[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Katie Paine - Notes for a Body

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Katie Paine worked on Notes for a Body, a piece of auto fiction that considers the relationship between grief memory, the medicalised body and the mechanised, industrial and institutional processes we use to understand the world.

 

Katie Paine, 2022, A Spectral Congregation. Image courtesy of Jon Butt. 

Ancient Egyptians used the measuring system of cubits, which measured the length from elbow to fingertip, or divided a plane into the span of 7 consecutive palms.

If I close my eyes, I can conjure a vivid picture of her hands. The perfect crescent of her thumbnails, the prominent ridges of keratin running down to her cuticles. It was with those hands that she would peel off my surgical dressings, their thick marshmallow bandages hiding the blueberry bruises that dappled my thigh. From the grips of an anesthetised haze, I remember feeling her hands brushing my feet beneath a hospital blanket. A light touch I could not feel. My feet rendered lifeless, leaden appendages at the mercy of my mangled nerve endings. Through childhood, drifting into adulthood, she would make me lie still on our moss-green couch, my feet in her lap. She would cut my toenails and slug away ragged patches of damaged skin. 

I remember washing her fingertips with a cloth the morning she passed away, her skin not yet cold. I can’t reach my feet properly anymore, and areas of my ankle and toes lack sensation, like bands of flickering white noise on an analogue television. Now I sometimes peel my socks off and peer down in surprise at the skin that has hardened in patches, the nails that grow crookedly in their beds. My feet, I barely recognise, and yet her clasped hands are so embedded in my mind’s eye.

A Computed Tomography (CT) scanner slices the body into a taxonomy of wafer-thin, manageable images, then organises and models them into an intelligible likeness of the inside.

The human body shares the following elements with the ocean:

Oxygen

Hydrogen

Carbon

Nitrogen

Calcium

And Phosphorus. 

We share atoms with the ancient seas that spanned the Earth during the Hadean Eon, over four billion years ago. It comforts me to think that though you are gone, we share traces of the same undulating, primordial waves and sun-dappled swells. 

I don’t know what to do with your ashes. They sit in a grey plastic box nestled between bobbins, Christmas decorations and measuring tape. Millions of tiny particles, infinitesimally small pieces of you. Pieces of the universe across time and space.

My dreams are populated with your visitations, your face and voice come to me in sleep. The world seems to know that which cannot be comprehended by day can always find its way back to you by night.

A ‘lover's telephone’ refers to a simple mechanical telephone, often made with tin cans or paper cups connected by a string or wire, that transmits sound through vibrations. 

My voice stretches out. Infinite. Elastic. My body may remain sequestered in this frustratingly rigid, musty office chair, but my voice eludes its confinement.

That was the year I worked conducting phone interviews for a research organisation. My voice travelled through unseen passageways to greet innumerable people. The people I speak to can never meet my eye, and we would never meet in space. We just skim past one another, tentative gestures of sound. 

Hi

I spoke with these phantom voices from the house within which we waited for my mother to die. The room looks out onto hers. I watch insistently. She can never see me.

Hour after hour, I engaged in these recurring conversations. 

Please select from the following.

 

A. All of the time

B. some of the time

C. none of the time.

 

Each dialogue is a near facsimile of the one that came before: a false interlocution. Words skimming the surface of one another like slick spots of oil upon the surface of a pool of water.

The study of semiotics promises us that signs will present us with the gift of meaning. Sometimes they oblige us. In that place, as we gazed at the precipice of death, signs failed us. When encountering the cleaving of body and spirit, meaning breaks down entirely.

My mother was lost in her dreams, murmuring in her sleep. Sometimes her eyelids part and her mouth opens and closes as if she is talking. No sound escapes, but her lips adhere to some kind of organised tempo. Odd noises and puzzling remarks, murmurs that erupt from a medicated, obliterating slumber.

In the back of a wardrobe is a large zip-locked bag. Inside are the remains of a grey ribbed pyjama top. When you died, your body was cumbersome, and we had to cut it off with scissors. I almost never open this bag, but I like to know that it is there. I hope and hope and hope that despite the sour of sickness, some tiny part of your scent is trapped in that secluded air.  

The game Snakes and Ladders originated in ancient India to teach players about karma and the spiritual trajectory of life. It was then adopted by the British Empire as a game of chance. Now it might be seen as a metaphor for the complex ways human memory navigates time: one might tread forwards and upwards confidently into the future only to be hurled backwards into the past when one least expects it. 

It was during a phone call in the hospital waiting room that I first noticed the aquarium. A conversation that leeched the world of colour. As I talked, I peered through bowers of synthetic kelp shrouded in a verdant layer of algae, watching the fish come and go as they undertook their mysterious aquatic errands. The charming billow of the whiskers of a catfish, the ensemble of ubiquitous tiny, silvery fish with dotted tails. A small albino fish caught my eye. Its unwavering stare reminded me of the eerie phenomenon of a painted portrait that makes perpetual eye contact with its onlooker. It seemed serene in its slow, tentative trajectory across the grubby glass wall of the tank.

A furtive current of bubbles from the water filter upturned the fish, and it made no effort to return itself upright. With a jolt, I realised the fish did not gaze out onto the surrounding ward. The fish was dead and had probably been dead for some time. It might have once been iridescent like its fellow aquarium residents, but death rendered it chalky. Upon closer inspection, its silhouette seemed to shimmer. I realised its flesh was slowly shedding, deteriorating, muscle and skin surrendering its claim to bone. Until that moment, I had been slouched, immobilised by the kind of parched, sedate exhaustion that comes with living in the orbit of illness. I made my excuses and ended the call.  I couldn’t bear to see this fish coerced into a kind of macabre and tragic waltz as it flipped and somersaulted to the rhythm of the tank’s current. The neighbouring fish appeared utterly unconcerned. I sat with my mother for another hour, watched her sleep, wake and grimace at the ashen hospital food placed before her. In the shower later, small feathery skeins of skin rubbed off my wrists and ankles. As I scrubbed them, I retched as the image of fish once more returned.