On Looking: Essays (18 page)
Read On Looking: Essays Online
Authors: Lia Purpura
Once I saw them.
But how that came to be involves a complicated set of strategies, the history of our own Office of War Information, a break with the Geneva Conventions. I saw the bloated faces of the evil tyrant’s sons. Browned. Potatoed. Like things hauled from saltwater. It must be that proof is dilatory, elastic, as expansive as the very early morning hours devoted to a single task. After all, “It is not a practice the United States engages in on a normal basis” said Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld. And “I honestly believe that these two are particularly bad characters, and that it’s important for the Iraqi people to see them, to know they’re gone, to know they’re dead and to know they’re not coming back.” For
this
purpose the faces are shown, for the purpose of indentifying monsters. For surely monsters look like monsters—see? Enduringly. And as surely, there is a child in bed, insistent,
but, but-ing
in the buttery light of happy endings:
what about the troll/witch/dragon—are they really dead?
Surely there is a mother imposing
sleep now, shhhh.
(And surely, the child—didn’t you?—gathers the loose threads of the story into her hand, since threads show in even the best stories, and asks:
what happened to the beanstalk after?
And:
did they eat the witch they kicked into the oven?
And:
aren’t there more witches out there? I know this story goes on,
thinks the child. . . . )
this
purpose the faces are shown, for the purpose of indentifying monsters. For surely monsters look like monsters—see? Enduringly. And as surely, there is a child in bed, insistent,
but, but-ing
in the buttery light of happy endings:
what about the troll/witch/dragon—are they really dead?
Surely there is a mother imposing
sleep now, shhhh.
(And surely, the child—didn’t you?—gathers the loose threads of the story into her hand, since threads show in even the best stories, and asks:
what happened to the beanstalk after?
And:
did they eat the witch they kicked into the oven?
And:
aren’t there more witches out there? I know this story goes on,
thinks the child. . . . )
Once I saw her.
But then, just like that, the next summer she was gone. When I called the director of the state fair, his secretary told me that people complained and said she was inappropriate and was being exploited. In her air-conditioned trailer with her newspaper and knitting, sitting, tiny legs crossed, tiny bonnet of blue calico and little calico apron kindling questions (how old
is
she? is she from this century? were, maybe, people smaller then?). The seat a little too high, just an inch, so her feet would dangle, making her even more specimenlike. Polite yet brief about the questions. Oh, she was a lovely person, and she liked her work and chose to do it, the state fair director’s secretary told me. Velvet rope between her and the quiet people filing by. Nothing about her left you exactly breathless. Gravitational issues though: the onlookers’ sudden, unexpected shame, embarrassment—no clue that this would happen—like entering a river, and suddenly the river is alive, minnows uncomfortably nibbling at toes, the current tugging. Soon an iciness not at all refreshing.
is
she? is she from this century? were, maybe, people smaller then?). The seat a little too high, just an inch, so her feet would dangle, making her even more specimenlike. Polite yet brief about the questions. Oh, she was a lovely person, and she liked her work and chose to do it, the state fair director’s secretary told me. Velvet rope between her and the quiet people filing by. Nothing about her left you exactly breathless. Gravitational issues though: the onlookers’ sudden, unexpected shame, embarrassment—no clue that this would happen—like entering a river, and suddenly the river is alive, minnows uncomfortably nibbling at toes, the current tugging. Soon an iciness not at all refreshing.
Most everyone hurried through.
One might resist:
touching a chicken to clean it, and retreat from its smallness and loose, bumpy skin where once feathers were and were scalded off. One might refuse the articulated movement of its legs while washing it under the water in the sink and still eat the chicken. Cooked by another:
Mediterranean. Fantastique.
Wined and buttered breast and thigh and leg transformed. Under pineapple, so you don’t have to see. And can finally eat.
Mediterranean. Fantastique.
Wined and buttered breast and thigh and leg transformed. Under pineapple, so you don’t have to see. And can finally eat.
One might resist:
the article about a mother, hot water, steel wool, her child. One might resist the phrase “her child.” One might start to read, and knowing at once what’s coming, seeing where it’s going
(bathtub, peroxide, wound,
and
squirt)
turn away. Feel the sheer drop-off, the height scaled fast and the sharp rocks shift underfoot. One might keep the article, file it, because all around the air is thinning. Because such helplessness splinters anyone. If you’re not a mother, or a father, you don’t know what it’s like to want—and maybe only once, and maybe only glancingly—to do anything, anything to make the crying stop, to stop your own helplessness in the face of it. How, even if only for a moment, you feel broken apart. And that’s when the shards start flying.
(bathtub, peroxide, wound,
and
squirt)
turn away. Feel the sheer drop-off, the height scaled fast and the sharp rocks shift underfoot. One might keep the article, file it, because all around the air is thinning. Because such helplessness splinters anyone. If you’re not a mother, or a father, you don’t know what it’s like to want—and maybe only once, and maybe only glancingly—to do anything, anything to make the crying stop, to stop your own helplessness in the face of it. How, even if only for a moment, you feel broken apart. And that’s when the shards start flying.
Remember the last time you had a speck in the eye? How you could think of nothing else?
But you closed your eyes to stop the irritation.
But you took a deep breath and the moment passed.
Right?
Here is a boy whose eye could be fixed. In the West. In America. But in the photo it’s slipping inward. And here is his mother whose black, body-long burqa, when she squats, makes her look like a mountain. A mountain of slag from a freshly dug ditch. Whose entire face is covered with meshing. Here is a mother whose eyes are graphed, whose cheek is graphed when he flies to her and presses hard for a kiss. What is a kiss through mesh—a graphed breath? Here is a mother who cannot find the eyes of her son. Here is a boy with a mountain for a mother. A newspaper lays these things before you, at your feet—good dog—in black and white, and black and white allows the incremental 1-2-3 of understanding. A reader says I see, I see. Then leaves. For orange juice. Water. Small pleasures/ consolations of tea.
If I am going to stay with these children (the girl’s name is Sylena), I have to consider what they turn towards. Heliotropically. Tiny, back-bent supplicants searching under beds, around corners:
Mom, where are you?
Child-as-heliostat fixed to reflect the sun’s rays, continuously, even as the sun turns away. And heliotropes: any kind of small, reddish-purple flower from Heliopolis, city of ruins, ruined, with a modern city superimposed, oh site of hurry and bustle, with ghost words and echoes, our ears too dulled to gauge a cry—of protest? exhaustion? hunger rising? And here, still standing in the city, my city, the story of the terrible bathtub, the story a reader might choose—
I
chose, because I am on trial here—to pass over one recent morning, to concentrate instead on the interesting demolition, 10th Avenue, the whole west side of the building torn off, the rooms like holes, empty, except for one.
Mom, where are you?
Child-as-heliostat fixed to reflect the sun’s rays, continuously, even as the sun turns away. And heliotropes: any kind of small, reddish-purple flower from Heliopolis, city of ruins, ruined, with a modern city superimposed, oh site of hurry and bustle, with ghost words and echoes, our ears too dulled to gauge a cry—of protest? exhaustion? hunger rising? And here, still standing in the city, my city, the story of the terrible bathtub, the story a reader might choose—
I
chose, because I am on trial here—to pass over one recent morning, to concentrate instead on the interesting demolition, 10th Avenue, the whole west side of the building torn off, the rooms like holes, empty, except for one.
With a white bathtub.
That stops me.
Ladder built back to the scene I keep turning away from.
The tub is clean. Very clean of the bodies (her body) (Sylena’s) (and the soaps and towels heaped on the floor would have been wet, and worse). (And here comes the wet bed that the child didn’t, didn’t mean to, that I couldn’t, I cannot... fix, clean. Fold away.)
And look! There are Murphy beds, still, in this part of town. See them in the torn up apartments! Remember the velvet ropes across the rooms in the Tenement Museum and the Murphy beds there. I remember that... safely now. I’m safe for now.
I paid my admission.
Then this comes:
How would all the tenement children live in just two rooms?
Crammed, I suppose. Crammed into, like these specimens I’m here to see, I’m not turning away from. Here in the museum of things gone terribly wrong, the Mütter Museum of Medical Oddities, in Philadelphia. All the specimens: a loud carbuncle in plaster, on the back of a neck, like a scream. A smallpox pustule like an open mouth, its lips pulled down in sorrow in the photograph. The (forgive me) macaroni & cheese-with-ketchup face of a syphilitic. The gorgeous phrase “cavity of the sacrum” followed by photos of Frederik Ruysch’s tiny, mounted fetal skeletons, some playing miniature bone-and-ligament violins, some jarred and injected with wax, talc, cinnabar, oil of lavendar, alcohol, black pepper, colored pigments to better illustrate the transcience of life and other allegorical lessons. And some he draped with embroidered lace. And to some he gave a mesentery handkerchief to accompany postures of grief.
The word
caries
. The words
phial
and
lancet
and
paregoric
. And
mercury pastille.
caries
. The words
phial
and
lancet
and
paregoric
. And
mercury pastille.
One fetus—like Da Vinci’s Hyperion Man, limbs out to measure the breadth of the known universe with its body—is really one star of conjoined twins, a head at either end and arms and legs as shining points. A star in the process of exploding, but caught. A star that didn’t explode at all. Among such pinkness and tension and sadness, among the weightless beings strung up and clamped to best show their features, heads bent below a meniscus of poison, heads cresting the terrible solutions—I sat down. I stepped into their sleep.
And when I peered around to see their open backs, where the seam of them split, and the heat clanked on in the ancient radiators, and a toilet somewhere loudly flushed and the lobby voices were pistons churning the room . . . what was the difference,
sitting with?
sitting with?
I read the medieval explanation about these bodies: God’s anger. The Devil’s hand at work. Some fear, danger, tragedy striking a mother straight through to her child. I looked and looked past reason to the useless necks again. To
sit with
you have to look into the gap in your understanding, not drive the conversation, not know where it’s going. Not know beforehand at all where it’s heading. I read once,
there is a quality of legend about freaks . . . like a person in a fairy tale who stops and demands that you answer a riddle.
That’s the space. That open field, where you’re sitting with, and don’t have the answer, but an atmosphere of response is forming.
sit with
you have to look into the gap in your understanding, not drive the conversation, not know where it’s going. Not know beforehand at all where it’s heading. I read once,
there is a quality of legend about freaks . . . like a person in a fairy tale who stops and demands that you answer a riddle.
That’s the space. That open field, where you’re sitting with, and don’t have the answer, but an atmosphere of response is forming.
I’m reading about a death-row inmate called “Little Lew.” And though here he is, framed in his neat newspaper photo, he is hard to see for all his running—away from home at seven, then a little blur escaping from juvenile detention. Little Lew, who, by twelve, was already a father. (He’s flying now.) Who loved guns from early on (“I can’t even explain why. Just had to have one.”). At 5’3” and 117 pounds, he’s feather-blown. Of his weight, say
Welter:
“to roll,” “to roll about, as in mud,” and used figuratively as in: “they weltered in sin.” “To be soaked, stained or bathed,” as in: “the corpses weltered in their own blood.” As in: “Leoma Chmielewski,” after Lew shot her in the face during a robbery.
Welter:
“to roll,” “to roll about, as in mud,” and used figuratively as in: “they weltered in sin.” “To be soaked, stained or bathed,” as in: “the corpses weltered in their own blood.” As in: “Leoma Chmielewski,” after Lew shot her in the face during a robbery.
It took nine corrections officers to hold him down while the IV tubes were inserted in his arms.
The prisons’ chief said he would have preferred not to have cameras involved in the execution process.
Of the drugs used to anesthetize, paralyze, and kill (sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride), the first, the article states, can mask symptoms of an agonizing death by suffocation. It’s banned by the American Veterinary Medical Association.
There were no signs that Williams suffered “once his struggles ceased” the article continues. “But that does not mean he did not feel pain” the article also reads.
Little kids playing hide-and-seek close their eyes and suppose no one can see them.
Safe, safe, safe.
Here’s Little Lew’s little picture, stamp-sized on page 1 of the paper. Below it
See Killer p. A2, Columbus Dispatch,
no picture, just words. But I see him there. I see him and see him. He is an argument hanging in air. He is a memory no one wants. He’s stubborn. Little Lew who ran away keeps turning up unannounced. Shoots the face off my peace right now.
See Killer p. A2, Columbus Dispatch,
no picture, just words. But I see him there. I see him and see him. He is an argument hanging in air. He is a memory no one wants. He’s stubborn. Little Lew who ran away keeps turning up unannounced. Shoots the face off my peace right now.
Right now I was sketching his face, the mustache and beard that encircled his open mouth. Two easy concentricities, my favorite design to draw. One circle inside another. It’s on the necklace I wear, a lozenge of silver with a bronze washer soldered on. I believe in the circle. Small circle on a larger one, my child always with me that way.
I also collect washers I find in the street. You’d be surprised at how many there are to be found. I have three already from Columbus, Ohio, where I’m living for a few weeks. At home I have small pea-sized ones, and large ones I can barely palm. Pocked, rusty, and scratched; smooth and bright. Lots from Baltimore and from New York. Sometimes I think I should catalog them with little tags and note the circumstances under which they were found. One has a raised pattern like a prayer ring, a chaplet, whose bumps you thumb along while reciting your Our Fathers and Hail Marys. One is black; one is toothed like a kid’s sketch of the sun. Easy to slide into my little mania. Even a friend of mine looks for them now. He finds them everywhere, though it took him a while to see them. I told him he had to train his eye for the object he desired, to practice being alert for the shape and sudden shine. And then they would come to him.
Two weeks after Lew was executed, another man lay strapped to the same gurney. The
Columbus Dispatch
reported that it took a team of prison health workers twenty minutes to find the veins on murderer John Glen Roe and to insert the shunts that would hold the needles carrying the lethal drugs. Family members of his victim, Donette Crawford, held hands and watched the execution on closed-circuit TV.
Columbus Dispatch
reported that it took a team of prison health workers twenty minutes to find the veins on murderer John Glen Roe and to insert the shunts that would hold the needles carrying the lethal drugs. Family members of his victim, Donette Crawford, held hands and watched the execution on closed-circuit TV.
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