Who They Weren't (II)

He was sitting near the window at a concourse in an airport he’d never visited before, sketch pad opened on a knee, pen at attention over a clean sheet of paper. This his traveling habit—to wait for an interesting face to present from a crowd. It was four days before Christmas so there were too many to choose from. Standing in line at a nearby gate, fooling with their phones; sitting with luggage at their feet, jackets folded across their laps. If he lifted a camera to his eye, he’d become instantly suspect. The interesting and uninteresting faces alike would turn away, or worse, would stare back inquiringly or as a challenge. But who would sketch from life in such a place? Quick glance up, look down, sketch. Quick glance up again, down, sketch. Speed and fluidity of action a premium, because the faces lasted only so long before they switched out of profile or vanished altogether. 
This one he was summoning through his nervous system currently, a guy with backwards baseball cap and earbuds. He was looking at something across the way, towards gate agents behind a counter. The nearest in view attractive—maybe admiring the generous soft curves of her profile? The pen skittered, flowed, wide loping passes in and out of the main congregation of marks, until a miniature version of the man emerged from the white of the paper. Sight of him entering stereoscopically through the eyes, transmuted into electro-chemical pulses via retinal cells. These racing almost instantaneously towards the back of the skull, the occipital lobe, where the pulses are recombined into imagery, harvested for contextual relevance, then experienced as shapes and colors as well as conjectures towards an idea: here was a man of specific age and race, wearing a L.A. Kings ball cap, head bobbing slightly to beats broadcast by Bluetooth from his phone to his ears. When the man’s gate becomes active and his number is called, he’ll gather his carry-on and walk over to his appointed place in line. Soon after he’ll follow the line to show a ticket to a gate agent, before disappearing down a tunnel towards his plane. Never to be seen from again, forever past tense. Abstract for the rest of his life. 
Being an amateur at his trade, the sketch artist didn’t worry after perfection. Many of his attempts veered wide of the mark, barely resembled their counterparts. He brought the pad along to pass the time but also to keep his eye in training. He aspired to professionalism elsewhere, where it really didn’t apply, a craft that ran shy of evidence, except when he later pointed little details out to others, what he’d noticed, aspects of the commonplace and obvious that many lived through but most others missed. He was a watcher by nature, having learned that memories were often formed and gained definition through careful attention to settings and occasions that claimed him as a smaller feature of their design. Vanishing into a crowd while also watching it move around him, he caught unrepeatable moments in instant half-life of their decay. The couple near the corner, for example. Dying for sleep, he could tell, expressions hanging from their faces, the father rising to stand with baby in his arms, bouncing it to keep it calm, mother taking a seat after handing off the baby. She pulls her jacket over her head, blots out the sunlight, courts a minute or two of unconsciousness. In ten minutes she’ll pull the jacket away and stand, take the baby in arms so her husband can sit and try the same. 
The pen skips and weaves, the couple wakes on the page, exhaustion surfacing as a messy knit of lines obscuring their faces. This is the best he can do for them. They deserve better commemoration, but that’s the most his hand can offer. Ten minutes shared at a gate in an airport he may never visit again, no other proof they existed or he did either. 
His friend Marmalade, once after flipping through pages of another of his sketchbooks years ago, remarked upon their busy, rushed quality. Sloppy, awkward. His figures blitzed by mistakes. Inept in perspective and proportion. It was obvious he was self-taught because no self-respecting craftsperson would’ve offered over the book for perusal to someone who’d been academically trained, such as he. Having established his bona-fides by insult, Marm was then free to admit these little instances of people he’d snatched from his surroundings had “genuine energy” to them. The fearlessness of his flaw-making gave life to his people. As if he weren’t representing them as avatars of some lonely eye but re-enacting them as sparks of movement and human relation. 
Marm’s conclusion? The pen and sketchpad were decoys, there to distract people from noticing they were being doubled in some stranger’s mind, where they’d flare up for a brief moment immortalized. His real skill was in sculpting attention into fresh encounters with otherness. The drawings were lesser byproducts of that. That’s what made them so curious to look at: the briefest passages of a feeling move through you and you’d catch for a moment what it must be like to observe unremarkable people, places, things as if they mattered. 
His hand was waiting again. Five pens of differently graded tips rested in his jacket pocket. His attention was on the move, grazing, scanning the crowd for a keeper. While he searched for someone, the sketchbook folded into closing position on the seat next to him. Closing the book between active periods was a habit he’d developed out of necessity, after a bystander once had leaned over to study what he’d drawn. Looked up, looked down again at the drawing, spotted his just-finished subject live among the crowd in an airport restaurant in Philadelphia. Without comment the bystander walked over to the person captured in the drawing and informed him, while he’d been peacefully minding his own business drinking a beer a stranger across the way had been drawing him without permission.
He stayed put. Would the man approach him, demand to see the picture? Would he tear the page from its book, crumple it to toss in a trash bin or fold and pocket it as a trophy? Flattered or insulted? Insulted by the thievery, flattered he was deemed valuable enough to be stolen. Instead of all that the man shrugged and nodded his way, continued with his beer. 
Flights were being delayed and cancelled. Snow was falling heavily in Chicago, which disturbed the delicate balance of arrivals and departures elsewhere, in other cities, Cleveland included. He could feel it spread through the crowd around him, angst about possibly being grounded for the evening. Over there, the family sitting on their suitcases in the corner near Gate B-16, all other seats taken. Two boys, twins from the look of it, maybe nine years old, a teenager in combined age, play rock-paper-scissors, the loser of each round presenting a wrist belly-up for a hard two-fingered smack by the winner. The parents on either side of them, plainly stressed, the mom scrolling through her phone and father with head in his hands. The head frees itself from the hands, pauses, yawns, then a finger lifts to pick a crust from the corner of an eye. These? Tableaux of frustration and boredom, family stranded for the next five minutes at least so ready to become a portrait. No, he decides, leave them. They’ve had a bad enough afternoon already. 
The sketchpad and pen waited patiently for a reason. It could be he was done for the time  being. An hour, two hours drawing and he’d often notice a loss of interest from both, pad, pen, so he’d give them a break and wander the room from a sitting position. People arriving and leaving, as if they were interchangeable, which in spirit they were, but not literally. They were approximate versions of one another only if he wasn’t putting all of himself into looking, mind and eye, not just the latter. One day maybe there’d be the technology to sketch without use of hands, but just from imagining it, visualizing. Neural interlink by some means to some later progeny of iPad, animation in an instant, this middle-age beauty for example sitting next to her boyfriend or husband crossing her legs, one muscular calf over equally muscular thigh, knee atop another, feet in a dangle next to each other but hidden in sneakers. If observing could come to fruition as drawing without mediation of hands, that would not be a good thing for certain. Who wants copious evidence of their perversions, casually formulated and committed on the fly?
Marmalade would be first in line for that kind of technology. Prurience was his specialty, most of his photos and videos and multimedia mash-ups played in some blithe but hungry way with straight-up hardcore pornography. None of his subjects had anything to hide except the real people they were, given the blatant nudity forced on their bodies. It was supposedly subversive, undermined and questioned bourgeois values of decency and politeness, but to the watcher, second-rate sketcher of people, Marm’s interest in people didn’t seem to extend beyond what he might instruct them to do, mere materials with which he might construct or reenact a fantasy. 
There was a difference between drawing a nude and photographing one. The difference even more pronounced if the nudes were clothed and allowed to go on their way, reintegrated with the mundane round of leaving and going towards places. Marm would probably be useless here. There’d be no one for him to see. Order them to strip, the whole lot, then the crowd would become visible. He only wanted people to be visible in one specific way, for his cold arousal, how strange. Whereas, journeyman that he was, the watcher and sketcher in his seat, is fine with taking a crowd wherever it’ll take him. Doubtless he was a bore and a disappointment to his friend, and had no idea why he gave away his precious free time meeting him every month or so at his loft, coffee for an hour, catching up about whatever, then asking for a look at any new sketchbooks he might be working on.
His own flight had been cancelled, rescheduled for later that evening. So his phone told him, by automatic text message. He perused the room to see if anyone else was reading their phone and if so, how their faces changed. The family of four sitting on luggage, the woman with impressive legs. The young mother and father with baby. Mr. L.A. Kings. Christmas music could be heard beneath the bustle of newcomers and blats of announcements and updates through the intercom. At the other end of a delayed flight and within the depths of his phone, people who loved him were waiting for him to walk through a door and hug them. If the watcher in him needed to make them more real, he’d have to pull up photos of them saved in his phone. If the sketcher needed to free them from the phone, he’d need to open to a fresh page and take pen in hand and one by one translate them into nests of scribbles resembling faces shaped by some memory of him. No to that, let the watcher and sketcher keep to their current surroundings. They’re merely passengers, companions he pulls towards the forefront of a situation when he’s left with not much to do but wait. He doesn’t need them to reassure him that he’s loved or remembered. 
He wasn’t a religious guy, not even what he’d call spiritual, but there was an air of pilgrimage about most airports. Metaphor regularly, and on scheduled time, became literal when people filed onto planes and those planes sleepwalked along a tarmac before rushing down a runway to lift off and meld with the sky. Similarly souls landed in bulk shipments and were released down tunnels to emerge enfleshed as people young and old, dragging carryons behind them on rollers. He’d died, entered cloud-land, then hatched into rebirth dozens of times before, a hundred even. Impossible to count how many lives he’d gone through, a different person wherever he landed. Marm would call all this flaky, stupid. Marm was a stickler with his atheism. If metaphysics of any sort approached him even so much as metaphor, he’d bristle and kill the discussion, citing the usual brutal truths as evidence against daydreams. That wasn’t the point, he would say. It’s not what we think or feel, but what they do. See how nervous some of them are, waiting for their number to be called? See how disoriented and groggy the new arrivals look, stepping into the florescence of the concourse? Most are headed somewhere and are suffering myriad irritations to get there. Let’s ease up on the judgments and not add to their burden. 
It was near dinnertime, his head was restless for coffee. His phone told him his flight now wouldn’t leave until just past midnight, plenty of time for him to indulge his other airport habit, aimless walking. No one would be a watcher forever. Eventually they’d have to stand and shake off the stiffness in their legs, take a step then another. He slipped his sketchpad back into his satchel, worked his arms through his jacket until the jacket became part of him. Another disguise for the watcher he often was, a standing man, yet another traveller. Natural kin to any given crowd in any given airport moment. Invisible to the Marmalade who wasn’t here except by mental proxy, as he imagined him, their discussion weeks or months in the future when Marm visits his loft in the new year, sips coffee from a mug that’s been handed to him, this fresh sketchbook within reach on the table before him. Together they’d relive the people excerpted from the flow of time and animated as marks on a page. Marm would pause now and then over a figure and ask, where had he found them, when had he seen them? He would think backwards from airport to airport to airport, arrival to layover to departure, then catch a brief flare of recognition, the person sitting there, alive again, him from a distance sketching them, then tell. Marm would flip the page, on to the next one, but for a second he’d still be in watcher mode, mentally still sitting in the moment. Then the moment would dissolve and he’d be back in the chair across from Marm in Brooklyn, leaning forward to squint at a page Marm would hold open and turn for his identification and description. They were each unique but fundamentally the same in that they were mirages summoned from and sustained by pen and paper. Close the book and in that single gesture intimate lived history could be collapsed into an object. And so in that how different was a book from a nude? 
He had never wanted to hear the answer, so never asked his friend. He was confident he knew the difference, though somehow it remained important he never think of it, so could never formulate means of describing it. He kept himself amateur, his technique undeveloped, crude. There was nothing to improve upon, but people to gain and lose by sharing a room with them. This one, for example, that Marm hadn’t yet seen, but which he’d soon flip a page to encounter. One boy extending an arm wrist-up for another to smack, the other with two fingers, pointer and middle, raised and waiting. Fingers forever ready to strike, sustained for as long as Marm studies them, asks after the reason they’re lifted, hovering. When Marm moves on and the page turns, the brothers are given back to oblivion as a book, one that might not be opened again for ages. Paper rock scissors. On a shelf among others like it, they might hide for the rest of their lives or his, imperceptible and so laid bare, but exactly where he imagines them. 

Who They Weren't (III)

 


A few months before I received a text from R’s sister telling me he had died, I’d received an email from him. The email appeared in my inbox in January and by late March or early April he was gone. I’d been busy then and put it off. Once things slowed down I’d write him back, I told myself. The email wasn’t overlong, just asked if it’d be possible to meet for a Zoom call soon. I’d sat for a Zoom call with him a month or two earlier, very awkward. He’d been receiving treatment for brain cancer. Chemo and surgery then chemo again. He spoke highly of the physician with whom he met with every couple of weeks at, I believe it was, Johns Hopkins. 
When we’d talked earlier that winter, he’d asked about my brother. He and D had met by Zoom a week or so prior and D had later told me it was uncomfortable talking with him. R spent the better part of an hour weaving in and out of his resentments about no one expressing interest in his writing. At a party he had met a “famous” editor or writer and had forced into her hands a few folded pages of his own writing, asked her to read it, give him feedback. He didn’t seem to have any sense how much of an imposition that was, D said. While that kind of gesture was totally in keeping with the R we knew twenty-five years earlier, I had to remind D of the cancer, the surgery, how these might effect behavior. R had always carried around grievances and had always been by nature depressive. If people phased out of contact, he labeled it rejection and would hold to that for decades without reconsidering. When I met with R on Zoom weeks later, one of the first things he mentioned was how D had seemed eager to end their call. How long had they spoken, I asked. An hour, he told me. I tried gently reframing his view of the call by reminding him just how busy D was, how he ran a non-profit, did ad-hoc work in the community as well, et cetera. None of these explanations seemed to register, and there again I was reminded of the condition of his brain. How ill was he? He seemed not himself. His speech stilted, pocked with odd tags, often beginning and ending sentences by addressing me by name, as if to remind himself who he was talking with. 
We’d been close friends thirty years ago. Through Facebook he’d found D and I and “friended” us around 2014. I’d flown to Washington D.C. for an event in the fall that year and we’d made plans to meet for dinner. We took a two-seater on a open patio and caught up with each other. He seemed reserved, maybe irritated. It didn’t take long before he disclosed resentment towards D and I, that we’d ceased contact in the mid-90s. He phrased it in such a way that you would’ve thought we’d cruelly abandoned him. I was twenty, twenty-one, D a year younger, and R, though young also, was a few years older and still living in Cleveland and working at the grocery store where in our mid-teens we’d first met him. Life got busy, I told him, and this was before the conveniences of the internet. Should I apologize? No harm was intended, I told him, I promise. He didn’t seem convinced. Hard to set aside a grievance over the course of a single conversation, if it’s been held onto for decades. 
There were troubles in his marriage. He would never speak about it directly. He had a daughter with a woman and they had moved first to Michigan then to D.C., where he worked as a curator at a gallery or museum. It sounded like a fine path, nothing to regret, and very much in line with what he’d been interested in, back when I knew him. But it wasn’t enough, wasn’t fulfilling, his tone seemed to indicate, as he narrated the course of his life as it’d progressed from when we’d last known each other. He’d always wanted to be a writer, fiction, poetry. I’d gone off and attended college to study those, had published a few books. But even worse, I’d seemed to have been connected to some sort of creativity consistently, either through drawing or music-making or writing. This was the idea he held in his head, one born of simple comparison. He seemed to have come to all sorts of conclusions on his own, without going to the trouble of talking at length with me, about how much it had cost me, the troubles involved, the frustrations. He seemed to envy me without even really knowing me. 
So a few years passed. He would text, call, email. D and I lived in our city, lived on the same city block even, close as ever. On two occasions R announced that he would be driving through town and requested a visit. Could he stay at our house? The first time, and I might not be remembering this correctly, he stayed a few days in the guest room at my house, then a few days in a similar room at D’s. Both D and I tried to be welcoming, but we both worked and couldn’t afford to take off to show him around the city. There was the sense his marriage was entering its final stages but neither D or I felt it was a welcome thing to talk about. Maybe he had wanted us to ask. But we were only acquaintances with him, different from the people we’d been back when he’d known us. Maybe he expected us to be the same? He seemed curiously unchanged. And unhappy, softly begrudging. After he left D and I took a walk around the neighborhood and compared notes about the visit. Did D feel the same as I did, that R resented us, even maybe blamed us a bit for how things had turned out? Or maybe by contrast we’d reminded him. It was weird, didn’t seem fair. And if that were the case, then why was he so insistent to spent time with us? 
After their Zoom call D was fuming. He just bitched and complained and put a bunch of passive-aggressive shit on me, D said. No sense of what all he puts on people, the entitlement. D described R’s account of his time at the party in company of the famous editor or writer, forcing his pages on her, asking her for comments. She never reached out, R told D. She never gave me comments, never even gave me my pages back, as if that were a reasonable thing to expect. D was appalled. Didn’t R have any sense that if he wanted even the smallest bit of this woman’s consideration he’d need to come by that honestly, having done the work and earned it? It was then I reminded D of the cancer, the surgeries. How those might effect impulse control and social awareness. But the neediness at the root of the gesture was a hundred percent how he’d always been. Always he’d wanted to be an artist of some sort but couldn’t ever get beyond his own inhibitions. Like many other people I’d known who were like that, there was the sense that if a practicing artist took them seriously, gave them attention, they’d become one themselves, that what’d been unobtainable by their own efforts would be instantly granted, and from there they could find the confidence to make stories or movies or paintings on their own terms, flourish without discouragement and never lose confidence again. 
It took only a few minutes on our Zoom call for R to mention D. D seemed in a rush to get off the call, R said. They’d spoken for an hour, a fairly long time, but he seemed cued to how D had felt talking with him. He was ill but it was difficult for D and I to understand at first why he was so insistent on talking with us. I speculated that maybe a therapist or physician had suggested he speak with older friends or acquaintances as a way of regaining shared memories of events he’d been unable to access since his surgery. This would make sense. This would also explain the flatness of his aspect, the robotic quality of how he framed what he sought to discuss or express. 
When he’d emailed that first time to request a call, he’d sent a piece of writing as an attachment. This was a move I really disliked, had been the recipient of such queries many an occasion. The request for time to maybe look at something they had written accompanied by a document of the writing in question, attached. No room to allow for a yes or no. “Here’s my story, my novel excerpt, my poem, my essay fragment, read it and give me notes.” A major breach of etiquette, in my opinion and in D’s view as well, because what someone who would send such a request is really expecting is that you would be free and bound to give them that much of our time. Usually a person waits for that kind of thing to be offered. And if it isn’t, maybe for good reason. And if they’re observant and respectful, they’ll not push the issue, having understood what had been communicated through lack of an offer. 
In this case it was hard to say no. The writing he had sent along was a reflective account of he and his twin brother’s childhood, something he’d begun a while ago and worked on so he might give to his daughter, so she could have a sense of what her father and uncle and older family members had been like before she’d been born. He didn’t get to spend much time with his daughter, was estranged from her since the divorce, but if I remember here correctly she had expressed a willingness to eventually read whatever he would send her in written form. 
I was busy, I’m always busy, but made time before the call to read the story he’d sent. From the way it read, it was clear he’d written it after his treatment. It’d been uncomfortable to elaborate any more beyond that. I made notes on what I could find to appreciate about it then, on the call, discussed it with him. As always, I had a strong sense he was wanting more from me, had expected to receive something from me he could have only ever earned for himself, and only after a decade or so of consistent work. Did this mean I wasn’t a good friend? Did I deny him the life he had wanted for himself, by not evolving a talent in him, living his life for him? Talking with him reminded me again of something I never lost track of but often felt strong frustration about: that nothing was guaranteed though the freedom to sit at a desk and work through fear and resistance was a privilege of sorts, one easily discarded for the enjoyment of many other, less complicated pursuits. It takes confidence to work with doubt, and therein lies the importance of craft. None of this was anything I could or would tell him. He probably already knew this anyway and avoided the topic, because at one point in his life he had the time to devote to developing just that, but for one reason or another hadn’t. 
Our call lasted roughly an hour as well, maybe a half hour more than his call with D, and afterwards I was left wondering why I felt I owed him my time. Why did I feel guilty? Maybe only because he believed I was guilty of failing my end of a friendship, and in no certain terms had said so. I’d been caught up in my own troubles. I’d been focused on chasing certain opportunities. And here I was, on the other side of both, busy, married, fulfilled, even happy. Maybe there was an implication I should feel guilty for that also? A month or so after that call the email came asking for another. It was not the best time for those kinds of emails, fresh off the holiday break. A week passed then another, and every few days I’d remember the email and feel a duty to respond but resistance to do so, also. I didn’t consider how sick he might have been, because I wasn’t aware where he was with his health, given it wasn’t something he talked about. Three months passed, maybe, before I received a text from his number. It was his sister, she was writing to say she was sorry, but wanted to let me know R had died of brain cancer a week or so before. There would be a memorial service and she said R had always thought of us as close friends. They would be grateful if D and I could attend. 
“Man, that’s some fucking bleak shit,” D said when I told him. That wasn’t true, we weren’t close, we hadn’t been close friends in almost thirty years. Stuck in the past, he said. Implied maybe the quality of the life he’d had since. So much had happened for D and I. Before we’d gotten back in touch with him, and really then only because of the whims of an algorithm, we’d rarely thought of him, separately or together. He was a figure of the distant past. We were caught up in lives and careers and relationships and future plans and travels so were never compelled to work backwards to who we were when we were freshly broken free from our teenage years. The whole situation made me feel like a bad person, because I couldn’t feel it. It was a misfortune that came and left in the abstract, to a distant acquaintance who existed far on the other side of a smart phone. In my text response to his sister I said I would send flowers to their mother, but then of course in the following weeks got busy and forgot. Months later I remembered and felt I’d fallen short of basic decency. Yes, I’ve read textbooks on evolutionary psychology, so have been familiarized with concepts such as inclusive fitness, what impels the human species to look after others as if they were their own. Here was another example of me failing my programming. Or unconsciously running the calculations and determining in the end I would not be held to account, would not suffer damage to my reputation among my peers and familiars for not sending flowers to R’s mother, despite the fact that was something I mentioned I would do, out of honor for the family’s loss and in tribute to his memory. I moved on quickly, maybe because I wasn’t very much bound to him. And maybe he wasn’t so bound to me either, but rather to some idea of me. The parts of me he would’ve like to have had, though really he didn’t know me anymore. What about him? Were there parts of him I would have liked, if I could have them? This wasn’t any of thought I ever had, because I’d tried those kinds of exchanges before, back when I was younger, and had found they consistently led to all sorts of disorientation, blatant errors of judgement, and general unhappiness. Better to feel those things directly, on their own terms. And on one’s own terms. And here’s one: not sending those flowers, but still holding clear awareness I didn’t and continue not to, I might be the very person R felt I was, and who he resented.