hide and seek #2
Someone steps up behind me. They’re very close, whoever they are. I can sense them, that friction of proximity, the electrical
current of their person reaching into me.
I feel their breath across the back of my neck. It’s such a jolt. A wave of heat.
“They’ll kick you out, if you’re not careful.” It’s a woman’s voice.
“Let them.”
Footsteps shuffle behind me, heels clicking against the tile floor, until this woman I’ve never met stands by my side, admiring
the painting. She’s bound to be in her eighties, wearing a mink stole and a crisp jacket. A pearl necklace wraps tightly around
her throat.
“Nice digs,” I chide. “Vintage.”
“You love it,” she says without turning her head my way.
Her focus remains on the painting. Blue Head by Susan Rothenberg.
Lilith, using this woman, reads the artist’s statement mounted to the wall.
“I was searching for an image and all I had to find it with was my head and my hand . . . That’s what a painter is—a hand
and a head.”
“Is that how you feel when you’re inside someone?” I ask, nodding at the painting.
The woman considers this. The slightest hint of a grin plays across her face. “There are other artworks here that are more . . .
how to put this . . . applicable to possession.”
“That so? Show me.”
“Better keep up . . .”
The elderly woman lifts her hand and gently pats the man passing by with his wife and children. I try to spot the inflection
point, that passing of the demonic baton, there and gone, as Lilith drifts further and further away from me, one host after
another.
She’s gone. Just like that. I’m left behind, blocking the flow of foot traffic.
I have to find her. Sift through so many strangers.
That man up there. A purple satin tracksuit, with a tiger sewn across its back. Red velvet tennis shoes. Look at him go. He’s
picking up his pace, running now.
My turn.
I start running, ready to grab hold. Catch her—him?—before she can slip away.
But just like that, I see the man’s hand rise and take hold of the woman next to him and—shit, shit, Lilith’s gone, her advantage stretching ahead, the gap between us widening.
I have to catch up. Run faster. Faster. Before she gets away.
Fuck, I’m too late. She beat me.
Where did she go? She’s not going to expose herself just yet. And she’s definitely not going to make it easy on me. I have
to play along. See if I can pick her out from the crowd.
There. I think I’ve caught up to her.
That man. In the gray suit. He’s alone, standing before an oil painting of the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve (Expulsion from the Garden) by Roger Brown.
It’s got to be her. I can tell from the way he’s taking in the artwork. The sheer reverence of it all. “Friend of yours?”
I ask as I slide in next to him, nodding to the serpent.
“Excuse me?” This guy doesn’t get the joke.
Okay, so maybe it’s not Lilith. “Sorry,” I say. “Thought you were someone else . . .”
Where the hell is she?
I’ve navigated half of the contemporary art wing. Maybe she made her way to another corner of the museum. Just as I’m about
to give up, throw in the towel . . .
“Nice try,” someone says behind us.
I turn to find a teen in overalls and a shaved head. She taps the shoulder of a young man holding hands with another. “You’ll
have to keep up with us better than that,” he says.
The current passes through their hands. Even if I can’t see it, I notice the shift from one person to the next. “Should we
give you a head start?”
That man taps the elbow of a woman on her way past. She doesn’t say a word, simply winking over her shoulder as she abandons
the gallery. On to the next chamber.
This is the work we wish to share. We stand before a sculpture. A tangled knot of pottery sits on a steel armature. The flow
of the ceramic tendrils suggests something almost human might be immersed beneath the twine of spindling tubes, but if there
is, they are surely suffocated. The color of the glazed pottery is such a vibrant red, it turns purple.
Raw meat. A man. The sinew glistens under the spotlights, as if it were wet. The tendrils are held together by wire, threatening
to come undone and spill across our feet.
Red Rover by Annabeth Rosen.
“Is this what it feels like?”
“Getting warmer.”
Jordan looks to us. A stillness takes over his body. A calmness.
“What is it? Why are you looking at us like that?”
“Can I say the last twelve hours have been the most fun I’ve had in . . . well, a while?”
Us as well. Can we tell him that?
There it is.
The itch.
The burn begins. We slip away, drifting into a young man walking by. We slip from him to another, and another, and another, so quickly, so fluidly, until we are circling Jordan.
“Where are we going?”
“To see more.”
“Lead the way.”
“Try and keep up.” We never stay in one host long enough to settle. Our voice becomes several. We blend—blur—from host to
host, so Jordan has to catch up.
Lilith doesn’t stay in a particular host for long. Always moving. Drifting. She never settles, connected by this electrical
current, swimming upstream through the crowd.
I must’ve had a conversation with a dozen different people, flowing from countless mouths. I’m wandering the halls, chamber
after chamber, cavities of the same infernal heart, while Lilith leads the way, hopping from one host to the next, never settling.
“Not bad as first dates go,” I say.
“Is that what this is?” the man next to us asks.
“Would you disagree?”
“No,” the woman behind us whispers. “It’s just nice to hear you say it.”
“No pressure on our second date, though . . .”
“Oh—do you think we’re going on a second date?” the woman two steps ahead of us asks. “Pretty presumptuous of you, don’t you
think? You haven’t even asked . . .”
“Would you? Round two?”
“We’ll think about it.” Who says it remains unclear. I hear the voice, but they’re gone.
“So what you’re saying is I need to work for it.”
Nobody answers me.
“Are you playing hard to get?”
I’m talking to myself. I stop and take in the crowd. The flow of people continues to ebb by, while I’m standing in place.
No one else is with me.
“. . . Lilith?”
Where did she go?
We lose sight of Jordan. We have lost ourselves.
There.
A ceramic pot from Mesopotamia located in the ancient artifacts wing. The pottery has cracked. Fissures branch over its surface,
threatening to shatter.
It is us. Me. An image etched across the ceramic vessel’s surface. My very own likeness, tendrilled, radiating like a black
sun. An urn sealed behind glass.
I have never seen myself painted before. Just look at me. Look.
“What is it?” Jordan asks, stepping up behind us, surprising us. He found us without needing to seek me out, playing our little
game of hide-and-seek.
“Me,” I say, my voice elsewhere. So faint. But mine.
“You’re stunning,” he says.
“Touch it.”
“Sorry?”
“The vase. Touch it. See what it feels like.” The sense of centuries, the dust of time, crumbling under his fingers.
Jordan scoffs. “There are rules against that sort of thing . . .”
“Are you afraid?”
Jordan must sense the dare. “That’d get me kicked out . . . Maybe even arrested.”
“Have you ever just wanted to do something really, really bad, Jordan? Something naughty?”
“All the time.”
“What’s stopping you?” We draw near and whisper, “There’s nothing, no line you can’t cross, no rule you can’t snap in half,
no voice telling you no. There’s no angel on your shoulder, Jordan. This is just you and me. Nothing else matters. Nothing
at all.”
He takes this in, then glances back at the vase. I watch as his hand slowly rises from his side, mere inches away from the vase. There is a glass barrier surrounding the edge of the pedestal, but there’s enough space to reach in and touch the ceramic artifact.
Jordan’s light seethes the second he does it. Burns so bright, I can’t help but wince once the vase crumbles under his touch,
a fresh fracture for all to see.
What a work of art he is.