Pouring it into his open mouth from an irregular mold. The light of it shines through the skin of his cheeks; delicate veins shadowed over sunset pink. It's painless, and thick on his tongue, sticking to the roof of his mouth and between the crevices of his teeth. It tastes like pure heat - the way an opened oven feels, the way a fire looks when it's low and smoldering. It cools into a brittle pane inside his stomach, and when it breaks the shards of it pierce through his organs and his muscles, finding their way out through his skin. He picks glass out of himself with his fingers until he's smooth inside again.
Feeding Arthur paint with a spoon -
That gnarled steel spoon in the back of the drawer that's been caught in the garbage disposal over and over again. Pitted metal coated in liquid tack; chalky bitterness hiding a razor tang. It poisons him and he's violently sick, sweating and vomiting up strings of colored acid. But paint coats him inside like a remodeled house and he's refreshed by an unfamiliar newness.
When I think about Arthur, it can be both so close and so distant. It is like parasitism.
Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine I am alone in his apartment; this voyueristic situation so far removed from him. It's about absorbing pieces of his life: the glow of street lights in the living room, how the tap of a moth against the window is louder than the city noise, the belief that when I step from carpet to hardwood the people in the apartment below will think I belong there.
I've also imagined myself as this thing inside of him; something gossamer wrapped around his spine, or something cold just beneath his skin. The closest we could ever be. And I've imagined myself beside him in many different ways.
But he has only spoken to me in dreams. In fantasy, I have placed my hand on his neck to feel the vibration of his voice, but he has said nothing distinguishable. So this is the end of our connection. We cannot speak to one another. There are only silent moments.
It makes sense that the cutoff is so abrupt and clear. Speaking to a parasite is like speaking to the worst part of you - a part of you that would not understand you regardless, because it is simply there to feed.
Holes are a prominent aspect of Arthur as a character, they are both visually and metaphorically represented. Lou's holes are entirely metaphorical and often physically filled in or so vast as to be only tenuously defined as holes:
The circular face of the watch - time as a hole
The circular lens of the camera - sight as a hole
The pit of dirt the plant sits in - growth as a hole
The darkness of night - the hole that is Earth
Arthur and Lou share some specific holes:
The Apartment
The living space as a hole, the hole which most represents themselves and their state of being, the hole into which others are invited.
Trauma
Their brains are physically pitted by trauma, but those in Arthur's brain act as eyes (watchful, reacting to light and dark) and those in Lou's act as mouths (consuming, voracious).
Emotion
Arthur's are like a well - a finite, narrow trench where something seeps in to be stored; a precarious place that can be poisoned or drained, infected or infested. Lou's appear as a small, shallow hollow but what you are seeing is a peephole painted over. Something paces behind a door.
Obsession
Arthur's is involuntary, directionless, he cannot tame or wield it. Lou's is focused, deliberate, he knows exactly how to utilize it. Ultimately, both are powerless in the face of it. Their world revolves around the bottomlessness of it, the impossibility of filling it.
Death
This is where they are exactly the same: their fixation on death and dying. Death is the eponymous hole, it is endless and empty. They are eternally on the edge of becoming holes themselves - Arthur is aware of the danger he poses to himself, while Lou is either unaware of or deeply unaffected by the danger of embodying himself. And it is through murder that they both tear new holes in the world.
Trepanation as a focus comes in waves of intensity and direction. When I imagine being trepanned in a practical sense, the hole is very small, perhaps the size of the tip of a pen. It's just large enough that, were I to probe, I could feel the outline of it beneath the closed skin of my forehead. I see it as the cure to a natural fault. But when I imagine it from a less grounded perspective, the hole is much larger and I'm allowed constant access. It's a space to fill.
There was a shift in size a while ago - predictably, the resting state of the hole became just wide enough to take in a marble (about 20mm across). The ruminatory focus was to freeze a marble until its color became dulled by frost, then slip it inside of myself and feel its coldness become warmed by the folds of my brain. At times this extended to the glass heating into molten streams that cooled and re-hardened into a fragile, interior web.
I like to give Arthur impossible features that I'm envious of. His own bore holes are neither immutable nor fixed. They can be open to the air and vary in both number and size. They can stretch enough that I could spread one apart to kiss his brain and feel the blood pulse beneath my lips; or the man with the painted face could do the same, but with his tongue and his fingers. Arthur could shove objects deep inside himself, into this space that constantly craves access.
It is interesting how one incessant desire can simply absorb all other desires. In a way, it seems necessary, and perhaps universal - a natural part of human functionality. A specific form of endocytosis.
pink tile, green dye
plaid wallpaper, painted circle
over-chlorinated water
acidic floral soap
pinks and greens dulled by shadow
tiles tic-tac-toed
pinhole of orange, pinhole of red
peeling paper ash
sweetened dull-blue smoke
a body displaces water
Maybe the distinction between being unopened and being closed is that being unopened implies a desire to be opened due to the nature of having always been closed, while being closed implies a denial of access. You can become closed, but once you have been opened you can never become unopened again.
Being unopened also implies a state of passivity; it is a neutral state of being. An outside force is the only thing that can open the unopened. But because the nature of being closed is purposeful denial of access rather than passive existence, what is closed can potentially open itself. There is the implication of choice. However, it is just as possible for an outside force to open the closed. And in certain cases this is the only way the closed can become open.
Arthur hasn't been touched in so long that he must crave only the intense and impossible. Fingers between his bones, a tongue inside his brain, a grip that burns his skin to ash.
Lack of touch makes softness hurt. A thousand white hot needles trail behind the stroke of a gentle hand. Desperation for tenderness will always transform into desperation for violence because anything else would feel like salt water after years of eating sand.
In the thickest hour of night, with his hands over his eyes and the sound of humans crawling beyond walls, Arthur lies tense with yearning. This tenseness claws him back from sleep not because his muscles are gnarled and his teeth are grinding together, but because he is on the precipice of combusting. He is growing spines inside himself and one one by one his organs will rupture and his hollow spaces will fill with gasoline and the spark of his need will send him up in flames.
Fantasies of softness become fantasies of violence become a physical realization of destruction, and it all feeds the eternal phantom terror of death.
Desperately craving paint - not tacky and globbed, but liquid and creamy. Warm toned white spun through with threadlike strands of color.
A hollowed out person is just an organic sheet of walls. Drinking paint will coat the inside - everything except what floats above the teeth. Maybe all human cravings pivot back to the hole in the head; the curative trepanation. We require a warm pour through the hole to have a fully colored interior.