TheMaiden&Death ~ Installation 2
Apr. 16th, 2025 07:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bleodsweanThe Maiden & Death Installation 1
There is a lyric, a poem, a book. A sketch, a painting, a sculpture. Somewhere a performance, a play, a film. There is a human creation quivering in its desire to explain. To ask. To rail. Weep and rejoice.
There is art the artist longs to have experienced. Known. Understood. Art the recipient yearns to experience. Understand. Know.
The scrawl, the writ, the song, the dance, the joy, the despair. The brief illumination and then the forever dark.
The ear bent to hear the voice that speaks the language of the interior life. The eye cast to see the guide who inscribes the story of the quest of a single heart.
It is the translation of the tongue forgotten. The explanation and the question. The definition and the word. Itself.
You do not have to seek these gods. Theorize the holiness of nothing. Understand the sacred imagination. Recognize the profanity of physical matter. But know this, with or without. All living things are born to die. Creation and destruction.
Only I remain unchangeable. Death is not the same as dying.
I am waiting. Effortlessly. Patiently. From now until the moment when I, myself, step across and greet you. You will know me. We will meet. My tongue will be your tongue. Again.
+++
He was prone, half-clothed, giving himself over completely. The lamb to slaughter, the body to joy, the mind to contemplation. Flesh to the needled iron.
Both men were bent over him. Mark had a black Sharpie marker and Jack had a blue. They were conferring with the pens. Jack’s deafness did not hinder his pen flashing assured and smooth across Jakob’s torso, filling in the twining roses and thorns, leaves and canes, decorating Mark’s anatomical rendering of rib bones. Answering silent questions without words. They bent and drew and stepped back and considered.
Finally, the two artists nodded to one another. Mark pulled the stool back up to the edge of the table and the cruel machine buzzed to life. Jakob’s ribs began singing a song of pain to the thin striated muscles that held them one to the other. His flesh rendered raw. He could feel each outline of bone cage bars. An ache that burned, heated right through the center of what seemed to be everything, his body, his life. The black flames licking at each one of his vertebrae, so that he had to fight the urge, the need, to get up and move away from the pain of it.
He closed his eyes, searching out the place inside his mind where he could embrace it.
+++
It was mid-April, the lion of winter holding the writhing world in clenched teeth, a slow reluctant dying. Mornings were still overcast in grey, afternoons marked by thin sunlight not strong enough to dry out the day’s damp beginning. Evenings ended with showers and stormy nights. Evangeline was ready for longer days of sunshine. She wanted to feel the heat sustained on her skin, seeping into her pores and warming her blood. Heating her bones until the marrow set on fire. She desperately wanted to see Mark in less restrictive clothing, wanted to trawl the riverbanks with him, drink beer, and lay on her back to watch the starry sky spin overhead. She wanted warm evenings spent melting her body into another’s body. She needed long hours that would bring them together rather than each passing day pushing them further apart. She wanted to believe that summer’s inherent feeling of limitless freedom would help her unloose the ligature that was tightening around the throat of their relationship.
The voice-mail alert dinged and she sighed and fished the phone out of her back jean’s pocket. It was the tattoo parlor. She listened to Mark clear his throat and then tell her that the guy with the skeleton tattoo was in the studio. He would probably be there most of the day.
She stood staring intently at the phone in her hand, stunned out of her darkening mood. She had spent well over an hour sitting in front of the computer fighting a creative sludge, dredging through sticky pools of black tar for something shiny, something of worth, and coming up empty-handed. She had begun to doodle shamelessly over the top of various images and digital negatives until she had clicked each file closed, unsaved, in disgust. The morning had been edging towards becoming a day solidified in frustration.
She was overwhelmed with feelings of wasted desire.
She hadn’t forgotten the skeleton boy but she had put him out of her mind. And here he was rising as though a specter and Mark begrudgingly remembering his promise to her.
Quickly, she shifted gears, drank the last of the coffee in her cup, packed a camera bag, grabbed several bottles of organic orange juice, and left the house.
The sharp astringent smell of the soap and the warm smell of human flesh being happily abused greeted her as she entered the studio. The bells rang and the murmuring of male voices in Mark’s room stopped.
“It’s me, Mark,” she called out.
“We’re back here,” he answered from his studio space.
She set her gear down just outside his door, and pressed her shoulder against the threshold. It was the artist’s version of the Victorian operating theater. Jack and Frank were leaning, side-by-side, against the far wall, the patient inert upon the table. Mark was seated, hunched over him, one hand finger-splayed on the naked flesh to hold the skin taut, the other hand gloved in black and guiding the buzzing tool through its motions. She was overwhelmed by it and it took a few moments for her to begin to see the scene through her own artist’s eye, composing the images, framing the shots, calculating the camera settings, gauging the light. She stepped back out, hunkered down beside her camera bag and readied her equipment, then grabbed two bottles of orange juice.
“Juice?” she asked and Mark took his foot off the pedal and looked up. She showed him the bottle.
He turned and set the machine down on a counter top and peeled his gloves off, tossing them into a small waste can. “That’s exactly what I needed.”
“Would you like one?” she asked the young man who was now looking at her the way a sleeping cat disturbed will lift its head and glare out of slitted eyelids.
“Okay,” he said sullenly and she handed him one.
+++
That night she sat surrounded by images of the skeleton. Her bank of computer monitors glowing, her humming Macs focusing her attention. The images were telling a story that she couldn’t quite read. Yet. The darkened room in which she worked on her digital visions was lit by the snapshots she had taken that afternoon. Most of the shots showcased Mark or Jack, each man working with concentration and skill on Jakob’s flesh, Mark outlining bones and whisking shading into the curving representation of ribs, Jack inking rose canes with thorns and then shading color into the petals and leaves. But that was familiar. After six months of work she understood the art and the craft, the mechanics and the skill. She squinted and looked past the shapes and forms and attitudes of the two tattoo artists, she wanted to see the unknown and unfamiliar living canvas of Jakob. She wanted to be able to stare at him openly and at her leisure.
He had been sulky and surly, generating a sense of suspicion in person. He was overwhelming with the nearly full-body tattooed interpretation of his skeleton. His face was very difficult to look at for a long period of time. But captured on film - he was something else. Young, naive, and strangely innocent. His body vulnerable with its exposed inked bones, his face reluctantly compelling. It was a juxtaposition that she could not quite fathom.
After spending over two hours in the studio that day, she had begun to understand some of Mark’s opinion of him. He was hard to read, no doubt, but he was also quite unlike Mark, as a man. Mark was sturdy and solidly masculine, Jakob was thin, and boyish with his head and face shaved clean. His entire demeanor was otherworldly. She wondered what he had been like before the intense tattoo.
She could see why Mark would dismiss him, find him difficult and frustrating. They had no common ground outside of ink, the process of it, the wearing of it. But even in that, she saw very little similarity. Mark was heavily tattooed but he wore his full sleeves, his neck pieces, his lettered knuckles as a badge, a visible secret handshake. Jakob’s ink was worn as though a costume, he was hiding and yet the disguise was anything but concealing.
Jack, the Deaf tattoo artist, seemed to have a different relationship with him. Opposite to Mark’s stark anatomical renderings, Jack’s work was beautiful and delicate and full of life. The twined roses and leaves spoke of poetry and lyricism. Jack seemed to like Jakob. He smiled at him often, nodding, indicating the fresh work or sympathizing with the pain. And he simply smirked whenever Jakob flashed attitude.
Jakob had tolerated her as viewer and photographer. Agreeing, with a strange tilt of his head down into his shoulder, to let her photograph the session. What at first glance appeared to be anger at the intrusion of the camera soon became an obvious and self-conscious shyness. He did not want to be studied, wanted only to be stared at. He seemed to expect and welcome a response of revulsion, fascinated horror. He did not want the empathetic eye trained on him. She had found this same attitude, this aggressive human demeanor, when she worked with the city’s homeless populations for a week-long series of newspaper articles. Special Interest they called it. She had spent days with the journalist, combing the downtown alleys, the parks, the river banks. She had photographed the forgotten residents, their tent cities, the Christian centers that fed and sheltered them, and the liquor stores where they congregated. They wanted to repel and yet they wanted desperately, she had learned, to be understood.
She bit her upper lip, nodding to herself now with the realization that Jakob was homeless in his own body.
She could hear Mark working in her kitchen. Night had fallen. She settled back into her chair, leaning it on its spring, looking from monitor to monitor and hoping beyond reasonable hope that the skeleton boy would honor the invitation she had extended to him to come to her studio. That he would be willing to reveal himself to her camera’s eye. Let her gaze upon him photographically with no distractions. He had said that he would, they had set the date for the coming Thursday afternoon. She would have to wait.
Behind her, Mark entered the small room and approached with two cold beers. He offered her one and she smiled, grateful.
“Dinner’s in the oven. Table’s set. How are you doing in here?”
“You’d make a great wife,” she laughed.
He was not laughing. “But you don’t really need a wife, do you?”
She turned away and quickly began to cycle through her computers, clicking files closed. She felt protective of the images of Jakob. She also knew that a close examination of them would reveal her interest in a new light.
Mark watched her close file after file. Sipping his beer. “Looks like you got some good shots.”
“I think so. Some great shots of you and Jack working.” She walked to one of the computers and cycled through a folder, opening a close-up of Mark’s gloved hand, his favorite iron, Jakob’s reddening flesh taut over his ribs outlined in black and grey ink. “I love this.”
“Yeah, my face isn’t in it.” He laughed.
“No, but it’s obviously you with your sleeves. And hey, you photograph great. You really have nothing to fear from the camera. I wish you would get over this thing, whatever it is, that you feel about photography.”
“You think?”
“Mark, you’re a handsome guy. Yes, I think.” She drank long from the bottle of dark imported beer, glancing pointedly at him.
“If you and my mother say it, it must be true.”
He didn’t look convinced. She walked over to him and pushed herself into his arms. He held her, his chin on her head. “It is true,” she said into his chest, against the placket of buttons on his black work shirt.
“I’ll take your word on it. I can avoid a mirror if I have to. You should have known me when I was actually one of the young and the beautiful.” He laughed but she knew this was a sore spot for him. Between them.
“Would you quit that already? You’re not even forty and if you’re acting like this now I can’t imagine the mid-life crisis you’re going to face when you’re really, actually, old.”
“One year away from the big four oh, baby. And get back to me in ten years or so when you’re thirty-nine and we’ll talk about it.”
“Funny.”
He released her and drank from his beer. “To be thirty again,” he said dramatically.
She kissed him and moved out of his arms. “Is it really that big of a difference? Forty?”
He looked at her, serious again. “It’s the halfway point, isn’t it? Now I’m counting backwards.”
This silenced her. She did not feel the press of time but could imagine why he did. She purposefully focused her attention back to the digital images. “I think we can use some of these close-ups if you and Frank still feel strongly about not using Jakob’s face or whatever. There’s a great one of Jack, let me find it –“ She pulled up the file and opened it. Mark grunted approval. “If Frank would finish the article we could submit it to “Tattoo World” this week. We could use these two pictures. You have to get on him about that.”
“Your wish, m’lady –“
“Mark, why don’t you give a crap about the article?”
“Hey, you’re reading me wrong. I care about it. Your photos are great! But getting on Frank is like wrestling with a tree sloth. I’ll talk to him again on Tuesday, but I can’t promise you that he’ll get it done.” He tried to reach for her hand, but she pretended not to see the gesture and instead sat back down in the chair and began mousing over an image. He finished his beer, rolling the bottle between his palms. “Why don’t you write it?” he asked into the empty space between them.
“Me? I don’t write. I barely do email. Frank is good. I’ll talk to him.”
+++
The pale horse and I are wading frantically through a low tide of blood and gore, bits and pieces of dismembered human beings suspended in the waves of coagulated blood. The horses have been whipped into an eye-rolling frenzy, the smell of this death, this violent death, preys on their grazing psyches with dripping canine teeth. I press my knees tight into the sides of my steed, steadying her beneath me. I look up ahead and my brother is possessed by bloodlust, he is swinging a broadsword over his head, two-handed, and an endless stream of blood showers from the blade as he cuts the air in arcs of triumph. This is not a place to stand still - and who is left standing in an abattoir after all? - so I spur my mount on and she leaps forward, a sound tearing out of her mouth unlike any sound she has made before. Her mouth oozes blooded foam and she is panting, this massive beast is panting in fear and I can no longer hold her. I knot the reins and drop them onto her neck and lean forward in the saddle, one hand on the horn, one tight in her mane, and I lay my face against her neck and bury my spurred heels in her sides.
The sea is blood, it is crashing on a shore of bone, and it is dyeing everything in its red tide. The sky is black, clouds hanging low weeping rain upon the carnage. Screams and moans and the sound of bodies rent and torn asunder. The sound of violence unmistakable, unlike any other sound on Earth. The ears cannot be stoppered.
Heads of men tumble from the waves and lay littered on the nightmare coastline, jaws still wide open, screaming silently.
We move past my brother and I look back, down beneath my arm, behind me, and I see him standing in his stirrups bellowing his cry of war. The giant red war horse beneath him is the true mare of night, she is horrific. Her eyes are solid white, rolled back in her dizzying head. Her lips flecked with her own blood and I would swear her teeth are sharpened porcelain daggers and I have no explanation for this. Her rider, her terrible rider, has an axe now and is swinging it one handed in a giant vertical arc and I can hear it singing its ghastly song. Battle cries answer in chorus and the cacophony deafens. It is all I can hear but my pale horse pounds out of the dark waters and finds her foothold and we run until she cannot run another stride. Head hanging, sides heaving, I slide off her back and refuse to turn and watch men destroy men. The sea waits to pull them all under.
I reach for the reins and begin walking towards a horizon I know must soon be lit by the rising sun. But first I must pass bloodshed of a kind that twists around my mind, the cruel ligature pulled tighter and tighter until my thoughts asphyxiate. Slaughter of the possessed and yet the eyes of the brutalizers are dead pools. I do not understand any of this; I am not a god like my brother.
After days and weeks of this I grow faint, diminished, diluted. Exhausted by the endless reaping without sowing.
+++
The morning was bright. The day new and shiny. He pushed the hood off his head, took his hands out of the hoodie pockets and walked a swinging, jaunty step down the sidewalk.
“Now, you’re a man who can’t get away with anything.”
He knew he was being addressed. It was a skill hard-earned from a childhood of being ignored. He stopped, taking in the legless veteran seated in a filthy, rusty wheelchair, leaning hard on an elbow against one arm of the manual machine, slovenly beard, tangled hair, and eyes that saw to the other side of the world and back again. A small cardboard sign was propped against one of the wheels, beside a metal box with its lid opened.
Jakob looked at him, on the defensive, then got the joke and smiled. He bowed low, with an outrageous, exaggerated flourish of his arms.
“Or," the man continued, "You’re a man who can get away with everything.”
Jakob straightened, laughed out loud and walked closer. He hunkered down beside the chair, back pressed against the storefront brick wall. Digging a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket he lipped one and handed the pack to the man.
The man nodded his thanks and Jakob waved the pack back at him when he tried to return it. The man’s hand trembled as he brought the cigarette to his lips. Jakob leaned up and lit it for him, lit his own, settled in, and dropped the lighter into the open box.
“Didja win the battle?” the veteran asked, coughing wetly.
He glanced sideways at the man in the wheelchair, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “What’s that?”
“The battle? Didja win then?”
Jakob shook his head, the smile on his lips pulling the toothy grin of the skeleton wide across his face. “What battle?”
“You against the world.”
Still smiling, but with his own teeth showing now. The effect was disturbing. “No, old man. Not yet.” They smoked. “You?”
The old man coughed again. “I was a fuckin’ god of war. Don’t it look like I might’ve won?” He indicated his missing legs, the street, the chair, himself locked into his body.
“You feel trapped inside there?” Jakob looked at him hard.
“Probably the same as you.”
After a long time, the man fell asleep, snoring and drooling. Jakob pulled himself back to his feet, standing protectively beside the human wreck. He dug deep into his jean pockets, pulling out wadded bills, and change, and a scrawled address on a slip of paper. He separated the paper out, pushed it back into his pocket and gently poured the handful of money into the box. He walked on.
There is a lyric, a poem, a book. A sketch, a painting, a sculpture. Somewhere a performance, a play, a film. There is a human creation quivering in its desire to explain. To ask. To rail. Weep and rejoice.
There is art the artist longs to have experienced. Known. Understood. Art the recipient yearns to experience. Understand. Know.
The scrawl, the writ, the song, the dance, the joy, the despair. The brief illumination and then the forever dark.
The ear bent to hear the voice that speaks the language of the interior life. The eye cast to see the guide who inscribes the story of the quest of a single heart.
It is the translation of the tongue forgotten. The explanation and the question. The definition and the word. Itself.
You do not have to seek these gods. Theorize the holiness of nothing. Understand the sacred imagination. Recognize the profanity of physical matter. But know this, with or without. All living things are born to die. Creation and destruction.
Only I remain unchangeable. Death is not the same as dying.
I am waiting. Effortlessly. Patiently. From now until the moment when I, myself, step across and greet you. You will know me. We will meet. My tongue will be your tongue. Again.
+++
He was prone, half-clothed, giving himself over completely. The lamb to slaughter, the body to joy, the mind to contemplation. Flesh to the needled iron.
Both men were bent over him. Mark had a black Sharpie marker and Jack had a blue. They were conferring with the pens. Jack’s deafness did not hinder his pen flashing assured and smooth across Jakob’s torso, filling in the twining roses and thorns, leaves and canes, decorating Mark’s anatomical rendering of rib bones. Answering silent questions without words. They bent and drew and stepped back and considered.
Finally, the two artists nodded to one another. Mark pulled the stool back up to the edge of the table and the cruel machine buzzed to life. Jakob’s ribs began singing a song of pain to the thin striated muscles that held them one to the other. His flesh rendered raw. He could feel each outline of bone cage bars. An ache that burned, heated right through the center of what seemed to be everything, his body, his life. The black flames licking at each one of his vertebrae, so that he had to fight the urge, the need, to get up and move away from the pain of it.
He closed his eyes, searching out the place inside his mind where he could embrace it.
+++
It was mid-April, the lion of winter holding the writhing world in clenched teeth, a slow reluctant dying. Mornings were still overcast in grey, afternoons marked by thin sunlight not strong enough to dry out the day’s damp beginning. Evenings ended with showers and stormy nights. Evangeline was ready for longer days of sunshine. She wanted to feel the heat sustained on her skin, seeping into her pores and warming her blood. Heating her bones until the marrow set on fire. She desperately wanted to see Mark in less restrictive clothing, wanted to trawl the riverbanks with him, drink beer, and lay on her back to watch the starry sky spin overhead. She wanted warm evenings spent melting her body into another’s body. She needed long hours that would bring them together rather than each passing day pushing them further apart. She wanted to believe that summer’s inherent feeling of limitless freedom would help her unloose the ligature that was tightening around the throat of their relationship.
The voice-mail alert dinged and she sighed and fished the phone out of her back jean’s pocket. It was the tattoo parlor. She listened to Mark clear his throat and then tell her that the guy with the skeleton tattoo was in the studio. He would probably be there most of the day.
She stood staring intently at the phone in her hand, stunned out of her darkening mood. She had spent well over an hour sitting in front of the computer fighting a creative sludge, dredging through sticky pools of black tar for something shiny, something of worth, and coming up empty-handed. She had begun to doodle shamelessly over the top of various images and digital negatives until she had clicked each file closed, unsaved, in disgust. The morning had been edging towards becoming a day solidified in frustration.
She was overwhelmed with feelings of wasted desire.
She hadn’t forgotten the skeleton boy but she had put him out of her mind. And here he was rising as though a specter and Mark begrudgingly remembering his promise to her.
Quickly, she shifted gears, drank the last of the coffee in her cup, packed a camera bag, grabbed several bottles of organic orange juice, and left the house.
The sharp astringent smell of the soap and the warm smell of human flesh being happily abused greeted her as she entered the studio. The bells rang and the murmuring of male voices in Mark’s room stopped.
“It’s me, Mark,” she called out.
“We’re back here,” he answered from his studio space.
She set her gear down just outside his door, and pressed her shoulder against the threshold. It was the artist’s version of the Victorian operating theater. Jack and Frank were leaning, side-by-side, against the far wall, the patient inert upon the table. Mark was seated, hunched over him, one hand finger-splayed on the naked flesh to hold the skin taut, the other hand gloved in black and guiding the buzzing tool through its motions. She was overwhelmed by it and it took a few moments for her to begin to see the scene through her own artist’s eye, composing the images, framing the shots, calculating the camera settings, gauging the light. She stepped back out, hunkered down beside her camera bag and readied her equipment, then grabbed two bottles of orange juice.
“Juice?” she asked and Mark took his foot off the pedal and looked up. She showed him the bottle.
He turned and set the machine down on a counter top and peeled his gloves off, tossing them into a small waste can. “That’s exactly what I needed.”
“Would you like one?” she asked the young man who was now looking at her the way a sleeping cat disturbed will lift its head and glare out of slitted eyelids.
“Okay,” he said sullenly and she handed him one.
+++
That night she sat surrounded by images of the skeleton. Her bank of computer monitors glowing, her humming Macs focusing her attention. The images were telling a story that she couldn’t quite read. Yet. The darkened room in which she worked on her digital visions was lit by the snapshots she had taken that afternoon. Most of the shots showcased Mark or Jack, each man working with concentration and skill on Jakob’s flesh, Mark outlining bones and whisking shading into the curving representation of ribs, Jack inking rose canes with thorns and then shading color into the petals and leaves. But that was familiar. After six months of work she understood the art and the craft, the mechanics and the skill. She squinted and looked past the shapes and forms and attitudes of the two tattoo artists, she wanted to see the unknown and unfamiliar living canvas of Jakob. She wanted to be able to stare at him openly and at her leisure.
He had been sulky and surly, generating a sense of suspicion in person. He was overwhelming with the nearly full-body tattooed interpretation of his skeleton. His face was very difficult to look at for a long period of time. But captured on film - he was something else. Young, naive, and strangely innocent. His body vulnerable with its exposed inked bones, his face reluctantly compelling. It was a juxtaposition that she could not quite fathom.
After spending over two hours in the studio that day, she had begun to understand some of Mark’s opinion of him. He was hard to read, no doubt, but he was also quite unlike Mark, as a man. Mark was sturdy and solidly masculine, Jakob was thin, and boyish with his head and face shaved clean. His entire demeanor was otherworldly. She wondered what he had been like before the intense tattoo.
She could see why Mark would dismiss him, find him difficult and frustrating. They had no common ground outside of ink, the process of it, the wearing of it. But even in that, she saw very little similarity. Mark was heavily tattooed but he wore his full sleeves, his neck pieces, his lettered knuckles as a badge, a visible secret handshake. Jakob’s ink was worn as though a costume, he was hiding and yet the disguise was anything but concealing.
Jack, the Deaf tattoo artist, seemed to have a different relationship with him. Opposite to Mark’s stark anatomical renderings, Jack’s work was beautiful and delicate and full of life. The twined roses and leaves spoke of poetry and lyricism. Jack seemed to like Jakob. He smiled at him often, nodding, indicating the fresh work or sympathizing with the pain. And he simply smirked whenever Jakob flashed attitude.
Jakob had tolerated her as viewer and photographer. Agreeing, with a strange tilt of his head down into his shoulder, to let her photograph the session. What at first glance appeared to be anger at the intrusion of the camera soon became an obvious and self-conscious shyness. He did not want to be studied, wanted only to be stared at. He seemed to expect and welcome a response of revulsion, fascinated horror. He did not want the empathetic eye trained on him. She had found this same attitude, this aggressive human demeanor, when she worked with the city’s homeless populations for a week-long series of newspaper articles. Special Interest they called it. She had spent days with the journalist, combing the downtown alleys, the parks, the river banks. She had photographed the forgotten residents, their tent cities, the Christian centers that fed and sheltered them, and the liquor stores where they congregated. They wanted to repel and yet they wanted desperately, she had learned, to be understood.
She bit her upper lip, nodding to herself now with the realization that Jakob was homeless in his own body.
She could hear Mark working in her kitchen. Night had fallen. She settled back into her chair, leaning it on its spring, looking from monitor to monitor and hoping beyond reasonable hope that the skeleton boy would honor the invitation she had extended to him to come to her studio. That he would be willing to reveal himself to her camera’s eye. Let her gaze upon him photographically with no distractions. He had said that he would, they had set the date for the coming Thursday afternoon. She would have to wait.
Behind her, Mark entered the small room and approached with two cold beers. He offered her one and she smiled, grateful.
“Dinner’s in the oven. Table’s set. How are you doing in here?”
“You’d make a great wife,” she laughed.
He was not laughing. “But you don’t really need a wife, do you?”
She turned away and quickly began to cycle through her computers, clicking files closed. She felt protective of the images of Jakob. She also knew that a close examination of them would reveal her interest in a new light.
Mark watched her close file after file. Sipping his beer. “Looks like you got some good shots.”
“I think so. Some great shots of you and Jack working.” She walked to one of the computers and cycled through a folder, opening a close-up of Mark’s gloved hand, his favorite iron, Jakob’s reddening flesh taut over his ribs outlined in black and grey ink. “I love this.”
“Yeah, my face isn’t in it.” He laughed.
“No, but it’s obviously you with your sleeves. And hey, you photograph great. You really have nothing to fear from the camera. I wish you would get over this thing, whatever it is, that you feel about photography.”
“You think?”
“Mark, you’re a handsome guy. Yes, I think.” She drank long from the bottle of dark imported beer, glancing pointedly at him.
“If you and my mother say it, it must be true.”
He didn’t look convinced. She walked over to him and pushed herself into his arms. He held her, his chin on her head. “It is true,” she said into his chest, against the placket of buttons on his black work shirt.
“I’ll take your word on it. I can avoid a mirror if I have to. You should have known me when I was actually one of the young and the beautiful.” He laughed but she knew this was a sore spot for him. Between them.
“Would you quit that already? You’re not even forty and if you’re acting like this now I can’t imagine the mid-life crisis you’re going to face when you’re really, actually, old.”
“One year away from the big four oh, baby. And get back to me in ten years or so when you’re thirty-nine and we’ll talk about it.”
“Funny.”
He released her and drank from his beer. “To be thirty again,” he said dramatically.
She kissed him and moved out of his arms. “Is it really that big of a difference? Forty?”
He looked at her, serious again. “It’s the halfway point, isn’t it? Now I’m counting backwards.”
This silenced her. She did not feel the press of time but could imagine why he did. She purposefully focused her attention back to the digital images. “I think we can use some of these close-ups if you and Frank still feel strongly about not using Jakob’s face or whatever. There’s a great one of Jack, let me find it –“ She pulled up the file and opened it. Mark grunted approval. “If Frank would finish the article we could submit it to “Tattoo World” this week. We could use these two pictures. You have to get on him about that.”
“Your wish, m’lady –“
“Mark, why don’t you give a crap about the article?”
“Hey, you’re reading me wrong. I care about it. Your photos are great! But getting on Frank is like wrestling with a tree sloth. I’ll talk to him again on Tuesday, but I can’t promise you that he’ll get it done.” He tried to reach for her hand, but she pretended not to see the gesture and instead sat back down in the chair and began mousing over an image. He finished his beer, rolling the bottle between his palms. “Why don’t you write it?” he asked into the empty space between them.
“Me? I don’t write. I barely do email. Frank is good. I’ll talk to him.”
+++
The pale horse and I are wading frantically through a low tide of blood and gore, bits and pieces of dismembered human beings suspended in the waves of coagulated blood. The horses have been whipped into an eye-rolling frenzy, the smell of this death, this violent death, preys on their grazing psyches with dripping canine teeth. I press my knees tight into the sides of my steed, steadying her beneath me. I look up ahead and my brother is possessed by bloodlust, he is swinging a broadsword over his head, two-handed, and an endless stream of blood showers from the blade as he cuts the air in arcs of triumph. This is not a place to stand still - and who is left standing in an abattoir after all? - so I spur my mount on and she leaps forward, a sound tearing out of her mouth unlike any sound she has made before. Her mouth oozes blooded foam and she is panting, this massive beast is panting in fear and I can no longer hold her. I knot the reins and drop them onto her neck and lean forward in the saddle, one hand on the horn, one tight in her mane, and I lay my face against her neck and bury my spurred heels in her sides.
The sea is blood, it is crashing on a shore of bone, and it is dyeing everything in its red tide. The sky is black, clouds hanging low weeping rain upon the carnage. Screams and moans and the sound of bodies rent and torn asunder. The sound of violence unmistakable, unlike any other sound on Earth. The ears cannot be stoppered.
Heads of men tumble from the waves and lay littered on the nightmare coastline, jaws still wide open, screaming silently.
We move past my brother and I look back, down beneath my arm, behind me, and I see him standing in his stirrups bellowing his cry of war. The giant red war horse beneath him is the true mare of night, she is horrific. Her eyes are solid white, rolled back in her dizzying head. Her lips flecked with her own blood and I would swear her teeth are sharpened porcelain daggers and I have no explanation for this. Her rider, her terrible rider, has an axe now and is swinging it one handed in a giant vertical arc and I can hear it singing its ghastly song. Battle cries answer in chorus and the cacophony deafens. It is all I can hear but my pale horse pounds out of the dark waters and finds her foothold and we run until she cannot run another stride. Head hanging, sides heaving, I slide off her back and refuse to turn and watch men destroy men. The sea waits to pull them all under.
I reach for the reins and begin walking towards a horizon I know must soon be lit by the rising sun. But first I must pass bloodshed of a kind that twists around my mind, the cruel ligature pulled tighter and tighter until my thoughts asphyxiate. Slaughter of the possessed and yet the eyes of the brutalizers are dead pools. I do not understand any of this; I am not a god like my brother.
After days and weeks of this I grow faint, diminished, diluted. Exhausted by the endless reaping without sowing.
+++
The morning was bright. The day new and shiny. He pushed the hood off his head, took his hands out of the hoodie pockets and walked a swinging, jaunty step down the sidewalk.
“Now, you’re a man who can’t get away with anything.”
He knew he was being addressed. It was a skill hard-earned from a childhood of being ignored. He stopped, taking in the legless veteran seated in a filthy, rusty wheelchair, leaning hard on an elbow against one arm of the manual machine, slovenly beard, tangled hair, and eyes that saw to the other side of the world and back again. A small cardboard sign was propped against one of the wheels, beside a metal box with its lid opened.
Jakob looked at him, on the defensive, then got the joke and smiled. He bowed low, with an outrageous, exaggerated flourish of his arms.
“Or," the man continued, "You’re a man who can get away with everything.”
Jakob straightened, laughed out loud and walked closer. He hunkered down beside the chair, back pressed against the storefront brick wall. Digging a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket he lipped one and handed the pack to the man.
The man nodded his thanks and Jakob waved the pack back at him when he tried to return it. The man’s hand trembled as he brought the cigarette to his lips. Jakob leaned up and lit it for him, lit his own, settled in, and dropped the lighter into the open box.
“Didja win the battle?” the veteran asked, coughing wetly.
He glanced sideways at the man in the wheelchair, taking a long drag on his cigarette. “What’s that?”
“The battle? Didja win then?”
Jakob shook his head, the smile on his lips pulling the toothy grin of the skeleton wide across his face. “What battle?”
“You against the world.”
Still smiling, but with his own teeth showing now. The effect was disturbing. “No, old man. Not yet.” They smoked. “You?”
The old man coughed again. “I was a fuckin’ god of war. Don’t it look like I might’ve won?” He indicated his missing legs, the street, the chair, himself locked into his body.
“You feel trapped inside there?” Jakob looked at him hard.
“Probably the same as you.”
After a long time, the man fell asleep, snoring and drooling. Jakob pulled himself back to his feet, standing protectively beside the human wreck. He dug deep into his jean pockets, pulling out wadded bills, and change, and a scrawled address on a slip of paper. He separated the paper out, pushed it back into his pocket and gently poured the handful of money into the box. He walked on.