The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan

Author:Eliza Barry Callahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646222148
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

The next session took place early in the New Year. The hypnotherapist arrived in his frame dripping wet. The light was flat and his face inconclusive. He began without small talk and asked that I focus on one thing in the room only. He told me to transfer myself onto that thing. He asked that I become that thing, wherever it was. Be over there, he said, pointing nowhere. He set a timer and exited the frame.

I looked at something in his room, not mine. A small black painting hung in the top left corner of the screen.

I remembered reading about a color-field painter who spoke about one patch of red being less red than a wall of red. I thought then of how one moment of quiet was less quiet than a long stretch of it. But I found that this long stretch of quiet had in turn begun to feel louder than anything I had heard before.

The image had frozen without my knowledge and when he returned to the screen, he was completely dry and asking me how long the connection had been cut for.

He said this exercise was called The Portrait. He asked me if I had been able to successfully transfer myself onto anything in the room—this would allow me to make a portrait of myself as a ready-made object.

I told him no but that I would try it again in the future. He said he was just here to supply the tools and asked what object I had selected. I told him I had chosen the painting in the top left corner of the screen. He said in the future I should not choose art as the object of my portrait, and he apologized for not saying this in advance.

He said that the painting was painted by a painter who was known not for his paintings but for his frames. That this frame was not even made by the painter known for his frames but by a framer in the garment district. This painting was not known for anything besides its hanging right where it was. It was a gift from a friend who had received it by way of the dead—and had arrived in the mail, accompanied by a printed email that said, “The flowers are chrysanthemums.”

He said that his wife liked it more than he did. He thought it was a nice painting but that yes, he was also suspicious of still lifes with black backdrops and unnatural light sources. Oil on canvas, 1970 or something. He said this painter had framed da ­Vinci’s portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, ­Giotto’s The Epiphany, and some Klines and Mother­wells. He held a postcard with a reproduction of da ­Vinci’s portrait in the frame. He said Léger was the framer’s mentor when he was in Paris on the GI Bill and told him to give up painting. On CBS Sunday Morning, the correspondent said that the name of this painter of the chrysanthemums in the white vase was like Kleenex in the framing world, a standard.

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