by Douglas Lain
She’d brought along the spectacles in her backpack. She’d carefully packed them, wrapping them in tissue before putting them in a paper sack inside the backpack. Now she took the spectacles out briskly, hardly paying attention and setting them down haphazardly on the desk.
“These are on loan from the Children’s Museum,” she said. “Everyone be careful with them.”
They were alternate vision spectacles. The lenses in each set of frames were shaped differently—some bifurcated, some compounded, some with blinders—so that wearing them gave you a view approximately like the vision of different animals. Looking through these glasses meant seeing the world as a bee sees it, as a horse sees it, as a chicken, or as a bat sees it. The idea was that, after taking a look out from these different perspectives, the question that Lissitzky and Malevich were posing would be easier to understand. Once you’d seen the world as a bee the question of pure seeing, of seeing in the abstract, would be a bit more visceral.
Wanda from the tanning salon tried on the horse-eyed spectacles and a line formed behind her, but Johnny in the front row didn’t move.
“Aren’t you going to join us, Johnny?” Patricia asked.
“I don’t need to,” he said.
“Oh no?”
“Pleidiens don’t only see things with our eyes. We go beyond that, go beyond even pure seeing, or this pure feeling that the Suprematists were after. These are the wrong words,” Johnny said.
“I feel like I’m going to bump into something,” Wanda interrupted. “Like I’ll lose my step if I try to walk.” Wanda was about forty-five and wore low-cut polyester blouses that revealed her softening but not yet sagging breasts. She held her hands out in front of her face and waved them back and forth. She was wearing the bat-eyed lenses.
“Everything is fractured,” one of the girls from Jazzercise said. She too was waving her hands in front of her face and turning about. She had on bee eyes and she turned too quickly and smacked Johnny on the top of his head. “Oops.”
“Maybe the word is ontology,” the alien said. “That’s the study of being, of essence.”
After everyone but the Pleidien had tried on all the different kinds of spectacles Patricia announced the break. An artist’s model, a friend named Shelly who was willing to pose nude for half the usual rate, would be arriving and Patricia reminded everyone to focus on the quality of the line, on shading. She gave the class fifteen minutes to use the restroom upstairs, to step out for a cigarette, or to mill about without purpose while she gathered up the spectacles and cleared a space in the front of the room for Shelly. She placed a sheet over her desk, and then set about placing graphite pencils and drawing paper on the students’ desks.
Johnny followed her as she moved about the classroom setting up. When she’d set down the last pencil, when she returned to her desk and leaned against it in anticipation, he spoke to her again.
“You’ve tried the bee glasses?” he asked.
She had.
“You’ve tried all the different ways of seeing?”
Patricia said she hadn’t tried all the different ways, that she always saw things in the same way basically, but she’d tried a few different filters. She explained that her original filter, the human filter, was impossible to remove.
“I don’t know,” Johnny said. “Maybe I could help you with that. Would you like that?”
Johnny told her that if she would place her hand on the top of his head, precisely on the spot where the young student had given him a smack, he could allow her to glimpse the Pleidien way of seeing. He could link up with her eyes and let her see the world as he saw it.
“Is this like a Vulcan mind meld or something?” she asked.
“Not like a mind meld. I won’t see through your eyes. It’ll be a one-directional link,” he said.
“Very reassuring.”
The Suprematists’ geometric patterns, their black squares and red ovals, even their crosses and people, were reductions. After the Russian revolution Malevich went to the extreme of painting a white square on a blank canvas so that the shape was just visible, so that the form was barely there. The aim was to get out of the way of feeling, to let what was sweep through the mind and come to be on the canvas.
“Everything which determined the objective ideal structure of life and of ‘art’ ideas, concepts, and images all this the artist has cast aside in order to heed pure feeling.”
Malevich wrote this in his Suprematist manifesto, and something like this pure feeling is what Patricia experienced as she stood in the basement of the Mt. Scott Community Center with her hand on top of the Pleidien’s head. Even if feeling was the wrong word that’s how she thought of it.
Johnny’s hair was a bit greasy, but soon this sensation passed and instead she simply saw what was, the toolbox and concrete floor, the desks and chairs, the canvas tarps thrown over piles of equipment and rubbish. These things weren’t distinct but one. It was not that the things of the world disappeared, but all imposed understanding dropped away.
She couldn’t say how long she stood like that with Johnny, seeing and not seeing, but after some passage of time this reverie was interrupted.
Shelly, the artist’s model, arrived. Shelly was a pretty black girl, about twenty-four, five years younger than Patricia. She was the kind of well-put-together woman who made Patricia feel unattractive and awkward. In her olive turtleneck and pencil skirt she practically shined, every inch of her ensemble fit her perfectly. They’d met at the art museum where they both volunteered as docents, but when Patricia first saw her she’d assumed that Shelly was a VIP, some donor’s granddaughter maybe.
“Patricia?” Shelly asked.
“Oh, hey,” Patricia said. Johnny stepped back, returned to his desk, while Patricia leaned against hers. She put her hand down on the bed sheet that she’d draped over the hard wood and took a breath.
“What was going on there? You okay?”
“I’m fine. You ready to be turned into art? Or, more accurately, ready to be drawn as a Disney princess with the requisite emphasis on tits and ass?”
“You have my check?” Shelly asked.
She did. Patricia apologized again, in advance, for the twelve identical drawings that were sure to come from this lesson. They were all of them bound to be crude and unnatural, focused on the model’s nudity rather than her form. All of them barring one, that is.
Johnny wouldn’t draw anything like a human figure. The Pleidien didn’t understand representation. All of his efforts produced Pleidien symbols—squiggles and gestures that Patricia knew was something like a language only not. The Pleidiens were too spiritual for written languages. Still, each time Johnny had drawn curly lines, his hand moving mechanically and precisely in this or that arc or with this or that flourish.
“Shall we start?” Shelly asked.
“We’re on a break, but in a few minutes…” Patricia looked around to see that her students were back at their desks and that they had their pads and pencils at the ready. “That is, the restroom is through that door and to the left.”
Johnny’s hand was already moving. The shape he was working out was very much the kind of thing that Malevich would have appreciated. What he was sketching was a telephone pole or maybe a cross.
(Charles wants more information about Johnny. “What is Johnny doing now?” he asks. Asket turns her head a bit to the right, as if looking at Johnny even though her eyes are closed.)
Johnny was getting up from his desk. What Patricia saw was that Johnny was approaching the front of the room and that he had a creepy smile. He waved to her but Patricia didn’t respond. Then he came to the front of the room, beside Patricia, and he reached out and unbuttoned the top button on her blouse and she still didn’t say anything. She found that she couldn’t say anything because Johnny was saying something. Or, more to the point, Johnny wasn’t talking but he was standing on her desk, looming over her. His gut was at eye level, and he had his arms out, extended like he was con
ducting, like he was about to instruct an orchestra.
She was to take off her clothes and switch places with Shelly. Johnny was telling her to move, to step out of her jeans, to be ready, and when Shelly entered the room in her terry cloth robe, when Shelly reached the desk, she took Patricia’s discolored panties, the pair that had turned a light purple and green in the wash, and put them on. Shelly took Patricia’s blue jeans, her socks. Shelly took all of it. She stood where Patricia had been standing and took her place.
“Can you see me?” Johnny asked.
The students in the class were sitting completely still, just as they had been, none of them moving, apparently not even breathing, and Patricia was naked in front of them.
“It’s time for a change,” Johnny said. “This has gone on long enough in this direction and now you should change.”
And Patricia found that she agreed with him and that she could move again. She lifted herself onto the desk and, with her back to the classroom, looked over her shoulder.
Patricia was an artist’s model.
No, that wasn’t it. The artist’s model wasn’t Patricia at all. It was Shelly who stepped up to the desk, sat down so her legs were in front of her, her legs spread and her sex revealed to the chalkboard. It was Shelly who glanced over her right shoulder to look, coquettishly, back at the students. She was a bit vain, but maybe a little saggy, Patricia thought.
Johnny returned to his seat, looking like nothing more than an overweight suburbanite.
“Okay class,” Patricia said. “Let’s try to be original here. Think about the Suprematists and pure feeling.”
“Is this right?” Shelly asked. And she felt she was asking about something more than her posture, about something more than the butterfly tattoo on the small of her back. “Is this okay? Are we okay?”
“Sure,” Patricia assured her. “You look great. Okay class, go to it.”
The students built their sketches as blueprints. Shelly looked back at them over her shoulder and her pale skin was covered in goose pimples.
The students, all of them, took Patricia’s instructions to heart and rendered Shelly in the Suprematist style. She wasn’t a woman at all, this model. She wasn’t Shelly, but was just an abstraction, a pure line on a page. She was pure feeling, identity without form, and the students drew triangles and squares. They used colored pencils, tying the feeling they were sketching together with red lines and green circles, and all of their drawings were the same.
When everyone was finished Shelly turned around and slid off the desk. She grabbed her robe and covered up, and then silently walked between the desks to the door. Her head was a triangle, her midriff an oval, and her legs were just thin lines.
(We aren’t really getting anywhere. Maybe Charles put her too far under? This isn’t a memory at all, but a dream maybe.)
After art class Patricia found Shelly loitering around the front of the community center. She was waiting for her by the double doors, nervously glancing into the entryway, through the pane glass doors, when Patricia, having exited from the basement door, came up behind her.
“Hey there.”
“That didn’t go right,” Shelly said.
“Sorry,” Patricia said. She stepped past Shelly and to the front door to lock up. She had a large ring of keys and struggled to find the right one.
“You have a minute?” Shelly asked.
“Who me?” Patricia asked. “Actually, I’m in a hurry. I’m sorry though. Sorry you didn’t enjoy the class. We’ll talk about it at the museum?”
“Where are you going, exactly?” Shelly asked.
Patricia didn’t know. She felt like a blank tape, a videotape that had been demagnetized, and she didn’t know what to say to her friend. Shelly looked tired. Were those bags under her eyes?
“Patricia? What’s going on?” Shelly asked.
She found the right key. It was the one with the green rubber key tag. Patricia turned it, checked that the door was secure, and then looked back at Shelly and gave her an embarrassed smile.
“Did you turn on the alarm?” Shelly asked.
Patricia found the key again, ran her fingers through her straightened hair, licked her lips, and then stepped back inside. She wanted Shelly to have the impression that she would be right back, she had that impression herself, but once she was behind the closed door, standing in the dark lobby of the Community Center, she didn’t move. She stood there in the dark for ten minutes and then for another ten, and then another.
“I don’t want to see that girl, that model, ever again,” she said into the relative darkness.
The trouble with testimony gleaned from hypnotic regression is twofold. First, there is no evidence that a person’s memory is improved through the use of hypnosis, nor is a person less likely to make a mistake or misremember when hypnotized than when fully awake and relying on conscious recollection. Second, a hypnotized person is suggestible. This is why hypnotism was popular as a sideshow act and in vaudeville during the late nineteenth century, it’s why hypnotism can be used as a way to treat people with various addictions, and it’s why abductees and contactees generally tell stories that reflect the worldview of the researcher. The hypnotized person remembers what the researcher wants them to believe, quits smoking at the hypnotist’s request, and will cluck like a chicken if you ask them nicely.
What Charles Rain asks this woman whose name we just learned might’ve been Patricia and might’ve been Shelly, and who claims to be Harold’s wife Carole, is to remember what happened next. That is, he asks her to tell us what happened to her the day after she changed, after her body became somebody new and she hitched a ride in a new body.
“I can’t breathe,” Patricia says.
“You can breathe. Right now you can breathe,” Rain says. He’s a bit panicked.
Patricia is coughing, waving her hand in front of her face, like she’s waving away smoke, and Rain moves toward her. He gets out of his leather chair and kneels down next to her on the couch, as if the closer proximity will help him, as if he can make her listen.
“You’re with us now. The air is clear here. You’re here with Brian and me, in my studio.”
“Why did everyone have to smoke? Why did everyone have to smoke in that little café?” Patricia asks. Her eyes are still closed and she’s still waving her hand back and forth in front of her face, but she’s not coughing anymore and she’s changed tense.
“What café is that, Patricia?” Rain asks.
The Telecafe was a small espresso bar near Mt. Scott Community Center, located just a couple of blocks away from where Patricia lived in SE Portland, and Patricia tended to treat it as her second living room. She went to get a latte and bagel there around 8:30 a.m. on most days, before she caught her bus and went downtown to volunteer for the art museum, and the morning after her body changed this was where she went. She woke up at seven a.m., the usual time, waited for the bathroom down the hall from her apartment to be free so she could take a shower, and then got dressed up as was usual in a tartan-patterned black and red wool skirt, cashmere sweater, and sneakers.
“I didn’t know for sure whether I liked how I looked,” she says. “It was sort of fashionable, but something seemed wrong about it.”
But even though something seemed wrong about her reflection, even though she didn’t like the way her clothes felt on her, she grabbed her purple plaid-patterned purse and house keys, and despite how odd she felt she went on her way. She was off to work even if she wasn’t being paid.
When she got to the Telecafe she started coughing. She manages to tell us about how annoying the cigarette smoke was, how stuffy and unpleasant she found her environment to be, without reenacting it for us. She’s got a bit of distance from her memory now, and she’s able to articulate what she remembers without interruption. The words are coming from her in a good flow, like a story she might have told before.
Most of the clientele of the Telecafe are in their early twenties, almost a decad
e younger than Patricia, and most of them are smokers. They’re sitting at their various tables, some of them square tables, some of them circular, not one matched set, drinking lattes or other espresso drinks out of pint glasses, and smoking. There is Robert, a kid she’s talked to before about Damien Hirst and Carl Jung, and he’s smoking a Menthol. The girl across from him, she looks like she’s out of a fashion magazine, a bit like a flapper, and she’s rolling her own cigarette. Almost all of the patrons of the Telecafe are smoking cigarettes, and even though Patricia chooses a spot to sit down near the door for the ventilation, she still finds it difficult to breathe. There is so much smoke she can’t taste her bagel. She’s coughing and coughing, and wondering why she likes this particular café.
Out on the sidewalk Patricia was deciding not to return, marveling that the ramshackle cafe ever became part of her routine. The latte was lukewarm, the bagel was clearly store bought, and there was so much smoke, and she was thinking about her bus schedule when she absently opened up her mini-purse and started rifling through it. She pulled out her pack of American Spirit lights, tapped one out, put it in her mouth, and lit it. Then she remembered.
The reason she liked the Telecafe was precisely because she was allowed to smoke there.
“There is a saucer over 11th Street,” Patricia says.
“You’re here with us now,” Charles reminds her.
“There was a saucer over the Telecafe. I wondered if the people onboard, the aliens up there at the controls…were they watching me?”
Patricia’s short-term goal was to be recognized for her good work as a docent and hired on as either Events Manager or as part of the education and outreach department, but her long-term aim was to be a curator, and the Barbara Kruger exhibit was a good example of why she felt her judgment and taste would add value to the museum. She would never have had scheduled a Kruger exhibit, not after the landing. Walking between the red and white banners that together made up the entirety of Kruger’s gimmicky exhibit, taking in her imperatives and observations printed in massive Helvetica letters, Patricia was a bit embarrassed. Kruger’s work had no heart to it, it was all in the head, and at a time when people felt unsure, dwarfed by events, the last thing they wanted from an art museum was to be reminded of their own alienation.
