Month: July 2009

I watched her fingers trace the angles of my chest down to my abdomen, deep ridges of muscle and bone and patches of coarse hair and skin darkened in thick tracks of scars. I watched her hand grow timid about the stained edges, as if touching the scars would bring back the memory of what had caused them, as if my seeing them each day and feeling about them with my own fingers wasn’t memory enough. What happened, she said.

I thought of lying. I fell drunk from a window and landed on some rocks or broken glass or maybe I was in a fiery accident or a knife fight and needed surgery to re-stitch the deeply shorn tissue. Something that might make her nod or smile or laugh and then forget it all. But she was gentle and seemed forgiving and so I told her the truth. She listened and was silent for a while and her fingers grew still and rigid on my skin and I regretted telling her almost immediately. Are you serious, she said.

After a few minutes she rose and walked to the bathroom and I breathed the warm air of her departure on the sheets. There was innocence and deep acceptance and years of hurt in her scent. She was like most every other woman. Light framed the closed door, a symmetry of knife edges in the dark. I heard the toilet flush and then the hiss of the faucet. She opened the door and stood in the frame, half-lit and exposed to the darkness, her nakedness stark and emblematic and teetering between the shadow of here and now and the verity of past light. I’d better be going, she said.

She gathered her clothes about her and put them on methodically, gracefully, like I wasn’t in the room. As if it wasn’t my room. As if she had done this a thousand times in a thousand different rooms just as I was certain she had. The clothes had come off in haste, without ceremony, the sole neutralizing obstacle to will. Now she stepped into them just as quickly and callously but with robotic calculation, like the clothes were a requirement and nothing more, as if they reminded her of her life before she took them off and how this new life was exactly like the old life and nothing like she thought it would be or perhaps hoped it would be. The clothes reminded her that nothing had changed, nothing would ever change. The brief nakedness between lives was her hurried respite from herself, from both lives. It was nice meeting you, she said. Call me some time.

She sat and the edge of the bed sagged beneath her. She reached into her purse and rummaged through it and I wondered if the bathroom light was bright enough to kill moods and strains of moods or if it would even stop there and I could hear the wind whipping through the city outside my window but I could hear nothing more save for the wail of bedsprings as she stood up and put a folded piece of paper with her phone number inside it on my nightstand. She crawled on the bed toward me and kissed me softly on the cheek and then the side of the mouth and for the first time I understood her intense sadness and its brutal dominion over her young life.

She walked out the door and shut it softly behind her and I could still smell her pale nomadic skin and her scalp and her breath woven into threads of the moment now lost to us. Her ghost haunted me through the night and so my dreams reverted in myriad to that lonely face at the far table in the coffee shop, that dark, worm-like body of abandon atop mine, shivering with the brief delight of self-sustenance. I closed my eyes and traced the scars on my stomach and torso with a sudden longing, for I never even thought to search her body.

The painter was tumbling down a well of creative stagnation and so he uprooted his life and moved to a strange town and got a job working nights as a cook. But even with the change of scenery and habit he still couldn’t create anything of merit for weeks and so he began to doubt his abilities as well as his decision to move and begin anew.

He had a crush on a girl at work. She worked the morning shift in the back office of the restaurant and never talked to anyone and so he watched her tentatively for about a month before finding the courage to approach her. Hello, he said to her one morning at the end of his shift, smiling, I don’t want to embarrass or offend you but I think you’re a beautiful woman, you’re quiet and reserved and you seem smart. I noticed you might be a bit younger than I am, how young I’m not sure, but one thing I’ve learned through the years is that when a person reaches a certain psychological maturity, age becomes an illusion. You’re negotiating those initial years of adulthood and one thing that’s important to remember is there are some things we can all share with each other, whether they be stories or curative methods or lessons fashioned from time and experience and certainly pain, always pain, but often times each of those things can combine into one cohesive package. And so being an adult, finding another person to connect with mentally, emotionally, spiritually, has nothing to do with how old or how young a person is, but what they have to offer, how they receive and interact with the other person.

As the painter was telling her this she shook her head at him and then she passed on a rather peculiar series of hand gestures and said, as only a deaf person could, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.

That morning he didn’t feel like going home because home was bleak and filled with blank canvases and bare cuts of wood and unused oils and acrylics. He walked down through the commercial district toward the water and he passed through the faith district and all the churches and mosques and synagogues of varied persuasions and denominations stacked next to each other, people walking dazed in and out of them and all of them dressed alike and moving in like manner of attitude and posture, and he realized the only difference between each lot was the architecture of their respective structures. He made his way down through the district of Neophalia and the vast network of bridges there and he stopped to rest in the shade beneath one small bridge and when he looked up to its undercarriage he saw one of the most amazing works he’d ever come across. It was a mural large in size but much larger in scope, a work stretching the entire length of the bridge’s belly and painted in the humble dialect of a master. It was a curious but potent narrative compressing all stages of thought and sprit, an idiom splashed in shades of shades as a volley to the gods: This is the human mind rendered true and real and composed of its own colloquial rites, and how beautiful this truth is, how sacred such offerings are. The painter sat and stared though the mural was faded with age and wear and the spattered shit of birds and other creatures. He was immediately cured of his creative obstructions and walked briskly to his apartment where he called in sick and began work at once on a piece that took him well into the night hours, an oil on wood that he finished feeling utterly alive and exhausted and relieved before finally falling asleep with the title of the work twisting and burning behind the fluttering lids of his eyes, Mirrors.

The next day he woke up in the early afternoon and walked to the kitchen around the corner for lunch. He sat at the bar next to an older woman drinking a martini and he introduced himself.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a painter,” he said.

“Oh!” the old woman said, delighted. “It must be my lucky day! My house needs painted, and who sits down next to me for lunch but a real life painter!”

“I’m afraid I’m not that type of painter,” he said.

“Oh,” said the older woman. “I see. You’re an artist. I don’t know too much about art. What sort of art do you do?”

“I’m a painter.”

“Well yes, of course,” she said. “But what do you paint? Do you paint people or landscapes?”

“I paint states of mind. I’m more or less a painter of the avant-garde.” And as soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t, for he knew better than most that all art was nothing if not avant-garde, that art by its very nature was at the forefront of humanity’s march across the steaming mouth of the unknown, and what is art if not the light and the bridge, the shield and the key that sanctions and endorses humanity’s greatest leaps?

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Well—”

“Last night an episode of my favorite television program—or maybe it was the night before or the night before that. I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s the program about the talent show full of famous people with unbelievable talents. They dance and sing and oh, how talented they are! Last night there was a famous actor on the show, I can’t remember his name. But oh my, what an excellent painter he was! He painted these beautiful cottages and he painted scenes of grass and he painted portraits of other famous people. Talk about a real artist! I couldn’t believe my eyes! Really, that’s the type of painting you should be doing, young man. That’s what I call Art.”

“That’s really not my—”

“Think about it,” the drinking woman said. “Don’t waste your time on this ‘avant-garde’ hullabaloo. In my day when something was ‘avant-garde’ it just meant that nobody understood it.”

The lady finished her martini and wished the painter well and walked out into the sunshine.

*

The painter wasn’t feeling well after lunch. He’d been having bouts with his allergies and so he looked up a doctor and made an appointment. When he got to the office he sat down and bobbed his head and tapped his fingers to the muzak and then he dug into his bag for a paperback and started reading it and after a while he noticed a man dressed in a suit watching him.

“Pardon me,” said the man in the suit. “I’m always curious what people are reading.”

“Oh,” said the painter. “This is a book of poems by my favorite Australian poet.”

“The title,” said the staring man. “I’m only interested in the title, not the contents.”

“Oh,” said the painter again. “Identity of Circles.”

“Thank you,” said the man in the suit, and leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Then the doctor’s assistant called the painter’s name and led him down a long narrow corridor of empty rooms and into the last room on the left.

“What’s seems to be the problem,” the doctor’s assistant asked.

To read the story in its entirety, you’re gonna have to buy the book when it comes out.