To the memory of

       Michael Van Rooy, 1968–2011 —

       too soon … too soon …

      And for

       Lucy K. White, and Katy and Michelle Lamothe,

       as always.

      Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation;

      It’s a form of magic designed as a mediator

      between this strange hostile world and us …

      — Pablo Picasso

      Prelude

      The woman lay buried in leaves and twigs on the marshy margin of the wide river through the night and wondered if she appeared dead enough that, after someone discovered her and the coroner took her away, they’d re-bury her alive, thinking she was already dead.

      Her left eye was dislodged and twisted, looking blindly, impossibly, away. The right eye was frozen open, a fixed lens on a fresh blue sky cut with arcing seagulls. She felt her throbbing cheekbones swelling against her gums. There were teeth in her throat, and she was afraid to swallow her pooling blood and saliva in case she choked.

      The logic of her senses told her she was alive. For her, sight was the most important and because there’d been no stars in the clouded night she’d feared she was blind and perhaps dead, until the eastern light began to glow on the periphery of her right eye. Scent and sound returned in that order; first the fecund odour of the river and of the musty cracked leaves over her face. Then the screaming madness of the gulls and the creaking of boat hulls, and in her ears the slow but lazy pulse of her indifferent heart.

      Live interment was a basic human terror. When she was a girl down in Missouri, some schoolmates, experimenting to determine if it was possible to turn her black skin white from terror, had locked her in a root cellar that was so dark and absolutely still and warm that she didn’t know where her skin ended and the dank air began. They’d covered her with a tarp and she couldn’t tell if she was face up or face down. Until she gave up hope that someone would come to the cellar, she had tried to still herself, tried to keep away the thoughts of black snakes and spiders. She’d lain frozen, humming gospel songs her grandma had taught her. She was freed several hours later when her dad came down to the cellar to get a wooden barrel of pickles to sell at the family’s roadside stand.

      It would be like that to be alive in a buried coffin: an atmosphere humid with her own breath, strumming with her own sounds. When she’d done a student documentary at the city morgue, though, a hale and hearty attendant listened to her spooky concerns and laughed into her wide eyes. “If you weren’t already dead, the autopsy would finish you off anyway.” He shrugged, adding that he’d heard tales of caskets being opened years after interment and fingernail gouges found engraved inside the lids. “So, what do I know?” His morbidity was friendly. When he saw he’d spooked her, he said, kindly, “Best thing, Missy? Check off the organ donor box on your driver’s licence. That’ll do it.”

      Had life been at all real since she’d been in that cellar? Was she still under that tarp twenty years later, and all her life a dream delivered between two impossibly long, final heartbeats? There’d been no college over in Chicago, none of the boyfriends had been born or even existed, her cat hadn’t lived and died, she hadn’t met Quentin Tarantino at a West Coast film festival. She wondered in a series of abstract thoughts whether maybe this was what everybody’s life was like: a dream in a wet womb of a woman who might have never existed in a place that never was. She wanted to examine that but the thought skidded away.

      She knew the survival value of an active mind, but didn’t think too much about the man who’d beaten her, methodically taking her apart until … Horace acted and there was yelling and cursing and the man was just gone, not there any longer.

      She’d studied film and video and knew her eye had now become a fixed lens and that a world of moments would pass in front of it, be recorded in the pixels of her grey brain. She thought of Michelangelo Antonioni’s beautiful seven-minute tracking hotel scene. She’d rather look at a blurry photograph of Antonioni in a magazine than have drinks in person with Tarantino. She’d never met Luciano Tovoli but she knew from the moment the film closed that she’d love his eyes without reserve.

      She studied the birds slicing around the sky. It was a perfect sky. For her graduation project à la Antonioni, she’d set up an old 8mm camera on a set of sticks and had her actors wander slowly across the frozen scene, talking or making love, or just standing a moment, then moving out of the frame as if their appearance was a sprocket in a longer journey.

      For her new documentary she’d wandered the banks of the river looking for beaching points used by migrant smugglers who ran little canvas dinghies and rowboats across from Canada, depositing Chinese families in the land known in China as Gold Mountain. America. There had been deaths, bodies found the previous winter in their inadequate coats, an ice sculpture of mother and daughter together, hugging each other, a pair of young boys a month later a mile downriver, their malnourished bodies twisted and trapped and frozen in the rocks. And a week ago a sailor on a lake freighter spotted the floating body of an elderly woman with photographs in a fanny pack of grandchildren she’d never meet and a telephone number of a local East Chinatown restaurant.

      The river was spooky at night. For comfort and companionship she’d brought Horace with her. The visit was taken without any equipment except her eyes and intuition. Before she had her mood, her vantage point, her voice, she wouldn’t lug equipment; she was a previsualizer, panning her boxed fingers through the trees, feeling properly pretentious. Once she had her research done and some funding in place, she’d film, hopefully with a full winter moon in the froth of grey cloud. Some wind to make a sinister rustling, although the trees would then be bare. Now there was only her own breathing and her faint footfalls in the dark. She had some rippling piano music in mind, a score she was composing. A little Keith Jarrettish, maybe. She would do nothing so cliché as blending a track of scripted migrants’ cries for salvation before death to interplay with the cresting ripple of noir piano. She had been thinking of owls, loud warning hoots, maybe an explosion of one out of a tree that would bring first shock and then laughing relief to the migrants. There were ethical issues; she didn’t want to do re-enactment, she didn’t want to do dramatization. She wanted to document. She’d have to research if there were owls along the riverbank in winter.

      When she’d seen flashlights bobbing on the water, she’d stopped. The Volunteers, come to defend the shoreline from Chinese migrants carrying all manner of disease and communism. When the lights were past she shook a cigarette from a pack, turned her back to the river to screen the flame, and lit it with a lighter in the cup of her hands. Before she could exhale she felt a huge mass slam into her. She was overwhelmed and her inner organs and her eyes and her breath and pulses seized in shock. She was rushed right out of her shoes and hoisted by the throat and held against a tree.

      As the man grunted, she grunted, each in turn. He was measured, as if she was a punching bag and he was a boxer in training or he was a workman getting a chore of rote done. It seemed to go on for a long time. A punch and a grunted word, a punch and a grunted word and a punch and a grunted word, and she thought, Horace Horace Horace. Confusion then, as she went out, returning to being dragged by the hair down to the riverbank, him swearing, calling her a fucking dog, then dropping her into a depression in the ground. The sting of dirt and pebbles as he kicked at her. And then he was gone.

      Alone in the aftermath she realized night wasn’t quiet at all. There were hums of insects, faint stirrings of shrubbery, the lap of nearby water, and later as the sun rose, the screaming of birds that she thought would drive her mad in their intensity and pitch.

      She hated those noisy birds.