The Looker
A Repetition and Exercises in Seeing
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The looker becomes the looked at becomes the looking itself—but I'm getting ahead of myself. Stories, like time, pretend to be linear when they are anything but.
Begin with a room. It is always a room, isn't it? Four walls that contain and fail to contain. In this room, five people are frozen, though frozen suggests ice and what they are is more like a photograph in the moment before it develops—all potential, no fixed image yet.
The first crack comes from Yves. In my notebooks, I've written his name seventeen times, each time trying to understand why he must be the one who breaks first. Critical eyes become prisms, he says, or perhaps he thinks it, or perhaps the distinction between saying and thinking dissolves when you're inside the breaking. This is any year when certainty shatters.
Elizabeth watches. She has always been watching, even before she existed. This is the paradox of observation—the watcher exists because someone watches her watching. In another version of this story, she is a surveillance operative. In yet another, she is God. In this version, she is simply Elizabeth, asking: Who's looking at the looker? But simple questions are never simple. Ask anyone who lived through history.
The space between inside and outside—I measure it obsessively. Fourteen steps in the first version. Twenty-three in the second. But distance, like time, expands and contracts based on who's measuring. Alain knows this. His body is a telescope, a microscope, an instrument of scale. When he says "Cell becomes galaxy becomes atom," he is describing not just perspective but the collapse of any certainty we thought we had about size, importance, meaning.
Laurent lives in fog. A specific historical fog from 1952, he specifies, though he wasn't born then, though that city is not this unnamed city where the performance occurs. But fog is fog—whether it's industrial smog or the haze between clarity and confusion. In one of my stories, I wrote about someone who aged backwards. Laurent exists in all states simultaneously: clear and clouded, present and absent. This is what it means to survive history.
Jun tastes purple. Synesthesia, the scientists would say, but I prefer to think of it as honesty. Don't we all taste colors in moments of breaking? The day everything changed tasted silver to me—metallic, like Yves's pennies on the tongue, like blood from biting your cheek to see if you're dreaming.
The audience holds mirrors. This detail stops me, makes me rewrite entire chapters. Because a mirror in a theater is different from a mirror in a bedroom is different from a mirror in an interrogation room, yet they all show the same thing: the terrifying fact of our own existence. When Elizabeth hands them these mirrors, she is really handing them responsibility. You cannot watch without being watched. You cannot observe without changing what you observe. Heisenberg knew this. So did the secret police.
Movement becomes crucial. Not movement as in dance, but movement as in migration, as in the shift from one system to another, as in the way thoughts ricochet inside a skull like—yes—like pinballs. They bounce off invisible walls because all walls are invisible until you hit them. Ask anyone who tried to cross a border.
"Fragments are whole," they say at the end, breathing together. This is the lie that makes living possible. We are all fragments pretending to wholeness, or perhaps whole beings who have been fragmented by time, by history, by the simple act of being seen. In one story, I wrote about a house that contained all the people who had ever lived in it. This performance space is like that house—containing all possible versions of looking, of being looked at.
The play ends with a question that continues after the lights fade. This is the only honest way to end anything. Not with answers, which are always temporary, but with the question that generates the next question that generates the next. Who's looking at the looker becomes the looked at becomes...
In my notebook, I draw a diagram. Five names connected by lines that could be ribbons or walls or the synaptic firings of a single mind pretending to be five. Or five minds pretending to be single. The difference matters and doesn't matter, like the difference between one side and another after the barrier becomes rubble becomes souvenirs becomes forgetting.
But we don't forget. We just transform forgetting into art, into performances where beautiful young people pretend to break apart while actually showing us how we're already broken, have always been broken, will always be breaking into smaller and smaller pieces that somehow—paradox of paradoxes—add up to more than wholeness.
The looker becomes the looked at becomes the looking itself becomes the story I'm still trying to tell.
