far

Flash Fiction

Now at Last

Pia Koh
issue six

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The other night my dad and I watched Ben Rivers’ NOW, AT LAST! which is just a film of a sloth hanging upside-down from a horizontal branch for 39 minutes. It’s deeply boring, but that’s the point and reason it’s good–I mean if you have that sort of temperament. It was nighttime and we were on the couch staring at the strong supple sloth hanging from the branch, my dad clenching his hand gripper and me farting on the short end of the L trying to see how much I could get away with.

As we watched the sloth I thought there was something altogether pleasant about things that made you bored. But then I had to remember Lady Deadlock, who was bored of everything and just wanted to die. The irony is that if she could have seen the documentary of the sloth moving across the screen, there’s no way she would say she was bored. I pictured her sitting between me and my dad on the couch, wearing a green corset and heavy green skirts. I always imagined Lady Deadlock piling her hair up high and fixing it with an emerald beret. She would be totally captivated, leaning on her knees to get closer to the screen, while my dad and I would quietly observe the antiquated woman seeing for the first time the art of the moving image. That would be thrilling, I mean watching her watch the documentary. Because if there’s anything to know about boredom, it’s that the things that make you bored are never boring the first time you see them.

Just look at those long pointed nails and spindly legs which are initially really something miraculous to the seer. But after about four minutes of examining closely all those images in the frame that Ben Rivers wanted us to examine, there remains not much more to do by way of looking. By minute ten I might have sketched the sloth, I knew every one of its fuzzy limbs so intimately well. If only I’d gone in for drawing, I could have turned off the TV and called it a night. That’s the difference between artists and writers–artists can look at something for five minutes and make art about it, meanwhile writers need to sit with the subject until they reach a state of subliminal boredom. It’s not so much a matter of concentration or technique but just sheer boredom and then despite all odds fighting to find something interesting to say about it. Artists might glance sidelong at a thing and paint it on a broad canvas; they can even make very emotional work with no plan like that. Any artist I tell this to gets defensive and says I don’t know anything about the craft, which is how I know my suspicion is correct.

I glanced at my dad clenching the hand gripper and staring at the screen with a totally bland expression. My dad wasn’t an artist or a writer. My dad went in for finance and then quit and became a day trader. Then he quit that and became an alcoholic, and quit alcohol and became sober. Now he lives like me in a state of subliminal boredom.

We watched the sloth yawn tenderly. I learned a long time ago how the sloth only interrupts its boring existence once a week when it comes down from the tree and defecates. This is always a risky endeavor, because the sloth moves so ludicrously slow that any passing jaguars can swipe it in a pinch. Yet once a week the sloth takes this risk for the sake of the tree, which is apparently fertilized by its feces. The sloth realizes that if it didn’t do this thing to maintain the entity with which it lives in boring symbiosis, neither of them would have any worthwhile existence. That’s something beautiful and profound in the most organic way. Yet despite all that, by minute thirty I was so helplessly bored, I realized I’d been picturing Lady Deadlock in all sorts of positions beside me on the couch.

I turned to the section of the sofa where she lay naked, I mean in my imagination, and that’s when I caught eyes with my dad. He was clenching the hand gripper and staring at me with a strange expression.

“When is this movie going to end?” he asked.

I said: “Nine minutes.”

He said: “Hm. Okay,” and turned back to the screen. But the way his mouth was open I knew he had something else to tell me. So then he turned back to me and said: “I have to ask. Are you breaking wind?”

I stared at him for a second, inert. But then I had to crack a smile. And he couldn’t help but laugh also, and we both laughed together briefly. Then we turned back to the screen at the same time, both of us still smiling to ourselves, and continued watching the sloth inch slowly along his tree.