Bright Shards of Someplace Else

by Monica McFawn

  He watched the dark streets outside his window, waiting for the return of the cruiser, the sluicing of slow tires in the damp street, the siren yip as the brakes engage and the car glows with the light of his file on the inboard screen. A man jogged by with a small dog struggling to keep up, its movement more side-to-side than forward, as if it were being twisted on a spit. He turned away, walked to the mirror in the hall. He put his wrists together in front of, then behind, his back.

  Which was best? In front implied a willing giving over, an offering. Yet to hold his hands behind him was also a submissive gesture, he noted, since it took both his arms away from him. It would make him more streamlined, like a little blade or fin. He could choose to be pulled forward, or pushed. Either way he would enter the apparatus that would take him to his fate. He imagined it would be like riding in a car as a child, half asleep. He would be bumped and jarred, his head would be heavy, and he might hang from the seat belt in a stupor as the headlights raked over him in cascading geometries. And they would keep asking questions in their sonorous adult voices, about where he had been, what he had done, how things had gone. He always liked that.

  IMPROVISATION

  The play was a success, and all the actors crowded into the green room, gasping and talking loudly, still projecting as if on stage, their individual voices flung over each other like grappling hooks thrown to opposite ledges. The success was made all the sweeter by all the ways it was nearly not. Rosie, the lead, is grinning and crying with relief and exultation, and a long eyeliner drip changes course as she throws her head back to laugh: “The knocking was supposed to happen after Gracie tells me about what happened with the baby. But I start hearing this knocking before she even gets a line out! So get this,” Rosie raises her voice—she is taking too long and losing listeners. “I start stomping on the floor! To cover up the sound of the knocks! And I explain it by saying I’m trying to confuse the termites. And Gracie says…”

  The rest is lost as all attention moves to John, who is red-faced and sweating, squatting and gesturing at an invisible object that he marks out with two forefingers in the air. “I was supposed to pick up a vase on the sideboard and explain how fragile it is … You know, like a damn metaphor.” He looks over his shoulder to be sure everyone is listening. “Well, I get going on my spiel and walk over to the sideboard and … no vase! No nothing! So I’m stuck explaining how fragile the damn sideboard is! And let me tell you, that thing doesn’t look too fragile.” He throws his hand at the mimed sideboard with a kind of playful faux-despair.

  Two actors argue loudly enough to turn heads. In their scene, a wall of the set came down and they had to jump aside. Glen had continued with his lines as if nothing had happened. The other, Hal, had exclaimed about the “shoddy-ass slum-lord run pit,” that is, he responded by responding in character. Glen has a glass of wine in his hands and shakes it to make a point. “Responding to the falling of the set at all takes the audience out of the moment. It acknowledges the artifice!” Hal is bent over the party tray, and sweat shakes off his mustache at every word. “Looks worse to ignore it.” They continue to argue as everyone leaves the green room and walks the light-slicked streets to the after party, where there are more flushed faces and rousing stories of all the ways the play was saved, the mishaps taken in nonplussed stride, the wrong lighting cues, the lost props, the badly timed entries, the stage-frightened, the missed lines and too-soon departs. A thin young man, Jack, with a congratulatory rose snapped off in his buttonhole, laughs and tells his stories, listens to the others, and leaves finally for home with the sense of loss that always follows even a good show.

  “But I must insist, Cecil …” As he walks he begins reciting lines from the play, of which he had precious few as the nephew of the patriarch who was written in late only to move the plot along; most of his lines were in the order of “But the Duke was just here!” or “I thought I saw the Mistress in the garden that very night!” and “This was left on the davenport!” He repeats all seven of them over and over, like a miser wrist-deep in a pile of coins, pulling up to hear them drop. The street is mostly dark, and the streetlights go out one by one; in fact they go out as he approaches. He keeps on. There is a place he often goes for drinks, but when he gets there it is no longer a decades-old neighborhood bar but an ice-cream parlor. He shrugs and gets a late-night cone. He walks and walks too far; the night wind whips the stem of his rose back and forth so fast it becomes a blurred arc, like a hummingbird treading air. He is lost. He looks around and sees his neighborhood rising above in the background as if it’s a city in the sky resting on the rooftops of the neighborhood he’s in. He can just see the molding around the top window of his apartment, the highest frond of his rubber plant. But there seems to be no way through; he darts back and forth across the street, his path like a stitch drawing the two curbs closed.

  Suddenly he is flying through the air, not toward his apartment in the sky but away from it. He sees the stars between his toes. It is like the trick with the wires when Grace as the angel is sent to tell the Duke a message from his dead mother—a horribly trite moment, but the way the angel swings and pinwheels from her waist is almost worth it. Tonight her harness slid down to her upper leg, changing her pivot point, so that she somersaulted completely backward and had to deliver her lines at the Duke’s feet through gossamer and netting while her naked legs pedaled above. Still she maintained her prophetic sweetness.

  He makes contact and crumples like a time-lapsed closing rose. The stars he sees are now interwoven into one cyclopic light, the kind that keeps you from seeing the audience. The blood in his eyes becomes a smokescreen behind which the scene is switched. The curtain is hit from the inside and buckles out in momentary ripples; a thin shelf of light projects outward between the fringe and the floor, the big dark shapes lurch and scrape. He must respond. Continuity was the name of the game. If you ever paused too long on stage, if you were ever thrown … he thinks of the messenger, who stood at the door to the Duke’s place, parcel in hand, and the slight obligation of saying, “A package for you, Duke,” but who froze under the pressure nonetheless. His silence, the vicarious shame of the whole room, the poised moment that went on and on wobbling and circling its conclusion while no one took a breath …

  His soul is working itself free of his body, like an actress snaking her way out of a tight, long dress with two stage hands pulling on the hem. With a great and violent undulation he is almost out, but in a heroic moment his body sits bolt upright and grabs the soul by the wisp of its trailing end, pulls it down, and cups it in his hand with a beatific, civic-minded smile, like this is the great opening of a public affair and he is in possession of the dove to be symbolically released. He lets go like he means to do it. In the empty orchestra pit, the void pads in and picks up the toothpicks and gum wrappers, music stands, and whatever else, then hangs there, like a custodian getting some shut-eye propped on two folding chairs. Even the celestial choir begins with coughs and laughs and people losing their place.

  THE SLIDE TURNED ON END

  We were sitting in his home office in Concord, Massachusetts. O’Hara—a biologist by trade—explained his entry into the art world. “I was on my way to a conference on DNA lithography in Illinois, when I got lost. I stopped at an art museum, called the conference directors, and realized that I got the day and time wrong. I missed the damn thing.”

  O’Hara gave a little shameless smile, acknowledging that brilliant minds are allowed leniency in planning and daily alertness. “So I figured, what the hell, I’ll look around for a bit, I guess. And what I saw there was nothing short of remarkable.” O’Hara, a rather shrunken man in his mid-sixties, spread his arms wide to show how wide-reaching his ideas were. “I saw science and art merge once and for all …”

  O’Hara claimed he glanced at a work of abstract art—a Kandinsky, he thinks—and was immediately struck by how similar it was to some of the rare amoebas he was working with at the time. “I thought I was hallu
cinating. I mean, here was something precisely like what I had under the slide just that morning!” So precise was the resemblance that he thought he had lost his mind. “I nudged this person next to me and said—I mean, I realize how absurd this is now—I said, ‘Is that a blown-up slide of Grayson’s amoeba, I mean, is that the guy’s er … inspiration?’” O’Hara reported that all he got in response was an “I think not” and some advice about brushing up on his art history. O’Hara, however, was sure that he had hit upon something significant. “The more I walked around looking at this so-called abstract art, the more I felt like I was looking at a bunch of blown-up slides turned on end.” When he returned to his university, he quickly arranged a sabbatical to study this phenomenon. “I lied to the department. I said I was going to study a new way to extract antibodies from fungi—specifically, truffles. There’s no way I would get a sabbatical to look at a bunch of art.” He was clearly pleased at his effortless deception. “Those morons heading up that department haven’t a clue. I used all the truffles they ordered for me to make dinner for a group of art critics.”

  Clearly, these truffle dinner parties were a success, because soon O’Hara had created a buzz among art critics. By this point, he had firmed up his idea. “I realized we humans probably react to art because we must, in some subconscious way, recognize it. Even abstract art. What I’m saying is I think we can sense the tiniest part of ourselves, and our origins—the cells, platelets, and our amoeba ancestors—in these images. And I think that’s what resonates with us when we view abstract art. We are, in a sense, recognizing the bits.” At first blush, this hardly seemed like the type of theory to garner any sort of following. The fact that it did might be more a reflection of the art world’s permanent scramble for the “new” than a reflection of its merits. Still, O’Hara was prepared for resistance. “Look, I know this theory is hard to accept. We all want to believe that we appreciate art because it’s ‘beautiful’ or somehow or other special and apart from our daily lives. But the fact is we appreciate it because it’s life—only magnified.”

  I must have dropped my neutral reportage face because before I knew it, O’Hara was leading me down to his basement, where he housed his “evidence.” “Look at this.” He produced a glossy photo of a striated blob. “This is a virus—the common flu, to be exact. And now look at this.” He now pulled out a reproduction of Paul Klee’s work. “Is that uncanny or what?” There was a slight resemblance of line quality, but uncanny seemed like an overstatement. Always alert to skepticism, O’Hara supplied the explanation. “If that virus was just a hair turned right, and caught during a moment of replication, it would match the Klee painting exactly.” He then produced a Helen Frankenthaler and sighed with relish at how much it reminded him of hemoglobin. “It reminds me of some of my first real moments at the ’scope,” O’Hara reminisced, using a shortened form of “microscope” to indicate both his familiarity with and affection for the device. “We were supposed to find irregularities in rat blood supplies. I remember thinking how beautiful these irregularities looked, even though I knew they indicated hemophilia, and thus the end of the rat.” At this, he gave me a significant look as if he knew he inadvertently linked death and beauty but wanted to leave the implications of that for later. He instead bent down and rifled through more drawers, producing slides, prints, and photos that he laid out in a meticulous display of resemblances. O’Hara went on to compare this who’s who of abstract art to what he assured me was a who’s who of bacteria, protozoa, and cells. Here and there the resemblances truly were uncanny, but what that proved remained obscure.

  Microaestheticism may seem, at times, big on evidence but short on implications—of course, comparing abstract art to microorganisms might show similarities, but what does that ultimately mean? Other art critics have criticized O’Hara for creating a theory that cannot be properly applied—once you believe that abstraction is a yearning for our minute origins, what more is there to do or say? O’Hara, still a man of science, bristled overtly at that claim. “Look, I’m a biologist. Everything I do must have an outcome and a methodology. Microaestheticism is no exception. It is, in fact, far more rigorous than anything that passes for a theory in the art world now.” O’Hara quickly brightened at his insult of art theory and suggested we go to his lab to see the “practice” of Microaestheticism.

  Markus O’Hara’s “lab” is not really a lab at all—after being ousted from his university for the fruitless (at least in traditional biology terms) and fraudulent sabbatical, O’Hara took up with a sympathetic group of critics who used their university ties to secure a space for O’Hara’s research. “No one in the sciences wanted anything to do with me. I was a defector.” Typical of O’Hara, he described all of his rejections as reflections of the small-mindedness and fear of those who turn him away. “They were nervous. I was applying science to the indeterminacy and chaos of art. I was collapsing the walls between them.” He dropped his voice conspiratorially as he explained the deeper reason for their fear. “And you know what? Sometimes I think science is nothing more than maintaining those walls—asserting that it’s not art, not religion, not philosophy. All their work is to prove their separateness. And I want to show science’s connectedness—the places where everything overlaps.”

  O’Hara’s allies in art could only provide support from their world, so his lab was a studio before he crudely converted it for his purposes. Extension cords ran willy-nilly over the floor, some connecting to a power source or a device and others purely aesthetic, serving nothing but the compositional effect of another curving line. Thin wires and small pipes also ran the length of the room, giving the whole place the look of a magnified network of nerves set aquiver by the latest stimuli. The hub of the lab was centered on a few battered stainless steel tables topped with a lineup of microscopes of differing repair and size. The walls of the space were covered with reproductions of art and tiny pictures of various magnifications of some “bit” with nothing but the captions 200×, 300×, 400× as identification. O’Hara ushered me over to a microscope.

  “It’s not a fully equipped lab, to be sure. But I have most of what I need. It can be dangerous here, though. To tell you the truth, this space isn’t at all set up for something to go wrong.”

  I noticed an emergency shower station in the far corner, but before I could point out that he at least had that for safety’s sake, O’Hara laughed. “That’s not a real shower station. That’s a sculptural piece meant to show how empty our ideas of security are. In fact, if you turn it on, it releases a noxious cloud of pepper spray.” O’Hara seemed unfazed by the possibility of being left with nothing but a safety parody in a lab crisis. “I think it’s a stunning piece. It’s by Mave Aieka. Heard of her?”

  Of course I had heard of her—she was simply the latest in a long line of trend-riding assemblageists. But O’Hara’s name-dropping indicated that he was becoming a full-fledged member of the art world, even as his ties to science become more tenuous. Perhaps sensing that he was treading too far into the art side of things, O’Hara made a show of his expertise at the ’scope. He fiddled with various knobs, putting his face to the eyepiece periodically to check on the adjustment. Sometimes he winced at what I assumed was a blurry image, and other times he smiled slightly, as if a particularly sought-after blob had just reached the proper crispness. Eventually, he said “look” in a hushed tone and gestured toward me, as if the microscope contained something wild and beautiful and capable of being startled away. And what I saw was indeed beautiful. Three organic shapes in sage, azure, and copper undulated into a picture of ever-increasing compositional sophistication. A stringy offshoot produced a pleasing diagonal line, while the greenish blob shifted into a deepening plane. It truly looked like a highly accomplished work of abstract expressionism. But then the forms shifted again, and the image now resembled the mawkish fumbling of a first-year art student, resorting to abstraction not out of passion but out of an inability to master the basics of realism.
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br />   O’Hara, with an uncanny ability to preempt my comments, summed up the experience. “I know. It’s beautiful for a moment and then it’s garbage. That’s the problem with organic, living matter. But you want to know what those were under there?” He waited for me to supply the superfluous “what?” while I waited for him to give up and continue without it. We broke down simultaneously, both of us suddenly speaking at once. For a moment O’Hara seemed annoyed, but the thought of his theory, as always, seemed to banish all irritation from his mind. “Those were my own cells you were looking at. My own cells, that is, after visiting the museum.” O’Hara delivered this with a finality that indicated that I should find this as significant as he did. With a slight hand-flutter of impatience, O’Hara elucidated. “You see, I went to the museum, and I swear to the holy higher power that my cells, blood, skin, tissue, the whole bit—became like art after viewing the art. What I’m saying is—and I know this sounds radical—I’m proposing that our organic selves adjust to art. We see the art, and our bits then become the art. Our body recognizes abstraction and, in turn, competes with it.”

  O’Hara now seemed to be entering some even stranger theoretical territory than before. Was he just synthesizing a number of clichés and new-agey superstitions into one pithy idea? We’re beautiful on the inside, art is good for the soul, and we’re all unique—all repackaged as Microaestheticism. Was this a ploy to sell the theory, to give it some marketable touchy-feelyness?