1.
There is a famous photograph taken at the edge of death: inside a car parked by the sidewalk are all manner of large dogs, looking directly into the camera. They stare without smiling, with a peculiar severity, like women and men in nineteenth-century portraits. The photograph is itself black-and-white. Studying it, one commonly wonders, How did they get there? or remarks aloud, This is something else altogether. And indeed there is something unsettling about the sight of those large animals, packed quietly into the abandoned car. The photographer maintained that there were no dogs present when he took the picture: his subject was an empty automobile. A week after he developed the photograph, he developed cancer, and within a year he died.
2.
There is a famous painting composed at the edge of death: a broad cabinet is lined with cubbyholes, each of which is deeply recessed and shadowed, and in each of which a doll maker has left a half-finished wooden hand; in the foreground, a doll of a boy and a doll of a girl, both their eye sockets empty. Looking at the painting for the first time, one commonly assumes that the hands are reaching out to seize the boy and girl, who cannot see to defend themselves. On repeat viewings, however, one begins to sense that the boy and the girl, eyeless, mute, are themselves summoning the hands, which reach not for either of them but for the viewer. The painting bears no signature. Its first owner killed herself, and its second killed his family before killing himself, in both cases within a year of having acquired the painting. Its present owner is storing it in a warehouse in New Jersey, where he will occasionally arrange a viewing. On the question of whether, in moonlight, the hinge of the girl doll’s jaw unlocks, such that her mouth appears to open, he is casually dismissive: That is a rumor. Or: I have never observed this phenomenon. Or: Her mouth, it is always closed.
3.
There is a famous book written at the edge of death: it comprises descriptions of the face that the reader will see looking back at them, if they look out to the lit-up window across the street. For every page a different face. The book was anonymously written, published and distributed, in a run of just a hundred copies. No facial description exceeds a paragraph, and while they differ in small details—the gender of the watcher, its age, whether its mouth will be open, or closed, or moving in rapid spasms—each description employs phrases like horror-stricken face, dread face, and so on. The book is the size of a telephone directory, with a plain white cover. It is said that for any given reader, the book contains one face whose gaze was meant for them particularly, at one particular moment in their life. Thus it may happen that a reader will sense, upon reading an entry, that yes, undoubtedly, this is the face that was meant for them—yet still never know when to expect to see it. Whether out their bedroom window, or a restaurant’s plate-glass window, or out the window of an office building. Whether if they looked up now, or to the side now, or if they did not look. In this way every window comes to be haunted by the potentiality of a gaze. As for the many blank pages bound in the book, it is said that these are descriptions whose gazes have been met. When a reader sees the face that was meant for them, their entry in the book—the very ink on the page—is erased. As yet, no one has come forth to lay claim to a blank. To report what was written there, or what they saw.
4.
There is a famous song recorded at the edge of death: a band performs in a nightclub, and midway through the performance the bandleader begins to address the audience—he speaks a few words in a foreign language, which are followed by a band member’s solo; he speaks another few words, and another member performs a solo, and so on through all the instruments, the audience applauding after each performance. Listening to the song for the first time, one commonly assumes that the man is introducing each of the band members by name and that they are performing by way of introduction. However, the more one listens, the more clearly one picks out the sounds that the man is making: they are words of no recognizable language, a dark gibberish, more like guttural noise than human speech. Each word is long, and clotted, and it becomes impossible to believe that he is introducing the band members by name. Replaying the song and focusing just on the man’s cadence, a listener might announce, He is describing an apocalypse in a dead tongue, or, He is pronouncing an ancient curse, and it is true that the wash of white noise at the end of the recording—that hiss of static, itself like a final solo—sounds so much like a tide bearing forth a curse.
5.
There is a famous film recorded at the edge of death: the camera frames the back of a chair, which is situated at the end of a semidarkened room; draped over the chair is a black shirt, which in the distance and the dark, as well as the graininess of the film stock, looks like the long black hair of a man, sitting in the chair with his back to the viewer. Indeed, for the first few moments viewers tend to mistake the shirt for a man’s hair. What is he doing? they ask one another. He’s just sitting there. The video, a static shot of this chair, lasts more than ten minutes: the shirt does not move, no one enters the frame, the camera is neither repositioned nor adjusted. When it becomes clear that the black length draped over the chair, perfectly still and quiet, is only a shirt, viewers assume for a while that a character, the shirt’s owner, will soon be introduced to claim it. They wait for the moment when a human being will walk into frame and grab the shirt off the chair. Why are we watching this shirt? they ask. Or: Is this all that is going to happen? Of course nothing does happen. Except that in the last seconds, before the video cuts off, the room appears to lighten slightly. It even becomes possible, in this improved lighting, to see why the shirt had been mistaken for hair in the first place—for yes, it is textured somewhat like hair and tapers at the end like hair. Occasionally viewers laugh outright: Just like the long black hair of a man! or If I didn’t already know that that was a shirt… Then, slowly, the long-haired man begins to turn in his chair, revealing a face that is like the nightmare of a face.
