Читаем The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities полностью

It was a groundbreaking achievement, of course, but not without precedent. The field of robotics did not yet exist—the word “robot” would not be coined till 1920—but the history of prosthetic automata went back at least as far as the sixteenth century and the legendary German mercenary Götz von Berlichingen, who lost his right arm in a freak accident when a stray cannonball caused it to be cut off with his own sword. The spring-loaded mechanical iron arm he caused to be built as a replacement could grip a lance and write with a quill. (Wykeham-Rackham was fond of quoting from Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen, based on von Berlichingen’s life, in which the playwright coined a useful phrase: “Leck mich am Arsch,” or, loosely, “Kiss my ass.”)

To replace Wykeham-Rackham’s shattered face, a wholly different approach was required. When he was sufficiently recovered from his first operation, Wykeham-Rackham was removed to Sidcup, a suburb of London, home to a special hospital dedicated to the care of those with grotesque facial injuries. It was an eerie place. Mirrors were forbidden. Throughout the town were placed special benches, painted blue, where it was understood that the townspeople should expect that anyone sitting there would present a gravely disturbing appearance.

Wykeham-Rackham’s old artist friends, those who were left, rallied around him. Facial reconstruction at that time was accomplished by means of masks. A plaster cast was made of the wounded man’s face, a process that brought the patient to within seconds of suffocation. The cast was then used to make a mask of paper-thin galvanized copper. Prominent painters competed with one another to produce the most lifelike reproduction of Wykeham-Rackham’s vanished features, which were then reproduced in enamel that was bonded to the copper.

In all, twelve such masks were produced, suitable for various occasions and displaying a range of facial expressions. On seeing them for the first time, Wykeham-Rackham held one up, like Hamlet holding up Yorick’s skull, and quoted from his old friend Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Following the end of the war, Wykeham-Rackham enjoyed a second heyday. His fantastical appearance made him the toast of the European avant-garde. A pioneer of kinetic sculpture, Marcel Duchamp was enraptured by Wykeham-Rackham, who agreed to be exhibited alongside Duchamp’s other “ready-mades”; he even allowed Duchamp to sign his steel calf with his distinctive “R. Mutt.” Man Ray photographed him. Cocteau filmed him. Stravinsky wrote a ballet based on his life, choreographed by Nijinsky.

Picasso created a special mask for him, a Cubist nightmare that he never wore. (Wykeham-Rackham remarked that Picasso seemed to have missed the point, as the mask was more grotesque than what lay beneath it, not less.) Prosthetics became increasingly fashionable, and not a few deaths and grievous injuries among the fashionable set were explained as attempts to reproduce Wykeham-Rackham’s distinctive “look.”

Meanwhile, he was continuously undergoing mechanical upgrades and improvements as the available technology progressed. He regularly entertained whole salons of inventors and engineers who vied to try out their innovations on him. Nikola Tesla submitted an elaborate, wildly visionary set of schematics for powering his movements electrically. They were, characteristically for Tesla, the subject of a defamation campaign by Edison, then a blizzard of lawsuits by others who claimed credit for them, and then, finally and decisively, lost in a fire.

But as time wore on, Wykeham-Rackham became increasingly aware that while his metal parts were largely unscathed by the passage of time, his human parts were not. At a scandalous fiftieth birthday party thrown for him by the infamous Bright Young Things of London, Evelyn Waugh among them, Wykeham-Rackham was heard to remark that he was both picture and Dorian Gray in one man.

It was not long afterwards, in 1932, that Wykeham-Rackham opted to have the remainder of his face removed. He was tired, he said, of having his mask touched up to look older, to match his surviving features. Why not become all-mask, and look however he wished? It is not known with any certainty who performed this “voluntary disfigurement” operation, but it is strongly suspected that Lambshead’s steady if not overly fastidious hand held the scalpel, judging by the fact that Wykeham-Rackham took a sub-rosa trip to Madagascar at around this time.

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