After all, haven’t we come from the same place, and aren’t we headed in the same direction?
MADE
David Hayden
The weight of unintention can make itself happen. I was in New York City. I had a friend that I was to visit. She was staying with her sister in Park Slope. I was meant to sleep on the couch but, in the early hours, Lia, my friend, appeared and implored me to join her in her bed. For the comfort. The sister hated me because of many things that I was not and, also, because I was a bad friend. I was a bad friend. I am still a bad friend. To her sister, who still I love.
We slept in the same bed and nothing happened. It was too much. I was asked to leave. It was agreed that I should leave.
Walking down the grey stoop, I meant to head for the subway but when I reached the sidewalk I saw a flash of yellow and put out my hand. I was before the frame, in the frame, behind the frame, the windscreen – and the city picture shook and altered and re-composed itself. There was no end of making, and every image was familiar and new, complete and unfinished, material and immaterial. The seat was soft and the air enfolding and oven-warm; there was a barely-smoked cigar at my feet and a smell of orange zest all around. The space was cramped but felt natural to me; the best way to travel. I thought vaguely about not arriving, about leaving decisions behind, outside. For the comfort.
The car stopped at a red light and I looked up, into the eyes of the driver who looked at me, learning what he needed to know. I was a picture to him too.
The avenue was broken into patches of light and movement held by the central grey-gold mass of the museum, which drew together people as they were and shaped us into a seeing crowd. The main exhibition gathered Mexican art; giant murals that, wherever they are now, are still made of smooth, flat-seeming areas of paint: blue-greys, clean, consistent but varied ochres, subjects, arguments, made broad and risen, brought to a single point of being. A wide depiction of dense foliage. Glossy green tonguelike leaves flourishing from thick, black, serpentine boughs that grow from bright yellow fibre-matted trunks and, behind this excessive life, eyes that cannot be seen but which are surely there, looking out, not seeing.
The flow of people slowed, coagulating in a narrow room where the most popular paintings hung; pictures of a woman giving birth to herself in bloody travail, of the artist, her fingers digging into her chest to hold back flesh and rolls of bright skin, her heart exposed and livid, her eyes still and fixed, above which was a tall shining forehead and a cloud of black hair.
A short woman in a lavender tweed suit jabbed me with her elbow, barged me with her shoulder and, finally, stamped on my foot to get a better view of the painting. I looked down, surprised; she was adjusting her wig and swearing fluently. She was as old as I am now but seemed as if she had a thousand more sour years left in her. She stared at the bloody woman, drinking her in. I could see, or imagine, that she lived the picture as a mirror, as a memory, as a mystery, and I wanted to know what she knew.
Another mass of bodies surged in through the entrance. No one was leaving. There was carping and shoving. One man spat in another man’s face. He didn’t wipe the scum off but let it slather down, all the while smiling, showing his teeth and leaning towards the spitter. A young man wearing an old man’s hat was pressed, crying, into a corner, close to a picture of a blood transfusion with monkeys perched on the white steel bedhead, dark red cables entering the naked artist’s body. One guard slouched, dead-eyed in a chair; another loitered nearby, looking on in disgust at no one in particular.
I needed to find a lonely painting.
Pushing counter to the heave of still-contending bodies, I moved from one bright room to another until I found one more sparsely peopled. A knot of neat young people staring pinch-mouthed at a vivid scene of collapsed sunflowers; tar-black seeds, twisted, elliptical petals, sulphuryellow, under a sky of gathered smoke and other nameless filth. One of the men looked to me, to my legs, and did something with his tongue. He might have been beautiful in his own moment. I couldn’t bear this for long and left, darting out and past the elevators and up, or possibly down, the staircase, the marble steps soft and mute underfoot, my fingers trailing on the cool brass railing; the light in the well being the light in the well.
On a new floor, which on reflection must have been a higher one, I found several empty rooms and wandered until a picture caught me. A drypoint etching on a large rectangular sheet of heavy-grade paper, roughedged, dressed-over carefully – splashily – with acid greens, bloody, liverish reds and browns, shadowy, pus-like yellows and coal black. After the mass and colours it was the shapes, simple but unresolving, and the lines, that I found present; fat and crude, densely-scratched, faint, crazed and desultory, until the figures became more of what I knew about the picture. A man and a woman – a couple, according to the title – standing in profile, facing left; what there is, was, of light suggesting a winter, a city, with a crowd of rotten buildings nearby.
There is no inhibition in looking at made faces for as long as there is something to see. There are not the consequences of looking there would be with a person. There are other effects; what happens after the gaze is broken, the long bearing of the picture memory, should any arise; the discontinuity, the broken presentness. The picture memory can become a recurring event with its own rhythm and sense; its own story, even. Such as now, as I recall all I can of the faces and what the pictured felt; all that was figured in line and colour but perhaps did not show on the surface of their bodies, their faces; all that was was alive in their minds, heavy, sparking, unconsidered … should there have been any such pictured people; should there have been anyone other than the artist and I.
The hats: hers plain, red and risen to a toadstool peak, his a white sugar-loaf. His bright cloak, her shabby coat; his curtain of drab hair, a steep, sloping chin, a long neck. One velvet eye, one eye shining dark in the corner of his face; her hair fluffed in feathers, blonde, out of the hat’s brim. Her eyes, keen face-dents slanting with the slope of the land behind, her mouth sloping against this, closed but ready to open. His mouth, pursed plump lips, his two hands clumped in fists that pull the cloak to, flagging it out; her hands pocketed, perhaps, but not visible. This couple are travellers. So many of their journeys are pictured here; the place-to-place, the time-to-time; the journey into, out of, love, together or apart (together and apart); the journey – every moment the journey – the journey out of life.
Lia was in Austin. I got the call in Boston. Pills had been taken. Many pills. The right amount to cause the vomiting that would bring them all back up. Otherwise the right amount to shut down the liver, perhaps to provoke a sudden cardiac arrhythmia that would cause – between beats – blood to puddle and clot before being hurled out of the heart and into the brain, causing a massive stroke. The right amount to take the body rapidly along one of many paths to death.
Lia collapsed in the kitchenette, striking her head on the sharp edge of the counter as she fell to the floor where she rolled on her side, puked and passed out. Sara, who – after much trouble, untold trouble – was moving out, returned moments later, early from her boyfriend’s place.
It was Sara who saved Lia, not me.
I remember standing in the hall holding the telephone, looking at the tawny rug, the over-large mirror, but I don’t recall who called me with the news, or whether it was a man or a woman. I can hear the voice now; low, steady and unreproaching. I asked, ‘Should I come? Should I come?’ and ‘What should I do?’ ‘Nothing,’ said the voice. I waited a long time, listening to the hiss twisting on the line. ‘Nothing,’ said the voice; and they hung up. I didn’t have to take instructions. I could have made another decision but I made the decision not to make a decision and I stayed. Made worst worse.
There was bustle in the gallery a room or so away. I shrank from the wall. I wasn’t ready to be not alone. The voices faded back from where they had come. I looked to the painting and could no longer take sight of it. There had been a sudden f
ailure of appearances from inside – but it was not the picture that had failed, it was me. My professor had said, ‘hesitate with awareness before the limits of what is possible to know’; he had reached out and put his hand on my throat. He had sat not quite still; the hand was cold and rigid. He had time, he had his time and after this, he gasped long and said: ‘with awareness before the limits.’
I looked around, glad not to be seen, searching for another picture, a steadying purpose, and noticed, for the first time, the shadowed spaces on the walls where what had been had been. I turned to the entrance and saw a trail of red-and-white tape on the floor between two hip-height metal stands. I walked out and past a room and another room and through a darkened arch. There was a high gurgling sound, which suddenly ended, and a hard white light that came on with a thump. The new room was huge, more a hall, and blank except for, at its centre, a confession booth. I at once felt bored and wondered how boredom could be thought of as a weight and a tide but, finally, wasn’t interested enough to follow this through to an idea. I walked over to the box as I supposed I was supposed to do. The first door I tried did not open, the second did and I entered and sat down. My feet felt sore and hot and I shucked off my shoes. Vinegary fumes filled the tight booth.
I heard the artist’s voice.
‘I.’
The voice was too physically close, almost as if it were coming from within my head. I wondered how this was done.
‘I …’ there was a long, breathy pause, ‘… suffer.’
I felt bored again.
‘I … suffer. I … suffer.’
I wondered when this would end. I decided to wait.
‘I … suffer.’
There was an anvil bang and darkness began. There was a dense pause and the artist spoke again; the voice thicker, wetter and – if this was possible – still closer.
‘I … suffer.’
I blinked, seeing white chrysanthemum blotches before me. This was vapid; silly even. Wasn’t it? I felt like peeing. I felt like a little girl. I laughed and it wasn’t me – it was me, laughing.
‘I … suffer.’
All feeling receded in me. I touched my face and sat still.
Lia had bought a loft in what was still the Meatpacking District. She showed me a sign placed on the sidewalk a block over that read Fresh Killed Lamb, done rather obviously in red paint that had slipped bloodily down the white board. The taxi driver told me that a man he knew of, but had never spoken to, had a few days earlier been pulled from his cab and stabbed to death for fifteen dollars and change. ‘Killed by children,’ the driver said, ‘and they weren’t even his own.’
Lia had a lover living with her – a lover whose story I cannot tell – and was studying writing. I was confused by how undefended she seemed; how warm, how kind to me, how solicitous, how direct and yet, somehow, appearing out of focus or to the side of herself. I saw a novel on her desk by a famous under-read novelist; one whose books I had also considered but had not read. I spoke, saying ‘Oh …’ in the book’s direction, and she grew angry. The book, she said, was just about passing, about passing time; it was held together by nothing but light, descriptions of light, there was a lot of stupid fucking in it, her teacher should never have demanded that she read it. She fell silent mid-sentence and looked out the window that took up most of the wall, that displayed the old working side of the city, that was bitter cold at this season when you stood close to it, and I could see that something was broken but could not name it.
I had grown comfortable in the box. The voice kept repeating the statement. The wide I, the sibilant s, the soft fs; the word clipped at the r; the long, floating, not entirely silent pauses. These became all the song I needed. The space grew closer, warmer. Eyes open or closed were all the same for what I saw. I was surely sleeping, dreamlessly away; without time or colour, without care.
‘I … suffer.’
I wanted nothing to keep happening. That would have been for the best.
‘I … suffer.’
An acrid, chemical smell – I wasn’t thinking it, I was sensing it. A slick sliding noise and a blunt crack, and the raw white light of a single bulb shone through the screen aperture. The shutter had opened and I could see the waxy, sweaty yellow skin, the naked body of a man; brown and red blotches covered his chest, his eyes red, lashless, his lips white, cracked, his teeth black stumps. He was holding – he is holding – a silver microphone. He spoke again.
‘I … suffer.’
There were zinc white smudges on his forehead, on the bridge of his nose. Pupils filled his eyes with black. Prick and balls receded into a dark froth between his legs. A tiny sketch of burst vessels surfaced, red on each cheek. Arms were long and bony, their skin bagging and dry. There seemed to be less of the artist the more I noticed of him. His brown tongue sagged forward, lolled back.
‘I … suffer.’
I wondered about touching him but that would have meant reaching out. He was seeing me, and I saw myself, and I thought I should think less of myself, and I realised that I had become, once again, momentarily distracted from what I should be most attentive to, regardless of whether I was able or willing to reach out, to move beyond the knowing that is seeing to a more committed knowing; one that might bring about change, or not; an understanding of more than apparency. I closed my eyes.
Lia is standing on the boards of an L platform waiting for a train north. I am with her, just. In the background is the upper mass of a sixty-storey office building, 1940s, faced in dark brown stone that steps upwards towards the sky ending in a grey steel needle. On the corners of each indent above the middle floors are grey eagles that, even from this distance, can be identified as crude, unintentionally stylised; nothing that could be mistaken in any condition of light for a real bird. The windows are tiny and narrow almost as arrowslits on a castle tower. Lia’s face stands out in the foreground, large and round; her hair is short and soft-looking, her cheeks are rosing in the cool spring breeze, her brown eyes are huge and wet and smiling, her mouth turned sweetly at the edges in the moment before a wisecrack, a plosion of pungent abuse or of some wordless utterance never to be repeated. There is nothing moving. There is no futurity. I have a photo of this. I am behind the camera.
There is a ringing which becomes a banging. The door opens and a night watchman stands in front of me in the dark, holding a flashlight, aimed to avoid dazzling me. I try to speak but my mouth is tacked shut.
‘Lady, it’s time to go home.’
I crouch forward, head tapping the box ceiling, and stagger into my shoes. The light beam hovers around my middle and I see that the shutter is down. I chew around my tongue, swallow drily and speak.
‘Where is the artist?’
‘I don’t know, lady. I just work here.’
The guard walks off and I follow him out of the hall, down the corridor and I lose my way with where I might be, and from there rely wholly on him and what he knows. We turn into a tight passage and stop. There is a click and a throb from below, a door slides open, and we step into a service elevator standing, by a silent, mutual effort, as far from one another as the space allows.
We exit in the basement and pass through a corridor, through its sweet scent of floor wax; the shadows, the echoes of our passing. We move past a statue in night-coloured bronze of a man, nearly dead, spiralled-round by a large, swelling snake. We go through a steel door and up some steps, and – too soon it seems – I am out on the street.
‘Night,’ says the guard, and nothing more, and he closes the door, and I hear at once the noise of the city as a single music; not as the sounds of separate vehicles below or above, or of cries and laughs and conversations, or of buildings working, or of other machines that cool or light or make. I pull down my skirt and lift my foot – a cigarette paper is stuck to my heel – and as I try to shake it off, a man steps forward from a fragment of crowd and he crouches and angles his hands and from the space between them there comes a flash. And he laughs and stand
s, and I blink through inky clouds and I see the man, his wrinkled suit, his red and shiny face, the camera bulking on a strap around his neck and he cries out.
‘Hey, baby! We made a picture!’
PALOMINO
Mark Doten
The Americans were coming up the road. They were walking a cart. The road was visible from the hotel. There was no running water, no electricity, but we had our rooms, and in the basements boxes of canned food stacked high on a dozen pallets, and in the courtyard a well with cold water. We had staked our claims to our rooms, and at night we closed our eyes and if we dreamt, the dreams were of each other – all of us, in all of our rooms, dreaming of each other in a cutaway version of our hotel, rooms visible, beds visible, sleeping, heads on hand, cups of cold water on end tables. Or so it seemed, some nights. Just as by day it sometimes felt as though we all moved as one, all reached for our doorknobs as one, then stepped back, and listened, and waited.
Our rooms faced the long straight road. On this day, we all sat at our windows, watching. They were a mark on the pale road that grew in size, until it was visible for what it was. The cart they were walking must not have been so heavy – there were six of them, but only two or three had a hand on the traces at any given moment, and the cart glided along almost without effort up the dusty road.
On the back of the cart was a horse. It was dead, you could see that from quite a distance. It was evening by the time they reached the hotel. The lead soldier, he was smiling as he greeted us.
What are you doing here? we asked. We had gathered in front of the hotel. The Americans had not been here in a long time, and in fact the treaty did not permit them in our town.
A Kind of Compass Page 18
