We are in the open, standing in a row. My sister, my mother, my father, my elder brother, my eldest brother, myself – we are facing boxed lightning. When the flash comes, we all want it to illuminate us in a frozen instant of projected truth, and so this is what each of us does: My sister takes out her powder compact and examines herself in the mirror, dusting her nose; my mother leans closer to me, and puts her arm around my shoulders; my father makes sure his shirt is tucked the same length all around his waist; my elder brother scrutinizes us because he wants this photograph of his to be display-worthy; my eldest brother simply slouches against the railing, content. As for myself – I am staring at the camera lens, willing it to burst into enveloping light.
One second passes. Another. Another. Our collective clairvoyance is being unequally eroded away; when the blinding light finally wraps us in its grip, we are caught in separate limbos between knowledge and ignorance.
My elder brother walks towards the tripod stand, shakes the Polaroid into existence, and brings it back to us. We are huddled over this piece of plastic that purports to capture truth in its precision of lines and colors, but all I see is people caught in their choreography. When I look from our preserved selves to our existing selves to our preserved selves, there is an even more jarring sense of dislocation. I take the photograph in my hand, and this is when it strikes me. This is a photograph taken together – of separation.
This is what leafing through my family album is: always an affair tinged with suspended disbelief. Most of these snapshots are fairly recent, the result of my elder brother’s initial fascination with guerrilla photography. Here is my father being shot, his face looking away, his hand instinctively raised against the assault of the camera lens. There is a simplistic inscription beside the picture. I can imagine my brother sitting at this very desk, pen poised over paper, trying to deconstruct into letters all that he sees in his image of this picture; letters that might reassemble themselves perfectly in the minds of all those who read them. But before he does that he has to first ascertain what is it exactly that he does see. And what is it that he does see? Whenever I look at this photograph I am conscious of at least three images pulling at my mind: there is the nameless other’s, a second-guessed construction of what I think I should see; there is my own, a image, shaped by my own notion of what this man is, that I do see; there is my father’s, a possible portraiture of Father Playing Chess, reproduced on film, that he wants me to see. The three images are imprisoned within this white square, superimposed on each other, and I cannot tell which of them, if any, contains truth. I can imagine my brother struggling with these mental conflicts, and then resigning himself to doubt, and finally touching pen to paper, tried, writing – “Dad at a chess game.”
This frame being taken is of most of my family: it is one more collected conflict of a changing succession. There are four of us seated around the table, and we are engaged in conversation. Questions that could draw wanted responses are advanced. Responses that could forestall more unwanted questions are implemented. Smiling, strategizing silences intersect. We are constantly rearranging, inventing, and subtracting elements of ourselves, composing and recomposing them into fluid forms. I look at my mother, my father, my sister, but even here we are far across from each other, divided by the boundaries we lay across the table. We use one misleading answer to create another misleading question, until we are surrounded by all those meaningless words that pile up into only a likeness of ourselves, by and not by our design. We are each thinking of our lives, but we are each of us externally a continually created photograph. Even if I look as closely as I can, this is what I see – inscrutable people, lonely within the borders of their knowledge, each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table, as is the breakfast table, as is any other social interaction, is a shared frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but we can only ever glimpse flashes of each other that may or may not be false. In each of our true totalities we are always a picture, isolated and ultimately unknowable.
In his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that a picture “falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person” (73) – even if it were possible to eliminate the infinity of obfuscating mental images each photograph invites, the photograph is also an infinity unto itself. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asserts in his book Beyond Good And Evil that “around most people there continually grows a mask” (29) – even each facet of the photograph’s infinity is either false or rendered unknowable due to its irreproducible essence. Knowing all of these traps mental and physical between our conceptions and their cruxes, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the limited scopes of our eyes?
How can we even try, when the images we collect for the planning of the capture keep changing?
This is from the pages of my recent history: a memory of my friends and I, fixed as a picture of the past from my mind’s continuous accumulation. We are sitting in a café. We are talking about the past; we are using all the memorial snapshots in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of them conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the invading black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.
When my friends talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite our opposing pictures, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in the personal collections of our divided consciousnesses, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency” (8), and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph” (19), but if every photograph and image that is carried by each person here, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph sitting right before them, what chance do the seven of us here have of deciphering a deceptive image, despite our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially but also temporally, and thereafter acknowledge the futility of our eyes – that most persistently clicking of knowledge-seeking cameras.
This is why when I look at my friends now, I cannot escape the instinct that even if I could somehow reduce each of them into a truthful photograph, those pictures would still be obscured by a double vision imposed by time. But worse than this is the fact that it is impossible at any given point to discern the twin outlines that constitute each of the endless permutations of each person. I think about the time I bought one of these friends a book written by his favorite author. I remember his face when he slit open the wrapping paper; the momentary flicker of confusion when he was confronted by the name of Kazuo Ishiguro is seared into my eyes, as is the immediate compensatory profusion of gladness that followed thereafter. There are assumptions that we hold about each and every photograph, assumptions that are imposed by us in the form of linear notes. But these single-sentenced labels of summation and explanation we write for ourselves, even if they are ever true, can only be held true for a period before time inevitably twists them into lies.
And yet they cannot be discarded, because without them we become devoid of the means of understanding, and the photographs themselves dissolve into meaningless scribbles and color-splashes. These assumptions, then, are necessary and knowing self-delusions, no less delusions because of our knowledge of them, and also no less necessary – they constitute the only lens through which we can even begin to view photographs. They constitute the only way we can even begin to try to remember – they constitute the only way we can even begin to try to take photographs.
This is one of the moments of my birth: a reminder preserved deliberately to celebrate its difference from its fifteen-year-old origin. I am here now with my friends and family; these disparate groups are gathered for my birthday, and they are distorted by my many cake-candles that are each bestowing confusing light. As I watch all of these people, their faces half-formed and indistinct disappear and reappear, dancing between light, shadow, and darkness. I start to notice that these people are different in light and shadow – but they are the same in darkness. What if I chose to extinguish all of these candles? I imagine myself pinching each fickle flame, one by one by one – and finally plunging the room into darkness. What, then? I would know that my family and friends are still here – but I would know something more.
Light is not always illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering, like two-dimensional walls of assumptions and delusions eternally wavering into new forms with the passage of time. Sight is always deceitful in the composition and preservation of the photographs it takes; no photograph is candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no superficial knowledge is enlightening, because enlightening superficial knowledge is also a contradiction terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection that any two people can start to share, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.
Painters, as with all artists who seek to touch each individual uniquely, know this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are willingly shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them into one in the blackness that strips away an infinity of misrepresentations. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way. This is why they do not even try.
I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism, even the relatively more factual representations of realism – all art is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance to intimacy. Every single painting seeks to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. It is only when we have allowed ourselves to stop trying to understand others that we have truly understood them, because we accept that while we all live in the same world, each of us experiences the world differently. This is why when we communicate of paintings we can agree on the techniques that create them, and never truthfully on the feelings they engender. This is why truly knowledgeable men and women are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too. This is the secret gift of these artists to the people of today – the common knowledge that when we use words we must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language that aspires to a common truth.
Plato’s prisoners are in a cave, sitting in a row. Their backs are to the fire; it casts their shadows on the wall in a primordial photograph that is distorted by others and themselves, and is shifting as time trickles away. But they are not us. They do not know that there is nothing behind them, but we know that there is nothing between us, and this knowledge is what makes us better. This knowledge is the only thing that can transfer meaning and value to where they should belong. Not in the fruitless goal of any universal and unyielding truth, but in the knowledge of its impossibility, and therefore in the fact that despite all these conflicts we know that we are separated together.
_____________________________
WORKS CITED
Ball, David. Backwards And Forwards. Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 73.
Barthes, Roland. “Camera Lucida.” Writing The Essay. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Randy Martin, and Pat. C. Hoy II. New York: McGraw Hill Custom Publishing, 2005-2006. 8-19.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good And Evil. Dover Publications, Inc, 1997. 29.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Monday, October 10, 2005
Story: Photograph
This is a photograph that is also candid. He is in a Raffles Junior College school uniform that bears six creases, and his tie is loosened three inches from his neck. He is staring at something off-screen, but there is also a flicker of recognition, a fractional turn of his eyes, an instantaneous clairvoyance of a moment as it happens. I have snapped him in my white box just so, at this one particular instant where knowledge and ignorance are superimposed.
This photograph was taken four weeks after we first met. We are sitting in the MacDonalds near our school, and we are chatting, questions that have answers that are really questions. He is organizing his thoughts about me into an emerging structure, he is filling in elements and building or extrapolating a background that may or may not become part of the accumulating foreground. As for me, I already have my elements, my background, and my foreground – an entire composition that now only has a him-shaped hole. I am simply fitting him into my structure. Then as we talk and the void is filled with colors, something happens, and he turns away, and I have my photograph.
This is what it means then to take a candid photograph of a loved one – careful planning, and the ability to impose order and structure in a flash. But when I look at him now in his almost nakedness, there is something foreign about him. There is something that I can neither understand nor name, and that I want to tear down. But when I touch his face, my finger to his cheek, there is a barrier, glossy, indestructible. I cannot shred it without shredding my image of him. I cannot reach him either way.
This is why I have never spoken of him to my family, and why I never will. I am sitting at the dinner table with my family members, but I cannot allow those words about him to leave my mouth, because if even I cannot deconstruct my image of him into letters, imagine the total lack of control I would have over the pictures into which those words might assemble themselves in my family’s minds. I know of my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, I know how he sneaks into our house late at night, and I know how she sneaks out of our house to drive off with him on his motorcycle. My sister and I know of my mother’s lost prince, we know of her rare dreams about him, and we know that she keeps a yellowed photograph of him together with one of her radiant youth. My mother and I know of my father’s past infidelity, we know that they used to meet in cheap hotels, and we know it ended with a mistimed telephone call. My father knows of my dissolved infatuation, he knows something of a boy in a picture, and he knows this boy never appears anymore. I know, she knows, she knows, he knows – but the only knowledge that we have are of images, limited in their frames, and worse.
I sit at dinner and look at my sister, my father, and my mother. This should be the frame of a traditional family photograph, but we are each far across from the others, divided by chasms of the table. We are each thinking about a person, we are each of us a photograph, alone in the white borders of our knowledge, and they are each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table is a frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but in each of our totalities we are always an image of loneliness. And in his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that “an image falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person”. If we are each of us alone in a single and yet infinite photograph, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the scopes of our limited eyes?
Even when I am with my friends, I am also conscious of these peripheries of my vision. This is us now, sitting in the set of memory that is masquerading as a café. We are talking about the past, we are using all of the photographs in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of the photographs conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the intruding black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.
When my friends and I talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite opposing photographs, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in our personal photographs, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency”, and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph”, but if my photographs, as well as each of the photographs carried by each person here and elsewhere, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph, what chance do the seven of us here have, despite of our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially, but also temporally, and thereafter know the futility in this world of our eyes – that constant knowledge-seeking camera that is always thwarted by the superimposition of an obscuring lens.
But perhaps obscurity is the answer to this question, the peephole to knowledge. See this birthday of mine happen in reverse. Everyone, family, friends, all these disparate groups are gathered here in the distorting light of my many candles, each bestowing confusing light. The last candle lit is now extinguished, and what happens? Faces half-formed and indistinct disappear; features previously dancing in shadows slide into a uniform darkness. The next-to-last candle lit is now extinguished, and the same happens with new faces. Each candle lit is extinguished, one by one, until the very last, whereupon the room is plunged into blackness. But this darkness is different, because I know these people are still here.
Light is not illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering. Furthermore, sight is always deceitful in its composition and preservation of the photographs it takes. No photograph is also candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, and to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no knowledge is also enlightening, because enlightening knowledge is also a contradiction in terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection any two people can have, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.
Long before photographs came into popularity, painters knew this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers, but every single painting in this gallery is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance into intimacy. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism – all of the art in this gallery, even the relatively more factual representations of realism, seek to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. Magritte’s painting demonstrates this in content as in innate structure. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them in blackness into one. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way.
I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this, these precursors to men and women today who are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too, people who when they speak must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language of civilization that aspires to truth.
I take out my photograph of this boy I used to love, this photograph whose only real truth is not in its precision of lines and colors, but in his foreign unknowability, and in the barrier, glossy, indestructible. Ignorance is not the same as the knowledge and acknowledgement of ignorance. When we believe love to be transformative, we transform it, but when we know we have transformed it, we can begin to love.
This photograph was taken four weeks after we first met. We are sitting in the MacDonalds near our school, and we are chatting, questions that have answers that are really questions. He is organizing his thoughts about me into an emerging structure, he is filling in elements and building or extrapolating a background that may or may not become part of the accumulating foreground. As for me, I already have my elements, my background, and my foreground – an entire composition that now only has a him-shaped hole. I am simply fitting him into my structure. Then as we talk and the void is filled with colors, something happens, and he turns away, and I have my photograph.
This is what it means then to take a candid photograph of a loved one – careful planning, and the ability to impose order and structure in a flash. But when I look at him now in his almost nakedness, there is something foreign about him. There is something that I can neither understand nor name, and that I want to tear down. But when I touch his face, my finger to his cheek, there is a barrier, glossy, indestructible. I cannot shred it without shredding my image of him. I cannot reach him either way.
This is why I have never spoken of him to my family, and why I never will. I am sitting at the dinner table with my family members, but I cannot allow those words about him to leave my mouth, because if even I cannot deconstruct my image of him into letters, imagine the total lack of control I would have over the pictures into which those words might assemble themselves in my family’s minds. I know of my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, I know how he sneaks into our house late at night, and I know how she sneaks out of our house to drive off with him on his motorcycle. My sister and I know of my mother’s lost prince, we know of her rare dreams about him, and we know that she keeps a yellowed photograph of him together with one of her radiant youth. My mother and I know of my father’s past infidelity, we know that they used to meet in cheap hotels, and we know it ended with a mistimed telephone call. My father knows of my dissolved infatuation, he knows something of a boy in a picture, and he knows this boy never appears anymore. I know, she knows, she knows, he knows – but the only knowledge that we have are of images, limited in their frames, and worse.
I sit at dinner and look at my sister, my father, and my mother. This should be the frame of a traditional family photograph, but we are each far across from the others, divided by chasms of the table. We are each thinking about a person, we are each of us a photograph, alone in the white borders of our knowledge, and they are each staring at something off-screen that I can never truly see. The dinner table is a frame in which two heads might sometimes appear, or two hands sometimes cross each other, but in each of our totalities we are always an image of loneliness. And in his book Backwards And Forwards, writer David Ball says that “an image falls within a common range for everyone… and yet evokes different responses from person to person”. If we are each of us alone in a single and yet infinite photograph, how can we ever hope to capture truth within the scopes of our limited eyes?
Even when I am with my friends, I am also conscious of these peripheries of my vision. This is us now, sitting in the set of memory that is masquerading as a café. We are talking about the past, we are using all of the photographs in our collective history to paste together a world. But so many of the photographs conflict because of the different frames of our eyes, and in addition to the overlaps there are gaps, black holes where remembrance has failed. This is a fraying world, divided by a million intersecting and chaotic lines, bounded on all sides and inside by the intruding black borders of forgetfulness. This is a fraying world, and this is also a world that is dead and dying.
When my friends and I talk now about going back to our high school, and when we forcibly drag out and unite opposing photographs, we are at the same time aware that there is no going back, physically or mentally. We are comparing schedules, we are bending chance and purpose in our little date-books, but to what end? In the second that each of us took one last look at that school in order to fix it in our personal photographs, it had already ceased to exist. The school still stands, but it doesn’t stand still; my school is already gone. Roland Barthes says in his essay Camera Lucida that photography is “the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency”, and that therefore “Death is the eidos of… Photograph”, but if my photographs, as well as each of the photographs carried by each person here and elsewhere, whether of the school or of anything else, can only be stillborn, then they must also be lies. If four people cannot make sense of a single photograph, what chance do the seven of us here have, despite of our number, because of our number, and also considering time? Consider a photograph, consider how it limits not only spatially, but also temporally, and thereafter know the futility in this world of our eyes – that constant knowledge-seeking camera that is always thwarted by the superimposition of an obscuring lens.
But perhaps obscurity is the answer to this question, the peephole to knowledge. See this birthday of mine happen in reverse. Everyone, family, friends, all these disparate groups are gathered here in the distorting light of my many candles, each bestowing confusing light. The last candle lit is now extinguished, and what happens? Faces half-formed and indistinct disappear; features previously dancing in shadows slide into a uniform darkness. The next-to-last candle lit is now extinguished, and the same happens with new faces. Each candle lit is extinguished, one by one, until the very last, whereupon the room is plunged into blackness. But this darkness is different, because I know these people are still here.
Light is not illuminating; when a candle is lit I can see, but not entirely – there are parts that will always be flickering. Furthermore, sight is always deceitful in its composition and preservation of the photographs it takes. No photograph is also candid, because a candid photograph is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron – to see, to photograph, is always to frame, and to frame is always to misinterpret, and to misinterpret is always to distance. And therefore no knowledge is also enlightening, because enlightening knowledge is also a contradiction in terms, also an oxymoron – to know is always to limit, to limit is always to falsify, and to falsify is always to distance. The only true connection any two people can have, then, is in their mutual awareness that there is none.
Long before photographs came into popularity, painters knew this. I stand in front of Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting of The Lovers, but every single painting in this gallery is a testament to the power of transforming ignorance into intimacy. Surrealism, impressionism, expressionism – all of the art in this gallery, even the relatively more factual representations of realism, seek to imprint on us not just a truth hidden within their brush strokes, not just a truth unique within each of us, but a truth that is unifying in the fact of its incalculable facets. Magritte’s painting demonstrates this in content as in innate structure. A man and woman are clasped inextricably around each other under a darkling sky, two people in this desolate landscape with only each other to cling to. But they are together only because both their heads are shrouded in white cloth, white cloth that melds them in blackness into one. If they were to tear off their blindfolds and see each other in the light of knowledge they would be separated in every possible way.
I stand in this gallery, surrounded by those who knew this, these precursors to men and women today who are silent in the face of not only great tragedies and happiness, but also small ones too, people who when they speak must be aware of the eternal insufficiency of any form of language of civilization that aspires to truth.
I take out my photograph of this boy I used to love, this photograph whose only real truth is not in its precision of lines and colors, but in his foreign unknowability, and in the barrier, glossy, indestructible. Ignorance is not the same as the knowledge and acknowledgement of ignorance. When we believe love to be transformative, we transform it, but when we know we have transformed it, we can begin to love.
Monday, October 03, 2005
Story: A Letter
Dear John:
All knowledge is only fiction with an earnest smile. You say to me, “We are not as good friends as we should be, because while I know you the longest, I know you the least”, but writer H. L. Mencken once said that “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine”, and I will go one step even further and say to you because even here and now are frequently moonshine, we are not only as good friends as we should be, we are also as good friends as we can be, as any two people can be, because we are still friends.
For the past twelve years you have come to my birthday celebrations as I have come to yours, and since we follow the same rituals you yourself must know the truth of what I am about to say.
Birthdays are microcosms of life, and like any life the morning is given to the family. I sit at the dining table, me on my side, my sister on hers, my father on his, and my mother on hers, and we are four people divided, divided by experience, divided by memories shared in secret with one but not all. In my family this experience appears as the specters of my youthful crush, my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, my mother’s lost prince, and my father’s infidelity – ghostly men and women, perhaps even joined by more that we know not of. But whoever they are, whoever they were or will be, known or unknown, they share our table, sometimes forgotten, sometimes noticed, but always there waiting. They sit between us, they whisper in our ears, and they cannot be driven away. It might not be the same with you and your family; your specters might not take human form, but each family has their own ghosts, ghosts who stop the tongue and dam the ears, who speak with our words and ask things like whether school was good or whether we want more vegetables. And on any birthday morning, yours or mine, this is true as it is of most days – this I know, and this you know too. But even our mutual knowledge is not a bridge across a chasm, because my specters haunt only my family, as your ghosts haunt only yours. There are no words I can use that would let you see the specters in my family; there are no words that would summon them to a table shared by you and me. And so as my family is divided by what we know, so are you and I divided by what you cannot truly know, because these are things I cannot truly show.
But would you want to see them, even if I could find the words that would open your eyes? Friendship is two people covering their eyes; it is two people blinding themselves with the white cloth of the morgue so each need not see the other’s ghosts; in the same way we cover the dead so as to not offend the living who have no connection to them. I see this when you step through my door as morning passes into afternoon and life passes from family to friend – I see you stooped over from the daily imps that burden your back, and I know that you do not want to have to carry mine as well. Like in Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, life is sometimes an ink-filled sky, made even more horrible by the comicality of its darkness, and we need to blind ourselves if we are not to realize how alone we are in our troubles. We need to cling onto each other in the necessary pretence that you are like me as I am like you, featureless and generic in our feelings so that we can understand each other. I understand this, as do you, and this is why we keep our distance, why we bind the cloth around our heads as in the painting, why we use words not to build bridges across chasms but to push each other further away even as we hold onto each other. As we sit down, we are aware, you and I. You think to yourself that this is my birthday, and I do not want to hear your problems. I think to myself that this is my birthday, and my problems should remain my own. We both think that we sympathize with each other’s problems anyway because they are, if not the same in themselves, then the same in our suffering of them. The hilarious thing in this would-be farce is of course that we both know all these truths are lies. We sit across each other, and we are blind – we cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts. We only want to think and say that we can and we do.
And so that is exactly what we think and say, even as afternoon passes into evening and friends and family begin to merge, proving once and again how little we can know of each other as we sit and chat. You are no longer the only friend here – people from all around the city-state have come, each of who see me in one particular way, and thus render me a fraud in everyone’s eyes. This is what you feel when I speak with other people; you feel my falseness because you cannot understand, you cannot see me in those circumstances no matter how much you smile and nod, and so my outline begins to fade in your eyes. You try to reach out to me; you may try to include yourself in this exclusive circle circumscribed by superficially shared knowledge, but how can you? When names are meaningless sounds to you, when the pictures we draw with words are for you like the pictures in a stranger’s scrapbook, the elements instantly recognizable but the whole they make never so, how can you possibly do anything other than feel like an invoked monster outside this group of human beings, and in the end finally become one? And so it is with you, so it is with me, and so it is with everyone else in this room – we are all monsters, we are each one of us something other to everyone else, even as we sit and talk to each other, even as we pretend that we are connected by something as illusory and frivolous as human DNA.
But this is not the extent of the unspoken and accepted tragedy of humanity as a civilization. We are not only our incalculable selves, each one unique and therefore unrecognizable – we are also the victims of time, which will twist every true word we speak into a lie. I loved once, but that man I loved is not here, because he does not exist now, not anymore, and neither does the I from that time. I built him up with my illusions, I clothed him in the colors of my fancy and made him a beautiful creature, but he was never that creature, and now I am not that I too, because time will strip away all these paints to reveal the strange monsters that we are, were, and always will be. Love is not transformative; it is we who transform love and with love, just as we transform friendship and with friendship, and so friendship is not transformative either – and time will thus kill all those I’s that dare to dream otherwise. This I know, and this you know too. Birthdays are also death anniversaries of those I’s that have passed into nothing, killed by time, and some presents are also our gifts of mourning to those selves. As I open a present, as my face flickers for an instant in an awoken memory of a self that liked it but that no longer exists, you can see in that moment the ghost that I am. How wonderful, I might say, but you know better. And you will look back at those conversations that we have had this day, and you will realize this terrible fact – when I speak to others I am a monster, and when I speak to you I am a ghost, because the only way we can connect is through shared and fading memories, memories of things dead and gone, with only our words dragging them forcibly from the grave like so many tomb-robbers hoping to find something valuable in our dead memories. And so as my outline begins to fade when I speak to others, so it is fading when I speak to you too, because I am an amalgamation of not only something alive and something other, but also of something that is always dying and is always dead. We are all monsters, but we are also all ghosts – we cannot help being either, and that is why we dress up in our uniforms of skin, not only to hide ourselves but also to give us an enduring substance.
You know this, as do I, and as evening passes into night the facts of our existence only become clearer. Look at us, we are gathered around the table, and the lights are switched off, and this is what we are – alike only when the darkness comes. Then one candle is lit, and this tiny and solitary flame illuminates a few faces, but not completely. Features dance in and out of shadows, and the whole scene is grotesquely mocking from the beginning, as it will be until the end. Another candle is lit, and another few more faces are brought into being, even as this same candle casts the faces before into struggling obscurity. Another candle is lit, and another, and another. But they will all burn down to nothing, beginning with the first, leaving only their unchangeable and easily removed traces upon the mutating cream scribble of my name. And this is what we celebrate – this is what we celebrate when we sing the song of life.
Now it is over, and people begin to leave. You will too. You may choose to stay longer than the others, but you will leave, sooner or later. And when it is over I will clean up the mess, kiss my parents goodnight, and go to my room. And the day will end as it began, with me alone.
This is a birthday, but this is also every day of every life. We cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts, we cannot even see each other clearly for we are all ghosts and monsters, and we will all leave each other in the end, if we were ever together. This is what we are, and since you and I both know this, I say to you – are we not already the best of friends, simply because we are friends?
All knowledge is only fiction with an earnest smile. You say to me, “We are not as good friends as we should be, because while I know you the longest, I know you the least”, but writer H. L. Mencken once said that “We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine”, and I will go one step even further and say to you because even here and now are frequently moonshine, we are not only as good friends as we should be, we are also as good friends as we can be, as any two people can be, because we are still friends.
For the past twelve years you have come to my birthday celebrations as I have come to yours, and since we follow the same rituals you yourself must know the truth of what I am about to say.
Birthdays are microcosms of life, and like any life the morning is given to the family. I sit at the dining table, me on my side, my sister on hers, my father on his, and my mother on hers, and we are four people divided, divided by experience, divided by memories shared in secret with one but not all. In my family this experience appears as the specters of my youthful crush, my sister’s disapproved-of boyfriend, my mother’s lost prince, and my father’s infidelity – ghostly men and women, perhaps even joined by more that we know not of. But whoever they are, whoever they were or will be, known or unknown, they share our table, sometimes forgotten, sometimes noticed, but always there waiting. They sit between us, they whisper in our ears, and they cannot be driven away. It might not be the same with you and your family; your specters might not take human form, but each family has their own ghosts, ghosts who stop the tongue and dam the ears, who speak with our words and ask things like whether school was good or whether we want more vegetables. And on any birthday morning, yours or mine, this is true as it is of most days – this I know, and this you know too. But even our mutual knowledge is not a bridge across a chasm, because my specters haunt only my family, as your ghosts haunt only yours. There are no words I can use that would let you see the specters in my family; there are no words that would summon them to a table shared by you and me. And so as my family is divided by what we know, so are you and I divided by what you cannot truly know, because these are things I cannot truly show.
But would you want to see them, even if I could find the words that would open your eyes? Friendship is two people covering their eyes; it is two people blinding themselves with the white cloth of the morgue so each need not see the other’s ghosts; in the same way we cover the dead so as to not offend the living who have no connection to them. I see this when you step through my door as morning passes into afternoon and life passes from family to friend – I see you stooped over from the daily imps that burden your back, and I know that you do not want to have to carry mine as well. Like in Rene Magritte’s 1928 painting The Lovers, life is sometimes an ink-filled sky, made even more horrible by the comicality of its darkness, and we need to blind ourselves if we are not to realize how alone we are in our troubles. We need to cling onto each other in the necessary pretence that you are like me as I am like you, featureless and generic in our feelings so that we can understand each other. I understand this, as do you, and this is why we keep our distance, why we bind the cloth around our heads as in the painting, why we use words not to build bridges across chasms but to push each other further away even as we hold onto each other. As we sit down, we are aware, you and I. You think to yourself that this is my birthday, and I do not want to hear your problems. I think to myself that this is my birthday, and my problems should remain my own. We both think that we sympathize with each other’s problems anyway because they are, if not the same in themselves, then the same in our suffering of them. The hilarious thing in this would-be farce is of course that we both know all these truths are lies. We sit across each other, and we are blind – we cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts. We only want to think and say that we can and we do.
And so that is exactly what we think and say, even as afternoon passes into evening and friends and family begin to merge, proving once and again how little we can know of each other as we sit and chat. You are no longer the only friend here – people from all around the city-state have come, each of who see me in one particular way, and thus render me a fraud in everyone’s eyes. This is what you feel when I speak with other people; you feel my falseness because you cannot understand, you cannot see me in those circumstances no matter how much you smile and nod, and so my outline begins to fade in your eyes. You try to reach out to me; you may try to include yourself in this exclusive circle circumscribed by superficially shared knowledge, but how can you? When names are meaningless sounds to you, when the pictures we draw with words are for you like the pictures in a stranger’s scrapbook, the elements instantly recognizable but the whole they make never so, how can you possibly do anything other than feel like an invoked monster outside this group of human beings, and in the end finally become one? And so it is with you, so it is with me, and so it is with everyone else in this room – we are all monsters, we are each one of us something other to everyone else, even as we sit and talk to each other, even as we pretend that we are connected by something as illusory and frivolous as human DNA.
But this is not the extent of the unspoken and accepted tragedy of humanity as a civilization. We are not only our incalculable selves, each one unique and therefore unrecognizable – we are also the victims of time, which will twist every true word we speak into a lie. I loved once, but that man I loved is not here, because he does not exist now, not anymore, and neither does the I from that time. I built him up with my illusions, I clothed him in the colors of my fancy and made him a beautiful creature, but he was never that creature, and now I am not that I too, because time will strip away all these paints to reveal the strange monsters that we are, were, and always will be. Love is not transformative; it is we who transform love and with love, just as we transform friendship and with friendship, and so friendship is not transformative either – and time will thus kill all those I’s that dare to dream otherwise. This I know, and this you know too. Birthdays are also death anniversaries of those I’s that have passed into nothing, killed by time, and some presents are also our gifts of mourning to those selves. As I open a present, as my face flickers for an instant in an awoken memory of a self that liked it but that no longer exists, you can see in that moment the ghost that I am. How wonderful, I might say, but you know better. And you will look back at those conversations that we have had this day, and you will realize this terrible fact – when I speak to others I am a monster, and when I speak to you I am a ghost, because the only way we can connect is through shared and fading memories, memories of things dead and gone, with only our words dragging them forcibly from the grave like so many tomb-robbers hoping to find something valuable in our dead memories. And so as my outline begins to fade when I speak to others, so it is fading when I speak to you too, because I am an amalgamation of not only something alive and something other, but also of something that is always dying and is always dead. We are all monsters, but we are also all ghosts – we cannot help being either, and that is why we dress up in our uniforms of skin, not only to hide ourselves but also to give us an enduring substance.
You know this, as do I, and as evening passes into night the facts of our existence only become clearer. Look at us, we are gathered around the table, and the lights are switched off, and this is what we are – alike only when the darkness comes. Then one candle is lit, and this tiny and solitary flame illuminates a few faces, but not completely. Features dance in and out of shadows, and the whole scene is grotesquely mocking from the beginning, as it will be until the end. Another candle is lit, and another few more faces are brought into being, even as this same candle casts the faces before into struggling obscurity. Another candle is lit, and another, and another. But they will all burn down to nothing, beginning with the first, leaving only their unchangeable and easily removed traces upon the mutating cream scribble of my name. And this is what we celebrate – this is what we celebrate when we sing the song of life.
Now it is over, and people begin to leave. You will too. You may choose to stay longer than the others, but you will leave, sooner or later. And when it is over I will clean up the mess, kiss my parents goodnight, and go to my room. And the day will end as it began, with me alone.
This is a birthday, but this is also every day of every life. We cannot see each other’s ghosts, we do not want to see each other’s ghosts, we cannot even see each other clearly for we are all ghosts and monsters, and we will all leave each other in the end, if we were ever together. This is what we are, and since you and I both know this, I say to you – are we not already the best of friends, simply because we are friends?
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Story: Loop
Caleb. He is in class 4D. He took combined science. He doesn’t know whether he’s going to do well in it. He thinks that he’s going to do well enough overall to get into a good junior college. He really doesn’t know, though, whether that’s what he wants, but that’s something that his parents want for him, certainly. He really wants, what he really wants – he can’t continue. He has to leave.
Caleb – I don’t even know his last name – walks towards the left. I am after him in the line, so I have to walk towards the right. I don’t know what his last name is, but it must begin with the same letter as mine, and it might even share more letters. I receive my piece of paper, my grades, and sneak a look to my left to see if Caleb is around, if he’s still left, nearly beside me. He isn’t. He’s left. I bend over to sign my name, a genuflection to leave my final mark on this school, a mark that will go into a cupboard somewhere and be forgotten. Alone. Then it will disappear when it is no longer relevant. My signature flows across the space, filling it but already drying, already seeping into the relentless white. Then I see it, above my name. Caleb Cho.
I stand still for a moment. The teacher coughs, half-deliberately. I start; he looks at me with – pity? Understanding? I cannot tell. I know what he means though, he can’t say it, but I know nonetheless. I step aside. Next. He signs. Next. He signs. Next. The line still stretches on forever, people appearing around the bend, some vaguely familiar, others completely unforeseen. They come, and then they go, leaving the same temporary unique imprints. Fingerprints on glass. They look the same, and they all disappear. I have to move on, people are beckoning to me, people are waving me away. I move on.
I can’t find my friends. I have to look for them. They are somewhere in this vast hall of people. If I walk around, if I search, I will be able to find them. I know that. I wonder for a second – but only a second – whether they have left, but they haven’t. They are there; there is a flicker of a familiar bag. I start towards him – but it isn’t them. There they are; those are different bags; I didn’t think that they would have changed bags, but I can understand. It is a different sort of day. I start towards them. I’ve found my friends.
They have already started conversations, some with people I don’t recognize, some with people I know by sight, some with mutual friends. I stand, but I’m also fidgeting. I’m talking, but I’m also listening. Bits, pieces stop, start. Disjointed words float, sideways, at me, from me; intelligible sentences they don’t make. Then a string of remarks that make complete sense. Then, again, words. Time passes. The conversations wind down, exhausted.
We leave now, after four years. We walk across the quadrangle. We will return, we will come back together on holidays, we will maybe visit when our schedules don’t conflict, we must see if chance allows and purpose tends. Then we will return. But then we will be walking down school corridors that we don’t belong to anymore. We exit the main gates. We’ve left.
I stand in my new school. People are arriving. I walk to my classroom. There are people in it, mingling, waiting. I sit down. A piece of paper is weaving its way down the line to me. The guy next to me offers a pen. We have two years in junior college together. I return him his pen. This is our introduction to each other; this is the way I meet him. Calvin.
Caleb – I don’t even know his last name – walks towards the left. I am after him in the line, so I have to walk towards the right. I don’t know what his last name is, but it must begin with the same letter as mine, and it might even share more letters. I receive my piece of paper, my grades, and sneak a look to my left to see if Caleb is around, if he’s still left, nearly beside me. He isn’t. He’s left. I bend over to sign my name, a genuflection to leave my final mark on this school, a mark that will go into a cupboard somewhere and be forgotten. Alone. Then it will disappear when it is no longer relevant. My signature flows across the space, filling it but already drying, already seeping into the relentless white. Then I see it, above my name. Caleb Cho.
I stand still for a moment. The teacher coughs, half-deliberately. I start; he looks at me with – pity? Understanding? I cannot tell. I know what he means though, he can’t say it, but I know nonetheless. I step aside. Next. He signs. Next. He signs. Next. The line still stretches on forever, people appearing around the bend, some vaguely familiar, others completely unforeseen. They come, and then they go, leaving the same temporary unique imprints. Fingerprints on glass. They look the same, and they all disappear. I have to move on, people are beckoning to me, people are waving me away. I move on.
I can’t find my friends. I have to look for them. They are somewhere in this vast hall of people. If I walk around, if I search, I will be able to find them. I know that. I wonder for a second – but only a second – whether they have left, but they haven’t. They are there; there is a flicker of a familiar bag. I start towards him – but it isn’t them. There they are; those are different bags; I didn’t think that they would have changed bags, but I can understand. It is a different sort of day. I start towards them. I’ve found my friends.
They have already started conversations, some with people I don’t recognize, some with people I know by sight, some with mutual friends. I stand, but I’m also fidgeting. I’m talking, but I’m also listening. Bits, pieces stop, start. Disjointed words float, sideways, at me, from me; intelligible sentences they don’t make. Then a string of remarks that make complete sense. Then, again, words. Time passes. The conversations wind down, exhausted.
We leave now, after four years. We walk across the quadrangle. We will return, we will come back together on holidays, we will maybe visit when our schedules don’t conflict, we must see if chance allows and purpose tends. Then we will return. But then we will be walking down school corridors that we don’t belong to anymore. We exit the main gates. We’ve left.
I stand in my new school. People are arriving. I walk to my classroom. There are people in it, mingling, waiting. I sit down. A piece of paper is weaving its way down the line to me. The guy next to me offers a pen. We have two years in junior college together. I return him his pen. This is our introduction to each other; this is the way I meet him. Calvin.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Story: The War Within
“Should” is a dangerous word; it is a weapon that splits atoms. “We are not as good friends as we should be”, the sentence strikes, and like a cosmic blade slicing through my being I am suddenly caught between two realities. I am here, in this world, in a plane 9000 miles from him, our physical distance almost as long as our emotional, but I am also here, in an otherworld, a realm that started fading a decade ago in the moment he handed me the first sheet of paper.
He and I, we have been friends for twelve years, but just as longevity is only a drawn out decay, so too has our friendship suffered the vicissitudes of time. “I have known you the longest, but I know you the least”, the sentence lashes, and even as I recoil I am struck by the appropriateness of the attack. He and I, we are writers – we understand not only that a well-placed word can flay a person more completely than the sharpest blade, but also that the simple combination of pen and paper can immobilize that person completely, freeze him for excoriation.
He must have known this six years ago when he sent me that second of three papers, an envelope innocently hiding a rectangle of white anthrax. “We exchange so many words”, the sentence stings, and suddenly that mailed nail-bomb of words explodes in my mind again, tearing through the depths of my consciousness to pierce every corner of my brain.
It was only the second time our feelings had poured out of our mouths, untranslated. Six years had passed since we first met, and three days before the bomb arrived he was sitting in my home, a boy among strangers, waiting for a stranger. When I finally arrived, almost two hours late, he didn’t say nothing, and underneath the civility of his manners I could see four years of needling nails straining at the seams of his being, even as the methodical hands of his anger were slowly packing them into an organized letter, designed for maximum devastation.
He and I met again two weeks later, waiting together for a bus. He and I said hi to each other, and nothing more, because if he and I understood that words were weapons, then he and I also understood that silence was, not a healing salve, but a plaster. And so as he and I stood there, we hoped that the absence of words would smooth over not just our freshest wounds, but also all the wounds that had been struck since he first handed me a sheet of paper four years ago.
“We’ve had problems”, the sentence jabs, and I know he has not forgotten it either, that one incident that divided our roads a decade ago. That first sheet of paper contained only a harmless story, if such things exist, but in the outline of his story were etched the minute details of his ambition, so much larger than mine. He gave it to me because I had won the lottery of our English teacher’s favor, and he knew that as his best friend I could help him see his story be published in our school’s annual book. As I looked into his eyes, I saw trust, but not the blind variety – it was trust with two wide-open eyes.
So I said yes. I took the story, and later I threw his ambition away.
“When both you and I come back, maybe things will be different”, the sentence touches hesitantly. “Should” is a weapon, but sometimes it is also a warning, shouted before a world disappears. “When you and I come back, maybe things will be different.” What it means is, “When you and I come back, maybe things will be the same”.
He and I, we have been friends for twelve years, but just as longevity is only a drawn out decay, so too has our friendship suffered the vicissitudes of time. “I have known you the longest, but I know you the least”, the sentence lashes, and even as I recoil I am struck by the appropriateness of the attack. He and I, we are writers – we understand not only that a well-placed word can flay a person more completely than the sharpest blade, but also that the simple combination of pen and paper can immobilize that person completely, freeze him for excoriation.
He must have known this six years ago when he sent me that second of three papers, an envelope innocently hiding a rectangle of white anthrax. “We exchange so many words”, the sentence stings, and suddenly that mailed nail-bomb of words explodes in my mind again, tearing through the depths of my consciousness to pierce every corner of my brain.
It was only the second time our feelings had poured out of our mouths, untranslated. Six years had passed since we first met, and three days before the bomb arrived he was sitting in my home, a boy among strangers, waiting for a stranger. When I finally arrived, almost two hours late, he didn’t say nothing, and underneath the civility of his manners I could see four years of needling nails straining at the seams of his being, even as the methodical hands of his anger were slowly packing them into an organized letter, designed for maximum devastation.
He and I met again two weeks later, waiting together for a bus. He and I said hi to each other, and nothing more, because if he and I understood that words were weapons, then he and I also understood that silence was, not a healing salve, but a plaster. And so as he and I stood there, we hoped that the absence of words would smooth over not just our freshest wounds, but also all the wounds that had been struck since he first handed me a sheet of paper four years ago.
“We’ve had problems”, the sentence jabs, and I know he has not forgotten it either, that one incident that divided our roads a decade ago. That first sheet of paper contained only a harmless story, if such things exist, but in the outline of his story were etched the minute details of his ambition, so much larger than mine. He gave it to me because I had won the lottery of our English teacher’s favor, and he knew that as his best friend I could help him see his story be published in our school’s annual book. As I looked into his eyes, I saw trust, but not the blind variety – it was trust with two wide-open eyes.
So I said yes. I took the story, and later I threw his ambition away.
“When both you and I come back, maybe things will be different”, the sentence touches hesitantly. “Should” is a weapon, but sometimes it is also a warning, shouted before a world disappears. “When you and I come back, maybe things will be different.” What it means is, “When you and I come back, maybe things will be the same”.
Story: Birthday
They are singing me a birthday song. The room is dark; the lights have been switched off, and in the flickering candlelight I can barely recognize the faces of these people, my friends. They dance with the shadows, these eyes, mouths, cheeks, ears, noses, tangoing with darkness, shrouding one feature while illuminating another, one after another after another. They don’t look real, these people, my friends. Their outlines seem to melt eternally, and every single time each one of them recedes into the blackness, I am gripped by an unreasoning yet instinctive fear that they might be assimilated, might not return. Or worse – that they might, but in forms completely unrecognizable.
They are singing me a birthday song. I wonder at my silliness, at my innate need to see them standing in a spot of flaying light. They do not ask that of me. They are each attracted to a different part of me, or, should I say, they are each attracted to a different me, but they have come nonetheless to see what can only be a fraud, they have come from all around the city-state; they had looked at their calendars and proportioned this moment, these few hours, crossing out this time to give it meaning, celebrating this day that is meaningful to each of them only in one particular way, this day that would be meaningless otherwise. And so they are united in this single action, as disparate as they may be, but they are united in one other action too – I wish they had not put on their uniforms of skin when they stepped through my door.
They are singing me a birthday song. The gruesome sacks of singing skins in front of me, the flames’ smoke that steals into my nose and pokes around my brain, the taunting candlelights that jump at me and snatch away, these, and all these, I cannot defend against. I am petrified, I am trapped by this coterie of well-meaning horrors, I am sitting here, smiling a terrified smile. The words of the song seem to stretch out, they are stretched out, they are stretching out – why doesn’t it end?
They are singing me a birthday song. I do not know where I am anymore; I have joined these people who are lost. I have touched them in the only way they can be touched, in the only way I can be touched: with the skin on my skin to the skin on their skin, a false connection made true by our mutual awareness of its falsehood – it has ended; I have found them, and I have made peace with them.
“To find what is lost is an art in some cultures. The Navajos employ ‘hand tremblers’, usually women, who go into a trance and ‘see’ where the lost article or person is located. When I asked one diviner what it was like when she was in trance, she said, ‘Lots of noise, but noise that’s hard to hear.’” - Gretel Ehrlich.
They are singing me a birthday song.
They are singing me a birthday song. I wonder at my silliness, at my innate need to see them standing in a spot of flaying light. They do not ask that of me. They are each attracted to a different part of me, or, should I say, they are each attracted to a different me, but they have come nonetheless to see what can only be a fraud, they have come from all around the city-state; they had looked at their calendars and proportioned this moment, these few hours, crossing out this time to give it meaning, celebrating this day that is meaningful to each of them only in one particular way, this day that would be meaningless otherwise. And so they are united in this single action, as disparate as they may be, but they are united in one other action too – I wish they had not put on their uniforms of skin when they stepped through my door.
They are singing me a birthday song. The gruesome sacks of singing skins in front of me, the flames’ smoke that steals into my nose and pokes around my brain, the taunting candlelights that jump at me and snatch away, these, and all these, I cannot defend against. I am petrified, I am trapped by this coterie of well-meaning horrors, I am sitting here, smiling a terrified smile. The words of the song seem to stretch out, they are stretched out, they are stretching out – why doesn’t it end?
They are singing me a birthday song. I do not know where I am anymore; I have joined these people who are lost. I have touched them in the only way they can be touched, in the only way I can be touched: with the skin on my skin to the skin on their skin, a false connection made true by our mutual awareness of its falsehood – it has ended; I have found them, and I have made peace with them.
“To find what is lost is an art in some cultures. The Navajos employ ‘hand tremblers’, usually women, who go into a trance and ‘see’ where the lost article or person is located. When I asked one diviner what it was like when she was in trance, she said, ‘Lots of noise, but noise that’s hard to hear.’” - Gretel Ehrlich.
They are singing me a birthday song.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Play: A Better Life
(LILY, her mother ALICE, and a DOCTOR are in a cramped, messy and obviously poor one-room hovel. Lily and the Doctor are talking in one corner, and Alice lies in a bed at the far end, seemingly comatose.)
DOCTOR
The landlord found her on the floor when he came to get the rent. He came to look for me immediately… (laughs a little harshly) It’s good that she hadn’t paid him yet, otherwise she probably wouldn’t be alive.
LILY
What happened? Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner?
DOCTOR
It was several days before he found her, and she wouldn’t give anyone your name. She wouldn’t even go to a hospital, so they put her on the bed, and they’ve had to force food and water down her throat just to keep her alive. (looks back at Alice, and then at Lily again) You might have to do that from now on.
LILY
(looking at Alice, not having quite heard what the Doctor said) Yes, of course.
(The Doctor takes two bottles of pills from his bag and giving them to Lily, who studies them)
DOCTOR
You should also make her take these pills. They’re pretty strong, so just one pill in the morning, and another at night. (pauses, looking at Lily’s slightly puzzled face) They’re sedatives. Enough to stop her from struggling so you can feed her. They gave her one last night, but not this morning, so you should probably do one now. Do you want me to show you how?
LILY
(slightly repulsed) No, I know what to do. Thank you, doctor. (the doctor nods, but he doesn’t leave) I’m sorry, was there something else?
DOCTOR
Well, I don’t want to be rude, but, well, the money…
LILY
(quickly) Yes, yes, of course. How much should we pay you?
DOCTOR
Forty dollars for the pills, and twenty for the consultation.
(Lily digs around in her purse, and draws out a small roll of bills. She peels off sixty dollars in tens carefully and gives them to the doctor.)
DOCTOR
Thank you. (He seems about to leave, but speaks instead) Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you could take her to a hospital it really would be for the best. It’s just that –
(The Doctor pauses, embarrassed.)
LILY
Yes?
DOCTOR
It’s just that I overheard some of the guys on the first day I was here, and it seems as though… well, as though your mother could afford a hospital. And you’re studying in a college, so… (breaks off, embarrassed again) But it’s none of my business, I know.
LILY
No, no… thank you for your suggestion.
DOCTOR
Right, right. I – I should go.
LILY
(perfunctorily, as though the Doctor is already gone) Thank you again.
(The Doctor leaves and Lily goes immediately to the bed, putting the bottles of pills on the small drawer next to it. She stands looking at Alice for a moment, then begins methodically changing the sheets and her mother’s clothes – they are both soiled. When she finishes, Lily draws up a stool and sits beside Alice, who has remained silent throughout.)
LILY
Ma… was it worth it?...
(Alice turns to look at Lily, and begins using her head to gesture to the bottles on the drawer, her mouth making painfully thin yelps.)
LILY
No, don’t be silly… I can’t. (Alice falls silent, staring at Lily) Nobody deserves to be punished like that, Ma, not even me. You just lay there; I’ll go downstairs and call a hospital and get them to come. You just lay there…
(Lily gets up and walks across the room, as Alice’s voice begins its heartbreaking keening again. Lily walks purposefully onwards, but when she reaches the door she stops, suddenly remembering. She walks back to Alice, who stops keening.)
LILY
Of course. We’ll need money. Where did you keep the book, ma? I’ll need the book to go and withdraw money so we can pay the hospital, and the landlord…
(Alice jerks her head continuously. Lily goes around the room, looking for it, asking “Here?” periodically, until she finds it. She opens the bankbook, and sees the balance, and is frozen for a moment that lasts an eternity. When she moves again she seems to be a different person. She walks to Alice’s bed and sits on the stool again.)
LILY
You – (she breaks off, as Alice’s eyes bore into her with terrible meaning, before jerking towards the bottles again) I can’t… I can’t. I can’t do it. (Alice begins to keen again over Lily’s murmuring) Stop, please, stop it, stop it! (Lily reaches over and begins shaking Alice, the bankbook falling to the ground. Alice stops immediately, and Lily stops shaking her) Please… Please.
(Alice’s head falls back onto the bed, defeated. There is a pregnant pause, and Lily takes a bottle, and Alice’s head raises slightly, hopefully.)
LILY
(opening the cap, taking out one pill) Just one, just one pill. (Alice’s head falls back again) Just take this one. (Alice refuses to take the pill, so Lily puts the bottle down, and gets up to force it down her throat) There. Just one will do.
(Lily sits again, picking up the open bottle. She stares at it a moment, an everlasting moment, and takes another pill. Alice sees this, and her head raises again from the pillow in sacrifice. Lily’s movements seem dazed, dreamlike.)
LILY
(putting the pill in Alice’s mouth easily) Just one pill. One pill will do it. Just one, just one pill…
DOCTOR
The landlord found her on the floor when he came to get the rent. He came to look for me immediately… (laughs a little harshly) It’s good that she hadn’t paid him yet, otherwise she probably wouldn’t be alive.
LILY
What happened? Why didn’t anyone tell me sooner?
DOCTOR
It was several days before he found her, and she wouldn’t give anyone your name. She wouldn’t even go to a hospital, so they put her on the bed, and they’ve had to force food and water down her throat just to keep her alive. (looks back at Alice, and then at Lily again) You might have to do that from now on.
LILY
(looking at Alice, not having quite heard what the Doctor said) Yes, of course.
(The Doctor takes two bottles of pills from his bag and giving them to Lily, who studies them)
DOCTOR
You should also make her take these pills. They’re pretty strong, so just one pill in the morning, and another at night. (pauses, looking at Lily’s slightly puzzled face) They’re sedatives. Enough to stop her from struggling so you can feed her. They gave her one last night, but not this morning, so you should probably do one now. Do you want me to show you how?
LILY
(slightly repulsed) No, I know what to do. Thank you, doctor. (the doctor nods, but he doesn’t leave) I’m sorry, was there something else?
DOCTOR
Well, I don’t want to be rude, but, well, the money…
LILY
(quickly) Yes, yes, of course. How much should we pay you?
DOCTOR
Forty dollars for the pills, and twenty for the consultation.
(Lily digs around in her purse, and draws out a small roll of bills. She peels off sixty dollars in tens carefully and gives them to the doctor.)
DOCTOR
Thank you. (He seems about to leave, but speaks instead) Don’t take this the wrong way, but if you could take her to a hospital it really would be for the best. It’s just that –
(The Doctor pauses, embarrassed.)
LILY
Yes?
DOCTOR
It’s just that I overheard some of the guys on the first day I was here, and it seems as though… well, as though your mother could afford a hospital. And you’re studying in a college, so… (breaks off, embarrassed again) But it’s none of my business, I know.
LILY
No, no… thank you for your suggestion.
DOCTOR
Right, right. I – I should go.
LILY
(perfunctorily, as though the Doctor is already gone) Thank you again.
(The Doctor leaves and Lily goes immediately to the bed, putting the bottles of pills on the small drawer next to it. She stands looking at Alice for a moment, then begins methodically changing the sheets and her mother’s clothes – they are both soiled. When she finishes, Lily draws up a stool and sits beside Alice, who has remained silent throughout.)
LILY
Ma… was it worth it?...
(Alice turns to look at Lily, and begins using her head to gesture to the bottles on the drawer, her mouth making painfully thin yelps.)
LILY
No, don’t be silly… I can’t. (Alice falls silent, staring at Lily) Nobody deserves to be punished like that, Ma, not even me. You just lay there; I’ll go downstairs and call a hospital and get them to come. You just lay there…
(Lily gets up and walks across the room, as Alice’s voice begins its heartbreaking keening again. Lily walks purposefully onwards, but when she reaches the door she stops, suddenly remembering. She walks back to Alice, who stops keening.)
LILY
Of course. We’ll need money. Where did you keep the book, ma? I’ll need the book to go and withdraw money so we can pay the hospital, and the landlord…
(Alice jerks her head continuously. Lily goes around the room, looking for it, asking “Here?” periodically, until she finds it. She opens the bankbook, and sees the balance, and is frozen for a moment that lasts an eternity. When she moves again she seems to be a different person. She walks to Alice’s bed and sits on the stool again.)
LILY
You – (she breaks off, as Alice’s eyes bore into her with terrible meaning, before jerking towards the bottles again) I can’t… I can’t. I can’t do it. (Alice begins to keen again over Lily’s murmuring) Stop, please, stop it, stop it! (Lily reaches over and begins shaking Alice, the bankbook falling to the ground. Alice stops immediately, and Lily stops shaking her) Please… Please.
(Alice’s head falls back onto the bed, defeated. There is a pregnant pause, and Lily takes a bottle, and Alice’s head raises slightly, hopefully.)
LILY
(opening the cap, taking out one pill) Just one, just one pill. (Alice’s head falls back again) Just take this one. (Alice refuses to take the pill, so Lily puts the bottle down, and gets up to force it down her throat) There. Just one will do.
(Lily sits again, picking up the open bottle. She stares at it a moment, an everlasting moment, and takes another pill. Alice sees this, and her head raises again from the pillow in sacrifice. Lily’s movements seem dazed, dreamlike.)
LILY
(putting the pill in Alice’s mouth easily) Just one pill. One pill will do it. Just one, just one pill…
Play: One
(JOHN and EVE, impeccably dressed, are in a bar, John at a table in the background, Eve at another in the foreground, her back to John. In her 30s, Eve has a fragile beauty, while John is distinguished in his 40s. As we watch, Eve rolls a bottle of pills on the table calmly, then opens it and downs one, all unseen by John. After a few moments of deliberation, John gets up and comes to Eve. As he approaches, Eve keeps the bottle of pills, and John stops, standing, beside Eve.)
JOHN
You don’t want to be alone, do you?
EVE
I’m not anymore, am I?
(John sits beside Eve. A moment passes.)
JOHN
(abruptly) Let me bring you home.
(Eve turns from her drink to look at John.)
EVE
(deliberately) Excuse me?
JOHN
All right. Let me sleep with you.
(Eve pauses, then laughs.)
EVE
Why?
JOHN
Because you need me to.
EVE
Because you want me to.
JOHN
A woman doesn’t sit alone in a bar for four nights in a row if she’s not looking for something.
EVE
This woman might have been looking for solitude. Or even just a drink.
JOHN
And yet you let me sit, and yet every night you’ve been here you’ve barely touched your drink.
(John gestures to her still full cocktail.)
EVE
(with a lazy sort of interest and smile) Have you been stalking me?
JOHN
Some people might call it harmless interest.
EVE
Some people might disagree.
JOHN
Most people don’t.
EVE
But I’m not most people, unless you’re in the habit of doing this.
JOHN
No, I’m not, and you’re not either. (pauses) So, how about it? Will you let me fuck you? It might… take your mind off things.
(Eve pauses, considering, and then looks at her watch.)
EVE
It’s eleven fifty-three now. I have until midnight, so you’ve got until then to change my mind.
JOHN
Is that a deal?
EVE
It’s a deal.
JOHN
(as with an opening salvo) I’ve got money.
EVE
What makes you think my price is in dollars?
JOHN
It might be if I offered you fifty thousand of them.
EVE
If you had fifty thousand of them you wouldn’t be here.
JOHN
(mimicking the Mastercard commercial) There are some things money can’t buy.
EVE
If sex is one of them then there’s no point in you offering it to me.
JOHN
Maybe I don’t want to buy sex. Maybe I’m looking for a certain quality and sex just happens to come as a free gift with it.
EVE
And what would be that quality? Desperation?
JOHN
Are you desperate?
EVE
Do you see yourself writing a check out for me now?
JOHN
Desperation’s not always financial.
EVE
You can be desperate even with fifty thousand dollars.
(John nods, and he lapses into a moment of silence. Then he rouses himself.)
JOHN
What about the desperation of loneliness then? Don’t you want to spend a night with someone, even if it’s just me?
EVE
Don’t you think it’s a little presumptuous of you to assume that I don’t already have someone waiting for me at home now?
JOHN
You’re in a bar.
EVE
(ironically) I might be married.
JOHN
I don’t see a ring.
EVE
So that makes it all right?
JOHN
Do you believe in the vows of marriage?
EVE
I might believe in general morality.
JOHN
Morality is for the happy, and the happy don’t sit alone in bars.
EVE
What if I’m looking to get married? Or I could even be looking for love.
JOHN
But you’re not, are you? You’re not looking for either of those things. They’re too easy.
EVE
If I were, you wouldn’t be a good candidate for either, would you?
JOHN
Probably not. But you’re not, in any case.
EVE
Convince me. Convince me that those aren’t the things I’m actually looking for.
JOHN
Why? Conviction doesn’t make something true if it isn’t already.
EVE
Well… (looks at him, then, conceding the point) I stopped feeling guilty about sex in twelfth grade.
JOHN
Eleventh. So why aren’t we getting a cab now?
EVE
Have you ever considered the possibility that, right now, I simply might not want to fuck you?
JOHN
Simply might not, or might not simply?
EVE
Because desperation and narcissism make such an irresistible combination.
JOHN
Two negatives make a positive sometimes. Besides, you’re still talking to me, aren’t you?
EVE
I could stop.
JOHN
But you won’t. You and I, we have something in common.
(Eve stops talking for several moments, but it’s more to prove a point than for anything else. Then she looks at her watch.)
EVE
(semi-reluctantly) I’m not married, but I will be. Soon. (As John is about to speak) He loves me.
JOHN
Of course he does. (sympathetically) You wouldn’t be here otherwise.
EVE
I am nervous, but it’s not because I don’t know what marriage will be like.
JOHN
It’s because you do know.
EVE
(as if it explains everything) His daily planner is always filled.
JOHN
He doesn’t sit in bars and… think.
EVE
Unlike you.
(John nods.)
JOHN
Unlike me. (as Eve looks inquiringly) I’m not married. Or getting married. (as though confessing) Well… an ex told me once that I was married to my work, if you’re picky. She was right, but I’ll probably be getting a divorce soon.
EVE
Why?
JOHN
I’m enjoying it too much. So, best to cut my losses.
EVE
And yet here you are offering fifty thousand dollars for an affair.
JOHN
(seriously) A one-night stand.
EVE
Is that all you can afford now?
(John shrugs not quite convincingly.)
JOHN
I have more than enough money. But… yes.
(John’s mind seems to wander off. Eve looks at John, and her expression changes subtly, and she is now the one who reaches to him, tapping his fingers.)
EVE
You’ve still got four minutes left. Are you giving up already?
JOHN
Do you want me to?
(Eve shrugs, but not carelessly. There is a pause, and she speaks to fill it.)
EVE
What job are you quitting?
JOHN
Defense attorney. You’re damned if you like it, and you’re damned if you don’t. Nobody told me that before.
EVE
I know what you mean. It’s the same with teaching English to children.
JOHN
Isn’t it rewarding?
EVE
The onslaught of innocence or the erosion of it? Every name I give them shrinks their world, and they think it becomes more manageable... I want to shake them sometimes.
JOHN
For growing up.
EVE
And for not growing up.
JOHN
The lucky bastards. Some of my clients are like that too. But the smarter ones choose to go to jail.
EVE
And the smartest ones must know that there’s no difference between inside and outside.
(John looks at her, considering. Eve smiles.)
EVE
Don’t they?
JOHN
You and I… how did we get to be like this?
EVE
We didn’t fill up our planners. We sat in bars and we didn’t drink.
JOHN
And so we quit our jobs and get married?
EVE
They’re directions.
(John smiles. Eve does, too.)
JOHN
Or diversions. How much time do I have left?
(Eve checks her watch.)
EVE
Three minutes.
JOHN
(smiles, with a tinge of his former cockiness) Too much time. (pauses, then, almost impulsively) Leave with me.
EVE
It isn’t time yet.
JOHN
No. (intensely) Leave with me.
EVE
(pauses) Where would you take me?
JOHN
He doesn’t understand.
EVE
Do you? Too much time isn’t the same as too little. We might both be stuck, but we’re not stuck together. I might be wrong about him, wrong about everyone. There’s still time for me, isn’t there?
JOHN
I see.
EVE
If we really had something in common you could at least lie and believe that for me.
JOHN
Belief and conviction are the same.
EVE
Equally useful on that one morning when I’m frozen before the mirror with a hairbrush in my hand? That – that won’t happen to me.
JOHN
One afternoon when you’re sitting in the doctor’s office and he insists that you’re perfectly fine. That’s when you’ll know. I’ve been there, I can tell you what to expect. All you have to do is… stay. Stay.
EVE
You tell me these things and you paint me these pictures as though I don’t know them… (shaking her head) Two people looking for the same thing doesn’t make it easier to find.
JOHN
But it might make it easier to forget that they’re searching. Wouldn’t it?
(Their smiles are strained.)
EVE
Offer me something. If you can tell me – if you can just put into words what I can’t, if you can give me those words so I can make it seem smaller –
JOHN
I can only give you a chance to forget how small we are –
EVE
(bitterly) I’ve got enough pills to take care of that, enough pills so it will never be a problem –
JOHN
Sometimes two negatives make a positive. Even if it’s only for a few hours. Sometimes a few hours are enough to save a person.
(Eve appears to give his proposal serious thought. John takes her hand and taps the watch gently.)
JOHN
Two?
(John and Eve look at each other. Time seems suspended, but suddenly Eve’s mobile phone rings. She looks at it, but doesn’t answer it, instead simply cutting off the call. She slowly replaces the mobile phone, and when she is done, she leans over and kisses John, slowly, tenderly, regretfully.)
JOHN
One.
(Eve nods, and gathers her things, and puts on her coat. She leaves the bar, leaving John alone, for one lingering moment. Then the lights on him go out.)
JOHN
You don’t want to be alone, do you?
EVE
I’m not anymore, am I?
(John sits beside Eve. A moment passes.)
JOHN
(abruptly) Let me bring you home.
(Eve turns from her drink to look at John.)
EVE
(deliberately) Excuse me?
JOHN
All right. Let me sleep with you.
(Eve pauses, then laughs.)
EVE
Why?
JOHN
Because you need me to.
EVE
Because you want me to.
JOHN
A woman doesn’t sit alone in a bar for four nights in a row if she’s not looking for something.
EVE
This woman might have been looking for solitude. Or even just a drink.
JOHN
And yet you let me sit, and yet every night you’ve been here you’ve barely touched your drink.
(John gestures to her still full cocktail.)
EVE
(with a lazy sort of interest and smile) Have you been stalking me?
JOHN
Some people might call it harmless interest.
EVE
Some people might disagree.
JOHN
Most people don’t.
EVE
But I’m not most people, unless you’re in the habit of doing this.
JOHN
No, I’m not, and you’re not either. (pauses) So, how about it? Will you let me fuck you? It might… take your mind off things.
(Eve pauses, considering, and then looks at her watch.)
EVE
It’s eleven fifty-three now. I have until midnight, so you’ve got until then to change my mind.
JOHN
Is that a deal?
EVE
It’s a deal.
JOHN
(as with an opening salvo) I’ve got money.
EVE
What makes you think my price is in dollars?
JOHN
It might be if I offered you fifty thousand of them.
EVE
If you had fifty thousand of them you wouldn’t be here.
JOHN
(mimicking the Mastercard commercial) There are some things money can’t buy.
EVE
If sex is one of them then there’s no point in you offering it to me.
JOHN
Maybe I don’t want to buy sex. Maybe I’m looking for a certain quality and sex just happens to come as a free gift with it.
EVE
And what would be that quality? Desperation?
JOHN
Are you desperate?
EVE
Do you see yourself writing a check out for me now?
JOHN
Desperation’s not always financial.
EVE
You can be desperate even with fifty thousand dollars.
(John nods, and he lapses into a moment of silence. Then he rouses himself.)
JOHN
What about the desperation of loneliness then? Don’t you want to spend a night with someone, even if it’s just me?
EVE
Don’t you think it’s a little presumptuous of you to assume that I don’t already have someone waiting for me at home now?
JOHN
You’re in a bar.
EVE
(ironically) I might be married.
JOHN
I don’t see a ring.
EVE
So that makes it all right?
JOHN
Do you believe in the vows of marriage?
EVE
I might believe in general morality.
JOHN
Morality is for the happy, and the happy don’t sit alone in bars.
EVE
What if I’m looking to get married? Or I could even be looking for love.
JOHN
But you’re not, are you? You’re not looking for either of those things. They’re too easy.
EVE
If I were, you wouldn’t be a good candidate for either, would you?
JOHN
Probably not. But you’re not, in any case.
EVE
Convince me. Convince me that those aren’t the things I’m actually looking for.
JOHN
Why? Conviction doesn’t make something true if it isn’t already.
EVE
Well… (looks at him, then, conceding the point) I stopped feeling guilty about sex in twelfth grade.
JOHN
Eleventh. So why aren’t we getting a cab now?
EVE
Have you ever considered the possibility that, right now, I simply might not want to fuck you?
JOHN
Simply might not, or might not simply?
EVE
Because desperation and narcissism make such an irresistible combination.
JOHN
Two negatives make a positive sometimes. Besides, you’re still talking to me, aren’t you?
EVE
I could stop.
JOHN
But you won’t. You and I, we have something in common.
(Eve stops talking for several moments, but it’s more to prove a point than for anything else. Then she looks at her watch.)
EVE
(semi-reluctantly) I’m not married, but I will be. Soon. (As John is about to speak) He loves me.
JOHN
Of course he does. (sympathetically) You wouldn’t be here otherwise.
EVE
I am nervous, but it’s not because I don’t know what marriage will be like.
JOHN
It’s because you do know.
EVE
(as if it explains everything) His daily planner is always filled.
JOHN
He doesn’t sit in bars and… think.
EVE
Unlike you.
(John nods.)
JOHN
Unlike me. (as Eve looks inquiringly) I’m not married. Or getting married. (as though confessing) Well… an ex told me once that I was married to my work, if you’re picky. She was right, but I’ll probably be getting a divorce soon.
EVE
Why?
JOHN
I’m enjoying it too much. So, best to cut my losses.
EVE
And yet here you are offering fifty thousand dollars for an affair.
JOHN
(seriously) A one-night stand.
EVE
Is that all you can afford now?
(John shrugs not quite convincingly.)
JOHN
I have more than enough money. But… yes.
(John’s mind seems to wander off. Eve looks at John, and her expression changes subtly, and she is now the one who reaches to him, tapping his fingers.)
EVE
You’ve still got four minutes left. Are you giving up already?
JOHN
Do you want me to?
(Eve shrugs, but not carelessly. There is a pause, and she speaks to fill it.)
EVE
What job are you quitting?
JOHN
Defense attorney. You’re damned if you like it, and you’re damned if you don’t. Nobody told me that before.
EVE
I know what you mean. It’s the same with teaching English to children.
JOHN
Isn’t it rewarding?
EVE
The onslaught of innocence or the erosion of it? Every name I give them shrinks their world, and they think it becomes more manageable... I want to shake them sometimes.
JOHN
For growing up.
EVE
And for not growing up.
JOHN
The lucky bastards. Some of my clients are like that too. But the smarter ones choose to go to jail.
EVE
And the smartest ones must know that there’s no difference between inside and outside.
(John looks at her, considering. Eve smiles.)
EVE
Don’t they?
JOHN
You and I… how did we get to be like this?
EVE
We didn’t fill up our planners. We sat in bars and we didn’t drink.
JOHN
And so we quit our jobs and get married?
EVE
They’re directions.
(John smiles. Eve does, too.)
JOHN
Or diversions. How much time do I have left?
(Eve checks her watch.)
EVE
Three minutes.
JOHN
(smiles, with a tinge of his former cockiness) Too much time. (pauses, then, almost impulsively) Leave with me.
EVE
It isn’t time yet.
JOHN
No. (intensely) Leave with me.
EVE
(pauses) Where would you take me?
JOHN
He doesn’t understand.
EVE
Do you? Too much time isn’t the same as too little. We might both be stuck, but we’re not stuck together. I might be wrong about him, wrong about everyone. There’s still time for me, isn’t there?
JOHN
I see.
EVE
If we really had something in common you could at least lie and believe that for me.
JOHN
Belief and conviction are the same.
EVE
Equally useful on that one morning when I’m frozen before the mirror with a hairbrush in my hand? That – that won’t happen to me.
JOHN
One afternoon when you’re sitting in the doctor’s office and he insists that you’re perfectly fine. That’s when you’ll know. I’ve been there, I can tell you what to expect. All you have to do is… stay. Stay.
EVE
You tell me these things and you paint me these pictures as though I don’t know them… (shaking her head) Two people looking for the same thing doesn’t make it easier to find.
JOHN
But it might make it easier to forget that they’re searching. Wouldn’t it?
(Their smiles are strained.)
EVE
Offer me something. If you can tell me – if you can just put into words what I can’t, if you can give me those words so I can make it seem smaller –
JOHN
I can only give you a chance to forget how small we are –
EVE
(bitterly) I’ve got enough pills to take care of that, enough pills so it will never be a problem –
JOHN
Sometimes two negatives make a positive. Even if it’s only for a few hours. Sometimes a few hours are enough to save a person.
(Eve appears to give his proposal serious thought. John takes her hand and taps the watch gently.)
JOHN
Two?
(John and Eve look at each other. Time seems suspended, but suddenly Eve’s mobile phone rings. She looks at it, but doesn’t answer it, instead simply cutting off the call. She slowly replaces the mobile phone, and when she is done, she leans over and kisses John, slowly, tenderly, regretfully.)
JOHN
One.
(Eve nods, and gathers her things, and puts on her coat. She leaves the bar, leaving John alone, for one lingering moment. Then the lights on him go out.)
Story: Calender
The calendar of my memory has days crossed out. This doesn’t mean that those days don’t exist anymore – it simply means that my mind’s eye, voluntarily or otherwise, usually glazes over them when it glances through the collected days of my life to date. But like the reticence that is only another form of self-aggrandizement, the muteness of those days, when eventually impossible to avoid, cries out in a silence that is louder than the competing noises of existence.
One of them began many years ago, in a night that seemed to live solely to divide the two days that birth and kill it. My mother sat behind her ironing table watching television, the parameters of her reality drawn in the sight of dramatic lives so very far removed from her own, and in the sound of her iron periodically clacking against its cradle as she replaced it again and again to free her hands for the starch canister. I sat behind my writing table, pen poised over paper, eyes looping over the same sentence, ears tuned to heroics and villainy that might yet be mine. And so one hour had passed, and another might, and yet another after it. But those latter hours never left the realm of possibility, because, at that very moment, the telephone rang.
I picked up the receiver, and it has always struck me that a voice so melodic could bring forth such bad tidings. She spoke in Mainland Chinese, but her ancestors must have been the Greek sirens of lore, because her words were musical notes that, while softened, had nonetheless lured my father to misfortune. She asked simply for my father, and when I told her he was not in at the moment, she said simply that I must be lying. Her voice never spiked to harshness in the minutes that followed, not even in her harmonic dismissal of my supposed lies an instant before the crack of sound that ended our verbal parrying.
My mother, of course, had not been deaf to my words, unlike her. Quietness had thickened into silence, but the force of her concentration upon the defenseless television set and the methodical ironing and folding that had sharpened to rigid precision shouted what she could not say. Invisible words pouring out of her crowded the air, and, battered by their formless yet incessant attacks, I saw it best to retreat to the safety of my room.
When I awoke later in the shattered tranquility of midnight, that initial wavering moment of lucidity betrayed me, reaching out beyond the circles of its comprehension and filling my mind with its retrospective clairvoyance. Even before I heard my father’s voice raised in guilty offence in the adjoining room, I could already see him: walking through the front door, facing my mother’s tight-lipped and immutable fury, divining in an instant that the game was up despite all of his efforts, telling her that this was something that should only be discussed when the children were sound asleep. And there clairvoyance drew its curtains, but what other scenarios could there have been? They must have sat there, weapons already at the ready, waiting only for the innocent, in this case my sister, to leave the battlefield and go into the sanctuary of dreams. And then she had, and so it had begun. Only now I had strayed into the paths of their collision, unbeknownst to them, and, by the creaking of my sister’s bed-frame, I was not alone.
What is there to say of those hours? Tears were shed, not only of disappointment but also of spite. Words such as ‘never’ and ‘always’ were uttered, lies the moment they left lips. Anger cooled into exasperation, and determination melted into weariness. I remember perfectly clearly only one detail, the last – my father, dialing his mistress’ number with my mother’s hands, telling this other woman in my mother’s voice that the affair was over. It seemed to me at that moment that the end of an affair should also at least bear with it the possible end of a marriage, but life is not a drama, and only a series of anticlimaxes followed – a brief silence, then the scuffles of tissues being stuffed into trash cans, then the click of switches being flicked, then, again – silence.
The next day we sat down to a dinner that my father had cooked. My father, my mother, my sister, and I, we were four persons seated at a table, each alone on our own side, separated not only by sharp edges but also by the walls we were building with each and every harmless question and answer. How was school? went one glass brick. Eat more vegetables, went another. Higher and higher the glass walls grew, and the more and more afraid we grew of nearing them, afraid of their being pushed, shattering and lacerating us, and afraid of pushing them, shattering and lacerating others. And so we sat tight and chattered, divided by a tangle of shared secrets, caught in the paradox of intentional forgetfulness, crossing out a day in our calendar that we can tear out, but which like a real calendar would make no difference.
One of them began many years ago, in a night that seemed to live solely to divide the two days that birth and kill it. My mother sat behind her ironing table watching television, the parameters of her reality drawn in the sight of dramatic lives so very far removed from her own, and in the sound of her iron periodically clacking against its cradle as she replaced it again and again to free her hands for the starch canister. I sat behind my writing table, pen poised over paper, eyes looping over the same sentence, ears tuned to heroics and villainy that might yet be mine. And so one hour had passed, and another might, and yet another after it. But those latter hours never left the realm of possibility, because, at that very moment, the telephone rang.
I picked up the receiver, and it has always struck me that a voice so melodic could bring forth such bad tidings. She spoke in Mainland Chinese, but her ancestors must have been the Greek sirens of lore, because her words were musical notes that, while softened, had nonetheless lured my father to misfortune. She asked simply for my father, and when I told her he was not in at the moment, she said simply that I must be lying. Her voice never spiked to harshness in the minutes that followed, not even in her harmonic dismissal of my supposed lies an instant before the crack of sound that ended our verbal parrying.
My mother, of course, had not been deaf to my words, unlike her. Quietness had thickened into silence, but the force of her concentration upon the defenseless television set and the methodical ironing and folding that had sharpened to rigid precision shouted what she could not say. Invisible words pouring out of her crowded the air, and, battered by their formless yet incessant attacks, I saw it best to retreat to the safety of my room.
When I awoke later in the shattered tranquility of midnight, that initial wavering moment of lucidity betrayed me, reaching out beyond the circles of its comprehension and filling my mind with its retrospective clairvoyance. Even before I heard my father’s voice raised in guilty offence in the adjoining room, I could already see him: walking through the front door, facing my mother’s tight-lipped and immutable fury, divining in an instant that the game was up despite all of his efforts, telling her that this was something that should only be discussed when the children were sound asleep. And there clairvoyance drew its curtains, but what other scenarios could there have been? They must have sat there, weapons already at the ready, waiting only for the innocent, in this case my sister, to leave the battlefield and go into the sanctuary of dreams. And then she had, and so it had begun. Only now I had strayed into the paths of their collision, unbeknownst to them, and, by the creaking of my sister’s bed-frame, I was not alone.
What is there to say of those hours? Tears were shed, not only of disappointment but also of spite. Words such as ‘never’ and ‘always’ were uttered, lies the moment they left lips. Anger cooled into exasperation, and determination melted into weariness. I remember perfectly clearly only one detail, the last – my father, dialing his mistress’ number with my mother’s hands, telling this other woman in my mother’s voice that the affair was over. It seemed to me at that moment that the end of an affair should also at least bear with it the possible end of a marriage, but life is not a drama, and only a series of anticlimaxes followed – a brief silence, then the scuffles of tissues being stuffed into trash cans, then the click of switches being flicked, then, again – silence.
The next day we sat down to a dinner that my father had cooked. My father, my mother, my sister, and I, we were four persons seated at a table, each alone on our own side, separated not only by sharp edges but also by the walls we were building with each and every harmless question and answer. How was school? went one glass brick. Eat more vegetables, went another. Higher and higher the glass walls grew, and the more and more afraid we grew of nearing them, afraid of their being pushed, shattering and lacerating us, and afraid of pushing them, shattering and lacerating others. And so we sat tight and chattered, divided by a tangle of shared secrets, caught in the paradox of intentional forgetfulness, crossing out a day in our calendar that we can tear out, but which like a real calendar would make no difference.
Story: Rose Glasses
Many years ago my father hurt my mother more deeply than a blow to her heart would have hurt. He had had an affair on one of his many business trips to China, but it wasn’t the shaming existence of the other woman that had cut my mother’s spirit. It was the fact that he had let her discover it through carelessness.
I remember overhearing parts of their modulated quarrel over his infidelity, even muffled as it was under the useless shield of my blanket. I did not physically see them, but images supply themselves in my recreation of the scene – I see my mother, sitting on the stool in front of her dresser table, ready to sleep but determined to impress upon him the importance of covering his tracks. My mother is a practical woman, but in this instance practicality and poetry meet in perfect harmony, and so my mother metes out his particular punishment. At this juncture, the scene shifts to my father as he picks up the phone, using the instrument of my mother’s misery and his mistress’s mischief to balance the scales once again, except this time with knowledge instead of ignorance.
Not too long after this I fell in love myself. It ended badly, but when I look back on the history of our brief and one-sided relationship, the similarly beautiful and almost filmic symmetry of it never fails to strike me. I see his face framed by the papers that bring him to me and change him from a classmate to a crush, see it smiling as the post-edit addition of a philharmonic orchestra of violins and flutes serenades what will ultimately turn out to be the cinematic cliché of a man clutching a bouquet of drenched roses, alone in the pouring rain. At this juncture, the scene shifts to me in a series of quick cuts featuring the end, as I frame his being again, only this time with the oppressive papers of my disappointment-fuelled letters.
Today, as I think about the parallel romances of my parents’ marriage and my own youthful foray, I wonder whether this is how we allow love to commingle with the attendant problems of love, by supplying sights and sounds to lyricize all of love’s permutations. There is a painting, Rene Magritte’s 1928 rendition of The Lovers, which captures this mood of love perfectly. In it, a man and woman kiss each other under a dark-filled sky, but their kiss is killing them, for their heads are shrouded in the white sheets of the morgue. And in that one image is captured love, which transforms interest to excitement, carelessness to willfulness, anger to fury, indifference to hate, and disappointment to tragedy. Love is a woman missing her bed, or a man being passed a form to fill, but we think love is transformative, and in so doing we transform love.
I remember overhearing parts of their modulated quarrel over his infidelity, even muffled as it was under the useless shield of my blanket. I did not physically see them, but images supply themselves in my recreation of the scene – I see my mother, sitting on the stool in front of her dresser table, ready to sleep but determined to impress upon him the importance of covering his tracks. My mother is a practical woman, but in this instance practicality and poetry meet in perfect harmony, and so my mother metes out his particular punishment. At this juncture, the scene shifts to my father as he picks up the phone, using the instrument of my mother’s misery and his mistress’s mischief to balance the scales once again, except this time with knowledge instead of ignorance.
Not too long after this I fell in love myself. It ended badly, but when I look back on the history of our brief and one-sided relationship, the similarly beautiful and almost filmic symmetry of it never fails to strike me. I see his face framed by the papers that bring him to me and change him from a classmate to a crush, see it smiling as the post-edit addition of a philharmonic orchestra of violins and flutes serenades what will ultimately turn out to be the cinematic cliché of a man clutching a bouquet of drenched roses, alone in the pouring rain. At this juncture, the scene shifts to me in a series of quick cuts featuring the end, as I frame his being again, only this time with the oppressive papers of my disappointment-fuelled letters.
Today, as I think about the parallel romances of my parents’ marriage and my own youthful foray, I wonder whether this is how we allow love to commingle with the attendant problems of love, by supplying sights and sounds to lyricize all of love’s permutations. There is a painting, Rene Magritte’s 1928 rendition of The Lovers, which captures this mood of love perfectly. In it, a man and woman kiss each other under a dark-filled sky, but their kiss is killing them, for their heads are shrouded in the white sheets of the morgue. And in that one image is captured love, which transforms interest to excitement, carelessness to willfulness, anger to fury, indifference to hate, and disappointment to tragedy. Love is a woman missing her bed, or a man being passed a form to fill, but we think love is transformative, and in so doing we transform love.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Story: Gallery
It’s no wonder people hate looking at paintings. Stand in front of one and let it talk to you, my art teacher used to say during museum excursions, waving a hand down a gallery as though her wand-like fingers would magically give the paintings voices. What she didn’t say, of course, was that most pictures already do talk, but they don’t say anything. They exhibit themselves in all their multi-colored glory, flaunting their seeming openness, inviting you to share in their secrets, but behind their whispered temptations is an impenetrable wall, a blank canvas. Perhaps it is because they have been forced into a surface-deep existence, or perhaps it is because of their innately superficial natures, but paintings have perfected the most cunning form of evasion – of hiding in plain sight.
I first fell in love when I was 15. I didn’t call it love, of course. I called it friendship. Friendship allowed me a much wider latitude in his company. Friendship allowed me to mask a tender caress with force. Friendship allowed, where love restricted. But to use one word where another is meant, even if the effect you mean to produce is the same, is to pay the price of blankness. I loved, but I was impenetrable, a portrait of shaded words and actions that conveyed the most brilliant of nothings to all but the most discerning of people.
My mother, however, was one of those people. She never had to worry about me as I grew up, because I never gave her cause to, and yet she worried all the same. She understood what I was doing, because she did the same things herself. We acted as if we were angry, when in actual fact we were. We used the palette of emotions at our disposal to paint a veneer that refracted almost perfectly ourselves, because deception is at its most beguiling when the lies it breathes are closest to truth. And so she worried, because she looked at me and all she could see was my veneer, a crafted thing of manners, and she could not know whether I was an innocent person or a person who was innocent.
She did not worry too long about this, though. Like the boys before and after her, she learned not to look too closely. Part of me wants to reach through the likeness of me to grab her, to pull her into this rarely visited place I occupy, where I mix my colors, but I can’t, because to do that I would have to reach through her likeness as well, and only if she was willing to be caught would she not slip away from my grasping hands.
But of course, there is another obstacle to this meeting, a voluntary one on my side. Part of me wants our facades to be cracked, yes, but a greater part of me shrinks from the exposure for the same reason onlookers fear paintings – the terror that knowledge will not only be revealed to and reveal us, but will warp us as well, transform us in some intrinsic way into messy stains of hues, unrecognizable even to ourselves. And as we fear, so we hide behind our reproductions, not only acknowledging the opaque nature of the paintings everywhere around us, but hating them as well, the hatred our second layer of protection.
I first fell in love when I was 15. I didn’t call it love, of course. I called it friendship. Friendship allowed me a much wider latitude in his company. Friendship allowed me to mask a tender caress with force. Friendship allowed, where love restricted. But to use one word where another is meant, even if the effect you mean to produce is the same, is to pay the price of blankness. I loved, but I was impenetrable, a portrait of shaded words and actions that conveyed the most brilliant of nothings to all but the most discerning of people.
My mother, however, was one of those people. She never had to worry about me as I grew up, because I never gave her cause to, and yet she worried all the same. She understood what I was doing, because she did the same things herself. We acted as if we were angry, when in actual fact we were. We used the palette of emotions at our disposal to paint a veneer that refracted almost perfectly ourselves, because deception is at its most beguiling when the lies it breathes are closest to truth. And so she worried, because she looked at me and all she could see was my veneer, a crafted thing of manners, and she could not know whether I was an innocent person or a person who was innocent.
She did not worry too long about this, though. Like the boys before and after her, she learned not to look too closely. Part of me wants to reach through the likeness of me to grab her, to pull her into this rarely visited place I occupy, where I mix my colors, but I can’t, because to do that I would have to reach through her likeness as well, and only if she was willing to be caught would she not slip away from my grasping hands.
But of course, there is another obstacle to this meeting, a voluntary one on my side. Part of me wants our facades to be cracked, yes, but a greater part of me shrinks from the exposure for the same reason onlookers fear paintings – the terror that knowledge will not only be revealed to and reveal us, but will warp us as well, transform us in some intrinsic way into messy stains of hues, unrecognizable even to ourselves. And as we fear, so we hide behind our reproductions, not only acknowledging the opaque nature of the paintings everywhere around us, but hating them as well, the hatred our second layer of protection.
Story: A Remembrance
Sometimes it is incredibly difficult to lose yourself. It is the end of 1999, and I stand in a shuffling line, waiting to receive my second blank slate, waiting to be released at the end of the line into a desolate landscape. When the teacher finally gives it to me, carelessly, I am already taking my first steps into the milky sea that separates me from that blessedly lonely land. I open the sheet, and the black letters float upon the surface for one suspended moment, but then they begin to sink, sink underneath the white sea, sink and form a path for me so I might pass through the whitewashing waters.
It is the beginning of 2000, three days into the unwritten year, and already I have reached that land. It is as yet empty, and yet not empty – shadowy figures flicker, extending temporary hands and words, but as I navigate the tricky corridors of this unchartered ground, I find myself unable to decide where the new borders should be drawn, and therefore unable to bridge the remaining steps it takes to bring them into permanent existence. I watch myself constantly, fearful that the paint on my surface might crack, might reveal the old tracings and scars. Already the film on my eyes has fractured, allowing flashes of false recognition to cross fleetingly pass them in the outlines of the past. Already dark clouds frame the sky, already the shadows seem to press upon me, seeking solidarity.
But then I find a shelter, a shelter where a half-finished man sits talking to a shadow. He is not like the shadows, he springs into this world half-formed against my will, created by the same inescapable attractions that pulse underneath my skin, that remain alive beneath the solid shell of white anonymity. Outside the three of us there is nothing, or at least nothing significant. An indistinct figure, a woman, reads loudly from a list, and from her hands pieces of paper begin to trickle. A mass of shadows male and female laugh. Another reads. But all I suddenly care about is this man, at once alien and familiar, whose shape I recognize only as that of my own desires.
And then a wonderful thing happens. One of those pieces of paper reaches me, and I hold it, and I learn I am to sign my name upon it. As I freeze, paralyzed by the lack of a pen, this half-made man turns, and from his fingers materializes a pen. He says nothing, but his face creases in a half-hidden smile, and I take the pen from him. As I sign my name upon the sheet, the black letters surface upon its whiteness, and when I finish he is waiting, waiting to receive his pen back. As I hand it back to him, he gives his name, asks mine, I answer, and with that one simple exchange a complicated invitation is issued and accepted, and he is brought first and fully into this land of possibilities, a man with an unreadable expression who now turns away. And once again I am traced slowly.
It is the middle of 2001, and still his face remains shrouded in blankness, even as his body and character are being drawn with the wavering and possibly erroneous lines of my experience. I too am a piece in progress, lost once and now being found again, sometimes black upon white upon black, but sometimes simply black upon white.
It is the beginning of 2000, three days into the unwritten year, and already I have reached that land. It is as yet empty, and yet not empty – shadowy figures flicker, extending temporary hands and words, but as I navigate the tricky corridors of this unchartered ground, I find myself unable to decide where the new borders should be drawn, and therefore unable to bridge the remaining steps it takes to bring them into permanent existence. I watch myself constantly, fearful that the paint on my surface might crack, might reveal the old tracings and scars. Already the film on my eyes has fractured, allowing flashes of false recognition to cross fleetingly pass them in the outlines of the past. Already dark clouds frame the sky, already the shadows seem to press upon me, seeking solidarity.
But then I find a shelter, a shelter where a half-finished man sits talking to a shadow. He is not like the shadows, he springs into this world half-formed against my will, created by the same inescapable attractions that pulse underneath my skin, that remain alive beneath the solid shell of white anonymity. Outside the three of us there is nothing, or at least nothing significant. An indistinct figure, a woman, reads loudly from a list, and from her hands pieces of paper begin to trickle. A mass of shadows male and female laugh. Another reads. But all I suddenly care about is this man, at once alien and familiar, whose shape I recognize only as that of my own desires.
And then a wonderful thing happens. One of those pieces of paper reaches me, and I hold it, and I learn I am to sign my name upon it. As I freeze, paralyzed by the lack of a pen, this half-made man turns, and from his fingers materializes a pen. He says nothing, but his face creases in a half-hidden smile, and I take the pen from him. As I sign my name upon the sheet, the black letters surface upon its whiteness, and when I finish he is waiting, waiting to receive his pen back. As I hand it back to him, he gives his name, asks mine, I answer, and with that one simple exchange a complicated invitation is issued and accepted, and he is brought first and fully into this land of possibilities, a man with an unreadable expression who now turns away. And once again I am traced slowly.
It is the middle of 2001, and still his face remains shrouded in blankness, even as his body and character are being drawn with the wavering and possibly erroneous lines of my experience. I too am a piece in progress, lost once and now being found again, sometimes black upon white upon black, but sometimes simply black upon white.
Story: A Moment Of Forever
Death comes in many ways, some more polite than others. In its first visitation to me, for example, it did me the courtesy of a telephone call. I was 14, my sister 13, and it was six in the morning when the telephone rang, a summons from Death in the calm, clear, and concise instructions of my mother. We were to skip school that day - already then an occasion associated with dread - and go to the hospital immediately. My grandfather had been found dead mid-route of his daily jog, attacked and murdered by his own vagrant heart.
That, however, was not my introduction to the place where life begins and so often ends. Two months earlier, a massive stroke had stolen half of my grandmother's body, and as I sat once again two months later in the limbo of the hospital's waiting room, I surprised myself with the ability to appreciate the irony that my grandmother slept seven floors above, survivor of her latter dissolute yearsm while my health-conscious grandfather reposed eight floors below her, felled by a single severe spasm of chance. Of course, my grandmother did not survive her husband long. A wild confrontation with my father led a relapse, and six lingering months later she gave up the remaining half of her body.
So many visitation in the space of less than a year, but the swing of the sickle was not yet complete. Two weeks after my grandmother's death, my emaciated uncle, my father's sole brother and remaining kin, announced that he would not return to Canada, where he had made his new life. He would, with his Canadian wife and child, remain in Singapore - for chemotherapy.
Imagine then, our family in the seemingly endless moment of grief. My father, who bore each blow and cried only once, in sympathy with my grandmother. My sister, who cried twice and never again, and who quickly became my father's silent partner in this series of unfortunate events. My mother, whose own parents had died decades ago and who now haggled over peanuts and mineral water with two clear and hard eyes, who now booked the funeral home and hearses and cremation timeslots. And then there was me.
I had not cried when my grandfather died. My eyes were again dammed when my grandmother followed suit, and when my uncle eventually succumbed, defeated, a wreckage of melted flesh and tubes. Why don't you cry, my sister asked me once. I told her I didn't know. That, of course, was only a half-truth.
See me now, wandering the precise corridors of the hospital, victim of the illness called a week of compassionate absence. Now blink, and there I am, sitting beside my grandmother, looking at her lain on her side to encourage blood circulation, listening to her thin reedy voice plead for a sip of water, moistening her fractured lips because any more would only dribble out of the corner of her mouth, thinking the frighteningly normal thought that her death would mean freedom from this eternity, and not only for me.
Even before that year of deaths slow and sudden had begun, I had already died a little. Death, after all, comes in many ways, and the living may not be completely alive.
That, however, was not my introduction to the place where life begins and so often ends. Two months earlier, a massive stroke had stolen half of my grandmother's body, and as I sat once again two months later in the limbo of the hospital's waiting room, I surprised myself with the ability to appreciate the irony that my grandmother slept seven floors above, survivor of her latter dissolute yearsm while my health-conscious grandfather reposed eight floors below her, felled by a single severe spasm of chance. Of course, my grandmother did not survive her husband long. A wild confrontation with my father led a relapse, and six lingering months later she gave up the remaining half of her body.
So many visitation in the space of less than a year, but the swing of the sickle was not yet complete. Two weeks after my grandmother's death, my emaciated uncle, my father's sole brother and remaining kin, announced that he would not return to Canada, where he had made his new life. He would, with his Canadian wife and child, remain in Singapore - for chemotherapy.
Imagine then, our family in the seemingly endless moment of grief. My father, who bore each blow and cried only once, in sympathy with my grandmother. My sister, who cried twice and never again, and who quickly became my father's silent partner in this series of unfortunate events. My mother, whose own parents had died decades ago and who now haggled over peanuts and mineral water with two clear and hard eyes, who now booked the funeral home and hearses and cremation timeslots. And then there was me.
I had not cried when my grandfather died. My eyes were again dammed when my grandmother followed suit, and when my uncle eventually succumbed, defeated, a wreckage of melted flesh and tubes. Why don't you cry, my sister asked me once. I told her I didn't know. That, of course, was only a half-truth.
See me now, wandering the precise corridors of the hospital, victim of the illness called a week of compassionate absence. Now blink, and there I am, sitting beside my grandmother, looking at her lain on her side to encourage blood circulation, listening to her thin reedy voice plead for a sip of water, moistening her fractured lips because any more would only dribble out of the corner of her mouth, thinking the frighteningly normal thought that her death would mean freedom from this eternity, and not only for me.
Even before that year of deaths slow and sudden had begun, I had already died a little. Death, after all, comes in many ways, and the living may not be completely alive.
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