Ekphrases

I.

There is a famous photograph taken at the edge of death: inside a car parked by the sidewalk are all manner of large dogs, looking directly into the camera. They stare through the windows without smiling, with a peculiar severity, like women and men in 19^th-century portraits. The photograph is black and white. Studying it, one commonly wonders, How did they get in there? or remarks aloud, This is something else altogether. And indeed there is something unsettling about the sight of those large animals, packed quietly into the abandoned car. The photographer maintained that there were no dogs present when he took the picture: his subject was an empty automobile. A week after he developed the photograph, he developed cancer, and within a year he died.

II.

There is a famous painting composed at the edge of death: a broad cabinet is lined with cubbyholes, each of which is deeply recessed and shadowed, and in each of which a dollmaker has left a half-finished wooden hand; in the foreground, a small boy stands beside a doll of a girl, both of their eye sockets empty. Looking at the painting for the first time, one commonly assumes that the hands are reaching out of the cubbyholes to seize the boy and girl, who cannot see to defend themselves. On repeat viewings, however, one begins to sense that the boy and the girl—eyeless, mute—are themselves summoning the hands, which reach not for either of them but for the viewer. The painting bears no signature. Its first owner killed herself, and its second owner killed his family before killing himself, in both cases within a year of having acquired the painting. Its present owner is storing it in a warehouse in New Jersey, where he will occasionally arrange a viewing. On the question of whether, in moonlight, the hinge of the girl doll’s jaw unlocks, such that her mouth appears to open, he is casually dismissive: That is a rumor. Or: I have never observed this phenomenon. Or: Her mouth, it is always closed.

III.

There is a famous book written at the edge of death: it comprises descriptions of the face that the reader will see, looking back at them, if they look out the window to the lit-up window across the street. For every page a different face. The book was anonymously written and hand-printed, in a run of just a hundred copies. No facial description exceeds a paragraph, and while they differ in small details—the gender of the watcher, its age, whether the watcher’s mouth will be open, or closed, or moving in rapid spasms—each description employs phrases like horror-stricken face, dread face, and so on. The book is the size of a telephone directory, with a plain white cover. It is said that for any given reader, the book contains one face whose gaze was meant for them particularly, at one particular moment in their life. Thus it may happen that a reader will sense, upon reading an entry, that yes, undoubtedly, this is the face that was meant for them—yet still never know when to expect to see it. Whether out their bedroom window, or a restaurant’s plate-glass window, or out the window of an office building. Whether if they looked up now, or to the side now, or if they did not look. In this way every window comes to be haunted by the potentiality of a gaze. As for the many blank pages bound in the book, it is said that these are descriptions whose gazes have been met. When a reader sees the face that was meant for them, their entry in the book—the very ink on the page—is erased. As yet, no one has come forth to lay claim to a blank. To report what was written there, or what they saw.