Gallery

Todd Ph.D. Komarnicki

Description

gallery |Ë?gal...erÄ?|

1 a room or building for the display or sale of works of art - a collection of pictures.

2 a horizontal underground passage, esp. in a mine.

PHRASES

Play to the gallery - act in an exaggerated or theatrical manner, esp. to appeal to popular taste.

Sujets

• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456604424
• Langue: English

Extrait

Gallery
 
by
 
Todd Komarnicki

Copyright 2011 Todd Komarnicki,
All rights reserved.
 
Gallery
By Todd Komarnicki
 
Cover image: 'helga's hands' by Nicholas Weber
 
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0442-4
 
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
 

Decided to take a walk today.
Now this, this is what’s funny – I, I have this terrible limp. I have blisters on both my feet, on a bunch of toes, and my hip from an old injury is out of whack – actually, it’s locked up – so my hips are operating as one thing. Sort of move like a young penguin. And uh, my knee hurts too. There is rain today somewhere. Anyway, so of course I, I decide to take a walk, which is a good reminder of uh, all these little frailties that I carry with me – like physical representations of…mania?...you know, the, the ping pong balls inside my head?
I decide to walk in, of all cities, Los Angeles.
And I find that if I walk long enough – without looking at anything, without smelling anything, without thinking about anything in particular, except limping – that I wind up in New York. So I guess the answer is…that’s why people in New York limp. They’re just at the tail end of a long, long walk.
 

 

She sat in front of the mirror today.
I, I uh, I shouldn’t have been, been I was watching. She knows, she knows I’m watching, but she’s afraid to turn around because it’s one of those things she doesn’t want to…know, you know. She doesn’t want to be caught being aware that someone is watching. While the irony is that everything she does is in the desperate hope that someone will watch.
So she’s sitting in front of the mirror, ostensibly putting on her makeup, although, after half an hour, there is make-up all over her finger tips and all over the vanity, but not, not on her face. And she’s uh, she’s reciting an entire episode of, of ‘Lucy’ she’d seen that afternoon, when she was supposed to be somewhere. Doing something.
And she, she says she can’t concentrate, can’t concentrate long enough to do anything. But she can concentrate enough to remember every line of dialogue in this Lucy show – the one about the fur coat – I don’t know, I’d never seen it. She looks into that mirror with those stupid brown eyes, not unintelligent just…uncurious? Bored, stupid, flat brown. The color of tootsie rolls with the wrapper still on.
So, she sits there and…she charms herself and…me, because I am watching her. Falling, stupidly, in love with her…again. And sometimes she gets so passionate she almost bangs her face into the mirror. So I get on the other side of the glass to be part of the story that’s being told, as if someone could tell about her, as she had done, with the fur coat, with Desi and Fred and Ethel.
So I, I’m about to come in and, and explain to her that no one is ever casually confused – they’re only frantically confused, or terminally confused, or exhaustingly confused – and just when I think she is about to spill out over the, the far rim of herself, she pulls it back in and finishes the, the tale of the fur and of Lucy, and of what gets left behind, and it’s always her. It’s always her.
I should tell you about the other one – the new one, the extra one. Now this, this girl – she is still a girl – not in calendar years, but in…the weight on her shoulders? She’s uh, got arms filled with helium and they’re always flying above her head in goofy exasperation. She’s funny and fun. Tickling life, not wrestling with it.
She’s…hiding…something…her whole self. And this costume that she wears – the giggles and the…pouts and the way…she hums when she leans into kiss…this one I can’t watch, this one I can’t sneak up on, I…give off…electricity when I am near her, and I…glow in the light, or in the dark, or wherever I might be, and…give my location away all too soon. There’s no sneaking up one like this. She’s too…not pure – I don’t want to say pure – she’s just…unfettered light, you know, it’s just like you, you can’t sneak up on air, it’s just always around you.
So she is…Always around me.
 

 

Down here by the abbatoirs, there are these little bones at the end of the work day. I mean, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, and everybody’s home. Everything is dead on the other side of the wall, and everything is gone this side of the wall, and there are all these little bones. And the, the bones don’t have any meat on them – they have maybe a piece of hair or fur left on them – but they don’t seem to be the bones of any animal that exists. Whatever was happening before is over, and this is just the reminder that it’s over. They’re like, just the bones of the day.
You know they insulate the walls so you can’t hear the pigs. Because they would make an awful chorus, when the knife goes hem to hide. And I always thought “abbatoir” was such a fancy name for a slaughterhouse. A pretty name. A bouncy, bouncy name. abbatoir , abbatoir. Delicious.
Here’s a good building – it’s…totally abandoned and…gorgeous. Tattoos all over it. Barbed-wire turtleneck keeping it nice and cozy in this funereal heat. And now instead of penitent animals, it is filled with…go ahead, say it, art.
Abbatoir to gallery in one fell landlord swoop. It’s just pieces of stuff, right, I mean. The same stuff that cluttered these walls when it was McGinty and Sons, Buthcher, baker, candlestick maker. Stuff that would have wound up somewhere else – either in the tube, never even squeezed out…or…across the street, attached to a sheep.
Don’t you feel sometimes that, the, the, the, that there alwa, that there’s always a whispering in your ear?...that there’s always an answer and…it’s just here…and on the tip of the…lobe around the…hammer and the anvil and the stirrup?...if we just let those, that whisper…funnel in…to where we can actually hear it…then, then we’d be okay…that, that something…that that whisper would take us back to, but does anybody remember how to listen?
We all know how to talk-talk in the night. I, you, you see that woman in the corner with the – hah. I shouldn’t say this, but that woman in the corner, with the…I can’t. See that’s the point…by saying “the woman in the corner with the…” I want to take her away. Now she is part of me. I want to peel her off further, so I can keep her at a safe distance and tell myself what she is. Then I don’t have to deal with her – then she is not the whisper. See that woman in the corner? She’s not the whisper.

Ughn, I’m so thirsty. Have you tried the wine? The wine is hopefully not indicative of the quality of art.
I like to imagine what we were all afraid of before we came here tonight. You know, terrified, like…is my husband going to say something…hypnotizingingly dull…or arbitrary? Is someone going to break the pattern tonight? Is someone going to…behave in a new fashion? Am I just-too-fucking-ugly to step outside of the door? Didn’t I wear this outfit the last time I saw Raya? Will Raya be there? Is there a Raya? Should I have had my daughter? Was it going to be a daughter, that child that never, never got its knuckles into the world? Hmm.
Take every insecurity, magnify it by a thousand. Our ridiculous loneliness, our adamant isolation.
 

 

There was a…he wasn’t a drunk, but there was some guy following us – she and I from the parking lot. Couldn’t…anyway…had a bit of a walk and this cat was following us. Seemed harmless enough. Sort of a Deadhead…swept-out looking guy…acid grin. He was…silly if anything – not threatening. And at first he didn’t seem the type to follow – so, I paid no mind, and she paid no mind – and we walked and he followed and we walked and he followed and we got to the door, and we went to the wrong door, and it was locked, and we turned, and he…he was there…fumbling…eyes, with her as his target.
And he finally locked onto her, and he, he said “I’ve been following you.”
“Yeah, so we see. What the, what the fuck do you want?”
He looked at her, she was bending down to tie her sandal at the time – he looked down at her and said, “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
It was a dull, velvet delivery…and…served only to insult her – this harmless little bear of a man…slurring out his…pointless affection. And he repeated himself, and he asked her his name – he asked her her name.
She said, “I don’t usually give my name out to creeps that follow me in the middle of the night.”
And he said, “What is your name?”
And she said, “But this isn’t…a normal circumstance.”
And I looked at, I looked at her – she looked like she was chewing something hard – her face had gone diagonal. There was a grunt to her stance. But, I looked at her, and it was really the first time I have looked at her…maybe in five years?...and I realized that…this clichéd clown was right. She was the most beautiful woman any of us had ever seen.
 

 

I’m really…limping now, I need to find a, a chair or something. Can you help me…help me find a chair? I’m starting to feel like these, these are someone else’s legs. They’re not obeying my…my spinal impulses.
Oh uh, wait. Wait, wait, wait. I gotta tell you this one. My sister told me this one – which, if you knew my sister would make it that much more, but you don’t so you’ll have to deal with it on its own terms – but this is the only joke I tell. I know I should, uh, tell jokes – I think it’s important – but I have…no rhythm…no grace for the story. I always leave out some key part of the joke. Come to think of it, I always leave out some key part of whatever I am doing. Anyway…don’t begrudge me the right to tell you this joke – poorly or not.
“It was Christmas…and the mailman was going to…deliver his last mail before the holidays. And as he came to eac