The Jakes and What Was Encountered There

Around 2015 I saw a piece of art hanging in a gallery in New York City while taking a lunch. The concept was simple enough­— four or five boards of white picket fence flush together against a wall with a hole the size of a half dollar bored into one of the pieces. When I looked through the opening, there was a wide blue eye looking back at me from a large face suddenly one third visible. Was it a painting? Was it a mirror? Was it another person, an intern perhaps paying their dues in the MFA version of a dunk tank? I can still recall how it startled me and wish I had remembered to look between my couch cushions that morning before heading to my barista job for the two or three grand needed to purchase the piece so I could investigate further. 

Spurred by my rereading of a great favorite novel, this is my modest homage to that experience some ten years later, when white eyes watching through broken structures often preludes such incredible, mindless violence. Imperialism turning inward, the end of the myth, the total dissolution of the collective, the war coming home–– is this not what the kid found waiting for him in the jakes once he stepped down beneath the footlights? 

Garrett Saleen is a writer and visual artist from Southern California. His work has appeared in the Santa Monica Review a handful of times, as well as in many other journals, including, most recently, Propagule and Citric Acid. He’s working on a debut novel titled Sinus Secrets of the Pharaohs. He lives in Seattle. Instagram: @jan_homm