by Blake Butler
At last the man has finished talking, so it seems, noting as she looks into the screen again how the speaker could only be one person, no one else, a head as recognizable as any, ever: it is the president, his squinted, arthritic profile definitive and sure despite how it’s been digitally polished beyond flaw, unto a flesh so flat it’s hard to remember how to look away. The broadcast, no longer local, comes live and direct from one of the leader’s many vast vacation homes, somewhere undisclosed in the Caribbean, or so suggests the notating text onscreen alongside the garish ads for skin pills and memory cream, encasing his broad executive visage front and center against an empty beach at dusk, so obviously projected on a green screen that it might not be.
“I can remember when I was six,” the ninety-nine-year-old figurehead intones, his voice digitally altered to sound younger, kinder, already digressing. “I saw a painting at a carnival downtown. I don’t remember where it was, or even who the artist, though it probably wasn’t someone you would know. I mean like it could have been a local dad, painting while the toddler squirms in his lap, or in the nighttime, while all the rest of us are dead asleep.”
This man must be wasted, Alice notes; he can hardly keep his head up, or his hands from shaking; or at least so he would like to seem, she imagines, so as to feel closer to the common, inundated citizen; anybody’s pawpaw. She can’t remember anyone who didn’t seem drunk as hell in at least years, perhaps her whole life; and yet no common world felt in between, nothing left to pin her down to who she had been but her own exhaustion, loss of resolution.
“Anyway, it was a picture of a giraffe. But you only knew that due to the label, Giraffe in Paradise, like a little brass caption below, because the content itself was totally I don’t know: the most disarming image I’d ever seen or still have since, all this time later, to the point words fail any attempt to correspond. It wasn’t getting any much attention at the show, I noticed, as there were free cotton candy machines and a clown that knew some tricks to fool the rubes. The whole rest of my brothers and sisters were in the goat tent, doing free goat rides, which of course I loved. But you know what? That goddamn picture, I mean that painting, it changed the whole shape of my life, right there on the spot, like being drowned. I’d never seen anything like it, understand me? Nowhere in creation. I was at once transfixed and overrun, filled up with power; I didn’t want to ever have to leave it, and realized I’d do almost anything to spend the rest of my life in its regard; like I would have got down on one knee if I had had a ring, and if it had fingers, maybe a mouth to say aloud, I do. Anyway, I begged and begged my mom to buy it for me, to bring it home with us, like I have never begged for anything since in my whole life, or at least not up to that point; and believe me, I can be one convincing S.O.B., not to be denied what I desire.”
Alice can hardly even tell by now who’s really speaking. The man’s voice sounds like every other man she’s ever met—the cop, her father and unfather, the unbrother, whoever else—somehow all of it nearer and louder than it should be, all throughout her, parsed in darkness. Like when my imagination’s saying all the things I never wished to have to hear, the world’s darkest wishes made manifest against not who I am, but who I will be.
“Between me and my mother,” the head continues, “my everlasting mother, may she rest in peace, we worked out a little plan, where for one full year all of my allowances would go to pay off the picture, see? Instead of all the junk food I could have had, trips to the movies, toys, I sacrificed it all just for this picture, passing loaned-up cash to its creator, whoever they are now, tendered definitively from hand to hand, and I took it home with me and into my bedroom and locked the door, and boy I thanked my lucky stars for the fact I’d been allowed to make it mine, for only me to ever see thereafter, no one else. So did I hang it on the wall? I did not hang it on the wall. I had much bigger plans for it than that. Grand plans, to change my world. And so I hid the painting in my closet, see, as something private, impenetrable but by me, the same way other boys around my age were hiding materials of a more, let’s say, unmentionable nature; I had always been slightly ahead, slightly my own god. So I would only take my giraffe out when I could lock myself inside my room, hidden from all else, and, friends, I must admit, I would take all my clothes off. And what would I do then? I would stare. I might spend a whole weekend in there like that, staring, scheming, meditating, just me and the picture, titled Giraffe in Paradise, did I say? It was scribbled right there on the back of the canvas in pen, without a signature from any artist, as if formed from out of time. But in my mind, I called it son; that is, it felt like my own child, before I even had good, working sperm. I would lie with my son flat on my chest and think about who he might be and yet become in growing into himself more fully over time, how I might better come to know the colors as they’d been rendered, how the colors were as much a part of me as any other part of who I was. How through growing closer to its grace, get it, I could now understand my own coming future—you know, my destiny.”
Until I can’t tell where his voice ends and mine begins. The speech’s words are all bunching up in Alice’s cerebrum, blurring together, fomenting sicker, darker language in between, all else unspeakable, without a surface, through which Alice feels in unseen blaze against her face, firming in around her, walling her in.
“And you know what? To this day, without that painting, and my years with it, the experience I felt it granted me, like a drug, meaning the good, prescribed kind, I know in my heart I never would have embodied what it takes to run this country, about which furthermore, between you and me, my fine constituents of faith, I will say I never meant to become a politician in the first place before I found that I’d become one. There was so much I had to overcome to be able to maintain my ability to oversee, to direct. I don’t believe I could have survived my birth mother’s suicide, as they graciously named it, or found the desire to continue to carry on from such immediately meaningful death and become what I am now, or rather, who, which I can assure you I am no less sure than you are exactly what that is, despite how I am I up here standing still trying to be it, every second, just like you are doing with your own self, in whatever little slice of your own life you feel you’ve taken charge of.”
If she could close her eyes, Alice feels certain, she could identify the source behind the sculpting, the subconscious lurch within the utterance and its rendition making her feel crowded on the insides, wracked with unscratchable itch. She’s been staring so hard at the screen for some time now, she realizes, that she can’t remember ever having not, a premonition corresponding sharply with the deeper-seated feeling of how the receptors behind her eyes might at any moment crack and come apart, disrupting her ability to grasp anything thereafter if she refuses to oblige.
“None of us have any clue what we are doing, is what I’m saying, people; including the people like myself who act for the most part like they do, who dictate orders all the rest must observe and obey, because we can, no matter how little or from how far away they ever seem to see us, how much they must know what will work out to the common good better than any of us know it by ourselves. This is the fundamental law of governing, as I have come to understand it: there was always someone else to blame; the guy behind the guy behind the guy and so on, where eventually, certain of my fine colleagues would have you believe, there eventually, appears the ultimate authority, which most of us, like I did even as such a young boy, would learn to see as God. Not God like the drink wine and live forever God, but God like you are mine and mine alone, and you will do exactly as I say, forever and ever, not only in your waking life, but into death and yet beyond.”
* * *
—
The president reaches into his pocket, then, removes a square of folded paper; he unfolds the paper to reveal a scrawl of messy scratching, faded hues, in some way resembling, according to the text scrolling beneath, the body of the precious image he’s just described, held up for all the cameras, hiding his face
. Though the paper might as well be blank, as far as Alice can tell; there’s nothing to it, its hues and hashmarks worn away to zilch with age and friction, nothing left, strange given the leader’s testimony.
Likewise, Alice can feel nothing of her body, only its surroundings; the same whorl carries on inside her as she feels her lids click closed in thoughtless capture, like a camera, and so much longer than a blink; and just underneath, constrained in darkness, the pull of something shifting in her immediate terrain; altered, as with the touch of wind or silent terror trapped in suddenly remembering something previously thought forgotten, some day so far gone now it could be any, which Alice finds the longer she allows herself to dote on, the gravity surrounding the silence in the absence of the president’s ongoing voice billows with weight, accessing something like atonal music carried in her, a mutant choir made of blood, her cells all pinching. It is unclear how long this goes on; it takes another lifetime to remember how to pull away, to make the flimsy scenery inside her lifelines dissolve back into nowhere, and then to even less. As Alice opens her eyes again she does so at the same time as the president appears to tear his precious artwork into two; and into two again, again, again, allowing the shredded fragments to fall beneath him like unmelting snow against the black deck of the set.
“I am very much like you, perhaps you see now,” the president utters, clearer and stronger still with every rip, until there’s nothing left but empty hands, “and yes, as you have long known, I am in all ways on your side. There’s nothing you can feel that I have not already felt before you, in your stead, so that you might never have to, despite how so often you insist on feeling pain. Reality is very jacked up for us right now, isn’t it? Indeed, I feel it is my duty now, in being frank, to admit that we, as a people, find ourselves at the cusp of a great emergency, one absolutely more dark and ominous than any other ever known. Some of the very best of us are being seized by terrible sickness, one that’s wound its way into the heart of every mind, a plague programmed out of the understanding of the first law of the market, taught to me by my great mentor, whose name I cannot share: They will take what they are given, which includes me myself no less than it includes each and every one of you.”
Alice can no longer tell if what she’s seeing is being projected in the blackness of her mind or on the screen against the wall; there seems to be no difference, as all there might be ever again seems made only of language, a projection, forced feed.
“And listen, I know I have come to you before to warn of great danger many times before, and many times among those times it was not true, or it was no more true than that it is always; every second, every day. But I must tell you now that we’ve been looking in all the wrong places all this time: it is our own people we need to be afraid of, more so than those beyond our walls; and we must consider now, as well, that perhaps those people aren’t simply evil, but they are animated by a force they don’t even realize they’ve let in, despite how it’s been hanging for forever right in plain sight, on the walls that line their lives, that fill our houses, define our space. Friends, I believe it is our imagination that’s turned against us. It has filled our insides, changed our brains while we slept, which many of us experience thereafter diagnosable as medical conditions, many more common than ever, which we believe might yet be stopped. But it is our very surroundings, too, the nature of our creations, that has changed; something has zapped aware within what for so long we saw only as passive, beyond mind. This was once a great country, a hopeful country. Preservation of who we’d always been was a source of endless pride, a way to remind us both of what we’d been and what we could be. And yet, this is not an open system, not ours to alter. By allowing outside influence in over our spirits, over and again, we have forgotten how to wish, or what to wish for, and what it means to want to wish alongside billions of others also wishing, in their own lives, all at once. The volume is as high now as it has ever been, I’m saying, so high there almost is no longer any sound we can shout louder than, to get it out. Instead, we must learn to hear again, within this deafness—not to listen, but to hear—a process which begins by accepting exactly what you have been given by those who know better than we might, myself included, without the luxury of understanding, at least not yet. We must respond to the ineffability of rampant peril by providing it no station, no reflection. Our living blood must be the only channel.”
The president peers into the screen, across the land. His unblinking corneas are blue now, where at the beginning they’d been gray, she recalls now—the same blue as her own eyes, her mother’s and brother’s, both her fathers’, each all alike now as she remembers, and so her own. The whole screen seems to tingle in recognition of her recognition of their shared traits, the relentless light a celebration in its own right, leaving only temporary, passing places in the blind.
“About all this, though, I want you to relax. The game is already covered, end to end. I come to you with all this information so that you understand that you can trust me; that I am with you, through the illusion, soon coming out the other side. We’ll take care of the details, me and my great people. We always have been, all this time. All you should want to do now is lie down on the floor and feel the ground, bask in its hardness. The ground has never once yet let us down, after all, has it? Ever beneath us throughout each step on our march to brighter light, as together we find a common will within to overcome what we’ve done to us, what we’ll keep doing, and desiring to do, forever, sight unseen. The world is ours.”
The face so near the camera now it is actually touching, Alice sees, skin to screen, into all homes. It holds and waits there like a world, eclipsing even its own features, pores big as holes one might slip into, makeup caked so thick it could be almost any body underneath; where as he blinks his eyes then and they close, so her eyes do too, meeting at once with massive, unlimited darkness.
* * *
—
Alice inhales slowly, in rhythm with the pulse of the TV, her exhale matching too, in mirror, beyond control. Something like time continues passing; the edges of her understanding ridged as if with something brittle rubbing past it on either side. She can still feel the room around her stuck so still it refuses to let the moment shift, waiting for the landscape to awaken, to allow Alice back into the access of herself, the same way she might have waited through the night as a child for the sun to rise again, whole lifetimes passing in between.
Meanwhile, in between heartbeats, she hears the news broadcast’s signal carried on, another voice left over from the last scene, its dictation drawing her attention back up into its ongoing story.
Renowned performance and installation artist Alice Novak, the speaker intones, age sixty-eight, was found dead this afternoon in her studio workspace complex in downtown X., following reports of “strange animal sounds” and “terrible music.”
Alice’s eyes unlock then, as if on command. There, where the president had just been, she sees only the image of a woman’s face, front and center and impossibly large—for at some point Alice had moved unknowing, she finds, to touch her own face against the screen, on both knees. The woman’s face seems at once familiar, if in a completely different way than the last face; there’s something both soft and yet constrained about it, surely, in the woman’s obvious old age, long white hair and round jaw, pierced ears without earrings, something worn down about the aged flesh thinned by years. Behind her the outline of an ocean appears, gray and flat, reflecting the sky above the waters without stars; nor any sense of time or space extending from it, as if how it’s captured is all it is.
Police entered the premises to discover the artist’s body naked and faceup on the floor, surrounded by a series of seven separate live webcams broadcasting to seven different independent URLs. Several dozen other artworks, recently recalled from their display at various international museums and estimated to have been valued at more than $380 million, were found burned on site, allegedly by Novak herself.
; There’s something wrong about the woman’s eyes inside the picture, Alice senses. They don’t seem human, somehow: cloudier, deeper, glazed over from the inside. They make the whole rest of the face feel not as recognizable as it had been at first, the longer she looks; something missing, a black cat stuffed in a bag. And yet Alice finds she can’t stop staring back into the woman’s gaze, how it sees through her, as if there’s something yet to be transmitted, some desperate phrase; though the feeling breaks up as the broadcast transitions to a montage of the artist in life and work: first at a flat black charcoal-colored desk in midst of typing; then in a room surrounded by camera heads all installed into white walls, her face enwrapped with silver fabric; then wading through a sea of prosthetic bodies dressed like cops in a gold warehouse, pressed in so full there’s hardly room to even see; and in a cathedral filling up from one end with a cloud of flooding smoke burst from a vial of hair placed on the altar.