Sunflowers (Tournesols) II 21 страница

"I should be ashamed. The one that you seem to like the most is a rendition of Van Gogh," Gerard quipped. He had come up behind me and touched the small of my back. He held the coffee pot and filled me up as well as himself.

"Oh, okay." As soon as he said Van Gogh, I knew what work this was. My eyes still lingered, not fully satisfied. "I see it now. But it's still different. I mean, you've done something to make it original. I was staring at it because of that."

"You're kind," was all he said. He went back to the kitchen to put the coffee away. My eyes moved on to the other pieces, still in awe.

"So where were you this morning?" he asked casually.

"Didn't you get my note? I went job searching - I left it on the table next to the newspaper." He was still in the kitchen, and I pointed to the table where there was a big newspaper spread out. He looked down and then sighed. "Ah yes, of course. Now I see it." He picked it up and then put it on the fridge. "I do admit it was rather disorienting waking up this morning and having you not be there, as well as going to bed last night and having you not there. I was beginning to think that I had dreamt you up."

He walked back over to me and touched my back, neck, and hair with his free hand. "But no, here you are." He kissed me, smiled at me, and then kissed me again, like some adult peek-a-boo. "How was the job world?"

"Uhhh... fine. I guess you could say I was also on a job hunt last night, too." I took a big gulp of my coffee, wanting to move on. It was hot and scalded my tongue. "With Jasmine, I mean. We went to this political banquet type of thing. Called Food Not Bombs. Apparently they have these places set up all over. Did you ever see any in Paris? Or go to any here? They meet just down the road at the memorial park...."

I was talking too fast, and Gerard could tell. I didn't want to focus on today; there were too many open job opportunities and I didn't want to get my hopes up. It was like him with his paintings. While everything was up in the air and unknowable, we were not allowed to draw attention to it. He seemed to recognize this type of unfinished certainty in my voice, and nodded. He asked me questions about last nights' politics instead.

"I've never heard of it before. What kind of affiliation are we talking, here?"

I was quiet for a while and vaguely repeated the words I had been told last night. "Anarchistic?"

Gerard smiled. "No, I have not heard of them. But anarchism? I'm quite familiar with that. Anarchism seems to me to be the closest thing to freedom in the real world, at least politically speaking. Tell me more about this place."

With a relieved sigh, I did as I was told. I felt that I was merely parroting Jasmine, or that I had butchered their core principles, but the intention was there. It was right in the title: that everyone needed food, but no one needed war. Gerard listened intently, he even sat down on the bench near the window and I pulled over his stool so we could sit and talk over our black coffee.

"I feel like I'm back in Paris again!" Gerard commented, but it was with a look of joy. The last time he had mentioned politics and Paris, he had said something about a fire. There was no sense of dread when he was speaking, instead, he seemed invigorated. "Something like these meetings happen all the time? Just around the corner, too? Beautiful! Wonderful! I thought I had left all of this behind. I'm so glad it has come here. And anyone can attend, correct?"

I nodded. "Are you thinking of coming next week?" Visiting with Gerard no longer seemed as scary to me as going with Jasmine or anyone else. If I was going to make it through another one, I knew I would need him with him, and the ability to see the world how he saw it.

"Oh, no, no," he said waving a hand in the air. "I don't do politics. I can't do politics. But I was asking because it's a dynamic thing. There is so much energy involved in that, and it's saying a lot by sheer demonstration. Sounds a lot like street theatre, now that I'm thinking about it."

His analogy kind of made me uncomfortable, but I wasn't able to articulate why. Sure, the banners, the logos, and the punks with mohawks and bandanas over their faces, that was surely a public demonstration of some kind, but that wasn't what made me pause. Those displays had been what I had come to see that day. It was when I pictured Fred throwing up, however, that it didn't seem very theatrical or performative anymore. There was no word to really convey this in the art lexicon or English language to Gerard, so I ignored it, and he went on.

"It reminds me a lot of Kafka's The Hunger Artist where a man does public declarations of fasting in order to make his point, to turn it into an art form. This seems to be the mirrored image of that. A public declaration of eating because the world is starving and needs food; this works so much more effectively. The actual act of starvation itself is a private thing, and in the book, it was used against excess. The whole starving artist mentality that is perpetuated in society is usually framed as how one should only exist for art alone, and then takes that ideology to the extreme. Artists are good with those extremes."

Again, all I did was nod. He was saying interesting things, but they weren't having such a hold over me as they usually did. Maybe because I had actually experienced Food Not Bombs, but I had never read The Hunger Artist, so I couldn't really relate. I had seen what I saw so recently too, that it was hard to shake from my memory. I drank my coffee and watched Gerard as he spoke with his hands, piecing together all of my interactions from the past few days and trying to cohesively frame myself within Gerard's art world again. It was like old times, I thought, only I was tired and not as into the conversation as I usually was, and there were no cigarettes or smoke between us.

"Hunger plays a large part in the creative process. If it's not the actual starvation which can be a public spectacle, or the sheer inability to buy food or to just live on less, the actual affect of hunger on the body, especially the senses, is fantastic. Everything is stronger. Colours are brighter, especially coupled with a lack of sleep, and smells are stronger. Everything appears much more vivid than it usually does and life takes on this kaleidoscopic quality. It's fascinating. Oh, and when you do finally eat, it's magical. Everything tastes so good." He smiled, as if remembering the first bite after one hundred years of starvation, as he drank the last bit of his coffee. I tried to pay attention to him and his own interpretation, but I kept letting my own thinking interfere with what he was trying to say.

I remembered the night that we had not bought dinner for ourselves, but had instead bought sunflowers. It was a magical feeling, I didn't disagree, but the hunger that plagued me that night had been terrible. It felt like my stomach was a cave folding in on itself inside of me and I thought at one point I would break in two. It wasn't exactly the most romantic thing I had ever experienced, but it was that fine balance between pain of the body, and pleasure of the flowers. The suffering and the ecstasy; that passion that Gerard had told me about which pervaded religion, we had definitely experienced it that night. Hunger was still hunger, though, and I was glad it was over when it had been.

Gerard simply told me it got easier the more you did it. Hunger simply vanished - at least, the pain of hunger and the want of food. Then came the real part, where the senses magnified and it felt as if you lived in a technicolor world and ate the best foods when you did choose to eat. I looked at him then and realized how much of his body weight he had lost. Even though we were eating again, and eating substantially, he seemed to still lose weight. It was as if the food was a shock to his body and it kept rejecting it, as if he could only live off art and his own perceptions of the world. "Our entire lives are nothing but a matter of our own perceptions, my dear Frank, and this way, every moment is magic," he kept declaring, as if this lack of food claimed his hearing as well.

It was quite odd, hearing him discount food and cooking when we had recently learned to appreciate it so much more. I understood that his time in Paris was marked with hunger. It only made sense. He did not have a lot of money and I knew he needed to rationalize his hunger and the loss of money with some artistic purpose, or else it would have been horrible to live through. But now? Now we didn't need that. He was no longer alone and we had money for food, and we knew that we'd be eating together, and the conversation that was created from those moments was a creative act itself. The way he was speaking about hunger and the hunger artistry was not marked by a sense of time. He talked about this as if it was still going on, and I was curious and unsure of how I was supposed to react to this.

"I doubt, though, that when the government is withholding food from people, they are trying to give them an artistic leg up on the competition," I said, unsure of my own tone. I got up and went to the kitchen. There was barely any coffee left in the pot, but I took what was there.

Gerard did not seem offended by my outburst. In fact, it seemed to be what he wanted. "Exactly! Which is why this group seems so interesting to me. Hunger is a key focus of art, but it is an internal struggle. It must be chosen and embraced, made part of our own perception. This organization does not advocate that choice; they also pick up on the violent aspect of war and suggest replacing bombs with food. War is something else that's so integral to art."

I waited now, for this new speech about how maybe the artist's inner struggle to make meaning was a war of some kind, and I admit I waited begrudgingly to hear this. I was getting a little overwhelmed with how lightly he was treating these situations. I shouldn't have doubted him, though, because war was very real to him. I could hear his voice change as he began to speak about the horrors and not artistic merits of war. I kept forgetting that he had lived in Paris, and while he had suffered through hunger, he had also lived through the fires of protest and the riots with civilian casualty. He had also just plain lived longer than I had. He had seen more wars started and ended than I ever wanted to think about. He remembered iconic days of national trauma, even though he himself never wanted to, and refused to own a TV because of this reason. He was sick of the 'death box' that only brought bad news and the global system that seemed to fixate on these days that we were supposed to remember. To him, Christmas had been the same as the Kennedy Assassination: a day within a day where he was made to feel something that he didn't always understand.

"Of course, bad news is going to find you wherever and whenever. You can't hide from it, but I can at least stop inviting it into my living room and pay for keeping it warm. But war is hard, really hard, especially when considering art," he declared, and part of me wanted to scream, "and hunger's not hard?" - but he went on. "It becomes difficult deciphering meaning and intent with war. Is the art supposed to replace war, are we anaesthetizing the cause, and capitalizing on pain, or is the art based on this type of tragedy okay because it's showing the horrors of war? Is war art okay so long as it's not stories of glory and patriotism, but about the children's crusade and civilians dying, which is what all war usually is?" He paused, and looked over to me. He began to become aware of just how much he had been talking, and my lack of engagement for a lot of it. He kept his eyes deliberately on me now and tried to pull me into the conversation again. "Do you know about the painting, Guernica?"

I shook my head.

Gerard smiled, in spite of the material. His smile then, as much as I would have thought it callous at the beginning of our talk, was a small relief. It made me understand how serious he had been carrying on, and continued to go with as he progressed through the explanation of Guernica. "By Pablo Picasso. I'm usually a fan of his work on doves, as I'm sure you know already, and there is also a dove in this work too. But she's not free - I think she's the first casualty of the war. The painting is named after the town Guernica in Spain where a bombing occurred and the majority of deaths were simple people on the street. The dove in this painting is trapped, panicking, in the corner while all of the bodies - of people and of other animals - are frantic and trying to move or just dead. The painting is completely gray, so you don't see blood or gore. I always liked that about it. War didn't deserve the red paint."

"War does not deserve memorialisation like that," I said under my breath.

"You're right, Frank. War does not deserve to be remembered, but there is always an exception, remember?" He tried to use that smile again, and it worked a little bit, for only a second. "We should only remember war and all the bad things that happen so we can try to tear it apart. Guernica is an anti-war painting. You see the panicked dove in the corner and you know all of this is pointless. You see the lack of colour and you know you don't want this. By painting something, it's hard to believe you can discredit its existence, but it's true. You can. You can paint a picture and not want what you've painted at all. It's an act of purging then, of catharsis. You can paint to remember an act of forgetting."

I nodded, but vaguely. I was getting depressed. Part of me knew that I should care about this, that I needed to throw myself into the cause and want to eradicate war and believe that art could do that. But could it, really? Did Picasso painting those people bring them back? Did it help that dove? No. Did the people who were in charge of the war see painting and realize the errors of their way? No. Even though I was not as old as Gerard and I had not seen as many wars as he had, I knew that there was always going to be one happening. Why bother putting it in art, if people were never going to forget and keep fighting anyway?

"What war was that painting about?" I asked Gerard.

"The Spanish Revolution. Why?"

"Do you know who Fredrico Lorca is?" I asked Gerard back, and this time, after he shook his head, I got to play informant. "He was one of Dali's friends. Good friend." Gerard smiled, knowing what I meant and I almost just wanted to leave the memory at that. Why couldn't we talk about Spanish art for art's sake, why did we have to make it depressing and horrible? The world was horrible enough as it was, so why couldn't art just stay wonderful? I pressed on anyway: "Well, he was a great poet. Very surrealist, like Dali's work. Although they were lovers, Dali denied it a lot of the time. Jasmine told me about them both, and she also said that Lorca was killed during the Spanish Civil war. He was executed with a few other people and no one really knows where he's buried."

Gerard clicked his teeth, taking this all in. "It's hard. War is awful. I know it's hard to remember, but I think people like Picasso painting the scene of Guernica to remember the war, to give his own voice to that war, because if you don't, then the war literally destroys art. It destroys you, as a person. Guernica, or any art that's made about war, doesn't necessarily have to condone or condemn them. It's at least saying that in the middle of all this destruction and annihilation that they as a person still meant something. Some paintings or poems literally scream, 'I was there. This is me. This is what I saw.' And sometimes it's enough to end a war, and sometimes, it's just like screaming into the ocean. Pointless, but you were going to die anyway."

Too much, I told myself and blinked slowly. I stared into the black drudge of coffee at the bottom of my mug, waiting. It was all too much. I felt like my chest was bursting inside of me and what was ruptured used to have all this hope, imagination, and freedom inside of it, but it was just gone. History made me forget myself; history made me realize how insignificant I really was, and about how I could literally do nothing. But I thought about Food Not Bombs, I thought about Guernica and even though I felt as if I didn't belong in either, I felt myself wanting to scream again and again, like that baby with the ear infection. I wasn't sure yet what all the images were trying to tell me. But I was there. I was here, in this apartment. This is what I saw and what wouldn't leave me alone the rest of the day. Gerard, realizing I had dropped my mug, came over to hug me. "It's all perception, Frank. It's only as bad as you think it is," he comforted me, but it was little help. If it was only as bad as I thought it was, then there was no hope for either of us.

I spent a good part of the afternoon in the dark room. After all of the conflicting messages of the day, I needed to remember what I had seen the night before. Maybe my memories were twisting it into something that it wasn't. Maybe I was overreacting and maybe even that morning with all my job hunting had actually gone better than I thought. All I knew for sure what that I needed to establish some of my own control on the situation, and the only way I could do that was through doing art.

In the dark room, the photos began to come together a little better than they had in my head. The entire time last night actually seemed tame and fun. It was just a gathering of people sharing food. I caught lots of smiles and waves; even the people who had pulled their bandanas over their mouth still looked friendly as their eyes peaked over the fabric. A lot of them still posed for photos, and two of them had even kissed with the bandanas over their mouths in a comical tableau. As I developed the pictures, I began to feel better and better. I wanted to go to this place every week, it looked like so much fun. The politics of it had taken the position of a banner in the background and became embodied in the food itself. But it was only if you understood the banner's message and the lineage of the food that the politics began to scream loud and clear. For the most part, it just looked like a fun evening out. It was still a community that eluded me, but maybe it eluded me because I was putting up walls of division. In the photo, they seemed welcoming enough.

Of course, I had not taken pictures of Fred, the vomit on the ground, or some of the other instances that had made me feel uncomfortable. It didn't seem right to take a picture of them, but part of me wished that I had, simply for the fact that maybe having visual evidence of what had occurred would make things feel less terrifying. In my mind, Fred could become whoever I wanted him to be, angel or demon, worse nightmare or normal person. I didn't have the option of objective analysis anymore and I kicked myself for it. It did occur to me that, well, maybe I could just go back there and see him again if I was really so unsure, but I didn't want to consider that either. At least, not right away. They met every week. It's not like they wouldn't go on without me.

It was when I developed the photos of Jasmine that my emotions began to play with me. I had taken quite a few of her at first because I was still warming up and getting used to the environment. Her countenance was somewhat annoyed in those first few ones, because she had always hated having her photo taken. As I went through the evening and she became more comfortable, especially with Braden, the photos took on a more artistic quality. My stomach was still having funny pangs around her presence, though. I even felt something akin to jealousy when I developed one photo of the two of them and he had his arm on her shoulder. I hadn't remembered that instance from the other night, and I wasn't sure how to place him in their relationship together. She had known him awhile, but how did she know him? I didn't want to think about it too much because I knew it wasn't mine to think about. Their relationship, whatever it was, was hers and hers alone to discuss. But I did wonder, especially since this new person seemed to fill a well-needed companionship void for her. They were both vegan and they both liked activist/political circles. This seemed to be the direction that Jasmine was going in recently, and although I longed for the days when her English degree and education were her main sources of joy, I knew I also had to accept the Jasmine who now was linked perpetually to work and ethical awareness. It didn't mean the bookworm wasn't in there, it just meant that my memories were simply that: images my mind kept alive while the future was different.

I hung the pictures up with a bit of a heavy heart. And a hungry stomach. I had actually been getting quite hungry when I first came back, but then Gerard's talk had managed to squash my appetite with the thought of war and casualties. Another part of me also wanted to see if he was right; when I went off to develop my photos, the gnawing sensation in my gut had returned, and I had let it keep going, hoping that it could provide me with some artistic insight.

Nothing really happened. Maybe because I was in a room that was constantly red and smelt like chemicals, but there were no wow-induced affects that came with hunger for me. Maybe it was just a painter thing. Having finished the last of what I wanted to do, I carefully let myself out of the dark room and walked towards the kitchen. Gerard was sketching at his table and didn't move when he saw me come out. It almost looked like he hadn't moved in the last three hours or so, and I wouldn't have been surprised if he hadn't.

The closer I got to the kitchen, the more my stomach seemed to anticipate and clench with fury. The coffee maker was still on and making hissing noises, so I shut that off, nearly burning my finger on it, and went for the fridge. I was completely shocked to see it was empty - save for mustard, ketchup, some cream and a jar of pickles, there was nothing inside the fridge. I opened the freezer - ice and only ice. I stood there for awhile and tried to remember the last time we had real food in there. Vivian had given us both some leftovers, and I supposed that was entirely plausible that we had just eaten the rest of it; or at least Gerard had. But still, no food in the fridge? I felt a certain panic seize me without warning. I began to look through the cupboards, hoping to find something else. Anything else. But there were just crackers and packets of salt, pepper, and sugar. I checked all the other areas where food might have been kept and found some peanut butter (with maybe three large spoonfuls left) and then some canned peas and peaches. Yum. This wasn't a meal at all. Even though I could possibly tame my hunger so I didn't start eating the moulding of the apartment, this was not substantial enough for our dinner. Or even substantial enough to just have around. What if we had gotten a really big dump of snow? How were we supposed to get groceries without a car or a bus pass?

"Gerard?" I called. He made a grunting noise so I knew he was at least halfway paying attention to me. "Did you realize how little food we had?"

I looked over to him from the kitchen, but he didn't move from his art. He made another kind of half grunting noise that I couldn't decipher was a yes or a no. I walked over to him, still holding the can of peas.

"Seriously, Gerard, why did we not realize this until now? Why didn't you go shopping or at least tell me we should?" My voice was rising and rising. I had no idea how to deal with something like this - it had never happened to me before. I knew that it was not the end of the world, logically. We would not starve, that was for sure. There was no epic blizzard and we could walk to the grocery store, or even better, Vivian could drive us. But it occurred to me that we had not gone shopping since that day Vivian took us. We had been subsisting on leftovers and the stuff from that trip for over a month. No wonder we were out of food. Although I was directing a lot of my frantic questions at Gerard, I knew a lot of this was my fault as well. It took two people to run a household, and I had fucked up just as much as he had.

He put his hand on my shoulder and nodded to my concerns. "It's okay. Let's just go to Vivian's for dinner tonight and then we can deal with this later."

"No," I said. "I want to deal with this now. Right now. I don't want to come back to an empty house tonight. I'm just not doing it."

If this had happened a week ago, then I probably would have said 'sure' and not thought about it at all. But my hunger had been left too unattended, and I had images of Fred going over and over again in my mind. No. This was not happening, not to us, not right now. I had just spent a good deal of my morning trying to calm myself into thinking that although I should get a job, I didn't need one. Having no food in the house, while it was a temporary burden for us, plagued me deeply that all my worst fears were coming true.

"Alright. Do you want to go now?" Gerard proceeded slowly.

"Why can't you go now? You've been here all day."

Gerard nodded and bit his lip. He looked upset, more upset than I had seen him before, and at first I felt really bad, but he didn't give me long to linger in that emotion. "I lost my wallet about a week ago. I'd go, but I have nothing to pay with at the moment."

My eyes grew wide. " What? Why haven't you done something about it?"

"I looked through the apartment, and it wasn't there. I barely leave, so I'm sure it's at Vivian's. Let's just go there tonight and we can eat something good and then I'll look through her things."

I shook my head, back and forth, though I did just want to go. I wanted to say, oh sure, that's fine, and just hop in Vivian's car and eat all of her food and not worry about anything. But a lost wallet? How many of his IDs were now gone? How much money? He'd have to cancel his bank cards and start all over again if he didn't end up finding it and someone else got a hold of it. He was right, though: he did barely leave the house. Vivian probably did have it, and she did like seeing us, and she had been bothering me about work so I could even tell her that I was on track. I could tell her about Food Not Bombs...

I stopped myself. No, I was not going to follow that same train of thought again. I bit my lip and stared at Gerard. I wanted to hug him, but I had never felt so mad at him before, so mad I was shaking. I hated myself for it and in spite of how easy it would be, I couldn't go to Vivian's tonight.

But I could visit someone, and I had a feeling she would have leftovers. The thought of upcoming food calmed me, and my shaking subsided. It was a brief moment of loss of blood sugar, I told myself. Not rage.

"I should see Jasmine," I told Gerard. "I have those photos to give to her for the magazine."

Gerard nodded. We stood close to one another, but still did not touch. He eventually said he was still going to go to Vivian's and not to worry. He would find his wallet, and there would be food when I got back. I just nodded, because I no longer had the strength to argue or think. I called Jasmine and told her I'd meet her at her office, and began to gather my stuff again. I waved to Gerard as I was leaving the apartment, and he waved back. He was still at his desk, not moving save for the small twitches of his hand as he sketched, much smaller than I remember him being.

Jasmine's office was across town, but since the downtown of the city we lived in was relatively small, it wasn't too bad of a walk. The sun was still out, and it had been a warm afternoon for the middle of January. The city workers had caught up with the snowfall as well, and there was plenty of salt making my walk less treacherous. One thing that I hadn't noticed before was how the salt began to change colour as I got closer and closer to Jasmine's office. It was so bizarre, as if someone had dropped a snow cone on the ground, which was what I thought it had been initially. But as the patches of blue, green, and purple, even pink at one point, began to become more frequent the reality of snow cones became less likely and I was stuck staring at the changing and moving colours in the white snow and sidewalk to try and figure out its meaning and purpose.

That was where Jasmine had found me: peering over a snow bank right outside her office. It was nearly five o'clock by the time I had showed up, and she had come down from her office to meet me.

"Hey," she greeted, touching my back to get my attention. "I saw you from my window and you looked kind of lost," she smiled, teasing me in her own implicit way.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14