“Only if you insist,” I said to Elisabeth. Way up high silver needles dissected the sky and contrails dissolved into mist and faded.

She wanted to show me an exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum. It was called “Supple Stone”. It was about Indian temple stone carvings.
“I insist,” she said.
“It’s First Thursday, won’t it be crowded?”
“Those are just the galleries,” she said.
She insisted on driving us there in her car. If I had it to do over again, I would have paid for a taxi rather than ride with her. She drove a dark-blue BMW, which wouldn’t have been a problem. It had a nice interior, tinted windows and air-conditioning which came in handy on a hot summer day. She kept it spotless and it still smelled new. It’s just that she drove it at a constant speed of 35 mph. She picked me up at my apartment, and we zoomed out into the street, and in no time were doing 35 mph in a 25 zone. A group of children stood at a cross walk, a long line of pairs of children about eight years old holding hands, a teacher in front of them and another at the rear. “You see those children, don’t you? You are stopping for those kids, right?” I said.

She didn’t exactly slam on the brakes, but the car did stop so abruptly that it rocked back and forth for a few seconds on mushy shocks. When the kids had all crossed – the teachers eyeing Elisabeth suspiciously – she zoomed away again. Then she got on the freeway and drove about ten miles into town, and never once did the speedometer needle edge above 35 mph. I looked in the outside passenger mirror and counted cars. At one point she was holding up over a dozen.

At the art museum she took my arm and asked me to help her up the stairs out front. It was pleasantly cool inside. She had a lifetime pass, I bought a ticket and we walked through the turnstiles. They clicked loudly in the large building.

We had to walk past a lot of Chihuley glass sculptures on our way to see the Supple Stone. Every time we passed one, I said the artist’s name (silently) as my right foot touched the ground. One-chihuley, two-chihuley, three-chihuley. On ten-chihuley we arrived at the room where the exhibition started.

Imagine some Indian art, Hindu stone carvings: that’s exactly what most of this stuff looked like, your typical Indian guys with arms and elephant heads all over. We passed a couple Shiva figures, which Elisabeth said weren’t her cup of tea. “I could take or leave the Ganesh figures too,” she said. “But look at this.”

It was one of the oldest pieces in the exhibition, just a fragment carved out of red sandstone. The label on the pedestal said it dated from the second or third century. “What’s a shalabanjika?” I said.

“Woman and tree,” Elisabeth said. “It held a gate. It’s a yakshi, a fertility goddess.”

I briefly considered saying, “wow” but decided not to say anything. Supple stone was right. The top half was broken off, it was just the lower half of a woman, from the vagina down, standing on a dwarf, but the pure grace of the stone overwhelmed me.

“It gets better,” Elisabeth said.

“Vrikshaka, a Tree Goddess from a Hindu temple – 8th century” the description said. There are times in your life when you experience something – having an accident or getting punched out, when the world shrinks abruptly until it’s just you and what’s hitting you – the bus, the fist or in my case, that work of art.

“Like the similar yakshis also combining the woman and tree motif, this figure is one of the most beautiful types in Hindu art. In it, suppleness, beauty and joyfulness coalesce into an aesthetically complete whole.”

If someone had told me fifteen minutes earlier that art could change your life, I would have thought they were full of shit.

Elisabeth sat down on one of the stone benches that ran along the wall and watched me stare at the sculpture.

And it was perfect. The sculpture was a perfect work of art. I walked slowly around the figure looking at it from all sides. The face wore a happy, open expression. Calm and grace in a religious and erotic sense simultaneously. Even at rest, the body seemed to be dancing as it stood in a sinuous posture with head tilted playfully, joyfully, to one side. Shoulders back as she embraced the tree behind her, against which she leaned. Perfect round breasts, full hips, small bulge to her sandstone tummy. It was a piece of sandstone carved more than a thousand years ago, but it had a stronger aura, greater charisma than most people. I honestly wanted to fuck it. I reached out a hand towards it.

“If you touch it, Greg, alarms will go off.”

I withdrew my hand, flooded with empathy for art thieves. The dancer, the goddess wore a necklace; what looked like a braided snake fell casually across her perfect breasts and down her inviting belly, its sinuous shape echoing her own, its mouth biting into the upper hem of the light cloth wrapped casually around her hips: all pure stone, but light as air.

Elisabeth stood up and wandered off. I sat down on her bench and gazed at the sculpture. An hour later she returned and sat down beside me. “Not bad,” she said, looking at the sketch I had done in ballpoint pen in the small notebook I carried around with me. “Here.” She opened her purse and gave me half a turkey sandwich on sourdough bread. I looked around for a guard. “Relax, they’re all over at the other end.”

I had been trying to imagine the sculptor. What kind of a life did it take to produce someone capable of such art? The turkey sandwich was delicious. I imagined the person who made it. A young woman, I figured. Short hair dyed black, lots of mascara, pale skin, hangs out in rock clubs after hours.

The floors were tiled with stone tiles two feet square. Large stone tiles cut, polished and laid with precision, without any grout. That took skilled craftsmen. How many people can still do a job like that? Lay stones, build a cathedral, make a barrel, shoe a horse, cast a bell. Can new professions that replace the old crafts be performed with the same care and devotion? Is anything lost if they are not?

My focus shifted from this fertility figure to the entire world and all the people in it, doing their things. Driving trucks somewhere, holding a tongue depressor and saying, “say ah,” leaning against a brass pole in this same pose in a strip joint, waxing a linoleum floor, cutting hair, packing a box, gutting a fish and throwing it the length of a fish market to another guy at the counter, who sells it to a tourist. The bench on which I was sitting had been carved by someone; it was hewn from stone. You can look at a house and see a house, or you can see all the work that someone has done. It’s the same with a car, or a shirt, or a road where a sweating guy with a hairy back has spread asphalt, or blown glass or X-ray specs, or apples that someone has cultivated and someone else has picked, or a ream of paper or a license plate. All touched by human hands.

In this world of industry, of people making things and discarding them and salvaging them, my plan had been to go to law school and become an attorney. What better job for a man with a heart of stone than that profession? Instead, I had found something both similar and different, newer and older – I was an inflicter of pain. Discomfort evaluation monitor. Torturer.

Leaning up against the tree like that the stone goddess reminded me of Saint Sebastian, joyfully awaiting a hail of arrows. Pierce me daddy, eight to the bar.

“It all happened so suddenly.”
“He was such a quiet neighbor.”
“Suddenly he’s senile.”
“Suddenly he couldn’t hear anything I said.”

Right now, a search of the Internet gives 148,000 results for “suddenly he” and 80,100 for “suddenly she.”

Very little happens suddenly. Usually, when something seems sudden it’s usually because we weren’t paying attention. We ignore the warning signs of hearing loss, psychosis, senility; eviction and repossession. Anything we’d rather ignore happens suddenly – an internet search gives me zero results for “suddenly he was slim.”

Because we don’t pay attention closely, people can pass. For them to pass as what we’d rather see them as, for what they’d rather be seen as. You can pass as white. If you’re a guy you can pass as a woman. It works the other way around too. You can pass as a lot of things. I should know.

I was thinking about my uncle. He seemed a little loopy the last time I talked to him, before he fell off his ladder and died, but he was doing a good job at faking normality. That’s why senility seems to happen so suddenly. People can lose large chunks of their memory and still pass for normal by faking it. By employing conversational tricks to cover up the fact that they can’t remember your child’s name, or even who the hell you are.

Although everyone who knew him, his customers and even me, chose to ignore the fact, my uncle was growing increasingly confused before he died. When he was under stress, he seemed more senile and confused. When he was calm and quiet, things seemed better, because it was harder for him to work around those holes in his head when a lot was going on.

It’s the same with someone who is going deaf. Watching them talk to other people, you can see them fake the ability to understand everything people say. Now and then they’ll give himself away with some small thing, an inappropriate response. Most conversations you can get through by just letting the other person talk and acting interested. The worse their hearing gets, the more often you notice his little tricks, since you’re looking for them, especially when they talk to you. With a lot of people, strangers especially, they can still pass for normal hearing; this is usually of no importance, although when they do it with their doctors, say, or an attorney, it’s a problem.

I do it all the time. In the course of a day I fake my way through most situations. He’s so polite and deferential, people think. I pass for a lot of things. I pick up people’s accents when I speak with them for any period of time. I probably have a talent for languages. Does it matter, in the end, whether I’m genuinely loving or just passing? But now, I suddenly found myself in a position where I had to to do the opposite – pass as someone who was not learning to feel.

Suddenly, stone becomes flesh.