ORKIDEH

The first time I died, I wasn’t even there. The whole payoff, the answer to the question of what happens afterward—I didn’t get any of that. Maybe Leila did. Maybe she got something like clarity, or peace, when that plane blew up. But I was left with all the loss, none of the reward. Stuck here lurching through my living, lurching from grief to grief. Just inertia, just tumbling forward. No carrot at the end of the stick. This time I wanted to at least be present for it. My death. My final installation, Death-Speak, is a way of being in the room, literally being in the room as it happens.

There’s a moment of Farrokhzad where she says,

I won’t see spring,

these lines are all that will remain.

As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.

I am gone, my heart is filled with sorrow—

O Muslims, I am sad tonight.

I think about that often. I don’t even really feel particularly Muslim, I don’t suspect Farrokhzad did either. But this bit, I wanted to pin it to my shirt when I first read it. The simpleness of it, the clarity. It’s like she’s reaching out from beyond the grave to say no, no, this isn’t decoration, this isn’t artifice, this is desperate, this is urgent. Let’s skip the bullshit, she’s saying. We can’t afford all that anymore, not here in the abyss.

For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that.

“As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.”

That purity, that simplicity, that’s it for me. I’m dying. Here I am. It’s ugly. There are all these tubes, all this gunk oozing out of me. Sometimes the bigness of the thing is too much for language, for paint, for art. You just have to say it plain: “O Muslims, I am sad tonight.” That’s what Death-Speak is. Being present. Saying it plain.

Of course, Sang hated it. Our romance had ended years before; she got comfortable, I got restless. I had found someone else for a time, but of course I did. A symptom, not the disease. Story old as time. Sang and I were better as friends, as colleagues. I still got dinner sometimes with her and her new wife, their grown-up kids. But while one part of our story ended, she was still my gallerist. And she was a good one, one whose opinion I’d learned to trust over the years. So when I pitched my final installation to her, the one where I died, it was also my way of telling her I was dying. She paused for only a fraction of a fraction of a second, and then snorted dismissively—

“The artist is present, AND she’s dying?” she said, rolling her eyes. “C’mon.”

It was cruel dismissal, barbed with anger at my having withheld my diagnosis from her. Which, yes, was wrong of me. Sang was the only family I had left. She had deserved to know, and I don’t know why I didn’t tell her sooner. All I could bring myself to say was—

“I’m doing this, Sang. I’d like you to be a part, but I don’t need you to be. I’ll do it at the Met or in a folding chair at Union Station. It doesn’t matter to me.”

She studied my face and I studied hers. She had really been in love with me once, and I had really loved watching her love me. Which sounds terrible, but it’s not. It’s easy to resent those who love you. Those who are over eager with their affection. Too performative. But I loved how Sang loved me, easily, like it was its own soul in her chest, pumping that love through her, animating her as naturally as blood. Even if I didn’t have that for her. We both knew it all along, all those years. Me pathologically waiting for her to fall asleep before coming to bed. Sang hoping something would shift, knowing it wouldn’t. We were both mostly fine with it, happy enough. Happy winding between museums, her kids’ graduations, art openings, fancy dinners. Happy enough, until we weren’t.

When I told her about my final installation, we argued some more, but I knew she’d give in. Finally, Sang said, “If you do this, you should call it Death-Speak.”

“I love that,” I said, and meant it. She paused.

“You know not everything is connected, don’t you?” she said. “Everything doesn’t have to stand in for everything else?”

“I know,” I said.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“It’s—” she said. “I just—”

“I know,” I said.