I had been unemployed for thousands of years and felt haunted by the sensual fullness of it. Having reached advanced stages of loneliness, I could fritter hours away just rubbing lotion into my hands. I floundered in baths like Marat, limply reading old letters, an eye towards my mailbox which had sealed shut in disuse like a pierced ear. Miraculously in my supreme and terrible solitude I constantly felt the appraising eyes of those around me. I had to swat their eyeballs off my coat. Housemates and their interminable thoroughfare of new friends, men on the train. I felt naked as a glass frog, beating heart barely protected by skins that couldn’t even block the day’s white light.
I spent so much of that time in my life trying to collect little pools of silence from wherever it happened to spring up. There was never any sunset, just the unyielding sky, brighter than a sheet of white paper. You may read this and feel depressed, but I was not depressed, not in the clinical sense. The dullness of life was a skin that could be ruptured quite easily. Even the cheapest apples in the market betrayed unimaginable sweetness and left sugar on my lips. Women on the street wore coats in heartrending tones of red. I saw men speaking seriously in barber shops and children in windows sawing away at child-sized violins. These joys were never at odds with my solitude but were rather woven in and poking out of it, as you weave the pulled yarn back into a well-loved scarf.
It was in this state that I began to attend figure drawing classes in a loft with the idea I may get all warmed up. The artists took turns modelling. It was this drawing session, I think, which really taught me how to see. It’s not as if I had ever needed to raise my eyes above the horizon. To sit and consider the edges of anything is counter to the pace that was set by the past hundred years of steam. Few outlines really are so thick or dark.
One Thursday in May I walked loftwards in the moist evening with my materials. It was the first generous temperature of the year, and so there were far fewer in attendance. At this point, I had been drawing for months and had a smiling relationship with most of the artists, though it was too late to ask for any names. Pleasantries were more than enough for me who was starved for them. The freshness of the air and the clearness and hardness of the sky emboldened me that night. I drew with an arm that was looser and freer than it had ever been before. The windows were open and all the dust blew around.
An old man danced through a sequence of 30-second poses. An impossibly narrow woman reclined for fifteen minutes. I rather liked drawing her because it was easy. When you looked hard at her, her lines and angles seemed improbable. I remember showing drawings I had made of her, proud of their accuracy, to a friend who had never seen her. I could tell by his put-on kindness that he thought I had butchered her femininity. He doesn’t know what I saw, I remember thinking. He doesn’t know that she looks like a child’s drawing.
When she got up from her recline, the room waited. I was next.
As I settled into my pose, I felt like a painting in a Halloween castle, still with mad eyes that follow you around the room. Sit still for 5 minutes, sit as still as possible. Sit still for 30 minutes and try not to feel like a prisoner. The computer of my mind whirred and overheated. All the time I sat I didn’t put together that the group’s hard eyes and rapidly moving hands would result in drawings. At the end of the pose, I stretched out and felt a recalibration. The artists began to show one another their work. I could not recognize myself in any one of the drawings. It seemed each artist was only allowed one fragment of me. Almost recognizable were the near black eyes and the circles beneath them, the hips, the socked feet. But the ears were wrong, and the hair and hands, proportionate but not mine. Dozens of drawings, all distant cousins.
Shy and stricken, I consulted my reflection in the window but could only really see the figures moving behind me. Smiling with just my mouth I swiftly packed up my pencils and slipped out. The sky was black now, and the air warm and sweet. Pine Street bristled with cyclists like clipped little greyhounds. I hurried away so that none of my colleagues might follow me out and ask after me, following side streets and obsessively avoiding reflections.
When I came to cross at an intersection, I waited a moment under a streetlight and fixed my eyes to the pavement. Was this the end? My shadow fanned out around me, layering on itself. Long shapes spilled from beneath me and jutted in each direction like petals. I paused, fixating on the pile of shadows that met at my feet. I could feel people brush by me to cross the street but remained standing and staring under the light, the shadows cast by other pedestrians brushing past my own. I must have followed the regular route home that night, but can only really remember being shepherded by the shadow.
In bed the shadow passed over me again like a giant bending flower, the bowing head of a monk, and I felt its shade. At once my limbs filled with heat and an amorous, tawny heaviness overtook me. I hugged myself and slept a long, pleasurable, dreamless sleep, and woke up energized and flushed the next day as though I had shared my bed with a lover.