Erosion

Myra was melting, she was sure of it — but slowly; slow enough that she wouldn’t be gone till she was 31, at least.

You know Venice is sinking into its canals, millimeter by millimeter? In a hundred years it’ll be another exotic dive for wealthy scuba enthusiasts, who’ll descend into St Mark’s Basilica to shine their headlamps through all that colored glass, lighting the surrounding brine in red-brown and blue-brown and brown. Not long after that, rising sea levels will have flooded New York City and San Francisco, returning the marina to the mire and washing Brooklyn clean for the first time since New Amsterdam was incorporated. A few billion years after that, the sun will go out and the whole world will be set adrift, out of orbit and with no solar system to call its own. So it really wasn’t the biggest deal that the tips of Myra’s fingers left little smudges on whatever she touched, or that the ends of her fingernails came crinkling off when she shook someone’s hands.

Myra knew she was melting, but she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t as though she were ignorant about this sort of thing, she would be quick to clarify. She knew a lot about erosion. It had been her thesis, sort of, or from an anthropological lens at least: how humanity’s presence altered their environment, and how that, in turn, altered humanity. That was how she’d pitched it, anyway. Her advisor told her was too broad. He was right, so she’d narrowed her lens onto the way the agrarian revolution had impacted the human psyche.

It was a chicken and egg problem, her advisor used to say, jabbing a finger emphatically downward with each point. Did man teach himself to farm to impose order on the wild land around him? Did man invent the concept of “possession” out of an implicit desire to possess? Or did he simply decide that gathering berries would be more effective if they were all growing next to each other, and then learn to optimize and obsess and control by example of the neat rows and careful allocation of land that followed?

(Both, obviously, she’d said, and then spent 180 pages elaborating).

She still hadn’t gone to a doctor, though she’d been melting for weeks. She was a grad student, not a millionaire. But she asked her therapist, Doreen, about it every other week.

“Maybe it’s a metaphor,” Doreen told her this week. “Can you think of anyone who you feel may be ‘eroding’ at your identity? Are there forces in your life making you feel ‘smaller’ or ‘less’ than you are?”

Myra thought about it. On the news today, a shiny pink senator had urged his fellow lawmakers to prosecute women who’d had abortions on the same level as child murderers — to execute them by any means necessary. “Take them out back with the shotgun if you have to,” he’d said, dabbing sweat from his neck with a greying kerchief. “A woman who’d kill her own child might as well be rabid.” His face was flushed only in patches, blood blooming under his skin like colonies of mold.

And at the coffeeshop this morning, the man in line behind her had told her to go back to her country. She explained to him that she was from Illinois, but he cut in front of her anyway.

“Yeah, I guess,” Myra told her therapist. “Sort of everything, I guess?”

“We’ve talked about your use of hyperbole before,” Doreen admonished. “I know that speaking hyperbolically can make threats feel less real, but you must look directly at your problems in order to address them.”

But it wasn’t hyperbole. When she thought about it, Myra couldn’t think of anything that didn’t make her feel smaller, or less. And her fingertips had dripped away entirely, all the way to her distal phalanges, leaving her fingers only single-jointed. She bent and straightened them anxiously. Did baby fingers make her look younger? Did she want them to?

Myra used to enjoy baths, but now she worried they might be exacerbating things. The last time she’d settled into one, the bathwater was muddied by the edges of her: first a wash of cocoa-brown, then a swirling expanse of ruddy red, and finally the chalky grey of marrow and bone. She’d stepped out hurriedly, not bothering to pat herself down to find out what she might be missing. Now she showered exclusively in cold water, and never for more than a few minutes. It was for the best, she assured herself as she ran soap over goose-pimpled flesh, what with the catastrophic drought and all. When she was done, she rinsed the bar of soap clean under the faucet without looking at it. She didn’t want to see the goosebumps that had slid free from her flanks and embedded themselves in its surface, like so many freckles.

“Perhaps you just need to reclaim agency over your body — take up more space,” Doreen suggested, gazing at her through half-lidded eyes. Doreen always looked like she was falling asleep in their sessions, but she probably looked that way with everyone. “Impose your will on the room around you. Do an open mic, or buy some new clothes. Write a book. Paint your walls. Affect something.”

Myra couldn’t afford new clothes, not with student loans and medical loans and health insurance and her monthly car payment, and her professors had all told her that her writing was dry as bleached bone, so she took up painting. She purchased paints in mostly earth tones, russet reds and dusty tans and mouse browns, so she hardly even noticed when her flesh flaked off into the viscous-slick acrylic.

She liked painting. She could only afford one canvas, but she didn’t mind painting over what she’d painted the day before. She was playing with textures, she told herself, like Monet did. And impressionism meant she didn’t need to be overly precise. She could even grip the brush between her teeth, once the skin of her palms was too loose and scaly for her to fold it into the nook between her distal and proximal palmar. Her fingers had been gone for weeks.

She started with a scene from her childhood: six-year-old Myra up to her elbows in mud, grinning mad, squatting froglike in front of the massive hole she’d clawed into the earth. Myra had written about that day in the first draft of her thesis — a cheeky anecdote on humanity’s implicit drive to affect their environment, even without practical purpose, even at the expense of the environment they were affecting — but had cut it by draft three. It wasn’t very professional to let her personality creep into her academic work, her advisor had explained.

Myra liked painting, but she didn’t like this painting. It was crude, unsubtle to the point of garish. There was something uncomfortably lewd about the way her younger self was squatting, bare limbs caked with rich slick mud. It gestured toward mud wrestling. Its hopping frogs and wide-set toads were childish, when she looked closer. And even if she did like the way their pebbled skin matched the cracked carapace of marbled mud on her younger self’s elbows and knees, it’s not like the painting was saying anything, really. When the time came to paint over it, she felt little regret.

Her second attempt was a slightly older Myra: a slumping, disappointed-looking girl in a long grey dress, standing in a dark room lit by a chaotic spray of polygonal, geometric shards of light. The prom. She’d wanted to wear a sari — her mother was going to let her borrow a beautiful one, mesmerizingly patterned in fuschia and bright gleaming orange. But at the last moment her best friend told her it made her look exotic and she’d changed her mind, opting for the simple grey sheath she’d worn in junior year. Myra ground her knuckles into mulch trying to render the utter mundanity of that grey dress, the weight of it. She covered every inch of the old painting save for the eyes, which she left gleaming beetle-black and devilish out of her teen self’s face. She’d thought they might look out of place, but instead they made this Myra look alive, fiery like she’d never been at that age.

That dress had made her look like sausage, Myra mused, squinting critically, and the grey made her skin look chalky (but perhaps that was just powdered bone).

She only half-finished her third draft before painting over it — a hopeful Myra on graduation day, who looked like more of a simpering sop than any of her forebears. Her paintings were growing more impressionistic as her appendages withered away. She no longer had any hands to wrap around the brush, so she jammed the end of it into the silty mulch of her forearms when she wanted to repaint the canvas.

“Keep going,” she could picture Doreen telling her. Doreen didn’t take appointments over the phone and Myra couldn’t drive to the clinic without hands, so she’d canceled her appointments for the foreseeable future. “You’re getting to the core of yourself. Keep digging.”

She painted that trip she’d gone on to find herself: to Mumbai, where her family was from but she’d never actually been. She’d allocated herself six weeks to self-actualize before she had to go home and start applying to jobs, but she’d only lasted ten days. Changing the flight had cost her nearly as much as she’d paid for the ticket in the first place. The jagged line of her painted mouth buzzed with anxious disappointment in spite of its simplicity, and the bramble of green and brown around her had no discernable boundaries, just whorls of claustrophobic chaos. She was getting better at painting, Myra observed, even as her fine motor skills disintegrated entirely. Perhaps she would be better off without them.

How long would it take them to find her painting, once she was gone? (She’d already come to terms with her departure. Myra found herself curiously unafraid of death. She couldn’t think of a single thing she’d miss).

Perhaps her landlord would knock at the door at the month-end to ask why her rent check was warped and shriveled and sodden with thin pink silt. “I wrote it with what was left of my tongue,” she would have told him through the door, if she had a mouth left to explain with, or vocal cords to vibrate sound into her mouth, or lungs to send air thrumming through her vocal cords. Instead he would find her portrait, her masterwork, six inches thick and representing her better than her physical form ever could. He would be the first person in her life to see her.

She was painting the present now, starting with her kitchen. She couldn’t look around at the space to confirm the accuracy of her work — if she turned her head, she feared, the structural integrity of her neck might splinter, sending her remaining senses rolling away across the hardwood floor — but she remembered it well enough. She’d remodeled it herself, after all: grey paneled cupboards over a smooth linoleum counter. The linoleum was swirled to resemble marble, though it looked more like melted ice cream. Myra had wanted to paint the cupboards a bright gleaming forest green, but the girl at Home Depot had talked her down. “They’ll overwhelm you after a few days,” she had said. “You want something a little more muted.”

Myra painted the present, but she painted herself whole. Long brown arms on a long brown torso over a pair of short, stocky brown legs, like a meerkat. She painted herself tall and strong and furious. It was like A Picture of Dorian Grey, she mused as she worked, except in reverse: every day her portrait grew more beautiful and more refined, and her physical form washed away. How did that book end? Was the painting destroyed, or the artist? Or was it both? She would have remembered, if chunks of brain hadn’t begun to slip through the holes into her skull and splat onto the floor like cottage cheese. She could hardly remember her mother’s name, or her advisor’s, or her own.

When she was halfway through her left leg, her eye sockets finally gave in. Myra felt a kind of relief as first her left eye and then her right hesitated over the precipice and dropped smoothly from her face, plunging her into darkness. She could focus better this way. She could work faster, unfettered by her own critical eye. She could paint herself in smooth, confident strokes. This would be the last layer of her painting, she knew, and felt elation bubble in her gut. She was nearly done.

###

In time, building manager Larry Dorano unlocked Apartment 306 to find it abandoned. The bathroom and the bedroom were bathed in a plush centimeter of dust — Larry’s leather boots left thick oblong tracks through it, like the first steps through fresh snow.

The kitchen was the worst of all. Here the dust was so thick he couldn’t breathe without gulping down torrents of it. And there must be a leak somewhere, because the dust in the kitchen was moist to the touch. It squished like wet plaster between his fingers, and gave off a curiously rancid smell.

It was like Pompeii, he would tell his wife later that night, as she commiserated with him over the overdue rent that they would never get back. The tenant’s table was still set for a romantic meal for one: a tarnished fork; a round blue bowl full of long-dessicated instant ramen. The bed was made. There was a bottle of Clorox cleaner next to the bathroom sink, as though its owner had just recently dedicated herself to a deep clean.

Oddest of all was the monolith that the tenant (Mary, he thought her name was, or maybe Mara) had left in the kitchen. A cubic rectangle of paint towered in the center of the room, booming over the rather drab decor. It was five feet tall and three feet wide and nearly ten inches thick, with a beige canvas back and an unremarkable grey-brown face.

“Modern art is like that,” his wife told him wisely. “It’s all playing with textures, to subvert your expectations.”

She didn’t seem like the type, Larry thought, but he supposed she didn’t seem like the type for anything, really.

“D’you think it’s worth anything?” His wife asked. Larry shook his head.

“I’ve already sent the guys to empty the place. The mold got into everything — I’ll have to refurnish the whole goddamn unit. They’ll clear it out tomorrow.”

###

Myra fit in nicely at the dump. Her sharp, clean angles offset the more organic, rolling mounds of trash. Her grey-brown sheen was reflected in the rotting cardboard that surrounded it, and the rats didn’t mind the slight smell of rot.

In time, the wind and the rain would wash away the surface layers of paint, revealing two gleaming beetle-brown eyes and an uncertain face. The winter snow would render Myra’s kitchen brittle, crumbling it away to reveal prom in time for spring. Spring rains would clear away gangly teenage limbs in favor of crooked teeth and puppy charm. But by now the painting would be buried under a hundred hundred tons of shattered glass and crumpled foil and rubber boot soles and tangles of wet plastic bags.

It would take 50 years for the rubber boot soles to return to the earth, and another hundred to reduce the foil to fistfuls of aluminum ash. The plastic bags would last a thousand years, or more, even, if buried where the wind and the rain and the sleet could not reach them. But canvas could decompose cleanly in only a handful of months. The plastic bags would poison the earth around it, rendering it blighted and barren even after they had disintegrated to dust, but the painting would not even leave a stain.