I Make Art But My Brother Makes Me an Artist

An excerpt from What You Make of Me by Sophie Madeline Dess

In two weeks they’ll be killing my brother and so I’m writing. I shouldn’t be. My brother would agree with me. Writing is not my art.

I am a painter, though I don’t expect you to have heard of me. If you saw me at a café you would not know me. You’d have no questions for me. Soft pop would be thumping and you’d be into it, and I’d only be another person sitting there plain‑faced with blueberry eyes, my hair dyed some variation of oat or vanilla, shirt and pants bleeding together in one wheaty monochrome.

If I were to look at you as you stood there ordering, I’d wonder all the questions one asks when faced with a stranger, like who you sleep with, and how, and what you think of before bed, and what it would be like to press my nose into your scalp. But neither of us is at the café. I am here working, writing. My first solo show is coming up at a small gallery called Withheld. The Withheld people recently called me to say they were going to send their assistant up to my apartment to look at all my work, so that she might write some flap copy. Fine. But then I heard that this flap copy was supposed to describe exactly what my paintings “do” and what they “mean.” These explanations were to be printed on a single sheet of paper. This sheet of paper—trifolded—would be called the “catalog.” And this little catalog would be printed a hundred times over and would sit stacked on a plastic tray at the front of the gallery, available to gallery‑goers upon entry or exit.

For days they’ve been sending her to my door, the assistant. For days she’s been knocking at noon and for days I have denied her entry. (Under any other circumstances I’d have allowed her in. She is chatty and structurally perfect. Her face in particular, because of its modernity and slight resemblance to a kitchen, has an industrial beauty. Vast cheeks. Boxy nose.) If she came in now she’d see me naked, perched here on my small metal stool. I’ve just opened the window. A gently polluted breeze is sifting off the sidewalk and I’m spreading my legs, letting the air come up cool through my crotch and hot out my mouth. I make it work like an organ sweep, a little urban exorcism. The only stimulants in this whole space are my paintings, placed like mistakes along my wall.

All the paintings are of my brother. You would not recognize him in them. In real life my brother has a straight line down his nose, caramel hair that waves upward, and eyes that are a very difficult blue like there’s black beneath them. But in the paintings you won’t find him like this. I’ve given him new shapes. You might mistake his cheek for an elephant tusk. His mouth for a small vat of blood. His nose the cracked edge of a tile.

What I mean to say is, Withheld will not be trifolding me and my dying brother into that little catalog. I’ll do it myself. All this time I’ve been sitting up here feeling dramatic, feeling nothing, thinking: That lucky boy gets to drop off and I’m stuck here clinging. Now, however, I’m starting to feel the holy series of convictions one must always feel when setting out on something new: This is the best idea I’ve ever had; this is the only idea I’ve ever had; this is the only idea anyone has ever had. I’m aware these convictions sound less exciting when written. That’s always the way with language, an insufficient medium. I try not to use or consume it. It’s not that I haven’t read, it’s that I’m an adolescent reader. I read too selfishly. I pick up books trying to figure out more about myself—as my brother, Demetri, has advised. The issue is that the reading turns me into other people whom I soon after abandon. And this reminds me that for the most part the self is only something that continually takes up, plays with, and then abandons other selves. I don’t need to be reminded of this. And, anyway, words should be spoken, not written. Like how they used to do it—a return to the glory days of oral! As I am now understanding, the worst thing about writing is that it takes time. Therefore writers must believe in old‑fashioned things like focus. I have no faith in this. My faith is in the image, in instantaneity, in the ability to see and say it all at once.

In a sense Demetri’s faith was also in the image. He worked in documentaries. His most recent piece, unfortunately, is a film (or documentary, even though it contains no official documents, it only wants to constitute a document in itself, which I refuse to concede that it does), a film about us, mostly about me, but not too much on this because it embarrasses me, and I will only say that when I found out he made it, at first I really thought: good. That’s fine. At least it’s off his chest. In fact I was surprised he got it done. Because often my brother was the victim (Is the victim? What’s the tense for the dying?) of what he only semi‑ironically called his spiritual quests. The specifics of these quests are irrelevant, just know he was one of those people whose life centered around moral questions like am I wrong, did I do wrong, how can I amend?

Demetri would sit naked in the East Tenth Street bathhouses and think about these questions. He’d sweat them out. He’d run to the bodega for a bag of Smartfood and a tub of mouthwash and come back empty‑handed, the questions having distracted him. He believed that the only way to get at them was to privately and deliberately dedicate his life to them. His making the film—the documentary—was a way to come to some answers. Still, I found out he made it and thought: No one will care. No one will watch it. I forgave him. I went to his sickbed, looked into his sunken, radiating face and I said: “This is pretty good revenge for my having oppressed you, Demetri. And so I forgive you.” But it’s true I’m having a bit of trouble forgiving myself.

Nati and I were on the phone recently, and with her typical coldness she said I was the one who killed Demetri. “You’re the reason he’ll die.” Not that you care about her yet, but I’d like you to know that that’s the kind of person we’re dealing with. Alas.

They’ll really kill him now (though they like to say they’re letting him go, releasing him—which is to say, restricting him from air and feed). It’s happening in two weeks at 3:00 p.m. By some accounts—those of certain doctors or philosophers—he is already dead. He has what is called a depressed consciousness. A tumor is sitting squat on his meninges. And now his brain stem has turned inward, become a stubborn child with its arms crossed, refusing to liaison properly between the spinal cord and cerebrum.

Still, as he dies his pride only seems to grow. I go to his little sickroom to visit him. He’s arranged it so that the Replacements and Pharoah Sanders are playing through his speakers on rotation. He is lying in bed, silent. His face stares up at nothing and is dry, glowing. His smile—which I’m always reminded is not actually a smile, only an involuntary twitch of the zygomaticus minor—has been suggesting all these very bad jokes which are all really true. I wish I could think of one now. I’ll have my own when I die. I know this because the nurse told me, with her scrub authority, that death is always attended by bad jokes and basic truths, unlike life where everyone’s hilarious and lying all the time. She was serious.

I know this because the nurse told me, with her scrub authority, that death is always attended by bad jokes and basic truths, unlike life where everyone’s hilarious and lying all the time.

Anyway, he is there, and soon the doctors will enter his room, and they will call me, and I will stay here, writing.

One last thought about writing. I’m thinking: If I were to tell you I was painting your portrait so that I’d capture everything you are and everything you’ve ever been—just by looking at you for hours at a time—you would be excited, you would be eager to see where I took it. But if I were to tell you I was writing the story of your life, using hard facts and descriptions, you might feel trapped. You might feel a more literal transcription of your life would have nothing to do with what is real to you. It would not capture the unknowable bits of you (the way a painting could). That’s all I mean, that writing—with all its specifics—has a harder time with the real. This consistent loss of faith in reality becomes (for me) a problem that extends beyond language. For instance, my suspicion of my own life is deepest when I think I might be feeling something “real,” like when I think I might be in love, or when I think I’ve at last succeeded, or even when I think I might’ve failed but in a rich way—any time when I know some deep sense of meaning should be tunneling into the soul somewhere, but is not. I lose faith. Anyway . . .

Demetri’s film about us: I haven’t seen it and don’t plan to. I didn’t ask him for details about it. I didn’t ask if there were close‑ups of my eyes or my teeth. If everyone was going to see the way they’re gnarled into my gums and come out in this stacked and slanted kind of way. I didn’t ask for a plot summary (of my own life!) or for structural details. I can guess at the outline. Demetri will start when we are children.

He was obsessed with youth, and with posterity. In fact before he really began dying he convinced me to donate a painting of mine to our high school. This was after I started making a bit of money. I’d sold a couple pieces at auction. I’d been written about and reviewed (I’d been called a “force” but it was still “unclear” if I was worth being reckoned with; I’d been called “powerful” but they didn’t know if the watercolor of me being railed from behind was “liberative” for women or if it only “reaffirmed submission”). A donation at that point, three years ago, would be a small asset for the school district. “Donate them an old one, a good one,” Demetri instructed me. He was so insistent, I came to understand, because he wanted the chance to go speak to the school—in Longhead, Long Island, a tiny town you don’t know and don’t want to—he wanted to go back there and lecture. By then that was what he did for me. He’d come up with things to say about my work, to flick it spinning into the world and give it direction. We wouldn’t consult about what he wrote. He wouldn’t ask me if he got my work “right” and I wouldn’t ask him to be sure to include this or that. We never discussed whether his written copy or my actual art was what got me into certain shows, galleries, homes.

The school was happy to have him visit. They were excited about his return. There’s even a recording of the talk he gave. I often find myself pulling up the video and watching him. The way he stands recklessly tall at the little podium. I watch his face twitch around before the young crowd settles. He does not know what to say to teenagers. He’s prepared a speech, but at the last moment he has scrapped it. Now he stands there and clears his throat until it sores. He tells the room full of pubescents that in order to calm down he’s going to imagine them naked. He blushes and rapidly takes this back. And then says it again. He asks how many of them have any grandparents left. He says he is there to discuss a trip to the Virgin Islands and then asks how many people have been to an island or know of a virgin. He cannot settle down.

“Ava and I were taken to a Virgin Island, once. It was our first flight,” he finally begins. “I was nine. Ava was eight. On the plane we were sitting twenty rows away from our father. Because we were loud, in the way that tragedies can make you really rambunctious.” He coughs. “On the plane”—he tilts forward, toward the mic—“I grew bored. I began taking hold of little threads of Ava’s hair and gnashing them between my teeth,” he tells them. “When she felt the tug she turned, saw a chunk of her hair in my mouth, my eyes wide. We both burst out. Ava had a way of shrieking when she laughed, she kind of threw her head back and bore all her teeth. Back then her canines were just coming in, breaking out through the pulp, which made her look ferocious. So we really just sat there and shrieked, smacked each other, leapt up in our seats.” He explains to the children that I fell in love on this trip. “When the flight attendant came to quiet us, Ava told him she thought he was beautiful, and that he had beautiful eyes. She thought it was good form to let a person know.” Here Demetri stalls. The light thins his body and for a moment he stands there shrinking.

In his speech Demetri skips over much of the vacation. He picks things up at the end. But the trip itself was an eternity.

We landed on the island and were shepherded into a van that would immediately take us to the hotel, as if to look or go elsewhere were criminal. In the van Demetri and my father sat across from me, arm to arm. The van went over a bump; everyone was for a moment lifted out of their seats, except for our father, who did not lift. I watched his profile—his nose a blade slicing through the blur of trees. Our father reminded us where we were and asked if we remembered anything about colonialism. Demetri did.

At the hotel our father spoke with the suited and sweating men behind the desk. Demetri and I left him. We stood out on the lobby’s balcony and looked into the ocean. We’d been promised clear ocean water, but all we saw was black, with bursts of bright navy far out where the sun hit. “You’re mad,” Demetri said to me, “because the water’s not see-through, and because you were in love with the flight attendant, and he didn’t love you back.”

I considered this. “You’re mad,” I said. “About?”

“Excretions.” We’d heard the term on the plane, from two vagina doctors on holiday.

Demetri turned to me: “You are largely vaginal.”

“You are a vagina.”

We heard a woman come out onto the balcony and stand behind us. She asked if we were admiring the view.

“No,” Demetri said. He looked at me—we conspired not to turn toward her. “I wouldn’t say that we’re admiring the view.”

The woman laughed. She seemed impressed with her own laughter, with her very ability to laugh, especially with children. “Not admiring the view? What are you doing then?”

Demetri considered this. “Observing it,” he said. “That’s hilarious,” the woman said. When I turned toward her, she smiled. Her teeth were pulled tight together, so bright that they seemed to make noise. She edged toward us.

“Are you two here alone? No parents?” she asked. We felt her smile continue behind our backs. I began to answer, but Demetri spoke first.

“Just our father is here,” he said. I didn’t think he was going to say it. “Because our mother is in the ocean. She ran in last year.”

The woman was not sure now. We waited for her. She looked at me. We’d seen this look before, from all the town mothers. The pity and distaste whenever Demetri and I were frank about death—their concern over whether or not to believe us, their wondering if we had not inherited the melodrama, or if indifference was its alternative form. The woman paused. “Honey”—she looked down toward me—“is that true?”

I looked at Demetri, who kept himself busy by pretending to notice something in the trees.

“No,” I said. I tried to take up Demetri’s method: “Our mother did not run. She walked into it very slowly.” This was true. Our mother was an actress. She had started off in Shakespeare and ended up in commercials. On the night of her death she took the tripod out onto the porch and recorded herself walking into the Sound—a recording that Demetri did not watch but that he often watched me watch, until it was taken from me. Anyway, this trip was our time to recalibrate, as we heard it described. It was our reintroduction to the water. It was important to start where the water was clear, where you could see all the way through to the bottom—except that we could not.

On the porch Demetri and I had the sudden urge to get rid of this woman. “Ava,” he shouted, and pointed toward a nearby branch. A thick green fluid was developing at the end of a leaf. I didn’t know what he was going to say but I primed myself for action. Before we could perform, our father stepped outside. A room key in his breast pocket.

“Okay,” he said to us.

The woman smiled and took a step back. “Sorry,” our father said.

Since she possessed an extreme, conventional beauty I watched to see how he looked at her but there was nothing in his face.

She suggested he really need not apologize and stepped toward him, offering him her hand. “Édith,” she said, “I’m the resident artist here. I paint portraits of families on the beach, usually at sunrise and sunset, if you are ever interested.” She pointed out a small bungalow to the right of the greeting center. “That’s my studio. If you three would like a quick tour . . .” She looked at Demetri and me. It was clear that she expected our excitement. We stayed quiet. She looked again at our father.

“It’s nice to meet you,” he said.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I echoed. Demetri reached out and hooked his arms around our father’s legs. “It’s nice to meet you,” he said, echoing us.

Édith smiled halfway, like she’d made a mistake that eluded her.

Demetri and I left our father, who took our bags. Alone, we made our way to the pool: it was unguarded, empty. We stripped to our underwear and got in. Demetri was desperate to conduct the laugh test. “It’s because,” he told me, bobbing, “when you laugh your muscles relax and you breathe out really hard and you can’t swim anymore.” He was clumsy in the water. His wet hair in a jagged rim around his head like an inverted crown. “And so you drown and die,” he explained.

“So test it,” I said.

He dunked his head into the water and then sprang up high, his eyes crossed, and shouted, “FUCK your DICK.” He yelled it as he leapt, his arms straight by his sides. “ANAL.”

I nearly burst. I bared my teeth and kicked out into the water, springing away. I managed to scream his name. I was still laughing as I sank. Demetri watched as water began to funnel through my mouth. I thrust my neck back for air and looked at the sky, a bruised, mean blue with small scraps of cloud. I called his name again. He didn’t come for me, but I didn’t drown. Soon we collected ourselves. We climbed out and sat on the ledge with our legs still in the water. For a number of minutes we stayed silent.

He didn’t come for me, but I didn’t drown.

“Do my eyes look like yours right now?” I asked, turning to him. His eyes were wide open.

“I don’t know, how do mine look?”

“Blue,” I said, “but with sun stuck in the blue.” I looked closer into his color. “A sticky blue.”

He put his head closer to mine—focusing on my left eye, then my right. “No, I don’t think so.”

I told him his breath smelled like clay—which it did, and which it does still. Even now his sickroom has the stench of sediment.

Soon we heard footsteps behind us, and when we turned we recognized Édith—she had taken off her hat. I remember her auburn hair matched her reddish eyes exactly, but only because I felt Demetri notice this beside me. He had stopped breathing.

“Are you two hollering?” Édith asked us, her hands laced together and pressed against her stomach.

“You paint portraits,” I said to her, standing up. Demetri followed. “So do I.”

Édith smiled with the same sympathy as before. We wanted to tell her not to. “I do, yes. And that’s very nice,” Édith said, nodding and smiling anyway. “It’s always good to paint. To have a variety of hobbies, especially at such a young age.” She nodded and nodded. Even back then I must’ve thought some variation of, This person only drinks wine.

Demetri and I stood together, looking very portraitable, we must’ve thought. We waited for Édith’s offer to paint us right then. Instead she stood in silence. My hair was wet. I felt it sticking to my neck, in plaits over my shoulders. I knew my stomach was out, hard and bloated. I felt my legs glued together. I waited for Édith. Édith said nothing.

“You have a good dress on,” I said to her.

Édith looked down at her dress. It was white linen, with a tan belt tight around her ribs. “Thank you.” She smiled.

Together Demetri and I waited, again, for our invitation to be painted. But Édith only stared, as if requesting that we go on speaking. Just when I had come up with something, Demetri bolted—for such a small body his wet feet slapped heavy against the cement. I waited a minute to try to let Édith talk to me some more. She failed. I ran back to the bungalow.

Demetri had not yet gone in. He was there standing by the door, his finger to his lips. “Shh,” he said. “He’s sleeping.” He meant our father. “He’s going to sleep all day.”

We sat on the ground outside the door. The stone’s grain sharpened into my ankles. Demetri let insects crawl onto his finger, then shepherded them onto his palm—ants, small spiders. “COLONIZE ME,” he yelled at them.

The sun was still high. It had taken on a sourness. Demetri kept spitting. Sitting there doing nothing we began to sweat.

“Okay,” I said, standing.

“We need hard hats,” Demetri said as we marched down to the beach, making our way by what Demetri thought an adult might call a charmingly ramshackle footpath. “We can melt these rocks.”

I told him we needed to go missing.

“That would be relaxing.” He asked me if I had known our father would be sleeping the whole time.

I said no. Our father slept all day at home, too, but we thought it was because our house was dark, exhausting. The island, however, was not. As we walked, I felt my face burning. I scratched my skin like this would scrape off the heat. We continued in silence until the branches cleared and the first hint of water was visible. We heard lapping before we saw the waves, at which point I screamed Demetri’s name and raced toward the shore, running all the way to the edge. There, I looked out. The water at last was clear and bright, pulled tight under the sun. I turned to find Demetri, who had stopped between the bushes and the shoreline, and waved at him to come. He didn’t move. I called him over twice more and assured him you could see all the way down through the water, into the sand. When he still didn’t come, I turned back toward him.

We stood watching the waves. I started telling Demetri how it smelled like salt and moss and water, and he told me I was wrong and that those were just objects and not scents, which were different categories of thought, even though he knew objects could have scents, but back then he was stuck in the habit of trying to give order to things because he thought it might give him power, and thought without power was useless. And just as he was asking me to describe the scent of salt—just to see if I could—we caught sight of Édith. She was standing farther down the beach, with her dress bellying out behind her, painting a family posed before the sunset.

I turned to Demetri and braced myself. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” I asked him.

He pretended not to hear me. “Where?”

“Do you think that I am beautiful?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

I told him never mind. We looked again toward the water.

“No,” he answered. “Okay.”

“When you laugh, maybe,” he said. So I laughed.

“No, not then, either.” I laughed harder. “Sorry,” he said.

I looked down the beach, toward Édith.

This is where, in his speech, Demetri picks it up: “Ava thought it was good form not just to tell a person they were beautiful but to do something about it. And so on our second morning on the island, before the sun was even up, I pretended to be sleeping when I heard her leave our room. She was gone for maybe an hour or two. When she came back I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want to know. But soon she was standing over me and letting liquid drip off her body and onto my arm. She whispered my name.” He whispers his own name into the mic. “So this is it, I lay there thinking. Ava and I were always waiting for ‘the bad thing,’ the bad thing that would end all other bad things, and I thought, This is going to be the bad thing. Ava whispered to me she was going to turn on the lamp. She did. I looked at her. In the lamplight I thought someone had torn her open. She was covered in blues and pinks and reds. It looked like one giant organ had exploded—like she was turned inside out, dying.” Here Demetri pauses for dramatic effect, and then:

“‘I ruined them,’ Ava explained to me there in our room.

“‘Your clothes?’ I asked her.

“She didn’t answer.

“‘What did you ruin?’”

Demetri tells his audience that I had entered Édith’s studio by the window and had not only ruined her paintings but left her with one of my own, a portrait of a man whom no one else would recognize, but who Demetri and I knew as the flight attendant, painted in my clumsy green strokes overlaid with a loose, watery white, whose sheeny effect was ruined when the paints mixed, as I did not give the green its time to dry.

Back then the trouble we got into was constant, and as such irrelevant to us, and so when we were kicked out of the hotel—off the island, effectively—the only thing that mattered was that the hotel manager, after informing us of our forced departure, did not suggest that I throw out my work. He looked me in the eye as he returned it to me. “And I assume you want this back,” he had said. I nodded yes and took it from him. Again he looked at me with a sense of solemnity, as if we had agreed on something and that that something was to do with the rest of my life. I carried the portrait with me through the airport. It was something sacred and dangerous—I would not let it go. It was too large to take onto the plane. They were going to make us check it. Our father wanted to throw it out. I refused. “Leave it here,” he warned me. I didn’t listen. He walked away from us after yelling obscenities at the airport floor. That was the only moment of brief rupture (and it wasn’t necessarily between us, but within him). Otherwise he frightened everyone by staying extraordinarily calm.

“This is the portrait we’ll be donating,” Demetri tells the auditorium. From the audience there is a chorus of ohs. “And the point is”—he finds refuge in this phrase—“the point is Ava had told Édith that she, Ava, was also a painter. And Édith had said it was always good to have a hobby. But! When someone calls what is necessary for you a hobby—as if it is a trivial reprieve, you know, a rest, a break from an arduous life and not the arduous life itself—they are trying to control you. Remember that worse than an inability to fulfill a desire is to have no real desire at all. There are people like this in the world. They will confuse you. They will want to control you. Refuse to be controlled.”

I groan every time. You righteous fuck, I want to say to him. These kids are already refusing control. The nature of the child is refusal. Although, maybe, who knows. Maybe they are at the age when the mind gets co‑opted. They are in that season of damage when curiosity gets frosted over by the cool of disinterest. If that’s the case, Demetri’s body here is convincing. It is enough to keep them present. His right hand is on the podium, his left arm is up in the air, fingers stretched wide. He leans from side to side in a rare shamanic death dance. His hair’s thinning. The tumor was formed by then and it makes him giddy, and the students like his energy. He’s having fun. He’s riding out the perimeter of existence.

I wonder if the young audience could tell he was dying. I’d say that maybe after Demetri stepped down from the podium, they ceased to think of him at all—that he came and spoke and was forgotten—but this would be impossible. You had to think things about him, even if only out of combativeness, because you knew he was standing there impressed by you in some way. His impressions of others were varied and inaccurate, and immovable once formed. Sometimes you could see yourself crystallizing on his face. I bet at least a few of the students thought: This random man who smacks of decay is going to remember me. He better take this vision of me with him down to death, so at least when I arrive, a part of me is there already.

To give others the impression that they are unforgettable—that is grace. Sometimes my brother had it.