stood behind us. The Phantom Jungle Girl was tucked in the back, and Allan Jordan and Gene Griffin, the private investigators I had run into, were also in the group. There was also a girl in harlequin costume, a guy that looked like one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men, a guy in a get up that looked like a pterodactyl, a girl in a prehistoric maillot, an almost giant woman with an em dash across her chest, and a white girl in a cat costume not nearly as convincing at the Mod Puma’s.
But I didn’t know half these people, and I had never stood for group photograph with any of them.
The light source over the picture dimmed, along with the desk lamp and candle; suddenly, the entire room was dark. The smoke, too, grew thicker and murkier, doubling the blackness. I couldn’t make out Michele or the professor until a tiny, glowing dot of light rose from the professor’s head; it was just a tiny spark at first, but it grew brighter and more intense.
In the light, Michele was still at the desk typing in reverse, faster than ever, creating stacks and stacks of clean, white sheets of paper.
Soon the light was so bright everything was bleached out entirely; my vision was flooded with nothing but bright light, even when I closed my eyes and threw my arms up across my face. I thought I could see a baby—a perfect, round, healthy, golden baby, in the middle of the light. The child moved its limbs slowly, gazing at me, smiling.
I’d seen a similar shot in an art film in Ann Arbor, except this golden baby swam in a sea of red plasmic blobs, like he or she was in a lava lamp. Michele, in the golden Egyptian costume I’d seen in the photograph, appeared now; she stretched out her arms; more golden material formed wings. Then, this pagan Madonna-and-child motif faded from view. I thought I saw the professor, still seated on the floor, float upward. He was stripped naked, and his arms were outstretched now. The flesh of his bare back was shredded from flogging, and a crown of thorns had been pressed into his skull so that blood was running out; there was blood everywhere. Hadleigh would have called this blasphemy.
Then I blinked, and everything was back to normal. Daylight was coming in from the windows, it was a clear, sunny day in Detroit; Michele was typing away—and putting in fresh sheets the right way, at normal speed, and producing typewritten pages—and Professor bar-Joseph was sitting in his black turtleneck. Everything, in fact, was black and grey and dusty, except for the clear blue sky outside the windows.
I felt nauseous and had to reach for a bookcase to steady myself, because I was momentarily knocked for a loop.
“Clarissa!” called out the professor, without turning around. “Thank you for visiting us.”
I pulled myself together and stumbled out from between the bookcases, into the open area of the offices, and onto the large oriental rug where Doctor Messiah sat. Michele glanced up at me only briefly and continued typing. “Please, have a seat, Clarissa,” she said.
“You know my name already, just from attendance,” I said. “Pretty good.”
I found a leather-cushioned side chair near Michele’s desk and sat down.
“We know all about you, Ms. James,” said Michele, looking up at me briefly only to smile.
“The girl in the fine arts office said it was hard to get to see you up here,” I said. “But I just came right up.”
“Why make things difficult, when we know you can fly?” said Michele. This time she didn’t bother looking up from her typing.
“I guess I’m not surprised, since you have a photograph of me on your wall,” I said. “But I don’t recall ever having a group photo like that taken; I don’t recognize half those people.”
“A photograph, of you, on the wall?” asked Doctor Messiah. “I don’t recall…”
“Sure, the group photo, the one that looks like a staged class portrait of all those crime fighters.”
“I believe you’re mistaken,” said Doctor Messiah. “You’d better check again.”
I felt less nauseous and dizzy, so I got up and went back to the wall where the lamp hung over the framed photograph.
Now it showed a slightly different line-up. Flanking B-50 were Wilton Ashe and Audrey Tomita, although they looked to be no more than teenagers; Gene Griffin was dressed in the Purple Penetrator costume he’d once mentioned to me, and Allan Jordan was made up like a circus clown. There was a blond archer and the Robin Hood guy again, next the harlequin; there was also a giant person with an em dash across their chest, only this time it was a male figure; there was the Detroit Day columnist John Bradford, Chas’s brother, whom I recognized only from published photos, and a weird guy in bandages with a black cat on his shoulder. In this photograph, I was nowhere to be seen.
“Who are these people?” I asked. “How did this image change…?”
“The Detroit Crime Busters,” said Michele. “Circa 1978. We have files and artifacts on all kinds of historical miscellania.”
“But you were both in this photograph a minute ago,” I said. “I was in it, too.”
“I don’t trust photography,” said Doctor Messiah. “I prefer the witness of my own eyes.”
I remembered I was still lugging my book bag and pulled out my reflection paper on the volcano painting. “I just wanted to drop this off,” I said.
“You can leave it here, on the desk,” said Michele.
“I also wanted to discuss my ideas for my research paper, if I’m not interrupting anything…”
“Your topic will be fine,” said the professor.
“You mean, about photography and our modern way of seeing? Or not seeing? But I haven’t told you…”
“We understand one another perfectly,” said the professor, making one fluid motion to rise to his bare feet. “Would you care for some tea?” He walked toward one of the windows and gazed out, never once turning to look at me.
“Will it mess with my head, like the incense did?” I asked.
Professor bar-Joseph turned finally; our eyes met. He laughed. “It shouldn’t. It’s Earl Grey.”
“His favorite,” said Michele. “Doctor Messiah knew the earl.”
Just then, a kettle steamed on a hot plate on a windowsill I hadn’t noticed before.
“You’re a social planning major, I understand, studying the urban fabric,” said the professor. “What do you think of our modern American city, architecturally, Clarissa?”
“A bit stunted and sprawling,” I said. “It needs more skyscrapers, aesthetically.”
“And what of the culture we keep tucked away in dark recesses?”
“It’s not particularly integral to our everyday lives,” I said.
“Good. I look forward to reading your paper, Ms. Megaton Man.”
I had a quick sip of tea but had to hurry out because I was scheduled to wait tables at the restaurant that evening. After I said goodbye to Doctor Messiah and Michele Selket, I wormed my way through the stacks. The clacking of the typewriter faded by the time I reached the door, and the smell of mildew and dust and cobwebs, like I had known in every other library I’d been to, made me sneeze.