The motive, they said, was envy. Speculation was that, believing the boy to be a superior painter and potential rival, I’d lured him to my studio and slit his throat – after forcing him to paint my masterpiece. That is a possibility. Who am I, child of the Teutonic Freud, to dispute the search for motive? For emotional cause and effect? In fact, I like the idea of envy. At least it points to something human.
During the pre-trial period, the police – big, brutal, crewcut men with swollen-shut eyes – were especially kind to me, even to the point of removing their uniforms in my presence and putting on robes resembling those worn by self-whipping monks. Next to the cell itself – a veritable palace with a colour television, automatic toilet that flushed every hour on the half-hour, books from Botticelli to the Bible, the latest in fine arts and pornographic magazines, a soft bed and a wide variety of exotic food – their kindness and attentiveness worried me the most. It had a simpering, paternal touch to it, a pat on the head, a tweak of the downy cheek, a gentle whispered word for the little infant in me. The thought of my guilt redoubled. After all, why should they take so much trouble with me if I were innocent? There was no point to that. Who wants an innocent man? Were they capable of “I think that you think that I think” machinations? And, if they were, where did it stop? Where did it all end?
My parents came to see me without showing the least surprise or interest in my incarceration. My mother – I believe she called me some name or other but I can’t remember – commented briefly on the pleasant surroundings and the need for fresh flowers. I felt as a man should when visited in jail for the first time by relatives or close friends. I honestly wished to kill them both. This confirmed my guilt. They remained for the longest time, taking turns in their assaults. While one talked, or wept, the other inspected the cell or stared at me. Then, by subtle shifts, they would change positions.
On hearing the toilet flush, my father rushed in, dropping his pants along the way. Apparently, he’d been through this before (a brother perhaps, explaining the link to my own genetic criminality?). My mother, growing older by the moment as if on cue, urged me to confess. I couldn’t stand the thought of her hair turning any whiter so I told her all she wanted to know: Yes, yes, yes. I had done it. I had done it all. She smiled like any mother would. Then, in one quick motion, she pulled a derringer dangling from a string between her legs and pointed it at my heart. She said she loved me too much to allow someone else to kill me. So she’d do it herself. I fell to my knees in appreciation. The gun clicked. My father returned, a disappointed look on his face. I’m sorry, he said, zipping up. I guess you’ll have to live with it till the next flush.
Afterthought: Did my girlfriend visit me during the night wearing a bathing suit and carrying a little boy on her shoulders? Or was it all part of the same nightmare?
The trial, of course, turned out to be a mere formality. What was the point when I knew I was guilty and that justice could only be served with my removal? When I told the court as much, the judge (a kindly white-haired woman wielding an immense yet familiar hammer that sparked when she banged it) smiled and said guilt was not something for me to determine but rather a matter for the jury to decide. I remained silent for the rest of the trial, refusing to answer even questions put to me by my own attorney. In the end, much to my dismay, despite my screams and remonstrations, they reduced the charge due to a technicality. Instead of first-degree murder, they found me guilty of having killed myself at the moment I both realized and renounced my talent. And sentenced me to this life ever after without the possibility of even a single single reprieve, a single death along the way.
The notes continued:
You don’t believe me, do you? Well, I don’t blame you. I don’t believe myself. I’ve never painted in my life. Nor have I ever been in jail. My parents, God bless their peasant souls, tend gardens, make beds and practice the art of flipping fritatta. You’re absolutely right not to believe me. I was just practising. After all, my duty is the telling of fictions. It’s safer: truth is the worm in the meat. I tell lies to avoid the Big Lie. You understand that, don’t you? Don’t you? My friend? How could I possibly tell the truth? Pick it out of the dense flea-bitten air with a black glove? Chop away the chaos to find the germ of order within? Nail it down to the corpse of what is really real – until that too explodes into just one more mockery of ice and snow?
Here is what I remember – or care to: She was a fine swimmer, an excellent swimmer, a lovely swimmer, almost a wonderful swimmer. Fine, excellent, lovely, wonderful. All meaningless but fun to roll around the tongue, full of the possibility of warmth and the illusion of sense. Let’s put it this way: she swam while I couldn’t even wade, couldn’t even keep myself afloat. But one must make the most of one’s handicaps (encripplements, maimings, disadvantages). So it’s clear the inability to wade should be a fabulist’s first attribute. The second is the inability to get drunk. To be drunk is to be human. Am I not right? Inability must rule. Only room for one skill.
Both she and I loathed beaches, especially the crowded northern inland ones (most of them now closed or turned into experimental labs for toxic materials) that smelled more like cheese than ocean spray. Fetid, dimly lit lagoons left behind when the ice retreated (temporarily, I’m told). However, while I sat on the sand churning my loathing into a hatred with no outlet, she, armed with a constant smile, would swim out past the reaches of human emotion. Or so I believed. And, lest you forget, this is the story of my beliefs. I envied her those moments wrapped in primary substance – and plankton-like creatures not yet injected with deadly viruses. But there was always the consolation that if she stopped moving for even one second, if she lacked alertness for the blink of an eye, she would quickly touch the edge of something hard and sharp. Quite a consolation, don’t you think?
In the summer, every chance we got, every moment we were free from work and the sun was shining, the breeze warm, she insisted on being near water – even if that meant busing it tens, nay hundreds, of kilometres. She said that children love water so much because they are of it. Intimate. Not yet separated from the elemental source, the sac that held their essence. And she wished to be near water because children were her main preoccupation. What childlike fancies did she perceive in me? I followed her sullenly, sitting crablike on the desultory beaches, on the yellowing cement of abandoned piers and crumbling breakwaters. I became quite adept at building sand castles which she’d destroy as soon as she returned from her sojourns. Not maliciously, but with a casual stroke of her milk-white, wrinkled foot. And she laughed at me for always being the only one who didn’t take off his clothes, who didn’t come equipped with a set of mandatory bathing trunks. “You’re such a bore.” Gleaming smile. “Bores bore me.” There were times when I could play along with her – “If I take these clothes off, I’ll disappear. Poof!” But mostly I acted hurt and she turned away for another swim muttering in disbelief. Or went off to play with the usual squad of children that waited patiently for her just beyond my reach. Funny how the squad was never quite the same yet always banded together, spreading their tentacles like some giant octopus that had strayed too close to shore. She wedged her way into the centre by some means I never discovered nor believe I would understand even if it were shown to me. It was as if she could turn two-dimensional for the time it took to penetrate their midst. Naturally, they wanted nothing to do with me, would go out of their way to avoid me. I reciprocated. Sometimes, I felt they were turning her away from me as well. Children are insidious. By that I mean simply that they’re inside everything. I could only look on. It’s frustrating to only look on and not even to enjoy the scientist’s pleasure of experimenting. Ah, the sweet taste of dissection, the lingering feel of the scalpel cutting, penetrating, the…sigh…
On the beach, I spent my time reading whatever technical manuals and instructional material I could lay my hands on. This usually consisted of out-of-date Popular Mechanics and Hi-Tech Electronics magazines. It protected me somewhat
from the others and from the perpetual wind. But, no matter how careful I was, my mouth would eventually fill with sand and I’d end up chewing on large quantities, unable to spit it all out. This was inevitable, one of the dangers of frequenting beaches. At first, I found the whole process extremely distasteful and it made it difficult to hold down any food I’d eaten beforehand. Then it became a take it or leave it proposition, an undeclared truce between flesh and sand. Finally, towards the end, I took positive joy in filling my mouth with handfuls of sand and chewing. In fact, it was hard to read about the smooth-meshing gears and perpetual motion machines without a mouthful of grit to give them substance. For the longest time after I’d stopped going to beaches, or during the endless winter days when the light barely climbed over the horizon, I could still feel those grains of sand. As if out of nowhere, the urge to chew would come on – at home as I readied for bed, at work as I fitted more boxes into the machine, on the street between bus transfers. And my teeth would grate together; the perpetual-motion wheels would turn; the hairs would rise along my spine.
It was particularly strong in the morning, that point when wakefulness is perfectly balanced and the sun would come peeking through the bedroom window with its cute message: “Arise, oh pale, flesh-bound one. Your perfect machine awaits you.” My machine? But yes. No point denying it. It was my machine, wasn’t it? I’ve long since abandoned the pretense of disassociation – just as I assume you have. Where would we be without our personal machine? Even today, I feel its magnetic pull (something to do with the electrical configuration, no doubt). It carried out – and, I presume, still does carry out – its rudimentary, fundamental task effortlessly, squeezing the old over-used and thus useless boxes into the least possible space, gift-wrapping them with metal straps and depositing them at the other end in neat cubes. How it did this I never bothered finding out. Does one probe the mechanics, the inner workings, the guts of a perfect lover? Those who tended to the machine’s internal needs knew it infinitely better than I. Those who had built it were even more familiar with its parts. But, despite that, it was my machine and had been my machine for all save the first few months when I was apprenticing at the shop. Those early days were frigid with timidity and shyness on both our parts. We were feeling each other out, looking for a way to get acquainted. Sometimes it would sputter and groan as I approached still not fully awake from fitful sleep; or it would suddenly disgorge a mashed-up box left in its bowels from the previous day, plopping it at my feet like a tender offering. It seemed we would go on this way, unable to take that final step that marks true intimacy, for the rest of our time together: always the novice; never to have mastered or been mastered. But then one morning the machine started up by itself, took the initiative as it were, as one of the workers stuffed some torn cartons into it. He lost his arm, sliced off cleanly at the shoulder by the recently honed blades. It really was quite interesting with the worker standing there transfixed, neither screaming nor fainting, simply watching as the blood pumped out of his stump. Later that night, after an ambulance had taken the unfortunate fellow away, the other workers turned nasty and violent. They began to curse the machine, tried to sabotage it, called down the powers of heaven on it (what exactly is God’s position on recalcitrant machines? Creations not directly his/her own?). Until, at last, the foreman, even though sympathetic to their cause, had to drive them away purely for economic reasons. On the other hand, I found this the signal I’d been waiting for. I patted the machine gently, whispered sweet nothings to it, lubricated whatever joints I could find. After all, I had no reason to doubt that I’d be working next to it for the rest of my life. Striking up an understanding was imperative. Best of all, there was minimal loss of production. Only one package had to be discarded – and that for obvious reasons. Through it all, what struck me was the professional attitude and disposition of my machine. Heckled, spat upon and monkeyed with (spanners can be deadly), it continued on its majestic course, producing one set of perfectly-packaged boxes after another, until I was ordered to stop it. No one else dared come near and they grumbled instead that the machine should be destroyed, put down like a pet that has suddenly turned vicious. I really can’t understand how some people think. It had done nothing, was guilty of no crime. At worst, the switch had slipped or it hadn’t been oiled properly or a gear had seized. But what had that to do with the machine? Perhaps they were envious? Do you think so? Do you think that might explain it? It wouldn’t be the first time.
The undated diary:
A. A flock of birds buried itself in the sand today. They moved in unison and in a barely visible blur, as if one organism controlled them. Birds never get sand in their eyes and mouths. I wonder what the reason for this is. Just another useless question. After a few moments of immobility beneath the sand, they burst out into the sky – like an arrow piercing to the very heart of it.
She ignores me more and more. Not for some other man. Or woman. She ignores us all, the beached creatures drying in the sand, walking through us whenever she gets the opportunity. Only the children she hugs and kisses. And then into the water. I tried practising all day being a child – the thumb-sucking mixed with a spiteful precociousness – but I couldn’t stick at it because it’s too hard. Much too hard. I don’t know how children do it really.
B. One of her favourites has lost his ears. That’s her expression. I laughed when she told me his parents were dissatisfied with his ears and so had then altered through surgery. She cried and refused to go swimming. How silly! Don’t you agree? She lay down beside me, the tears brimming over and spilling down the side of her face before being lost forever in the thirsty, leechlike earth. Then she suddenly stood up and rushed to caress him. I tried to read, stuffing more and more sand into my mouth. Tonight, she turned her back when I reached for her, saying it was inappropriate as she was in mourning. Is the loss of your ears or a part of them really so horrible? She suggests I cut off my ears to see how it feels. I remind her it was a question of aesthetics not torture. This changes nothing in her opinion. I have to agree: aesthetics can be torture and vice versa.
C. Overjoyed today by the fact I am not the only one on the beach who doesn’t remove his clothes. Overjoyed. He’s a moderately old man (his description) with no teeth and protruding cheekbones who calls himself Mr. Loki. Or Lowkey. He blocks out the sun, a hunchbacked shadow, and tells me suddenly he’s been observing me for weeks. You always start castles of gigantic size and complexity, he says, and end up with one-room huts whose walls are a metre thick. Why? Funny I haven’t noticed him before. He’s as conspicuous as a black spot in the sun: an ancient coat down to his ankles, a misshapen, grease-lined pork-pie hat tilted across one eye, thick old orange-coloured work shoes over crusted wool socks. He asked me if the sand was good. I didn’t answer. He said it was all right for me not to answer, him being a stranger and all. That should be a general principle – not answering, that is – as you never know when even the closest of friends will turn into strangers. “At the drop of a hat,” he said, demonstrating by dropping his own and then whirling it back onto his head before it hit the ground.
He said that in his youth – a sigh that seemed to signify eons – he too sat constantly on beaches, cursing the air and the people. But since then he had mellowed, had accepted the gravity of the situation. Now, he paints. I was startled. An artist of the old school, I said to myself. No government subsidies or grants. No attempts at ingratiating himself with the reigning bureaucracy. Or orthodoxy. He offered to show me some of his work. I was delighted. Overjoyed – startled – delighted—
For a blessed afternoon I forgot completely about her. The last time I looked, she was swimming in gigantic circles around the lake, starting from the outer edges and working towards the centre. Someone was pointing at her. There was something wrong with the shape of his head. Come, Mr. Loki said, helping me up. His hand was smooth as he gripped mine, that of a much younger man. I followed along. It was the first time I’d actually seen the town behin
d the beach. Mr. Loki led me down the dusty streets, stopping occasionally to talk to other old people who sat on their front porches or puttered about in their gardens, gardens gleaming with unnaturally vivid colours. Only the old ones are left, he said. They have no place better to go. So, they come here – to the edge of nowhere. Everyone else is gone. No patience, no stamina. Ah, here we are! My masterpiece. I looked around. Masterpiece? He pointed to a building at the end of the road. It was a bright red schoolhouse with a glossy green roof that dazzled in the sun. I turned, ready to spit out that no one made a fool of me, that I wasn’t a yokel whose idea of art stopped at country fair baskets. But then I noticed he was totally earnest. It’s never been used, he said. The ultimate symbol of birth control. We went closer. He talked about the time he’d put into this building, getting it ready, painting with painstaking care every little cornice, every shutter and windowsill. As he talked, completely immersed in his recital, I went around the back. Shit! Was nothing sacred? Someone had defaced his work with obscene scribblings and what looked like the image of a boy with an enormous penis masturbating beneath the slivered moon. I came around the front again, hoping to distract him so he wouldn’t go to the back and notice the defacement. But there was no need. The old man was caught in a reverie, remembering the days when his artistry was at its peak and making gummy smacking sounds with his lips.
D. We’ve just returned from the beach – at night. As horrible and long a night as I’ve ever experienced. Another of her bright ideas. Oh, it sounded so romantic: a warm close embrace as we knelt in the sand, tongue to tongue, legs rubbing, the squeak of bathing suits, a hazy moonlight sanctifying our spontaneous coupling. Do humans really do that? Roll in the hay? Jump on the wagon? Beat in the back seat?
The Photographer in Search of Death Page 6