Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  Discussion questions:

  a. Why does the artist paint her parents as they appeared in their twenties, before her own birth?

  b. Why are neither Meszaros’s fierce gaze nor her guardian hand directed at the figures of the parents (the only other people in the composition), but at a point beyond the right border of the picture?

  c. This work was composed in the year following Sheila Rosenberg’s death from brain cancer, which was also the year in which Latimer and Meszaros finally married. How many uses of the word “family” are implied by the title?

  131. To Interfere, for Good, in Human Matters (2018)

  Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 60"

  F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery,

  Reed College, Portland, Oregon

  The scene is a crowded street in downtown Providence. A homeless woman with a young child sits on the doorstep of what may be a church; they are malnourished, shabbily dressed, and the woman holds out her hand as if asking for alms. The dozens of others on the street around her are a mix of both “highlight” figures and characters painted in muted colors (as are the beggar woman and her child). The composition pushes the eye of the viewer back and forth between the different groups in a sort of tennis match: from a “highlight” figure one is drawn to a muted figure, then to another “highlight” figure, then to another muted figure, back and forth until one has scrutinized every figure in the picture.

  This oscillation forces the viewer to see the contrast between these two groups. Superficially, the muted figures wear everyday clothes contemporary to 2018, while the “highlight” figures are clad in varying styles from the previous 150 years. More significant, however, are their differing reactions to the homeless pair. The muted figures bypass the seated beggars, or approach them while looking elsewhere; a few are watching them from the corners of their eyes. The “highlight” figures, on the other hand, all stand motionless, each facing the mother and child, each with a look of pity or compassion on her or his face. Some reach out their hands as if to touch the pair, but none actually reach them.

  Discussion questions:

  a. As in other Latimer paintings, critics have observed references to other works, notably Courbet’s Real Allegory of the Artist’s Studio (1855) (Fig. 40) and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504) (Fig. 41). Again, why does Latimer quote from two such different pieces?

  b. Athena Ptolemaios (2025) has suggested that there is a racial or cultural message here. The muted figures are turning away from one of their own, while the “highlight” figures reach out to the stranger. Are we being shown than it is easier to feel compassion for those who are far away, or different?

  c. While her technique here earned much praise, Latimer has been criticized for the blatantness of the message. Thomas Taney (2030) was particularly scornful of Latimer’s unexplained use of a passage from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) as the title of the piece. Do you agree with Taney?

  146. Almost (2022)

  Oil on poplar wood, 30 x 21"

  Private collection

  Almost is the last portrait Latimer made of Magda Ridley Meszaros during the latter’s lifetime. It is an unsentimental portrayal, detailing the damage done by both breast cancer and chemotherapy with all the hyperrealist accuracy at Latimer’s command. From her favorite chair, Meszaros gazes quietly at the artist. One detects neither fear, defiance, nor even acceptance, only the affection of one life partner for another.

  Standing on either side of Meszaros are four “highlight” figures: Pamela Enoch and three other women who have not been identified. They are looking not at Meszaros but at the artist, their arms held wide.

  Discussion questions:

  a. The subject, size and materials of Almost are identical to those of Magda #4 (#34), so that it is natural to compare them. Whereas the brushwork in Magda #4 pointed to Meszaros herself, in Almost the strokes radiate from the “highlight” figures; even the strokes with which Meszaros is painted come from them. What other differences do you see between the two works? What similarities?

  b. Why are the “highlight” figures smiling?

  155. Comfort (2025)

  Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 8½"

  Private collection

  The last known completed work of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer is Comfort, found among her personal effects after her death by medication overdose at the age of 66.

  It is a quadruple portrait, somewhat reminiscent of her Three Women (#1). The setting is the exterior of Latimer’s home, although the focus is so tight that only certain abnormalities in the brickwork allow us to identify it. The four figures are Pamela Enoch dressed for a performance, Lisa Wilson in her party dress, Magda Meszaros as a young model, and Latimer herself at 30, the beginning of her most productive period. Latimer stands slightly in the foreground, one step ahead of the others; Enoch and Wilson are to her left, Meszaros to her right, as if they are ready to catch her if she falls.

  All four women are “highlight” figures, bright and clear with strong definitions and confident lines. They are more radiant than the “highlight” figures of Latimer’s earlier works; light pours from them, and they drown out the color of the bricks behind them. Enoch’s, Wilson’s and Meszaros’s faces are fixed on Latimer, who is smiling broadly, with flushed cheeks and eyes full of hope.

  Discussion questions:

  a. The title Comfort was suggested by Paula Tarso, executrix of Latimer’s artistic estate; we do not know what Latimer herself planned to call it. Do you think the name fits?

  THREE TIMES

  Camille Alexa

  3.

  Soon, for the third and, Zhee knows, final time, his body will slip beneath the surface of the river and that will be the end of this particular story. Deep wounds under his arms, between his ribs, across the backs of his legs fill with water and begin to feel almost pleasant as the fire of them is doused and starts to cool. He didn’t know death would be like this, but is not surprised; instead of surprise he feels wonder. Even now, even with this, he feels wonder, and joy, and sorrow, and the lingering memory of her soft cool lips against his.

  Her brothers disturb the jungle leaves as they move away, their rustlings growing fainter as the undergrowth along the riverbank swallows them into the swelling darkness. Or perhaps it is Zhee who moves away from them, his body buoyed by the warm sluggish currents of the wide muddy river of his birth and death. He feels himself turning slightly as he drifts, slowly rotating. His arms and legs have spread naturally outward from head and body, so he floats like a reflection of the five-pointed star rising bright and white in the purpling sky. When the moon rises also, rippling its reflected length across the water and across Zhee’s glassy open eyes, it makes him smile, reminds him it is the same moonlight which also bathes her. His last conscious thought resembling anything human is that though they have been parted for now, she and he, washed with the light of the same moon, are as close this way as though they hold hands still, or touch lips, or press bodies one to the other.

  If he’d lived more than just one day he might’ve understood she would be grieving. It’s a blessing he didn’t live long enough to understand tears.

  2.

  Her brothers are silent when they emerge from the trees. They don’t bicker among themselves, or taunt Zhee. They don’t berate their sister, or treat her particularly roughly as they drag her away still wet and glistening in afternoon sunlight, water from the river in which she’s been floating with Zhee running smooth across her skin in rivulets to mimic the waves of her hair. Dry, her hair springs into tug-resistant coils, sometimes on humid days puffing up around her shoulders in a soft black nimbus. Wet, her hair reaches halfway down her back, its coils lengthening, water mimicking its undulating pattern in trails down her spine, her thighs.

  Zhee loves her hair. He’s spent the day thinking of her hair, touching it, sucking wetness from its ends where it trickles and runs. Too, he loves her skin. That’s the thing that has surprised him most about the human
form: skin. When someone who’s never known the slide of skin against skin observes a human being, it’s with no way to fully understand the electricity of the intersection of motion and intention, the communication of sensation through anticipation. When she looked at Zhee and he had human skin, it was as though her gaze alone stirred all the tiny endings of nerves and cells and atoms of his new-made surface; and when she touched him with the tips of her fingers—just the tips—he shivered from all the million zillion points at once, and when she tasted that same skin with her tongue, traced a wavy rivulet of moisture across it the way the riverwater runs down her back, he thought he’d melted again into that formless lifestuff from which he’d come.

  So that morning, before he’d touched and been touched—skin to skin, breath to breath, electricity to electricity—humans had seemed to him to be loose-shaped sacks. He certainly hadn’t thought of it as morning, nor had he viewed humans through human eyes and so saw only the configuration of their energies. To him, skin had seemed a mere knitted bag to hold together the countless zipping particles of the stuff he thought of as life. He knew, as a sentient being, that life was not the same as living, even to a creature whose spirit was capable of expanding to fill the voids between stars or of shrinking to the size a human might’ve said was able to dance on the head of a pin.

  Zhee didn’t know anything about pins, of course. Or dancing. Or even of the specific ways in which being a life did, in fact, differ from being alive.

  And before he’d seen her it had never occurred to him to care.

  1.

  Zhee is born as human in a moment of glory. His birth is a silent backward explosion, a coalescing of billions of particles borrowed from the humming, buzzing, slithering, flitting, rotting, shining multitudes of living and unliving things which make up the sluggish muck at the bottom of the river, the wings of the dragonfly skimming its surface, the disintegrating bones of a fish long dead, the nameless motes dancing in the rays of morning sun and very light of the sun itself as it glances off the water. All these things donate a tiny gazillionth of themselves to Zhee, and he borrows them with what a human would call gratitude.

  Zhee, brown and naked and perfect with all the glorious imperfections of the human form, floats out into the center of the river. He marvels already at the sensations skittering across this covering, this skin, which is stitched together over an impossibly complex and delicate network of bone and sinew and cartilage and capillary. It’s inconceivable that such a fragile and fleeting construction should feel so … present. Everything feels so here, so now. A human body should feel like a brittle cage, easily bruised and quickly used up. But it doesn’t. What it feels, Zhee decides, is alive.

  He hears her before he sees her. He’d somehow not anticipated ears. They, like skin, like the sensation of touch, are astounding. On his back, floating spread-limbed, spinning a lazy circle as slow eddies push him toward the nearer shore, Zhee’s ears are half submerged. Some of what he hears is the glug glug of the river as it speaks its lapping lullaby into his soft cartilage shells. Some of what he hears is the world, the twitter and caw and shush and whine of living things droning and flitting and hooting between trees and shore and sun and water. Some of what he hears is his own body, the beat of heart and the rustle of blood flowing through brain, echoing in the hallways of the skull. Zhee had certainly not expected that; of all the things which surprise him about hearing, it’s hearing his own body, hearing his stomach rumble and his lungs expand, that astonishes him most.

  But as soon as he hears her, he knows her already. Before that day he’d merely sensed her in the aether, had ached to mingle his spirit with hers in the form her destiny prescribed for her. Now he hears her and knows her, even without seeing her, because all her human parts—her form, her sound, her smell, her motions where she disturbs the particles of the air—are merely expressions of her spirit, and that he’d know anywhere.

  Splashing and gasping. More splashing. And then she touches him. The water even this close to shore is deeper than she is high, and so she must hook one arm around his slippery naked body and beat aside the river with her other hand as she kicks them both toward the bank. Zhee lies still in her grasp, patient and inert. It’s enough that she’s so close. His spirit is practically blinded by the brightness of hers.

  She slogs heavily ashore, brownish river mud sucking at shins and ankles. Zhee feels but doesn’t see the trough his body leaves in the soft bank, a human-width gulley which quickly fills with swirling water after they pass. She stops, kneels above him. He looks up into her face, sees her for the first time with human eyes….

  And then she does a funny thing, a thing he hadn’t expected: she takes a deep breath, bends down, and releases that breath into him, fills him with mint and air and light.

  Zhee is amazed, delighted to feel his lungs respond to hers. He’d been breathing before, but had he forgotten for a time, there, in the water? He’s now unsure. His body, this body, is an amalgamation of its trillion trillion parts. It’s a creation born of his longing and need to touch her. His own spirit is so long-lived and her life so brief, he was afraid a moment of inattention on his part would lose him his opportunity forever. He feels like one of the winged insects fluttering under the trees along the river’s edge, as though he’s drawn to the bonfire of her many-suns-bright core.

  His lungs stutter to motion with her breath. She helps him sit as he coughs up river, crooning softly in a human language with her human tongue and lips and teeth. She smiles and nods, and he with a natural mimic’s grace returns the gesture.

  0.

  Though Zhee has made up his mind to go to her, he doesn’t know it.

  He does not think with human linearity. No human agenda colors his desire for closeness with the bright burning flame he’s crossed galaxies and bored through nebulae to be near. It doesn’t occur to him that he has been alone for an eternity, nor that he’ll be alone for another after her eyeblink’s eyeblink time is spent. His consciousness simply isn’t equipped for the concept of alone.

  He only dimly grasps the concept of death. He does know that things are fleeting. All things: even himself in his vast eternity, everything being simply a matter of scale.

  What he most certainly does not have is any sense of why her brothers will come seeking her after she’s been at the river all day without them. Even had Zhee been capable of understanding their outrage and their intricate balance of honor and ownership and pettiness and tradition and survival and cruelty and fear and all the other trillion parts that make up human society the way the trillions of borrowed parts make up Zhee’s temporary human form, it would’ve made no difference. Zhee would still have been unable to resist flitting into her flame; she would still have pulled him from the river, and breathed her life into his chest, and felt something in his gaze and touch she hadn’t realized she’d ached for until he crossed the stars to bring it to her. The brothers would still have killed the man they found entangled with their sister, and she still would’ve been dragged away from him while he was bound and kicked and beaten with sticks by the silent human men who loved her most.

  But Zhee won’t mind. He will be grateful, having learned gratitude, for every second he floats in the moonlight, in the river, spread to five points like a reflected star. He will not have enough human understanding to feel pained by her pain, which will continue long after his first and only day and last the entirety of her brief brilliant flash of a human lifetime. And as his body begins to dissolve back into its gazillion particles, begins to sift back into mud and water and light and dead fish and live reeds and molding tree roots and stultifying heat, he’ll have enough understanding to hope this: that after her spirit is done, after it slips loose its gentle sack of bone and blood and ivory, it will be free to bore through nebulae and cross galaxies to find him, and that together, they can be incandescent.

  THE BEES HER HEART, THE HIVE HER BELLY

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  Under Sennyi’s fe
et the mud is hissing a mantra for health and prosperity.

  The path is a burial ground for seven hundred and seventy-seven monks, sealed behind yellow-paper firewalls. In death their vestments were stripped and torn to little talisman shreds, wards against illness and accident. Their prayer beads went too, spread out on merchants’ mats on- and off-world, touted for their sanctity and bringing terrible misfortune to all buyers: virulent malware that scrambles networks in seconds, infects medical equipment in hospitals, upsets commute at rush hour.

  She puts one of those beads, bought for this pilgrimage as offering, into the mulch and buries it deep. Within her the next batch of bees is fruiting, and each of their small hearts flutters in time to the monkly chants. At night they buzz for a queen that will never come. She can hear them between her ears, in her stomach, secret communication through the hive that is her torso.

  * * *

  When Sennyi was thirty, her closest crèche-sibling disappeared. She—or they, though Sennyi is fairly certain it was a sister—did this by erasing all records of her birth, childhood, and research. One moment Sennyi knew her name; the next, after a routine network sync, she didn’t. If they met now in the streets of their birth city or at the port, Sennyi would think her sibling a stranger. All she had to mind was the idea of a girl who giggled like a horse and who taught her to whistle.

  It was the first time a deletion so drastic happened to her. Such things weren’t unheard of, and she should have been able to take it with equanimity. Instead, when she first realized what had happened, she flung a paperweight against her window. The latter cracked; the former shattered. As she gathered and tidied up the shards, she became near-certain that this was a gift from her sister and spent the next hour forgetting that she was too old to cry.