A Corpse Which Moves
Perry Ruhland
Going forward, I vow to no longer view Dylan as a person living or dead, but
solely as a corpse which moves. As a corpse which moves, it is a vector for a
specific force, pointed in a specific direction. What is that force? Where is
it going? This is what I intend to find.
The project spans both rooms of my — once our — two-room apartment. The rooms
are of equal shape and size, but their atmospheres are drastically different.
In this room, I live and work. My futon is rolled against the wall, and next
to the futon is an old bookcase which I have repurposed to store, among other
living essentials, my portable stove and stash of pre-made meals. In the back
corner there is a desk with a laptop and laser printer, and a smaller desk
where I maintain this journal. I have covered most of the walls with pictures.
The other room contains the corpse. The room has one window and one door. The
window holds an air-conditioning unit which I keep running at a severe
temperature. I have covered the window with dark, breathable bedding and
stuffed towels in the gaps under the door. I have experimented with the use of
candles and aromatic sprays to mitigate the stench, but to no avail. It is
good that I have no neighbors, that the complex on whose fifth floor my
apartment sits is more or less abandoned.
During its period of dormancy I had undressed the corpse and fastened around
its neck a posture-correcting collar. The collar has metal rings on its front
and back, and to the back ring I attached a very short chain, which I attached
in turn to a metal bolt driven into the wall. The corpse stands on a sheet of
crusted plastic, surrounded by a semicircle of LED lamps and digital cameras.
The LED lamps are bright and cold. Each digital camera is placed, adjusted,
and lensed so as to capture a particular segment of corpse. One camera
captures the taut muscles of the right calf, one the curve of the left breast,
one the jawline, the navel, the penis, the left and right hands, etcetera.
Each camera is plugged into a power strip via long black cords. They are set
to take photos every thirty minutes. I switch out the SD cards daily.
⚬
Today I saw, beside the gray and bloated right foot, a fairly sizable sheet of
dead skin. The skin was hard, curved, and mostly purple. I recognized it as
that flap of right cheek which had for the past few days been gradually
peeling and was, for a period yesterday, dangling loose from the head. Now
another window has opened onto the corpse’s musculature, which is tough,
burgundy in color, and marked by tight striations. This exposed muscle joins
the flaking ears; the crushed, deflated nose; the one eye which is filmy white
and the other which is a dried and deflated sac; the bitten-off stump of
tongue, gone green.
I’ve kept my tools stashed beside the humming power strip. I have tripods,
battery packs, canisters of insect repellant, pliers, a hammer, cartons of
nails, a pneumatic drill with bits, and a telescoping trash-picker. The
trash-picker has rubber grips and metal jaws.
I wrapped a garbage bag around the end of the trash-picker and carried it
towards the bay of cameras. A corpse which moves may not have a pulse, but the
corpse itself pulsates. Its muscles are always tight, prone to violent spasms
not unlike those of myoclonic fits. The corpse’s jaws often snap with great
force, hence the mangled tongue, and a row of broken teeth. As I reached for
the flap of dead skin, it dragged the broken nail of its gray big toe across
the floor. The plastic sheeting was covered in scratches. I deposited the skin
in a bucket with the refuse of days past.
I do not interfere with the corpse’s decomposition beyond my control of the
room’s temperature and my spraying of its feet with insect repellant, so as to
keep away carpenter ants and centipedes. After spraying, I swap the insect
repellant for a small bottle of glass cleaning solution. Reaching over each
camera, unscrewing every lens, spritzing the face of the lens with cleaning
solution, wiping them down with microfiber cloth, and reaching over to screw
each lens back onto its respective camera is a long and cumbersome process.
Removing and replacing the cameras’ SD cards makes it longer still. So I note
the motions of the corpse. Today its head rolled clockwise then
counter-clockwise, heavy on its neck. Its shoulders jerked up and fell down.
Its fingers wriggled; some digits stiffer than others on pustulated hands.
⚬
In a sense the corpse exists in two rooms. In one room, it occupies a single
defined physical space. In the other, it spreads across the walls. If I were
to look up from the page at this very instant, I would see disarticulated
occurrences of scalp, bulging Achilles tendon, and right elbow hanging above
this desk. Each picture is made of ten to twenty other pictures: photographs
of the same subjects layered over photographs over photographs. My living
essentials include dozens of color ink cartridges.
⚬
A pinky detached during the night. The bucket of refuse is now full, and
tomorrow I will dump it in the complex’s courtyard.
I reviewed some emails while listening to Scarlatti. Certain commissions were
due, offers extended. I formulated responses before turning my attention to
the SD cards. After inserting card A, I double clicked the first picture.
Hard, rubbery skin filled the screen. The diagonal impression of ribs pressed
against the confines of a rotten chest. I looked at the ribs until I felt I
was touching them with two fingers. I tapped the right arrow key. Repeating
this process for all forty-eight pictures, for all eleven SD cards, once
consumed a whole day. Today, it was a three-hour process.
After reviewing the photos, I rename each to note the corresponding section of
corpse and the day and time of which the photo was taken. This makes the
images easier to sort when working on my superimpositions. The
superimpositions came about when I realized that although raw images have
their use in isolating and magnifying certain aspects of the corpse, the
appearance of a peeling shoulder is only its appearance. But if multiple
images of the same aspect taken across a period of time are layered one on top
of another, entropy and gravity become visible. The animating force might also
be seen.
⚬
Checking in on the corpse was followed by two hours of meditation. Ribs
disappear into pure intensities of motion. I was hungry, so I heated a
pre-made meal. I have grown used to the everpresent stench. My appetite
remains. I ate ravenously.
⚬
Having filled my walls with pictures, I have begun to cover the ceiling. After
tending to the corpse, I printed my latest superimposition. With a stepladder
and tacks I stuck it in the center of the blank surface. The picture is
composed of the mouth through thirty noons and midnights. It is a smeared
oval, jaws simultaneously opening and closing, baring teeth over teeth, all
pale and purple and black.
Dying might be a protracted process for some, but the moment of death is
instant for all. Death turns one into many: the organism’s machine dissolves
into its constituent parts. But in the case of living death, some specific
force cuts a gap between one and zero, and with cold hands, opens it wide.
What do I see when I look inside? An instant, glaciated.
⚬
For the first time in weeks, I strapped on my filtration mask and stepped out
onto the street. The air was filled with smoke: thick columns rose behind
slanted roofs. I walked along the wide, empty boulevards. Under my hat I wore
wireless earbuds. My music was louder than the occasional crackle of gunfire.
I would not have left without good reason. My stash of pre-made meals was
running low, so I placed an order online. These days I’m forced to order less
— the meals cost three times more than they had previously. The closest
remaining delivery center was further in the city than I would have liked. At
least I wouldn’t have to carry much back.
I waited with a small group at a checkpoint where the guards were outfitted
with long guns and masks. They reviewed my papers and took my temperature
before I could pass. Not long after, I was forced to wait at another
checkpoint where the guards were outfitted with long guns and masks. This
second checkpoint was in a neighborhood with a stadium resembling a massive
black beetle. There was an empty lot on the other side of the checkpoint,
wedged between one shuttered storefront and another. The lot was full of brown
weeds and fenced with barbed wire.
While waiting I watched the instructions that flashed across an LED billboard.
Do practice good hygiene. Do not approach the dead. Do follow all commands
written and verbal. Do not shelter the dead.
The billboard was above a sports bar whose windows were nailed over with
wooden planks. A man stumbled out, pressed his head against the wall, and
vomited on his shoes.
On my way back from the delivery center, the fenced lot was no longer empty.
Portable barriers now stood against the barbed wire fence and corpses were
dragged through a gate. Their ankles were shackled and their heads were caged
in chickenwire bulbs.
The sound of the cleansings were ubiquitous, but I had never seen one before
today. I left my place in line and joined a growing crowd just outside of the
lot. I removed my earbuds and listened.
The corpses stood against a brick wall. The wall was charred black by previous
cleansings. The corpses gnashed and twitched. Some had decayed worse than
others. A few looked nearly alive. Across from them guards with heavy armor
lined up in rows. The first row held long guns and the second row wore bulky
flame-throwers. The guards moved in tandem. The first row acted, made way for
the second.
The bodies went to pieces. The pieces caught fire.
⚬
Pure conjecture: Death is a thing carried through the folds of time. After
latching on to life, it incubates for some duration, and hatches in a moment.
For the instant it exists, Death is sharp and pointed. If this instant is to
never pass…
⚬
The skin of my corpse which moves is lunarlike, all grey and cracked and
cratered. Skin falls away over insides bright and gleaming. Bones are white
and yellow, muscle is deep wine red, veins are cobalt blue, organs are orange,
green, silver, and purple, massive and entwined like a coral reef. The corpse
has marbled cliffs for thighs and frozen lava floes for forearms. It has grand
balconies for bare ribs, peaked gable shoulders. In the exposed skull
chattering senselessly beneath a crust of scalp, the deflated sac of an eye
forms a vast white sand dune.
The force can no longer be contained inside the corpse. It points out through
the body, and the incoherence of this body makes its surroundings insane. The
presence extends past its single defined physical space and onto the concrete
walls of its room, pitted and picked like blistered skin, and the charging
cables run from cameras like black capillaries.
In one corner of the room I keep my tools, but in another I have stashed the
clutter of my previous life. It too has changed.
⚬
Halakha states that corpses are the most unclean thing. Anyone who has touched
a corpse is made unclean. If a corpse is in a house, every person and object
inside is made impure.
⚬
Recent difficulty meditating on my superimpositions. Rotting limbs on rotting
limbs on rotting limbs reveal only flat blurs and digital noise.
⚬
Over the course of seven hours, I’ve taken down the pictures and used the
trash-picker to remove those pasted on the ceiling. The chimeras and the
montages and the closeups magnified to landscapes are stacked face-down. I
opened my laptop and made a point of manually dragging each row of my
thousands of photos into a digital trashbin in reverse chronological order.
Upon reaching the first photos, I was relieved to find a face I no longer
recognized.
The stench from the adjacent room has made the air thick.
⚬
At some point, I neglected to spray the corpse with insect repellant. Today I
found it’s been chewed by carpenter ants and centipedes. It’s just as well —
this phase of the project has ended. I unplugged the charging cable attached
to the camera fixed on a marbled thigh. I then unscrewed the camera from its
tripod, collapsed the tripod, and placed both with the clutter and the tools.
I repeated this process with the rest of the cameras in the room. When I
finished, I realized the corpse’s urethral sphincter had at last given way;
the contents of its bladder spilled over the plastic sheet and across the
floor. The urine trickled across marks where the tripods stood. I saw his
skull in a yellow mirror.
⚬
Once we took a trip abroad. During this trip, we took a bus tour of the
countryside. The tour stopped at pagan sites. One site was perched at the top
of a verdant hill too steep for the bus to climb. All of us tourists were out
hiking a stony path lined with white sheep. I remember the day being very cold
and bright. Dylan walked ahead and cast a long shadow beside me.
At the top of the hill there was a barrow. The barrow was wide and
dome-shaped, made from stone but grown over with grass. The hill was green but
here the grasses had browned. A wedge was carved out of the dead grass and
stone, over which a small iron gate had been fixed. We were all supposed to
line up at the gate and wait to see the dead’s treasures behind iron bars.
Instead, Dylan took my hand and we walked the perimeter.
Behind the barrow we found a stretch of grass and a large stone. The stone was
pitted and flecked by rain, and marked by something else too. When I
approached, I saw these other marks were interlocking spirals, slanting
parallelograms, and concentric circles. Although they had faded over millenia,
the marks had retained the basic clarity of their forms. They covered every
side of the stone.
Some two or three thousand years ago, a man had knelt here with his crude
hammer and chisel. With steady hands, with open eyes, he carved patterns into
blank space. It must have taken days, working in the sun or by flickering
firelight, focused on nothing but these forms. I crouched to get a closer
look. The interlocking spirals filled my vision, and I could not help but
touch two fingers to a groove. In that moment, I understood that it is not
enough to see time — it must be felt.
I will approach him now, with open arms.