In Plato’s Cave No. 1
BY REBECCA BERNARD
My wife amputates human feet, three to four a week. A grim business, though a person can get used to anything. Chop chop, she says to me over pasta, over linguine alfredo or penne alla vodka. She slurps the sauce, always extra sauce, and I picture the population of human beings she’s deforested that week. Stumps, I mean. All of them.
It’s because they lose their sense of touch. Certain illnesses can make you lose sensation and give it long enough and you end up at my wife’s clinic. Your standard lack of access to preventative care and poverty, diabetes most often the culprit. And my wife’s the last line of defense.
My wife is a doctor, a podiatric surgeon, and I’m a lecturer in art history. We’re successful women who own cashmere turtlenecks and drink Beaujolais and talk about surrogacy because neither one of us wants to grow another person inside of us, at least not for a full nine months.
How many people does it take to make a baby? My wife jokes, pesto greening her lips. Let’s count—Your egg, a stranger’s sperm, a borrowed womb, and all the bigwigs of Big Sugar sustaining my practice.
My wife laughs, but I don’t find it funny. I like to believe the woman I fell for would not have either.
I do the dishes while she turns in early, exhausted from all that cleaving. My hands disappear in the soapy water, then resurface. I work until the kitchen is immaculate, the way we like it. A room so clean it makes an argument that we might not even exist.
Finished, I stand in the living room, gazing at the empty suburban street. I’m inside, but I see the outside before me—all that separates us a thin line of glass.
Lately, I wonder what’s keeping me here. Meaning, how possible would it be to find myself there instead?
Peering in, aware of what I’ve lost, yet detethered.
From the other room, I hear my wife snoring. I turn off the light and feel my way to bed.
#
Twice a week in a darkened theater I project slides of famous paintings and discuss them with a sea of undergraduates. Lately, I’m drawn to portrayals of parts. Like Bruce Moore’s chicken feet or Salvador Dali’s nose.
The first Tuesday in September, I project Vasily Dmitrievich Polenov’s Right hand, keeping the staff.
I continue the conversation where we left off.
And what do we get in isolation? I ask the collection of heads before me. What does it mean to take a piece and make it the whole?
The students raise their hands. Invent answers because that’s all we’re ever doing, really.
It provides focus, says one. It changes our perspective, adds another. It teaches us to really see, says a third.
As I lecture, I tap the laser pointer against my palm, then highlight the uneven edge of Polenov’s severed hand. Yes, I say. But what exactly do you mean?
The third student hesitates then speaks into the dark void of the theater. Their voice not disembodied but firm.
The hand alone makes us remember that we have them. It reminds us we’re a collection of pieces put together. The hand lets us know ourselves as if we’d forgotten ourselves.
Wonderful, I respond. I click to the next slide, The Red Model by René Magritte. A pair of boots becoming feet. The light yellowish and sickly. What’s beneath revealed.
And what do you see here? I ask the darkness.
Wait long enough, and an answer will arrive.
#
Mornings, lately, I make a point to ground myself so I know where I am. Head, toes, shoulders, and knees. I try to touch each edge to be sure of my limits. Ear lobe check, big toe check, hip bone, further buried in flesh, but there. I’m sure of it.
My wife usually wakes before me, but on occasion she witnesses my routine. Where’s Stella? she says to me, like I’m the baby. Then a kiss on the forehead. And off to the clinic she goes.
My name, of course, another way I know I’m here. Silly how much a name might account for permanence. Without my name on her lips, would I know that I belong?
Some days I fantasize about what it’d be like to lose perception. Proprioception to be more precise. The ability to know where my body is in relation to the world in which I live. Without this sense, a person’s liable to fall over at any moment, only their vision tethering them to earth.
A recurring daydream that I’ll close my eyes and transport to a sitcom’s version of heaven (or hell). All empty white space and perilous falls and echo.
Though not as common as Alzheimer’s, my wife tells me this loss can happen. Here one day, aboard an ocean liner the next. How I imagine it at least.
That I’ll fall asleep beside her, and in the morning, I’ll wake up to nothingness, adrift. Middle of the gray Atlantic Ocean and no way to tell how close or far her body is. No way to tell if she and I are still together, if I’m intact. If she still loves me. If we exist.
If I do.
#
Here’s how we met. My wife in her fourth year of med school, and me working as an art handler—heavy, bodily work. Unpacking and repacking paintings. Nailing, hammering walls and crates.
We met at a gallery show in front of a painting of an owl with the body of a man. The man’s body naked and somehow shy. How he turned in on himself, desperate to hide with nowhere to go. My future wife put her arm around my shoulder, then recoiled. I thought you were someone else, she said to me. Later, I learned this was her move.
By the end of the night we were all lips. Against the white wall outside the bathroom. Against the brick façade in moonlight.
I remember thinking I could swallow her if I tried, but that I wouldn’t want to. Enough to be attached intimately. Tongue to tongue. Lady and the Tramp and their strand of spaghetti.
Back then, I longed to lose myself—in another person, in a painting. Now, I am not sure this is even possible. And if I lost myself, where would that mean I have gone? The I inside. Stella. Me.
And who’s to say if we split, she wouldn’t become phantom? My lips forever reaching for what once was. Still could be. Is not.
#
Thursday, I show the students, Théodore Géricault’s Study of feet and hands. I worry that they’ll tire of my theme, but I press onwards. Ask them what they see.
What happened to the rest of the bodies, says one voice. Was this a still life painted in a morgue?
I explain the parts were modelled on a living man, a living woman. Imagination creating the breaks.
Erotic, says one student. Lonely, says another. Can it be both? wonders a third. Was this on the syllabus? questions a fourth.
I wait for them to request the Mona Lisa, The Scream, but they stare passively at our dismembered selves. A representation at least.
What’s next? they ask, and I click. Reveal a photo of a sculpture. Two massive feet taking up the entire room, legs cut off by the crumbling ceiling through which they appear to have descended. Ergo Erectus by Mario Mankey; I listen to the intake of breath.
The toenails large and perfect. The beauty and foundation of our contact with earth made visceral, grotesque, extraordinary.
Where’s the body? asks a familiar voice. What does it mean if the body doesn’t exist? If this is everything?
Like if he didn’t sculpt the rest? another student’s voice chimes in.
Doesn’t it only hold power because we know there should be more? says the first student. Because of what’s missing?
The darkness pregnant as they wait for my response. Once finding an answer was easy, but lately.
Professor? the voices shy, seeking.
Although my eyes are closed, I sense exactly where I am.
Mankey forces us to imagine what isn’t there. What never was. He tricks us into believing the sculpture is something that it’s not. All the gravitas of the implied body that we ourselves will into being. The whole thing an illusion to add meaning to what’s there.
The room silent but for their breathing, the projector’s incubator hum.
Or that’s a question of perspective, no? The student’s voice silver in the absence of light.
Perception? I repeat.
The student hesitates. Maybe all he cared about was the feet. Can’t it be what we can see and nothing more?
Can it? I wonder. And then aloud, But what is it you think you see?
#
The next day, I go for a jog. All my parts working to keep me upright, and I thank them one by one.
Hamstrings, depth perception, lungs.
My wife’s friend, a pulmonologist, once told me about the number of toothpicks inadvertently inhaled, floating in lungs across the world. Her work to extract the little slivers of wood, like a videogame. Although it’s real life.
After my shower, I stand dripping before the mirror. Breasts and pubic hair, knee pits and calves. I press my palm against my stomach, empty but not really. Filled with blood like everything else.
I think about the paintings, the sculptures, the naked feet and toes. Always naked. Or often naked. The best way to illustrate our true selves. Clothing only protection or disguise.
Before the mirror, I see myself in pieces despite my uninterrupted flesh. The eye prone to seeking edges, close-ups.
Seven years ago, when my wife first started her practice, she’d confessed to me a worry. That the textbooks warned that patients in rare circumstances would seek out amputations that were medically unnecessary. She hadn’t met anyone like this, nor had her teachers or her fellow residents, but they existed. Persons who felt incomplete intact, the opposite of the rest of us.
Eerie, I remember thinking. Though to be fair, how unsettling to be assured you’re whole and believe, innately, that this is the problem.
A part of yourself you’d like to lose. That you think you’d be happier without.
#
At dinner that evening, I pick a fight. My wife’s cheeks already pinked with merlot, raised fork gesticulating a particularly tricky operation.
I wait until her mouth is full to interrupt, my own face warm and self-righteous. These are real people you’re describing—you know that? Real people with full lives you don’t even try to imagine!
My wife pauses, slurps the dangling linguine noodle into her mouth. Lips red with marinara, she raises one eyebrow at a time, meaning, Stella? But she only thinks my name, she doesn’t say it aloud.
I hold the table for support. It’s true! You talk about your patients like they’re objects. Parts even! But they’re human beings. Full, complete—
You think I don’t know that? My wife sighs. Twines another noodle, then changes her mind and puts down her fork.
She leans towards me just short of touching. I see into their faces, Stella, she says. It’s me who squeezes their shoulders when I explain to them it’s the only way.
She presses two fingers against her chest. I put my arm around them. I’m the one who holds them and sits in the room with them and wakes them up and faces them day after day. She wipes her mouth on her hand. Stella, I know them—
But you don’t know them, I reply.
Well. Neither do you.
Later my wife finds me in the living room, sitting in the dark. A baby, are you ready for a baby? Is that what you want?
Outside the window, a stranger walks by, torso briefly visible in the streetlight.
Will adding another person make us complete? Shouldn’t we already have everything we need? I ask her.
Here, maybe, she taps my lips, my hips, my nose, the leather sofa, and the redwood bookcase. But here? She taps my forehead. Next, my heart.
I lean forward to kiss her because it’s been too long. How I crave this conjoining, even now. Plato’s halves, a seashell. A working locket. Twin kidneys. That our coming together once signaled to me a whole, and how much we both might need that.
But my wife pulls herself away. I’m tired, she tells me. All day I have to hold it together, pretend it’s not awful. Of all people, Stella, I thought you knew me. I reach for her again, but she’s beyond my grasp.
I wait for the stranger to walk past our window, but they don’t. Their journey not a loop, I suppose, but an arrow.
In the pale light of the picture window, I stand on my right leg and then my left—the presence of one what allows me to balance the other’s absence. The shadow I cast on the hardwood not mine, but of course it is.
Physically, at least, I know exactly where I am.
#
A week passes, then two. I exhaust my archive of paintings of parts and spend my free time at the university library researching others. Leonardo da Vinci’s Study of Hands. Wassily Kandinsky’s Four Parts. Jim Warren’s Body Parts.
My wife becomes busier and busier at work, her fellow podiatrist on maternity leave, and my wife’s reputation for clean cuts and kindness preceding her, and the hours grow longer and the days shorter. How often she misses dinner, arriving home with takeout from Olive Garden, from Fazoli’s, round, messy meals without edges. A shower and off to bed, then awake before I’m aware of the light streaming past our blinds. Cohabitating like shadows, each missing the other on accident or as intended, I can’t be sure. The absence of her cauterizing wit palpable even if I can’t admit it.
When she’s asleep I drink wine or whiskey, and I practice touching my nose with finger extended. How often I make contact, and how often I miss and if it means anything at all. I read that an overdose of Vitamin B6 can lead to a loss of proprioception, and I watch my diet carefully, then overindulge in sashimi just to see.
I inventory our life. My frozen eggs ready to matriculate to a rented womb. Careers lively enough. Mine and hers. Our home halfway paid for. The anti-aging creams we own robust.
And yet, the tendrils of rot, do they exist? Or only if I’m looking. Worse, have I made it so? A person can get used to anything, but in acclimation might we lose our ability to see.
#
At the beginning of November, the students make a request. Show us the insides! Give us organs! Enough of this surface exterior. Go deep or go home!
Warily, I comply. Kit Paulson’s Lungs. Gorgeous spiders of glass breathing out from a red stem. Sam Francis’ Spleen (Yellow) with its lemony mass surrounding a carved white middle. Federico Carbajal’s Anatomical No-Body Heart. All bent wire and twisted metal, a sinewy manifestation of our centers.
Far afield, I’ll admit, from our art survey syllabus, but the students seem enthused. Mostly.
What if we Frankensteined all the works together? suggests one student.
A compilation of the parts to form a body! shouts another.
A perfect being. A group show! Says a third.
I’m great at photoshop, says a fourth.
Where are the non-male artists? cries a fifth.
I listen to the students, hear their desire for wholeness, like most of us. We can survive the loss of a foot, but what about a middle? A spleen, sure. A lung even. A kidney, a gallbladder. But not everything extricable from the whole. Not everything meant to be—
I’m tired of the body, says a familiar voice. Can you show us a soul?
A soul? I think, but I don’t say the word aloud. I run through my remaining slides. Aren’t they all a kind of soul? An animating presence, a reason for ongoing life. Can it even be unearthed, shown on its own?
To hell with the soul, give us something phantom, says one.
Give us the gap, shouts another. We want to see what’s no longer there.
A lacuna? I wonder as I click and click. A palimpsest? Something there and not, all at once? I could show them a Picasso, all the pieces rearranged to allow them to make sense. But should I? The symbolism so sticky I can no longer feel my way out.
All this emphasis on what’s knowable, clearly discernible pieces, but why should we be so sure?
I offer them a rectangle of acrylic and charcoal. In Plato’s Cave No. 1 by Robert Motherwell. An ache in grayscale. No absolute shapes beyond the frame, but rife with ones they might decide exist.
The work that got me started on this path. Myself a teenager wandering the National Gallery of Art, stopped in my tracks. Was it a feeling or more than? To know where I was if ever briefly, as I did there on the museum steps, frozen. The canvas nearly crossing two floors. A great weeping rectangle, abstract yet you might find yourself inside it. The square in the center like the sorrowful eye of a mare, dripping. None of it anything unless we make it so. Here I was, at last.
At last.
I wait for the students’ awe, but I’m given silence.
Is this everything? says a quiet voice.
I hold the lectern for support. Then, I let go. And if it is? I ask.
I thought this was art history 101, says one.
I like it, says another.
I’m haunted, whispers a third.
Next! shouts a fourth.
I click to the following slide. Patient, I ask them what it is they see.
#
So it happens, the third Tuesday of my thirty-seventh year, a cool November day. After class I return home, almost. I make it as far as the driveway before I’m down in the leaves. On my back, gravity spilling me, and my legs useless, my knowledge of the familiar space not helping me, and I don’t help myself either. I keep my eyes closed so I could be anywhere, though I know I’m not.
After a time, rain begins. The drops wide and decadent. I open my mouth, and they enter. The asphalt sighs its release, and my body briefly all sensation. The muted drips on the bed of bright leaves. The hard ground beneath me. The lightest wind raising the down of my forearms. A coppery flavor in my mouth, rich and sauce-like. I don’t cry because I have no reason to—I’m not in pain. No one walks by or if they do, I don’t notice.
Gradually, the rain increases and before long, I’m soaked through.
My wife finds me. Of course she does. Kneels down beside me and I know she’s there before her hand touches my forehead. Before her mouth finds mine. She doesn’t help me up but lies on top of me. Her full weight evening out my own. We’re not a perfect match, but who would expect us to be?
I don’t have to ask her if this was a hard day.
I know, she says.
And so do I.
We lose ourselves, but if we’re lucky, we get to come back.
