The bus is a body. It is a living, breathing mass. We climb on and we climb off, the bus stops and releases, consumes, moves forward, stops and releases, consumes us.
On Tuesdays I ride the bus thirty minutes out to Trumansburg to Dr. Schneeble’s office to talk about my week and also the last week’s CT scans and blood samples, which I then repeat fifty minutes later in the lab downstairs. It is a repetition I’ve grown accustomed to, a clear and consistent practice. The bus as a large organism, an active and humming machine. On the bus I am processing various movements. I am collecting some serious data.
Aboard the 24A we are all together a system, a radius of action. Here are the students and the nine-to-five-ers (the difference is between the shininess of their messenger bags, and the direction of the slant of their hips), the young mothers with their ear-pierced and diesel-jeaned newborns, staring outwards with blank eyes. Here are the elderly making faces at them, puffing up their cheeks with air and popping them with their fingers. Here are the middle-aged hippies, the tie-dyed, Birkenstock-wearing free-lovers, the construction workers, the lunch ladies.
Dr. Schneeble’s office is in a large and rectangular sand-colored building just before the interstate, its appearance and space so flat and ordinary that it’s virtually unrecognizable. Its parking lot is beneath the structure, giving off a stark look of abandonment. Upon driving up you sense an absence so powerful, but yet so subtle that it seems to linger in your bones for days.
They are searching my body for signs.
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In the entrance to T.H. Hall there’s a video projector running 24/7 of a montage of close-ups of body parts. There’s a clavicle, an arm, a leg bent at the knee – all of the images cropped so close that at times they pass before you can distinguish or place them – an undulating backbone, fingers muddled together, a clitoris, a heel. A displaced map of the body. The color is sepia.
When film was first developed people did not understand how to look at a piece of the whole. There was a sense of innate fear, a disbarring, a castration. A forearm without an elbow without a tricep without a shoulder. An eye without a face. A smile without the cat. You get the picture. They didn’t get the slightest bit how to. It was something like seeing death. An upset in the plotting.
The installation has been on display for over a month. It is part of my twin brother’s thesis project that he’s been working on for the past year. After our mom got sick right after we finished undergrad, we both decided to stay in
which Caleb and I used to play hide and seek in
Some of the bodies in the video are corpses. It is almost impossible to tell which parts are alive and which are dead, unless they are moving, but sometimes it’s the camera panning and you’re not sure if it’s your eye or the screen or the image on the screen. Half the people who walk by it or glance at it or even stare at it for a period of time are not aware of the corpses.
Our dad has connections with the anthro-archaeology lab on campus. As head of the anthro-archaeology department for the past twelve years, he basically is the connection. He’s always been pretty receptive towards experimentation with art, especially after marrying our mother, who was a performance artist back in the 60’s along with Yoko Ono and Valie Export in the women’s rights movements. I know for a fact my mom had a pair of Valie’s Action Pants but I don’t even want to think about where and when she wore them.
Ever since they took her away he’s been pretty easy to convince about anything. Especially now since Caleb’s moved back home with him, Caleb pretty much has full access to anything and everything.
It’s been eight months, three weeks, and two days since she’s been gone, and already it feels like it was always this way. I mean, for the last two years it wasn’t really her that was around, anyway.
Rachel,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the last paragraph is perfect for making us sympathesize with what's her name. She seems like a real person in this paragraph. However, this is the only area in the second piece that I feel connected with her. You're doing a good job with bringing in more elements of place and time and a sense of progression with the story, but where's that lovely voice you had in the previous stories? I'm thinking that you're trying to get that back from wherever it went. I know it's probably frustrating, but these fragments need that feeling of importance that the other parts were giving with her voice.
Keep up this valuable work. Rachel, you can do it!