There’s a message out tonight/ nobody’s looking at the sky
A bruise on my grandmother’s arm which needs documenting. She calls me up in the middle of the day to tell me. “It’s spreading,” she says, “and I think we should get a picture of it.” For what purpose, I have no idea. But I do this stoically, documenting her arm where she has had blood drawn. Someone has inserted the needle wrong and it looks infected. She has drawn a perimeter around the bruise on the first day, and now the purple mass of infected skin is spreading out from its center, surpassing the marks she has made around the edges. Once I have captured the pictures, she tells me that I can share them with family and friends. I imagine showing by a friend’s house and producing the photographs of my grandmother’s arm. “Hey, check this out,” I would tell them, “look at all of the black and blue.” What she is thinking, I do not know.

In the living room I sit down, seeing the room for what seems like the first time. It’s kind of a weird room, with a definite nautical theme: a mirror that looks like the window of a ship, and various other accoutrements, which include pictures of authoritative-looking captains and bizarre wooden statues of similar things. Among all of that are family pictures on various shelves around the room. Looking straight before me, I discover what appears to be an item I’ve never noticed before. Down on one of the shelves is one of those cliché collage-type pictures you give to someone as a gift. It’s sort of a cut and paste representation of various family members from over the years, at barbeques and other functions which no one really wanted to attend. Most of the pictures are careful cutouts of heads, incongruously pasted in there, any old way. And within the tornado of imagery, dead in its center, is a picture of me. It’s a carefully cut head, pasted in among the many smiling heads and torsos of the collage. But the weird thing is, I appear to be crying. What the hell is this? I wonder. On further inspection, I realize these are not tears but the bleed marks of a magic marker unsuccessfully attempting to cover up the redeye in the shot. A pool of black tears stream from my eyes, and are actually running down onto some of the other pictures below. “Are you kidding me?” I ask my grandmother. “What kind of picture is this?” She has no idea what I’m talking about, has never noticed the black tears before. I am incredulous at the sight of this. “Someone actually gave this to you?” I ask her. I cannot believe. It’s totally outrageous. I’ve never seen a more horrifying picture in my life. As a child I had professional pictures taken, opting out after the third grade, when I had a bloody nose which produced a bloody booger to be immortalized in that moment for all time on my parents’ mantle. And here, now: this is the end result of that subsequent refusal of documentation, black tears. How the forces seem to conspire against you.

Out of doors and shaking my head at the picture. What the hell is wrong with people, I wonder, gnashing my teeth at the whole world. And what is up with this climate? I find myself simultaneously thinking. One day tropical storms and the next day cold. I would not be surprised, actually, by a burbling volcanic eruption that came from the great beyond. Or a flood. Or basically, any sudden onset of death and destruction. Do not ask me why. It will be nothing like that at all, however, as Joan Didion points out in The Year of Magical Thinking. It will be more mundane than you could ever imagine, out of nowhere. It will come in the back of a bus, in transit to nowhere in particular. Or sitting in the armchair while you ruminate on some obscure errand you have to run. Or somewhere else entirely. I had better think of something else, I realize, before I get carried away. What am I even doing here, I wonder? And then I remember: I came to document a bruise.