I
always feel better when I'm
Misunderstood by the Great
Unwashed. I feel like it really
validates me as an Artist.
Otherwise I might feel bad
about fantasizing about being
published in arty magazines
that will pay me in back issues
(if I'm lucky). Instead I
excitedly visualize myself
living for weeks on three
meals a day of undiluted Back
Issues.
David
Bunn (under Features)
got
all the cards from the card
catalogues... [Speechless
with envy sounds like that..]
So many words.
It
was a team project. Steve,
Dane, and Justin were the
surveyors and Pembroke was
the terrain. It was decided
that she should be the landscape
because she was the smallest
and had the most interesting
topography. Pembroke lay face
up on a hardwood floor beneath
a frame hung with a fine screen.
The surveyors took turns lowering
a tiny plumb attached to a
thread through each hole in
the screen above her. They
measured the length of the
thread at which the weight
touched her body. They recorded
the coordinates of the hole
in the screen and wrote down
each measurement. Pembroke
lay very still. They started
at her head and worked their
way to her feet.
Ten
years later she can still
taste the lead weight like
much handled change, as it
records her lips at infinitesimal
intervals. She wasn't to speak.
She wasn't to move. When they
reached her bare inner arms,
she was numb and still silent
though she no longer had to
be.
After
six hours they removed the
screen, but she couldn't get
up. Justin rolled up the topographic
map and helped her to her
feet. She shakily signed her
name in the lower right corner.
The surveyors turned the map
in to the teaching assistant
in site design class the next
day. Pembroke stayed in bed,
lying on her stomach, her
head beneath the pillow. A
watery bruise deepened over
her sacrum.
She
dreamed of a vertiginously
rolling, tree-covered landscape.
She couldn't see the ground,
only the shifting deep cerulean-greens
of the foliage and the undulating
blue blots of shadow.
When
the site design class ended,
Pembroke enrolled in a class
on Roberto Bourle-Marx and
moved house. She took up residence
in a tiny apartment consisting
of the butler's quarters in
what must once have housed
a large Victorian family and
their servants. The apartment
was evenly divided into two
rooms. A bed, armoire, desk,
and kitchenette crowded one
room. The bathroom, with its
chubby claw-footed bathtub
and clean surfaces of white
hexagonal tile seemed airy
and serene by comparison.
Always before bathing, Pembroke
left her dirty clothes in
a heap outside the door so
not to foil the ordered expanse
of tile surrounding the tub.
Sometimes on hot summer nights
she slept in the bathtub,
her cheek against the porcelain
and her body in inches of
cool water that gradually
grew tepid then warm during
the night.
That
summer she dreamed often the
tableau of protean green ledges
and swells.
