Part 2: Reunification of a statue
I dreamt I craned my long neck over a wall to nourish myself with an apple hanging on the other side. I felt something on my face and found myself surrounded by spiders and their webs.
“I awoke at an unusual hour and flipped on the light, startling the house roach. Frantic twitches of his antennae preceded his retreat down the sink drain and I felt a tinge of guilt. Guilt! The last girl I was dating asked me to choke her a little but my hand ultimately withdrew from the abortive attempt, and at this too I felt guilt. Guilt at my aversion to violence? I think it goes back to the statue.
“The Apollonian head was found in the 18th century and kept in the castle. The torso was acquired in 1904 and held in the regional archaeological museum. Petrographic and geochemical investigations were conducted and it was concluded that the two pieces belonged to the same statue, so they decided that the two pieces should be reunited. But there were some objections, the most vehement coming from the sculptor himself who spoke to me from beyond. “Be careful where you step,” he said “for I’ve been deprived of my human shape. I may be an insect.” Indeed his voice sounded strange, almost inaudible, totally incomprehensible at first, but my mind was evidently endowed with the ability to translate his sounds. He told me of the island of Paros and the long forgotten accounts of a massive volcanic eruption on a nearby island, its subsequent caldera collapse spawning tsunamis which in all likelihood inspired the Exodus story of the parting seas. It seems the construction of this statue was cursed, bringing catastrophe and suffering in its wake. Or rather deconstruction, as the statue was in fact the result of much stone being cleft away from its features. Perhaps the original marble monolith has long lamented its shattering at the hands of the sculptor. In any case, the sculptor expressed his gravest regret at his life’s work. And one must admit the fact that human civilization has assumed an alarmingly downward trend since the statue was reconstructed a decade ago.” “Yes, these are alarming times. It cannot be disputed” the assistant concurred while diligently wiping various magnifying glasses with a soft cloth. “Yes well you can imagine the responsibility I had, being the only one who understood the otherwise unknowable source of our suffering. I had to do something to stop it all and set it right.
“The sculptor’s insect form, though generally disadvantageous, did grant him the freedom of movement in and out of my prison cell bars, and for this I envied him. It was in prison that envy and hatred clasped their metal claws about my heart. The physical violence was one thing, but there’s nothing like humiliation to corrupt a person.”
“Yes,” assented the assistant, “humiliation”.
“In time, his visits and words only sent me into a rage. I would like to have crushed him under my fist with a swift blow, but his scurrying body evaded my grasp again and again. I no longer cared for the suffering of the world, I only regretted my mission of destruction which landed me in that dismal hole, far beyond the vision of any angels you may believe in. Less fortunate prisoners than I, condemned to many years beyond my brief stint, were utterly disfigured by humiliation, never to be recognized again by their former race. I was spared and released only moderately crippled, as you see me. Oh!” the inspector exclaimed, wheeling over the undulations of the scarred earth, “nothing rivals the genius of nature, carving and sculpting with its tools of wind and rain. Better than the rumble strip, wouldn’t you agree?” “I must confess you are correct. These are good bumps.”
“It’s similar in a way, the rumble strips consisting of negative bumps carved out of the pavement, or rather pressed in, I’m not sure of the process. Subtracted material, or compressed. There are the ones arranged in such a sequence so as to play a tune when driven over at the correct speed, and these are a disgrace. The rumble strips are by nature dissonant and disturbing, they are forced then to betray their truth and to lie with music. I find myself less interested in harmony than in dissonance. I find deliberate attempts at perfection disgusting.
“Still, I must acknowledge that the delight of novelty is increasingly rare and fleeting in our work. In a new place among new things and people, yet I feel as if I’m doing the same things, as if there’s nothing new in the world anymore. How did we end up here? I don’t know why I became a bump inspector, it just happened and life took its course.” In the parking lot, they discover a call box. The inspector picks up the receiver and holds it to his ear, speaking into the mouthpiece: “what happened to me?” The voice on the other end: “Sir, this is a call box.” “Yes.”
“When I consider the faltering course of my life, I trace the crucial misstep back to the sculptor and that fucking statue. You can imagine the adrenaline which flooded through me when a stranger accosted me in the street and his uncanny knowledge informed me of who he was. Murderous rage overwhelmed me as I clenched his feeble throat and gazed back into his somehow unsuspecting bulging eyes. The pain of my life transferred through my hands and into his pitiful body, only slightly larger than his prior insect form. The grave was an incredibly laborious effort. As I was digging I thought of sandcastles. Best part was digging the mote around the perimeter: water comes in, watch it go. The way it carves out the loose sand, the way it swirls round different shapes. Dig out a little channel to a pit, make a reservoir. I stepped out of the grave to look back on it, to assess its size. Have I ever dug a hole so deep? I was momentarily shocked to perceive a resistance when I grasped the body’s wrists to drag it. It had become a bit stiff. Rigor mortis, that’s all. The body was stunningly graceless when it fell into the grave. It slid from the edge unevenly, pulled first by its bulkier portions, and did a half turn at the bottom to wind up mostly facedown. I felt a sting of guilt, as if I had clumsily dropped someone’s cake and now saw it upside down on the ground, ruined. It was an incredible relief to see the body disappear at last under a shovelful of dirt. Filling the grave went much faster than digging it. I felt the relief of being rid of something, but it was only a passing illusion and my old feelings returned to me, following like demons in my shadows. Life was different once.
“Loyal assistant, someone close to me has died. I don’t know who, but I can feel it. In a past life, a girl looked back at me through the bus window, a glance which caught me like a glint of light off a jewel in the desert. Yellow-gold hair which seems to have absorbed and embodied the light of the sun. My first encounter with the only other person on earth, so stunned by that novel grace and life: paralyzed. At the thought, my hand glides over my arm and I can’t help but note the perfect texture which has graced my skin. Go ahead, feel. A grin of intoxication floods the assistant’s face at the mere touch. Such is the lot of all workers, irrevocably shaped by the task which consumes so much of their life. When the flight attendant gets home and kicks off their shoes, they enter the kitchen weary and, stricken by thirst, grab a glass and compulsively add a scoop of crushed ice before opening a canned beverage. Krr-ksch! Gluck gluck gluck. And when the waiter greets his friends, he can’t help but wear a false smile and ask, with inquisitive eyes and a hopeful thumbs-up, “how is everything?” I wonder if this invasion and domination of my identity has removed me still further from my past life.
You were sick as a kid.
I was sick as a kid. They had to force-feed me this awful medication with a syringe straight into my throat. I kept getting worse. I’m not sure what happened. Sometimes I think they removed something they shouldn’t have, took something from me. Stole my life away.
Past life. My childhood is almost completely gone from me, I hardly remember a bit of it. Unmoored. It has drifted away from me. Where is my brother these days, is he still alive? I seem to remember his voice. His books and airplane models, raising my panicked body from the pool, swim goggles. We’ve been separated. There’s no justification for the many wordless years that have gone by. A stubborn fear clung to me but the true calamity has been unfolding all the time. My love has been denied its voice, sitting silent in my castle chest. My atom heart has long since starved and melted down catastrophically. Years have gone by, my hair is turning grey. Those old scars are bleeding again. Soft sand gives way beneath my feet with each step and my scars are bleeding. I’m starting over. I can’t help but hear something in the breeze and my eyes are weeping.
yelling about buildings 