Bust Of Young Man In Monstera Leaves (2020)
“I move between my new, enclosed white walls as suspiciously as a foreigner might move through a new country—never mind that my skin is also dark, never mind that the metaphor has been reduced to my race.”
BY JODRE DATU
IMAGE BY ANNA BONDARENKO
On the seventh of January, my front door disappears. On the eighth, my windows.
I barely notice at first. I am cooped up in bed when it happens. A frequent skipper of classes—skipping once more.
I’m a biomed student, you should know. On the verge of academic probation. I am someone who doesn’t notice big things, even if they happen in my own home.
I’m the type to stay inside my dorm room—with my single bed, my single kitchen. The type to ignore loneliness and logistics even if they fester into hot pain or spill into low test scores, missed assignments, and mould.
But yes, the last of the milk goes. I put on my coat and go to my front door and see that there is a blankness instead. Like in a house about to be renovated, when a painting is taken down to reveal the white underneath—it’s clean. Almost shiny. It’s as if someone tore off the door and erased all evidence that it was ever there. I wander to the sole window in my kitchen and see that’s gone, too. Deleted.
In this way, I come to intimately know the word blank. Blank is different than empty because it suggests something should be there, that something was there, once. I move between my new, enclosed white walls as suspiciously as a foreigner might move through a new country—never mind that my skin is also dark, never mind that the metaphor has been reduced to my race. I stare at the new blankness at my door and feel it’s oddly familiar.
I go to call someone, but there are no bars. No service. No internet. Old iMessages between my mother and boyfriend are still there, though. Old conversations, inside jokes—the records of my life stare at me but seem like different universes that I can never slip back into.
Can you help me? I text someone.
Not Delivered. The words in red.
I laugh at first. I run my hands along the smooth blank wall and think this must be an elaborate joke. The upstairs neighbours, rowdy engineers I always hear partying on Thursday nights—they must be responsible. They must have gotten together and removed my door, subtracted my only entrance and exit in the name of fun.
Or I am responsible. Somehow.
I bang on the walls. Once, twice. Infinitely. Again and again.
On the other side of the door that’s not there, there’s a group of concerned students, I imagine. My RA, my classmates, gathering around the predicament and scratching their heads like it’s a riddle. How is there nothing when there was something yesterday? They’re probably calling faculty, or campus police, or construction workers. Burly men in hardhats drilling through the room. Or perhaps it’s a SWAT team—synchronously ramming a pillar, once, twice, through my now mystic cage. After, I’ll emerge towards reporters and press. Newly famous. The Boy Who Got Out.
But as I pound my fist feels frail, my wall spongy. It’s as though the room is absorbing my shock, deducting all its urgency. As in Newton’s Third Law, except violated—action and reaction dissolving into a million, untraceable pieces. My banging sounds barely louder than whispers. I grab a glass cup and throw it; it shatters without any of that sonic satisfaction. My wall remains stubbornly undamaged, no matter how hard I punch or kick or bang.
My philosophy professor says objects run through a cosmic stream of life and reality; my physics teacher says all matter vibrates no matter how still it appears.
My therapist says I need to open up more.
All these concepts fill my mind while convoluting and clarifying the main issues:
My front door has disappeared. So have my windows. There are no metaphors here, no sensible laws of physics. There is only time, space. Dead air.
Days pass, then a week. Other objects start to go. I begin to care less.
Take the microwave. You can eat things cold. It’s the earliest object to go. Disappearing the morning after the night I decide I have no solutions. I actually watch it happen: like a magic trick. It’s there, then it’s not. Its blank place on the counter reveals dust and shriveled rice that got swept under a long time ago; I take a paper towel to clean out what’s left behind. Then I move my succulent to this new blank space atop the counter. I add the microwave to what will become a long list of everything that used to belong to me.
Then my desk goes—and everything on it. The laptop, the phone. I don’t see them go, I only feel them. Like a change in air pressure on a plane. A pop, and they leave.
I don’t panic this time; I only shake a little, worrying that their absence makes all this disappearing official.
But the laptop, the phone; I learn to live without them. I learn to entertain myself by looking. I memorize the strange patterns around my room—on my ceiling, on my bedsheets. I sit in my chair and name every line and arc and triangle above, write stories in my head about the men and women I see riding these courageous shapes.
There is the square in the corner, a lover. A squiggly line in the centre, a snake. There is my family in the arcs near the edges and faces of people who I have yet to meet in the semicircles whirling above. There is my entire future in loops. Closed off, uncertain. I see silhouettes that might be kids (mine?). Land masses, holes, bodies of water. Places I have not visited gather above. I see dots that look like bits of fire coming out of a dragon’s mouth and shadows of fragments that look like they might spell goodbye or at least good.
I look up again. I see myself, my face. I see everything I haven’t said or done. Wasn’t I supposed to be this person? That man? Wasn’t I meant to leave this room one day? Become someone? Apparently not. Maybe I was always supposed to end up here. I see how the blank spaces between the markings of the ceiling expand with each moment and spread like a ghost’s fire. Even the etchings are starting to go. Even the stains are becoming replaced with white.
I look at my own skin. Maybe this will go next. Maybe my body will leave unequally—not everything at once. The colour will be gone, then the skin, or pieces of bones and arms. One day it will all be smooth, no trace I was ever here. When the things around you start disappearing, regret comes less like a flash and more like a pulse. I learn to remember moments I haven’t even lived, to invent memories of a life I never had. I learn to stave off the end by thinking of the beginning — : happy times, from when I was a kid. I must have lost these too.
I stand. When there’s nothing left to do, I gather all the mugs left in my house and arrange them in a line, a glass army.
Then I start filling them up with water. I’m afraid that the sink will disappear one day, and I will run out of water.
There is hunger instead. I forget if it’s three weeks or three months that a body can go without food. But, yes, around two and a half weeks, I remember. I am close to the answer.
I put on a sweater and set the chair in the middle of my hollowed-out home, light a cigarette to pass the time. Nearly everything else is gone. Shoes, posters, plants, the pile of laundry I never got around to.
There’s only my chair. My sweater.
It’s amazing how much you don’t need. How everything boils down to just warmth, and food, and blood.
I sit, drink my water, smoke what’s left. My clothes feel incredibly loose, and I feel incredibly indifferent.
This is how I see it. There is no reason, no main idea—just some cruel abnormality, or a glitch in the system. I’ve learned nothing. Only that I am so hungry. And that there are ways to be both hungry and happy, but it just depends on how you think about things and how good of a liar you think you are.
I am happy I think. At the centre of all this there is a core of happiness that I think belongs to me and not anyone else. I pray—for the first time in a long time. Please God, make me the next object to go. Make it quick. Make the objects in the mirror closer than they appear; make everything come in bright and fast, like the start of a forest fire or the middle of a crash. With the pen I found in the corner of the room, I write the note:
If you find this chair blank, feel free to take it.
Jodre Datu is a creative writer based in Guelph, Ontario. A graduate of Humber’s Professional Writing and Communications program, he is now pursuing his MA in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Gloucestershire.
Image: Anna Bondarenko, Bust Of Young Man In Monstera Leaves, gouache on gilded wooden panel, 2020.
Edited for publication by Anthony Kelly as part of the Creative Book Publishing Program.
The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by the Applied Research & Innovation.