Perfectly Perverse Love; as in, Statuesque
By: Patrick Bruning
She walked by again today. This is the forty-ninth day, forty-ninth business day that is, in a row since I began counting. I’m feeling weary so I’m in a sitting down position on my metallic black stool, right ankle resting on the left knee and, because there is a bit of an overcast, my left hand acts as a visor over my eyes. She walked by, again, at 10:33 a.m., twenty-seven minutes ago, just like every other day. My stare, just like every other day, is directly at the clock tower just across the other end of the park; and as I wait for the giant, my best estimate two meter-long, minute hand to make eight more rotations around that same circular face, I do not make a single move.
My eyes do not twitch except for the occasional blink I take to maintain moisture in them, of course peripherally scanning to ensure no one is viewing my art at the time. I’ve become quite impressive at regulating my blinking, narrowed down to only four times a minute. My hair, perfectly hardened with maximum strength hairspray does not budge in the five mile-per-hour gusts that the air today contains. My hands, the left one keeping it’s horizon with my brow and the right loosely gripping it’s resting foot, which has been falling asleep for the past eighteen minutes, are expertly still, as always. Inside my black boots, the one sheltering my infuriatingly drowsy foot, I do what I can to keep my toes moving, discretely of course, to keep blood circulating in the elevated leg. My suit and pants, the same spray painted metallic black as the stool and boots, lay stiffened, concrete, on my motionless posture, and there is a squirrel collecting the fall harvest from the chestnut tree I sit under. My spot. This squirrel is used to my presence by now, and I his, he often sits under my stool, when I bring it that is, and silently breaks open and eats the nuts he works so hard to manage. The spider web of lines that the skin on my hands boast, canyons on the palm, different from anybody else’s in the world, crack the black makeup I’ve put on them; the same black makeup I’ve always put on them, and the same cracks always occur. This is the only sign that I am, indeed, a living human. It has dawned upon me more recently that this cracking adds to my art, personalizes it in a way, gives it my signature. My face, clearly, provides the same roughly metallic hue that the rest of my body offers. Not one drop of sweat drips from my onyx temples, my steel hair, my obsidian chin. I sit, still and calm, motionless yet collected, letting any pedestrian who may recognize it look in wonder at not only my discipline but, yes again I will say it, my art. I am a professional.
The town’s skyline, depending on a suitable definition of skyline to determine if it can be called that, gleams in the October sun, which one should think from my position was directly above the colonial clock tower, centered in the skyline, the pride of the town, the same at which I perpetually gaze. A luscious mixture of greens and yellows reflect from the sun’s beams off of the neatly cut blades of grass, every one of them, and stimulate my vision. As do the scores of townspeople on their daily trudges to they’re chosen, whether intentionally or not, paths of life. As do the birds and bugs in the sky, wistfully flying past, around, and through these paths of said people. The same birds everyday, the same people everyday, though different, and I have the pleasure of complacently viewing the wondrous spectacle of these interweaving paths. Despite the similarity between images, each image after another, the beautiful delicacy of watching lies in the finer details. Not only does each townsperson possess a different set of crevices washing over the palms of their hands, but in a similar way each moment’s pause contains a set of D.N.A so utterly different from the one just before it.
The bird that flies past my ear every afternoon at roughly 1:17 came on my right side yesterday, and the left the day before. And while this of course has no significance to the daily walk of the elderly man and his equally elderly dachshund who passes at 5:20 p.m. from my left always; of course, walking through the park to reach The Vintage Coffee House, of which his son is the owner, for his standard decaf black and cream cheese danish, eagerly waiting for his boy to get off so they can chat. Or the thirty-some couple on their morning jog passing me at 8:20 a.m.- she going to work soon since she walks by again an hour later, he staying home with the two year old daughter. Or her, at 10:33. The details are simply what makes life exciting. I am but the simple audience.
My path, everyday, business day that is, leads me to this very spot. Where I sit and stand and contort and then remain perfectly motionless. Some people, like the elderly man, Todd, he’s told me on a number of occasions, actually come up and speak at me. Some people toss money into the briefcase I lay open in front of myself each day. Enough people toss money into my briefcase. So, as a humble and toilsome existence I manage to come here, everyday, and watch. I am homage to the human soul, the human life. By remaining still, I pay tribute to the movement our population has achieved, in every respect. I am fascinated as each individual meanders past my vague form in the backdrop of his or her moments. I am nothing but an image, an image of human experience, in all of its perfection and perversion alike. It is seen in my patience. I do not speak, I do not move, I do not make a sound. For to do so would create an entirely different moment, a less perfect one. I am void of all sensory experience except in that I am to be sensed by others, to be felt. This is my art.
I feel her, though. I know when she is coming, when that symbol of beauty breaks from my peripheral subjection and introduces true life into my visage. What a thing to happen daily, if only for a moment. Forty-nine days, from when I began counting, I’ve looked forward to and been blessed with an instance of perfection in the most perverse, human sense. Aesthetically pleasing is a combination of words not in the dictionary to my art, as it says nothing. Sure the standards of what the world calls beautiful in a woman are there in her; nevertheless, true beauty is something unable to be spoken, unable to be thought, it is simply a knowledge one must recognize. I wait for her head to turn as she walks by me everyday in that second, not that I could ever react. I will not react, I will never. Yet when she sees me, if she feels me, providing the universe won’t collapse, any tragedy in the world will cease.
At 7:00 p.m., everyday, after scanning the park to ensure secrecy, I reemerge as a life form, capable of emotion and sentience and kinesis. In my suitcase sits sixty dollars and eighty-two cents, a below-average day. I walk away through the darkness of the park, not to be seen again until I’m found the next morning as another statue, another chilling form of prototypical human life, allegorically trapped in a single moment…
…Today is Friday, 8:00 a.m., and I have settled into a position with a little more strain to it than yesterday’s relaxed, seated one. Because of the atmosphere carrying a stronger breeze to it a tweed flat cap of the same black hue as the rest of my body and clothing rests on my head, bill facing forward. I stand with one foot, my left, in the same direction as my of the cap’s bill, facing the central knoll of the park, and the other positioned on top of my shorter stool perpendicular from its counterpart. My left hand waits on my backside, half-open, dangling. My right hand reaches out, though not extending, merely letting it hang in the air at my waistline, the same height above the ground as my left one. My position is one that embodies a struggle with wanting to be needed. My hand, outstretched, calling to attention the canyons on my palms as the apricot hue streaks through the coal colored skin, reaches out to be felt. Not touched; no, felt. Today is Friday, and at the end of the day I must go home and wait the abhorring weekend to return, taking my regular Saturday night shift loading and unloading shipments at the potato chip factory on the outskirts of town. Fridays remain the most peculiar day of the workweek, where everyone has a jovial sense of disregard but carries out the same exact mundane tasks as the four days prior. I make my most money on Fridays; Fridays are where I am most artistic. To leave an impression to last for my viewers over the two days, to have them ponder me whilst not observing, that is my objective.
The clock tower reads 10:32 and my adored has yet to appear through my peripheral vision. I stand, fortified and petrified in my persistently static form. A form of subconscious weakness. My pupils inspect the margins of my sight, catching every finite detail of each moment, looking into the moments themselves. A pair of young boys fifty meters away at thirty degrees have a war with their kites in the air, running and laughing and pushing one another over. Twenty meters stage right of them lies a middle-aged woman, assumingly one of their mothers, with her head buried into a book. To my direct left ten meters away, the direction from which she ought to have arrived by now, two older men, mid-sixties, play a game of chess as another stands over the table, arrogantly instructing each one on which move to make. A white knight is pummeled by the black queen, an obvious trap from the white army. The man standing jeers at the commander of the black forces when he realizes the inherently approaching checkmate and high-fives the enemy who is smirking proud. A cardinal sits in the tree forty-five feet to my right, resting its tired wings, before it takes off again while the chipmunk in the branch underneath sprints into a hole in the bark, nut in hand. A man of roughly my age, twenty-seven, wearing corduroys and a navy blue thermal shirt slows his walking and with a forced smile drops three one-dollar bills into my briefcase, barely glancing up into my eyes though contact is never made. 10:35 and I am in agony. The thought that she will not walk past me today begins to situate itself into reality.
The kites stop in mid-air, the wind excusing itself from existence. Faintly, I see the woman halt her turning of her page, mid stride of the wrist. The page in her still hand, still as mine, standing upright over the crease of the book. In the preliminary stages of a new game, this time the man who was standing participating in place of the embarrassed loser, the first pawn taken by another is held frozen with the previous winners hand in a gorgeous action pose. Though not entirely at a halt, these images and the rest of them move as slow as they ever have. Abnormal. I can see all of them happening at once, as if every action were deliberately braking for my full examination. She is near. I can feel her.
On the border of my peripherals, her walking feet break the threshold of my vision and I do not budge. The sky and air turn a dull gray as her legs slowly reflect more and more of themselves through my eyeballs. Black, two-inch heeled shoes make way into cornflower-hued stonewash jeans. There is a slight rip on the knee of the left leg. As I stand there, rooted to my position, impossibly inert, a plaid button down shirt hangs flowingly just above the sensational thighs. Unzipped, a black leather jacket hugs her torso and its checkered coverer alike, met by a pastel green silk scarf wrapped around her neck three times with ample room to spare. Her face. Like the hue of a creamy bisque, blemish free, with porcelain consistency and the softness of a feather, her face is halting. Halting to the point where I could not move if I so desired. I would not move though, if I could. Her hair avalanches past her cheeks and neck in stunning curls a sharp maroon, covered on the other side by a hood to a black sweat-jacket invisible from the front behind the leather.
Manufactured, no doubt. As am I, however; as every human is. That is all I know about her, and that is all anyone can know. What isn’t manufactured are moments, what is are the lives in between them. In this moment as I perversely observe it, hoping for her to feel my art as I feel hers, she is crying. Her eyes stare roughly twenty degrees below eye-level at the ground in front of her, and her head slants forward as a result, the hood creating more of a barrier from the world than anything else. Her arms cross over themselves, grasping their opposing sides. Entering the center of my scope of vision, she barely unfolds her arms, only reaching her far one up to wipe her running nose. To do so she lifts her head up to a straighter position, revealing her watering cerulean eyes. Her vision, on the fiftieth day since I began counting, meets mine for the first time.
Now the world at a complete standstill, the universe is collapsing. No, she feels me. In a single solitary instant, she flashes a smile, a natural, raw one, re-crosses her arms and assumes her head back to the concrete path through the grass. Movement through the moments returns to its standard pace, the kites dancing once more, the woman on to her next page, the man removing his hand from slamming the adversary pawn. What a thing to behold! And again, until the next day, business day that is, she is out of my sight.
The moments smoothly flow through each other, unlike they ever have before, as usual. People observe me and give me money. They look at my outstretched hand and walk around me, laughing and mocking, appreciating and respecting, thinking and assessing. Some know art, others don’t. Some feel art, others don’t. I feel her, still, at 6:45 p.m., long after Todd’s walked by and given me his nod and friendly wave, knowing full well it won’t be reciprocated. The kite flyers have gone home, and the chessboards are as bare as the grassy knolls themselves. It is simply I alone, a statuesque, perverse human who populates the park. Doing my art for fifteen minutes more, until the weekend comes and no one notices the moments of their lives. I, once again, break my motionlessness, collect my eighty-three dollars and seventy-five cents and walk through the dark home…
… It is raining today, Monday, and the park will largely remain void because of the inclemency. Save for the morning business commuters by foot, like her, no one will spend their time today tossing the Frisbee; meeting a friend, acquaintance, or date for a stroll; painting the skyline of the town; having a picnic. I remain here, my spot, right now 9:36 a.m., an iconographic representation of human incidence. I will make few dollars today, but the art is invaluable. As per usual on days like today, I sit on my stool, feet a few inches apart on the bottom rung, facing forward. My left arm rests in a prototypical fashion over its congruent thigh, horizontal with the ground. Slouching a bit, my right elbow crisply touches its thigh, and extends to my hand holding a black, umbrella shielding me from the revealing splashes of the precipitation.
I wonder if she will recognize me from the exchange early Sunday morning as I was walking home from the factory, connect the dots that she saw my mortal, living face; notice that it was me, the guy who pretends to be the statue in the park, that she arbitrarily walked through me with another man in a drunken stupor. I doubt it. I hope not. It would be hard to notice anyone during an argument of that proportion, though I wish I could’ve briefly captured what the issue itself was. The clock tower is barely visible from this distance and I can faintly make out, only because of the light inside, the straight line made by the minute and hour hand at 10:20. The roofs of the town, none taller than a story below the clock tower’s summit, blend into the fog of the late morning, making it seem as if they go on forever. Birds in flight appear and disappear in moments notice, trying to find shelter with intention but futility nonetheless. The squirrel who relishes sitting under my stool shows no trace of his existence.
She is arriving, her hood again covering her maroon waves and creamsicle face. This time it shields her from external wetness, rather than internal. A vinyl coat, the green scarf, duck boots and, as far as I can tell, the same cornflower pants, complete her rainy day outfit. 10:33 on the dot, she seems back to the same routine and the stomach of the sky rumbles a deep tone, mischievous. She mustn’t know who I really am, what this image truly looks like. She couldn’t. She pauses her stride directly in front of me as the world continues its regularly scheduled proceedings. The rain is falling at a rushing pace. Some would allude to cats and dogs about it, I prefer the prospect of bullfrogs. All the same, the world continues its clockwork, normal movement through moments, while she stops. It is intentional, I know, as our visions meet once again, her doing. That’s right, bullfrogs falling from the sky.
She couldn’t have seen me in her overly occupied state, I guarantee it. The rain rolling off from every direction of my umbrella barely gives me the capacity to see another one of her raw, unbelievable smiles, as she turns and paces towards me, keeping it on. As she bends over in front of me, her eyes peer right through mine, noticing and accounting for all of my thoughts, all of this, in terms of corporeal things. Her smile, not overwhelmingly friendly, but quaint, natural, widens my eyes. She places a bill with the face of Abraham Lincoln in the briefcase sheltered under my stool, the proximity is almost too much to bear. The world is closing in on itself. Bullfrogs. Despite the heaps of water torrentially splatting over her body and my vinyl dome erect above mine, my eyes grow thirstier as each fleeting moment blends into another, our visions still concurrent. She is staring into me, and as still as my body remains, one could hardly tell I am breathing, my eyelids must touch and quench their incessantly needy refugees, the balls from which I see. I blink, as quick as I can in hope she may miss it, how she could is impossible. She doesn’t. Her smile turns into an expression of bewilderment and intrigue, as if she actually believed I wasn’t alive. Most would question it, I’d hope, but I never expected her. My art is ruined, I am weak and overcome. Now she knows: I live. This individual who she passes everyday is real. There is no recognition on her face, though, she is enticed; she feels me. Sensing my mortification, her smile returns, somewhat abruptly and settles into misshapenness. Perfect. Perverse.
“My name is Jill,” she says, at length. Her stare breaks and she looks to the ground, her feet sunken an inch into the mud now- my stool much deeper. “I’ll.. uh.. see you tomorrow?” She pauses, considering her question. Embarrassed, endearing, she counters herself. “Right I guess you’re not allowed to respond… I guess. Or uhh, stay dry.” She pointed at me with a smile as she backed up, turning around completely before she finished pronouncing the long i in dry and continuing on her way. Hardly breathing, I blink again as she walks away, the only movement I dare make. The universe is still here, reality intact. She still feels me though too, I know it.
My position tomorrow will be in mid walking stride. The left foot trailing the right as my torso will gradually upwards turn ninety degrees so I will be able to see the clock tower, obviously. In my right hand dangling down, perpendicular to the ground, I will hold a pail of water, this rain water. In my left hand more importantly, I will hold up a sign that simply introduces myself. Jack.
*
…I’ve lost track of how many days in a row since I began counting that Jill has walked by me. She stops everyday now, not always to give me money, more often to talk at me. February, yet unreasonably warm for the time of the year. Typically she keeps her similar appearance with her leather jacket and scarf with the hood resting halfway atop her head. She owns three pairs of pants that she wears regularly. Her rotation goes cornflower stonewash jeans, black jeans and khaki cargo. Her place of work every weekday morning, shift starting at 11:00 a.m., is the corporate bookstore across town, she lives a block west of the park. When she started stopping regularly and began greeting me, “Hey Jack, how are you today?” to which I quite clearly will never give a reply, she always arrived one minute earlier than the business day before. Eventually, she settled at 9:47; waking up at 9:00, leaving her apartment she shares with her boyfriend at 9:35. This is what she’s told me. She loves beginning her mornings talking at me. This is what she tells me. I share the sentiment. She is no longer merely adored, she is my angel.
9:40 and she must be on her way towards my stare again. Not often does she anymore gaze at eye level with me, though in early November that is what our meetings consisted of. Now that she has more time to sit with her blonde coffee, a sugar and a splash of two percent, she sits on the ground under me, telling me facts about herself I only cherish hearing, needing more every time she says, “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow?” Never quite realizing I won’t respond. I remain as still as ever around her. Committed in giving her my art. In giving the world hers and mine. The stationary statue, her companion, the only steadfast thing from moment to moment to moment.
Yesterday, she sat telling me of her boyfriend, whose existence devastated me the first time I heard of it. She complains about him regularly, however, and I’ve gathered that he is the individual I saw with her that Saturday night in October, drunk and fighting. They continue to fight, she tells me. He doesn’t respect her, I know. He doesn’t feel her, I’m positive of, because only I do. I must remain still and halted however, for the world will not comprehend each capacity of the human experience without me. She will not know the complexity of her own being, fleeting from moment to moment but the same person throughout, just as I am the same thing, always. Barely a person, myself.
She requests ways for me to position myself, and I oblige typically, embracing and feeling and expanding her art through my medium. Yesterday, she asked me to “be in a romantic position;” that I should show the beauty of human affection, the veritable combination of perfection and perversion. An awfully vague suggestion. So, in my black make up and black suit and black hair and black everything I kneel, inert, my right knee touching the ground, my left knee upright over its attached foot. My left hand rests behind my back, slightly palsied and open, relaxed, with the elbow bent to hug my torso around the back. My right hand extends forward, reaching upward slightly. The charcoal skin exposing the cracks again, impossible to remedy. In my right hand is, outstretched into those scores of people, a red rose, supported by a foot long, three thorn, stem. The first time I have ever incorporated color, reflected light, into my art. This is no standard red either. It is a dazzling scarlet, the petals the same softness as her flawless face; the thorns the same sharpness as her entire existence. Defined, natural. Raw. Nothing else in the world like that rose, like the canyons on my hands, like her. She is approaching. Bullfrogs.
Before she can manage the “Hey Jack, how are you doing today?” She runs up laughing hysterically, relishing every brief moment. Looking into my eyes and back at the rose and laughing. I do not budge. She will never make me move, even if I wanted to. The straight expression I have on my face everyday is enough laughter for her it seems, as she continues enjoying my interpretation of human affection.
“I love it, Jack. Well done.”
I am elated and unspeakably charmed knowing I’ve succeeded in another request for my art. She assumes her seat on the ground next to me, not removing her eyes from my profile from the position she is seated. In my peripherals I see her not blinking either, and just past her the three men are back for their weekly chess tournament. Scanning the park, the scene is serene. Surreal. I feel no perversion. Everyone is doing everything just because that is how it is to be done. Nothing behind it. Nothing tangentially human about today. Perfect art. Jill stays as still as I for sometime, not saying anything. Staring at me stare at the world.
“I’ve left him,” she says. “I’m moving out this weekend and staying with my sister. I’ll still come through the park to see you, so don’t get worried, couldn’t tell if you were anyways though.”
Momentarily, I was petrified. She is explaining that is was time for her to do her own thing and go her separate way. Separate way? I worry what she expects or thinks of me. I am not a person. I am not a social thing that makes decisions and lives a life. I am a piece of art. She knows this, I know. She feels my art. I am allowed to feel truly only the experience of other people feeling me. She is telling me where her sister lives, an area where a route through the park is easy to manage. 10:33 already and she must leave for work.
“Yeah well I um figured I’d like you to know that. Thanks for the rose,” she chuckles, biting her bottom lip as she carefully slides the stem through my fingertips into her possession. Her eyes twinkling at mine, and her voice chuckling, she smells it and spins it around controlled around her nostrils. Not breaking her eye contact, hesitating at first, she begins to bend over. Bullfrogs. The world is collapsing. I can feel the rumbling. The apocalypse is nigh. Unaware of the fact, she continues leaning, until the static electricity on her cheek barely raises the miniscule amount of hair on mine creating a tense energy and I feel my jaw tighten. She feels me, the art, and in an instant presses her lips to my cheek, holding them there for roughly four seconds. A few passersby cock their heads at the peculiar sight of the strange statue man in the park being kissed by the beautiful girl who curiously sits with him every morning, but most are obtusely unaware. My high is hallucinatory, all sensory perception is in free fall, and the atmosphere offers a tint of goldenrod to the otherwise cloudy, dreary morning. My innards crescendo, though my body does nothing. This moment is the only universe. Her wet lips moisten the paint upon my face and I can notice it being lifted off as she pulls them away and resumes eye contact with me, reaching into her pocket and placing a slit of paper into my briefcase. An imperfection! Reality remains, but mine does not. I see that the paper contains seven digits in successive order. When recognizing that I’ve seen what the slit of paper contains she nods, black smudge on her lips, and says in her angelic voice, “I need to know who you really are. What you really are. But I gotta go, I’ll seeya tomorrow?” Can’t quite grasp it is the only thought flowing through my brain. I will not move. I will not respond. I love my Jill, but I must convey my art. I am a professional. Bullfrogs.
When she has turned and walked away I blink, watering my desolate eyeballs. The perversion! My skin is bare for the remainder of the day. I am trapped in art that does not fully give the illusion of separation yet involvement, capability yet struggle, the human experience. I am weak and overcome. More so than ever. Still as a sleeping sloth I remain in the position without a flower and without makeup on my cheek…
… 7:00 p.m. and when the coast is clear I remove myself from my standard trance and, coming to my feet scream at the indecent art. The poor display of understanding and comprehension. It is not her fault, it is mine. I invited her with my motion. If I had remained a single moment like I was supposed to, like my job requires of myself. I feel her now, and I know she feels me at this instant too. What movement through the moments, to have the privilege of observing is never to remain untainted in this world of humanity. With fifty-two dollars and seven sequential numbers acquired, I walk home blended with the darkness of the winter night, except for the spot on my cheek…
**
My position today is one of exquisite perfection, truly raw humanity, redemptive of my flaws for which I claim fault for yesterday. The first time I’ve ever mimicked a pre-existing statue, another work of art in itself. Like the triumphant Greek titan depicted world round, the Rockefeller Plaza centerpiece, I hold over my head a terrestrial globe disconnected from its base, painted over in a black acrylic on the oceans, light grey on the land. I resemble Atlas, carrying the burden of the mortal world, only to be gazed at in wonderment of how one keeps the composure for so long and not relapse into human subjection and weakness. My body, the same black, shadowy, hue stands straight upright, feet shoulder-length apart. My body looks up at the earth I hold outstretched above myself. Not the classical depiction of the celestially governing man, who carries the earth on his back, I represent the awe to which mankind has grown to become. I am void of personal subjugation, my posture bellows through the park, and more people than ever before stand in front of me, stopping their daily trudges to their perverse lives. Even at 8:25 in the morning, my briefcase is more full than a typical day by 2:00 p.m. The world will not collapse so long as I continue to show it to everyone, holding it upright, making them recognize the brevity yet fluidity of each moment, so fragile. A splash on the sidewalk darkens the tan concrete to a dull brown. And another. The clouds thicken and the bright green knolls transform into a dirty asparagus. Like a pepper shaker seasoning a dish, the ground grows darker as the sun ceases to exist. A magnificent bolt of lightning crashes through the sky, seemingly missing my proverbial clock tower by mere inches. The same upset stomach the atmosphere had in late October has worsened into the flu, belching and bellowing and moaning at the ground below. The park is quickly void of anything living, spectators and walkers run to their destinations, leaving me alone with the reality, the adhesive keeping it from dismantling itself. The forecast of the day gave a ten percent chance for scattered thunderstorms, a chance I idiotically overlooked committed to my form for today. I must maintain my art, the art of the world, for everyone, for her. She needs to see, she needs to feel. Despite my inability to overcome my qualities of sentience, of knowing I exist and I have these emotions, I will never submit to them. I represent suppression and, equally as much, separation. Patience. Never to reveal my true form, my perversity.
9:30 and the splashes abruptly turn into fluid streams falling from the heavens. Waves perpetually crashing onto the earth. Lightning sending currents less frequently, yet enough to maintain the thunder vibrating throughout reality, which is beginning to crack. Bullfrogs. No, not bullfrogs. Not this time. This time only a revealing of my pink pigment underneath my charcoal exterior, dripping down my arms and the side of my face. Washing away and flooding my skin. I remain still, of course, offering my world to the rain as sacrifice. Embracing the clean. She is approaching, I notice, the only true life form in the park.
My skin is bare, like hers, unhidden and human. She must see me like this, I know, recognizing that I’m no different from when I have the black on. I am no social being, capable of living. I will not budge, I do not, as she enters the axis of my vision for another time. She stops directly in front of me, first glaring at the soggy globe above my head, then fixating on me, drinking my true form in, noticing every detail of this infinite moment. Another lightning crash and she jumps a little at the roar of the sky, bidding her leave. She resists, knowing I will never make a single motion. She feels me, she knows art. The moment continues; two statuesque beings, one keeping the world intact, myself merely holding its representation in the simple terms of the species which claims to understand it best. We are the only reality, her and I, and we are its masters. This park, us the only things in it, despite the contents of my artificial orb, holds the sole location instantiate in the world. She fidgets, reincorporating the rest of mankind into our existence, breaking the mutual stare.
She turns, and I sneak a blink. Watering my eyes amidst the ocean falling from the sky. Looking back at me, saying nothing, she steps and continues to work, rain pummeling both of us. Once thirty meters to my barely still in my peripheral vision, she repositions her head in front of her, away from the statue man in the park. Away from Jack, her Jack.
Another figure appears from my horizon in the peripherals, behind me. He walks unusually close to my Jill. Struggle. I slightly, for the first time ever, turn my head to the right less than five degrees, angling my eyes to the far corner of each lid. The slightest of movements. She is fighting the figure, the man, dressed in all black, big hood covering the larger proportion of his face. Physically battling. The two tug back and forth her handbag between their hands. Within seconds, the man’s strength wins the battle and pushes her to the wet ground, collecting the bag in his possession. He runs in the same direction from which he came, towards the clock tower out of the park. Out of sight in moments, she remains on the floor, sitting now. Shocked, terrified, appalled.
She looks to me, noticing I moved ever so slightly, my gaze matching hers from the thirty meters. She arises to her feet, for the first time moisture from her eyes matching that from the atmosphere, impossible to hide. Again, a moment to last for infinity. A human, a feeling thing, glaring at an I don’t know what. The human, my Jill, unable to comprehend the art. The world is keeping itself together. I hold nothing. Merely an image, a perverse image, exalting a globe into the air. Art for no one to see. Art for no one to feel. She again, turns her head, betrayed. She doesn’t feel anything; however, she knows. I will never move, not for her, not for anything. Only I remain…
***
...I’m feeling weary today so I’m in a sitting down position on my stool, painted metallic black like the rest of me used to be. The squirrel underneath my stool, my spot, frolics in the happy springtime air, unconcerned with the winter months from now and collecting any sort of harvest. Birds fly past me and the rest of the people populating the park with chess, picnics, kite flying and ball playing. Both of my feet face forward firmly on the ground, knees bent ninety degrees. My body hangs over my legs, hunched over as both of my elbows dig into their respective thighs. My head hangs with my body, hands covering my eyes facing down to the ground. I look at nothing except the inside of my canyoned palms. Blackness, like my stool, like my old make up and spray paint and clothes. My neck cranes up into an upright position, scanning the park with not only my peripherals, but my entire head as well. I gaze, gathering every detail moment to moment to moment. To observe this beautiful scene of infinite moments, one never the same as any from the past, is true art.
I stand from my stool, pick it and only it up, no briefcase containing a fair amount of money. 11:00 a.m., and I turn around from my spot and begin make strides away from the grassy knolls, the kite flyers, the joggers, the elderly chess players, and the remainder of moment creators in the park, a simple location different but the same from any place on earth. I hold no reality together. There is no universal collapse. There are no bullfrogs falling from the sky. There is only the human experience, perfect and perverse in all its achievement and failure.
Today is the forty-ninth day, well business day that is, that she has not walked past me.