The image dissolves with a shudder into a tableau of metal, tin. Some discarded roofing panels, variously grey and rust-red, tinged with green. Another dissolve, and we see her skin, the sheet, the sweeping line of her cheek, like a travelling droplet of moisture. Dissolve: tin, roofing panels. Dissolve: skin and sheet.
Eventually, the two images replace each other so quickly that all we see is an abstract shimmer. The breathing of the two people grows louder and increasingly abstract, dinsintegrating. The faintest of sounds amplified, the image changing too fast for us to discern any single element.
Thus we leave the scene:
The two figures mid-stage in the bed, the spinning storm of images, the sound of their breathing as it turns into the sound of the sea; or the sea being the sound of their breathing, a sound such as that produced by pressing one’s fingers hard into one’s ears, or closing one’s eyes and listening.
SCENE 5
We see a gleaming, white-painted floor of wood. Long curtains drape wave-like, sweeping in the breeze in front of the open door. On the other side of the door: blue where there should be green. The garden is blue. But there are sounds of a garden in summer, a bird. The low hum of agricultural machinery in the distance.
THE WOMAN:
Are you asleep.
No one answers, the room is quiet. A cat comes in through the door and passes through the room like a pair of scissors through a length of fabric.
THE WOMAN [again]:
Aren’t you going to wake up soon.
No answer.
Time.
Now and again the curtains are lifted from the floor entirely, the breeze is gentle, the lightness of the curtains is like a woman who has not eaten in months, half-years, that same bluish tinge, the down that covers her skin, a lightness of movement and a peculiar masculinity as the bones, the jaw, the skeleton become visible.
The lightness that resides in that.
THE WOMAN:
I remember I was going to pretend to be asleep. I’ve forgotten the reason, if there even was one. I suppose there wasn’t, apart from the desire not to…miss out on that special kind of solicitude, or whatever you might call it; the tiptoeing about when people saw I was sleeping. I wanted to hear that. The way people’s movements become cautious, as if they were actually walking on top of me like on glass or nails. The look in their eyes, without sound. But I woke up, it was evening by then, and all the guests had gone home.
I don’t know…I could tell they’d been there and had celebrated my birthday without me. It was for me they’d come—and perhaps they carried me into the other room. Had I really been asleep, rather than just pretending.
Are you asleep.
THE MAN:
Hmm.
THE WOMAN:
Please don’t.
A sound of crisp sheets, as if the bed were made of the dryest straw or paper, when the body settles.
We see the fabric, the skin, as the duvet is drawn aside. Their bodies are a single beast, sleeping.
THE MAN:
What were you thinking when you bought this place.
THE WOMAN:
Were you there that evening. Did you see me.
THE MAN:
It was because of the garden, wasn’t it.
THE WOMAN:
And did you leave then. Couldn’t you see the difference.
THE MAN:
The difference between what.
THE WOMAN:
Real sleep and…
A woman’s hand cuts into the lower frame. The hand is slender, the fingers long. Tendons flex beneath the skin. It rests lazily on the shiny white of the painted wooden floor.
THE MAN:
Hmm.
THE WOMAN:
…pretend sleep. That…goes wrong.
A silence. The woman crawls naked on all fours across the floor, reaches out and grasps the bottom rail of the French door to pull it shut.
A hand reaches out to clutch her leg. He grips her ankle and she pulls free.
THE MAN:
We’ve only just met. You keep forgetting.
Sleep now.
Can’t you sleep.
THE WOMAN:
I don’t think I can.
The woman is making up a story about him, a story about the remnants of an encounter.
You’re tired, we walked I don’t know how many kilometres along the shore, you must be tired.
We see the woman hold a hand up in the air, opened like a fan. She turns her hand as if considering a prism. The ceiling lamp’s severe splay of light against the wall.
An image of the wall: the figure of the fan. The graphics contained in the movement of the hand, fingers like slats.
The alienation that can arise all of a sudden, as abruptly as the opposite arose.
Everything can be reclaimed, it’s so obvious here.
The mobility of bodies, thoughts. One minute—the next.
That collapse and the resurrection into something like: togetherness. One, a union, without end, and yet always ending.
SCENE 6
A glowing coal he suddenly holds in his hand.
The sun squeezed into a black ball. Wishing for something, or wanting something.
SCENE 7
In rain. A summer, everything threatening to burst into flames at any moment. Bonfires and watering are banned. All glass is forbidden, mirrors are, tin foil, gold leaf. Garden waste piling up, because we want things tidy too, and the hedge needs doing. We want brand new views, we want vistas. If we dig up all the bushes on the hill we’ll be able to see the sea from the decking. And he might, you might have gone back to your parents.
If only they could cut down those trees, the cluster of trees that block a view you remember from when you were a child.
The view comes creeping forth.
And we dream again of rain.
The late sun has to ignite a whole landscape, though it’s nearly on fire already, and of its own accord.
Burning.
And then it comes. A drop that strikes a cheek or a warm arm. And then the next, and the next again, and all at once the sky rips open, rain pours down on us, plastering heads of hair to scalps, nature opening wide its mouth, gaping gullets, all drains and ditches, clothes, skin and veins are vessels greedy for rain.
In the towns, water fills the streets.
It travels across the road in its patterns of herringbone, washing with it a jetsam of newspapers, plastic, matchsticks, and still it falls, heavy drapes of fabric hung from the sky. The streets are overflowing, the rain rising up above the kerbs, to the doors of the houses. It seeps into their entrances, trapping the people inside, who stand and watch while the water floods in like light under their doors.
A single door, opened slowly.
We seek the high ground, clambering onto furniture. That kind of rain. And maybe eventually you manage to enter your building, you let yourself in, press open the door, step into the hallway, close the door behind you. The encroaching water, so quietly it flows. And slowly you realise: this isn’t where you live, this is the wrong apartment. Yet you take off your coat and walk through the hallway, into the living room, to kiss a woman who has no idea anything is wrong. Or a woman who doesn’t think anyone will come, that all are drowned, and that either she takes this man or no one at all. This may be reasonable. Arbitrariness is a fact we must live with, a fact we live with regardless of any other circumstance. Presumably that would be the kind of thing such a woman might think.
Dryshod first.
Nice, shiny black, patent leather shoes. Round toes. And she goes into the kitchen to see to the dinner. Maybe she leans across the counter and sees her distorted face reflected in some surface. Maybe she speaks her name out loud, in fact she does, she whispers it so that you may not hear. She listens with eyes closed. The way he takes off all his clothes and puts on those of a stranger instead. Your transformation can be seen in the woman’s face too. Her face changes. It’s what faces do, change with every
new person they love.
My face is your face.
We decide to make love. My face is your face. And when she opens her eyes, her eyes have become white.
She closes them again.
When she opens her eyes, they are black.
The entire orb, black.
She tries again, and now they are blue, they are acceptable.
Borrowed new eyes, and yet seemingly so—and this is the word she thinks—REALISTIC. We realise this is important to her, to live a realistic life, whatever that is. And when she puts a dish of steamed fish down on the table, she thinks to herself: This is a realistic fish. These are lovely potatoes, he says later, and she thinks: This is a realistic thing to say. At this point in time it’s realistic that he say such a thing. Compliment her on the food. And their entire life together can be realistic, she thinks. The thought comforts her. The fact that she can ENVISAGE it being so.
And so she is reconciled.
Everything that may be seen, and everything that may be envisaged, and everything that nearly exists. It all runs together in her mind. Whatever difference there might be. Whether it matters. You drink wine. You talk. She confides in you, and you nod as if you understand. Or maybe you really do understand her. Maybe she really is the one you have always loved, maybe she’s the one you were always looking for in your girlfriend. Who would go looking for someone they never knew. I suppose that’s what occurs to me—that you never knew the one you loved. Only nearly.
The woman switches on the light and we see the man has lain down to sleep with his head in her lap.
She strokes him, we see his hair, her fingers at first trembling, then becoming steady.
The scene draws out, slowly, slowly.
The woman’s hand moves with increasing weariness, heavily it proceeds across his skin, comes to a standstill, then jolts abruptly into motion again. All this is seen in close-up. There is nothing else in the frame than this hand and the trail of light that traces its movement. It’s like seeing the hand and the night through the sights of a rifle. As if one could blow the two people away with two shots and put an end to it all. We feel empowered, a feeling superseded by something like: the sense of having no power at all over anything. Impotence. That kind of feeling. Being subordinate to the two bodies. While eyes might be imagined that can see in the dark, one can never imagine a human body that does not at some point fall asleep. To be trapped in the body. Though perhaps in the proximity of another, a real body next to one’s own, or perhaps on top. The feeling that this possibility exists. To lie in one bed, two people; to lie there all four, five, six. Riddled with holes and alone, an insane multitude.
THE WOMAN:
You know, I was thinking, that when I met him it was like something happened to time. I never got older. Not by a single day, not until he left me. The year after.
The woman puts her hands to her face and explores her skin.
THE WOMAN:
And then you wake up [she repeats] and your face is the same as two, three, four years before. Then straight away, at a single glance, the body ages. Just like that. Like a skin sloughed off, as if the realisation of standing still precipitates collapse. A kind of hideous unmasking. You’ve yet to see what damage it did, the time that was spent together. And then there you stand, with the wreckage of your face. You think: I can’t ever see anyone again, not with this face.
THE MAN:
You think the whole world will turn away. But then.
THE WOMAN:
But then no one can tell. Your face has looked like that all the time, and you’re the only person not to have noticed.
THE MAN:
That may be the most terrifying part of it. Those around you never letting on.
THE WOMAN:
And so it turns out you don’t know a soul in this world. The fact that they saw nothing. Said nothing. Or the fact of you not hearing.
SCENE 8
A bed, in the middle of the room. The man and the woman tightly entwined.
A tangle of arms.
Sleeping.
Only a blue sheet covers them, or rather: it has slipped partially from their bodies and hangs to the floor like water running over the lip of the bathtub in their hotel room. Like honey spun from the comb—a limp disarray of arms and legs, and blue light. Night, or early morning. Summer. We see them on their stage, from the audience, and from above.
A film, the movements made in the course of a night.
Images bleeding into each other, a night of poses edited together, physical arrangements, more or less: a single body. At least: a single movement. And at the same time: the image of a hand.
We understand the person is asleep.
The hand of a woman asleep.
The navel, and the suggestion of her sex; her hips.
The image remains, longer than we thought we wanted it to. The light is soft. We see the throb of her pulse in the neck’s artery; and through every image a persistent crackle, the sound of something ablaze, and yet not. It is a human sound, a sound of the body, though uttered in language unintended to refer to anything else. The sound of a body when consciousness is rendered unconscious by the truth of sleep—unchoreographed sleep.
EPILOGUE
An image of the lava pouring down the slopes of the volcano’s cone.
Plants withering in the heat. It’s as if the volcanic soil is being fed. The heat chars everything, makes everything its own.
An image of a blackened landscape.
The volcano sleeps, the lava stark and solidified. Everything is burnt. We see what must be the remains of the green plant. We remember it. There’s a kind of grief over time having passed. The picture is still, without movement. After some time something stirs, dust being shifted by what we can only take to be the wind. The charred plant pulverises in the disruptive air. We see what used to be plant, disintegrating in that way. Dust whirls and settles, a fine mantle of black on the stage. The woman must close her eyes for the dust not to make them dry and lustreless. The man shields her face with his hand. Covers her mouth. He shuts his own eyes tightly.
We watch as the woman rises to her feet, removing the man’s hand from her breast; she rises slowly from the bed and steps out of the light, passes through the dimness, to a table behind the bed. The murk is green and soft. We see her body become another in the green.
Light has age.
That’s what hurts about light, and what is uplifting about darkness.
The body understands this.
She examines some papers that are spread out on the table. With this act, time passes.
The body adjusts to all things. The body accumulates time. The body takes in the time of light.
The morning light is 8.3 minutes old when it is shed upon our faces. We absorb this time, becoming older and older still, depending on the amount of time that is shed upon us.
If we stay in the dark it’s different.
But the fact you had to go home again. Or me having to stay. There are various chairs in the room. We see their silhouettes, along the wall and drawn out onto the floor. The shadows they cast. The house is by the sea, slightly back from the shore. A hundred metres, or a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty. Depending on the tide and the storms. A small patch of grass out front, juniper. Dark, green sloe. Heather, dry grass. We see the house on a summer’s day, a face, a boy reading. His eyebrows are knitted close and look like the leaf of a fern, the same shape, widest towards the middle of his face, a slender, freckled nose. It is the height of summer, the dreadful spring has passed, endured. Now the days run together, the way light can run together with things that radiate, the same light, one day and the next.
The approaching of a point, a place in the woods, simultaneously from two different positions.
The darkness of night is no longer darkness, more an inky kind of light, a bluish rendition of daylight, as it is here on this night, with the sea’s fog descending upon us. An odd collapse of time, like a row of books on
a shelf, the glue of spines vanished and gone, the threads of bound volumes rotted away.
A form that surrenders and leaves its elements to stand on their own. The being unable, incapable of maintaining standards, the way you might give up on what is done and what is not and simply hang the washing out on the balcony to dry.
A whole human, when thoughts dislodge and drift away from the body’s pain—this is what we hold up to the light and examine, this is what we see. Okay, so this is what happens.
An outpouching of a spinal disc, the fluid that seeps, pressing against the nerve, like when she went to open the back door for the first time after her long trip, a shove of her shoulder against the rail, a gummy complaint from the rubber beading, the wood that had contracted and expanded so many times since she had been there last. Where have I been—where have I been all this time. Time, accumulated in all the spaces, the gaps in between. Between her lips.
The spine, not only holding the limbs in place, but also upholding a relationship between an arm and a point in the brain.
The different parts of the face, merging. The spine, the books on the shelf—when the first page succumbs, and then the next, a wing whose feathers loosen and dislodge one by one, dropping to the floor like birds shot down from the sky, or stumbling horses. Time as a frail form, the scenes that dislodge from time, whirling in descent. Some words that tear themselves loose and keep returning.
Of Darkness Page 11