None of the advertisements ever mention his scenario.
Lucien dips the same brush into red then orange then water again and flicks his wrist to splatter the canvas. His hand whips back and forth, until flecks spray his cheeks, his upper lip. He stops when the canvas is covered with a sort of fiery confetti—sparks as if burning from behind. As if the flames might finally break through, the entire canvas crumbling.
Lucien finds a wide, dry brush among the rest of his mother’s tools and drags it across the canvas. The photograph now looks submerged in water from all the layers of paint and gloss. It reminds him of an image in its chemical bath, as if it might still develop, change. What is more hopeful than watching an image appear, dissolving into life? And yet—even then its fate has already been decided. What’s happening is only the reveal. An illusion of discovery, of change.
Only his mother’s smile still shines through. Hers is—or was—one of those smiles that’s hard to look at without mirroring; you caught yourself smiling back, even when you didn’t want to. In the photograph, only the tip of Lucien’s chin perched on her shoulder shows from underneath the paint. Otherwise, he is gone.
He grabs his SLR off the bed and photographs the canvas close-up, so that there isn’t any reflection off the once-glossy picture. He clicks over and over, moving and zooming, looking for anything that works. Any piece that’s interesting. Then he steps back to look with both eyes.
He kicks the canvas across the room.
Lucien tosses the camera back onto the mattress and pulls a cigarette out of his pocket. He places it between his lips. He can’t smoke it inside, his new lease says so in bold print, but something about it dangling there—caught by the dryness of his lips—helps him think.
He just needs something, anything, to send Natasha. Even if it’s only the start of something new. He pushes both hands into his hair, letting his elbows fan out. Lucien isn’t a painter. In the series featuring his mother, he used paint because all his photographs of her felt wrong. Photography was his way of processing, of seeing. Everything he shot of her then felt incomplete, and only something added could have changed that. In a way, the paint was an homage to her. But now Lucien’s whole world is off, and nothing, no amount of paint, can fix it. He throws a sheet over the canvas and turns it gently to the wall.
He collapses onto the mattress, staring out the window at the many shapes and shadows of leaves so foreign to him that they should be intriguing. His new normal. It’s only a matter of time before he hears from Natasha, his art dealer, again. Before she learns that he has nothing. Nothing to say, nothing to show. And maybe he never did.
Was it Bernini who said he didn’t carve into marble, but rather revealed something already inside—or was that Michelangelo? Lucien always preferred Bernini, perhaps that’s why his memory ascribes it to him. No, certainly it was Michelangelo. His pieces so often look only just released from the stone, with remnants still at the base or around the edges. Bernini’s sculptures look as if they had never been stone at all.
This idea of trying to uncover what was already there, versus pulling something from yourself, has always been inspiring—or reassuring—to Lucien. It takes the pressure off the artist. They are only revealing something. And isn’t that what photography is? Revealing something already there, for everyone else to see. Capturing it permanently. Showing how one sees, in a moment, an angle, a look, and freeing everyone else to do the same.
For the collages of his mother, Lucien used a palette knife to smudge and layer thick clouds surrounding her photographed in various stages of illness. Her treatment. Then remission. A feeling of hope for the two of them trapped inside. For his always active mother, bound to the bed or the couch, reclined with nowhere to look but up. His mother who told him she never realized how heavy ceilings were before, how they hovered. How claustrophobic they made her. What choice had he had then, really?
That series never felt like effort, or planned, but like expressing something he needed to see, that he wanted to make real. He wanted it for her. Now every time Lucien looks through his camera, there is a quaking inside him. And not an energy from within, but a warning. A foreshock he cannot ignore. Now the white-painted wood floors of Lucien’s apartment are speckled red and orange. Why, with his mother gone, does he keep opening her paints?
His mother loved the freedom of painting; she lived for the possibility in every blank canvas. Lucien finds that freedom terrifying, not liberating. He likes the control of photography. The limit of a moment even if that is something to be played with—subverted, inverted, rotated, fractured, split, overlaid. Every piece of his started with the constraint of reality, his source material. His true medium.
Only now, reality is off.
Lucien needs constraints. Isn’t sickness a constraint? Responsibility? To be untethered feels unhinged. His newfound freedom is a void, not a chance.
His phone chirps, meaning his grandmother will be ready for visitors. Lucien gets up and wets a washcloth at the sink in his tiny bathroom. Then he wipes the cloth across his face, tasting where the bitter paint got on his lips.
Chapter 3 TODAY
Sophie lies in bed, holding her body to keep herself there, as if she could.
Alone in the dark, she misses touch with a fire burning under her skin. Each day at the Center, she both fears and longs for someone to inadvertently make contact. When they pull chairs into a circle for sessions with Dr. Sloane, she winces, ready to recoil if someone steps too close. But seated there, close together, she feels her skin pulling in spite of her. Begging for the thing she cannot have.
Her room is impossibly dark, devoid of much to catch moonlight. At this time each night, as she waits for sleep or something else, Sophie wonders if it is worse now being unable to remember, unable to place the thing that continues to torment her. Or is she spared, not knowing?
These phantom terrors should not linger. Dr. Sloane said so. And yet, night after night they return, an amorphous dread creeping up her chest, until all she can do is cry out.
Her throat is still sore from last night, when she cried so hard she had to be treated again, another drip in that misty bright room. Every time she swallows, she feels the pain of those screams. How strange, that something like sound can hurt.
That what we breathe can do such harm.
She remembers a time, not long ago, when she wanted so much. So much more than simply this, herself. So much more than feeling whole again. With that, her fingertips begin to turn foreign against her skin. She releases her hands from her shoulders and rubs them together, using her knuckles to massage the other, then switching hands.
She takes a deep breath. Sophie, she whispers into the dark.
A bottle of pills sits on a ledge built off the bed frame. The custom bed in sleek, light wood is the only attention to design in the room. In another world, the ledge might have been perfect for a book. An alarm clock. A cell phone.
A small indent in the birch accommodates the pill bottle perfectly. This bottle is marked SLEEP. Another across the room beside her crumpled-up uniform is marked RETURN. Its contents offer a more subtle daytime supplement for use as needed. SLEEP is clinical strength with a mild sedative, plus magnesium and melatonin to encourage healthy sleep cycles. Dr. Sloane has made these special for her.
Sophie taps out a pill, pearlescent in the moonlight. The moon is one of the only things that changes, a variation they cannot control here, and Sophie notes its changing shape each night through her window with something like hunger.
She waits as the pill slides down her throat. The feeling starts in her back, warm fingertips kneading her into sleep. Then the day, like so many others, blooms inside of her.
Rehearsal, another lift, another throw.
Driving east from the studio, her leg so exhausted that it quivers over the pedal. She is light-headed with anticipation. Korean letters begin to appear along Olympic Boulevard, first under English signs on banks, then tea shops and beauty centers,
bookstores and BBQs, until the English letters disappear entirely.
Inside the bright space is a ricochet of voices, and as the door chimes shut behind her its bell fills her with a Pavlovian calm. She waves to the two children who join their mother on weekends, reading picture books and chatting with other customers, and only then does Sophie remember it’s not a weekend but a holiday.
Another lift, another throw.
Sophie limits these massages to her tip money, after subtracting the necessary allocations to groceries, gas, new practice socks and tights, lest she “ten more minutes” herself into debt. Plus, she likes to pay in cash. Cash professions understand one another, she thinks, and this is one of her favorite places in all of Los Angeles, a place where she feels both at home and anonymous.
Another lift, another throw. Another order. Table 5 is waiting. Jonathan, bent over the bar. Her feet throbbing, her back no more than a standing ache.
Atop the table, the masseuse’s fingers dance up Sophie’s shoulders and across her back; she deftly plucks each knot, clenched and taut as a tightly strung harp. Gradually the movement deepens and Sophie’s body relaxes under the pressure. Each push of the masseuse’s fingertips, the tickling sting of their pressure, strokes nerves that make Sophie feel she might start sobbing, throw up, or both.
Another lift, another throw. Table 5 is still waiting.
Aside from dancing, these massages are the only moments Sophie loses track of time; when she wishes it would cease to pass. She lies suspended in the freedom of surrender, not waiting for the moment to be over, or wondering what comes next. When she dances, there is nothing then, too, only the music and the movements of her fellow dancers puzzle-pieced with her own. But even if her mind forgets the world outside her body and beyond the stage, afterward, she is still left with a body of denial.
Tension is a tool. Sophie depends on it; physically, where her muscles learn to hold tight for balance, but also emotionally, where the pressure solidifies inside her, pushes her further. Even the fastest, most passionate choreography in ballet has to be executed with precision, with perfection. Sometimes, the thought of this release is the only thing that gets her through the structured restrictions of her life.
Another lift, another throw.
Her time offstage is spent with caution. With control. Even these trips feel somewhat forbidden. The masseuse traces a tendon behind her heel. Is it not a risk for any ballerina to put her body, let alone her feet, in someone else’s hands? Now the masseuse’s thumb circles the skin below Sophie’s inner ankle, then nearly folds her foot in half between her hands. The release ripples through Sophie’s body. Perhaps the risk is part of the pleasure.
She hardly feels the pillow on her bed at the Center under her face anymore; her cotton sheets have turned to the vinyl of the massage table, tugging her skin with each sway as she presses farther into it. Then, just when Sophie feels the softness of the masseuse’s body leaning over hers, the room loosens, its memory fleeting.
Her stomach twists.
The fingers stop and she is falling, fading into some unknowable darkness where her stomach isn’t the only thing twisting, and what she feels is cold and wet and red.
Everywhere, red.
And then it is dark, until a sliver of light in the corner turns to more, and Sophie feels the needle in her arm before her own screams—the sharp breath returned, as if it never left.
Chapter 4 TODAY
Remember, remember, before you forget.
The night after Lucien’s initial treatment is endless and amorphous. He touches his face, still his. He makes fists around the bedsheet, still there. He feels emptied, the vague sense of himself lingering as if only recently retold. A story he can almost remember. It may take time for the memories to settle, they said. The first night is the hardest.
In fits of sleep, he watches himself as if perched from the ceiling. Ashamed of the body below. Soon he drifts back into that place he cannot control, where parts of him insist themselves known, and others recede only to return in veiled fantasy. In dreams he is back in that blinding room with no walls. He feels around on hands and knees but finds only more light as he crawls toward some unknowable edge. To be trapped in a limitless space! Then he is back on the table, his body motionless as his mind claws forward, searching for edges because edges mean exits.
There are no doctors in lab coats anymore. A faint mist floats up from under him, charging his skin until he no longer feels the weight of his body. Only a tingling, as if floating in the cold bright air. When he breathes, with the mist comes a shock of familiarity. His chest tightens, like walking into the ocean, each wave breaking higher, pulling out more breath. Until finally, he lets go. The air settles everything he knows, a warm blanket laid under his skin.
He smells nothing.
He remembers it all.
He is on the way to freshman soccer tryouts on Randall’s Island; identical buses from all the prep schools pass, kids he recognizes in each, their faces hovering then falling back or racing forward. Their curious, condescending grins. He mostly knows of them through new crushes and their crushes, this network of tallying that his new friends who went to Collegiate and Dalton introduce him to. Back at M.S. 51, Lucien fished oysters from the Gowanus Canal for science class, and he could walk home after school. Home. Musty fallen leaves on a damp autumn day. The dry, powdery scent of canvas being stretched.
Back on the bus he’s carsick as his new friend Miles tells another classmate across the aisle that Lucien’s mother has sex with women and men. Lucien watches it spread in whispers across the rows, zigzagging his pulse. He doesn’t know his mother to have sex with anyone, but Miles says his parents read an interview and she said so herself. Lucien looks down to where the seat sticks to the backs of his legs. He peels them off, the pain sharp like a Band-Aid.
Street-cart meat in Washington Square; the fountain’s sparkling mist. Warm air from a subway grate. Flickering fluorescent lights at the bodega, paying for a pack of Hi-Chew. Soaked socks from practice in the rain; mixing hot chocolate, licking the powder off his spoon before it dissolves. Standing alone in their tiny, dark kitchen. Waiting for his mother.
Is he still?
* * *
Lucien wakes to daylight outside the high window in his room, so sealed against the ocean breeze that even the waves below crash on mute. The tightly pressed pane gives him the impression of holding his breath, squirming to relieve the growing pressure. For just one gasp of fresh air. All this, after just one night.
On the small ledge attached to his bed, Lucien notices a pill bottle. Then voices, from outside the room. He shakes out a pill and slips it into his pocket.
His door is cracked open. He walks into the hallway and toward the sound of those voices until he reaches the living area. He passes what must be the front entrance, though he has no memory of it. This place, with its blankness—no context, no names, no triggers—is disorienting. He already feels it loosening the parts of himself that once felt tied to specific places and times. He is static. Ever present, but entirely indescribable.
Wiped clean, comes to mind.
And yet, what had felt fuzzy during the night is now clear. His memories are there. He can retrieve them like trivia he might hold in his hand. Where did I go to high school? Stuyvesant. What did it look like? Endless red brick, the new kind, rising. Looming. Heavy. What did it smell like? Candy and Axe bodywash. Dry-erase markers and computer stations. What did it feel like? Pressure. Opportunity. Nerves on fire. All these facts, yet there is something different. Something distant. Maybe this is what they mean when they say it takes time. Maybe this is what the pills will fix.
Lucien’s fingers flicker, feeling for something. A cigarette. The body remembers, though the urgency is gone. He gravitates toward the open fire in the sunken heart of the room. Does he like fire? Loves it, in fact. Bonfires in Montauk. Lucien’s braces got stuck in Stefanie Lewis’s and they never spoke again. Still, he loves fire.
&
nbsp; He sits on the stone perch along the fireplace and looks out. Men of all ages relax in comfortable chairs and sofas scattered throughout the space, as they might to watch television together. But there is nothing on, no television. They have the same sedated smiles. Virtual reality without the headsets.
Lucien pulls the tiny, opalescent pill from his pocket and observes it in the daylight. Its appearance changes with the slightest movement, containing every color and then none at all. How strange to be given the thing that got you caught in the first place. As if oysters could consume their pearls.
He could join these men, eyes glazed and checked-out, but right now it feels important to stay. His dreams last night held nothing remarkable; the memories were overwhelming if anything. Lucien places the pill back into his pocket. Sparks from the fireplace flicker into the air above, where an open atrium looks like a painted ceiling, so blue and cloudless that only a gliding seagull confirms its reality. Lucien leans in closer, holding his hands to the flames. He crosses his legs and notices the stiffness of the jumpsuit he had nearly forgotten. The space is so neutral that their clothes are like camouflage. His eyes rise. Strangers in matching disguise.
Beyond the glass walls, ocean stretches to the horizon. A cormorant nearly lands on its gleaming stillness, wings flapping as its talons cause a ripple in the water. Lucien pushes himself, abs tightening, trying to summon a recent memory. Or better, to remember the thing that got him here. All he turns up is the room where his treatments took place, its walls and floor so brightly lit as to defy perspective. He was left on a slim table for what seemed like hours as the drip hydrated him—and cleared his mind. He remembers a woman with a doctor’s mask, no words. He remembers two shiny curtains of dark hair swinging past her face as she leaned over him; the closeness of her as she shined a light in his eyes. The orange glow under his lids.
The Shimmering State Page 2