vulnerability

denial & tragicomedy

Dear Friends,

We are living in a real-life tragicomedy. With the tragedy more real than the comedy for some, so we can help one another through it.

This painting I started is based on a photo from the same dump of gold I mined for another painting I shared the start of a while back. Courtesy Tennessee side of the family. At first I misgendered the children in the photo, because I live in East London where the little boys wear their hair long. But my dad identified them as two now-grownup female cousins of mine.

So the image is more illustrative than I’d thought, of the content in the excerpt I’m about to share. You’ll see.

You know when you think you’re making work about something, and that work shows you you’re making work about something else?

The excerpt below picks up where the last one left off, though you won’t have to have read that one to grok what’s happening in this one. (Dear reader, I won’t care too much about plot, if you won’t.) My characters Elliot and Rae are leaving the scene of his parasuicide.

To get outside where the ambulance could collect them, Elliot and Rae had to walk through the dorm building. He, holding on his sliced-open arm, the non-tourniquet she’d made of his beanie, looking wounded and suspicious. They had to go down the elevator and through the lobby, where they had to cross barriers: a row of turnstiles, each designed to let one body at a time pass through, the acrylic panes sliding in—then out again—before too much could happen; security guards whose job it was to be stationed on either side of those turnstiles. It wasn’t hard for two bodies to act as one and pass through a turnstile together. Not as if the guards couldn’t see what they were doing. Just that the guards were probably used to girls sneaking their boyfriends into and out of the building, and maybe they thought this kind of activity wasn’t really what they were there to guard against. All Elliot and Rae had to do was act normal. She put her ID to the turnstile sensor, he on her heels, the panes slid in and the two of them breezed right through. And it would’ve been the same with any other girl, coming into the building: he’d have just sidled up to her with that loping gait of his, their two bodies close enough to act as one.

Why would it have been any different? Why would any other girl not have jumped at the chance to let him use her to pass through, if it meant his body pressing up against hers from behind? How else would he have gained access into the building, before he showed up unannounced at Rae’s door?

There was the way his body moved through space, that was neither his body nor the space, while being both his body and the space, that spread like hot butter through Rae, from her soft core to her extremities. The way he moved, translating to a feeling so private-feeling she’d needed to believe it belonged to her and nobody else. What else could she do with a feeling that came with no limits on what it could do to her? How could she hold it without wanting to hold onto it? Could she really let go of such a thing, after it had touched all of her innermost parts, for nothing? But it only stood to reason, that she should have no special claim to it. That her palpable feelings would only have made the formless dimensions of Elliot more available to others. Expanded his auric field into their perceptual awareness. And any other girl might’ve been, all along, filled with Rae’s same feeling, believing it was hers alone too. Nobody was struck blind or sense-less just because Rae had fallen in love. And imagining guardrails where there were none wouldn’t make it any different. Imagining the turnstile served more than just a symbolic function wouldn’t make the turnstile more than just a decorative frame around Elliot’s loping gait, like a bar of musical meter only ushering his rhythmic motion through it.

When they got outside, the sun was a star with a messiah complex, a ball about to wreck the entire solar system it was at the center of. So brightly did it shine, beaming down so hard on all of the people on East 14th Street that their shadows fell out of their bodies onto the sidewalk, dancing in an amoebic one-dimensional distortion in praise of its radiance. The people on East 14th Street were the children of the sun god, though they seldom looked up to see where they came from. Hugging their brown paper bags so tightly, carrying their loaves of daily bread. Where the sun didn’t touch, their eyes couldn’t see, but turning their gaze directly toward it could fry their corneas like egg whites on asphalt. They still loved the sun. Even without knowing it. Still loved it like anything that could kill you you could not live without. As it just hung there in the sky, waiting for the right moment to flare and make a hot mess of everything, before they could even think about escape, descent down into the Subway, the Brooklyn-bound L-Train they took for shelter. Whether or not they knew, a single moment in its unfiltered radiance would save all of the other moments, the dull brown-paper-bag ones alike.

In other words, it was a pretty day. The sun shone on Rae and on all of the bright shiny objects the City held up so her eye barely knew which to get caught on. A mirage, sparkling, tempting her to trust in it because she trusted in its industriousness, never resting, always reflecting.

Elliot was gone by the time she noticed he was gone. Disappeared into all of the people, just like that. You could do that in the City: just disappear into all of the people in their heads, constructing worlds there, where you were not leaking blood on the sidewalk. Her first instinct was to go after him. But, by now she knew not to trust any of her instincts, which had acted on her more than she had acted on them. Her instincts had led her here, someplace she never wanted to be, and before here, all over the Northern Hemisphere, following a trajectory Elliot had set for himself—Dallas, Paris, New York City. They had crossed the Atlantic with her (twice), unchecked, stowed in her sensory underbelly, where they etched how it felt to follow him. So that how it felt to follow him felt natural, whereas how it felt not to felt like carving a new way out of herself.

VrrVrrVrr

Her phone was vibrating like it were a helpless animate object whose heart would stop if she didn’t pick it up. It had to be the paramedics. Her more regular caller was busy missing in action, with one arm trying to stem the bleeding of the other one. Rae didn’t pick up. It was not as if she could avoid her present reality by ignoring her phone. But she could avoid her future reality by ignoring her phone. Or defer it—that future reality that had never included Elliot, no matter how many romantic projections she’d thrown at it. She could resist the inevitable, the way this kind of thing just had to go, if only for a minute or two. It was circumscribed in the storylines: falling action, denouement. Disentanglement. The paramedics, already on their way, would find her, track him down and help deliver them to their mutually exclusive destinies. Because sometimes love made people a danger to each other, confused them and turned them against each other. Sometimes professionals had to be called to help bring on the disentangling, pick out the shrapnel before people could be lifted out of the minefield of delusion that was love.

VrrVrr

Her phone rang like a screaming child whose head she’d put under a pillow. She just needed a moment to get herself together—

AHHHHHHH

HHHHHHH

HHHHHHH

HHHHHHH

In the falling action, gravity. The force because of the ground. The anxiety of the fast-approaching denouement, when it would all unravel and for an indeterminate length of time-space, because her life was not actually a work of fiction, subject to any book-length constraints, any typeset pages the threads could not meander off of, unraveling in torturous ambling peregrinations a reader would be spared, on and on and on. But a collection of stories she’d taken as real, and disbelieving in them would be no easier just because the truth had dawned it was so.

It was already happening. Landmines of delusion blowing up, leaving an empty clarity where her face used to be. Romantic projections lobbed by her self trying to get around oblivion, coming undone. That old fantasy of hers, of a singular vision, that was not at all a shared vision, not at all her self extending itself, but rather recruiting other selves in its own program of self-determination (if even at the expense of those selves’). Of Elliot looking out through her eyes, so his vision folded into her vision, though it had only ever been her there, trying to hide in passivity: I’m not doing anything here, just the host he’s inhabiting, looking out from. She saw this old fantasy now, all of its furrows visible in the light of her fall he’d not be there to break. She had not been passive. She’d been very active, strongly expressing the infinitive, the uninflected unrestricted form of the verb, to be.

VrrVrr

The paramedics would arrive any minute, whether or not she took their call, and, separated from Elliot, she’d have to learn how to live. Without seeking a cure for life. Without using love every time life felt like an illness.

But what choice did she really have?

What would it take for her to release him?

She opened her phone, put it to her ear. It was difficult to hear what the paramedics were saying. It sounded like they were trying to get across but not getting across a lot of key information the City mostly drowned out. She heard the yelp of a siren, not so close she could tell where it was coming from, still closer-sounding than any she’d ever heard before. Heartsick. She pulled it closer. Hijacked and steered it to the safe place of her self-pity, where her self could solidify as an object of pity. Stabilize when her legs wobbled like they were one too few of a tripod, loath to prop up the charade of a fixed lens any longer. The world had turned on her, when it had turned to look back at her from the lofty point she’d always viewed it from. Made her just an other at the end of its gaze, visible to the bad things that had to happen to somebody, that had always happened to somebody else. And she reckoned, that if the price of seeing through some illusions was the feeling of being a focal point among many, so then not a focal point at all, of being diffuse and unmoored, then she’d rather not pay that price, rather not see through those illusions, but pull that siren closer, be the one and only object it yelped for.

“I’m outside Trader Joe’s on 14th and 3rd,” Rae told the paramedics. And then she realized that she could not stay there and go look for Elliot at the same time, no matter if a part of her still wanted to follow him, without even knowing where he’d gone. She could not be in two places at once. And this simple fact might’ve put the brakes on her wishing she could be. Were facts actually simple things that couldn’t be complicated.

The voice that spoke for the paramedics rose above the City noise and said, “Stay put.” An ambulance would be there soon. Rae couldn’t tell the voice that Elliot had split. Run away and she could only guess in which direction. It felt too stupid, too foolish to try putting into words. It made her want to laugh and cry and break the tension between laughter and tears, if laughter and tears were two poles of an emotional spectrum holding everything expressible, the universal tragicomedy between them. It made her feel like she could be in more than two places at once.

Like the distance between here and there was just a letter and had nothing to do with her body in space.

But where could he have gone, could he really go anyway? Back to St. Mark’s Place, where Buddha sat at the foot of his dirty mattress? Where people still wanted to believe in punk rock, in smashing idols and musical instruments, but could only be sad in doing so, because punk rock had been co-opted a long time ago?

The call ended. Rae closed the inanimate object that was her phone. She stayed put.

The ambulance arrived, its back doors flung open like arms ready to take Elliot into them. If only he’d reappear. Paramedics, and out of the commotion, Lulu materialized. Because you could do that in the City: just appear out of all of the people, easily as you could disappear into them.

Lulu was talking to one of the paramedics. Towering over him as she did most men. As Rae did most men, and maybe he thought Lulu was Rae, or Rae was Lulu, without knowing that Rae had a sister, and a lot of people thought they could be twins, though their superficial likeness owed only to bone structure and other subcutaneous kinesthetic factors. Lulu was knock-kneed and her arms splayed out, bent at the elbows, so the vectors of her zigzagged and she had the look of a spindly doll. Her long neck, limbs extended to the paramedic, arms tensed like they held out something precious just to show how it could shatter.

Maybe Lulu was telling the paramedic, in so many words, that she was not her sister, the one who went with her boyfriend after he showed up unannounced at their door, looking small through the peephole and sounding meek, that is to say, not like himself. And maybe she was telling the man that she’d known then something wasn’t right. But what could she do? Her sister and the boyfriend left her alone in the dorm and she couldn’t be sure where they went. And when they didn’t come back, she heard in the wail of a siren, echoes of the unusually meek boyfriend, stranger and more desperate in the shrill crescendo. Until she couldn’t stand it any longer and had to come down and see for herself what was the matter.

Because Lulu wasn’t one to flinch at things other people flinched at. Lulu liked to watch plastic surgery on TV. Closeups on the hand of a surgeon lifting a face. Stretching it to meet skin it had never met before. Then setting it back down with sutures. Lulu wasn’t afraid to see what was underneath the flap of skin that was all a face was. But the screen was the seismic divider between reality and reality TV. Remove the TV and you were left with reality.

The dream had a built-in safety mechanism; you could put your finger to its iridescent rim, pop it like a bubble. Whereas the emergency felt dreamlike, but its limits were ever just out of reach. Sur-real.

People had gathered, trying to figure out what was going on. They were looking up at the building the ambulance had parked in front of, for tongues of fire sticking out its windows, or other drama. Rae saw, in her mind’s eye, a grand piano being hoisted up the side of it. The one from a screenplay Lulu had written, though in Lulu’s rendering, only the ropes of the pulley system were visible out a window from the inside of a building. From an omniscient viewpoint hovering over a figure with long dark hair like Rae’s, slumped in a bathtub one arm dripping blood draped over the side of. What mattered now was the big clunky instrument Rae visualized, dangling in mid-air, from a distance appeared to float, light as a feather. She imagined the sound it would make, all of its hammers clanging, strings snapping as it came loose, back down to earth. The unplayed piano might’ve been the unlived life, the satiny corpse, but the suspended piano was life hung in the balance. Or just life, precarity. And premonitory sororal telepathy was sloppy. It arrived by the same random generator as art and dreams, impartially scrambling and recombining elements of reality, so that sometimes clumsy substitutions were made and blood came out the wrong arm.

Rae looked at Lulu. Then Lulu back at Rae. She came and stood beside Rae and they looked up at the building together, though they knew there was nothing to see there.

Rae heard a door slam shut behind her. She turned around. Elliot had come back and the paramedics were loading him up into the ambulance. The other back door was still open and she slipped in before anybody could tell her not to. It was cool inside, dark except for where a shaft of sunlight through the open door struck. Elliot flashed her a look through the light sparkling with dust, his red-rimmed eyes drained mostly of venom, filled with fear. It was the same look the family dog had shot her, after it’d been run over and must’ve seen the car in everything, when she tried to pet its distended pink belly where the fluffy white hair was thin and there were fresh black tire marks. Before it sunk its sharp little teeth into her hand.

Lulu came into view through the open door. The aperture was small but her eyes were concise, and they fit a lot into it while she still had time. Her eyes said: remember when we were young, and young is all we were? Whole in our unknowing, never giving a thought to thought as being or not being, just inside of whatever absorbed us, without the need for context, reason or explanation? You, the colors corresponding to numbers in the tiny shapes you painted, and I, the blackberries I smeared all over the wallpaper, moved by a force deep as the caves of Lascaux, that might’ve hurt me had I not let it move me? That’s why I’m here now. Just because we were then, before our minds reinforced the wall our hearts hadn’t known separated our bedrooms.

Then a paramedic shut the door, and darkness came between Elliot and Rae. They started moving. Elliot’s eyes fixed out the window, on something in the changing scenery that only he could see.