Time Warp

Never before shared writing about traveling to the studio during the pandemic in a strange land during lockdown.

Today, I put on something that I put on every day. Six months on it is still not second nature, though yesterday, for the first time, I walked outside and thought… wait, I’m missing something. My mask.

Not many people are getting dressed, there’s a joke in my house, and indeed on the internet, which constitutes the world now, the outside having faded to an improbable thin and non-existent hologram, underfunded as it seems to be lacking the thousands of people who would normally crowd a city scape, that pants are not a thing anymore.

My sister works in visual effects, I know crowds are expensive, and I suppose this dystopic, paused, thirsty, weary, hoping, resigned, afraid city only pays for them on Saturdays, when Battersea park overflows with holograms out walking dogs and babies in the morning and girlfriends and toddlers in the afternoons.

It feels a surreal act to pack bags, like I’m going on a ski trip into the back country and I need all supplies: I don’t like to buy anything or touch anything when I’m outside of the house. I pull on my smashed once cute tennis shoes on with some clean jeans and a nice sweater no one will ever see. I wear a cute sweater because I can’t be bothered to brush my hair, pluck my eyebrows, or do anything that even remotely resembles make up. Now that people only exist on the internet and in their silent, shuttered cupboards of homes, I have hours of productivity, previously lost to the blow out, the facial, the endless shaving, plucking, moisturizing and making up.

My perfume is English Turpentine, a strange rose amber pink in the glass, my make up is smudges of oil pastel and a fine spray of gesso in my grey hair, which hasn’t seen a hair dresser in seven months. My partner refers to me as Bun Head. This is an apt description, I suppose, as I wear my hair in a bun almost exclusively and continuously because it is so long that it reaches my ass for the first time in my life. I have Covid hair and a Covid belly and a Covid studio.

Bags packed and loaded into a shopping trolley, my newly liberated frame is still too out of shape to carry many or heavy things though I am slowly plodding to recovery, I have far fewer attacks than I used to, and they are less severe, and I need fewer meds to deal with them. It’s better enough that I have a pending notice for a bone biopsy in my email that I’m ignoring so I can focus on my work. Yes, that’s a dumb idea, but really, the hospital has never been my favorite place, having contracted a blood infection in one in India and spent most of the summer of 2018 in the emergency room in Aspen. Hospitals today are like hospitals before Joseph Lister washed his knives in Edinburgh, they are places you go to die or, baring that if you go for any other reason they are a place to get sick in. Hospitals today are places you don’t go into for fear you will not come out again.

I say goodbye to my family every day like I might not see them again, because they look so concerned when I go, and the world outside always seems like a construct. There are new ads up, “Act like you have it.” This is the ad campaign we should have had in the US back in March last year. I’m glad they are being strict, and I still go out. How can I justify this behavior? Because I’m in love? Because I need to paint? Do I need to paint more than I need to live? Is my work essential? It feels like it is, because it is about now, but perhaps that is the most obscenely narcissistic thing I’ve ever felt. I feel a bit like I should document this just in case it kills me. And we all know in my family that if I get it it won’t be good. I was robust not that long ago. The one who could eat street food in Chenai, the one who could paddle down the Meekong with kids, ride a motorcycle with a bunch of people on the back, now, four years of meds and neurasthenic responses to phantom threats to my body have turned me into a husk who moves slowly, powered soley by will and the oasis that is the miraculous studio I have managed to procure in London.

I drag the trolly through the mostly deserted streets of Clapham Junction to the trains. Tom is afraid every time we get on them that we are going to get arrested. I keep telling him they are looking out for partying teenagers, like the rave that they broke up last night with 300 people at it. I look at a sign that says “Do your bit, stay home.” And the train comes squealing down the track to platform 11.

I have my enormous down mountaineering coat on on top of the sweater, shawl, wrap, gloves, hat… I dress as warmly as I did for -20 in Aspen here in London because a) its damp and b) I can’t withstand the cold like I used to. When I get cold, I get symptomatic. If I keep symptoms at bay, I can work. And work. I’ve been in bed already for three years. I don’t mind being alone, wearing an N-95 mask and not making eye contact with anyone. I just can’t stay in my house for an additional three years.

The train is empty.

The automated plummy English voice tells us that this train is for Strawberry Hill and to mind the gap. The doors beep. I get on and sit down. I am the only person in this ten carriage car.

There is something, I think, about this train. I have decided that I get on it because it is the train that goes to the place where the atmosphere between now and then and before and after is muddled and thin. The train pulls out, I listen to Kishi Bashi as the empty streets and chimney pots flash by. The farther we go the more of the city I see from the elevated train and the more empty and still it looks. The only people on the platforms as we pull up along the way are people who work for the South Western Railway. Most of the time, there are no people. We stop at Wimbeldon. The voice tells us kindly that we are at Wimbeldon. The doors beep. Nothing happens. The train leaves again.

Further and further we go toward the belly button of the universe, which resides in Hampton Wick. The closer we get the more I can feel the pull, like a tractor beam from Star Wars, sucking me toward inevitability. I don’t have to say “no” to anybody, because nobody is asking to do anything. People are, apparently, doing things, and there are, apparently people, but they know that Tom and I don’t feel comfortable doing things, so no one asks and everything begins fading away until there is only the painting the research the conversation the sanctuary, and me. My children exist, my partner exists, but in a somewhat theoretical way, I see them when I return, wrung out like a straining cloth left over a dowel to dry. A little smelly, a little rumpled, a little bit stained but still functional. They forgive me. They know at some point I’ll be kicked out of this black hole, I’ll lay on the floor for a few days feeling bereft, and then we will find our way to Richmond Park because all the museums are shut, and we will find our way to each other. My family is uniquely understanding, maybe because we’ve sold everything we owned and rolled the dice on this move. I don’t feel pressure from that, I feel freedom.

We land at Kingston, the train is now a spaceship traveling through the warped tunnel of time, the doors ding, no one gets on. The train leaves again. I pull on my gear in the empty carriage. I could have a dance party, I could swim through the cars in a bikini. I don’t touch anything except the windows with gloves to open them (it’s airborn) and I don’t play on the train.

I catch sight of him the first time, though I’ve been feeling him since I laid in bed this morning. I catch sight of him as we cross the river Thames just after Kingston. The sun comes from the left, steep, low, and lemon blue. The bridge I can see is from King Henry’s time, It’s cart horse width, with narrow arches reaching bricky fingers deep into the sitly water. I am catapulted into his sphere with that glance.

The doors beep, the doors open, and I alight on the icy platform. Twice it has been snowing when I’ve got here, though they say it hasn’t snowed in London in years. Is that because I’m making a panting that’s talking to a painting that’s being made in 1842 that is of a snowstorm or is it because I brought the snow with me from Colorado or is it because it’s cold again right now?

I walk across the ice encrusted platform and down the wet and empty stairs. I duitifully beep out of the open station.

I walk across the drop off point, Priya’s looks open, there are three holograms standing outside waiting to buy or collect packages. I pull my trolly the 55 steps to my door at #55 High St. It is calamitous, I can hear it through the tunnel: the paintings, the sea, and Turner, banging on the doors.