My powers of recollection have never served me well in the business that I am in. People, in particular, their faces and their deeds don’t impress on my memory. I have a pocketbook for that, you see. They come in as fuzzy little descriptions of people I’m supposed to remember. If I’ve forgotten, I don’t frantically try to imagine what they look like before the meeting, I just train myself to look unsurprised at everything. If you have a pocketbook and some little acting ability, it’s easy to dupe the world into thinking you’re an art dealer.
Well, the truth is, lately I’ve been clinging to my memories. Wishing they were better trained to capture the moment I have now been set upon to recall. I’ve already been questioned endlessly by reporters, and to no effect! I have systematically refused to give details to anybody concerning the Punnett Painting. This is because I’m claiming rights to the story, as I was his one good friend in the entire world, not to mention sole witness of said “creation of undoing,” as the tabloids would have it. That has a mythical ring to it, which is why I appreciate the phrase so much.
The fact is that John Punnett was a mythical creature. He had an aura of the fantastic, and the improbable. It really did seem like an aura that he was projecting, sucking things from this world into his gravitation, and spewing them out again bizarre and fascinating. He was like a dream character brought to life. For instance, he was known to carry a sharpened samurai sword, which he knew how to use quite well. He was an autodidact, in every sense of the word. I would often find him drunkenly quick-drawing bottles in his back yard, shooting from the hip. His speed and motions were actually quite good, but his aim was terrible. This might have had something to do with the fact that all of his targets were empty whiskey bottles. As you can tell, despite my adolescent powers of recollection, I recall John Punnett very well. He wasn’t just another person, he was a human being: a fascinating and implausible thing.
The first time I met John Punnett. Well this is one of those fuzzy recollections. Something I couldn’t recognize at the time, some ornamented bludgeon, distorted by the sudden crossing of my eyes as it smashed into my nose, sending me sprawling and unconscious. I awoke with a bib shaped bloodstain thick across the front of my shirt, Punnett nudging me with his foot, seeing that I was awake and lifting me to my feet. He then began slurring apologies to me with his back turned, waving a flippant wrist in my direction, his sword (that’s what it was, a genuine goddamn Japanese katana) swinging at his belt. He was a tall man and skinny as a pole, with a mess of dark hair on his head. It looked as though he had given up shaving entirely. I rose to my feet in a blind rage, but I remember several guests at the function holding me back from stomping his face in.
“That thing can cut through a human neck like butter.” One of them, a man by the name of Sivins informed me, his eyes wide with the knowledge. I thought, that’s a very strange thing for an accountant to be so sure of. But as it turned out, Punnett had shown up to the party early, with only an acceptable level of alcohol running through his veins. He had brought with him two bundles of bamboo stalks that had been soaked in a chest of water over night. This gave them, so he claimed, the exact consistency of a human neck, bone and all. And so after displaying his ability to slice through both of them in clean, lightning fast motions, he went on to give the memorable speech of the year.
“Now then, that in mind you are all about to have the privilege of being part of a great social experiment. The rules are simple; I’m going to mingle in this social gathering and attempt to drink until the social part of my brain shuts down. Keep in mind that when I’m drunk I don’t usually get through in one clean cut. The scientific community thanks you for your cooperation.”
Punnett was well known for his way of putting things. It was often crass and egotistical, but just as often it was filled with strange wisdoms, bordering on the mystical. However, regarding the rest of his speeches that night as his experiment was well underway, this was not the case.
Famous outbursts include:
“I’d out-fuck Heston, on a space station.”
Or, after being told that he resembled Edward R. Murrow by some woman:
“You hairy knuckled Jesuit; I hope someone burns your uterus down! If your spawn ever survive the fourth dimension I’ll hunt them down and lacquer their tongues!”
I never found out why he had such a big problem with this statement. Murrow is a respectable person to be compared with. I will admit though, he did resemble him in the eyes.
Obviously I did not really meet John Punnett that night; I merely stood by just like everybody else, admiring him in horror. I have no doubt this was how he preferred to be perceived. Many, I think would call the stunts he pulled symptoms of some sort of messianic complex. But he never once claimed to be a prophet. He never tried to save people, except perhaps through his paintings. And even then he wasn’t interested in saving people’s souls, just their sight. He wanted people to see things the way he did. I would eventually come to find that this way of thinking was almost as wonderful as it was dangerous.
I saw one of Punnett’s paintings a couple of weeks later. A man by the name of Conrad Thorogood had traded him a couple of six-shooters for it, apparently. I didn’t really feel the need to probe the circumstances. And good God, was this ever the most attention grabbing painting I had seen. Here’s a quick description of the piece:
Plato’s Cave (The Empire Never Ended)
There’s a mural of projections on a cave wall. The outer circle consists of five different scenes: a toddler joyously kicking around a red ball, a soldier gutting another soldier with a bayonet in the trenches, a beautiful sprawling cityscape glistening like a diamond, a nuclear explosion populated by dancing exaggerated human silhouettes, and a man in full space suit, mid-bounce playing a fiddle on the moon. There is a center picture amidst all this, and it is a depiction of the artist pointing furiously at a mirror, the reflection is that of an ape pointing a crooked finger back at the artist and laughing with its head thrown back, the other hand clasped over its eyes. The foreground shows a hollowed out human brain with the back removed and a fire constructed inside of it. It’s being used as a projector, and an outlandish bio-mechanical creature of Lovecraftian inspiration wearing ceremonial robes is using a mass of writhing tentacles to create shadow puppets.
Being a man of no talent myself, I’ve always clung to my ability to recognize good art when I see it. I admit, I am a predator of the worst variety. I take the two things I’m good at, appreciating art and making business deals, and I make a living out of these two seemingly opposing skills. A good artist is almost always socially crippled in one way or another, that’s why men like me exist. So we can leech off of their talents for no other reason than having been busy building fake personalities while they were off plumbing the depths of their souls. Well, with Punnett things never turned out the way they were planned. In fact he was something of a terrorist toward every day structured existence. This I must have missed through willful ignorance, when I set up our first meeting with dollar signs in my eyes.
I think you have a great start here and I am definetely interested in reading more. Sorry for the lack of help! *star*