Vicious Aliens (continued)

Cycle 9

CYCLE 9 

Botox injections

Chemical solvents

Making midnight movies

Contaminated actors

Living on a farm

Harnessed to a life of protein and equipment

—Beck, Midnite Vultures (Surviving Fragments)

By the time we started to determine who would be making the next trip outside our eccentric enclave everyone had their alibis and excuses at hand. This one was too old, this one was too weak and so on. Impairments appeared out of nowhere. I was caught off guard by how feeble everyone suddenly was. My diagnosis was that ninety-nine percent of the building was suffering from chronic cowardliness. In my experience, almost everyone has stories of bravery and heroism so long as the bad times are in the rearview mirror and not barreling straight toward them. I was informed that I had been chosen through a fair and democratic selection process based on my age and physical fitness while my cohorts happened to be randomly unlucky. Joining me on this expedition into the unknown were a group of residents I would come to know intimately and whose special skills would be highly-useful during our ‘Destiny’ mission, the details of, I plan to disclose at a later time. I realize now that I haven’t sufficiently introduced the residents of The Apthorp. You may be as lost as I was before my initiation into this rare group of political surrealists, artistic outlaws and avant-garde anarchists. Allow me to brief you on some of the talented and intimidating players that would be joining me on a supply run through the wintry, radiated streets of NYC, straight into the cold emptied heart of the free world (what was left of it).

There was Klaus Kier, a wiry, hairless, almost gollum-like individual of indeterminate age who had been a world-famous thespian known for playing marvellous and haunted characters; the witches and warlocks of the stage. Friends referred to him as ‘Shadow’ based on his uncanny and chameleonic ability to mirror everyone around him, stealing their essence, fusing it with his own physiognomy and projecting it back to them.  Klaus had left his ancestral estate in Bavaria after the death of his tubercular half-sister who he later claimed that he had been in love with. Despite lacking any formal training, Kier quickly made a name for himself on the Berlin stage for playing a series of small roles that called for a characteristic mesmeric quality in the performer, usually haunted, spectral parts. The black magic he brought to these quasi-demonic and vampiric roles gained him notoriety within the experimental German theatre scene of the late 70s. A standout dual role in Cabaret as both the Nazi smuggler Ernst Ludwig (a part that had been expanded and substantially rewritten in subsequent iterations of the musical) and The Emcee whose unattractive Jewish character is always emphasized, cemented his star power. 

The portrayal of The Emcee as a treacherous, unreliable narrator whose sexual ambiguity and skeletal physique foreshadows his eventual placement in a prison camp for deviants was particularly lauded in Das Reich and Der Stürmer. Kier went on to portray Shylock in a staging of The Merchant of Venice—now attributed to an anonymous Elizabethan playwright—as well as a triumphant turn as Mephistophilis in Doctor Faustus. Kier’s star faded after a series of interviews where he appeared to be unwilling to tow the party line and refused to criticize the villainous characters he portrayed, instead referring to them as “mirrors” that the audience identifies with. He eventually immigrated to the United States and took on a series of smaller parts in American B-movie productions as well as off-Broadway magic shows. He had a brief late-career resurgence in the early 2000s as monologist of surreal and macabre auto-fiction detailing his various escapades and doomed romantic conquests performing in the East Village only to retreat again into a reclusive existence in one of The Apthorp’s many apartments. 

Katherine Shellstein was a master of dystopian literature who remained completely mysterious to her reading public because she wrote under the pen name Murray Bolex. Murray Bolex drew widespread controversy for writing alternate histories in which the Allies defeated the Nazis in World War Two. Shellstein was known for her lesbian novels which were widely banned in Germania. She countered the prevalent male-dominated media narratives by creating counterfactual scenarios in which men die out or are placed in subservient roles in matriarchal societies. Her famous book ‘Nicht Swastika’ described the rise of a Moses-like figure who betrays the ruling regime and allies with supernatural forces in order to destroy the Nazi party. The battle between ‘the hidden ones,’ and the Nazis leads to a period of perpetual darkness as the story unfolds.

Dame Sandra, an elegant woman in her sixties, was legendary in street art circles for defacing or ‘remixing’ public monuments with chemically engineered paint that would be only be activated under specific lighting conditions. The Dame was held in high esteem by art collectors as well as those in the criminal underworld who admired her daring. Her graffiti handle Dame Sandra was notorious given that her tag ‘DS’ was scrawled in an increasingly complex manner on different objects of all scales. She left gigantic initials in the earth, air, and water as well as microscopic copies in mass produced computer equipment. She once defaced half of a major iPhone release and famously sewed her initials on the behind of an unpopular political candidate while he underwent a routine medical procedure.

Humboldt Dreyer was an Austrian bibliophile whose monumental library absorbed most of my free time. Dreyer’s collection of German philosophy was the basis for many late night, brandy-filled, discussions. His knowledge of arcana and obscura helped me to  understand my true place in the “historical process,” i.e. my Time Islander adventures…Have I mentioned how I wound up in this parallel universe yet? I suppose I skipped some important details (although that’s to be expected when one’s identities are scattered across the multiverse). Dreyer was an expert in the subject of lacunae occurring throughout history, in fact, he coined the term ‘amnesis’ to describe the philosophy of forgetfulness. He was obsessed with the role that language plays in our understanding of beauty and ugliness, right and wrong. For him, life and death, ethics and morality, were merely questions of aesthetics, a tightrope that our brain walks without our knowledge or awareness. Dreyer provided me with a foundation for getting through ‘post-Winter’ life without feeling overwhelmed by survivor’s guilt. He told me that the worse aspects of humanity, our destructive and murderous impulses are only one side of an invisible ledger, balancing hidden karmic values that defy all the rules we’ve ever been taught.