A Puppet of Circumstance
After catching a few dreadful glimpses of the goings on in his tenth floor apartment, Luther took refuge in the building's elevator. He stood against its rear wall, rigid and atremble, pinned there in a timeless freeze, as though this enclosure were the only conceivable place of safety. Its up and down journeys signified transition, and his mind proposed the possibility that he hadn't taken the fateful steps to his apartment door. The discovery still awaited him, and perhaps wasn't real if he hadn't yet beheld the images. The elevator hum was telling him seductively: "not yet." He also didn't have to make the seemingly irrevocable decision to leave the building and acknowledge that the stable life he had possessed there was finished. Too much to let go of all at once. Luther looked down at his shoes. Somehow both of them had come untied. He squatted down and made the laces into bows successfully, as well as creating secure knots. He felt strangely proud that he remembered how to do this. An important life skill held onto through thick and thin. He thought of Pinocchio. Possibly Luther too was inanimate, a puppet of circumstance that had not been granted the gift of life. Hard all the way down, barely used to deep suffering. His responses to what was happening were just rough, wooden simulations. He rapped his fist against his face, imagining his cheek was a log, giving off the right sound. He just had to laugh, and did so mechanically.
Torin had often modelled for paintings of Biblical scenes. He had a face that evoked scripture: dark, plaintively lined, and open to visions. His friend Emmanuel, a capable artist, decided to use him for a painting entitled "Jesus and Judas Conferring." The two men sat at a table next to a bare wall, one speaking, the other listening. Torin modelled for both figures. It was hard to tell the two robed men apart. Each of their expressions had qualities that might be construed as tenderly Christlike, but in each there were also intimations of anxiety and disappointment.