Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

Is that all the difference there is between their views, then – a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable. She remembers walking around a wood with her father one winter’s day when she was nine or ten and there was a full-size tree that they almost walked straight past until they realised it was man-made, it was a sculpture made from tens of thousands of sticks glued together, woven to form the appearance of knots and bark and boles and branches. You couldn’t tell it apart from the other bare, wintry trees, except that once you knew it was an artwork it pulsed with a different energy, a different atmosphere. This feels to her what separates her universe and Shaun’s – a tree made by the hand of nature, and a tree made by the hand of an artist. It’s barely any difference at all, and the profoundest difference in the world.

An intoxication; the height-sick homesick drug of space. The simultaneous not wanting to be here and always wanting to be here, the heart scraped hollow with craving, which is not emptiness in the least, more the knowledge of how fillable he is. The sights from orbit do this; they make a billowing kite of you, given shape and loftiness by all that you aren’t.

He looks then – when Pietro hands back the postcard, reaches across to squeeze the bony dome of Shaun’s shoulder before diving away – at the dog in the foreground. He’d never given it a second glance, but now he can’t look at anything else. It has its eyes closed. In a painting that’s all about looking and seeing, it’s the only living thing in the scene that isn’t looking anywhere, at anyone or anything. He sees now how large and handsome it is, and how prominent – and though it’s dozing there’s nothing slumped or dumb in that doze. Its paws are outstretched, its head erect and proud. This can’t be coincidental, he thinks, in so orchestrated and symbolic a scene, and it suddenly seems that Pietro is right, that he’s understood the painting, or that his comment has made Shaun see a different painting altogether to the one he’d seen before. Now he doesn’t see a painter or princess or dwarf or monarch, he sees a portrait of a dog. An animal surrounded by the strangeness of humans, all their odd cuffs and ruffles and silks and posturing, the mirrors and angles and viewpoints; all the ways they’ve tried not to be animals and how comical this is, when he looks at it now. And how the dog is the only thing in the painting that isn’t slightly laughable or trapped within a matrix of vanities. The only thing in the painting that could be called vaguely free.