multiple personality ken

multiple personality ken
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Bubbles floated outside her building like computer generated schools of fish. A wall of mirrors bounced window-shaped beams into elegant angles of mote and light. Park closed her eyes again. Sunday morning in SoHo was bright. Her hermit corner apartment had been a dance studio before she moved in, several months ago, almost a year. The tired floor still bore the scuffed signs of the many overweight hopefuls who had dreamt their way to the city years before her. She had kept most of the furnishings intact, bringing only her bed and electronics, adding a small stove and fridge to the changing room, nothing to the showers. Her groceries came delivered and everything else could be done on her laptop. During her rehabilitation the empty days filled up easily, much easier than one would expect. Sleeping, waking, walking. She had practiced her walk in front of the silver expanse of mirrors, the cloaked piano always mute. That had been the hardest, not the voice or the gestures, but that hipless shuffle, that heelless trot so effortlessly and universally internalized at the onset of basso voce and fuzzy tummies. She sometimes wondered if, when she finally did dare to leave the building, the doorman would think she was someone else, a boyfriend, or a brother.

clockwork sparkly

clockwork sparkly
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Shards of sunlight napalmed her eyelids and her long arm drew the heavy white sheet over her still pillowed head. It was too early for her to stop dreaming these memories. She could only see it through the camera’s eye now. It was to be the first take of her big goodbye scene, the speech at the prom, a scandalized teacher at the local high school, the real killer was caught, but still she would leave, even though her few loyal pupils had all sparked tears on their close-up shiny faces. She shook her head in lazy eights to clear her mind of all the cluttering distractions. A thin sound ripped from the spotlights and the sky fell. It left her with a line that ran from where the lighting rig had hit her first, high on her temple, all along her skinny violin back, to halfway down her leg, when momentum and gravity had stalled the destructive process of the pointed steel edge on her freshly powdered skin.
In the hospital, after the accident, the vision, her future, had come to her as she woke, paralyzed, focused beyond the wrapped white tulips, on the screen lowered from the speckled ceiling. The remote was in the bandaged hands of her tufted blond neighbor. The woman had poured water on a burning frying pan. Of all things, it was a fishing marathon her finger had frozen on, eyes closed shut while her cheeks glazed over with salty water.

spongebob prism

spongebob prism
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Peeling from her sleeping skin, Park tunneled through the pixilated glass, finding herself somehow more substantiated as she walked down a hallway, one hand heavier than the other. A pink metallic suitcase. Her suitcase. But those were not her shoes. This looked like the day she left Seoul; off to Los Angeles to bilingually act in a small movie of immigration, family and the American dream. She was discovered at Christmas, just five years old, in the pulsating toy section of a giant department store quietly calling for her mother in English. She had wanted to do this every year since her mother disappeared. Somehow she believed her mother would be more likely to find her in an Americanized space like that, instead of the street market or the store around the corner. Her mother had been an actress too, on location in Korea when she had fallen for her driver. The man who had raised Park alone, after.
He did not come with her to America that day, offering her without question into the custody of the American studio as if he had always expected to lose her too. Her father sat next to her in the taxi, the suitcase between them. Big signs and star-less skies filled the windows until the car stopped. He steered her head through the doors of Incheon airport. Where were her braids? Her eyes searched the lofty space for a reflection. There between the pillars something stirred in the air conditioning vents. It could not be, but there it was, a little white flake wavering down on the hurried shoulders of the cramped businessmen in line ahead of her. This was just the first. Her father did not notice the shiny bustling space was slowly turning into a frosted postcard wonderland. Just behind the metal detector hid a big fat tree, a shivering squirrel between her crunchy feet. Park was struck silent, unable to articulate to her father or the mannered stewardess what had happened to the weather. He crouched down and looked into her eyes. She did not hear what he said then, but now she saw his eyes were frosted over, kind but white. Walking towards the exit, he half-waved as she passed through the detectors, dwarfed by the white tree.

navy blue on bed

navy blue on bed
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

She remembered the waiting at the gate, but not this next part. As she approached the windexed glass overlooking the ever-whiter tarmac, Park realized what had felt so strange before, her hair was a boy’s length, her dress now trousers, walking down the snowy lane hedged with huddled travelers snowed in like sleeping big city bums. Yet she felt good, better with every step closer to the edge. The tiny squirrel was now holding on to her suitcase, mumbling, could he be smiling at her? Park could tell in her mirror image stare, she certainly was. As she gazed out at the slowly waltzing planes she felt a presence at her side. A boy like her, but white, like the falling snow. Their invisible bubbles met and he returned her gaze with the deepest wells of summery moss. A tiny twist of muscle memory in her bandaged chest the only reminder this projection was not real, at least not then and there. Just as his hand moved closer to hers, just as that space between them filled with that cruel warmth, a twinkly sound grabbed the boy’s attention. She followed his eyes up and screamed a breathless scream as an absolutely tiny sharp flake embedded itself in his spotless eye. His surprised hand retracted, redirected to his face. His eyes like a fast-forward of some Icelandic lake in winter. As he faded, first crestfallen, then numb, she was drawn back between the waiting benches, into her body. The quiet noise of the tulips, the television, and the tears suddenly sounded somehow more alone now than ever before.
Then, in that hospital tomb next to the weeping woman, her scar still throbbing, Park had realized that that was to be that. There would be no more very-special-guesting on daytime dramas. No more sexy doctor Chen, mysterious model Yang, long lost sister Lee. No, from now on she would be a man with a mission. She would find this boy, take his hand, and press it to his frozen heart.

fun with prismatron

fun with prismatron
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

He had found the VCR on the street too. Brown found almost everything on the street. The mismatched furniture in his back alley apartment played musical chairs with the disgraced items he saw seductively posed on gaudy lit circles of pavement. The dusty books he took home just needed a wipe with a wet cloth before he put them on little Aztec piles beside his mattress. The occasional roach refugee he blasted with his trusty Raid, but still… Garbage here seemed cleaner - less brown sludge, less dull and gross - than he remembered from his few visits to grand old Kiev. Supposing he remembers them at all. Here he tried to wipe his old world memories, flooding his mind with new narratives. This was after he fled his mother. Left her in that macrobiotic commune in Oregon. She bought it with the money they made back home in the Ukraine. Apparently the favorable mention of an obscure grain in a popular no-carb diet bible had sparked so much interest in the meager harvests of their ancestral land that his father had been able to simply buy their way into America, the perplexing country Brown was now attempting to understand, on film, in magazines, on the street.
This city, he often thought, recycles itself; one person’s clutter becoming another’s until everyone is connected in a nostalgic downward spiral of ironic lampshades, dorky pastel record covers, and faux-leather bowling bags from drowsy upstate suburbs. The lady walking just ahead of him, the sad one who looks like she had a very slow day in high-end publishing, she just stopped and hunched, peering between some stale Staples boxes. This constant spying, downcast eyes roving between the base metal of parking meters, for Brown too had become second nature. After the Delicious Dumpling restaurant closed, the other Chinese would be here, their shopping carts parked just behind them, crouching, gently grazing the almost body sized black bags, collecting the drinking containers tossed out after SoHo’s more adventurous shoppers had drunk their last canned sip of too sweet moccachino here, in the no man’s land he now called home.

cacti in the sun

cacti in the sun
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

Brown had had no idea about America. He grew up in the Soviet Union, or what was left of it, in a family where TV was banned, and bedtime stories came from his parents’ lips. His parents had run from the city as soon as they could, leaving their college educations to till the land of their great-grandparents. Not for the glory of communism, but out of fear, he believed. They genuinely feared the progress of technology, as if it were only a matter of time before they would become robots, locked in patterns until their batteries dried out. At the airport that day, after they said goodbye to Andrej, his father, after the pile of precarious luggage had been secured to the crippled cart that surely stemmed from Khrushchev’s days, his mother had ceremoniously blinked her last look at her native land, or at least the asphalted web of roads that was its current stand-in, and closed her eyes at the first sight of a turnstile. He guided her through check-in as if she was blind, up the Aeroflot’s powder blue aisle, down Frankfurt’s almost liquid marbled hallways, over the oddly office-like texture of the carpeted floors in JFK, all the way to the rental car place in Portland, where the flowery woman behind the counter had looked at her with pity and smiled at his accent. Here in the city nobody minded, but there his halting words had encouraged questions. Always the same. “What was it like?” Then, when he asked what what was like, they rephrased, starting with their traditional assumption of telepathy. “You know. When the wall fell.” How could Brown explain they only found out much later, when the first junk mail overflowed their small mailbox and painted the overgrown gravel of the driveway with garish rainbowy promises. Without TV or news, time used to pass slowly, flowing through their house at the speed of fallen leaves. Brown thought the city would change time’s pace, yet here he often felt in a stationary state of flux, as if he was in the eye of the storm, as if the sheer number of factoids and news reports whirling around him somehow added up to zero; the blurry hum wrapped the citizens in an ergonomic blanket of noise, without really drawing them out of their metropolitan bell jar, sleepwalking them through their daily landscape. Uptown, downtown, elsewhere.

tablecloth bonanza

tablecloth bonanza
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

At the video store, Brown had had a slow night, sat through most of a Godfather without the door’s annoying little bell alerting him not to slouch. There were the usual customers. The lady who came in early once a month, still wearing her drone outfit, always rented Schindler’s list, and returned it puffy-eyed just before he closed up shop. The myopic stunted kid, who took ages sneaking peeks at the store’s more risqué content. The optimistic Midwestern guy who was working his way through the foreign section, film by film, now at G, for Ginger E Fred, reminded him of himself when he visited his first video store in Oregon, pacing starry-eyed and dithering before the wall of same-size boxes plastered with frozen faces. He found a box that seemed unthreatening, a love story he thought, in timid black and white, the title incomprehensible but somehow familiar. Seated in the rental’s sunken rec room, right on the soft receptive fur, he did not understand a word the unseen nervous man was saying. Mesmerized by the wide scenes on the television’s bulging screen, he never saw the rest of the film, rewinding again to that first part. The bridge, the park, the snow, the music, this city, this was cinema, this was America; not the yellowish earth of Oregon, nor his mother’s morning porridge or the singing wires above their square home in the woods.

misty mountain hop

misty mountain hop
Originally uploaded by nyresolutions.

He only took one film home these days, Brown watched and rewound, taking great care to take a walk outside before pressing play again. He sincerely intended to explore other neighborhoods, but never really succeeded, his feet always turning the extra right that led straight back home. On one of these walks by Seward Park, it must have been late November, Brown spotted Jackson. The dark gaunt man was standing on the corner, impatiently waiting for the lights to change. He hardly seemed to stray from the four blocks Brown roamed home from work. Throughout the day he sat on stoops and benches with a kind of daring backwards slump, staring through the fabric of reality, into his, a world where all the nighttime shop windows were his personal fish tanks and the shiny things within could be reeled in with a well-aimed throw of his illusory fishing rod.
The lights changed to the blaring white they substituted here for green. Brown looked down as if to tell his sneakers to find their own way home when his eyes found the crate at the very tip of the street corner. The afternoon crowds vined around him; too busy holding nose-obsessed children’s hands to spot the red milk crate’s contents. Videos, labels ripped off, it must have been twenty tapes or so, as heavy as two shopping bags. When he came home, he sat at his table and carefully wiped off the tapes with a paper towel, choosing the cleanest. At first the film seemed just like any other, but soon irregularities appeared, speech seemed clipped, the story made no sense: the weepy pregnant teen wandering into a main street shootout, spaceship hallways morphing into hospital corridors, the fat kid looking for treasure, finding only dust. Brown started to take notes. He would catalogue these films. Find their sources, trace connections, meet their maker. Brown had found his calling.