The Oasis was meant to be a playground for adults but also an open-air gallery for avant-garde artists working in unconventional mediums and genres, a place to spark the imagination at every turn and, as Emmerich put it, “stretch and enrich our hidebound minds with the revolutionary art of the new.” Even I, still a callow youth at nineteen, knew that conflating newness and art would ensure the production of bad art, which indeed was everywhere in the Oasis. Those who create in protest against the history of art do not stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the treacherous ground of their own pretensions. The art in the Oasis tended to be immense, not because the subjects required it, rather because the egos of the artists demanded works of physical enormity. Here was a sixty-foot-long, twenty-five-foot-high Gillette razor blade presented on a block of Lucite, so it seemed to float in midair. And here stood a mixed-metal sculpture maybe fifty feet in diameter and nearly as high, so abstract that I couldn’t decide whether it was meant to be a cancer-riddled colon or the scalp of a Medusa on which all the serpents were simultaneously trying to copulate with and devour one another. Nestled in a humongous ear was a giant mouth with a big eyeball clenched between its teeth; on the granite plinth that supported this grotesque work, the following words were engraved: I HEAR WHAT YOU’RE SAYING, AND I SEE THAT IT IS MEANINGLESS.
As we progressed through Emmerich’s malignant wonderland in search of a front door, Winston grumbled at this and growled at that and lifted a leg to pee on the base of the ear-mouth-eye. Although he lacked language, he was a perceptive critic capable of expressing his judgment.
To the rest of us, the collection in this open-air gallery was increasingly disturbing for two reasons. If at first we found the more absurd works to be beguiling, our capacity for amusement faded the farther that we proceeded. Many of the artists appeared to have celebrated chaos and death. The wicker man reminded me of an old movie in which pagan villagers in modern England sacrificed a young woman by locking her in the chest cavity of such a giant construct and then setting it on fire. What was a wickedly gleaming, sixty-foot-long razor blade if not a tribute to a common instrument of suicide? Past a grove of graceful Metrosideros in early flower, we discovered a thirty-foot-tall sculpture of a sharp-faced cartoon rat that was definitely not Walt Disney’s famous Mickey, though it was wearing the yellow shoes and red shorts in which the beloved mouse was always depicted. The rodent’s teeth were bared in a sneer, and its red crystal eyes glittered. In its right hand was the naked body of a headless human infant on which the monster evidently feasted.
Equally disturbing was the thought of how much the Oasis had cost to construct, a sum surely in excess of a billion dollars. I estimated more than two billion, maybe three, depending on what awaited discovery. A man who would spend so lavishly on a fantasy retreat might have been a business genius, but even before he had squirreled away in this refuge from normality, he’d been wading in the shallows of insanity.
Eventually, psychic magnetism brought us to the front door that we had been seeking. By this time, we had intuited that most of the residence must be underground, a vast bunker insulated against the Sonoran heat. The door stood at the head of a wide ramp that led to a flying saucer that seemed to be of formed concrete skinned with slate-colored aluminum, serving as a reception hall. The earthbound alien craft was about thirty feet high at the center, maybe eighty or ninety feet in diameter, tapering to ten or twelve feet at the perimeter.
We would later learn that Emmerich hired a construction company that specialized in building top-secret military installations, and that everyone who worked on the Oasis had to sign a nondisclosure agreement with such fierce teeth that those who breached it would invite financial ruin. No one violated the NDA, perhaps not merely for fear of being impoverished by attack-dog attorneys. They also suspected that anyone who undertook such a project would be capable of retribution that bypassed courts in favor of specialists who could put you in a wheelchair for life, disfigure your wife, and mess with your children until they needed lifelong psychiatric care. Still more disquieting was the thought that some of the workers, tradespeople, and artisans who labored on the Oasis took pleasure in imagining to what libertine activities the place might be devoted on completion, and envied the dispensation from morality and even from the law that Emmerich’s wealth might buy.
The immense flying-saucer entrance was styled neither like the sleek alien craft in the movies of the 1950s nor the extravaganza of light and glamour from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was more in line with the Gothic craft in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Emmerich seemed to want to inspire wonder in his guests on their arrival, but also instill a sense of awe and a vague apprehension that would keep them slightly off balance for the duration of their visit, whether they were staying for a day, a week—or forever.