illiteratus.com

by Justin Loke

He had come to believe, not without a certain embarrassment, that what he required was documentation. It was something stamped, laminated. It was for this reason, or so he later insisted, that he found himself one morning at the embassy, among others whose faces bore the same provisional quality. He carried with him a borrowed sense of purpose.

The photographic booth accepted his coins, though not without that brief and familiar interval in which they were swallowed but not yet acknowledged, a hesitation he associated with vending machines, slot machines, and other apparatuses of exchange, whose silence seemed to imply the possibility of loss.

Inside, beneath the curtained enclosure, he arranged himself as instructed, while the machine recorded him. The resulting image, when it emerged, presented a version of his face with a clarity that struck him as excessive and lacking at the same time. When the flash went off, he smiled, recalling that such expressions were not always customary, that early photographic processes required long exposures, during which subjects were held in place, making neutral expressions more practical, while portraiture itself inherited from painting a preference for dignity over spontaneity, a convention that persisted even as technology improved, later reinforced by mid-century injunctions, perhaps even commercial in origin, promoting the cheerful, smiling subject, to say cheese—a word designed less to express happiness than to produce its visible form… but he smiled.

He noticed butterflies gathering by the window, their movements uncertain. He recalled that hope had once been described to him as feathered, “Hope” is a thing with feathers… a phrase he had first encountered in a song and only later discovered to have originated in Emily Dickinson. It was in this spirit that he dreamed himself aiming a gun at her heart, only to find that what issued forth was not force but a small flag, on which the word BANG had been printed in childish letters.

From a distance, he organized his days around the anticipation of a sentence that had not yet been spoken. The mornings extended themselves with elasticity, the afternoons were sustained by imagined conversations whose details he revised continually, and the evenings… the evenings… safer to take the pills.

He told her that he had just returned from a thousand-year time trip, and he told her what he saw: in that place, children moved in pairs holding hands, children kissing… untroubled by the presence of others; there, it seemed that everyone was happy and would live forever, and all their dreams would come true.

Yet the illusion betrayed itself in minor details, and he understood wth clarity. He was swimming, while the air around him carried a faint residue of alcohol. The whiskey was ice cold, but he felt a slight burning in his throat, and then, almost immediately, found himself recalling the warmth spreading through the water when he had realised he was pissing in his trunks at the pool.

He recalled that day, from a distance, he saw her ascend the diving board, where she paused, suspended between the act of stepping forward, the possibility of retreat. In that moment, she appeared to gather a certain light before the descent, though whether it belonged to her or to the conditions of observation, he could not say.

He set about reconstructing his day with a care, ensuring that each hour was aligned with the prospect of her return. As evening approached, and the distinctions between the day’s segments began to dissolve, he found himself once again repeating the sentence upon which everything seemed to depend. It struck him, not without a certain irony, that the phrase was fragile. In this way, he held it in place, as one might hold a structure together through sheer attention: that she would come back to the house that night.

Adaptated from lyrics of Without Feathers by The Wave Pictures after listening to it for 16 years.