Bright Shards of Someplace Else (16 page)

Yet it seemed too variously shaded to be blindness, too permeable to be the lens cap, too solid to be the image of my blood cells. It was something else, something that encompassed all those things but committed to none of them fully, or perhaps better said, committed to none of them
restrictively
. It was a rich overlay on the present moment, a cryptic light-blocking, oppressive, yet aesthetically one-upping every specific—blindness, the lens cap, blood cells—I could dream up as its source. It was, in essence, what art should be, what theory could be—an expanse outside all specifics. O'Hara, likely sensing how beyond him and Microaestheticism I now was, threw his hands up and let me finally fall. In that sweet drift away from the confines of theory to the release of art, I went over and over the options for what the darkness could be, granting, finally, that what it was
truly
was not as relevant as what it was
critically
. The blackness had achieved the only triumph to be had in art: an irreproachable ambiguity.

I tried to lift my arm to indicate that I was, in my own highly qualified way, a believer. Perhaps not in Microaestheticism and certainly not in O'Hara, but I did believe in the desire to extend the reach of art—to science, to the body, and beyond. But as I raised my arm in what was meant to be a sort of reverence for the communal enterprise of art-furtherance, my body chose to express this reverence in a far more explosive way. Blood shot from mouth like paint from a stepped-upon tube, my breath drew violently into my lungs, where it sulked, refusing to release itself in an exhale. Worst of all, the glorious blackness before me, with its eloquent language of value, was suddenly shot through by a blinding white light, the kind of impulsive,
stupid mark that instantly demotes a painting from masterwork to let's-get-out-the-gesso-and-start-again. The whiteness expanded, beckoned; like all bad art it was notable only in how blatantly solicitous it was of the viewer. Unlike bad art, however, this swath of white seemed to have the manpower to back it up, and drew me in and away despite myself.

“You mind if I use this stuff as a sample? It'll save me a lancet.”

My father has died, and in my hand are his remains—ashes pressed and fired into a small flattish cube—and I'm laboring to insert him into something so that he sits flush. He always wished to be a geometric form (so often did he rail against “the tyranny of the organic” that I could tell myself he'd be happy), but he also hated bric-a-brac and I think right now he'd qualify, being a small object with no function. Better to join him with a nice flat plane. Shim up a gap on a sleek modernist home. There are plenty around here. Some are monolithic and shimmering, with metal roofs that sweep across the facades, the entrances coyly obscured. Others are crouched tightly to their lawns, their recessed windows narrowed and aglow.

I walk through the backyards, pretending to be a meter reader. I'm wearing Dad's red jumpsuit, the one he wore in prison, and a tool belt to complete the look. I stop and study each house. I pull out the cube and run it along siding, storm windows, blocks, etc., hoping to feel it dip into place. It does, in the back deck of a glass monolith, a house that resembles a drive-in movie screen upon which a scene of a Weimaraner darting between two midcentury daybeds repetitively plays. I almost leave him, but the cube looks too obvious in the space between boards.

Before he set our neighbors' dollhouse shed on fire using a plain silver Zippo (triumph of utilitarian design) and naphtha, we lived together in a Danish modern home. What I recall most was cleaning the stainless steel refrigerator, chasing a smudge of grease round and round, driving it across the surface with a Windexed rag only to
have it reappear on the other side, so teasing and full of character it seemed like a friend. Then Dad went to jail. For him, prison was a revelation—he thrilled at the cells, with their efficient layouts, the clean-lined cinderblock walls, the low toilets, the austere bunks. The
iconic
red Princess phones, heavy with engineering, the Plexiglas, turned nicely matte from all the scratches. The
pleasingly unadorned
speech of prisoners.

The afternoon light quivers on the horizon edge of an infinity pool. Blocky red chaises sit in this backyard near cast-concrete stools made to look like tree stumps. I consider dropping him in the pool—it is a nice pool—and saying my goodbye into a swirl of deep-end bubbles. A safe place for the dead arsonist. I am holding him up to the sun, ready to let go, when a shadow crowds my peripheral. It's a man, dressed in a beige polo, rounding the corner. I step behind a streaky potted grass. The man is carrying a rake. With superfluous flourish, like someone signing an important document with a triumphant lift of the pen, he makes a small pile of silver leaves. Paid by the hour, my dad would say, not by the job.

I remember Dad running his hands over surfaces—our granite countertop had pink striations, like veins. When it was clean—which was often—he would run his palm, quickly, over the whole length and off the edge. Then he would hold his arm out, trying to keep it at the same level for a second. If there were things on the counter—junk mail, mother's shed bracelets, restaurant mints—they were swept off in this way. My mother used to stop his hand by putting hers down on his and pressing. For a few moments he moved both their hands along, very slowly, before his fingers lifted up under the weight, like those overloaded donkey carts you sometimes see on dusty streets, held aloft by their burdens.

While on probation, he tried burning down a house with
busy
stained glass windows. The windows depicted a lush jungle scene, and the interior of the house was buried under zebra print, fake palm fronds, and red velvet couches. The owner was the retired principal of
my high school. After he left the school, he wore a fresh kimono every day and walked five small, exotic dogs on a complex twisted leash, so it seemed the dogs were leading one another while the line to my old principal was slack. During one of these walks, my dad set the old man's garbage on fire, hoping it would ignite the house, but it only melted the bin part way and made the neighborhood stink.

That's what ugly smells like
, he said, paging through an interior design magazine as two policemen clomped up the stairs, joking with each other so boisterously that when I opened the door, false solemnity snatched over their faces like sheets yanked over caught lovers. They hid their snickers with coughing fits as they walked Dad out. For a few days the house was a peaceful place. Without his expansive connoisseurship, the tyranny of taste, I could experience the toaster, switch plates, and spoons without a thought to the missteps or glories of their forms. Mother and I ate off the old flowered china and didn't bother to nicely plate the meal, monograming it with sauce. He always told me I had the worst problem—no taste—worse than even bad taste, since bad taste required
at least a point of view
.

The cube is warm in my hand, and I keep sort of tossing it in front of me as I walk. I've never been a good catch, but I'm catching it fluidly each time. A few people—nannies, mostly—rattle by with strollers, and kids squeal as they spot my game. When I was young, after my father left, my mother dressed me bizarrely for quite some time. For instance, she sometimes had me wear different plaids from head to toe, or found several zippered pieces—pants, shirt, boots—and put them all on me at once. It seemed to be a problem for everyone else but me. Even schoolkids, with their reputation for cruelty, felt compelled to give me gentle tutorials on what looked right, speaking with strong authority about what buttons to leave unbuttoned and the like. When I told Mother this, she grabbed my face, looked me in the eye with unsettling intensity, and told me never to forget the freedom that was ugliness.

My girlfriend Yolanda picks me up by the gate to the development. I lean over to hug her, and she feels the sharp angles of the cube in my palm. She wants to know why I still have the cube; wasn't I supposed to finally say my goodbyes? Yolanda is dressed like always—a skirt and shirt, big jewelry, and her purse, fat like a bladder, quivers by the shifter. It's made of a soft, crinkled leather and resembles, in its general aspect, those old-fashioned cold compresses for headaches. A leather tassel hangs off its side. There is something obscene in the way the purse rests between us—plops, really—opulent, heavy-bellied, and insolent, like some coddled prince of a foreign land. The gray-brown color—a versatile neutral, Yolanda said—is so much like the gelatinous skein of fat at the margins of cheap meat cuts. It is terrible.

The windows are down and the air rushes around us. I hold the cube of my father in one hand. In a sudden motion, I grab the purse with the other and hurl it from the moving car. Yolanda howls. The brakes engage and the car skids to a stop. Yolanda jumps out. I look around, praying this was a fluke. I see the clean-lined road, the nasty brackish ditch water where the purse sinks, the lovely tree canopy, the overstuffed lumps of cumulous clouds. The world cleaves into beautiful and ugly things; it is just as bad as seeing double or hallucinating. I watch as Yolanda pulls the purse out of the ditch gingerly, backing up with it like a collie pulling a drowned toddler from a river. She slips and curses up at me.

I put my head down for a moment and sit in my own dark. For years Mother darkly intimated that I would end up like Dad. She's in Florida now, amongst her ceramic cow figurines, crocheting garish beach totes—hideous objects meant to ward off any tastemaker retirees who might spirit her away. Just a blip, I say to myself, but then I look up and see the shabby-chic glamor of my Yolanda (her skin through the mud like peeling strips of Victorian wallpaper, freckled buds among cream), and I tighten my hold on the cube.

A pony hangs from a sling in the middle of a barn aisle in Indiana. His front right cannon bone is broken and in a thick white cast with a slight curve for the knee. He is a silver dun with patches of white on his head and belly and streaking his mane. His name is Snippet, and he is eleven years old and thirteen hands high. His past is unknown, though for a time he was likely owned by the Amish and used as an errand-running horse for the children. At some point he was neglected, and he ended up skeletal and shaking in an auction ring in Shipshewana, Indiana. There he was purchased, for sixty dollars, by Heart's Journey, an equine rescue nonprofit. After he was rehabbed, he became known as the Painting Pony, one of the few horses trained to lift a brush in his mouth, dip it into a bucket of paint, and press it to a large sheet of paper, again and again. Then he broke his leg.

His sling hangs from the rafters at four points, suspending him inches from the aisle floor. He is hooked to an iv that enters the arched muscle of his neck. Beneath him, white sawdust covers the concrete, and a Rubbermaid box filled with antibiotics, Vetrap, bandages, Betadine, bute, etc., is stored off to his right. His water bucket, grain pan, and hay net are propped up in front of him on a wooden cart. The stall doors, off to his right and left, are decorated with get-well cards. Most of these contain his crude likeness, drawn under rainbows or among a funnel cloud of hearts and stars. A few depict him painting, leaning back and dangling the brush from a dexterous
hoof. A tinfoil helium balloon that says “Get Well Soon” is tied around the stall bars, and a small herd of stuffed animals is tucked between them. One of Snippet's own paintings—irregular puffs of green, blue, and pink floating over a linear red scrawl—stands on an easel in the pony's view.

It had been Marti's idea to put the painting there. Her thought was that the painting might inspire the pony's healing, remind him of what he needed to get back to. Marti is one-half of Heart's Journey, the founder and
CEO
. She's the emotive one, the one whose mascara is forever running down her face (why does she even wear it?) as she weeps in empathy over an equine's pain. She's forty-seven, with the rough look of someone with a
past
—drugs, spousal abuse, jail time—all this seems inherent in the cut of her Carharts, the crispy taper of her long hair, the tremulous wrinkles that seem to rotate around her mouth as she speaks in that confidential half-whisper, as if she were in hiding with whoever is listening. She seems threadbare, fragile, ready to break down or apart, yet she is so at home at the edge of ruin that she seems interred there, no closer to destruction than she is from health. She is sitting on a grain sack in the feed room.

Her partner, Judy, is picking up all the medical flotsam that has washed up by the pony, as if he were the shore of a toxic sea. She kicks the dog away from a bloody wad of gauze; she rolls up the Vetrap, combines two nearly empty bottles of iodine. She picks up several syringes and fans them in her hand, as if their needles must be kept apart, then drops them all in the coffee can for sharps. Judy is forty-two; like a twelve-year-old girl left in the elements for thirty years, she is faded, with faint cracks for smile lines, but her childhood form is essentially unchanged, right down to the sloppy long hair and perky joint-floppiness that marks her movement. Unlike Marti, she seems fresh and healthful; she speaks with an insistent but soft voice, as if she knew her good common sense is disruptive enough and aims to dampen its inherent blows. Often she is the one pulling friends and family back from excess or irrationality; she is that steadying hand on
your shoulder before you do something rash. She cleans up around the pony and whistles in a strained and breathy way, like someone who has never really learned how. The barn is very quiet, apart from the padding of the dogs, the sighs and shifts of the pony, and the occasional plop of loose stool from him, which hits the aisle with a wet hiss.

Two vets are heading toward Heart's Journey. One is Dr. Jim, from Coldwater, a sixty-year-old large-animal vet who graduated from the land-grant college way back. He is extremely tall, with a concave thinness, like a sail full of wind. His hair is mostly white and his face has a grim, angular look whenever he is serious, which he rarely is. Most often, he's making smooth, small jokes to put people—taciturn farmers, waitresses, strangers waiting in a long line at the bank—at ease. He climbs into his truck adorned with the faded decal of a longhorn (though there are none in the area), turns the key, and smiles when an old George Jones song comes on. In the back of the truck, a canister of bull semen bounces like an antsy child as he eases over the dirt roads. He had to leave his dinner for this call, push his chair away from the peach cobbler and pull on his boots. As he laced up all the eyelets, his wife wrapped his pie slice in tinfoil and asked where he was going. “To see to the crazy ladies' horses,” he said, and she nodded. She was never in the habit of asking further questions.