by Logan Woller
MARANASATI. A WORD meaning the dread of death, mindfulness of death, frequently used for inscriptions on pictures of decay. Usage in a sentence? That would be a walk with death, as a man walks his dog in the morning.’
The professor glanced down at his graduate student, a young man with a blue dress shirt, who was given the job of taking down his notes. The professor wanted an accurate record of the thoughts which would greet him only when standing in front of the painting, in real life, in order to get published in the prestigious Journal of Near Eastern Studies. He had burned his contacts on the review structure of the Journal of Oriental Pictography, and was no longer speaking to the head of The Buddhist Revolver. That man had been his former student but refused to return his emails. Now, so late in his career, the moment when his potential was finally realized—he could only get published indirectly, through subterfuge.
‘Don’t think, in that metaphor, you’re the one walking the dog.’
His student nodded and furiously crossed out a line on his notepad.
The painting was a grey world, beneath an ash sun, with birds of bones flying across a mottled, green sky. Straight clouds made of jagged smoke whispered across the horizon, and in the background little mountains perched over the scene like gentle dunes. Everywhere, corpses were laid across the floor, slumped on top of gravestones, their limp hands clutching softly at the dirt.
His student could see the lurking obsession in his teacher’s eyes. He wondered what he saw: it seemed like they were looking at entirely different things.
Professor Yaxtin extended his hand towards a corner of the painting, his finger pale, trembling, and skeletal. The harsh light of the museum back room pierced his body and made the student, when he glanced up from his book to inspect the corner he was shown, see strange, out of place bones within his teacher’s hand, like a crooked X ray. The viewing room to the Eastern section of the museum was empty at this time of day. All around them it was silent. The only noise was the soft, quietly angry voice of the professor, as well as the rustling of leather clothes and the soft scratch of a pen, writing quickly across the thick yellow paper of the legal pad.
Yaxtin had devoted much of his life to the strange topic which generated so much controversy in Eastern jungles, but fell on deaf ears stateside. There was a self-conscious revival of traditional culture going on in the world, and people, he told his department—he told his department constantly—would be interested in what he had to say on the topic, if only he could secure funding for a series of Vietnamese translations. It was a painting in Myanmar that spoke to him most profoundly, like the visitation of the dead inside a dream. And he had very interesting things to say about it.
They stood in front of the painting until the sun fell and they could feel the faint suggestion of night beyond the smooth walls of the museum. The harsh yellow light of the cool bulbs remained constantly, without any hint of change, but the painting seemed to grow ghastlier and ghastlier as the night wore on, greens becoming greyer, and the odd flash of yellow from one of the few exposed limbs leaping out at the professor.
One of the curators eventually came to retrieve them. Her shoes clipped across the tile. She informed him it was ten minutes to close, that he really ought to be leaving. The professor responded by looking at her with a detached gaze; in his mind he was miles away; and his student had to agree with her before he started to pack up the series of sketches he had made throughout the course of the day.
‘Did you see that!’ the professor exclaimed, two days after. He had been bruised, stewing in his rage. ‘Did you see how they treated me!’ He had been ranting about the curator since the incident at the museum on the twelfth of December, two thousand and twenty three, and even promised never to return. But after three hours of pacing in front of a blank presentation, he had reconsidered, and even told his student they would actually be getting back at her by returning, day in and day out, escalating the conflict to the highest possible level, causing scenes.
Walter, his student, was a flat faced midwestern graduate student, with a wide brow and blonde hair, studying Historical Anthropology with a concentration in Asiatic languages. His dissertation on the influence of water formations on the genesis of distinct cultures in jungle climates would be defended in a year. With a slow nod, he conceded to his teacher that they had been wronged, and would need to correct their honour.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked, the second time they had visited after their first expulsion, ‘that this is the best way to achieve our goal?’ He was always concerned of scaring the professor, and so, when he talked to him, would make sure to circle what he wanted to say, in order to prepare him for his thoughts. Eventually he found himself becoming as long winded, as boring as Yaxtin.
‘This is the only way,’ Yaxtin said, staring with an enchanted look at the red hand turn into a white man on the traffic signal, ‘and we really do need to study the painting, more and more, to figure out what it means.’
‘And then?’
The two men stepped onto the smooth pavement, decked with little puddles, that caught the headlights of the car and threw yellow lines across the water.
‘Then what?’
That night, Yaxtin proceeded to his apartment with the same dull, enchanted look. The muscles around his eyes were loose, his feet dragged past gravity with an unnaturally heavy pull. He assumed his usual sleeping posture, his back completely flat, squarely in the centre of his bed, the covers pulled up to his neck, his two hands clasped cold on his sternum. He slept as if he was more at home inside a haunted sarcophagus. In the dark, he stared up at his blank, fan less ceiling, and listened to the circulation of his air conditioning, with metal gears bouncing into the plastic shell, keeping him awake. Printed on the canvas of his ceiling he saw the painting, divided into thirty six squares. He inspected each square and figure as he attempted to figure out the exact pigment they had used: was it yellow limonite ochre, flaked into a dark consumptive purple, or hematite red, chopped from the resistant fat on the edge of scavenger organs? Simple kaolin clay, calcite and gypsum mixture with a body of yuin’sha powdered moonstone? He fell asleep to the distant sound of trucks on the interstate.
He stood in front of his class looking fresher than they had ever seen him. His movements were no longer shambling, stuttering, cerebral, but slow and precise as he moved from tile to tile, his brown shoes filling the silence of his lectures. His eyes were a clear blue, inside them there was no insanity, but a focused intent. His skin was healthy, aside from the red blotches around his knuckles from the lingering winter cold, dragged into the early rising spring.
‘Is there something different about you, Professor?’
A female student had approached his desk after class with a question. Her brown hair was falling loose, but as she talked quickly, her right hand went to repair the strands behind her head. Her left hand wedged a green mathematical textbook between her armpit and her elbow, and her brown eyes were magnified by the lenses of her glasses.
‘You just seem a little fresher than usual—that’s all.’
‘Ah ‘ he thought, when she had left the room, ‘someone is trying to get an in to Ms. Talia’s graduate program.’ What she didn’t know, he reflected with no small satisfaction, was that Ms. Talia’s adjunct post was getting remanded and folded into the sociology department across campus. It was unlikely she would be retained the following year. Her salary was too important not to be distributed in sums of two thousand dollars to each remaining member of the faculty. Her performance results were mediocre.
The painting was waiting for him in his apartment.
His apartment was a five minute walk from the governor’s mansion. Occasionally, he would be able to see between the blinds of his windows, a gathering of local journalists outside, white vans with blue numbers on the side staring into expensive camera rigs. A whole floor, it was at the top of a three storey townhouse which had usually rented exclusively to professors, but had, in recent years, been renting to the rich children of suburban households.
The key shook in his hand, but he had to grasp it tightly when he twisted it in the lock, and almost, in his eagerness, left it in place when he rushed up the stairs, his cat brushing between his legs. His student was standing before it—he almost pushed him out of the way—as close to the painting as possible, he tried to observe it under a new December light, before the night fell early.
‘But Professor,’ his student said, ‘how did the museum ever let this go?’ He had no conception of city prices, and thought it had cost him at least a year’s salary, to rent the painting out for study; maybe he had gotten the school involved, or his grant petition had finally been accepted from the National Science Foundation.
He quieted his student with a raised hand. Transfixed, he watched the painting for hours, accepting coffee from his student, who he heard scribbling diligently at his notepad; at that point he realized he was speaking. His voice tapered off at the end of a thought, and the echo moved through the room with a murmur.
His fresh health was soon gone. For days, all his time had been spent observing the painting, turning it crooked, and fixing it straight, taking it out of the frame and spreading it out gingerly along a table beneath a lamp. He could see each flake in the paint, and had, removing a chip with a scalpel, determined its particular composition to be a haematite ochre, while the figures moved in his delirium. His body weakened. His arms, already weak, and frail, and slender, began to show bones through his wrist. His veins were visible not just as spiderwebs on his forearms, but also against his forehead; while his skin yellowed. He developed a cough he attributed to the paint. And his lack of sleep, along with his newfound paranoia, caused him to walk somewhat into walls when he tried to pass through a door. His work suffered, and he had failed to attend two out of his last five biweekly classes, sending his graduate to lecture on South Asian topology.
He arranged the painting in his room so that, as he fell asleep, he could view it, and it would be the first thing he saw on waking up; but this was only able to be done by slanting the painting at a diagonal, and he worried its frame would slide along the tile, and fall, so he put a panel of thick wood he was able to find at the foot of the painting; but now the panel was so bulky it obstructed the legs of one of the figures.
He woke up one morning expecting to see the painting, and was met with the flat back of his graduate student; that had become an argument, and for the past week they had barely spoke.
He decided to stage a viewing for the department one evening after class. They were interested in his work. He was finally publishing a paper again, and had been talking about it to whoever stopped to chat. His colleagues proceeded through his apartment with curiosity; but they were more interested in how their strange colleague lived than his work. He tried to direct their attention to the painting, which he had removed from his room and set up in the main dining area, beneath a faux candelabra, made from incandescent lights. But they would only ask him about his living arrangements, the eating habits of his cat, why he kept his books stacked on the floor instead of carried on shelves.
It was a failure. No one had seen what he had seen in the beauty of the figures, the ash sky, the bone birds, the subtle harmony of the sick world. He even suggested, which he knew to be untrue, that this painting represented an early attempt at the invention of perspective, at least thirteen hundred years before the Italians; they had seen through him; one of the women had been a painter in high school.
He went to sleep that night almost in tears. No one had respected him; they hadn’t even concealed their disdain for his life and status. In a moment of comfort, before he fell asleep, he saw the figure in the middle, he saw it move.
At the close of the semester he carried home a stack of exams he was required to grade within a week. The results had been disappointing. His class failed to grasp even the basic fundamentals of the subject. In order to secure his position, he marked up each student by a letter grade; it would be a mistake in these economic times to reveal himself as a poor educator. As his red pen hovered over failing papers to make the correction, he felt an arm on his shoulder, aiding him along. He realized his hand was shaking, his writing was barely legible. He realized then his mind was foggy, he could barely think. He would submit the grades and turn in early, nothing else could be done. He had lessons to prepare for the coming semester, and he resolved to do a better job in the spring. Winter fell over his house and covered the walls in a thin veneer of snow. The white flakes disappeared beneath the night, and he woke up, sometime around three, with another being in his room. It was the corpse in the painting; he made a note in his folder—’beautiful,’ then crossed it out in pen.
That night he fell asleep, feeling that his body had been wrapped in the arms of the skeleton; on waking up he turned aside and saw its face, the yellow moult, the sunken cheeks, the hollow eyes; he proceeded to work on grading his exams.
The police came to investigate a week after. Since then, he had been enjoying life with his figure. He had been forced to acquire multiple chairs. When the police arrived two sets of tea had been laid on top of the table. The white tablecloth, pulled to one side like bedsheets, blew lazily in the wind. He opened his door a sliver, showing only his eye. The police were astonished to see the paleness of his cheek, and the yellowing of his iris. They asked him if he was suffering from jaundice; ‘No, sir, I am not. But I need to see your warrant, if you want to inspect my house.’ Down the corridor he could see his co tenants, with their partners, peer out from doorways.
Through the main doorway, he could see an arm, stumpy and awkward; immediately he recognized the limb of his graduate student.
‘So,’ he said, shutting the door on the police officer, before he could respond, ‘I’ve been betrayed by a man who I’ve supported, given help, taught... It seems... sick..’ He planned that day how to get back at his graduate student; the incident with the police did not occupy any space in his mind whatsoever. ‘Is there someone in my house?’
The graduate student was nervous and confused. He only understood half of what the professor was saying. To him, the professor seemed to be unravelling, like a thread, undone from off a spindle.
‘Professor—I do not understand... Exactly what you are trying to say.’ The student managed to say that the police had been the ones to approach him, that they were concerned about the status of a recently stolen painting, that he himself was a suspect; the student had told the police in a fit of innocence: ‘If there is anyone who can help you find the thief of that miraculous painting, it is...’
‘You fool,’ the professor said, staring at the wood of his desk in his office, ‘leave. Get out. At once.’
He did not need to finish his sentence before his student had fled from his office.
‘Is there someone in my house?’ were his first thoughts on entering the door. The door made a shrill noise and had to be pushed hard to go across the carpet. Wherever he looked was a new sign that items in his house had been displaced: but he faced his room with courage: ‘Oh!’ he said... ‘Of course. It’s only you.’
‘It’s only you.’ Those words were more a comfort to him than anyone else. It was, at the end, only him. He recovered. His body regained health. He started to move with vitality. When he slept, he was no longer alone; a long yellow arm covered his waist.
The police continued to impede his happiness. They pestered him with questions. They began to turn his close ones on him. He could no longer trust that anyone was on his side. Even his graduate student, who depended on him for professional advancement, was a suspect. But he began to feel the loneliness wash away from him, he was no longer lost on an ocean.
He continued to inspect the painting, but now he could finally verbalize the thoughts that had always resided within his heart. He could feel the words pour through him. When he moved his pen, on a fresh copy, he could feel a hand on his shoulder, he could feel a hand on his shoulder and when he turned his head there was a hand, ringed, beautiful, and slender.
The police came by one day with a warrant.
‘Is that a figurine?’ the officer asked him with surprise.
The figure of a skeleton, like one you may find in the classroom of an anatomist, stood in the corner of a room. What made this figure special were the bits of flesh still stuck to the bone. It occupied a corner and was put into a strange, lifelike position, resembling a figure painters mannequin. They were astonished how it managed to stand entirely on its own. They asked him where the threads were, which kept it in place. In a moment of cleverness:
‘Why—it’s bolted to the floor.’
The police left, and the figure began to move.
The police, now confident Yaxtin was not in possession of the painting, stopped trying to enter his home. He pointed them in the direction of the museum curate, the one who had harmed him and his work. His work began to soar. His papers had passed the initial state of review with the University of Michigan’s prothonotary—it would be sent to the Journal of Cultural Exegesis.
He asked the figure to review his work. He called over to it. Its eight feet of bones and flesh and animation bent to pass through his doorway. Its eyes scanned the paper. The figure pulled up, and Professor Yaxtin eagerly watched for any sign of emotion on the face of his companion; his companion was angry, disgruntled, it even looked, to his mind, betrayed.
He fell to his knees. ‘Is there a problem?’ he asked, ‘please, tell me.’
That day the figure was exceedingly chatty. Its mandibles clacked together. He apologized profusely, but nothing he could do provided the relief he sought. That night, before going to sleep, he turned and apologized. A slow noise greeted him.
The argument continued. Nothing he did could persuade him. He tried to make amends: he purchased so much his money began to falter.
Eventually, he was found dead in his apartment. There was a stack of papers on top of his chest. The lost painting was returned. He was remembered with a chair outside of the Sociology Department’s headquarters, two years after his death. His name was on a bronze plaque. Students would caress each other on its white granite, at night, when the lights from the classrooms dimmed, and all they had to think of were the nights they, free of ego, were beginning to leave behind.
