Still Life

There’s this awareness you sometimes come to in a still life class. Let me explain. It begins workmanlike: sketch in the shapes, block in the tones and colours. After a while you switch to a smaller brush, add highlights, blemishes, the finer points. Still, it does not look quite real. So you pay closer attention to the path of the light, the violence of the shadow—the intricate dance of reflection and refraction, moving all around you, so fast as to appear still. And now your subject is not the fruit, but the dance of that light’s motion—rebounding off the taut skin of a pear, swooping through the shadowed hollow of the bowl below and back up again. Suddenly even something as ordinary as an apple seems too much to articulate, too detailed and alive. But if you hadn’t tried, you would have only ever seen a bowl of fruit.

            That overused word, moved, clarifies itself in moments like these: you understand one is moved by art because all art is movement, all art is is movement: the conservation of motion, from the hand to the brush to the hair on the back of the neck and the laugh in the belly and the tear welling up and tumbling down the cheek. It is movement, beginning in the world and redirected through the body. Strange that only by focusing so intently on the still can we become aware of this constant motion. Stranger still how quickly we forget it once we leave the room. I get home and the fruit I see browning in a bowl doesn’t seem miraculous at all.

I first saw Jamie in a still life class. He immediately struck me as odd. Like a statue out of antiquity whose creator had taken liberties with the human form—neck long, bones curved, child’s face on a man’s body—laboured-over so as to go unnoticed at first, but becoming more impossible the more you looked. Some Homeric spirit, in a body that strained and bent but could not quite accommodate it.

            People did not come like this, I knew, or felt I knew. They—we—are animals. We represent nothing—living to be alive, to undergo the processes of aliveness, as any animal does. Jamie was different. He ate when it was time to eat, never because he was hungry; he slept when it was time to sleep; he never kissed, only kissed back; making no choice that could not have been made by a machine, each as if to demonstrate that, yes, he was unquestionably living.

            In observing him I began to notice how I had, over time, allowed every aspect of my life to drift and fall askew, and felt compelled to work them back into order, into the machinery of his. His kettle, curtains and lamp were colour-coordinated because those were considerations decent people made; soon, mine were too. He planned his meals and shopped precisely once per week; now, so did I. I don’t know if you could call it love. It was representational of love, at least, it showed enough of love’s symptoms for me to fool myself if I wanted. Which I did. I had found the other into which I could be absorbed, as into a warm pool, completely.

            Eventually, I got out of the water.

It was summer, and hot. A heat that wrings you out like a towel. There would be weeks where I could think of nothing to do but lie naked on my bed and feel the barrier between sheet and skin dissolve in sweat.

            As I lay there the smells in my apartment began to intensify, over days. I felt the acrid tang of evaporated sweat deeper in the back of my nose and throat; the unwashed containers of takeaway scattered around the bed and kitchen began smelling stronger of the foods they had contained, then wilder and less food-like, their smells were new and complex. I imagined the blotchy, voluminous mould, the different colours it might be taking based on the smells which arose. I imagined the veins breaking down, the blueish blood collecting in limp, pink skin under the bed; the body stiffening into a pose not unlike mine, like it was my shadow, or I was its image projected upwards through the mattress. I felt—could feel—the microbes, making their intrepid way outwards from Jamie’s stomach to his intestines and beyond; the gases, forcing open his lips, nose and anus, blistering his skin and sloughing it downwards until it draped loosely over his green-black body and collected on the carpet like a tablecloth covering yesterday’s meat.

            I've lain on this bed and danced, for days.

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This story first appeared in issue 123 of Voiceworks