RE-RELEASE: PAINT
A couple tries to keep their sanity in a post-modern dystopian reality.
Watch the short film directed by Armand Zentil:
PAINT
C. E. Santana
In between her legs, as she squeezed her thighs to my ears, I swore I could hear the ocean. At least, it sounded like how I remembered the ocean. Everything I heard or smelled or felt reminded me of something that was. I used to hate being nostalgic. I used to think dwelling on something, regardless of how fondly you reminisce, was a waste of time.
The morning lovemaking sessions were just something we did to keep us sane, and our morale high. The love aspect had begun to diminish some time ago. I had lost count of how long exactly. Like pretty much everything else. I didn’t know the time of day, the month, and I assumed, from the last time I saw the date, that it was the year 2014. The last time I noticed the date was the last time The Man in The Suit brought supplies. On the box, they’d stamp the date, so you had no choice but to see it because they knew that after a while, you found it pointless to keep track of time and destroyed anything that told you what month or year it was.
I didn’t want to get up that day. Like all days. What was the point? I used to love saying, “Same shit, different day,” when someone asked me what was up. I should have gotten used to saying something like “Life is great. Every day is a new beginning.” Maybe that would have changed something in the future. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my old life. I didn’t necessarily take life for granted, but I didn’t expect life to change so rapidly. Nobody did. I guess that’s life.
Still, I was one of the lucky few. I still had her. I still woke up every morning with her next to me, her face glowing, even though she had stopped caring about her appearance years ago. I looked up from the bed and saw her sitting in front of her mirror, gently brushing her hair, her robe slightly off her shoulder exposing her soft skin. I went over and kissed her neck. She tried to smile. It was hard. For sanity and morale purposes, she used to get up a little bit more excited. Now she just sits on the edge of the bed and stares at herself in the mirror, gently brushing her hair, trying to keep her beauty alive, a deep depression killing it, causing wrinkles and her hair to fall out. When her hair first started to fall out, I ordered Biotin vitamins from The Man in The Suit, and for weeks (maybe months) we waited. Finally, a bottle of twenty-five pills arrived, along with a generic hair regrowth foam. It was already too late; her hair was thin and fragile. Luckily, (if you can call it that) the wig we ordered also arrived –early, considering it was a low demand product. When she took it out of the box, she started to sob. She didn’t come out of the bathroom for hours. Finally, she opened the door and with only her hand out, she asked for the wig. Our wine rations also arrived in that shipment and when she came out of the bathroom for dinner, her wig on, I poured her a glass and told her she looked beautiful. Which she did. Eventually, her spirits improved, her depression subsided, and her real hair grew stronger. She stopped using the wig, stashing it deep in her closet and cut her hair shorter, so that it wouldn’t fall out so easily. When I saw her with her new haircut, I told her she looked beautiful. Which she did. As beautiful as the first time I saw her.
I was at a bar with some friends. It was early two thousand, eh, ten, I think. No, I’m sure of it. There were some things you just didn’t forget; just sometimes I confused dates. We were gathered around drinking, as usual. We were facing the door of the bar. I noticed her immediately when she walked through the door. One of the buddies I was with knew one of her friends so they sat with us. I didn’t say much. I just looked at her and tried to make eye contact. When she caught my eyes, I would look away, then look back to see if she was smiling. She wasn’t. I went outside for a cigarette, hoping she would follow. She didn’t. I decided to head back home, to Jersey.
Two weeks later I saw her at the same bar, this time alone. I asked her if she drank by herself often. She said she did but didn’t feel depressed about it. She just liked being alone sometimes. I told her I could relate. I asked her if I was interfering with her alone time. She laughed and said she wasn’t completely anti-social. She did enjoy good company. I asked her what she did. She said she was an artist. She was in New York from Spain. I asked her how that was going. She shrugged. I told her I was a security guard. She asked me how I liked that. I shrugged. It’s a job, I told her. It gets lonely, though. I daydream a lot. About what? She asked. I don’t know, I guess about a better life. Being rich. Is that all you dream about? She asked. Money? No, just what money affords. Where are you from? She asked. I told her Jersey. She asked: Like the shore? I told her, No, North Jersey, right across the river in Jersey City. We stayed at the bar for another hour or so drinking and talking about her art. I told her I wished I had bigger dreams than just getting rich dreams. Something fulfilling, like her art. She said I was still young and assured me I had nothing but time.
Nothing but time. Daily, hourly, constantly, I repeat the mantra in my head over and over and over again like a mad man. Nothing but time.
I finally got up from the bed and went to the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror. For sanity and morale purposes, I grabbed a trimmer and started to lower my beard down to a five o clock shadow. I put moisturizer on my face. I grabbed the generic hair regrowth foam and rubbed it into my hair. I flossed and brushed my teeth. Took a shit. I grabbed the garbage from the bathroom and stuffed it along with the other trash from our apartment into a large black bag. I went out to the hallway of the building to the trash chute room. I opened the shaft and stuffed the trash inside. I went back inside the apartment and sat on my reading chair. I fell asleep shortly afterward.
“I don’t think I dreamed,” I told her after waking up. She was standing above me with my mug of coffee in her hand. “For fear of explosion,” I told her, laughing.
The night before we watched films. Every once in a while The Man in The Suit delivered movies, like how Netflix used to. One movie we saw called “Visioneers” was about people in the future who were exploding from stress. I thought it was okay. I enjoyed it. I don’t know if she did. We didn’t talk about it, but when she laughed at my reference, I guess she did.
“I mean I was only passed out a few minutes.”
“No, last night. Did you dream? You were shaking a bit,” she said.
“Maybe. If I did, I don’t remember what I dreamt.”
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“I can eat. What’s on the menu, the usual?”
“I’ve told you to stop saying that.”
“I know. But I can’t help it.”
After we ate the usual –a generic man-made tuna fish type of protein –we had sex. Then we laid idle in bed. Idleness was the activity we participated in most. Idleness was our biggest enemy. But It was unavoidable. We could do yoga, or have sex, sometimes we’d have a little dance session, me and her, Bowie and Daft Punk, usually when our wine rations came in, but that was pretty much it. Everything else we did during the day consisted of sitting around waiting for The Man in The Suit to bring us a new shipment. I used to have such a disdain for idleness that my biggest pet peeve was missing the train by seconds then having to wait for the next one. Just sitting there, stuck in a filthy underground subway station, not knowing what was going on outside, used to piss me off to the point of panic attacks. A waste of time. Now there was nothing but time.
Nothing but time.
Like a prisoner doing life, I dwelled a lot on the past. That’s what we were. Prisoners. It was true that at least we had each other. Still, that became a prison as powerful as any man-made building. There was no escaping each other when something was wrong. There was no taking walks, or leaving for a weekend, or crashing at a friend’s pad, or spending time away from each other. Or infidelity: the escape when one’s partner gets too boring.
And in our case, I was the boring one. She was the artist.
I was the jealous one. She was the one who cared more about her work than anything else. I didn’t have that privilege. I didn’t care about my odd jobs.
I was the one who couldn’t deal with the fact that she could be happy without me.
I was the one that was selfish. I wanted her all to myself. I got my wish.
Like in some fairy-tale, I got my wish. I remember shortly before it happened, we were laying in bed idle for the pure joy of relaxation, not the forced act of the present, and as I held her, I whispered in her ear, “I wish we could stay like this forever.”
Nobody knows exactly what happened. The Internet was down immediately, along with television and all other forms of media. The only thing working was radio, but we didn’t even have an AM/FM radio in her apartment. We simply woke up one morning to darkness. I checked the time and it was 11 AM. It was late November 2012. I figured it was just extremely cloudy on a gloomy autumn day. I made her favorite breakfast: scrambled eggs mixed with a tortilla Española and coffee. After working on a mix on the turntables for a couple of hours, I put on clothes to go downstairs for cigarettes. That’s when I realized something was terribly wrong. The front doors of her apartment building were locked. There was no doorman. And after looking through the glass doors it appeared that the doors were covered in plastic. I couldn’t understand it. I went back upstairs and that’s when I realized there was no Internet or cell phone reception. We barely ever talked to our neighbors but we decided to knock on doors. The man across the hall, a foreigner subletting, allowed us inside his apartment to listen to the radio. We sat around his dinner table, sipping coffee, and listened to the news. Apparently, for some reason scientists couldn’t yet figure out, the Sun was being blocked, and since 4 AM that morning, the air on earth was deemed uninhabitable for the first time in like millions of years. There was no explanation on why it all happened so rapidly or when it would be safe to go outside again. They simply said to stay indoors and close all windows. The city of New York City, with all its rich inhabitants (they didn’t state this on the radio, this was the foreigner commentating) was preparing extreme measures to secure the lives of all. This included covering buildings with plastic, a massive task already underway, and basically quarantining everyone. Men in hazmat suits will then be going around distributing information and supplies: first, water and other essentials, then, with time, special requests.
We tried to live every day as if we were simply staying home, as so often we did when it was safe outside. We tried to not think of anything that was going to depress us, but I found that hard to do, as we lay idle in bed, smoking on cigarettes. I was thinking back on my selfishness, and my dying wish, which was safe to call it, when the doorbell rang. I looked through the peephole at the familiar site: eyes looking at me through goggles under a heavy, impermeable suit, and opened the door. In slow movements, The Man in The Suit walked in, placed a box on the floor, and then stepped out. I used to say, “Until next time”, but I didn’t even bother anymore. I opened the box, disregarding the sheet of paper taped to the top with the date and current news, which were always miserable, and looked at the contents. I grinned, knowing that one of the items in the box we’d been waiting for quite some time. I grabbed the metal can of paint and brought it over to the bench, in front of her easel, holding a blank canvas. She didn’t say a word. She stared at it like it was an alien object. Then she looked at me for approval. I nodded my head. She walked over to the bench, sat down, staring at the canvas. She opened the can, placed a dry paintbrush inside, and mixed the liquid slowly like a witch mixing a potion. She then took a deep breath and released all the bottled up angst and anger inside of her, violently attacking the canvas with rapid strokes; like a prisoner noting time on the wall of her cell, she created lines and lines placed side by side each other.
