| Living Color By Laurie Scheck At first there's greenish flesh until the knob's turned farther to the right, and then the flesh turns paler, pink; the gray walls behind the silent faces shimmer, and next the sound's turned up, the lips are moving, the hands, the voices, rising, moving--- is this what fright is, these pale interchangeable faces, is this the body of the world that can be seen but never touched, the faces floating there, the hands, and all the broken things? The set casts its flickering light onto the walls as the ghost-bodies dressed in their momentary garments bend to kiss the gleaming armor of the world. They have given themselves over to quickness, to soundbites, to thirty- or sixty- second spots. How slow we are against them who dream of change but rarely, finally, change. Now the man is walking toward the woman. He sits down beside her on the bed, the walls pale gold, the bedspread flowered, gold. On her dresser are many small bottles, delicate long-stemmed vials, perfume and makeup, and on the wall above it a mirror that holds them from behind showing us what the man and woman cannot see of who they are: the man's broad back in his striped suit, the woman barely covered by a neglige`, her brown hair tumbling down. As if they had no names. As if they had no faces, no address. But she lifts her face to him and her skin is smooth as the gold lamplight falling in a calm closed circle on the carpet so that we are meant to think: it is important to know what happens next. But how grotesque they appear when I turn off the sound, trapped in a world where speach is ceaselessly required, in which mouths move and move but nothing can come out and still they keep on moving the way neon pulses on and off, on and off against a wall. No stillness there. No rest. And no one can be left alone for long; if the woman stands at her window it is clear soon enough someone will come knock on her door. There is no room for silence. I turn off the set. I watch the dark blank screen, how it holds only the merest shading of a face, barely there but it's still there, no sound at all, no humming sound, no hushed electric purr, just blank like the door a child wakes to in the night, the voices shimmering and slurring on the other side, in darkness, but there is no screen to hold them, making them its ghost there is no way to shut them off. |