Brian Evenson
A Report on Painting
For twelve years, I owned a house in P., though I never cared much for P. as a city. Now that I have moved, I do not miss the city at all. But I did, vaguely, care for the house, at least to some degree. Though it is also true that I hardly miss it either.
I painted the interior of the house four times during those twelve years, which seems like a ridiculously high number. I did not paint the entire interior each time, but I repainted a good portion of the house all four times.
I painted first when I bought the house and moved in, as a way, I suppose, of making the house mine. I covered the paint that was already there with a coat of paint of a slightly different shade, and then another coat, and then an additional one, until I judged the paint beneath to be completely invisible.
Eight years later, shortly after lung collapse and a severe infection that nearly killed me, I painted again. I was in incredible pain, fevered and clammy, somewhat delirious: I had been in the hospital for three weeks and I had lost 22% of my body weight. But I insisted on painting, perhaps hoping to see it as a new beginning. My ex-girlfriend, J.—still, barely, my girlfriend at the time (we would break up a few weeks later)—tried half-heartedly to stop me. A month after that, in a misplaced act of either guilt or altruism, I moved out of my house and into an apartment, leaving J. to live in the house I had just repainted.
I painted again a year and a half after that, when J. moved out and bought a house with a former friend of mine, also called J. I moved back in, bringing K., who I would marry, with me.
The fourth time came a few years later, as K. and I prepared to leave P. for good. The realtor told us we needed to repaint everything in white and light colors—it would help us to sell the house.
Did it help sell the house? In any case, the house sold. It is true that when K. and I moved here to V. we didn’t buy a certain house largely because of the paint. The interior walls had been deliberately painted to look like smoke-stained stucco. We felt like we had stumbled into a badly conceived Mexican restaurant.
Could we live in such a place? No, we could not.
Painting of this sort is like repression. You have something that you have experienced for years, and then suddenly, by your own volition, you cover it over. It’s still there, you still know it’s there, but you no longer see it. But unlike repression there’s rarely a return of the repressed—at least if you paint properly: roughing the walls, washing and drying them before you begin.
What have I repressed from my days in the house in P.? A lot, no doubt. Does it ever rise up? Yes, occasionally, but always in a way that makes me think of an old and ailing pet. Each time, it seems more and more a mercy to simply put the animal down.
When K. and I moved here, we decided to paint again. We did not want to live with the previous owner’s paint choices because we could not imagine them to be choices we ever would have made. We did not want to feel like we were guests in someone else’s life. We painted the interior of the house, but by the time we were ready to paint the final room, the converted attic, we were exhausted. We stopped.
A year and a half later, that attic still has not been painted. In some sense, it belongs to an earlier house, as if we have not yet claimed it.
The philosopher B. says of the attic: “Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear.” I do find this in our converted attic, but still I see it as someone else’s attic, not mine. In other words, someone’s thoughts are clear there—or rather here, since that is where I am writing this—but it is difficult to say exactly whose.
A Report on Breaks
A friend of mine, H., who had been struggling to lose weight ever since I first met him, suddenly over the course of half a year managed to lose a third of himself. In losing mass, he also lost the desire to do certain things. Before, he had been a chronic used book buyer—now he can’t enter a used bookstore. Before, he had obsessively watched sports on television. Now, if a football game is on, he can’t bear to be in the room.
When he told me this, I pretended to be surprised. I was not surprised. When I had nearly died six years before and had lost 22% of my body weight, something similar had happened to me. Not with sports but with books. I too had been a chronic used book buyer. Now I hardly bought any books at all. As for sports, I had never watched them in the first place.
I didn’t tell him this. Why? Perhaps because I didn’t want to puncture his sense of the uniqueness of his condition, perhaps because I didn’t want him to know that I, too, had changed. Instead, I let him believe that I was exactly as I had always been.
Is H. happier? Yes, definitely. Or someone, anyway, is happier. But is that someone still H.?
By which I also mean, of course, am I still me?
When I think back on it, it’s hard not to think of my whole life as a series of breaks, each new swerve making something new of me—if “me” is the right word to use. There’s a comfort in having them, in becoming something else in a way that each time leaves a part of myself, sometimes a very large part of myself, behind.
Writing these reports, too, is part of that. One day I wasn’t writing them and then, suddenly, circumstances in my life changed dramatically, I became someone else, and I began writing them, perhaps as a way of pretending to speak to the person I had been and no longer was.’
I fully expect to stop writing them just as suddenly as I began. One day, I simply won’t write them.
Or, in any case, someone won’t. It remains to be seen who that someone will be.
A Report on Ghosts
In the Mormon temple, marriage ceremonies take place in a room with mirrors set on the wall in such fashion that when you kneel at the altar you see your reflection echoing infinitely back, every image of yourself reproducing itself in miniature. This ceremony is called not a marriage but a sealing, with the idea that the husband will be sealed to the wife and the wife sealed to the husband, as if each is a piece of plumbing brought together and made watertight.
When I was sealed, I was told by the officiator, an old man wearing all white, that I was being nailed to my wife through the Masonic-style grip in which we held one another’s hands, my index finger resting on the inside of her wrist, and hers on the inside of mine. Not even God could break the seal, he told us. Nobody could break it but us.
As he spoke, I watched our terrified faces in the mirror, forever receding, more and more distant, eventually illegible, but never quite gone.
Now I am no longer Mormon, excommunicated by own choice, and I have yanked out the nail that ran through my own wrist and straight through the wrist of my now ex-wife. I did this willingly, of my own volition as Mormons say, as I used to say when I was still Mormon, though that did not make the divorce any less painful.
That was years ago. My ex-wife and I have gone on to wed other people, she re-employing that same Mormon nail and I relying on other, more worldly sorts of bindings, such as love.
And yet, very occasionally, I still think of those two terrified people, reflected infinitely, only just realizing how big of a step they are taking. I imagine that when our physical selves stood and left the altar, there were reflected selves so far removed, so deep within the mirror, that they never had a chance to leave the glass— that the attenuated ghosts of our newlywed selves remained there, trapped, well after our physical selves were long gone.
Years before, I had had the impression that the Mormon temple was a haunted place. I was nineteen and had just passed through the veil and into the celestial room. Suddenly I found myself in a thicket of ghosts, surrounded by palpable invisible presences. I am prone to such things, though I often wish I wasn’t. I could see nothing, but felt them there, swirling around me. It was exhilarating and terrible. It was the only moment in my life when I was in danger of believing in God.
But as I was being sealed in the Mormon temple that danger passed for good. A mirror must have broken, I thought about that other time, and the trapped ghosts of lost selves were suddenly free.
My own ghosts, or rather the ghosts of myself and my ex-wife, still remain trapped, like insects in amber. The mirror hasn’t broken yet. I go on, my ex-wife goes on, we live our separate lives, but the ghosts of our past selves remain trapped, kneeling, nailed to one another, unable to break free.
A Report on Monsters
E., a scientist who is also a writer, claims “We bear in our actual bodies traces of our formation out of the animal remnants of the past… we have been stitched together from the bones and tissues of creatures which are now extinct.” Evolution, in other words, gathers the raw material of the dead and gone to make, piecemeal, our current life.
Which makes me think of another scientist, a mad one, from a novel. F., who robs graves and stitches together sodden bits and pieces of many corpses to make a patchwork monster which he galvanizes into life. He dedicates years of his life to this project and yet, when the creature opens its eyes, a “breathless horror and disgust” fills him, and he is “unable to endure the aspect of the being” that he has created.
In the novel which gives us F. and his creature, the creature is never named. It is “the creature” or “the monster” or “the wretch” or “the demon” or—rarely, and due to a misunderstanding—“friend.” And yet, when readers speak of this creature, they generally refer to it and the scientist by the same name. The creature is F. and the scientist is F. As if creator and creature were one and the same.
If we accept E. at his word, perhaps they are. The monster is stitched together from the bones and tissue of the dead, but so, according to E., is F.
As are we all. We lurch forward, groaning, believing we are ourselves when we are little more than bits and fragments gathered from the dead and gone. Monstrous, we are galvanized to life when we would have been better left to expire.
But we will expire soon enough. And then we will serve as the bone and sinew and soft tissue of whatever monster replaces us.