The colors are all gone and there is nothing left. Cathode-ray flicker in this high-rise concrete cave system the only illumination. Your face, whoever you are. A transmission from the other side of the world, or next door—how can I know? Paralyzed and dying forever, I watch you in the dark. The monochrome glow from ancient screens, battery relays with an acid stink I taste in my sinuses, my teeth; dragged from streets and basements in a past life barely passed, your face the light of my existence. Every wall painted with your cipher; painted with the ashes of the burned world, scooped in calloused handfuls and smeared across cracked plaster, mixed with my black blood and the cancerous rain that still oozes from the sky.
Who films you, I don’t know. What your name is, I don’t know. Why me, a mystery. I am not the last one. I hear them sometimes: searching, scrabbling, cat-calling the traces of your glow that escape through the boarded windows, the black-out drapes. I turn off the old monitors as they screech, never knowing if there will be enough power to turn them back on. When that day comes, I will navigate these rooms by the impasto crests and barbs of your likenesses—your eyelashes, the slack curve of your lips, the vein in your slender throat that pulses far too seldomly for you to ever wake—my shaking hands leading me in circles through this mausoleum, leading me, maze-like, to nowhere.
I thought at first this was a hospital—the piles of burned-out machinery, the bloodied, half-inside out latex gloves and the specter of disinfectant fragrance in the paint and linoleum—but soon it appeared more like an asylum, and then again a prison, and finally, enduringly, like a hybrid of all those places. Melted and melded from concrete, glass, and steel, fire doors scorched of their paint, black monoliths in the dark, forbidding and enticing all at once. A place of twisting corridors and lonely cells of sickness or incarceration that one might leave, but of course might also never.
I have known these institutions, have come and gone.
No unbarred exit has been revealed in recent days, and I have chosen to take this as an omen that I have all I need here for the duration of my life. Afraid to attract others with noise, afraid I might not find my way back if I were to exit, this place is now my home. I drink the same water that dilutes the ashes and survive by eating—what might I eat here after all? I turn my back on your image when I eat. I know you would not judge me, but—but.
There were so many times in my life before I failed to sell my work; been shunned, wept hungry. But now I would not sell these pieces even if there were anyone left to buy them, not if they wished to pay in bread and apples and clean water. Locked away, they are not for the eyes of others. Creator, curator, custodian, consumer: I am all these, all at once, alone.
Tonight, a close-up of your mouth.
So intimate I imagine I can see the veins beneath, the glacial flow of your life’s blood. A dark grey bow, unsmiling. I project your resignation to your fate upon them. I would be swallowed by that mouth, were those lips to part. Static burns a momentary line across them, or perhaps—and I have pondered this before, but chosen not to believe you are not alive, that this is not live—a point of damage on a tape rewound and played too often to remain intact. I feel it; the caustic touch of jealousy, that someone else has not only watched you, but had the power over how they watched you. I know, rationally, that you are being filmed, that this power exists. Rationality has nothing to do with the acid in my stomach, the bile in my heart.
I must create your mouth anew.
I pile the ashes and drag the old paint and food cans filled with water. My hands, unclean and invisible in the dark, are lit up in the screen’s glow. All lines of prophecy obliterated by my work, I am freed from the tyranny of the stars. I mix the shades I need, or as close as I can manage. I struggle to imagine you ever finding these rooms and passing through them, pausing as you recognize these most personal parts of yourself dissected and writ large—or rather when I have imagined it, I curl in upon myself in shame; in shame’s larger, more aggressive twin, mortification. I would cower in the farthest, darkest corner for fear you see the eyes that stared so hungrily upon you, or the hands that so imperfectly rendered your likeness.
I clear the room’s floor. Sliding the monitor gently into the doorway, afraid at every moment that the cables will snag and tear, will disconnect, every scratch and scrape a cacophony that threatens to bring the world down around my ears. But this will be the room; the room that will bear the imprint of your lips on every inch, reverse Sistine never to be beyond my reach. Bare concrete and dirt, crumbs of civilization beneath my sopping palms; threads of my blood swirled through the absence of color to infuse a glimmer of life. I will lay here on future days, if the future arrives, and rest my cheek against your continued silence. I will slow my heart and breath and wait for you to whisper, knowing whatever I hear will be my own invention; not caring.
I reinvent you all the time.
* * *
The films change.
Whether the sign of a different hand and eye behind the camera or an inevitable progression, I can’t be sure.
I wonder if they know I am watching. I wonder if they know anyone is watching. I wonder if whoever filmed this still lives, guerrilla projectionist of the end times.
The films become more intimate yet never reveal who you are. Your androgyny is amplified beneath the new harshness of the lights. It grows harder for me to transcribe your likeness, no materials available to me pale enough for this new overexposure. I smear great swathes of black across the walls, the negative of you. Tiny whorls rubbed away: your pores, the piercing jut of your hipbones beneath elastic skin stretched to near rupture. None of it satisfies. None of it feels worthy.
Frustrated, I return to the screens, burning my eyes out in the darkness. What I’m shown toys with me, teases me with the unpaintable topography of your skin. The camera swoops in close: medical; a soft bleached forest of down I become lost in. No trail, no way back. So close now I can’t know if the image is static or moving. The white grain of heavenly nothing.
And then a jump in the edit; sudden, brutal. Two pairs of hands implying the existence of a third. Black latex fingers, surprisingly gentle, reveal and pull apart your teeth. Hold your mouth open while the second assailant places a plastic apparatus inside to keep it open. You make no protest. Obscene, sex doll orifice. My body recoils at the invasiveness of the procedure, but my eyes will not be torn away. Your tongue glistens in its transparent cage. The hands withdraw, then reappear holding a rubber tube slick with lubrication. The black fingers feed it down into the darkness.
The screen goes black, decays into static.
I wait.
Nothing.
For a very long time, nothing.
* * *
I have struggled, for days now I think, to not go out of my mind. Nothing on the screens but the useless reflection of the power light. Static or darkness depending on my mood, on the whims of direct current. I began so many times to paint this new version of you; this screaming marionette, this ingester: uncomfortable in my skin at the thought of recreating that passive, involuntary gateway to your viscera. I revisited the mouth room and found I could not stay. Each time my eyes closed I saw that void with its teeth bared and the unheard rush of stale air disappearing into the darkness. All it took was unknown hands clogging your mouth with a plastic O to destroy the beautiful purity of those lips. I can no longer see them the same way, loathe myself as a pathetic prude. You did not create that indecent display, and yet it has changed how I view you forever.
When I sleep, I dream of your mouth. In those few washed-out minutes and hours I crawl between your teeth. The scream-echoed portal to a carnival ride that will make me sick, will frighten me. Dark and wet, impossible to turn back from. Sometimes I turn as I pass the flesh and enamel threshold and see the shadow of myself against the wall. Sometimes the black rubber hands are there, their owners in silhouette as the light from their camera shrinks my pupils down to microscopic black stars. Independent of your consciousness, your body’s peristalsis inexorably pulls me down and down and down. I wake each time as I am swallowed whole, sometimes the words help me in my ears. Sometimes I think what I heard was this is not for you, sometimes you could turn away; I second guess myself in every waking hour, eyes across my shoulder in the unquiet dark.
And then the screens spark back to life and the awe sticks in my throat.
* * *
My brain fills with the absence of color.
Meat, elastic and engorged.
Your inner workings: slow motion fiber-optic crawl. Pulsation and the yield to the camera’s progress rules here where the near-dead stillness of your skin did before. Everything is tubes and globes and alien landscapes, the wet horror of us all. You are humanized again. Still my muse, but down from your pedestal to surround me. I blush in the glow of your digestive tract; berate myself for my squeamishness before. I whisper my apologies to the slow on-screen journey through your body. I know you cannot hear me, but—
I have no medical training, but I have seen things; seen things when TV showed more than these phantom transmissions. The dreams of ghosts clawing up from the dirt, their disassembled bones beneath the fractured concrete. There is a sickness in your organs, pockets of disease in black nodes. Unless some new strain of evolution, some burgeoning godhead, but—no. You are, if not dying inside, then heading towards death. I am heading towards death, but I had never thought that of you. In your washed-out brilliance I assumed you had achieved some kind of stasis in this broken world, some kind of immortality. The hospital bed your coffin of glass. But now you are the poison apple that rots from within, seemingly perfect until the last.
I have trawled far gutted rooms and swept the ashes into piles. Your inner space adorns the walls: sweet cancerous monuments turned sideways along corridors, spirals of blackest decay exploding from weeping tunnels of flesh. My passion renewed by a sense of battling against time itself. My fingerprints are swollen and distorted by the sheer volume of paint required; no unique signature adorns these works. I don’t so much forget to sleep as become incapable. There is simply too much work to be done.
The screens flaunt their metastasizing blossoms, on and on. The motion of the camera slows and stalls. Retraction and progression in a loop, organic malfunction at every turn. My mind takes surreal tangents: the city outside composed of this inner flesh, its crumbling, capsized towers your disease; the impossibility of the contrast between your surface and what roils beneath, the purity and the putrescence; what shines in the light and what festers in the dark. I reside in all these places, subject to their whims. Am consumed by them.
The howls outside continue but grow distant, their interest lost. Barbarians unable to break through, beneath me in every sense. Untouchable in my tower of ash. Yet I wake from nightmares of my murals defiled by the offal dragged from my yawning wounds, the echoed whoops of their frenzied destruction. I cry in the dark and quietly check doors I know to be sealed.
The rain still falls, blacker each day. It begins to burn, just the tiniest bit. My thirst is the opposite of quenched, and fingerprints begin to slough away. The barbarians are not required at this point in our extinction event.
Renewed as non-entity, I paint. No one will remember, or even see. A closed gallery at the end of time.
I fail to make connections, and so the connections are made for me.
* * *
Please don’t, I cry as the scalpel opens the veil between your two realities.
Please, don’t, I whisper as the trickle of black blood becomes a flood.
Please stop, I scream as the layers of you are pinned and excised.
* * *
The return of the harsh lights—the operating theater lights—has me shielding my eyes: infant cave-dweller’s first glimpse of the sun. Impossibly bright, the scalpel blade absorbing and magnifying; a shard of exploding star burning through layers of skin and fat and muscle. The sluice of your cancerous blood washing things black in the black and white. The camera never wavers. The black hands move in and out of frame, methodical and shimmering, fingers clutching gobbets of tumorous flesh. Steel bowls filled to overflowing replaced as an afterthought. There is precision in the work of the blade, yet I still cannot believe any of these unseen forms are surgeons. In my gut this is performance art, reducing me to the role of reporter, of critic.
I cannot tear myself away. I fear what may happen if I do—that the transmission will end; that the gloves will be peeled away and discarded in resignation, the ratio of diseased to healthy tissue too imbalanced. On my knees, my hands tighten into claws, paint drying, unwatched. I wrestle with my desire to immortalize this. I take in the details of your cross-sectioned body; the diminishing number of leaking, uncauterized blood vessels. The grain of the film an echo of your sickness. I am watching either the dismantling or salvation of another human being and my urge is to smear the walls with bodily fluids and the burnt leavings of a broken world rather than to keep vigil. But—that is my vigil. If the film ends, if the power dies, my work will be the only memorial to your life, to mine. A grand, brutal descent into extinction marked only by my hands.
With no one left to see.
Futility dragging purpose down into the tar pit.
The hands on screen cut and burn, cut and burn, stopping only when there is nothing left to do of either.
I watch dumbly as the suturing begins. An ocean of breath leaves me. A thousand tiny black X’s gathering your fault lines together, repair and ruination in each pass of the curved needle. Those black-clad hands so gentle in their found rhythm, an intimacy I could never hope to achieve. Yet strive for all the same, optimistically hopeless. The camera pulls away and we wait, those non-surgeons and I. Like the bas-relief atop a mausoleum casket your body fades into the theater table, almost like you were never there at all.
* * *
I paint and paint and paint.
In the higher rooms least touched by fire I mark great swathes of black across walls a score of shades away from the hue of your skin. The places where you were opened; the places where you were cinched shut. Surgical twine blown up to hold the cracks in the plaster together; illusion of security. What decay still lurks within?
Dimmest light trickles through the cracks in the window boards, enough to work by. I am now as hollowed out as you. Eating even filth is a memory. A festering shadow creeping through the twilight to leave its mark. Behind and below the batteries die. Up and down the endless stairs: one screen only at the end of the circuit, placed in the room filled with your sleeping mouth. The flex of your ribcage, black mask of ventilator obscuring your face these days. These days? You could have been dead for a hundred years. I have searched this endless building, and you are not here, not even your bones. I know, I know—but I feel I would know your bones after all this time, is that not clear? Is that not somehow possible?
All that matters is that somewhere in time you breathe.
One day the ashes will run out and I will be forced to stop creating or go outside through portals of broken glass. Either would feel like death. Either would be death.
I orbit the cathode image of you now like a dead satellite, entropy dragging me slowly down into the last of your light. Elliptical, I shuffle and crawl through the rooms of our shared past, the trajectory of perhaps the final parts of both our lives. The majesty is gone it seems, but there are still times when my dry eyes want to cry. Still times when my sluggish heart becomes arrhythmic. Still times when my cracked lips smile.
One day the last of the batteries will give up the ghost and the screen will go black, and I will never know what became of you. Will you rot on that bed, lungs inflated and deflated by machines even as they liquefy? Will the electricity that runs the apparatus die, and you in turn? Will you still breathe beyond the life of machines? Will you rise—stitched, eviscerated Lazarus—into a bright white afterlife and wonder why you can’t remember what you dreamed? Or perhaps wonder at the dreams you do remember: the hands black with latex and dripping paint, circling you near and far, keeping you alive on one plane or another.
Or one day—soon, perhaps, it feels, the taste of my own rot on my tongue—my light will go out before that final screen, and it will be your image left alone in the darkness. Time and gravity frozen, and you watching over me. My bones and rags to keep you company through eternity—be kept company by you—both stained with all the work I’d done, and still had yet to do. A curled body bathed in dying light, eyes not quite closed, unable even in my final moments to willingly abandon your image. Lips parted for the world’s expiration, both yours and mine. Embracing at the center of a lost maze, a puzzle no one will ever solve. A puzzle no one cares about but that meant everything to me, here at the end of things.
I watch you breathe.
The screen fades.
I wait for you to return.
Just for a while.
In this last darkness.