The Body Artist

CHAPTER 2

It's a hazy white day and the highway lifts to a drained sky. There are four northbound lanes and you are driving in the third lane and there are cars ahead and behind and to both sides, although not too many and not too close. When you reach the top of the incline, something happens and the cars begin to move unhurriedly now, seemingly self-propelled, coasting smoothly on the level surface. Everything is slow and hazy and drained and it all happens around the word seem. All the cars including yours seem to flow in dissociated motion, giving the impression of or presenting the appearance of, and the highway runs in a white hum.

Then the mood passes. The noise and rush and blur are back and you slide into your life again, feeling the painful weight in your chest.

She thought of these days as the first days back.

In the first days back she restocked the pantry and sprayed chemicals on the bathroom tile. There was a full-size pantry, a dark musty room off the kitchen, and it didn't need restocking. She cleaned and filled the bird feeders, shaping the day around a major thing with all its wrinkles and twists, its array of swarming variations. She sprayed the tile and porcelain with pine-scent chemicals, half addicted to the fumes. There were two months left on the rental agreement. They'd rented for six and now there were two. One person, two months. She used a bottle with a pistol-grip attachment.

It felt like home, being here, and she raced through the days with their small ravishing routines, days the same, paced and organized but with a simultaneous «allow, uncentered, sometimes blank in places, days that moved so slow they ached.

She looked at the pages she'd been working on with Rey, his bullshit autobiography. The hard copy sat there, stark against her sense of his spoken recollections, the tapestried lies and contrivances, stories shaped out of desperations not always clear to her. She hand-patted through the clothes he'd left in the bedroom closet. She was not undone by the things that people leave behind when they die and she put the clothes in a box for the needy.

When she was downstairs she felt him in the rooms on the second floor. He used to prowl these rooms talking into a tiny tape recorder, smoke in his face, reciting ideas about some weary script to a writer somewhere whose name he could never recall. Now he was the smoke, Rey was, the thing in the air, vaporous, drifting into every space sooner or later, unshaped, but with a face that was somehow part of the presence, specific to the prowling man.

She climbed the stairs, hearing the sound a person makes who is climbing stairs, and she touched the oak grain of the newel when she reached the landing.

It was okay. She wanted to be here and she'd be okay. All their marriage, all the time they'd lived together they'd lived right here.

Her body felt different to her in ways she did not understand. Tight, framed, she didn't know exactly. Slightly foreign and unfamiliar. Different, thinner, didn't matter.

There was a package of bread crumbs on one of the shelves in the pantry. She knew she'd seen wax paper somewhere in a blue and something box. These were the things that were important now. Meals, tasks, errands.

She stepped slowly through the rooms. She felt him behind her when she was getting undressed, standing barefoot on the cold floor, throwing off a grubby sweater, and she half turned toward the bed.

In the first days back she got out of the car once and nearly collapsed – not the major breakdown of every significant function but a small helpless sinking toward the ground, a kind of forgetting how to stand.

She thought about broiling a cutlet, self-consciously alone, more or less seeing herself from the edge of the room or standing precisely where she was and being who she was and seeing a smaller hovering her in the air somewhere, already thinking it's tomorrow.

She wanted to disappear in Rey's smoke, be dead, be him, and she tore the wax paper along the serrated edge of the box and reached for the carton of bread crumbs. When the phone rang she did not look at it the way they do in the movies. Real people don't look at ringing phones.

The wax paper separated from the roll in rat-a-tat sequence, advancing along the notched edge of the box, and she heard it along her spine, she thought.

She was always thinking into tomorrow. She planned the days in advance. She sat in the panelled room. She stood in the tub and sprayed high on the tile walls until the depraved pine reek of acid and ether began to overwhelm her. It was hard to stop pressing the trigger.

She burned her hand on the skillet and went right to the fridge and there was no ice in the fucking. She hadn't filled the fucking ice thing.

People pick up ringing phones or don't. She listened to it ring. It sounded through the house, all the handsets jingling in their cradles.

How completely strange it suddenly seemed that major corporations mass-produced bread crumbs and packaged and sold them everywhere in the world and she looked at the bread-crumb carton for the first true time, really seeing it and understanding what was in it, and it was bread crumbs.

She sat in the panelled room and tried to read. First she'd build a fire. It was a room designed aspiringly for a brandy and a fire, a failed room, perversely furnished, and she drank tea and tried to read a book. But she'd make her way through a page and stare indifferently at objects fixed in space.

In the first days back she ate a clam from hell and spent a number of subsequent hours scuttling to the toilet. But at least she had her body back. There's nothing like a raging crap, she thought, to make mind and body one.

She climbed the stairs, hearing herself from other parts of the house somehow.

She threw off a grubby sweater. She raised her arm out of the sweater and struck her hand lightly on something above, wondering what it was, although this had happened before, and then she remembered the hanging lamp, metal shade wobbling, the lamp that was totally wrong for the room, and she turned toward the bed and looked, half looked, not looked in expectation but something else – a meaning so thin she could not read it.

There were too many things to understand and finally just one.

In town she saw a white-haired woman, Japanese, alone on a stone path in front of her house. She held a garden hose and stood weightless under lowering skies, so flat and still she might be gift wrap, and she watered a border of scarlet phlox, a soft spray arching from the nozzle.

Things she saw seemed doubtful – not doubtful but ever changing, plunged into metamorphosis, something that is also something else, but what, and what.

She began to pick up the phone. She used a soft voice at first, not quite her own, a twisted tentative other's voice, to say hello, who is this, yes. Word had gotten around that she was here and the calls were from New York, where she lived, and from friends and colleagues in other cities. They called from the cities to tell her they didn't understand why she'd come back here. It was the last place she ought to be, alone in a large house on an empty coast, and she stepped through the rooms and climbed the stairs and planned the days in advance because there was more to do in less time as the light grew threatened. You looked and it was dark, always unexpected.

She woke early every morning and this was the worst time, the first murderous instant of lying in bed and remembering something and knowing in the flow of the same breath what it was.

They called five or six times a day and then a little less and she thought of the Japanese woman, a beautiful and problematic thing, if she is Japanese at all, watering her garden when the sky shows rain.

She took the tin-can ferry to Little Moon, where there was nothing to do but walk along a muddy path to the other end of the island past wind-beaten houses and a church with a missing steeple, a forty-minute march to an abandoned crafts center, quilting and woodcarving maybe and pottery by all means, and then briskly back again. The ferry ran on a schedule and this was reason enough to make the trip now and then.

The plan was to organize time until she could live again.

After the first days back she began to do her breathing exercises. There was bodywork to resume, her regimen of cat stretch and methodical contortion. She worked from the spine outward, moving along the floor on all fours, and she felt her aorta recoil to every blood surge. There were headstands and neckrolls. She stuck out her tongue and panted in tightly timed sequence, internally timed, an exactitude she knew in the bones that were separated by the disks that went rat-a-tat down her back.

But the world was lost inside her.

At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.

She stopped listening to weather reports. She took the weather as it came, chill rain and blowy days and the great hunched boulders in the slant fields, like clan emblems, pulsing with stormlight and story and time. She chopped firewood. She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. It was the middle of the night in Kotka, in Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering.and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were best.

She sat and looked at the screen. It was compelling to her, real enough to withstand the circumstance of nothing going on. It thrived on the circumstance. It was three in the morning in Kotka and she waited for a car to come along – not that she wondered who was in it. It was simply the fact of Kotka. It was the sense of organization, a place contained in an unyielding frame, as it is and as you watch, with a reading of local time in the digital display in a corner of the screen. Kotka was another world but she could see it in its realness, in its hours, minutes and seconds.

She imagined that someone might masturbate to this, the appearance of a car on the road to Kotka in the middle of the night. It made her want to laugh. She chopped firewood. She set aside time every day for the webcam at Kotka. She didn't know the meaning of this feed but took it as an act of floating poetry. It was best in the dead times. It emptied her mind and made her feel the deep silence of other places, the mystery of seeing over the world to a place stripped of everything but a road that approaches and recedes, both realities occurring at once, and the numbers changed in the digital display with an odd and hollow urgency, the seconds advancing toward the minute, the minutes climbing hourward, and she sat and watched, waiting for a car to take fleeting shape on the roadway.

Mariella called, her friend, a writer in New York.

"Are you all right?"

"What am I supposed to say?"

"I don't know. But are you lonely?"

"There ought to be another word for it. Everyone's lonely. This is something else."

"But don't you think. I don't know. It would be easier."

"This is the kind of conversation you ought to have with someone else. I don't know how to have these conversations."

"If you didn't separate yourself. You need to be around familiar people and things. Alone is no good. I know how you felt about him. And how devastating. God. But you don't want to fold up into yourself. I also know you're determined. You're strong-willed in your creepy-crawly way. But you have to direct yourself out of this thing, not into it. Don't fold up."

"Tell me what you're doing."

"Feeding my face. Looking out the window," Mariella said. "Talking to you."

"What are you eating?"

"Carrot sticks."

"This is not feeding your face."

"This is starving my body. I know. They're showing some of his early work at the Film Forum. You didn't know him that long. This could be a plus."

In the morning she heard the noise. It had the same sort of distinctness she'd noted the first time, about three months ago, when she and Rey had gone upstairs to investigate. He said it was a squirrel or raccoon trapped somewhere. She thought it was a calculated stealth. It had a certain measured quality. She didn't think it was an animal noise. It carried an effect that was nearly intimate, like something's here and breathing the same air we breathe and it moves the way we move. The noise had this quality, of a body shedding space, but there was no one there when they looked.

She was in the kitchen when she heard it this time. She carried her tea upstairs. The rooms at the end of the second-story hall. The dim third story, bulbs blown and most of the furniture removed. The short stairway to the cupola. She looked into the stillness, head swiveling, her upper body projected into the structure, which was fairly broad and used as storage space. Her tea was cold by the time she stood on the floor of the cupola. She poked into old clothing layered in cardboard boxes and looked at documents gone brittle in leather folders. There was a stuffed owl and a stack of unframed watercolors, badly warped. She saw a twirling leaf just outside the window. It was a small amber leaf twirling in the air beneath a tree branch that extended over the roof. There was no sign of a larva web from which the leaf might be suspended, or a strand of some bird's nest-building material. Just the leaf in midair, turning.

She found him the next day in a small bedroom off the large empty room at the far end of the hall on the third floor. He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear. In the first seconds she thought he was inevitable. She felt her way back in time to the earlier indications that there was someone in the house and she arrived at this instant, unerringly, with her perceptions all sorted and endorsed.