Three Moments of an Explosion (38 page)

For many meters above that, the image is almost clear, the primed space interrupted by only a few occasional sweeping ribbon-thin black lines, silver points and slivers. Until at the painting’s uppermost left corner, we see a dense collection of interwoven green strokes—short and thin—and then thicker lines in brown.

Pick a work on which to base your own. This original you will henceforth know as the
cadaver
.

As we enter the second phase of our movement, breakaway grouplets now derive their cutworks on non-representational originals by, for example, Riley, Matta, Gechtoff. We abjure such faux-radical deviations. Our art is
rigorously
representational or it is nothing.

Of course we by no means insist on derivation from photorealist work. We do, however, demand that you pick for your provocation a painting in which representation outweighs abstraction.

Stand before your cadaver. Tap your temnic intuition.

Les Parapluies
is an image of pedestrians in a rainy Paris street.

It is a refraction of Renoir’s 1881–6 picture of the same name, a section cut backward through that work.

The flat edge of the slice starts a few centimeters above, and perfectly parallel to, the base of the original, and goes back into the picture. The lines, the cell-like shapes are the faces of perfectly split clothes, umbrellas, hands, and bodies.

The image from the plane extends upwards away from the viewer, through dresses, trousers, bones, the wooden hoop of a child, the heads of the crowd, up to where the jauntiest umbrellas are held. At its far edge, it juts into the leaves of a tree.

Temno-: To slice.

Extend a conceptual slice through your chosen scene. It may continue into the picture at any angle on any axis, so long as it intersects both the left and right vertical edges of the hanged cadaver. It is traditional to use the past tense “hanged,” rather than “hung,” for works of art considered in this context.

Your task is to depict a cross section of your cadaver.

Behind the front few subjects of Renoir’s picture, shapes in the slicework imply new information. They hint at secrets. A tiny daub of free-floating dark brown is a button flying from a straining raincoat. This pale hair-thin line pressed against a red shape like a giant cell? A man carries a letter not in a pocket but beneath his shirt, next to his skin.

This is representation of the most revelatory kind. This is a radical aesthetic democracy. Our works equalize all matter within the cadaver’s field.

And they disclose agents present
but previously hidden
. Those behind other things, invisible in the originary work, we section with cool ruthlessness. To lay their innards, their substance, bare.

So long as there is even the smallest deviation from planar sections previously depicted, there is no dishonor in basing a cut on an image already vivisected. It has been such repetition that has vindicated our work as remote viewing.

Because all such revisiting works, including those painted of the same cadaver but in ignorance of each other, agree on
all
elements of a scene. It was when the third slicework depicted a tiny black organic intricacy behind the rearmost wooden leg, in a place previously invisible in the cadaver, that observers agreed that there had been a beetle on the kitchen floor, when Van Gogh painted
Van Gogh’s Chair
in 1889.

In slice-paintings of Victorian still lifes we see the blood-flesh-and-bone circles of children crouching behind doors. With the thin silver lines of cross-sectioned steel hiding in the dark of wood, what have for decades looked like canes are revealed as sword-sticks. Thefts have been revealed—the bright colors of gems in briefcases. The gray-bound blood of great fish below boats.

But beyond this, what lies behind the transformation of temnic to temnomantic art are those few figures revealed in slice-images that are the shapes of flesh, integuments of meat on struts of bone, and yet of such shapes and tones, in such positions, that they should not exist. Hovering below the clouds in renditions of John Atkinson Grimshaw’s nightscapes, what are these glowing membranes and human-like slices of rib? What are these big blood-and-feather blotches to the meat’s sides?

These things move through our images. Only we can investigate what it is with which we share our galleries, and our world.

Amid the greens and browns at the top of
Les Parapluies,
a clot of colors evades decoding. There is something with veins and muscles in a wash of twisted hues.

There is something living but not animal, something watching us from the tree.

COVEHITHE

There were a few nights in Dunwich, where the owner of the B&B kept telling her guests they were lucky to have found a room. Walking Dunwich Beach, showing his daughter wintering geese through binoculars so heavy they made her laugh, the man was glad they were not in Southwold or Walberswick. They were not so hemmed in by visitors. Each evening they had fish and chips or pub grub. Each night after she had gone to bed he hacked into next door’s WiFi to check his messages and monitor the forums.

On Thursday night he woke her. It was not long after midnight.

“Come on, lovey,” he said. “Keep it down. Let’s not get anyone else up.”

“I hate you,” she said into her pillow.

“I know,” he said. “Come on. Don’t bring your phone.”

There was not much on the roads. Still, Dughan took them roundabout ways, through Blythborough, on the A145 towards Uggeshall, past stationary diggers where roads were being widened.

“Where are we going?” the girl asked, only once. She hunkered; she wouldn’t ask him to turn up the heating.

Wrentham was on the western rim of the security zone. It went north along the A12, south on the B1127 to Southwold. Within it, in daylight, fields were still worked, for animal feed, and the roads were mostly open, but those were, legally, indulgences not rights; the area was, in the absence of an official escort, no-go after dark. Exceptional laws applied in that little triangle, the coast a six-mile hypotenuse, its midpoint Covehithe.

Dughan stopped by a pub garden south of Wrentham. He opened the door for his daughter with his finger to his lips.

“Dad,” she said.

“Hush,” he said.

It was overcast and windy, shadows taking them and releasing them as Dughan found a way through undergrowth to the boundary ditch. They were both quiet as they crossed it. Holding their breath. Beyond, they walked eastward on the edges of the fields.

“Dad, seriously, you’re crazy.” He had a torch but did not turn it on. When the moon came out enough he stopped and took bearings.

“They’ve got guns,” she said.

“That’s why shhh.”

“What’ll they do if they catch us?”

“Feed us to wolves.”

“Har har.”

They went still at the sound of a helicopter. The beam passed by half a field ahead, so bright it looked solid.

The air smelt. They could hear echoes. Dughan avoided the hamlet where until recently locals had lived, which had been requisitioned, with only minor scandal. They could see lit windows. They came instead at Covehithe from the north.

He stopped her by the roofless ruin of the church, pointed, heard her gasp. She stared while moonlight got past the clouds to the holed and broken walls, onto a low newer church inside the nave of the old. He smiled. When eventually she was done looking they continued through the graveyard. There was nothing at all frightening about the graves.

This close to the waves the land felt, as the girl said, misbehavicious. A good word to make her feel better. In the leafless trees of this region were cold, random, and silent flares of light. Touch the soil, as Dughan did, and as his daughter did too at the sight of him, and it felt greasy, heavy, as if someone had poured cream onto loam.

“Which way are we going?”

“Careful, lovey,” he said. “The ground here …”

“How do you know it’s tonight?”

For a while he didn’t answer. “Oh,” he said. “Bits and pieces.” He looked over his shoulder the way they had come. “Ways and means.”

“What if they find out?” She pointed at the cottages. She rolled her eyes when he said nothing.

They continued on the road past a sign forbidding exactly this last short walk, on tarmac so old it was becoming landscape. Perspective was peculiar. The smell should have been sappy and muddy and of the sea.

“Look!” His daughter gasped. The road stopped abruptly, rag-edged, fell into nothing. He watched her inch forward. “It goes right off the cliff!”

“The sea’s taking it all back,” he said. “There used to be a lot more coast here. Careful.” But she had lain responsibly on her stomach at a certain proximity and put only her fingertips and eyes over the tarmac rim to look down its sheer crumble at the beach.

“Is it still going?” she said. Her voice was faint, she was dipping her mouth below road-level. “Being eaten?” Dughan shrugged. Waited till she scootched back and turned to him, shrugged again.

He told her they would know within two or three hours if anything was going to happen. He did not say it was only hints and whispers he had to go on, trawlings from bulletin boards. Two names he knew, erstwhile colleagues, both announcing they’d be near Ipswich next week and did any of the old crew want a drink? The latest codes were beyond him, but that query and the night’s sudden burst of encrypted chatter had been reasons enough to move.

He checked his watch and sat with her at the decomposing road-end. He was cross-legged, she with her chin on her knees, hugging them. She kept looking into the sea. The noise of it lulled them as if it were designed to. There was no light but the moon and those occasional sourceless mineral glows. Somewhere some insane bird, not a nightingale, was singing.

All their layers could not keep them warm. They were shaking hard when, after less than an hour, Dughan saw movement on the beach. He motioned for his daughter to stay still and looked through his binoculars at lights jouncing on the shingle. Three sets of headlamps stopped, overlaying each other, illuminating the sea and a strip of the shore.

“It’s them,” he said. “They’re setting up. They must’ve …” The girl could tell his excitement was not wholly enthusiasm. “They’ve … we’re on.”

He could make out nothing beyond the headlight gaze, and hear nothing but waves. He recced once more but they were not observed. This cliff-top was out of bounds and they, intruders, were alone. His daughter kept watching the water. Dughan wondered if she would complain or ask how long or anything, but she did not. Twenty minutes later, it was she who pointed, who first saw something in the sea.

There were no helicopters now. Nothing so noisy. No downcast beams to light up what was coming, breaking water, way off the coast. It was only moonlit. A tower. A steeple of girders. Streaming, and rising.

The girl stood. The metal was twisted. Off-true and angular like a skew-whiff crane, resisting collapse. It did not come steadily but lurched, hauling up and landward in huge jerks. After each a swaying hesitation; then another move higher, and closer.

The lights on the beach went out. Flame ignited at the tower’s tip. Sooty sepia guttering lit the shaft. The sea at its base spread flat and fell away from suddenly rising intricate blockness, black, angled and extrusioned. As if a quarried wedge of the seabed itself had come up to look.

The towerwork was on a platform. In the glow of the thing’s own flame they saw edificial flanks, the concrete and rust of them, the iron of the pylon barnacled, shaggy with benthic growth now lank gelatinous bunting.

It was coming at the Covehithe cliff. Under its stains and excrescences were more regular markings, stenciled warnings. Paint remnants: an encircled “H”.

Another step—because these were clumsy steps with which it came—and all the main mass was out of the water and raining brine. It waded. Each concrete cylinder leg a building or a smokestack wide. The two on one side came forward together, then those on the other. Pipes dangled from its roof-high underside, clots of it fell back into the sea. It wore steel containers, ruins of housing like a bad neighborhood, old hoists, lift-shafts emptying of black water.

A few wave-widths from the beach, it hesitated. It licked the air with a house-sized flame.

“P-36 ,” Dughan said. “Petrobras.”

One of the cars below turned its headlamps back on. The rig shied. Dughan hissed. But the lights quickly dipped and after a moment he said, “It’s probably OK now.”

The platform was at the level of their cliff-top. Now the girl understood its strange ungainliness. On each side, its supports merged at their base, into two horizontal struts, so it moved like a quadruped skiing. What must have been ten feet of water lapped at the struts like a puddle at a child’s shoes. The rig facelessly faced north and slide-stamped along the shoreline.

“Quick,” the man said. They took the cliff-edge path, a hedge to their right, the oil platform’s tower lurching beside them above its leaves.

“Went down 2001,” Dughan said. “Roncador field.”

“How many people died?”

“When it sank? No one.”

“Have you … is this the first … ?”

He took a moment to stop, to turn and meet her eye. They could hear the flame bursts now. Its straining metal. “I’ve never seen it before, lovey,” he said.

The path descended.

She had been too small when her father left to imagine stories of his exploits, to be proud or afraid. All she remembered were his returnings, an exhausted, careful man who lifted her onto his lap and kissed her with wary love, brought her toys and foreign sweets. When later she had asked him what he had done on those trips, his answers were so vague guilt had hushed her. She did not ask about his injuries.

The rig was slowing. The smell was stronger and the ground, the air juddered, not only in time to its huge steps. Dughan stopped at the last path-end trees. He and his daughter hugged the trunks and watched the oil rig sway in their direction. He held her hand. The girl watched him, too, but he showed no signs of angst, no flashback, no fear.