Stories of the Eye, page 8
I didn’t expect the concrete floor, but it’s nothing that a half-dozen blankets from a thrift store won’t fix.
A pair of clogs walk past my window. I try to follow the legs up—but she disappears into the mystery of what’s beyond my ceiling. I’ll also have to buy something to cover that thing up. The idea of people being able to look down here at me whenever they want makes me feel more than a little anxious, and tension works its way up from the bottom of my belly until my fingers start to twitch, like a smoker who ran out when all the stores are closed.
I take out the Polaroid and set it on the counter. Reaching out, I press the shutter; the flash goes off. First, you pull the front tab and then pull out the second to get the picture, I recite to myself. I had picked up the brand new “Big Swinger” just before I left and read the instructions at least a dozen times on the ride here.
I lift the exposure paper and take a look at myself. My hand goes to my hair, or where it used to be. The hair is now in the garbage of some gas station restroom somewhere between there and here. One of many stops the bus took along the way. Next, the hand gingerly goes to my nose. As I look at the bandage across its bridge, it is nearly one huge pitch-black square splotch on the photograph.
It probably needs stitches. That isn’t in the budget, either. It’s just going to have to wait, or else I’ll have to live with the scar. I peel off the bandage and take another picture. This time I can see the edges of the wound across my nose curling up into an Elvis sneer, pulled up to one side. Like a second mouth. I never asked for the first one. The asymmetry bothers me more than the gash itself. I look around the room for a mirror but come up empty.
In the picture, dust in the air catches the reflection of the flash, making white freckles like tiny snowflakes or flowers dapple across the tear in my skin. At least I don’t look like me. That’s the whole point of moving so far away, to be someone else. Right now, I’m the last person I’d want to be.
Second day here, and I already have a job at a diner. The owner said he didn’t have anywhere else to put me than dishwashing until the bandage came off. Wouldn’t look right, he said. I don’t need people thinking I’m beating up my employees any more than they already do. And then he laughed so hard it sent him into a coughing fit, spit and sweat diffusing into the air like perfume at a cosmetic counter.
My hands jerked reflexively up to my chest. But I didn’t say anything.
The less I have to talk to people, the better. I’m still working on my voice, and don’t want to spoil any illusions.
I start work right away, and all they play all day is AM radio, saccharine and sweet. It’s like the Carpenters and Osmonds started breeding together to take over the airwaves. Like the children from Village of the Damned but backed by the finest studio musicians the record labels have to offer. It could be worse. At least it’s not a bunch of hippy shit.
I walk into the seating area after my shift. A man sitting at the end of the counter looks dried and crumbled into himself, his movements puppet-like and stiff.
Things grow down there, he says in a raspy feminine voice. His movements and speech are so slow that they’d be going backward if they could.
What? I ask.
I feel an unwelcome hand on my shoulder, and I nearly collapse. Don’t mind him, the owner offers. He’s always saying weird shit to people, especially people he’s never seen before. It’s just nonsense. His voice hushes. He comes here every day, and orders pancakes and coffee, sitting there pecking at his food and getting refills till we close.
The problem is that people spend more time talking than they do listening. I know. I’m guilty of it myself. The impulse to be heard is a potent drug. Most don’t have the willpower to resist. And trying to understand anybody or anything outside of yourself is something the vast majority won’t even begin to consider.
For example, my professors at Cranbrook have been teaching the same way since before Jackson Pollock was a sperm. You would be hard-pressed to find a few who even thought photography was an art. Anything that didn’t resemble a Rembrandt or a Renoir was entirely out of the question.
Something I forgot to ask about while taking the tour of the campus, I guess. I’ll chalk it up to my naïveté, as most of them hadn’t kept up with art theory past the first World War. The idea that Dali, Rauschenberg, Warhol were their art, and what they produced was just secondary was something that most of them couldn’t even wrap their head around, let alone actually teach and support in their students was just out of the question.
After a year of discussing my ideas with them, with a lot of gallery art buzzwords like “identity,” “performance art,” and “the lucid ephemeral,” one of my teachers gave me a check for $200. For materials, getting away, he said. He claimed it was an artist grant he had applied for on my behalf. I didn’t doubt that it came out of his pocket.
The next time I saw him, his hand found its way to my knee and started slowly moving up. I don’t know if he took my silence as encouragement, but I couldn’t have opened my mouth if I tried. Fortunately, someone came into the room, and I fled to the bus station a week early.
I take out the Polaroid, set it on the counter. Reaching out, I press the shutter; the flash goes off. First, you pull the front tab and then pull out the second to get the picture. I lift the exposure paper and look at myself. The wound across the bridge of my nose is even bigger than in the last several shots, the edges spongy like old fruit. I figured, from looking at the stack of pictures, that it wasn’t really dappled light or dust. It appears more like new skin starting to form, but that doesn’t happen, does it? I should have paid more attention in biology.
Little splotches of white on the raw flesh underneath my skin.
I press the edges together, and rather than an Elvis snarl, I see a Cheshire grin. Alice has nothing on me, or rather that cat doesn’t. In a book by Kenneth Anger, I remember reading that Disney would press his erect penis against little boys and girls when they would come and sit in “Uncle Walt’s” lap. Maybe, that’s when the last bit of my childhood illusions finally died, not that I had many to begin with.
After my father hit me, I never talked to him or my mother again. There was a handful of change sitting on the counter for me every Monday for lunch and other kid expenses. Never enough to last through Friday. We picked up our dinner plates and went to our respective areas every night. We were roommates. Nothing more.
The money disappeared when mom caught me waiting tables.
When I left for college, I didn’t say goodbye.
My name is Gray Sorensen. I repeat to myself, a little higher, a little lower, and then back up a notch.
I’d spent the morning practicing a sob story about losing my ID, but the woman at the Ankeny DMV waved me off. Gray seemed as good as any name. She didn’t ask any questions. Didn’t even ask for proof. She said I should come back when I don’t have the bandage anymore. It was unsightly and would be hard for people checking it to recognize me.
It’s not like I need it for anything other than the project. I take the ID home and stick it in an envelope, already busting at the seams with Polaroids. Along with my first month’s rent notice.
MY name is Gray Sorensen.
My NAME is Gray Sorensen.
My name IS Gray Sorensen.
You can scrub your life of as many identifiers as you can, but people will always insist on a name.
Every piece of art needs one.
I wake up to the sound of my father breathing. I know it can’t be him because he’s dead, but his unmistakable presence lingers. I go over and turn on the single bulb dangling from the ceiling. There is nothing but the nest of blankets I stole from the donation pile outside a closed Salvation Army. I should feel bad about that, I think. I just don’t.
Tears run down my face, but when I wipe them away, my hands are covered in white liquid tinged with a slight pinkness; must be pus from the wound. One month and 100 pictures later, it isn’t looking any better. The rotten fruit pucker of its edges is deeply pockmarked. It even droops over the edge of my nose when I take the bandage off.
I take out the Polaroid, set it on the counter. Reaching out, I press the shutter; the flash goes off. First, you pull the front tab and then pull out the second to get the picture. I leave it in the envelope without looking at it.
Been feeling weak. Maybe the gash is making me anemic. Either way, I’ve been sleeping most of the hours I’m not at the diner. It’s slowing down the project, but it should be better soon. I have months before I need to start curating the bits and pieces to see how I’ll display this, what fragmented parts still need to be filled. Narrowing down what ritzy galleries I should contact. What galleries represent Warhol? I’ll have to check my list later. Might as well start at the top, at least the top of the places I’d want “Gray” to be seen.
But when this comes out, is Gray just the subject or also the creator? Who am I when I start to try to parcel out who gets credit? Or is there a separation at all? After all this, will “Gray” become nothing, or do I?
Frankenstein stitches are the best I can do. The flesh sags around the crude, uneven loops of thread.
I picked up a small mirror, needle, and thread from Woolworths. I probably should have gotten something to disinfect it, or at least my face. At this point, I’m not sure it even matters. The smell of fresh soil seeps from my skin. Underneath it, the once raw red meat has nearly turned the color of boiled pork from the hundreds of little splotches knitting together.
You’ve been hurt a long time. The old man says to me from the other side of the counter in his gravely androgynous voice. I reach to my face, but my hand ends up on my chest. What do you mean? I ask in a thin and wobbly voice that I’ve never heard come out of my mouth before.
Headlights go by the diner’s windows and cast shadows of big fat snowflakes on the walls. A monochromatic light show that nobody asked for, but for a moment, I appreciate the distraction. A moment of reality in what has felt like a bad B-movie ever since I stepped off the bus in this town. A film that I have no conscious control of, though I wrote the script. Alone, in my dorm room, a lifetime ago.
This basement is a meat locker. I feel sick. My body’s sore in a way that’s worse than any flu I’ve ever had. Did I come down with something? I see my breath as I cough. My chest feels heavy with congestion. Getting out of these blankets sounds like a hell, but it’s time to take another photograph.
I lift the exposure paper and look at myself.
A small flower pokes out from between my uneven stitches, right on the bridge of my nose. A tiny white flower like they use as filler in bouquets. Half-stained pink from the ooze that continues to drip into my bandages every day.
I try to pluck it, but it makes me feel like I’m falling through a void.
I pull at the stitches, and they come out without any effort. Just the slow, uncomfortable feeling of floss being dragged across my gums. Tender and as deliberate as I can be until they’re gone, and the skin falls loose again, now drooping down past my bottom lip.
I press the shutter; the flash goes off.
From the bottom of my vision, I see many of the flowers sprouting from the meat of my face. As if controlled by someone else, my hand goes to the loose skin and I tug. It rips like tissue paper. I keep going, and more flowers grow down my neck.
I press the shutter; the flash goes off. The previous photo falls to the floor, unexposed.
I keep pulling, and the skin is almost completely gone from my head and shoulders. It falls down my back like the hood of a jacket.
I press the shutter; the flash goes off. The previous one falls to the floor.
I pull at my collar, tugging like trying to rip off a shirt, and my skin comes away effortlessly. From the center of my chest, a single red flower springs up like a jack-in-the-box.
I grab the flower by the stem and once again feel faint as it comes loose.
Another picture falls to the floor.
THE DANCER, THE DANCE
DONYAE COLES
The canvas stared back at Yeva, bleached skull white, its blankness close enough to a grin to make her stomach churn. Her fingers wrapped tight, forming a fist around the brush hard enough to snap it. The canvas taunted her with its whiteness. Its nothing. (She hadn't slept in days.)
She hadn't painted in just as long.
The two kept step with each other, the insomnia, the failure of her creativity. She tried to break up their dance; she rained her attempts all over the studio floor. Thick, charcoal lines slashed gray newsprint. A figure that spun and refused to form on every page, tossed to the ground. Pages spread like legs and she sat in between them waiting to be birthed, waiting to birth. But the canvas stayed pure. Unmarked. Untouched.
It had to be perfect. None of her sketches had been. None of the thumbnails. None of the trials. She had only the one canvas. She couldn't get another. Couldn't make another. She sighed, stepped back. It wasn't right. It wasn't ready.
She moved to put down the brush, pick up the charcoal again. Reached for the stack of newsprint. Stopped.
That was the failure. The sunlight made everything hazy. Lack of sleep, lack of dreams, made everything a dream. So close to that sweet fountain she could taste it. It was never meant for paper. She was never meant for paper.
She'd be born on skin, wet and messy. From flesh to flesh.
Yeva dropped the dark stick. Picked up a tube of paint, squeezed a fat blob onto the gray palette. It emerged clay brown. She dipped her brush in, picked up the color and turned to her canvas.
It took up the whole easel. The bottom sat along the shelf at the foot; the top was clamped down with the last inch of the back brace. Tall, taller than her, nearly nine feet. She'd made it herself. Started the project when her sleep started to slip from her.
“Your work is too safe. You need to stand out. I wanna bring you up with me but you're not ready yet,” he had said. Ryan, the darling, the star. He ran his thumb under her eye, prodding the bruise left by the night (she hadn’t slept in days). A purple-red half ring, the sucking hungry kiss mark of her exhaustion. He looked like he would kiss her, but his phone rang. “Put more of yourself into your work!” And then he was gone.
But she already knew what he thought of her work. That's why she started the project. Linen wouldn't work. She needed something different. Something to stand out. She needed skin.
Hide.
The front was impossibly white, chemically white from the gesso but the back was still natural. She wondered if Ryan had ever done that. Stretched his own canvas. He said she had potential. Found her at a local gallery, invited her out. But still, none of his connections had come to her. She wasn't ready, he said. She shook her head, chased thoughts of him away. This was her work.
Thick gesso applied in layers hid the stitches that created the surface she craved. There hadn't been a large enough skin to create the canvas she needed, one that stretched to the heavens and so she took many. They weren't perfect at first, they were ill matched, the hides, the shape of living things and the colors, dusty rose, rose peach, close but not perfect. But she made it work. Stitched them together, slathered them over with bright white.
The back left messy, real. The wood still rough, she was no carpenter, had only invested in the bare minimum needed to cut the boards, nail them together. She spent her money on the more important tools. An artist knows where to spend and where to save for the best result. The staples, chaotic, clustered over each other but there, holding. The whole thing holding.
(She hadn't slept in days.)
The brush deposited paint on the canvas, destroying its purity with a determined swipe of burnt sienna. Yeva jerked her arm angrily across the surface, leaving harsh marks. Wet and thick at the start. Deep brown lines, the color of rust, the color of something alive left to dry, began to form a shape. Curves that became not a person but a figure, clear as anything. It burned a hole in her retina.
Insomnia settled over her like a lover, keeping her awake in the deep dark of early morning. Get out of bed, do something else the articles said. She did. She tried. Let the art take her, make something of her while she stumbled in a haze.
She made the canvas to have something to do. She’d never done it before but she found the information online, bought what she needed from sellers through Craigslist. Overnighted the tools she needed to prepare the hide. She was an artist. She knew how important the right tools were. Hauled it all into her studio. Put it together in the deep dark when she couldn't sleep.
The first was a mess. It smelled so bad and she'd ruined the skin. But she had to do it herself. She learned from exploring online. Carried the small animal, her first practice, already dead and drained into her space, her studio. It had been a ballet studio before she rented it and filled it with easels and paint and now this new practice.
Yeva cleared pencils and paper pads from a table and set the first one down. Couldn't bear to think of it as anything but the skin. Used her tools to part skin from muscle, buff titanium from peach and cadmium red. Tanned it with its own brains, a brown that leaned towards grey. She dumped the meat in the garbage. The meat was waste, she couldn’t paint on it. She just needed the skin. Upstairs her neighbors played music that thumped through the floor.
That first skin was there, all torn imperfect pieces, stitched along with the others. It was part of her canvas.
Yeva frowned, pulling her brush into a wide arc. A sweeping arm topped with slashed lines that would be fingers. A ghost of color from the nearly depleted bristles. All of it poised above a blank oval that would be a face. Would be something. As she would be something, someday. Ryan was wrong about her. She was ready. She bit at the inside of her mouth, brush floating in the air.
