A Photographer and His Model.

Blink.

He stared through his single wide eye at what he perceived to be reality. And if that which he perceived to be true truly was, in fact, the truth, why, the truth was beautiful, and full of splendid curves and colors in which one could drown. Through his eye, truth was in form, and in proportion, and in composition. His eye blinked, and truth was captured. He would take it with him wherever he wandered, the 3.5 x 4.25 rectangle of reality in his pocket, collecting lint as pockets do. And when the world seemed too harsh and reality had lost its luster, he could pull out the truth that he had two-dimensionally imprisoned, and remember that all was not, in fact, lost. For as long as he could touch the truth, and see the truth, then he could simultaneously hide from it.

She contemplated death by starvation. She wondered what it would feel like. Perhaps like nothing at all. Perhaps like a scorching blade of grass under the hot August sun. Perhaps like a leaf at the end of autumn. Perhaps like an icicle as winter melts away. Perhaps like a flower when the May showers stop falling from the sky. Regardless, it would feel like the end. Although the end, she thought, is more like the beginning. For the summer burns into fall, and the trees incinerate under the equinox moon. And autumn withers into winter, and winter melts into spring, and spring explodes into bloom, and suddenly the summer has arrived again. Perhaps death by starvation wouldn’t feel so badly, for if blades of grass sprout from her bones too visible, or if leaves blanket her translucent skin, or if icicles drip from her ears like silver rings, or if flowers are nourished from her stagnant blood, then she has created beauty, and that is all she cared to do.

He saw the world in angles, in parallel lines, and in proportions. It was all science, and it was all math, and if he perfected his knowledge, then he could reproduce the world on sheets of paper, plastering man-made walls with replicated beauty. If he could perfect the parallel line, he thought, then he would be happy. For if he could perfect the parallel line, then he would be perfecting the already perfect, and in that, he would be God, or more. God created the universe, and the world, and the man about whom we speak, but it would be said man who took this universe, and this world, and warped it. His eye would not sleep until the man behind it could take parallel lines, and bend them, yet still never allow them to touch.

She contemplated death by suffocation, and wondered what it would feel like, or how one one would go about doing it. Ropes were too callous, they left marks on the neck, and the neck was too gentle for one to leave rope marks. She did not have the will power to hold her breath, nor to hold a cord, nor to leave that car door closed as death itself leaked through the cracks into the windows and into her collapsing lungs. And if one does not have will power, why, there is nothing more loathsome than a failure. And what of water? Water could be cold, and water could be hot, and water could be salty, or fresh, or dirty, or infested with tiny little microbes that would eat her body from the inside. Perhaps the lines on her neck would twist into calligraphy, and tell the story of her last moments, and the blue that would tinge her cheeks would compliment her eyes, and when the sunlight flashed through the thin layer of water covering her still lips, why, she would truly be beautiful. And if she had created beauty, then there was nothing left for her to do.

He began with buildings, because they are square enough, or rectangular, at that. Or so he thought, and so he hoped. But he realized that no matter how hard he tried, he could not capture their design with his eye. For one line would be too big, too slanted, too full, too curving, while the other was too thin, to straight, too meager, too crooked. Or, just as his eye opened a little wider to accommodate said lines, a man’s head would peak out of the building’s window, or a sparrow would fly across the facade, or the sky would be at a contrary angle. So he went farther away, he fled across fields turning only once in a while to see if perhaps the distance that he had travelled would finally allow his eye to see parallel lines in the buildings that crept farther and farther away on the horizon. It seems as though he turned in vain.

She contemplated death by chemical. Would they put the name of the chemical on her tombstone as cause of death? If so, she would love to pick something with an exotic name, like saxitoxin, but she worried over where to find poisonous shellfish. She could gnaw on cigarettes, and ingest acetone, and arsenic, and nicotine, and hydrogen cyanide, but she doubted that yellow teeth would be attractive upon her death. There was the flaking paint in her grandmother’s home, or furniture polish, or laundry detergent, or gasoline. But as she thought of these things, she couldn’t help but feel like an inanimate object, one that had never seen life, or love. Her back that she had trained to be so straight would be nothing but a rotting wall. Her arms hat she had learned to poise so beautifully would be nothing but the curved knob that decorates ancient chairs. The clothing that hung so loosely on her slender body would be nothing but overly starched sacks of fabric. And the heart that every once in a while she let love would turn into a machine, like the motor of an automobile, turning, always, but feeling nothing. She did not take well to this thought, but yet death by chemical intrigued her. If she consumed bleach, would she finally be white as the Scandinavians, who were all the rage this season? Perhaps then, in the whiteness radiating from her stomach, she would be beautiful.

He felt like Christopher Columbus, searching for the flat end of the earth that he so believed truly did exist. But unlike Columbus, who feared for his ships and his crew, he and his eye longed to find it, to see the water of the earth falling off the sides and to see the continents slowly slipping downstream towards that definitive end. And at this mystical place, he swore he would find parallel lines. For until he found the edge of the world he would be plagued by God’s cruel joke in making the earth a sphere. But one day he would stop walking in circles and reach the fatal end of his journey, plunging down off the edge of the world, surrounded by buildings and animals and humans and mountains. He wasn’t sure what he would find at the bottom of that chasm into which he and the continents would fall once they finally floated their way to the sharp, straight edge of the earth. Perhaps there would be monsters, as Columbus always swore there would be, and they would gobble him up. But he wouldn’t mind being eaten alive by a million open mouths, for in arriving there, in being gnawed by their sharp teeth and deformed by their acidic saliva (or so he imagined it would be), he would finally have testament that he had become more than God. For Godhad created the universe, and a world, and each was a sphere, or so the astronomers thought. But in arriving at the stark and end of this sphere, the man, equally created by God, would have surpassed the whole of God’s creation. Or so he mused.

She contemplated death by metal. There we various types of metal, of course. There was cheap metal that she could find buried in the ground, or depicting a coca cola sign, but that would leave rusty viruses in her coagulating blood. There was shiny metal, but that would lose its sheen when it touched human flesh. There was blunt metal, but it would be a shame to lose its perfectly rounded tip forever within the burning acid of her stomach, or within the bundles of nerves in her brain, or within the tiny respiratory chambers of her lungs. No, what she preferred of all metals was thin metal. Simple. For with thin metal she could write novels in red ink, or draw pictures on her thigh, or simply draw rivers of blood on her wrists. Yes, that’s what she preferred. Because in those rivers of sanguine she could swim, and she could drown. And later, when they would search for her beneath the rivers that had covered her arms, and then her chest, and then her neck, and then her lips, they would know in fact that she had lived, and that she had loved. And there is nothing more beautiful than the life of one who has loved.

He did not find the end of his own world, where the oceans and the islands and the continents all rushed over a giant cliff that signified Columbus’ greatest fear. Instead, he found the end of someone else’s world, and for the first time, his eye realized that what it perceived as reality was only one of many realities. He and his eye found parallel lines, one day. He had been walking, looking at buildings, zooming his eye in, zooming it out, crouching down, standing up. But eventually his eye grew weary, and the cement was ready to swallow him and cast him down into the depths of God’s cruel sphere. But at once his eye found, again, truth. And if that which his eye perceived to be true truly was, in fact, the truth, why, the truth was beautiful, and full of splendid curves and colors in which one could drown. His wife, lying quietly on their couch, had arms poised like those of ancient furniture, shiny and polished. Her neck was long but crooked, like that of a swan with its graceful head bent to look at its own reflection in the water below. The angle was unnatural, but he and his eye loved it, for never before had they seen such a color, or lack thereof, rather. She was as white as the year’s first snowfall, as a dove on its day of its inaugural flight, as the bravest daisy whose head announces the return of spring among the mud of melting winter. She was as white as a lemon scented load of freshly bleached laundry, but for two rivers of red that decorated her forearms like ribbons on Christmas packages. And in them, he finally found his parallel lines. The eye shuttered as it blinked, and the man did too. For in blinking, the eye had, as was its custom to do, captured the truth. And in imprisoning the truth, the eye had untied those bright red Christmas ribbons, exposing that which lay below. The prying eye searched beneath the river that covered her arms, and had dripped on her chest, and had crept up her neck, and had rouged her lips, and it discovered that though the sight was, by far, the most beautiful thing it had ever seen, the truth was not, as it had once thought, quite as impeccable. The truth was that though she had loved, all that had loved her in return was a single wide eye, and this simply did not suffice to live.

In the blink of the eye, he found that truth tasted like salt and like death, and quietly, he and his perception of reality died, both, alone. The eye sputtered and groaned, and the its mouth below spit out a small rectangle, 3.5 x 4.25. And thus she was immortalized.