Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

Propp and Sylvia move through the bodies to the back rim of the crowd, both looking around for Fernando, trying to get a sense of what’s about to happen. Sylvia steadies herself against Propp’s shoulder and climbs onto the same mailbox she used to shoot up the riot. Up in front, she spots Boetell whispering into Ratzinger’s ear. Ratzinger is staring at his wristwatch, maybe oblivious to the Reverend’s babble.

And then the noise comes from the north end of Watson and the attention of the mob pivots to watch the last of Paige Beatty’s troops, her elite guard, swing around the corner of Goulden Ave, still chanting their castration march, now even more intense than when Sylvia first heard them outside the Rib Room. She looks back to see Boetell kind of absentmindedly rubbing his hands together like some greasy, fat rodent and the sight makes her nauseated so she looks back to the platoon, to Paige out in the lead, to the constellation of stubborn phallic candles still flickering in the drizzle.

Paige lifts the red bullhorn to her mouth and points it skyward toward the roof of the Skin Palace.

“Mary and Martha,” she yells, her voice made mechanical by the horn, her syllables electrically dulled a bit, “drop the sheets now.”

There’s a collective intake of breath from the crowd and in that second Sylvia sees Ratzinger walking away from the mob, heading for a Mercedes sedan that’s parked halfway up on the sidewalk a block past Herzog’s. He doesn’t look back and he doesn’t run. He just disappears into the car, kicks over the engine and drives away.

Sylvia turns her attention back to the roof.

From the front two corners at the top of the Skin Palace, figures can be seen heaving clumps of pillowy white material over the edge of the parapets. The sheets billow out on the night’s breeze, resemble for a moment parachutes being unfurled on a current of cold air, then sail downward, almost, but not quite, in synchronized glides. The sheets flap and come to a rest, hanging close to where the sidewalk meets the building’s foundation. A pack of women tear out of the crowd and run to the sheet’s hems to tie them down, secure them in place against the breeze. They look like a well-trained yacht crew, everyone assured of her particular duties and performing them with the speed and precision of an eternal instinct.

Sylvia thinks for a minute that Paige is making some kind of visual statement, that she’s “wrapping” the building, like the artist Christo. That she’ll give a detailed exegesis of her complex symbolism to some indulgent Spy reporter and tomorrow’s paper will translate her meaning for all.

But then Paige speaks through the bullhorn again, saying, “Start the projectors,” and from the rooftops of the buildings across the street, Sylvia sees tiny bluish circles ignite and then beams of light, shafts of expanding illumination, fire down on the new wall of sheeting. And Herzog’s Erotic Palace is no longer a building but a massive, bizarre canvas, an enormous movie screen simultaneously presenting dozens of moving images. And the images are all of the hard-core S&M variety. And the images are all overlapping, bleeding into one another until the whole projection seems like a horrible hundred-foot hallucination. A violent, nightmare vision from a special section of hell. A raw and confusing dream where elongated women are perpetually manhandled and desecrated and beaten into positions of acrobatic submissiveness.

Paige Beatty is projecting sadistic fantasies onto the face of the Skin Palace itself.

Paige has somehow coordinated an offense that Sylvia already knows, standing here just seconds after its birth, has instantly evolved into legend. The planning must have been backbreaking — amassing such enormous sheets, scrounging up industrial projectors, smuggling projectionists onto the rooftops, and then, finally and most important, willing this craziness, this whole visual stunt, into something so far beyond a stunt. Into a ritual. A ceremony. A blitz of light divorced from sound. Into a larger than life art form and ideology, a cumulative image whose meaning won’t let the observer alone for a long time, if ever again.

Whether by chance or analysis, the sheets are completely covered with images. There’s no margin, no border of white to show where the movie ends. There must be seven different movies playing from one end of the building to the other. It’s like going to a drive-in where rival projectionists are battling for dominance but no one is winning. It’s like a drive-in with a multiple personality disorder. And if she keeps watching, Sylvia knows it’s going to give her a headache because there’s no way to distinguish exactly where one film leaves off and the next one begins. And she thinks maybe this is one of Paige’s many points.

Because the movies are being shown on sheets rather than real screens and because of the distance of the projection and the fact that they’re outside and there’s moon and street lights, the images thrown up on the building look a bit faded. But that doesn’t detract from the graphicness of their content. There’s a good chance that Paige will end up in jail tonight, not just for storming and seizing someone else’s property, but for publicly displaying these films for anyone walking down Watson Street to see.

There are women shackled and being blasted with firehoses. There are women bent over a row of Ping-Ping tables being paddled on their behinds. There are women being pursued through dark woods by men with dogs and rifles. There are women bound to hospital operating tables. There are women being burned at the stake in open fields by men dressed in flowing black robes. There are women on their backs and on their knees. Handcuffed. Manacled. Chained. Tied down with ropes. Tied down with belts.

Sylvia looks to Paige and the banner that her lieutenants are flying high over her head— Intercourse is Genocide —then looks back up at these despicable images playing high on the front of the Skin Palace.

And she feels she’s missed something. She’s not sure what the abominations silently repeating on the enormous sheets have to do with intercourse. As far as she can see, there’s no sex taking place on the sheets in her view. Just image after image of brutality.

She looks out over the crowd which seems to be growing. She feels like everyone has more knowledge than she. Like everyone else understands all the central connections of this life, all the primal pictures. Sylvia looks at Paige again and then looks up. On the front-facing screen, ten feet above Paige’s head, is the central image, stationary, static, more like a photograph than a movie, but also more horrifying than anything else being projected. This is the picture, the one that everyone will carry home with them, the one Sylvia will carry for the balance of her natural life: a naked woman, hanging, crucified on a wooden cross, planted on the top of a stark and desolate hill. There’s no one around the woman and when you focus on her image everything else on the sheet/screen dissolves. Her head is hanging down so you can’t see her face. Blood is running from her hands and from her feet. Sylvia closes her eyes for a long second then opens them. Pinwheeling all around the crucified woman are the other images from the other movies. But this martyr just stays absolutely still on the cross. And absolutely fixed in Sylvia’s brain.

Is this what happens to the Madonna?

“How much longer?” Paige screams into the shivering silence of the crowd. “How much longer will we allow the horror?”

As if on signal, the mob erupts into a scream of rabid, cheering approval and Paige clusters into a three-way hug with her lieutenants. When they release, Paige relights her phallus-candle with a disposable butane, brings up the bullhorn and screams, “Free at last.”