I am a lizard. Up here near the top of the island the things with two legs don't bother me. I eat birds, only the little brown ones and never the ones with many colors. Sometimes I eat the little buzzing things and the rodents but they are very small and not really worth the trouble. There is much sun here, and nothing to eat me. I will grow very old.
There were once many more of us, enough to keep the two-leggeds away, scare them back upon their containers that swam on the sea. But then came the ones with pieces of metal in their shrunken claws and killed most of us. They did not know we were lizards and called us instead culebra, which meant snake in their tongue. But we are not snakes, we are lizards, nearly as large as the two-leggeds themselves.
If we were not on an island there would be more of us. But we would be small and eat little buzzing things, have more enemies. This island keeps us here, but it is ours.
Not so long ago, the two-leggeds learned to fly like birds, too big to eat, too fast to hide from. They dropped things from their wings that exploded. They killed most of us that had outlived the invasion from the sea. And then they stopped; they must have thought they had gotten all of us. Now the only ones who come to look for us are easy to spot—they wear many colors and carry things in their claws that are not part of their bodies and look through them from far away. Sometimes they plant flags in the rocks and scribble in little books.
Yesterday, one came all the way up here. Up close it is hard to understand what kind of creature they are. She was not looking for anything to eat, not running from anything I could see. Her hair was black, her shirt, her shoes, everything but her pale skin. I say that it was a she because she had wide hips that would be good for sitting upon eggs and bumps upon her chest like the deer have when their young suck milk from their bodies. She carried a thing in her hands like the others, but she pointed it toward the ground, never looking up and so it was easy to be close to her without being seen. When she got near the top of this mountain, she pulled out shells of the things that killed us from her pocket, arranged them on a rock and pointed her box at them. Then she moved them and pointed her box at them again. She did this for a long time and then sat upon a rock looking at nothing. There was a clicking sound, unlike rock upon rock or rock upon wood.
Excuse me now. The sun has gone over the hill and it is time I take a nap.
Here I am lying on the sand next to the ocean. It's not really me but that's alright, my brother and I are here because this is not Massachusetts in December, not because Culebra is the vacation isle of our dreams. In fact we could have dropped straight from the sky and onto the white sand for as much as we are like the other gringos. I could not find anything to bring that was not black and my brother, Jessie, dresses like a minor hip hop celebrity—powder blue running suit, doo rag, big white basketball sneakers that look like loaves of bread. But when he swims in the water he is as fluid and comfortable as a dolphin and I am at home watching him swim.
I am trying to keep my eyes open here. This morning there was a couple jumping around in the shallows. They had to be honeymooners. She was young, Asian, wore a bright red bathing suit. Her groom was older, a little paunchy around the middle, with hair like a bowl of butterscotch pudding. They jumped at each other, spat water back and forth. She climbed on him whooping like a cowgirl and thrusting her hips like she spurring a horse. He tossed her off and someone snapped a picture from the shore.
When she rose from the water, her back was toward her groom. Her mouth was a perfectly round O and she looked scared, all the whooping had vanished, an ice cube would not have melted in her mouth. And then she turned back to her husband with a big smile, and the moment was gone. This is the kind of image that excites me, makes me wish I had not left my camera in camp.
She returned the next day without her box. She put something in her mouth that made fire, sucked on one and then another. She ate nothing, looked at the ground, tapped her knee with her free finger.
The sun had turned her skin, what there was of it, pinker than before. She pulled another box from her pocket, flipped it open and punched buttons on it. This is something two-leggeds can do now, use these little boxes anywhere. She talked into it.
"Hey it's me. What hat time is it there? Oh right, same time zone, I knew that.
"How is your show coming? You sound tired.
"There is nothing here to shoot. Not really I mean Jessie has taken about 100 pictures of us standing by the water. It's so blue. That seems to be what you do here, lie on the beach, get up, talk about how blue the ocean is. Repeat.
"You would be very, very bored here. Anyway, I'm up on a hill now. They say there may or may not be these four foot lizards up here. The people here on this little island don't know whether there are like these humongous lizards here. Tells you what you need to know about Culebra—the whole island is kind of like a Jimmy Buffet song.
"Jimmy Buffet? You know that guy who sings about margaritas and sailboats.
"Anyway are you listening? Are you safe? You sound high, tell me you're not.
"Okay, what am I supposed to think? You said you wouldn't.
"Never mind. Where are you anyway?
"The show is good? That's great. Really it is, you deserve it."
"This battery is going to die and I can't recharge it here. I'm surprised, you know, I'm sitting on the side of the mountain looking out toward St. Thomas. Wouldn't have thought there would be coverage here. I just wanted to say, well you know, that I love you.
"Bye for now."
I am here because Marlena is not. This is not my idea but my mother's; she believes in places where people do not move too fast and have no clocks. My brother doesn't believe in anything, he just soaks it up, moves through the world around him at ease. He was on winter break and so he came to make sure I did not pine away into a lump of jello; I make sure he does not drink too much beer.
Marlena. The first time I saw her she stood in front of the classroom looking about seven feet tall, like an angry waiter in a rumpled whit shirt and black pants, waving her hands, pointing at us, beating us back. She was fierce, fear rippled through the classroom, but she was impossible to ignore. So alive, so caustic, jabbing her fingers at us, laughing theatrically. Her hair was a medusa hive of dyed black tendrils,chaotic and looking at odds with itself. The class was on something called Body as Landscape, a topic she almost entirely ignored.
Her reputation was immense but obscure. Like most of our teachers no one could remember anything she had done lately. Just a slippery appreciation that she was Someone. That no one knew what she did was just mysterious, elusive.
She gave us an assignment to take basic nudes of each other. "No ironic framing, no bullshit, no small shots of tattoos, or avoiding the body. You have to know what the mold is before you can break it."
On a whim, because there was something magnetic about her skinny body in too big pants, the way she threw it around like a bag of bones ignored by the whirlwind mind above, I asked her to pose for me. "Absolutely not,” she said twice. I smiled my best pixie smile and said, "I'm going to have to just keep annoying you until you say yes.”
"Work fast then, and no shots of my face. You tell anyone in this class I did this and you get an F."
When we got to the studio, she pulled off her clothes and threw them on the ground, turned away from me. "Try to avoid my ass, it's too skinny and I don't want to look like a little boy."
"I thought this was supposed to be about shooting straight on, no hiding, no cropping out of the bad parts."
"I'm the teacher. I give bad advice." She refused to turn around but eventually did so and looked up at the ceiling. I asked her to look at the camera, she looked up and smoked a cigarette, pulled her shirt back on. "Are you getting anything? she asked.”
"No."
"Good."
Finally I got a shot of her face by ducking quickly to the side before she could turn away. She was lounging on her side looking at the wall and when she turned in anger I got a blurry image of her face yelling at me. She got up and dressed.
"This was a very bad idea."
"I thought bad ideas were your specialty."
When I developed the picture, except for the head moving like an attacking bull dog her body was in clear relief. On her right arm there was a small tattoo of the word Escala. I had to look it up, it's Spanish for Ladder.
I don't know why you write upon me what you do. That is the job of the eye and I am the
film. In the dark I reside but for the brief flashes of whatever you decide to etch upon me. Whatever you tell yourself about what you see, it is in my grain that what you see is made. I have
no say and I am the final say.
A week after she let me shoot her, Marlena stopped me after class and said, "I'm not
mad anymore. Let's have lunch."
She took me off campus to a small Vietnamese place with a window on the street. "That
was brave, pissing the teacher off. You don't look that brave."
She ordered stir-fried vegetables with chicken, asked for extra chicken, extra spicy, and I
ate hot and sour soup. She chewed in big bites, like having to use the fork was an imposition, I
picked at my soup, stealing glances. When her plate was mostly clean, she pointed with her fork out the window. "Look at how these kids put bumperstickers even on their bicycles. It's cowardly, carrying around their words instead of saying anything out loud."
"Maybe they do have something to say. You can't very well walk around telling everyone
you meet everything you have to say."
"No, look at how he pushes his bike down the sidewalk, shoulders hunched up, wrapped up
in himself. He's a coward. He doesn't really notice anything around him. Do you?”
She was looking at me for the first time, like she expected an answer not an audience. Her
eyes were a light brown, her lips shining with chicken grease. She was smiling at me, not smirking, just smiling.
"You don't know anything yet do you? I like that."
"Teach me then."
"I am a teacher after all. A bad one."
She leaned across the table and held my chin, kissed me. We finished as quickly as we could and then we went back to her place where she tore me apart, limb by limb, a helpless chicken flopping around on her bed while she licked her lips and ate without a fork. She smelled like cilantro and cigarettes, I can still smell it from here, now.
A bad teacher indeed, she had skipped out on her afternoon classes.
The next day she came up the hill again, this time looking more carefully around her. Before it had been easy to watch her because she never looked up long enough to see me. I could have bitten the back of her neck before she noticed. She had little black boxes around her eyes, and was eating something, an orange ball. This time she looked around her, sat down and put more of the fire things in her mouth. Took off her glasses and little drops of water were falling down her cheek.
If she starts using her eyes like this, I will have to hide better or not watch at all.
She wiped her eyes and stared at her little box, punching numbers but not talking into it. Then she walked back down the hill. I followed her awhile, down into the sun. She moved more like an animal, less like a machine. She left the peels of the orange things on the ground, fruit.
I followed her down towards the water, to where there is an old broken place where a family of two-leggeds once lived. Sometimes I can catch birds there. I saw her reach the shore before I had to turn around, make it home back up high before the hill turned into shade, the sun set. Her family must have been near by then, the things that she would eat.
Six months later we were living together in her apartment crammed full of books and dirty dishes. The books teetered in big piles everywhere, but I made it my duty to get rid of the dishes, wash the sheets, clean the bathroom. I did not mind, I was learning to care for someone else in these little ways for the first time.
The rest of the building was inhabited by retired nuns, I could never escape the sensation they were staring around corners at me every time I opened the door.
That doesn't make much sense does it? How we went from a Vietnamese restaurant to sharing a space the size of a closet, me doing the dishes, washing her laundry. It doesn't make sense but there you go. Her nature, angry, frenetic, when kept under control drew us together quickly, completely.
She needed an audience to expend all of her energy upon, drag around. That's me alright, happy to be dragged along. Really.
She could be very kind at just the right moments. Like when my brother came to visit and she snuck him into a club to hear some hip hop group he worshipped. Or the way she would put her hand in mine, walking to the subway in the morning, smiling like a little kid. She bought me a leopard print coat with her first paycheck. In those moments I felt towed along by a force of nature, awed that she had chosen me to show this soft side to.
She told me she was raised by diplomatic parents, mostly in Belgium, had known how to curtsy and speak French, a few words of something called Walloon even. I had imagined only something broken, something intense could have created her.
"I miss the cheese and the chocolate. It was as good as childhood as could be.”
I am a bullet. I was dropped here long ago but I did not explode. I probably never will, but I will not die unless one of these people who dropped me here finds me again. They made me and I lie here in the bushes waiting for them to come find me. I will make noise someday, when one of them finds me again and commands it. One almost did today, he walked right past me with his sister. This is what they said:
"What did you mean, you’re taking a break from pictures. Isn’t that what you do?”
He wore big baggy pants and a white tank top. He waved his hand in front of his sister’s face and whistled.
"Yeah, pictures I take pictures. But I’m burnt out—that’s what art students do, we work for awhile, we have a crisis. We get over it."
The boy found a shell casing in the road, a spent one, put it in his pocket with some others, shook them around so they rattled. "So Mom is really banging her hairdresser?”
"Don't ever, ever, ever refer to our mom and banging in the same sentence. Eww."
“Call it what you want to. Fucking, having an affair, you know what I mean.”
"Yes she is having an affair with the hairdresser. I think that's why she bought us these tickets, so I don't tell Dad. Pathetic isn't it?”
"Nah. Good for moms. She's more worried about you than about Dad. You look like shit, seriously. I think you should start taking pictures again."
They are weak people, I hope that I don't have to make my noise at them. I was made by much stronger people to kill other very strong people. I do not like these ones at all, they are not worth listening to.
When the semester ended her contract was not renewed because she was an even worse teacher than the others. Her criticisms were withering, she cared very little for the topic. Almost no one could think of anything they learned from the class except that it must be frustrating to be a Real Artist and have to get a job.
She said she didn't care and packed up what little she had in the classroom.
And then she started working again. When I had moved in, I was amazed to find nothing indicating she had ever made any prints at all. All through the semester, she had refused to let me see anything she had done. Thinking back, how is it I could have lived with her and had no real idea what sort of art she made? Score one for infatuation.
"I throw everything away after a show that I don't sell, the camera too." She had no regular gallery anymore, burned each bridge as it came and buried herself into a dead end teaching job to make money.
She bought a used Nikon and a tripod and convinced the college not to rescind her dark room access. The more she worked, the more surly she became. The soft side of her ebbed away, what had been the floor of her anger and energy had many floors beneath it. What had looked like her best face, even then tempered with gusting distractions and casual anger, was a mask over uglier things.
She would lock herself in the bedroom and tell me to go away while she scribbled and planned inside. When I told her I loved her, was worried, she started to stay out late, mentioned bluntly that she was feeling the desire for boys again.
"Sometimes, I just want some dick.” She says things like that, like a drunken sailor.
She consumed nothing but coffee, cigarettes, and raw egg noodles, scowled when I suggested she let me make her a real meal. I learned to bake, set out cinnamon rolls and fresh pies, bowls of fruit. They sat on the table going cold while she took notes and more notes, said almost nothing.
When I asked to see her work, she started sleeping in the darkroom, returning at odd hours to take a shower and climb into bed and, rarely, make love without kissing, without saying a word, without caring who I was.
I could not take it anymore. If not a chance to dig into her work, her passion, what else was I getting out of this? I had become a housewife, a caretaker of a little lonely apartment. I spent most of my time drinking coffee and walking around the streets, pretending to marinate the world into photographs of my own.
So I went to the darkroom to see what she was printing.
It was stunning, but I cannot convey why. A photograph is resistant to words after all.
Each image was shot from inside various bathrooms, meticulously crafted forced, staged scenes:
A hand dryer billowing red smoke in a long curl almost touching the floor.
A couple dozen white roses arranged in the back of a toilet, the handle replaced by a long section of garden hose.
The towels in a dispenser replaced by a long unbroken sheet of rubber trailing over the sink below.
A soap bowl on a counter refilled with a tower of grapes, pyramidal, the grape on the top suspended, about to fall off.
The best by far was wide angle shot of three walls of a bathroom stall. On the surface of the walls she had written in very small print over every inch of surface. The words were impossible to read but ran in long columns, each four or five letters long. A dim, sulfur colored light shown from above the stall.
Putting words to photographs, it is a pointless task. Try to see it as I did:
Marlena lugging a camera, a tripod, a bag of her props from bathroom to bathroom, an odyssey of dedicated intrusion. That was what made the photographs so alive, the unspoken back story of some kook camped out in a bathroom for hours on end, kneeling in a stall writing carefully on the walls with a Sharpie while, no doubt, others stood impatiently outside the door probably having to give up after awhile.
I confronted her, told her I was in awe of how she had made these pictures. "They're gorgeous, really. You are so so good it is spooky."
She curled her hand as if to hit me, but then stopped to find her coat. "Don't ever do that again. This has been fun, you and I, but don't push it too far.”
"Too far? I barely see you anymore. Come back to me, please. I love you, I want to be a part of what you are doing now."
She left but after a few days started calling at odd hours. Little by little she came back, not so angry, just exhausted looking. That was her secret, she returned to what supported her without admitting to ever needing anything. The more she runs, the more she comes back. It was confinement that she resisted.
I would find her nodding out on the couch in the early mornings, the hint of a smile on her face. "It was good tonight,” she would say when she saw me, "It's going to be good."
Sit here upon me if you wish, it is for but a second. Sit here and breathe in smoke, stare at your telephone, talk to some illusion that lives on the other end. I don't care what you do. There are better things you could spend your time doing like pay attention to the lizard who watches you with cold eyes from above, sing a song, watch the ships heading out from St. Thomas. It's your loss.
I was born a long long time ago down under the water there and then I was pushed up here. It took many generations of things that crawl and walk for me to get here and I will never die. I am patient—it is only the things that live and die that are restless, looking for something. I am content.
Sit there and gush all the water from your eyes that you can, even the hurricane rains do not bother me. One day I will become rubble and drift down into the ocean again but I will still be. You are but a small second on a long long clock. Nothing you do matters.
If you were to lie down upon me and let all of that rotting flesh wash away. Let the other things with legs eat you and the sun dry your juices and become nothing but bones, then you would know something. Then you would be something. But mostly you are nothing.
She had no regular gallery anymore, but her name was enough to get in the door at the places she had not tried yet. A gallery called Hang agreed to give her a show. "A good gallery,” she told me, "The kind of place with acres of floor space, almost nothing on the walls. A big black desk at the front with a Visa machine on it."
The superintendent of her building knocked on the door one day and told me that if Marlena did not pay last month's back rent we would be evicted. "Please, just give her a couple of weeks. She has a show coming up."
When a couple of weeks passed, I called my mom and asked for some cash to keep from being thrown out on the curb. She insisted on coming to the city for a visit first. She took one look around the place, at me and said, "Get your clothes. You need to get out of here."
Sometimes the boy comes and floats upon my back, pushing along with long, languid strokes. He drifts, dragging his legs behind him, peering down with a mask. He is watching the fish and sun rays, the silty bottom and shadows moving on the reef. He is seeing what he sees, not looking for something not there. He moves like a seal among the waves, not like the others who splash and jump in my shallows, stare mutely at the reef below looking for something they were told would be there.
It comforts him, makes his thoughts go away. He could be something born within me, something made to travel over my back. He walks upon the shore looking out, opening bottles with shards of coral between the crook of his thumb and finger. He knows the shallows, would like to set out into the deep. He could sail forever, looking straight ahead, laughing at storms and smiling at the waves. If I could give him fins and remove the useless, awkward limbs from his body, I would do so.
When my brother was very young, my parents packed us all up and moved to western Mass. My father is an architect and he took a job overseeing the building of a new county courthouse there. My mom grew vegetables, sewed quilts, wore mud boots, and decorated the old farmhouse we rented with black and white historical photos. She felt that she was coming into her own there, but Living on the Land was a fairy tale and we packed up after a year and moved back to Newton.
Ever since he has worked on enormous projects, bridges and buildings—anything big and time consuming. He is rarely home, my mom wears silver jewelry and blousy dresses, tries to look like the old hippy she never was, recalls the old farmhouse with a warm look in her eye.
When she herded me home, I went into withdrawal. I called Marlena a dozen times a day and mostly she would not answer. My mom threatened to take my phone and so I stood out in the snow smoking and redialing. My brother came home for winter break and dragged me to movies and ice cream parlors, introduced me to his friends—mostly white boys in baggy jeans and backwards ball caps. I remembered these kids from growing up here, they all said S'up, and Word, and Yo in constant refrain. They gawked at my tits when they thought I wasn't looking.
I was getting worse not better so Mom suggested Jessie and I take a vacation together.
"You are so pale, you need some sun. Some rest. Go down to Puerto Rico with you brother and lie around like a lizard."
"Is that what you and your hairdresser would do?”
She laughed, "Of course you noticed that.” It was hard not to, this aging woman in long salt and pepper hair who suddenly had to check on her hair appointments several times a week, left the house at odd hours and returned smiling and distracted.
"Yeah I noticed. I don't suppose dad has caught on yet?”
"Not unless you have something to say to him about it."
"Is this a new thing?
"You could say that." She tapped the side of her coffee cup. "It's hard to live with someone for 20 years who loves his job more than he loves you. I deserve this."
Probably she was right, my father who had given me bad eyesight and 5'2” worth of assertion into the world. He had long ago become a kind of mole, squinting at everything, white short sleeved shirt perpetually stocked with three or four pens in the pocket, returning home to his basement full of half-finished models of airports and bi-planes, ships with no bottle, race cars. Who does these things anymore?
I was starting to become Marlena, agitated and jumpy, clothes smelly and mean words that I used too much. Really, it was not me any more than this island of sun and frolicking couples.
Point me at anything, my eye is your eye, fill it with what you want. Trees, people, buildings, walls, clouds, it makes no difference to me. I pay no attention to what comes through the eye, only the hands that guide it. You can point me at a thousand, a million different moments of the day and I will not tire of any of it, it will not go stale, nothing is obvious to me.
But it is to you. You grow tired of looking at what you have already seen, what the world has made without you. You cannot take it all in but must carve the canvas up into little pieces that you can make your own. Go on, I don't mind, I like that you see something through me whether or not I see it on my own. You have seen so little to be so tired of it.
I have climbed up this hill day after day now, leaving messages for her, becoming her or really the absence of Marlena. I cannot shoot much anymore; my photographs just won't live any more without her anger at their banality. I love her so much and I could not tell you exactly why. It makes me love her the more somehow, to not know why. She is probably run into the ground by now, her pictures sold and the camera pawned, worn and dragging herself around like a ghost.
Yesterday I came up here and felt the beauty of this place, this rise looming over the water. But what do you do about beauty other than stand around and look at it? I want someone to grab onto and carry me away. Someone angry and unbuttoned. But I don't want to be ignored anymore.
Then I lay upon a rock looked up into the clouds. Big white clouds turning to grey. I had never noticed how they fly along over the sky, a transparency of one thing over another, not bound to anything as vague as a landscape, a vista, an atmosphere. The sky behind is just a scrim, one of many superimposed polaroids, each thing only itself but near to everything else. They are my new heroes, the clouds.
I did not meant to hurt her. She was moving more like an animal than before, her little box on a thing with three legs. Her eyes scanned here and there, really looked at the shrubs and birds for the first time. She set up her box on a cliff out of the wind and stopped darting around. I wanted to get a closer look—she was more like a thing now that would be good to eat. I moved down right above her like I had done before but she surprised me. I surprised her too; she turned and saw me took a step backward and then was over the cliff. As she fell, she said words. I don't know what they were.
From the top of the cliff, I could see her moving a little on the ground then not moving. She looked up at me then her eyes stopped moving. I did not know humans could do that with their necks, bend them that way. I considered going down and trying a bite of her flesh. But she was in the shade and I will wait until she is not.
So maybe she will float back to me like cloud, even here at the bottom of a cliff on an island far far from her. The more she has moved away, the more I know she will come back. She needs to drag something as much as I want to pulled along. Isn't that how she works?
Only I wish she would hurry. I cannot feel anything at all and I am sleepy. So sleepy.
I have no name, I am made of too many things to be any one thing. Sometimes I am the wind, sometimes, the sun, sometimes the paint on the side of one of the old buildings by the Dewey harbor. I can be anything I want. I am free, I have no form, I settle upon nothing. I am water and not water, wind and not wind. I move and keep moving, but I am one place and not another, I am this place, this island but not this place now, this place as it always been. Once I surrounded the big lizards with their bloody mouths and then the people and the ships came and so on. I was here long before the lizards I could tell you how they got here but I have my mysteries and so do they. I will tell you anything but you have to ask or I will tell you nothing.
What the lizards and the acacia trees, and the little creature in the reefs and the big dark birds and the fish know I told them. I speak all of the languages here, I am language before words or instincts. I am bigger than all of this, I am these things.
I can be anything that comes here; the hurricane winds, the drunken visitors down by the shore, the unexploded bomb shells, the last few big lizards. I can be this pale young girl growing cold in the dirt, her hand clutching a metal tripod, her mouth leaking blood. She will be found and carried away back to where she came from before the mice and the birds and invisible little bugs can eat her and leave her bones to bleach, before the lizard decides whether or not to have her all to himself. But when she is gone, she will still have been here and so I will be her too.
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