—hurt left by those who care leaves a hole that only love fills—
The darkness filled every corner and then skin shown too close. A cutaneous canvas smooth and devoid of features flown over. The topography of flesh cast in bold chiaroscuro and a face. The eye, nothing but. Closed. Opened. The pupil wandered, searched. Widening, a face, the face of a man. Shorn scalp and fine eyebrows, the only hair visible. Deep caverns for eyes and their movement disappeared, obscured by the shades. His face bloomed in the halflight, then withered to a forehead, nose, and chin. Shadows long. There was no movement then. A face invisible but a body grew in view. Emaciated, ribs peeked through the darkness, all corners, sharp elbows and knees, a long body origamied.
Encased by a hole, the man sat and waited. For many minutes there was nothing but a cough and a readjusting of body parts, an attempt or three at comfort. Dirty and hairless and nude, the hole shovelled into the earth. The man looked up, his face bathed in light for a moment. Gone. A hand over the skin of his bare head, the sound grated through the silence. And silence set. And movement stilled. The man’s face dropped in and out of light and dark, a battlefield around him between the shadows and the filtered light. Their movement and appearance followed no logic and disintegrated naturalism. The shadows grew like teeth, like a mouth, and swallowed first his head and reached down over his shoulders, but the light took back the arms and the crossed legs, then it flipped. The face shown bright, the extremities obliterated. Thin lips and a straight narrow nose etched from skeletal features. High cheekbones and a pointed chin on either side of cavernous cheeks that no light penetrated. Movement, closing in, following his skin once more from his right knee to his stomach and round him up his spine, each vertebrae cracking skin, to his neck. round and round, and slowly up swirling cyclically about his head at an increasing pace until there was only flashed brightness and dizzying darkness, and then the hole above, so far above, so bright above, and spinning still, but it slowed and then stopped and traced the wall of dirt, the shovelhead’s force, the mark of human hands, of fingernails, of despair.
Back to the man, the back of his head and downward to his back, the in and out of his breathing, the way his back expanded and contracted, and then shuddered violently and seized with a cough. He reached to scratch his back and the mechanisations of his physiognomy, sinew and bone so clear, scratching through the thin sheen of dissolving skin, so long since sunlight.
Twist and his jaw chewed on nothing, chewed on dreams, on memories, a tooth fell from between his lips and then another and blood followed, but a hand to understand did not. It rolled down his chin and he spit. His eyes stared far as the blind away through the dirt inches from his face.
Far away, at the top of the hole, perhaps, or in an adjacent hole, maybe, fingertips grazed piano keys, not in song, but in experimentation. Testing each sound, each key, drawing an audiographical map on his face. Each key punctured his expression, his deadeyes and absent chewing jaw raining teeth and rivers of blood.
The body’s in the seats shifted uncomfortably and murmurs pierced the illusion of celluloid. Hundreds of humans staring together at a large screen in the southeast of France in late May. The film continued but the crowd’s impatience loomed. Twenty minutes of film already passed and nothing but a dirty bald frail man sitting in a dirthole. He did not move because there was no where to move, no room to do anything but sit, and so he sat, he coughed, he bled, his teeth fell, but nothing.
Riveted to his seat, his eyes never fading beneath the screen’s glare, an octogenarian sits between three women. To his left is a young asian woman who sits beside a middle aged caucasian with dark hair and a face that held onto its beauty. To his right sits another middle aged white woman, not as pretty, rugged and unrefined. All three women cried, the tears streaking the face they wore to the premier. His eyes remained dry but the fist in his throat choked. His breathless glassy gaze swallowed each and every instant lived on screen. Every moment of the man in the hole and the unbroken eye of the camera lens.
The man there, on the screen, he stood and stretched. His penis dipped in and out of shadow revealing his jewish heritage. The war of shadow and light never ceased and violence escalated as the man’s movement increased. A lightshow of absence and ablutions, of dissolution and absolution, carved into the skin by the chaos blaring from the piano, still far away or buried nearby, played as if by a child with wooden hands and glass eyes and metal ears. The camera connected to no time or geometrical boundaries moved as if tied to a serpent’s head as it glided and spun, revolved and orbited, dived and soared.
Halfway through the film the unrest of the humans turned intolerable and the man in his seat was torn for an instant from the man in the screen when heads disrupted the illusion. Bodies standing and walking and leaving, grumbled whispers, hisses, outright single syllable condemnations broke the sound and the man in the seat in the cinema in the southeast of France late in May during a film festival lost the thread that had woven round him. He watched them go, nodded, a frown pushed his lower lip over his upper, and then attention cut out the humans in the theatre and returned to the man in the screen in the hole in the past.
For eighty seven minutes the film lasted. For eighty seven minutes the unbroken take lasted. For eighty seven minutes a man sat in a hole. When the credits rolled, the jeers struck, the boos, the hisses, the shouts of indignation, demanding why this lost film had not stayed lost. The three women beside the man still cried, whether from sorrow over the film or sorrow over the film’s reception. The man returned to the world of the present when the humans erupted in anger and dismay. He looked around, nodded, frowned, pushing his lower lip over the upper, and pulled his hat low. He shook the hand of the young asian woman beside him, thanked her, his voice rattled, tears that did not come rang in his vocal chords, but she did not hear over the humans.
He watched the postfilm interview with the asian woman, Miho Takitani. It lasted two minutes and one question: Who cares about Sebastian Falke?
I do, she said, and walked off stage to much booing, hissing, and jeering.
The man sat at the bar where no one spoke french but neither did they speak english. The jeers did not stop and the entire festival turned on the film that never should have been unburied. He drank two glasses of red wine and walked to the beach, wandering from encroaching violence. The sunset long past, the moon smiled, but not at him or for him. He steadied himself and slowly kicked off one shoe, then the other. He bent at the waist, reached out a hand to the shoes, gave up, and stood upright again, his breath shallow, his frown stuck to his face since the film ended. Loosening his tie, he walked to the shore. The sea danced over the sand and cooled his feet, a sigh dropped from his frown, eyes closed. The stars, numerous and luminous. One shined brighter than the others far away at the spot where sea and sky greet and meet each night and day.
He stood there for minutes and then walked up and down the beach until midnight. A woman appeared beside him and his heart beat too hard when he noticed her watching him.
She did not say anything but stood so close he felt the sadness of her life. It was the woman from the theatre, the unpretty one. He glanced at her, then the stars, her, stars, her, stars, sand, sea, stars, her. She watched, not him, but the one star brighter than the others.
That’s him, she said, I know it.
He looked at her and she looked back, his frown already in place. He averted his eyes but she did not, so he put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle.
He whistled the song to an old film that he composed the music for. Another lost film about a young girl who carries the souls of the dead to the ocean.
The woman began to whistle with him and he stopped, stared back at her, but she was lost to the stars once more, whistling a song he had written before she dreamt of being born, lost nearly as long. He studied her but there was no answer for him to the question he did not ask.
He sat down with great effort, rolled up his trouser legs, and let the waves take them.
Did you know him, she said when the whistling stopped.
He frowned and nodded but she was not looking at him so he said Yes.
She sat, put her arms around him, pressed her head to his shoulder. I miss him, she said. The tears crawled through the fabric of his suit and reached his aged skin. He put a palm to her cheek and patted it once.
She helped him stand and his breath was gone. They walked, him through the waves, smiling, her on the beach, behind, crying, watching that one star.