I register the details almost instantly, looking away before I can realize what I’ve seen. Turning my head, too quickly, snapping a look of innocence over my eyes. Have they noticed anything? I try to fit the details into a coherent image: the flat, glossy print, the mustache, a flash of teeth, what is that in the corner – a knife? – gray or silver, perhaps metal, or it could be anything, some other color in shadow. Something about the teeth, some fascination: upper lip pulled up in a smile, or possibly a snarl. Now the image is disintegrating, phosphenes, or pixels, nulls and units of light, they reverse, shift their places, I cannot keep track: negatives or originals, I must look again, I cannot. They are talking but they won’t look away, they glance at me for confirmations, expressions of interest: yes of course, have you indeed, I had no idea. I spit these out blindly, utterly at random, but they somehow move into the proper spaces in the conversation. In the chaos of my mind’s eye, still trying to piece together the smile, the knife: why is it so familiar? I intermittently catch sight of their faces, the amused nod, the grimace of agreement; waves of talk rise and fall across the small room, in a near-perfect imitation of natural conversation. They’re not watching so closely now, they think I haven’t seen the picture, they’re relaxing, perhaps a shade too quickly. Paying split-second fragments of attention to them, another nod, a half-smile. I’ll look down in a moment for a short part of a second, just enough to really see the face, it will be so sudden they won’t notice – I glance left, to distract them, then, too sharply, down – and freeze, mesmerized by the snarl, I know this picture, the knife, the tree, the line of blood angling across the veins of the bicep – they’ve fallen silent, I must look up, they’re watching me – how did they get this picture, how did it come here? – terrified, I rip myself away and up, through surface tension like a diver, look between them at nothing, and hear myself saying, my voice strangely steady:
“It’s me.”
[Los Angeles, 1/31-3/22/90]
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