At the same time, in Long Island, Mary Sinclair dutifully filtered out the various aches she lived with, one by one, and tried to put a name to whatever might be left over. Eventually, once twenty minutes had elapsed, she got up and wrote on a small piece of paper—
“See a table fork. Nothing else.”
Out of 290 drawings made, the total complete successes numbered 65—around 22 percent. Partial successes, on the other hand, went as high as 155, or 53 percent. And the number of complete failures? “Only” 70, a.k.a. 24 percent.
Dr. Abbott showed us reproductions of Mary Sinclair’s portfolio. The successes seemed dubious, almost a bit too perfect to be true. But it was the mistakes, the partials, which really stuck with me . . . not that I believed any of this crap, you understand.
In one case, the “sender” had doodled a roller-skater’s leg, upflung after some headlong sprawl. In Mary’s version, somehow, shoe and calf had blurred into the head and neck of an obscure animal—half stallion, half giraffe. The wheels became this thing’s bulging eyes, skewing in either direction like a demented bullfrog. About this phase of the experiment, Black Magic “expert” William Seabrook writes:
“There was a general similarity of outline, as of something ‘seen through a glass darkly,’ which is more disturbing to me as a skeptic than a clearer sketch would have been.”
“We thought, what with your artistic background, you might make a quite perfect sender,” Dr. Abbott told me, gesturing, then turned back to Vivia. “While, as for you, Ms. Syliboy—”
A bit too fast: “Hey, that’s okay, no problem. I actually have a job already.”
Abbott gave her a gentle frown. “So . . . why are you here, then?”
“Moral support.”
They gave me a bunch of forms to fill out, a log-book, and a digital camera. The latter I was supposed to use to document my sketches, even though the Institute also expected me to mail each sketch off to them pretty much as I did it—wanted to make sure the time-signatures checked out, I guess. Which was fine with me; I’d always wanted one, and this counted as one up (or down) from a free test-drive.
“Who’m I supposed to be ‘sending’ this stuff to?” I asked, almost absently.
“One of our control group.” At my look: “I’m afraid I really can’t elaborate, Ms. Mol; might taint the findings. Suffice it to say they’re all names from our files, all proven sensitives. . . .”
I just nodded, thinking for a minute about how the word “sensitive”—used in that context, at any rate—always made me want to laugh out loud. Like hypo-allergenic soap: My mind is cleaner than your mind, neener neener neener.
And then, I don’t know why . . . not even now. . . .
. . . I saw Carra Devize again, just for a second: the mere slumped outline of her, right through that pebbled glass separating Abbott and us from the waiting room outside. A stick-figure woodcut girl, all shadow, no definition, with nothing but a hole—dark and flat, yet contradictorily deep—where her hair-hidden face should be.
Carra Devize like some Hiroshima negative on my eyelids’ inner screen, some lost silver nitrate silent film’s edge-of-melt flicker-start; a synaptic pop, flashpaper brief, then out and done and gone. After which there was me and Abbott, Vivia watching—me scribbling my name at the base of the very last form, and did I say second, back there? I meant half-second, tops. Quarter-, maybe.
I dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s, and Abbott cut me an advance cheque for fifty bucks, right there and then. It bought two Green Goddess bowls at Juice for Life, with yam frites and a side of blueberry Tofutti.
| post-hypnagogic suggestion
“The gates of hell lie open, night and day/Wide is the path, and easy is the way. . . .”
One of those things that gets in your head, ’specially if your skull’s got cracks as big as mine does, these days. Making you wonder: was that Dante, for real, or does it just sound like it? Or could it be something I saw in a movie, once—one by Clive Barker or Guillermo del Toro? Se7en, even?
Can’t remember. Doesn’t matter. We’re talking generalities, not specifics—echoes, not events. That ever-present noise which rides forever side-saddle under your thoughts gone first loud and white, then off like bad milk; murky and odorous like chum dumped in deep water, inviting all manner of sharks to share the meal.
The one thing I know for sure, now, is that after I left 676 Euclid, my life (as I’d hitherto known it) sort of fell to jack-shit. Lost the asshole job I’d ended up in the following June, couldn’t get another no matter how I tried. I knew I had seven months ’til my rent was re-evaluated, nine months ’til Welfare kicked in, but nothing mattered as much as keeping my apartment. As long as I had a place to stay, I wasn’t really poor. I wasn’t really a failure.
Which is why I sold my TV to keep it, why I sold my blood. And yes, there was time and money between the two stages, but less than I would’ve liked . . . far, far less.
So it all went, piece by piece, quicker than I could ever have imagined. Everything that burned juice, everything that distracted: books, CDs, my walkman, my hair-dryer, my furniture. I sold my computer, kept my disks, worked off the system at the local library; when space got tight, I printed out and wiped my back-up files. I had my phone disconnected, had to save my change just to return calls. When Mr. and Mrs. Mol came (at long, long last) to find me, I was living in the closet, literally—renting out the rest of the space under the table I didn’t have anymore, sharing that dim box with a mattress and my notes while two other girls had the run of “my place,” one a hooker, one a junkie. Plus their various customers.
The Mols took one look, then came back with the cops.
If they’d got to me any later, I often think, I might well have been living in a doorway. And simply . . . not . . . noticing.
This noise in my head, these patterns, rough like wood and dark like textured charcoal. Max Ernst’s shells and creepers spreading like mould over every surface, and the light of my room flapping back and forth, back and forth—sky like an incipient bruise all day, every day, constantly dimming and shifting with the onset of some incipient storm. Like the phantom wings of some gigantic, low-flying bird, one surely huge enough to merit worship at the petrified altar of any former Dadaist turned Surrealist turned just plain artist.
I’d stand in front of my cupboards making an inventory of all the food I had, what I might be able to sell, and how long that might last. I’d lie down weeping and wake in greyness, then feel for the clock with both hands and touch something—cool, smooth, dry—that skittered from my grip like a plastic cockroach.
And I’d think: Ah. Somebody’s put a razor by my bedside —a “safety” razor, ha ha. “Somebody” meaning me, ’cause nobody gets in here, and I sure as hell don’t go out.
A razor. Very . . . suggestive, that is.
And how could I do that, without even knowing I did it? How?
. . . easy.
Easy as anthrax pie.
This is where I found myself, where the Mols found me. And it wasn’t until a whole year later that I ever had more than the tiniest inkling why.
| eleven-thirty, 6th of May, 2004:
sketch #1
When I came down to get my coffee that morning, I found my fellow tenant Aaron Coby already occupying the common-area kitchen, eating Captain Crunch while watching tentacle porn on his laptop: squishing, squelching, and breathy little manga-girl squeals hung heavy in the air. “Hey, man,” he said, not looking up. “Didn’t know you were in.”
“Well, I am. So could you please not?”
“Dude, it’s research.”
“You know, that’d ring just a bit more believable if your hand wasn’t down your pants.”
He flipped me the bird, then took another bite. And asked, muffled, through a gooshy mouthful of peanut-flavoured milk:
“Yo, Janis. You know that thing around the sun—”
&n
bsp; “Mercury?”
“No, man. Like when there’s an eclipse? The part you can still see, where everything’s black except this thing. . . .”
I poured myself a cup, added Sucrose. “That’s called the penumbra.”
“Oh. So what’s that mean?”
“It’s Latin. Umbra’s like ‘shadow,’ so—uh. ‘Beside-shadow.’ Or—’under-shadow,’ Or—”
“‘Inside-shadow?’”
. . . maybe, sure.
He glanced back at the screen and took a sec, seeming to admire the staging of what looked like yet another particularly wet and sucker-burnt DP. Then said, musingly—
“It’s pretty weird, when you think about it. Like, the colour black. . . .”
“Black is the absence of colour, Aaron.”
“No. White is an absence—”
(—like black is a presence?)
“Take your word for it,” I told him, and went back upstairs.
It wasn’t like I had no furniture up there: a desk too small for much except my monitor, a chair in front of it, my printer and hard drive stowed underneath. A futon on the floor. Four bankers boxes full of clothes, six bankers boxes full of books. A print of one of Ernst’s “Forests” hanging like an extra window between two scabby posters I’d bought from the campus art show my first year and just forgotten to ever take down—Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies” on the right-hand side, Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” on the left-.
A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs./B is for Basil, devoured by bears . . .
In Bosch’s garden, one nozzle-headed creature pushed two oblivious lovers around in a glass ball while, nearby, another climbed a gargantuan strawberry. My alarm went off, reminding me that—“on-a-roll” feeling or not—by half-past eleven, which was fast approaching, I’d really better do my level best to have something for the mysterious other half of my circuit to start concentrating on.
So I got out my sketch-pad and a light charcoal, laid a sheet of foolscap on the floor at the foot of my bed—where the light came in strongest, of mornings—and squatted down to work.
Frottage, its sexual in-joke of a name aside, is (by the main) a system of discovery. The idea is to take something textured, something rough like stone, or sand, or . . . the worn-unsteady wood which makes up a downtown student-house’s uppermost floor, say. This then forms the basis for a tracing into which you can look and see shapes, forms, faces suggested by nothing more than light and dark, line vs. line, a merest Idea of Image. Follow these suggestions to their conclusion, illogical or otherwise, and a drawing tends to emerge—individual as a Rorschach blot, predictable as a fever-dream. Like moving light on wallpaper in a still and darkened room.
In 1924, after moving to Paris, Max Ernst finished his first series of completely Surrealist paintings, pale and exacting works, which look somewhat like bad Magritte. Their symbolism was explicit. He called them “a kind of farewell to technique and to occidental culture.” Later the same year, Ernst sold all his remaining work in Germany and sailed for the Far East, reuniting with fellow ex-Dadaist Paul Eluard in Saigon. It was on his return from the East that he discovered frottage, of which he wrote—
“Botticelli once remarked that by throwing a sponge soaked with paint against the wall, one makes a spot in which may be seen a beautiful landscape. This is certainly true; he who is disposed to gaze attentively at this spot may discern within some human heads, various animals, a battle, some rocks, the sea, clouds, groves, and a thousand other things. It is like the tinkling of the bell that makes one hear what one imagines.
“But though this stain serves to suggest some ideas, it does not teach one to finish any part of the painting. To be universal and to please varying tastes, it is necessary that in the same composition may be found some very dark passages and others of a gently lighted. . . .”
. . . penumbra.
(And you know the really odd thing? I remember writing all this down in the library, transcribing it into my files, moving parts of it here and there, using it however I saw fit to support whatever point it was I thought I wanted to make. But not until later, not until now, did I recall that particular word being used—not so close to the conversation with Aaron, no. Not in that context.)
I squint my inner eye and see myself cross-legged on the floor, sketching away. Letting the lines take me where they take me. While, on the wall above me, something moves and spreads like smoke, like bruising. Like something straining desperately to lean over my utterly engaged, utterly uncomprehending shoulder.
Says Max:
“It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if, after gazing fixedly at the spot on the wall, the coals in the grate, the clouds, the flowing stream, one remembers some of their aspects; and if you look at them carefully, you will discover some quite admirable inventions. In these confused things, genius becomes aware of new inventions, but it is necessary to know well how to draw all the parts that one normally ignores.
“Here I discover the elements of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provokes in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of sight—a hallucinatory succession of contradictory images, superimposed upon each other with the persistence and rapidity of amorous memories and visions of somnolence. These images, in turn, provoke new planes of understanding. By simply painting or drawing, it suffices to add only a colour, a line, a landscape foreign to the object represented, and these changes, no more than docile reproductions of what is visible within me, record a faithful and fixed image of my hallucination. They transform the banal pages of advertisement into dramas which reveal my most secret desires.”
I never named my sketches, and to be frank, I have trouble remembering what most of them looked like. But I still recall how it felt to be there in my hot, dense attic room, tongue-tip between teeth—a swirling, edge-of-swooning feeling, far too intent for explicit nausea, yet certainly akin to it. Like that thing I often found myself doing when I was a kid, too young to worry about how I might be deforming my own ability to interpret the world around me . . . this glorious, multifoliated bag of tricks, so apparently both boundless and permanent, which is (nevertheless) so easily and sadly reduced to nothing more than an empiricist’s shaky self-delusion.
How I’d stare at a given object and the space around it, cross my eyes just so, and see it pixilate into oblivion—reduce itself to component parts, to inward-spiralling boxes or circles, before disintegrating completely into that calm, grey, vaguely ozone-smelling blankness which signals oxygen deprivation. Back then, I had no idea I was probably killing brain-cells every time I indulged myself this way. And these days—
—these days, if I could still do it, well . . . fuck it, man, I might. I very definitely might.
But not unless I knew for sure I didn’t have to worry about petty crap like waking up with nothing to show for my efforts but a headache, later on.
| imago
It was a week or so after that initial sketch that I developed my rash—first faintly under the wire of the bra, then up along the breastbone, itchy and flaky and redder and redder, like it was going to open up at any minute and let something out.
Mrs. Mol recommended aloe vera, which formed a crust of “healed” skin that sloughed off to reveal yet more rash underneath. The man at the drugstore said to try Nizorol, a vile pink concoction usually applied to really tough dandruff or genuine scalp infections. That made my skin burn and puff faintly in a very offputting, constantly distracting way, so I only used it for a few days before chucking it.
“Got any suggestions?” I asked Vivia, who was going through my portfolio at the kitchen table—sketches vs. “original” Max Ernst prints—and poring over the contents, looking for just the right backdrops for her theatre piece. “I feel like taking a cheese grater to the Goddamn thing.”
She scoffed. “Can’t be that bad, surely.”
“You want to take a bet?�
��
I hauled the bottom of my shirt up, ready to show her—which, naturally enough, happened to coincide exactly with Aaron emerging from the back yard (where he’d been gardening), full garbage bag in one righteously dirty hand. “Whoo-HOO!” he yelped. “Free show at 676!”
“Shut up, idiot. What’s in the bag?”
“That?” He set it down, drawing both an earthy rattle and a less-predictable clink; at our reactions: “Oh yeah, this is weird . . . I was just digging the slot for that compost-heap, right? And I keep finding all this junk buried in the ground, doesn’t matter how far you go down—like, broken glass and charcoal briquettes and shit. Freak-ass, huh?”
“Maybe there was an explosion at Colonel Sanders’,” I suggested, bored; Aaron’s idea of “freak-ass” left more than a little to be desired, in my not-so-humble opinion. Besides which, I was already starting to itch again.
But: “Maybe the top of your house burned down,” Vivia said, laying my fourth sketch next to a print chosen seemingly at random and giving both of them the coldly measuring bale-eye. To me: “This the one you were thinking of, when you did that?”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking of anything, much; that’s sort of the point of the exercise. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason.”
Aaron shook his head, as though to clear it—pure Looney Tunes, even without the requisite “whubbada-whubbada” noise foleyed in on top. “’Scuse me: the top of the house? Like, when?”
“Oh, a good long while ago, probably; before you bought into the house, anyways. Same thing happened to my family and me once, back in Patcock. We move in, thinking it’s all freshly renovated, and. . . .”
We Will All Go Down Together Page 24