KEEP PLANNING
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#012
caraparcel
performans sans grata
blooms of light cast an unsteady yet warm world, a lone figure stretches their arms, buoyed up within that warmth, darkness pools onto their fingertips, slipping off once they spin into a dance. each step beat on the floor, they draw back in the golden veil congealed into flesh punctured by their silhouette. but who was this person? they returned to center stage bare of all shadow, but as the performer meets my gaze again, i realize that it’s me. but how? i had been watching them, but when i try to move, i do not get any closer. i don’t have feet or hands. despite everyone’s insistence that we are here, their nudges on my shoulders or them taking my hands, my eyes could only encapsulate them basking in a globule of summer’s pale blue, and i’m just space around all that surrounding the haze cast from the stage lights, the truss beams on the ceiling glimmered with bright crosses.
platinum slices through dusty clouds, the sky unable to sustain the stretches of earth scabbed with rocks, prickled overgrowth along the highway shoulder. backseats of cars are comfortable because the interior subdued this outpour in its darkened grasp, keeping me from vanishing. two black plush figures stood in front, like the kind of people on bathroom signs, that to someone somewhere, we were supposed to be them. hearing their voices, courtney, and oakley faded clips of them talking about the edm musicians on the car’s heads up display, what they chose to do, and how they became somebody, in the end. fate arising from all our movements but it sinks within the hums of the car and all i could think of were the way things shone bright from frenetic movement in particles.
only hong sat beside me in the backseat, his eyes played with the trickles of luminescence through the window. mechanisms of the car coiled this silence between us until our words became deliberate, almost exposed. despite this, most of the things i said to him were almost vulgar, paying no heed to how this closed this smooth distance between us, the kind that we’d spend long periods of time in until we’d be this close, everyone expecting things to happen in that small span of time, like a miracle. maybe, to the driver, and passenger, i caught glimpses of that person wilding out in their eyes and all they do is laugh along, something to see as they remark about the provincial park we’re going to. air minted on cliffsides with the whispers through pine trees that’d provide some kind of clarity, scenic lakes threw its sparkles across the blue waves, casting an almost artificial glow across the leaves. entering backgrounds on computers because we thought there was always something real there.
forests splash green but jarred into leaves held in knobbly branches once we step out on the parking lot, walking onto the trails until twigs and pieces of bark crunch under our shoes. white glitters through the leaves consumed by clearings at small cliffs. winds crease the lake’s surface below and my ears ring to a scene without music, or some arrangement. courtney asks oakley a lot about what he does. hong records the sounds of birds flying or leaves brushing up against each other, somehow painting this scene in his mind that he could return to if he closes his eyes. a place that even when we are together, i cannot reach. little lichens grow off large rocks with this bit of life drooling from the grey surface.
at the joking suggestion of oakley, i climb them, making some headway until the snickers stop as i press forward, riveted by the sudden momentum i run past the trees that unfolded to no end, courtney, oakley, and hong nowhere to be seen. i yelled towards them but heard nothing, yet i had no real need to head back and pass over a little river burbling over stones nearby a wreck of an old car, its roof caved and parts gutted out save for the chassis frame and hood like a large old stove. a little chuckle disturbed my silence. bright sprinkles carved leaves out of the dark boughs blotting out the afternoon in this funereal temple of dun pillars, overgrown with saplings. once, i fell off my bike and scraped my hand watching the bits of red on it but the sensation entered deep within me and thought where that movement would swirl or dull inside me. but even then, i still appeared the same. all these things on the outside, watching the gauze wrapped so tight it squeezes pudgy flesh out of my palm. maroon stains on the cloth, blights like the way i was to oakley, and courtney, talking about me ruining their trip running off in that forest, overhearing them behind the bathroom door in the airbnb, my glances at the mirror after washing my face, seeing myself sequestered in this pane, only standing here could extricate me from the murmurs that breed this phantom, whose appearance within their eyes only caused pain, and winced faces.
lukewarm cheese encrusted the cardboard box from the pizza, white tulip-shaped lamps dulled the red pepperonis and green peppers, crumbs broken off the bread. door opened, entering from downstage and with a tense lip sealing whatever trembled through me earlier i pulled a smile and said, ‘let’s go stargazing’
when we went out, leaves flashed within the headlight beams of the car sheared out of the dark cloth covering the forest. courtney and oakley look up in the sky that was not its deep indigo but blanketed in clouds. from there, words uttered quickly, maybe too loud about whatever came to my head from landmines to flight or fight response until i fashioned myself a laughing man, moving around within the seatbelt. hong kept silent, watching all this noise happen and i wondered if he too was like space, all of us in freefall.
eventually, we stopped at a pier. lamps from the jetties dip white crosses that ripple into the heavens of the lake, unable to enter past the night, only crease it. courtney prodded oakley to go somewhere darker, but he shook his head with a smile saying he doesn’t know what’s hiding in the forests, making up stories of how we might end up getting lost or have to search for each other. clouds barely came apart and i almost wanted it to rain to snuff out any hope for those stars to appear getting all of us to scatter as our jackets stuck to our arms running back to the car, soaking the seats with the heater turned up to max while someone tries to say something funny. but we remained, waiting and after a while went back. fatigue set over me when i arrived back home, photos from the trip on instagram carved itself out of a radiant white. skies greyed and leaves crisped outside the window, burnt from an unseen heat.
cam, a friend from the performance studies program, told me about another building rooftop to climb. downtown, rushes of traffic leave strands from headlights that polished steel framed windows of coffee shops, steam emitted from the holes in the circular plate of a sewer grate, meandering and curving as if a damp ghastly tendril reaching from the depths of the concrete caked in discarded posters. cam’s friend opened the entrance of the apartment complex saying that security’s taking a break right now. taking the stairs from the top floor, we reach a ceiling hatch which cam picks the lock of and pushes it open, a grey square grew into vast sky.
pulses beat in our necks, rivers that nourish the tolls of our hearts. windows of high rises glittered around us and only from this far did all this life look pretty because entering into any of those bright rooms would have crystallized us in their stalactites, our movements in them inert until we only see what happens after them. from here, if all these bright grains joined together, they’d be these necklaces that bestowed something so rare. steps became prudent as i approach cam, worried i might teeter into a sudden collapse of the rooftop’s impenetrable surface that made us, despite these lapses, seem so small up here, framed in mortar where we could only possess ourselves from the gales swarmed around us, pulling the fraying clouds, stuffing comes out of bright rips in the fabric. cam then leaned back, hands on the floor.
‘so, you work on your performance yet?’
‘shoot, well i gotta think of something then’
‘you haven’t even said what it was. you’re more secretive than the kowloon walled city’ she huffed. cam turns back but stops when the hatch opens, a man in a large white dress-shirt wrinkled in places and sleek black pants steps toward us with his phone in his hand, a nametag that says security on his breast, seeing us almost in a necessary association. a glint of fear shocks her as i realize someone must have called them from seeing us outside their window.
‘what are you doing here?’ he asked firm. ‘you can be arrested for trespassing’
‘well, damn, we were just sitting here.’ i said. cam huddled back, soles scraped at the floor. debating did little to ease the situation, and i place my hands up, walking to the side to try and assuage the man as he says to stay where i am, my own steps verged like a ticking clock towards fireworks.
‘don’t you move’ he said, reaching his beltloop this single silhouette of a man anchored our panics, the kind of person we had to run from all along, the shadow that haunts these abandoned places.
before i knew it, cam and i break for the hatch, grabbing it open for her to slide down. before the man reached me, i thrust my palm but stop upon his hands shielding his face, his stumble gives me enough time to double back to the open hatch, grabbing the handle to close it above me. footsteps boom down the stairwell, snuffing our panting, as we reach the ground floor, fast walking through the warm corridors until pushing the door out to the parking lot, all the teeters of our running slow down once we swerve into a nearby alley, cam’s breaths attacked with sobs she’d stifle with a neutral expression, lips closed stretched to seal her panic.
‘cam…?’
‘i’m alright…really’ her mouth a brittle smile that if i said anything, might topple it completely, and i have no choice but to believe her. sitting on the streetcar back, i said nothing, a kind of nothing that wouldn’t affect her in the same way she could sit here while people boarded and disembarked, and she could sink into the flow of all this, without an instant that jarred her from this continuous beat of entrances and exits, reeled in moments of people sitting at kiosks behind concourse panes.
taking the bus down to campus, milky fluorescent light laminated the plastic seats with little cushions making them seem almost flat as slush and dirt crumbs already gathered on my boots and then i close my eyes in comforting darkness, little pockets of black i could carve for myself. in the lecture hall, a classmate, ren, gets up to perform and they ask me to help with their costume wrapping their face and body in translucent packing tape until their features blur in the lengths enrobing them, becoming faint, lights shone along the creases. ren’s entirety squeezed out as he ran up the steps behind the long tables, a phone held in their mouth as they bit down on the back ring, the screen loops a montage of buildings blown up in grey dust clouds, its surface smooth, his face like that, the audience seeing the hues underneath the tape where ren lay somewhere in their minds as flesh beneath that surface. despite the calamity on screen or how ren felt, they were human just like them who would be heading out with them after class.
when they finish, ren places their hand on my shoulder and i go to set up my performance dimming the lights. even in the glow cast by the video on the projector, i was only these small glints in the eyes of the audience, caught in it. exposed with each spear of this visibility that locked each action hoping it could sink back in that darkness. i was human. hand rummages in my bag. faint quizzical glance from the audience. i can change the things i cannot change. that same person they saw in class and now, still with nothing to say. i have control of my life. fingers obscure the flat blade of a razor i draw back upon my wrist, a brief ebb slowed my frenzy. repeat it again and again trying to get this brief ripple to expand until red clung to my arm, as if someone held onto my arm. it was warm and i thought of disappearing into this feeling. another affirmation. i could stop all this until red streaks ran across my arm, some of the students in shock turn away and i knew there would be people who just couldn’t stand to be around me and to that, my haggard breaths break into a shrill laugh that grated on the audio’s bridges blaring from the spaeker while i lay upon the ground shaking, throbs of my veins stampede at the sudden wounds slit across them. what was it that i wanted out of it? perhaps that i wanted someone to stop me from even doing this at all, knowing all i needed was not to do anything as my soles anchored themselves, my first steps, my first words discontinue my ever-growing silence, thinning, the person i am now, the person i would become, and then the person i wanted to be. even if no one saw this person, if i somehow said something within the sobs and recitations and cries in this lecture hall, would they see them, if not from me, but from those in the audience who turn away or when i finally could foresee my shuddering to the end of the performance, the end of me, the wound that discontinues this frenzy and i could feel myself emanating from warmth that could carry me across these spaces.
a few days into christmas break, i walk with hong in a park with transmission towers, power lines thrummed an electric frequency across snow drenched fields, overcast withdrew the sunrays from radiating upon them as if becoming a moon that has not yet grown its craters. bandages wrapped around the clotting wounds on my arm. after the performance i was sent to a counselor who asked me if i had any trouble at home or outside the campus to which i said no to both, slouching on the chair as i sometimes break into a conversation about what i learned at the class and the appointment ended with only a small reminder that my actions caused people to be hurt. after i acknowledged such, i was let go. oakley even had a small panic asking me if i was okay and that if i needed help to come talk to him, almost employing that kind of skill to be dispensed if a person was injured in front of him but i simply told him i was fine.
hong looks through their sound recorder, wind blew the powerlines until they made electric chirps like tiny objects ricocheting within the wire, these skeletal towers built off these beams that crossed each other over and over again.
‘how was your performance?’ hong asked
‘it was fine, wanna see the wounds?’
‘no–i’
i unroll my sleeve to show the bandage with a spot of red but after a quick wince, he places his hand on my arm, feeling from the bandage’s layer where the wound was and firmed his grasp between them, perhaps hoping that in this show of concern, this warmth wouldn’t exacerbate the pain. we continue to walk until reaching the field where he turned to me.
‘hey can you do something for me?’
‘what is it?’
‘i want to get some sounds of you walking in the snow.’
‘uhh sure’
walking from the concrete path into white field, my foot breaks the surface, chiseling jagged ledges within this well until it embeds itself into the clump of snow groaning from each stir but i keep myself still within the crater, as if to lengthen the bridge between these sounds made by movements yet in that silence, i felt almost like the wires above that stretched across the towers, this thread that connected these structures yet plucked by the fingers of the wind. hong’s sound recorder peaks from the noise of each successive movement around us, recording this glisten of the wire’s transmissions from the dying winds, and my own steps jagged the green line on the screen. falling into the snow, soft crushes muffles the air around me until i get up, imprints of a person tilled the ground and i kick, shoeprints shaved off the surface. soon, silence levels the line on hong’s recorder, stirred occasionally from emissions of the powerlines, fragments of the earth connected in these beams. white cliffs from my passage, mounds of snow thrown into hills. each instant of contact lapped through my gloved hands, sculpting them out of these motions before expanding out into this breadth, shrank into grains from up in the sky, glimmers of airplanes hewing the air glimpsing below at the rooftops and the fields where we must have left creases in the snow, these places where we can’t be seen.