welcome to The Fate of Faye Rowan- Morganson . Though if anyone’s even watching , for you it’s Thursday by now. I hope you’re having a better Thursday than my Monday anyway. I’m having a hard day.
A pause, which Adine, seeing nothing, had to fill with her imagination. Maybe Faye Rowan-Morganson was just staring into the camera, at herself reflected in the lens. Maybe she had stepped out of frame for a moment, maybe she was getting a drink. Adine raised the volume a couple clicks and listened for the knock of a mug or glass placed back on the kitchen table.
Of course, since Adine saw nothing, this table was just one detail in a world she imagined for this stranger every noonhour, the rest of the kitchen sparse and dimly lit, more scullery than culinary suite, just a sink, bare countertops, with this pale and drawn woman hunched at a plastic table with her arms outstretched, thin arms, reaching toward the camera and toward anyone who might be watching. Or not watching: listening.
THAT NIGHT, back in February, when Debbie came home to Adine painting the goggles black she joked, Is this so you don’t have to clean out the mousetraps? Later, in a more delicate tone, she asked, Is this about your accident when you were a kid? Adine pulled the goggles over her eyes and stared into the emptiness concocting some acid response.
Finally she said, No. It’s about trying to be alone.
The air went taut.
Adine sensed Debbie hovering, wounded. Then the bedroom door closed and from behind it came whimpering. Adine turned on the television: two Helpers were elucidating the merits of a backhand serve. After a few minutes she called Sam. Tell me what’s happening, she said. And happily he did.
Watching TV without seeing: this became her work. Not investigating blindness as phenomenology , not a (sub)liminal exploration of nonvisual space , not an inquiry or critique of any sort. Not lost in words. She just wore the goggles day and night, flipping channels, seeing nothing beyond the pictures her imagination painted inside her mind. Maybe one day her hands would paint them. Maybe not.
At 1:00 and 5:00 and 9:00 Sam would call and narrate the action in two-hour chunks. Her brother felt so faraway out there on the Islet, it was good to connect again. Before We- TV ’s closed-circuit democratized the airwaves, they’d grown up together with television: cartoons and gameshows and the overwrought daytime dramas in which soft focus signified both memories and dreams.
Meanwhile Debbie was out saving the world with her endless friends and colleagues and contacts and networks and indomitable faith in the city and its citizens. Adine found it all exhausting: pleasing so many people fractured Debbie into many different people herself. From the moment they’d met she’d struck Adine this way, trying to please her even as Adine ranted and raved and shoved her against a wall.
This had been at an IAD gala, a semi-formal banquet celebrating the new arts-dedicated floors at the Museum of Prosperity. The exhibits included a retrospective of Loopy’s work, four sculptures by the mysterious Mr. Ademus, and, thanks to Isa Lanyess’s on-air lament, Adine’s Sand City, which technicians had unearthed from Budai Beach and shellacked and preserved under glass. Though she’d been invited, Adine played event-crasher, ninety-five pounds of rage storming past security, her hair a brushfire, right up to the host of In the Know.
I’m just the show’s Face, explained Isa Lanyess. She pointed across the room at Debbie skulking by the punchbowl. She’s the one whose idea it was, she’s the one who wrote the script, she’s who’s responsible for your sculpture getting saved. Talk to her.
You ? Adine railed, driving a finger into Debbie’s chest. You’re responsible for this? You want to save Sand City? Do you understand anything ? Who even are you?
I just thought it was a waste to have such beautiful work washed away, Debbie whispered, steering
A pause, which Adine, seeing nothing, had to fill with her imagination. Maybe Faye Rowan-Morganson was just staring into the camera, at herself reflected in the lens. Maybe she had stepped out of frame for a moment, maybe she was getting a drink. Adine raised the volume a couple clicks and listened for the knock of a mug or glass placed back on the kitchen table.
Of course, since Adine saw nothing, this table was just one detail in a world she imagined for this stranger every noonhour, the rest of the kitchen sparse and dimly lit, more scullery than culinary suite, just a sink, bare countertops, with this pale and drawn woman hunched at a plastic table with her arms outstretched, thin arms, reaching toward the camera and toward anyone who might be watching. Or not watching: listening.
THAT NIGHT, back in February, when Debbie came home to Adine painting the goggles black she joked, Is this so you don’t have to clean out the mousetraps? Later, in a more delicate tone, she asked, Is this about your accident when you were a kid? Adine pulled the goggles over her eyes and stared into the emptiness concocting some acid response.
Finally she said, No. It’s about trying to be alone.
The air went taut.
Adine sensed Debbie hovering, wounded. Then the bedroom door closed and from behind it came whimpering. Adine turned on the television: two Helpers were elucidating the merits of a backhand serve. After a few minutes she called Sam. Tell me what’s happening, she said. And happily he did.
Watching TV without seeing: this became her work. Not investigating blindness as phenomenology , not a (sub)liminal exploration of nonvisual space , not an inquiry or critique of any sort. Not lost in words. She just wore the goggles day and night, flipping channels, seeing nothing beyond the pictures her imagination painted inside her mind. Maybe one day her hands would paint them. Maybe not.
At 1:00 and 5:00 and 9:00 Sam would call and narrate the action in two-hour chunks. Her brother felt so faraway out there on the Islet, it was good to connect again. Before We- TV ’s closed-circuit democratized the airwaves, they’d grown up together with television: cartoons and gameshows and the overwrought daytime dramas in which soft focus signified both memories and dreams.
Meanwhile Debbie was out saving the world with her endless friends and colleagues and contacts and networks and indomitable faith in the city and its citizens. Adine found it all exhausting: pleasing so many people fractured Debbie into many different people herself. From the moment they’d met she’d struck Adine this way, trying to please her even as Adine ranted and raved and shoved her against a wall.
This had been at an IAD gala, a semi-formal banquet celebrating the new arts-dedicated floors at the Museum of Prosperity. The exhibits included a retrospective of Loopy’s work, four sculptures by the mysterious Mr. Ademus, and, thanks to Isa Lanyess’s on-air lament, Adine’s Sand City, which technicians had unearthed from Budai Beach and shellacked and preserved under glass. Though she’d been invited, Adine played event-crasher, ninety-five pounds of rage storming past security, her hair a brushfire, right up to the host of In the Know.
I’m just the show’s Face, explained Isa Lanyess. She pointed across the room at Debbie skulking by the punchbowl. She’s the one whose idea it was, she’s the one who wrote the script, she’s who’s responsible for your sculpture getting saved. Talk to her.
You ? Adine railed, driving a finger into Debbie’s chest. You’re responsible for this? You want to save Sand City? Do you understand anything ? Who even are you?
I just thought it was a waste to have such beautiful work washed away, Debbie whispered, steering
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