Process Artist
It inspires no particular feeling inside him. He just knows. And then he moves towards it, like a magnet is pulling on his bones.
Jamie Psalterston lives in a two-room shack on some waste land down near the refinery and pays three hundred fifty dollars a month for the privilege. It has no running water and no insulation in the walls. He shits in a bucket and wears a heavy coat eight months of the year. He has a job part time washing dishes at Richard’s Steakhouse. He always comes home smelling like beef fat and liquid soap. His job is not his work. He considers himself an artist.
Jamie stands with a permanent hunch in his spine from scoliosis, exacerbated by his job. He stands on someone's front steps at night and tries to see into their front room through the frosted glass on the door. This is what he considers his work. He goes around at night, and tries to see into people's homes.
Jamie often gets the cops called on him. Someone hears something, sees a shadow move outside their window. It’s hard to avoid these things. He accepts it as part of the process. Sometimes the cops catch him, and sometimes he’s arrested. More often he’s able to slip away. All the cops in town know him by now. They all think he’s a lowlife. They think he’s going to do something awful someday, if he hasn’t already. He’s been told as much. Sometimes, instead of booking him, they drive him to an empty stretch of road and beat him with his hands cuffed behind his back. They tell him one of these days someone’s gonna burn his shack down with him inside. They tell him they’ve got their eyes on him. Jamie is glad he has an audience. He doesn’t mind that they don’t understand what he does. He imagines it would be worse if they did.
Horace once asked Jamie: “Hey man, why you do that peeping shit?” Horace is a coworker at Richard’s Steakhouse, a line cook. He looks like a human mountain, wide and sloping. When he gets time off he likes to shoot meth and spend two days straight playing pornographic visual novels. His favorites are the ones where he can make the girls fuck animals. The more species the better. Everyone who works with him knows this because it’s his favorite thing to talk about. Jamie had answered him: “I want to leave a mark that no one else has left before. One that only I can see.” Horace had just nodded. He had nothing to say, for once.
Jamie has no problem talking about his work, but when people ask him questions he finds it hard to answer in a way they want to hear. They never really get the point. The most common question he gets is if he’s ever seen anything really crazy looking in someone’s window. He doesn’t know how to explain that when he’s working, he always feels exactly the same.
One night he had gone around behind a house on Vulture Rd. and found a dead dog chained to a stake in the ground. It was curled in on itself like a leathery seashell, surrounded by a cloud of flies. He goes up to the house and looks through a back window. Inside, past the gap between two drab curtains, he sees a man’s hand dimly illuminated by the glow of a TV screen, short fingers drumming on a kitchen table. He can’t see the TV screen, or the rest of the man. Only the fingers. He stands there until the TV goes off, and then stands there for a while longer. He tries to see if the man is still sitting at the table, or if he’s left the room. It’s too dark for him to make it out. The curtains cover too much up. Only the man inside knows.
There’s always something only the people inside know. It’s the basis of his work. His raw material. Like a block of stone, it can be eroded over time. Unlike a block of stone, though, it can’t be destroyed. Only eroded. He’s an artist of erosion. Jamie tried to explain this once, for three hours, to a boy he met by the side of the road. Eventually, the boy had asked him to unlock the door.
Jamie is methodical in his work. It’s an open-ended project. Each night he goes out or does not. On the night he does, he chooses one house, and doesn’t leave until the sun finds him, or he thinks someone else has. It doesn’t matter what he sees inside, if anyone is awake, if any lights are on, if it’s even occupied. There’s no goal, just a process. Sometimes it takes hours. He’ll walk from one side of town to the other. But he always knows when he sees it. It inspires no particular feeling inside him. He just knows. And then he moves towards it, like a magnet is pulling on his bones.
Jamie doesn’t have many people he would call friends. Faces drift in and out of his life. They usually don’t seem to want to hang around, he’s noticed. His smile is thin and unpleasant. It rarely puts anyone at ease. And his work takes up most of his time. But he knows how to make a pretext of listening, and this is enough to make a few people want to know him. One of them is a wiry boy named Alternate. His name stems from a misunderstanding while his birth certificate was being filled out, but his parents decided it suited him, and so they never got it fixed. It made school a difficult experience. He’s nineteen now and works at the Fast Market. He met Jamie walking home from a party one night. He’d taken too many pills and gotten lost. Jamie listened while he told him about how he would see other versions of himself, clones or doppelgängers, he doesn’t know, standing in the middle of the street, outside his parent’s house. He says he’s sure they’re trying to take his place in his life, although he can’t imagine why. He says he doesn’t think he can find his way home, and so Jamie lets him crash on his couch that night. The couch is filthy and smells like mold, but Alternate doesn’t complain. They become something like friends. Many weeks later, he invites Jamie to another party. Jamie says he’ll be there. He has nothing better to do.
The party is at an empty storefront on a dead end side road with all the windows boarded over. There’s about twenty people there. There’s a fire going in a steel barrel in the center of the space. The lights don’t seem to be working. Jamie goes and sits on an old sofa cushion in a corner and watches the people mill around. A woman with a barcode tattooed on her arm comes over and sits next to him. She asks him what his name is, then offers him a hit of something before he can answer. He takes it. “I’ve been working through my fears,” she starts to tell him. “I was afraid of loud noises, so I set off a box of firecrackers in my room. I was afraid of spiders, so I let one crawl into my mouth and bit down. I was afraid of small spaces, so I had my boyfriend nail me into a coffin for a day. That took care of my fear of premature burial, too, and my fear of death. I shattered my finger with a hammer to get over my fear of broken bones. That shit hurt but I don’t regret it. I’m afraid of heights, too, but it’s so flat around here. I don’t know how to get high enough.” Jamie nods but doesn’t really listen. The whole party has started to feel ancient to him, like something from the dawn of time.
The next night Jamie goes out to work again. He finds a house with no lights on and knows it’s the one. He stands in a shadow on the porch and looks into the living room. There’s no furniture inside, no paintings on the walls. Just a clock, moonglow catching on the pendulum as it swings, and a huge circular rug on the floor, like a pool of oil atop the dark. He mostly looks at the rug. He tries to dive into it, and etch a message on the abyss inside. The message is unreadable.