We Will All Go Down Together (28 page)

A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs./B is for Basil, devoured by bears . . . 

In Bosch’s garden, one nozzle-headed creature pushed two oblivious lovers around in a glass ball while, nearby, another climbed a gargantuan strawberry. My alarm went off, reminding me that—“on-a-roll” feeling or not—by half-past eleven, which was fast approaching, I’d really better do my level best to have something for the mysterious other half of my circuit to start concentrating on.

So I got out my sketch-pad and a light charcoal, laid a sheet of foolscap on the floor at the foot of my bed—where the light came in strongest, of mornings—and squatted down to work.

Frottage, its sexual in-joke of a name aside, is (by the main) a system of discovery. The idea is to take something textured, something rough like stone, or sand, or . . . the worn-unsteady wood which makes up a downtown student-house’s uppermost floor, say. This then forms the basis for a tracing into which you can look and see shapes, forms, faces suggested by nothing more than light and dark, line vs. line, a merest Idea of Image. Follow these suggestions to their conclusion, illogical or otherwise, and a drawing tends to emerge—individual as a Rorschach blot, predictable as a fever-dream. Like moving light on wallpaper in a still and darkened room.

In 1924, after moving to Paris, Max Ernst finished his first series of completely Surrealist paintings, pale and exacting works, which look somewhat like bad Magritte. Their symbolism was explicit. He called them “a kind of farewell to technique and to occidental culture.” Later the same year, Ernst sold all his remaining work in Germany and sailed for the Far East, reuniting with fellow ex-Dadaist Paul Eluard in Saigon. It was on his return from the East that he discovered frottage, of which he wrote—

“Botticelli once remarked that by throwing a sponge soaked with paint against the wall, one makes a spot in which may be seen a beautiful landscape. This is certainly true; he who is disposed to gaze attentively at this spot may discern within some human heads, various animals, a battle, some rocks, the sea, clouds, groves, and a thousand other things. It is like the tinkling of the bell that makes one hear what one imagines.

“But though this stain serves to suggest some ideas, it does not teach one to finish any part of the painting. To be universal and to please varying tastes, it is necessary that in the same composition may be found some very dark passages and others of a gently lighted. . . .”

. . . penumbra.

(And you know the really odd thing? I remember writing all this down in the library, transcribing it into my files, moving parts of it here and there, using it however I saw fit to support whatever point it was I thought I wanted to make. But not until later, not until
now
, did I recall that particular word being used—not so close to the conversation with Aaron, no. Not in
that
context.)

I squint my inner eye and see myself cross-legged on the floor, sketching away. Letting the lines take me where they take me. While, on the wall above me, something moves and spreads like smoke, like bruising. Like something straining desperately to lean over my utterly engaged, utterly uncomprehending shoulder.

Says Max:

“It is not to be despised, in my opinion, if, after gazing fixedly at the spot on the wall, the coals in the grate, the clouds, the flowing stream, one remembers some of their aspects; and if you look at them carefully, you will discover some quite admirable inventions. In these confused things, genius becomes aware of new inventions, but it is necessary to know well how to draw all the parts that one normally ignores.

“Here I discover the elements of a figuration so remote that its very absurdity provokes in me a sudden intensification of my faculties of sight—a hallucinatory succession of contradictory images, superimposed upon each other with the persistence and rapidity of amorous memories and visions of somnolence. These images, in turn, provoke new planes of understanding. By simply painting or drawing, it suffices to add only a colour, a line, a landscape foreign to the object represented, and these changes, no more than docile reproductions of what is visible within me, record a faithful and fixed image of my hallucination. They transform the banal pages of advertisement into dramas which reveal my most secret desires.”

I never named my sketches, and to be frank, I have trouble remembering what most of them looked like. But I still recall how it felt to be there in my hot, dense attic room, tongue-tip between teeth—a swirling, edge-of-swooning feeling, far too intent for explicit nausea, yet certainly akin to it. Like that thing I often found myself doing when I was a kid, too young to worry about how I might be deforming my own ability to interpret the world around me . . . this glorious, multifoliated bag of tricks, so apparently both boundless and permanent, which is (nevertheless) so easily and sadly reduced to nothing more than an empiricist’s shaky self-delusion.

How I’d stare at a given object and the space around it, cross my eyes
just so
, and see it pixilate into oblivion—reduce itself to component parts, to inward-spiralling boxes or circles, before disintegrating completely into that calm, grey, vaguely ozone-smelling blankness which signals oxygen deprivation. Back then, I had no idea I was probably killing brain-cells every time I indulged myself this way. And these days—

—these days, if I could still do it, well . . . fuck it, man, I might. I very definitely might.

But not unless I knew for sure I didn’t have to worry about petty crap like waking up with nothing to show for my efforts but a headache, later on.

It was a week or so after that initial sketch that I developed my rash—first faintly under the wire of the bra, then up along the breastbone, itchy and flaky and redder and redder, like it was going to open up at any minute and let something out.

Mrs. Mol recommended aloe vera, which formed a crust of “healed” skin that sloughed off to reveal yet more rash underneath. The man at the drugstore said to try Nizorol, a vile pink concoction usually applied to really tough dandruff or genuine scalp infections. That made my skin burn and puff faintly in a very offputting, constantly distracting way, so I only used it for a few days before chucking it.

“Got any suggestions?” I asked Vivia, who was going through my portfolio at the kitchen table—sketches vs. “original” Max Ernst prints—and poring over the contents, looking for just the right backdrops for her theatre piece. “I feel like taking a cheese grater to the Goddamn thing.”

She scoffed. “Can’t be that bad, surely.”

“You want to take a bet?”

I hauled the bottom of my shirt up, ready to show her—which, naturally enough, happened to coincide
exactly
with Aaron emerging from the back yard (where he’d been gardening), full garbage bag in one righteously dirty hand. “Whoo-HOO!” he yelped. “Free show at 676!”

“Shut up, idiot. What’s in the bag?”

“That?” He set it down, drawing both an earthy rattle and a less-predictable clink; at our reactions: “Oh yeah, this is weird . . . I was just digging the slot for that compost-heap, right? And I keep finding all this
junk
buried in the ground, doesn’t matter how far you go down—like, broken glass and charcoal briquettes and shit. Freak-ass, huh?”

“Maybe there was an explosion at Colonel Sanders’,” I suggested, bored; Aaron’s idea of “freak-ass” left more than a little to be desired, in my not-so-humble opinion. Besides which, I was already starting to itch again.

But: “Maybe the top of your house burned down,” Vivia said, laying my fourth sketch next to a print chosen seemingly at random and giving both of them the coldly measuring bale-eye. To me: “This the one you were thinking of, when you did that?”

I shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking
of
anything, much; that’s sort of the point of the exercise. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason.”

Aaron shook his head, as though to clear it—pure
Looney Tunes
, even without the requisite “whubbada-whubbada” noise foleyed in on top. “’Scuse me: the top of the
house
? Like, when?”

“Oh, a good long while ago, probably; before you bought into the house, anyways. Same thing happened to my family and me once, back in Patcock. We move in, thinking it’s all freshly renovated, and. . . .”

“Uh huh. Hey, Viv—there a law how every place-name in the Maritimes has to sound obscene?”

She bristled a bit; you could always get Vivia’s neck in a knot by reminding her where she came from, if nothing else. Shooting back, immediately—

“What, like ‘St. John’s?’”

“No, I mean like ‘Patcock.’ Or ‘Intercourse.’ Or ‘Dildo.’ Or—”

“Look, you want to hear about this, or should I just change the subject?”

Which was definitely my cue, as duly elected house mediator, to step in. At him: “Aaron, knock it the fuck off.” At her, meanwhile, prompting: “House, roof, burning?”

Vivia cast Aaron one last glance/glare, then shrugged. “Yeah. Well, my Mom and I move in, and everything seems fine, right? But then we start to figure out the place has a few more glitches than the landlord ever told us about, and I don’t just mean all the glass and what-have-you in the garden—more like you couldn’t turn on the dishwasher or run laundry and drain the tub at the same time, or water’d start coming down through the kitchen ceiling.”

“And the denouement?”

“About what you’d think; we’d been screwed, no legal recourse. Moved out as soon as humanly possible.” She turned over one more sketch, adding: “I heard the next family sued ’cause their Mom broke her back making peanut butter sandwiches.”

“Slipped in the overspill?”

“Nope. Tub caught her right in the spine, after it finally fell through the bathroom floor.” As Aaron snorted—back injuries, man! That’s the
shit
!—she pivoted suddenly, waving the last sketch in front of his face. “Hey, laughing boy: what’s this look like to you?”

“Vivia—” I started, only to have her wave me silent. Aaron considered the drawing for a moment; it was the same one I’d been working on the night before, an Ernst-esque forestscape composed of little except leaves and branches, which either lolled like dogs’ tongues or arched upwards like curved knives. Then said—

“Some kinda guy? Big and thin, no face, sitting in a chair like that one you gave Janis. With his head on fire.”

Art’s not an exact science, that’s what I told myself. Frottage equals open invitation to fill in the dots. So it’s never a big deal for two different people to look at your frottage and see two (markedly) different things—

No. It’s a very big deal indeed, however, to look at an image
you
drew and realize that not only do other people see it as being something completely other than the thing you thought it was, but . . . that it actually
is
something completely different.

God knows, under other circumstances, that attic would have never been my first choice for studio space; hot, small, and spare, with limited light and a highly distracting, “normal” noise level. All of which had, from the very beginning, made it difficult to keep hold of any given idea—I’d start picking out a fairly accurate object only to see it blur and alter in front of my eyes due to headache, or dimness, or the fact that it always seemed to take so much longer than I ever thought it would. And by each successive twelve-thirty, I’d feel utterly drained, as though my skin was nothing but an old plastic bag stretched thin over an hour’s worth of exhaustion.

The Institute’s “main switchboard” number rang eight times before Nail-lady finally picked up.

Beyond bored: “Who-should-I-say-is-calling?”

“Janis Mol? I need to talk to somebody about the Mental Radio recreation.”

“Doctor’s out ’til six. Demonstration at the Theatre.”

She tried to switch me to voice-mail, but I wasn’t having any. Pried the (Jay and Jay Memorial) Theatre’s address out of her instead, caught a series of connecting streetcars, and got down there within forty-five minutes.

HYPNOTISM AND THE PARANORMAL—OPENING YOUR INNER EYE, a shaky marquee sign above the front door read. Both the second “N” in OPENING and the final “E” in EYE had been shoved in backwards, an instant Cyrillic translation for a mainly Slavic section of town, the latest Toronto neighbourhood to become informally reserved for immigrants fleeing the former USSR. From a nearby storefront, row on row of immaculate china Infants of Prague—interspersed with period plaster busts of Lenin and period plastic busts of Yeltsin—kept disapproving, gilt-laced watch like a silent choir of pre-teen Liberace impersonators.

I ducked inside to avoid their accusatory stares along with the rain, which had just begun to fall: late sleet, big crunchy gobs of it. While the sky above had already sealed over with boiling grey clouds, shedding light like dust—light so cold, so thick, it clotted on the pavement behind me like shadow.

The Jay and Jay Memorial Theatre smelled like vinegar. Abbott was already onstage and well into his lecture, pointing to various charts via a wheezy, secondary-school-style overhead projector. Explaining, as he did—

“. . . seizure as a form of glory, of set-apartness—a sign of prospective power. Instead of simply treating people who had epilepsy, our ancestors used to make them into kings . . . or gods. Probably just as well, in context, since their idea of successful neurosurgery was to cut a hole in the patient’s head in order to let the demons out. Still, they had a few valid insights. One Greek metaphysician, for example, found a very clear link between the ‘storm in the head’ those epileptics he’d studied felt during their various episodes and—”

But here, a voice from the audience cut in—clear, though not loud, back near the auditorium door. A surreptitious glance confirmed it was that oddly knowing girl from the Freihoeven’s waiting room, lank hair still hiding her bent face, once again not looking up from her book, even as she said, dryly:

“—orgasm.”

The audience giggled, en masse. I repressed a snort. Abbott fixed Carra Devize, lips thin, as though trying simultaneously to regain control and remember his place.