TheMaiden&Death ~ Installation 1

[bleodswean]

There are beds that become vast plains. Cribs, shared rooms, hotel queens with broken springs. Mattresses on floors, vintage iron bedsteads. Alone and with others. Rocked in arms. Hospital cots and the satin lined coffin. The earth cradle. Sleep now. Dream.

The prone form, the skeleton at rest. The lovers entwined, the bodies estranged.

In the dream, they sleep in beds grown cold, wrapped in the shroud of sheeting. The dreamers rise and leave their houses of mourning, walk until they find one another; meeting at a crossroads, shovels slung over their shoulders. She is veiled. He has a linen handkerchief over his face, held fast by his own hand. These are the weeping veils that protect them from the season of their sadness. Dressed for the climate of inward sorrow. They cannot see the other clearly, cannot see past the fabric limits of their grieving. All shape and form, movement and muted shades. It is a dream and she dreams in black and white, he dreams in vivid technicolour.

Under the low-slung, full moon, they stand. Each has their secret wish, the sacrifice they are willing to make, the oath wanting to be sworn. The trade, the deal, the dark hope. Shoeboxes tied with gut tucked beneath their arms. Hands bloody. Looking far off in the distance for the approaching devil, they find only angels weeping on the edges of the vast and empty plain. Kneeling in the gravel, digging with their hands now, shovels discarded, fitting the body into the grave, realizing it is their own body, the shoebox in the form of man, of woman, eyes urged closed, pulling a blanket of dirt up, they tuck one another in, pressing the wormy loam tight around shoulders and hips. Sleeping again, the dream inside the dream.

Their veins are filled with bone marrow. Their pockets are filled with seeds.

They both wake. The shared dream that lingers throughout the day. A déjà vu, an unremembered name, a familiar face in a sea of strangers. The ghosting of touch, the haunting of elicited reaction.

Evangeline rises quickly from the dream, dusting it off her, physically skimming her own body with her hands to rid herself of it. Beside her, Mark stirs and grunts. What is it, he whispers into the dark of her bedroom. The new moon casts no light, but the city is never entirely blackened and she breathes out of the panic, blinks herself to a calm wakefulness. She can feel how she has come back from a dead place, she reaches for him fiercely and he stills beneath her touch. Too fast, too needy. He tries to slow the trajectory with his own body, but she’s insistent and writhes in his arms as though a snake. She’s offering him everything but he rocks her back to sleep instead.

On the other side of town, Jakob surfaces from the dream, the languid swimmer reluctant to leave the safety of the water for the rocky shore. His body is disintegrating and he relishes the experience of it. Mourns the loss of the dream, knows he can’t return to the silent vista, the crossroads, and the girl. Who was the girl? Beside him, Tami has kicked off the dirty sheet and blanket. He wants someone to hold him, but cannot bring himself to rouse her from her stupor.

+++

Even I have a story. The beginning of the endings.

The dreamt play. The narrative of one existence. Although if I exist it is an oxymora, and the tale is not mine to tell. It is yours. Your own beginning and your ending. Truncated. Entering in the middle of another’s story and leaving in the middle of your own. Missing the initial and the final syllable, your life the catalectic line. And I the poet maligned.

Within the skull theater I am waiting for the lights to dim, the curtains to be drawn, anxious in the way one is before an impending arrival. When I close my eyes the story is told on the inside of my eyelids. It is the telling of my birth. The stilled birth. The birth of Death.

I was born angelic, tumbling from light into darkness. This is how I tell it. Before the Angel of Light yoked me to his darkened destiny. Before the apple seed was sprouted. Before the brethren declared me brother. Before our grim journey began, the long walk towards the distant horizon.

Spinning within the nebula. Light exploding, wings unfurling, cosmos knotted and unraveling. A seed of nothingness at my core, watered with tears. Consciousness enters. I am endless and singular. I shudder at my first thought - when will I turn and touch the world?

I wake from the longest sleep, reaching for the memory, the reenactment, the retelling. But it rips away from me, remnants.

Can you remember it? I know that you can.

You find yourself beneath the pressing weight of saltwater. The ocean floor below; a secret quiet darkness. The membrane of the waves above; a beckoning sound-filled light. Upside down, you hang suspended in the amniotic sea. Look back up through the waves to the universe beyond. Close your eyes and be rocked. Into sleep and awake. Again. You dream of me.

When I sleep, I dream of you.

+++



His hand had finally gone completely, blissfully numb. The wrist had been bad. As though a detailed search was being made of the bracelet of bone with the tip of an exacting scalpel. He looked down; his fingers splayed wide, his palm fast and hard on the arm support of the modified barber’s chair. He could not keep the grin from spreading across his face, the bones of his hand were outlined now, the black and grey shading being whisked into the carpel outlines and he could tell it was going to be glorious. The edges of the back of his hand were an angry red. He would take an ibuprofen the next time Mark took a break, the tattoo artist needing to flex his own carpal glove to relieve the inherent job risk of repetitive injury.

Now that he could see the work was good Jakob leaned back in the chair, closing his eyes, and let the stinging push and pull of the shading needles lull him into a place of grey pain. He liked it there. It was his recognizable valley to tread.

His skin was beginning to swell, the tingling numbness would abate soon. Adrenaline tasted bitter on his tongue but it was the chemical taste of drug and he savored it.

Two hours later and his right hand, fingers, and thumb were finished. Designed to match the left but it would be several years of the ink aging into the flesh before the match was perfect.

+++

The tattoo studio was housed in a small, post-war cottage on a main thoroughfare in midtown. The building was set back from the street, fronted by a ragged rectangle of grass, beneath two towering, ill Dutch Elms, between a similarly established costume shop and a modern glass and chrome copy shop. It offered dangerous street parking only unless one knew about the small alley lot. A cracked sidewalk ran block-length but saw very little foot traffic. The studio had black-out film on all the glass, a neon sign in one of the larger windows that simply read “Tattoos” and a plastic red and white “open and closed” sign currently turned to read “Open” hanging on the inside of the door. A long, narrow porch sagged but a sprung couch and several folding chairs beckoned conversationally.

It was the end of the first decade of the 21st Century in a sprawling town in Northern California and the studio was doing steady business in an unsteady economy.

Each of the three artists making time there had his own studio space with the front room serving as a comfortable reception area. The walls were papered with colorful, laminated flash helping to keep the nervous eye busy while the sound of buzzing irons was muffled behind walls and partially closed doors. The tattoo business was efficiently run from a mahogany bar that had been appropriated from a demolished building.

Evangeline was beginning to know the business as intimately as she knew its owner. Both Mark and his tattoo parlor shared a stark contrast in appearance and actualities. The ragged look of the outside of the studio belied the meticulously clean and hygienic inside; the bland and dull exterior opposed the vibrant and creative interior. Mark’s stunning and complex skin suit was covering bones longing for a pedestrian domesticity.

The owner of Alchemical Rose Tattoos was routinely outfitted in a long-sleeved black work shirt severely buttoned up, the colorful swallows on each side of his neck straining to fly above the sharp edges of his collar, tattooed knuckles that declared his personal ethic to the world. WORK HARD. Closely cropped hair hinted at steel around his temples, and long thin sideburns accentuated his handsome face. He had two forms of constant headgear, a flat-brimmed baseball cap he had just switched to with the onset of warmer weather, and the black knit watchman’s cap he had worn pulled low over his ears throughout the winter.

Evangeline had fallen in love with the parlor, the artistry, the bravery of the craft, before succumbing to the lure of Mark’s gentle seduction. They had been seeing one another for six months, their faltering relationship teetering out of the damp dimness of autumn and into the cold and wet darkness of winter. She wondered how they would weather the warm and wild abandon of summertime.

Sitting in the car, watching the damp world outside the windows, debating the use of an umbrella or a mad dash to the front door, she cracked her window enough to perfume the interior of her aged Volvo with midtown’s unique aroma of old tarmac, diesel fuel exhaust, wood rot, and the bitter smell of the dying elms.

She could clearly feel the first stirrings of growth and revival as the earth shifted and tilted beneath her and the seasons began their return towards the light. It was the first day of spring but in Northern California, the equinox was passing meaninglessly with morning rain and afternoon rain and evening rain. March was leaving, the proverbial wet lamb.

She found herself thinking of summertime, of the tenuous tie she had made with Mark in the dark seasons, of the strange way she could feel her heart’s wings beating against the bone cage.
She opened the car door and bolted.

She had the test prints in a large, awkward portfolio tucked under her arm. On the porch, she pressed her shoulder against the studio’s front door, trying to work it with her elbow, intent on keeping the photographs from getting bent. Without warning the door was pulled inwards and she stumbled forward, into someone's chest.

A soft, guttural noise emanated from him and she straightened. He set his hands firmly on the balls of her shoulders, pushing her away from his body. She sensed a restraint, the shove that was both helpful and repelling. She looked up and into his face.

She could not keep herself from gasping aloud. His gaze narrowed, affronted and dangerous. Then he fake lunged at her, popped his eyes, sneered ugly pushing past with his shoulder banging hard against the glass of the door and he was gone.

The door had been ground to an opened stop. She turned and watched him lope down the walkway and onto the sidewalk before he disappeared from view, into the misty morning. His combat boots had left widening rings on the rain-sloshed cement. “Who was that?” she said aloud to the room, standing astonished.

“No one you want to know,” Mark answered, walking past her and closing the door.

“Really?” she said, responding to his tone more than his response. Her lips closed in a tight line.

He shrugged. “A guy working on a full body tattoo.”

“That was seriously overwhelming.” She could still feel the affect the man’s heavily tattooed face had left her with, a reeling shock. “I honestly don’t know what to say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a face tattoo like that.”

“You haven’t spent enough time in a gang,” Frank said from behind the counter.

“Oh, haha,” she replied, turning to the other tattooist with an exaggerated eye roll. “That was not gang ink. I’m blown away. Literally.” She turned back to the door with its black-out film, peering through it, as though the skeleton would return if she summoned him. She looked at Mark, blinking. “I wish I had gotten a better look. You’re doing the work for him?”

“Yep. Just finished one of his hands.” He shook his head. “On a long-gone payment plan. Working on the cheap now.”

“And the work?”

“Ain’t cheap. You didn’t get a good look. It’s insane.”

Frank stood from behind the counter, leaning on both hands towards them. “It’s insanely fucking fantastic.”

“Alright then. I want to get a good look, take some pictures. We can add him to the shop’s collection.”

Mark had walked back to the counter but stopped short at this. “Why? What for? We don’t want to use him to represent the studio.”

Frank interrupted. “Hell no. It’ll scare off the co-eds. We’re trying to improve our image. Why do you think we hired you?”

She smirked playfully at him. “You didn’t actually hire me, though, did you? I begged, you agreed, and we’ve all been locked in a sick kind of symbiotic relationship since.”

“Don’t talk about your and Mark’s thing like that.” Frank was laughing, looking from Evangeline to his boss. She wondered if he could see the uncomfortable distance that had begun to separate them. “Jakob would give the shop a different feel. I don’t know-”

Mark nodded in agreement and leaned over the counter, reaching for his coffee mug. He sipped it watching her over the rim. “He didn’t slow down just now because he doesn’t like to be looked at. I can’t imagine he wants to be photographed.”

She realized something was bothering him and concluded it was probably her. A viral tension had infected their relationship. Both were miserably feverish with it. “Why would someone who doesn’t want to be looked at have his face tattooed like that? It’s not that surprising that he’s difficult, is it?” She pulled the portfolio out from beneath her arm and reached over her shoulder to free her long braid of blonde hair from inside the back of her leather jacket. She sharpened her voice. “But of course, you should consider them college girls and their tramp stamps. Your bread and butter?”

“Definitely my butter,” Frank said, leering.

Evangeline watched Frank sit back down, picking up the discarded crossword, pulling a pen out from behind his ear. She looked over to Mark, his gaze was even harder now and she felt a sinking discouragement. She could see that her flippancy was irritating him, his aggravation with her irritating them both.

He spoke and his voice was dismissive. “The fact that he doesn’t want to be looked at, yeah, that’s weird, huh? But regardless, you’re not going to make any money off him. He’s got no money. I think he squats in some shooting gallery over on the west side.” He finished his coffee and set the mug down with a clatter on the counter top. “You could probably make art with the guy if you’re into that kind of scene.”

“What kind of scene is that exactly? Is this a jealousy thing then?” She lowered her voice and laughed flirtatiously, trying to win him back. He refused the advance. She had come to recognize this trait, once determined to be hard there was little chance of softening him.

“Believe me, Evangeline, you’ll know it when I’m jealous. But you’re avoiding the point. He’s not going to pay you to take his picture. And I don’t think we want to use images of him here. We actually haven’t seen him for, what Frank? Almost a year now. I think he’s a drug addict or a drunk.”

“Or both,” Frank agreed.

Her gaze narrowed, sliding from Frank to Mark. “On my dime then.”

Frank laughed loud. “Time is money, baby. Oh, that reminds me - Jack wants you to take his picture with his new lady.”

“Alright, alright.” She shrugged, defeated. “Where is Jack? And what’s this about a new girlfriend?” Before Frank could answer she straightened her shoulders and turned to Mark. “And I do want to photograph that guy. It’s not about money.”

“I thought you said money legitimizes you. You’re going to end up paying him. Like a tourist.”

“Like a tourist? That doesn’t even make sense.” She curled her fingers into her palm and took a deep breath. “Work this out for me, Mark. Really.”

He looked down and away, his expression noncommittal. “Maybe next time he comes in I’ll mention it.”

Frank was nodding. “We’ve all worked on him. Mark’s shit is sweet, but Jack has done roses and thorns that are just as outrageous. He looks good.”

“You say that so reluctantly.”

“He can be a jerk. And now we think he must be a bum. All that work wasted.”

“Wasted how exactly? You thought he’d make you famous?”

“Not us, but we thought he’d do more with the ink. Have you seen him before?”

She considered this. The face of the inked skull etched clearly in her mind, the stark black-and-grey shading, the lines, and the tattooed grin that split his face from ear to ear. A young man’s face tattooed with the framework of the bones beneath, the living death’s head, and she had never seen him around town, or on the news, in the local rags, or even at shows.

Mark interrupted her contemplation. “We worked on that guy off and on for several years. This was before we knew you or yeah, you would have been involved. We were excited about it at the time,” he paused, “but once we committed to it, it got really overwhelming. It’s a boatload of ink and, well, it has to affect his life, you know? It just never became what I thought it would become. That’s all. If he keeps coming back, says he wants to finish the work, I’ll feel it out and see what I think. But no, we don’t want him as shop mascot or anything. But,” he exhaled, “he might be able to satisfy your strange urges.”

“She’s got strange urges? Dude, you are so holding out on me.” Frank looked between the two of them.

“I do not have strange urges, Frank.”

Mark shrugged. “You’re looking for something to photograph that no one’s ever seen before.”

Suddenly she felt exposed and looked away from Mark’s direct gaze. “That isn’t possible. Really. But I would like to photograph something in a way that no one’s ever seen before.”

“Apparently, your modeling days are numbered. She’s looking for a new muse,” Frank said to Mark, his voice good-natured, but Evangeline recognized the cloud of emotions that darkened Mark’s handsome face.

“I’m not a model or a muse and I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Mark answered with finality.

The conversation was veering into uncomfortably familiar territory. There was truth in Frank’s casual assessment. She watched Mark’s clouded expression, his brow lowered and she wondered how physical intimacy could be so separate an experience from emotional knowledge. She knew she had limited the range he was allowed to travel with her. Relationships had always been about caging herself and feeling the frantic throbbing behind her ribs, she knew that she wanted to set her heart free. She scowled.

He stepped toward her, reaching out for the portfolio. “Let’s see what you’ve been working on.”

+++

She had lured him into her studio. On the other side of the kitchen wall loomed the work space of her live/work loft. The floor to ceiling glass panes, the timeworn brick and mortar, the thick planked flooring all bringing to static life her interior staging. Although the bulk of her photographic work was comprised of client portraits, she had also created art in that space and it held sacredness for her.

She knew that Mark believed her desire to work with the tattoo studio as a photographer was a professional courtesy. He had never once commented on her unmarked skin and she had rarely asked him to pose for her reverential lens. She had kept her growing fascination with the inked bodies narrowly focused on his tattooed clients, shooting for advertising media. His own heavily tattooed body teased her with creative possibilities but she had yet to open her studio doors to exploring the human artwork artistically. The siren call of inked flesh had begun to pull her under and she had to do something to force herself back to the surface, regain control.

He was standing uncomfortably in the middle of the floor, surrounded by light stands and the rolling backdrop hanger. He looked miserable and on edge and this angered her speechless. She took a deep breath. “This is supposed to be fun.”

“Fun.”

“Mark, c’mon. Why be like that?”

He shrugged and her heart could see that he was trying but her head refused to give ground and she lowered the camera. “Fine, you don’t want to do it, fine.”

“It’s not my scene, Evangeline.”

“What scene? Why does it have to be a scene? We’re not filming porn.”

“I just don’t like my picture taken.”

“What you don’t like is being told what to do, how to move.”

He shrugged, and she nodded.

“But you aren’t even giving this a chance. You’re not giving me a chance. You do know that people pay me to take their picture, right?”

“People pay me to ink their flesh and I’m not pushing that on you.”

“Wow.” She hesitated, turning his words over in her mind. “I didn’t think asking you to pose was pushing something on you. You make it sound dirty and selfish.”

He came to her and reached out but she backed away from the gesture. She could not hide the accusatory disappointment in her voice. “Let’s not do this. I’m sorry I asked, let’s forget it. You don’t like your picture taken, I get it. I take pictures of people so that might be a problem for us. Between us, but right now let’s just forget it.”

“For me, it feels like being objectified.”

This hit her in a small direct way, the pebble on the windscreen, the damage done, the starred break threatening a larger cracking.