The Space Between
by Andrew Rayle
Your stepmother called today. She wants a portrait of you, or something recent, to display for your ceremony. “If you can just do that,” she said, “if you are able to do just that without fucking something up it would be deeply appreciated,” and then the line went dead.
Digging through your old scribblings and paintings, now that I know you’re gone for good, I find an unframed portrait you made of yourself two months ago, just after the death of your father. It was something you called “metaphysical realism.” I run the tips of my fingers over the dried paint stubble and can still feel your warm presence still somewhere on the canvas.
The painting was done in thick acrylic and resembles a dream. The main scene is viewed through a pair of worn, faded drapes pulled in opposite directions as though we were looking out a window. In the background far in the distance, resting high in a field of yellow and green grass sits a marble statue of a creature with the body of a man but the head of a lion, decorated by an array of oversized, multi-colored Christmas lights. I pack the canvas into an empty suitcase, blow out the candles, and walk out the door.
***
At the funeral home, in the room with your body, there seems an unending parade of method actors, all vying for the role of “bereaved.” Your stepmother receives the portrait I give her with silent unsubtle disdain. As she places it upon the flowered pedestal I feel a sense of relief. Your body is the same as I found it just a few short hours ago, resting heavy, submerged body-deep in the metal bathtub we picked out for you. Your skin looks as though it had just washed up on an ocean’s shore like driftwood. Your hair, your fingernails, and your eyes look like they have been dead for years. It looks so sloppy and rushed, how could the morticians have done such a poor job? The people here look at me from the side of their faces, I can see it from the side of mine.
These stiff, gutless judgmental bastards. These people don’t know how long a night can be holding the hand of your lover as he shakes and claws at the floor! Or the pain which twists and grips your stomach scrubbing fresh blood stains from bathroom walls, the same blood I used to hear beating obediently inside you as I fell to sleep against your chest.
I gaze into your self-portrait and hold it deep inside my mind as a form of justice in this insufferable room. I’ll give them plenty of reasons to guess why I’m the only one not crying knowing they will never get it right.
You held your moments in this world in your lungs like the last breath of oxygen in space. In an atmosphere all by yourself you died refusing to exhale. But what you got was not death but a fantastic dream. And I know now that your sleep is unperturbed, although your dreams may now have ceased the seams are at best products of our own imaginations but to you they were always invisible.
I remember in the calm that comes with morning when you spoke so plainly, “Imagine the future maybe a hundred years from now,” as you flicked the thin neck of a syringe, “when people are so preoccupied with turning towns into cities and cities into empires and purchasing unfathomable gadgets, that you can feel everything you are fade into nothingness, into an oblivion that doesn't resemble heaven.”
I stare into the last physical remnant of your self-awareness on display, surrounded by orchids frozen in full blossom. I cherished our bond and believed I knew you more than anyone else in the world. But I know now that no matter what happened there was one with whom I could never compete.
Examining the statue more closely the details become more apparent. I begin to notice more how carefully and with what degree of attention the hair and the muscles were crafted. And within the collage of light and obscurity of location lies a smirk of self-reassurance in the countenance of the lion. It becomes obvious to me the painting you made of yourself is more accurate than any photograph I or anyone else could have ever hoped to produce.
