HUMAN INTEREST NEWS CLIP
Today Eye-On-Art focuses on the provocative sculptures of Paulo Ribeiro, a Brazilian artist who works in a radical medium. As you can see from these images, his work is stunning, intriguing, and often disturbing. He calls himself an “Artist of Life,” because every piece of work is crafted from the unwound.
We caught up with Ribeiro at a recent exhibition in New York.
“It is not so unusual what I do. Europe is full of cathedrals adorned in human bones, and in the early twenty-first century, artists like Andrew Krasnow and Gunther Von Hagens were known for their work in flesh. I have simply taken this tradition a logical step further. I hope not just to inspire but to incite. To bring to art patrons an aesthetic state of unrest. My use of the unwound is a protest against unwinding.”
Pictured here is what Ribeiro considers to be his finest piece—both haunting, and intriguing, the piece is a working musical instrument he calls Orgão Orgânico, which now resides in a private collection.
“It is a shame that my greatest work should be privately owned, for it was meant to be heard and seen by the world. But like so many unwound, it now will never be.”
Risa dreams of the stony faces. Pale and gaunt, judgmental and soulless as they gaze at her—not from a distance this time—but so close she could touch them. However, she can’t touch them. She’s sitting at a piano, but it will not bring forth music because Risa has no arms with which to play. The faces wait for a sonata that will never come—and only now does she realize that they are so close to one another they cannot possibly have bodies attached. They truly are disembodied. They are lined up in rows, and there are too many for her to count. She’s horrified, but can’t look away.
Risa can’t quite discern the difference between the dream and waking. She thinks she might have been sleeping with her eyes open. There’s a TV turned low, directly in her line of sight, that now shows an advertisement featuring a smiling woman who appears to be in love with her toilet bowl cleanser.
Risa rests on a comfortable bed in a comfortable place. It’s a place she’s never been, but that’s a good thing, because it can only be an improvement over the places she has been lately.
There’s a lanky umber kid in the room, who just now turns his gaze to her from the TV. It’s a kid she’s never met, but she knows his face from more serious television ads than the one on now.
“So you’re the real deal,” he says when he sees she’s awake. “And here I thought you were some crazy-ass crank call.” He looks older than he does in the commercials. Or maybe just wearier. She guesses he’s about eighteen—no older than her.
“You’ll live. That’s the good news,” the umber kid says. “Bad news is your right wrist is infected from that trap.”
She looks to see her right wrist puffy and purple and worries that she might lose it—perhaps the pain being the cause of her armlessness in the dream. She instantly thinks of Connor’s arm, or more accurately, Roland’s arm on Connor’s body.
“Give me someone else’s hand, and I’ll brain you,” she says.
He laughs and points to his right temple and the faintest of surgical scars. “I already got brained, thank you very much.”
Risa looks to her other arm, which also has a bandage. She can’t remember why.
“We also gotta test you for rabies because of that bite. What was it, a dog?”
Right. Now she remembers. “Coyote.”
“Not exactly man’s best friend.”
The bedroom around her is decorated in gaudy glitz. There’s a mirror in a faux-gold frame. Light fixtures with shimmering chains. Shiny things. Lots and lots of shiny things.
“Where are we?” she asks. “Las Vegas?”
“Close,” her host says. “Nebraska.” Then he laughs again.
Risa closes her eyes for a moment and tries to mentally collate the events that led her here.
After she made the call, two men had come for her in the barn. They arrived after the coyotes had left and before they came back. She was semiconscious, so the details are hazy. They spoke to her, but she can’t remember what they said and what she said back. They gave her water, which she threw up. Then they gave her lukewarm soup from a thermos, which she kept down. They put her in the backseat of a comfortable car and drove away, leaving the coyotes to find their next meal somewhere else. One of the men sat in the backseat with her, letting her lean against him. He spoke in calming tones. She didn’t know who they were, but she believed them when they said she was safe.
“We got a pair of lungs with a doctor attached, it you get my meaning,” the umber kid tells her. “He says your hand’s not as bad as it looks—but you might lose a finger or two. No big thing—just means cheaper manicures.”
Risa laughs at that. She’s never had a manicure in her life, but she finds the thought of being charged by the finger darkly funny.
“From what I hear, you really did a number on that parts pirate.”
Risa pulls herself up on her elbows. “I just took him out; it was nature that wolfed him down.”
“Yeah, nature’s a bitch.” He holds out his hand for her to shake. “Cyrus Finch,” he says, “But I go by CyFi.”
“I know who you are,” she tells him, shaking his hand awkwardly with her left.
Suddenly his face seems to change a bit, and so does his voice. It becomes harsher and loses all of its smooth style. “You don’t know me, so don’t pretend you do.”
Risa, thrown for a bit of a loop, is about to apologize, but CyFi puts his hand up to stop her before she does.
“Don’t mind my lips flapping: That’s Tyler talking,” he says. “Tyler don’t trust folks far as he can throw ’em—and he can’t throw no one, as his throwing arm has left the building; get me?”
It’s a little too much for Risa to process, but the cadence of his forced old-umber speech is soothing. She can’t help but smile. “You always talk like that?”
“When I’m me and not him,” CyFi says with a shrug. “I choose to talk how I choose. It pays respect to my heritage, back in the day, when we were ‘black,’ and not ‘umber.’ ”
Her only knowledge of Cyrus Finch, aside from the TV commercial, is from what little she saw of his testimony to Congress—back when it was all about limiting the age of unwinding to under seventeen, instead of eighteen. Cyrus helped push the Cap-17 law over the top. His chilling testimony involved Tyler Walker describing his own unwinding. That is to say, the part of Tyler that had been transplanted into Cyrus’s head.
“I gotta admit I was surprised to get your call,” CyFi tells her. “Big shots with the Anti-Divisional Resistance don’t usually give us the time a’ day, as we just deal with folks after the unwinding’s done, not before.”
“The ADR doesn’t give anyone the time of day anymore,” Risa tells him. “I haven’t been in touch with them for months. To be honest, I don’t know if they still exist. Not the way they used to.”
“I keep hoping they’ll reorganize, but all I see in the news are more and more resistance workers getting arrested for ‘obstructing justice.’ ”
CyFi shakes his head sadly. “Sometimes justice needs obstructing when it ain’t just.”
“So where exactly in Nebraska are we, Cyrus?”
“Private residence,” he tells her. “More of a compound, actually.”
She doesn’t quite know what he means by that, but she’s willing to go with it. Her lids are heavy, and she’s not up for too much talk right now. She thanks CyFi and asks if she can get something to eat.
“I’ll have the dads bring you something,” he says. “They’ll be happy to see you’ve got your appetite back.”
FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
“Hi, I’m Vanessa Valbon—you probably know me from daytime TV, but what you might not know is that my brother is serving a life sentence for a violent crime. He has put himself on a list for voluntary cranial shelling, which will happen only if Initiative 11 is passed this November.
“There’s been a lot of talk about shelling—what it is and what it isn’t, so I had to educate myself, and this is what I learned. Shelling is painless. Shelling would be a matter of choice for any violent offender. And shelling will compensate the victim’s family, and the offender’s family, by paying them full market value for every single body part not discarded in the shelling process.
“I don’t want to lose my brother, but I understand his choice. So the question is, how do we want our violent offenders to pay their debts to society? Wasting into old age on tax payers’ dollars—or allowing them to redeem themselves, by providing much-needed tissues for society and much-needed funds for those impacted by their crimes?
“I urge you to vote yes on Initiative 11 and turn a life sentence . . . into a gift of life.”
—Sponsored by Victims for the Betterment of Humanity.
Risa sleeps, then sleeps some more. Although she usually loathes lethargy, she decides she’s earned little bit of sloth. She finds it hard to believe it’s been barely three weeks since the Graveyard take down—and the night she exposed Proactive Citizenry’s devious endeavors on national news. Truly, it was another lifetime ago. A life of being in the media spotlight had become a life of hiding from searchlights.
It had been the shadowy movers and shakers of Proactive Citizenry that had gotten the charges against her dropped and allowed her to come out of hiding in the first place. But—big surprise—new charges were filed after the night she made herself their enemy. There are claims that she had stolen huge sums of money from the organization—which she had not. There are claims that she had helped to arm the AWOL Unwinds at the Graveyard—which she did not. All she had done during her tenure at the Graveyard was administer first aid and treat colds. The truth however, is of no interest to anyone but her.
CyFi’s fathers—both of whom are as sienna-pale as CyFi is dark—dote on her in equal measure, bringing her meals in bed. They were the ones who came all the way out to Cheyenne to get her, so they’ve taken a vested interest in her health. Being treated like a delicate flower tires for Risa quickly. She begins to pace the room, still amazed every time she swings her feet out of bed and walks on her own. Her wrist is stiff and aches, so she carries it carefully, even after the doctor-in-residence concludes that her fingers are fine and she will have to pay full price for any future manicures, and happily, she doesn’t have rabies either.
Her window gives her a view of a garden and not much more, so she really doesn’t know how big the place is and how many are here. Occasionally there are people tending the garden. She would go out to meet them, but her door is locked.
“Am I a prisoner?” Risa asks the taller, kinder-looking of CyFi’s dads.
“Not all locks are about restraint, dear,” he tells her. “Some are merely about timing.”
On the following afternoon, the timing must be right, because CyFi offers to give her the grand tour.
“You’ve got to understand, not everyone here is sympathetic to you,” CyFi warns. “I mean, yeah, people know all that whack campaigning you did in favor of unwinding was bogus. Everyone knows you were being blackmailed—but even so, that interview where you talk about how unwinding is the least of all evils?” He grimaces. “It’s a dish that sticks to your bones, if you know what I mean.”
Risa can’t meet his gaze. “I do.”
“You best be reminding people that the new spine you got is something you didn’t ask for and something you regret having. That’s a sentiment we can all relate to.”
As CyFi had said, the place is more than just a home; it’s a full-fledged compound. Risa’s room is in the main house—but the house has large wings that were clearly added on recently, and across the large garden are half a dozen sizeable cottages that Risa couldn’t see from her window.
“Land is cheap in Nebraska,” CyFi tells her. “That’s why we came here. Omaha’s close enough for folks that got business to go about it and far enough out that strangers leave us alone.”
Some of the people she passes glance at her, then look away without a greeting. Others give her a solemn nod. A few smile, although the smile is forced. They all know who she is—but no one knows what to make of her, any more than she knows what to make of them.
This afternoon there are several people tending to the garden as Risa and CyFi stroll through. On closer inspection, the garden isn’t just ornamental—there are vegetables growing in rows. Off to the left are pens with chickens and maybe other animals Risa can’t see.
CyFi answers her question before she asks it. “We’re fully sustainable. We don’t slaughter our own meat though, ’cept for the chickens.”
“Who, may I ask, is ‘we’?”
“The folk,” CyFi says simply.
“ChanceFolk?” Risa guesses—but looking around, none of the people here look Native American.
“No,” CyFi explains. “Tyler-folk.”
Risa doesn’t quite catch his meaning yet. It seems quite a lot of the people she sees have grafted bits about them. A cheek here, an arm there. It isn’t until she sees one bright blue eye that perfectly matches someone else’s that it begins to dawn on her what this place is.
“You live in a revival commune?” Risa is a bit awed and maybe a bit frightened, too. She’s heard rumors of such places, but never thought they were real.
CyFi grins. “The dads were the first to call it a ‘revival commune’ when we got started. I kinda like it, don’t you? It sounds kinda . . . spiritual.” He gestures to the cottages and land around him. “Most everyone here got a part of Tyler Walker,” CyFi explains. “That’s what the Tyler Walker Foundation is all about. Putting together places like this, for people who feel the need to reunite the Unwind they share.”
“Cyrus, that’s twisted.”
CyFi doesn’t seem fazed by her judgment. “A lot less twisted than some other things. It’s a way to cope, Risa—cope with something that never shoulda happened in the first place.” Then his jaw tightens, his gaze turns dodgy, and she knows it’s Tyler talking now.
“You go put yourself in a room with the arms, legs, and thoughts that belong to that spine of yours, and you’ll look at this place a whole lot differently.”
Risa waits a moment for Tyler to go back to drafting behind CyFi again, as CyFi’s much more pleasant to talk to.
“Anyways,” says CyFi, not missing a beat, “this place was the first, but now we’ve set up more than thirty revival communes across the country—and there’s more on the way.” He folds his arms and smiles proudly. “Pretty cool, huh?”
Out in front of one of the cottages, Risa spots the doctor who’s been tending to her wrist. CyFi calling him “a pair of lungs,” suddenly makes more sense now. The man is throwing a ball with a young boy who is clearly his son.
“So people just dropped everything and came here with their families?” Risa asks.
“Some brought families with them; others left families behind.”
“All to join the cult of Tyler Walker?”
CyFi takes a moment before answering. Maybe it’s a moment to keep Tyler from shouting out something they might both regret. “Maybe it’s a cult, and maybe not—but if it fills a need and doesn’t hurt anyone, who are you to judge?”
Risa holds her tongue, realizing the more she talks the more she insults her host.
CyFi is happy to change the subject. “So, how’s the Fry?”
“Excuse me?”
He rolls his eyes, like it should be obvious. “Our mutual friend. How is he? Do you hear from him?”
Risa is still at a loss.
CyFi looks at her incredulously. “The one, the only Levi Jedediah Small-Fry Calder. He never told you he knew me?”
Risa finds herself stuttering. “Y-you know Lev?”
“Do I know Lev? Do I know Lev? I traveled with him for weeks. He told me all about you and Connor kidnapping him and stuff. The way you saved him from getting tithed.” CyFi gets a little wistful. “I took care of him until he had to take care of me. He took care of me real good, Risa. No way I’d be here today if it weren’t for him. Life woulda hit me like a train if he hadn’t been there to stop it.” CyFi stops walking. He looks down. “When I saw he became a clapper, I nearly crapped my pants. Not Fry—not that good kid.”
“He didn’t blow himself up.”
He snaps his eyes to her. She doesn’t know whether it’s CyFi or Tyler. Maybe it’s both of them. “Of course he didn’t! You think I don’t know that?” CyFi takes a moment to mellow. “Do you have any idea where he is now?”
Risa shakes her head. “There was an attack on his home. Last I heard he went into hiding.”
CyFi purses his lips. “Poor little Fry. Hope he turns out less screwed up than the rest of us.”
Risa knows that, as horrifying as it was that Lev had become a clapper, she would have been unwound long ago if his clapper friends hadn’t taken down Happy Jack Harvest Camp. “Small world, isn’t it?” she tells CyFi. “Lev’s still here because of us—but we’re both here because of him.”
“See, we’re all interconnected,” CyFi says. “Not just us Tyler-folk.”
As they pass the last of the cottages, a middle-aged woman with no outward surgical signs smiles warmly at Risa from her porch, and Risa smiles back, finally beginning to feel comfortable with the idea of this place. CyFi touches his chest, indicating to Risa that the woman has Tyler’s heart.
They round back toward the main house, and Risa’s wrist begins to ache, reminding her that she’ll have to take it easy for a while. Her running from the powers that be will have to slow to a walk for a while. She could think of worse places than this to have to lie low.
FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
“This is actor Kevin Bessinger, asking you to vote no on Initiative 11. Initiative 11—the ‘pound-of-flesh’ law—is not what it appears. It says it will allow for the voluntary shelling of inmates—in other words, the removal and disposal of their brains, followed by the unwinding of the rest of their bodies. It might seem like a sensible idea—until you read what the initiative actually says.
“Initiative 11 states that shelling would be voluntary—but it also allows prison administrators to override that and mandate the shelling of any prisoner they choose. In addition, it brings into the mainstream the unethical black-market practice of selling unwound parts at auction. Do you really want our lawmakers in the black market?
“Vote no on Initiative 11. The pound-of-flesh law is not a solution we can live with.”
—Sponsored by the Coalition for Ethical Unwinding Practices
Dinner that night for Risa is not room service but a feast in the large dining room of the main house. The long table seats two dozen, and Risa is seated toward the middle, after refusing to be seated at the head. CyFi’s fathers, who, Risa learned, had given up lucrative law and dental practices to run the Tyler Walker Foundation, are not present.
“Twice a week we have a special dinner,” CyFi explains. “Just Tyler-folk—no spouses or family. It’s a time just for us—and tonight you get to be one of us.”
Risa’s not sure how to feel about that.
The doctor takes it upon himself to introduce Risa, stealing CyFi’s thunder. He offers Risa up in the best possible light. A loyal member of the ADR forced by the enemy to testify against her own conscience. “She believed that by doing their bidding, she was saving hundreds of kids from being unwound,” the doctor explains, “but in the end she was double-crossed, and those kids are now in harvest camps awaiting ‘summary division.’ Risa is a victim of the system, as we all are, and I, for one, welcome her with open arms.”
Those gathered applaud, although there’s still some reluctance. Risa supposes that’s the best she’s going to get.
The meal is brisket and flavorful home-grown vegetables. It’s like Sunday dinner among a big family. Everyone eats with minimal conversation until CyFi says, “Yo, maybe you all oughta introduce yourselves.”
“Names, or sharings?” someone asks.
“Sharings,” someone else answers. “We might as well tell her the Tyler.”
CyFi begins. “Right temporal lobe.” Then he looks to his left.
Reluctantly the man next to him says, “Left arm.” He holds up his hand and waves.
Then the woman beside him says, “Left leg below the knee.” And around the table it goes:
“Right eye.”
“Left eye.”
“Liver and pancreas.”
“A substantial part of the occipital lobe.”
Part after part is announced until it comes all the way around the table, back to Risa. “Spine,” she says awkwardly. “But I don’t know whose.”
“We could find out for you,” the woman who received Tyler’s heart offers.
“No, that’s all right. I’d rather not know,” Risa tells her. “At least not now, anyway.”
She nods with understanding. “It’s a personal choice—no one will pressure you.”
Risa looks around the table. They’re all still eating, but now the attention is focused on her.
“So . . . every single piece of Tyler Walker is at this table?”
CyFi sighs. “No. We don’t got spleen, left kidney, intestinal tract, thyroid, or any part of his right arm. And there’s also a bunch of smaller brain bits that didn’t have enough of him to feel the pull—but about seventy-five percent of him is here around the table.”
“And the other twenty-five percent can take a flying leap,” says left-auditory-tract man. Everyone laughs.
Risa also learns that the garish decor in every room is also for Tyler. He had an overwhelming attraction to shiny things. Stealing them was part of the reason he was unwound.
“But everything here is bought and paid for,” the Tyler-folk are quick to tell her.
“Does the Tyler Walker Foundation pay you all to stay here?”
“More like the other way around,” the doctor says. “Sure, when we first heard the idea, we were all dubious”—his eyes go a little euphoric—“but when you’re here, in the presence of Tyler, you realize you don’t want to be anywhere else.”
“I sold my home and gave everything to the foundation,” someone else says. “They didn’t ask for it. I just wanted to give it.”
“He’s here with us, Risa,” CyFi tells her. “You don’t have to believe it, but we all do. It’s a matter of faith.”
It’s all too strange, too foreign for Risa to embrace. She thinks of the many other “revival communes” that have sprung up, thanks to the Tyler Walker Foundation. Their existence is another unexpected consequence of unwinding—a convoluted solution to an even more convoluted problem. She doesn’t fault CyFi or any of these people. Instead she blames the world that made this place necessary. It galvanizes her more than ever to bring an end to unwinding once and for all. She knows she’s only one girl, but she also knows she’s a larger-than-life icon now. People love her, fear her, despise her, revere her. All these elements can make her a force to be reckoned with, if she plays her cards right.
That night, before everyone goes to bed, there’s a ritual that CyFi lets her witness.
“We played with a bunch of ideas—silly stuff mostly—like lying on the ground in the shape of a body, in our respective positions. Or huddling together in a little room, all squeezed in like clowns in a car, to reduce the space between us. But all that crap just felt weird. In the end we settled upon this circle. Simpler is better.”
The circle, which is at the center of the garden, is marked by stones, each one engraved with the name of a part—even the parts that aren’t there have a place. Everyone sits in front of their respective stone, and someone—anyone—begins to speak. There seem to be no rules beyond that. It’s a free-for-all, and yet they never seem to speak over one another. Risa notices that it’s the people who got Tyler’s brain that seem to motivate most of the conversation, but everyone participates.
“I’m pissed off,” someone says.
“You’re always pissed off,” someone else responds. “Let it go.”
“I shouldn’t have stolen all that stuff.”
“But you did, so get over it.”
“I miss Mom and Dad.”
“They unwound you.”
“No! I can stop them. It’s not too late.”
“Read my lips: They . . . unwound . . . you!”
“I feel sick to my stomach.”
“I’m not surprised the way you scarfed down that brisket.”
“It tasted like Grandma’s.”
“It was. I convinced Mom to give us the recipe.”
“You talked to her?”
“Well, to her lawyer.”
“It figures.”
“I remember Mom’s smile.”
“I remember her voice.”
“Remember how cold she was toward the end?”
“Sorry, not part of my memory.”
“There’s so much stuff I wanna do, but I can’t remember what it was.”
“I remember at least one thing. Skydiving.”
“Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.”
“Maybe it will,” says CyFi. Then he asks, “How many of you would skydive for Tyler?”
About half the hands go up immediately, then a bunch more with mild reluctance. There are only a couple of holdouts.
“Great,” says CyFi. “It’s a done deal. I’ll have the dads make the arrangements. Tyler’s going skydiving!”
Risa feels like the ultimate outsider, and she can’t help but feel these people are deluding themselves . . . but she also can’t help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, Tyler is really here in some real but immeasurable way. Whether it’s an illusion or not, she’ll never know. Like CyFi said, it’s a matter of faith.
One thing’s for sure, though. If Tyler really is “present,” then he’s got a lot of growing up to do. Risa wonders if a divided person can grow up. Or if they’re stuck at the age at which they were unwound.
When the circle chat is through, CyFi walks Risa back to her room, and Risa can’t keep herself from giving at least one opinion.
“It’s all well and good what you’re playing at here, Cyrus,” Risa says, “but when you stood in front of Congress and fought for the Cap-17 law, you were doing something truly important.”
“Yeah—and look what good it did. We got Cap-17 through, and now there are even more crackdowns by the Juvies and ads convincing people what a good thing unwinding is. They use all our good intentions against us—you should know that more than anyone. I’m pretty damn smart, but no way am I smart enough to beat that.”
“That doesn’t mean you give up trying. Now what are you doing? Nothing but indulging the childish whims of a troubled unwound kid.”
“Watch yourself, Risa,” CyFi warns. “People have given up a lot to indulge that troubled kid.”
“Well, then, maybe Tyler needs someone to tell him to man up.”
“And that person is you, I suppose?”
“I don’t see anyone else doing it. You’re all fixated on what Tyler was and what he wanted before he got himself unwound. Why don’t you start thinking about what he’d want three years later?”
For once, CyFi has no wisecrack answer. But Tyler does.
“You suck,” Tyler says out of CyFi’s mouth. “But yeah, I’ll think about it.”
FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
“My name is Captain Lance Reitano, and I’m a decorated firefighter. Let me tell you why I’m voting yes on Initiative 11. By the voluntary shelling and unwinding of violent offenders, Initiative 11 provides crucial tissues and organs—and the initiative has a provision allowing burn victims to receive them for free. When you’ve been in the field as long as I have, you know how important that is.
“Opponents of Initiative 11 claim some sort of ‘moral high ground’—but you want to know the truth? They’re the ones with an unethical agenda. They, and the Juvenile Authority, want Initiative 11 to fail, because they want to repeal the Cap-17 law instead. Not only that, but these same self-serving billionaires are fighting for a constitutional amendment that would bump the legal age of unwinding all the way up to 19, allowing even more kids to be unwound—which would increase their profits and their stranglehold on the organ industry.
“I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see a killer unwound than the kid next door. Vote yes on Initiative 11!”
—Sponsored by Patriots for Sensible Shelling
Although Risa had resolved to stay a second week, her antsiness, and desire to do something becomes overwhelming. On her eighth day, she decides to leave.
“Where will you go?” CyFi asks as he escorts her to the main road. “If the ADR is the full-on mess you say it is, do you even have a place to go?”
“No,” she admits, “but I’ll take my chances out there. There’s got to be someone left in the ADR. If not, I’ll start my own Anti-Divisional Resistance.”
“Sounds pretty iffy to me.”
“My whole life’s been iffy—why should this be any different?”
“All right, then,” says CyFi. “You take care of yourself, Risa, and if you happen to run into Lev, tell him to come on by. I’ll cook some nice old-fashioned smorgasbash.” CyFi smiles. “He’ll know what it means.”