hide and seek
Jordan & Lilith
Lilith and I have a new game to play.
We stayed in my apartment for most of the morning, listening to records together. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve done
that. Shared music with someone else. Given these songs over to another, a song they’ve never heard before—Listen to this one, and this one—experiencing the song through someone else. That vicarious feeling of the very first time.
You only get your first time once, right? Seeing Lilith react to the music, her body responding to each song, the melodies,
the lyrics, drawing something out of her . . . cathartic.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Let’s try something.”
“Something else? How many ideas do you have?”
“What can I say? I’m feeling inspired . . .”
“What’ve you got in mind?”
“Ditch the body.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” I said. “I want to see if I can find you.”
“. . . How?”
Art is always an out-of-body experience. The best of it transports you. Takes you somewhere else, outside your own flesh.
As fate would have it, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts has over 50,000 works of art from all over the world, right here in Richmond, ancient and modern, under one roof.
This spot always struck me as a solid date spot, so I figured . . .
Why not bring Lilith?
I just have to find her. Or she finds me. Whichever comes first. I wanted her to abandon her host because I want to see if
I can sense her on her own, without a body.
The essence of her. The spirit. The demon.
Let the games begin . . .
I know she’s here, somewhere. I can feel her. Something elemental in the air.
A presence.
It’s like a beehive in here, humming with activity. It’s a Saturday, so the museum is exceptionally busy. A lot of hustle
and bustle. Families wander through the various cavities of gallery space, drifting from one room to the next. The sheer number
of people is staggering. Suffocating. I can feel that fingernail of anxiety pressing against my chest, jabbing at my lungs.
It won’t be long before it’s a brick. I don’t know how long I can stay.
But I’m not giving up until I find her. Where is she? In whom?
Jordan doesn’t notice our new host. Why would he? He’s never met him before.
Or her. Or him. Chianti. Merlot. Chardonay.
He wants us to follow, so we go along. A fun game to play. We enter the museum right behind him, then slip ahead. Let him
wonder where we are. See if he can spot us.
He likes to play games. So do we. The thrill of the hunt is here.
He rides even without his bike. He races, even now.
So do I. Let’s have some fun . . .
We drift among the art. So many people. So many fresh vessels. The jostle of onlookers gives us a river of flesh to flow through,
from one body to the next.
There is so much to look at. To see.
We find ourselves taken by the ancient artifacts. The Syrian flask fashioned as a human head, blown out from molded brown glass, made in the first century A.D.
The Sassanian bottle made from silver with mercury gilding from early fifth century Persia. See the etchings of the goddess
across the bottle? We’ve been that woman before.
All these totems of mankind. Testaments to their deities. Their gods.
Their devils.
We never settle in one vessel for long, simply adrift in this sea of people. That’s what Jordan wants, isn’t it? To play catch me if you can? See if he can sense us? Pinpoint us?
These people have all come here to bear witness to their history. The rise and fall of so many empires, the remnants of collapsed
cultures now placed behind glass, sealed from anyone’s touch.
We have witnessed these downfalls. Sometimes we’ve even nudged them along.
Jordan slips away from us, into the next room. It’s not difficult to find him in a crowd.
Always burning.
The fissure within him has cracked so wide, light pours forth from his ribs, a pressure vent spitting volcanic gas into the
sea, a trench in his chest, blasting the blackest heat.
See how he burns.
But can he see us? See me? He’s trying to prove something. Test himself. It’s charming, actually. Watching him search. Maybe
he needs a little help. Just a nudge.
He doesn’t notice us closing in on him.
We’re so close now. Right at his back. Look at the skin of his neck.
See how the hairs lift.
She’s here, I know it. I can feel her. It has to be her . . . but where? Where is she?
More like who is she?
I’ve left the ancient art and made my way to the contemporary wing. The artwork here is mainly paintings, along with several sculptures at the center of every room.
Each gallery space feels like its own chamber of an ever-expanding heart. All these people are merely blood cells getting
pumped from one ventricle to the next.
Just when I think I’ve circulated through the entire heart, there’s another chamber.
The fingernail of anxiety against my chest reaches in deeper, piercing the very tissue. I don’t think I can stay much longer.
I don’t know what I was thinking. Too many people.
I need to get out of here. Before I lose my grip.
Just stick it out, Jordan. You can do this.
She’s here. I know it. Feel it.
Feel her.
But where? She’s hiding, somewhere. In someone. I know I can find her, on my own. If I can do that—feel her—then who cares
what host she’s in?
Too many people. Too many faces. Hold it together, I think. Lock that shit down.
The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. Rise, all on their own.
It’s her. It has to be.
I spin around, take in the people all around me. Nobody makes eye contact. Everyone’s focused on the art. It has to be her,
doesn’t it? I swear she was just here.
Getting warmer . . .
The drab terracotta tint of the ancient art falls back, and now we’re in an explosion of color. Here we have Warhol. De Kooning.
Lichtenstein. So many bold, brash paintings.
I join the flow, letting the slow riptide of bodies guide me, stopping at each framed piece long enough to take the painting
in before moving on to the next portrait.
Getting warmer . . .
I notice the couples. The shared experience. Taking in the art. Talking about what their interpretation is. Holding hands.
Do I want that? Someone to share this?
Look at these people. Going about their lives. They could all end just like . . . that.
A snap of my fingers.
I find myself halting before the Rothko. The black plains of his paintings. There’s something oddly calming about his work.
I wonder if that’s what hell looks like.
Hotter . . .
There’s death in there, I can feel it. It seeps out from the canvas, radiating out from the frame. I reach my hand out to
touch it. I want to see if it’ll rub off on me.
Burning . . .
“You’re standing too close to the artwork, sir,” someone says right behind my shoulder. “Do you mind stepping back, please?”
When I do, I bump directly into the person who said it. It’s one of the security guards, a Black man in a crisp suit, standing
at attention. His eyes never leave mine, but I see her.
“Am I in trouble?” I ask.
“The day’s young.”
“You’ll have to catch me.”
I bolt. Leave Lilith behind. I’ll play hard to get. Let’s see if she can catch me.
I hear footsteps just behind me, so I pick up the pace. I’m running now.
Laughing.
“Slow down,” someone shouts. Is it her? “No running!”
There’s no stopping me now.
I duck into another room, racing into another. I glance over my shoulder to see if she’s still following, but I can’t make
her out. She’s not there. Or is she? Where? Who?
Jordan wants us to catch him. That shouldn’t be hard. His black light bleeds across the halls, the floor, the ceiling, spreading
out from the very center of himself.
He is a work of art himself, more vibrant than the portraits adorning these walls. He has his own oil spill hues of purple, green, and blue. The darkest colors. The coldest light.
We want to hang him up on the gallery wall. Let these people marvel at him.
Bear witness.
All these artists from over the centuries have spent their lives struggling to exorcise the images within. Their own demons.
The voices cluttering their mind, whispering.
Who used their own skin as a canvas? What if your body was the frame? Within it, your flesh? What if the demon within was
your work of art? Who would hang us up?
Who would see?
We’re running after him, pushing past all the people. Nobody stops us. We’re chasing after each other through a field of people,
their limbs bristling as we run by.
“Hey! Slow down! No running!”
He’s laughing. Listen to him, the giddiness of this man. There’s such an energy to him, racing like this, always on the move,
always on the go, never stopping long enough to let the world pull him down. Gravity does not own him. He wants to ascend.
To fly.
We’re running, too, passing from person to person to person, man to woman to child to adult, going faster, faster, keeping up with him, getting ahead of him, slowing down, then letting him take the lead again, all with a dizzy electricity.
Look at us go, look at us run.
And then—Jordan halts. The peal of his shoes skidding against the floor is so shrill, it echoes through the gallery.
Jordan has stopped before another painting, taking it in. His chest heaves, out of breath from all the running. We want to
swim laps in his lungs, caught in the flow of his hyperventilating, in and out, in and out, back and forth, back and forth.
What’s so special about this particular portrait that it’s caused him to stop? What’s caught his attention so wholly? The
colors call to him. So let’s have a look. It looks—feels—familiar. The canvas is a mottled white, bruised with layers of paint. Filling the frame is a hand, fingers to the ground, white as well with blackened contours, almost like a glove.
Overlaid across the hand itself is the cerulean outline of a wraithlike face. Blue eyes settle overtop the wrist. There’s
no other features, but the fingers below take on the impression of teeth. A skeletal grin. Something about the head and the
hand merging.
It’s a skull. The head possesses the hand, the two becoming one, inseparable.