This is a story of a man who was afraid to lie down on the bed.
His name was Gordon Baltimore. This was one of those men who always try to behave independently.
The day was a little bit cloudy, but hot and humid. Gordon, Jess, Penny, Benjamin, Tobias and Joanna decided to go down to the small town of Umbertide.
A building that they entered was being restored. It was a church - Chiesa di Santa Croce. Deprived of all the paintings and figures, filled up with scaffolding and trash, it seemed to be entirely soulless. God wasn’t there, for sure.
Tobias set up the tripod, measured light and started to take pictures while turning the camera around. Joanna set up the bed in the middle of it, covered it with four white bedsheets and two white pillows. Gordon stood right next to it and put one of his hands on the pillow. He was all white too: white shirt and pants, white jacket and white hair.
When Tobias looked into the viewfinder of his old Rolleiflex, he saw a white shape of a bed, Gordon’s body and the quite dark figure of Benjamin, whom Joanna placed high in the main altar. “Benjamin is growing out of Gordon’s head” thought Tobias. “Benjamin is Jesus Christ, but he is growing out of Gordon’s head after all,” thought Joanna. He was very young, only 16 years old, but as Penny once put it – he wasn’t afraid to express his opinions clearly.
They didn’t even talk too much, everyone knew their jobs. Penny rested in one of the side altars in a long, tight red dress and red lipstick. Later on Jess said that she looked like Coco Chanel and she did. She was smiling and this half-conscious smile made her a bit perverse. Penny was a woman who had decided to go her certain way, to love this and not another man and perhaps this is why she was so unbelievably calm.
Look – Joanna turned to Tobias – The face of this little figure of Virgin Mary in the niche behind Penny is crushed.
– Yeah, really.
Jess stood in another huge cement niche in the side altar on the right. Wearing blue pants and a blue top she was holding her hips as if trying to push them up. In Joanna’s eyes she was filling up the niche entirely. Her beauty was of a delicate and somewhat distancing nature. She resembled this church. Her long, blond, curly hair was sinking into the cement.
Tobias and Joanna were the first witnesses: they understood, that Gordon was representing mankind, condemned from the beginning by a lack of free will.
– I have never told you that, Jess – said Gordon – but I decided to sign a certain agreement. For every single pleasure that I really want to experience and I let myself go for, I will die one day earlier than they predicted.
– Who proposed such a thing to you? – asked Penny.
– That was my own idea. I was afraid to lose a taste of life.
– This way you’ll lose life instead of its taste. – Tobias thought aloud.
– I am leaving – said Benjamin – I don’t even want to think about all this.
He didn’t though.
– Now you know why l am not able to make up my mind about this bed. I apologize for that, but this pleasure could cost me a day.
They had to open the door, so that more light entered the church.
Right after they started, they heard a loud shout in front of the building. And subsequently – an incredible human-animal scream. A big, fat Italian was lying on the street doing those slow, crawling gestures as if trying to catch the air above him, trying to pronounce the words of his own language that suddenly became so foreign to him. A stream of blood was flowing from his right eye and his broken glasses without the right lens were lying on the ground nearby.
One hour later Tobias returned after he reported to the police what happened, for they had called him up as a main witness of the shooting. He was told that the murderer turned out to be a 76 year old guy, a neighbor of the victim and that he reported himself to the police, pointing out those who had witnessed the event.
While taking pictures of all of them against the background of niches, pilasters and altars, it turned out that they are duplicating Gordon’s case. Well, perhaps in not that drastic version. People were deprived of minutes from their life by every single shutter release. Each picture took away from them a bit of breath, talk, swallowing, angers, cramps, boredom and pleasure – a bit of time (their time) – according to the exposure time. They spent many hours in Chiesa di Santa Croce, shooting many versions of themselves.
Gordon nevertheless was hesitating all the time whether he should lie down or not. It took him the entire day.
