AN: Fic told from first-person Deidara's POV, set in an AU resembling the modern world. Since Sasori and Deidara are both artists and criminals, there will be a little gore but nothing different from the manga. I don't know much about contemporary art aside from some research and imagination. And this is for me attempting to write again after a long time of being blocked, I know it is far from perfect.
"The first step to eternal life is you have to die."
"A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment is all you can ever expect from perfection."
- Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
"I don't know about Art with a capital A. What I do know is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks to me."
- House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
"…my heart can beat with bricks and strings…"
- Artpop, Lady Gaga
I
If you are reading this, then I'm probably dead. You've heard of a glorious explosion, something never seen in the world before, and my name. They have speculated about that 'crazy pyromaniac artist who talks about art as an explosion', the tabloids, news websites, and social justice bloggers all with something to say about it. But that's just me, imagining a future reader of this, but of course while I'm writing it now it is for me and me alone. I'm still alive, but I'll be dead next month. Don't worry, I don't have a terminal disease or a death threat or a serial killer after me. My death would be entirely of my own will, my suicide all planned out. The only thing is when. I'll know when it will be when the moment presents itself, I'm certain it is near.
What's with this business of talking to an invisible audience? The scenery is so boring, its noontime and I'm only typing it on my old netbook. Something like an account of my life. A memoir, that is, before I disappear. Yeah, I'm all about art is a bang and beauty is fleeting but I don't want to be entirely forgotten after my death. That is, if someone ever cared to open this thing and I don't accidentally explode it or something. That reminds me that I must remove the password at least before I die, and leave a note to whoever who finds it.
I'm stalling, I know. First: I'm no writer. I'm an artist, I never had patience for novels or short stories. I rather like poems – they're fleeting, shorter, has more impact, has more potential for beauty than dry prose. But I'm not here to talk about literary preferences.
I thought to write this because the past three years have been so weird. If I tell it to anyone else now, they wouldn't believe me. I need to make sense of it all. He's dead now, the person who started all the weird shit. So I must go back to the beginning, before Sasori and his puppets and his catacombs. My story wouldn't be complete without him, maybe this story will be about him. Not story – call it autobiography, or an extended suicide note.
Where do I start? Since I was young or... That's what memoirs are about, right? Or call this, "My life before Sasori".
First, things about me. I'm 21 years old and an art college dropout. How cliché is that? But then I realized that I'd rather make art than study about it, and also, I should have signed up for Nuclear Physics instead of Fine Arts... But then, I never liked studying or school really. I'd rather mix my chemicals like choice paints, and the resulting explosion of color and destruction is the only thing I've ever lived for. When I experimented with Molotov cocktails and handmade fireworks from soda and peroxide when I was 12, I was in love, and my first thought on seeing the first clay bird detonate into a fleeting kaleidoscope firework, was Holy shit I want to die that way, I want to die EXPLODING.
Before I go to Akasuna no Sasori, I'll narrate about my (dull) childhood. There was nothing much to remember. My mother, a blonde who looks just like me (if I were a girl), died when I was two. She died young, too, the same age I am now. She had an odd way of disinfecting a toilet bowl. Weird that it's the most vivid memory I have about her.
Don't try this at home. Get a bottle of rubbing alcohol, pour it along the insides of the toilet bowl, light a matchstick and throw it there. Get away quickly. A brief ring of fire will float upwards for a moment and then disappear. Do this in a dark bathroom for full effect. She tried different shapes, my favourite one was her intricate portrait of a crow on the cement floor of an empty parking lot... it did rise up like a phoenix. She died when a fire broke out in the club where she was partying. Her name was Diana.
My childhood was spent with relatives. I was the only blonde head in that family. There's nothing remarkable to remember about it, though me and both my cousins, Akatsuchi and Kurotsuchi, used to watch cartoons and anime together huddled on the floor. Talking about what we wanted to be in the future, Akatsuchi said he just wanted to eat and be a chef, Kurotsuchi wanted to be a Volcanologist, while I fantasized about being a kamikaze pilot... and Kurotsuchi asking why the hell would anyone want to do that, and there were no wars in this peaceful age to sacrifice myself anymore…
Where am I going? I think that I'm the one losing patience. I need to get this down, fast, in one piece. Get it down fast before I die.
—
I make enough money to live by, working for a fireworks store. Minimum wage but I never needed much. My job is mostly setting up the fireworks for events like weddings or birthdays, but the people only buy a lot during new year and that was months ago. Now, there's no special events, and I doubt I can last until then.
The only person I talk to is my next-door neighbor, a platinum-blonde, purple-eyed self-proclaimed priest named Hidan. He loans me money sometimes, though many times I have doubted his sanity. He also doubted about mine. He laughed when I called myself an artist but got nothing to show in my room but dirt. He had a weird kind of rosary and preached about the apocalypse in the streets. I never listened, despite him knocking on my door sometimes like a Jehovah's Witness, but not to talk about Yahweh but of his ancient god Jashin.
He would talk about his god, with tears in the beauty of his worship, but then our landlord Kakuzu would pass by to remind us to pay our rent and bills already then Hidan would utter the most colorful string of curses. In fact it was Kakuzu who helped me find that meager job for that small Chinese fireworks store.
Now all I do all day is shape clay but still creating nothing. The minute I hold clay in my hands, despair looms, and I become angry instead. Which makes things worse. I long for the days when my mind was free.
—
ART, OR CRIME? the tabloid headline on the newsstand said, from the paper yesterday that Hidan bought. So, these past few days there have been crimes in the various art circles of the city. It seems that dead bodies are the new craze, because this one was another fourteen year old girl found preserved in a formalin aquarium, her body turned to a mermaid. She was cut in half and sewn to the tail of a large fish.
The artist suspected crucified himself in the name of eternity.
These crazies were inspired by Akasuna no Sasori, you know, the famous puppeteer who is a hunted criminal now?
These bastards with their obsession with eternity and legacy, I wanted to explode all their asses. Real art is impermanence, not this immortality bullshit. These people are blind and this bastard Sasori, who is a notorious criminal, the best puppeteer in Asia since Monzaemon, is a loony who eventually stopped using wood and steel and instead had a brilliant idea of turning people into puppets.
It was his idea, that spread this sickness. I might respect his art, but its just an offence to me to try to force eternity and preserve the eternal beauty of man… when death and change is a fact of life. An explosion would be good. An explosion is the only true art. An explosion started this world and I am convinced an explosion will end everything. These damn 'artists' need a wake up call, an EXPLOSION.
Hidan would laugh at me, then Kakuzu would remind me of all the money I had to pay for damages if I was carried away by this 'I wanna explode everything' and destroyed the apartment building. You know, I know it is impossible but if I meet that Sasori guy I'd threaten to explode his stupid puppet collection to show him what true art is. Don't care if people hail him as the modern Da Vinci, he's got nothing on me. I hate the guy so much for all these imitators he spawned and this art craze that I hope won't become like an era like the Renaissance, death and mutilation and aspiring for immortality.
But meanwhile, me... I'm ashamed to admit it, but ever since dropping out of school I never worked on my art much. I mean, I create but never finish a thing. I'm never satisfied with what I make. I'm (I hate the word) blocked. I know I should practice and create, but my work falls short of the magnificence in my imagination. The city is crowded, congested with too many people and buildings, I long for open space. I wish to whatever gods that I could begin again, feel that exhilaration again. I blame school a little.
—
Hidan said there was a free art exhibit at the city's Cultural Center. The CC is a place for concerts and dances, plays and such. I pass by there a lot to look at sculptures and paintings. I don't talk to the artists that much if they're there because when I start talking about my art views they'd look at me with my long hair and crazy face and think I'm pretentious. So I don't talk anymore I just look and somehow try to find the magic, the feeling of creation. I am a dry desert as barren as Suna. My life only has meaning when I create, and for some reason I can't.
Hidan said he happened to pass by there, and the latest exhibit retrospective about Akasuna no Sasori entitled Artist as Atrocity. I scoffed, but I also wanted to see if I can see if some of his creations were there, so I can study them and see for myself if he deserved the title of genius. The CC was a twenty-minute walk away so I stopped for cheeseburger and coke at a McDonald's and imagined what I might see there.
I went there that night. There was no one around, it was a weekday and the place was usually crowded on weekends. I saw Sasori's exhibit, but I was pretty disappointed when I didn't see any of the works of the puppeteer himself, but only pictures of them. Beautiful dolls.
Sasori was a hunted criminal. He turned PEOPLE into PUPPETS. And somehow there were these sick people who admired his art, I dread to say it, his fans, and he started this annoying freaks who claim to be inspired and cosplay as dolls, who even go so far as write letters to him that he may preserve them after death… That's sick, so wrong, to want that grisly immortality and what an ugly, fictional word, immortality. Words associated with Sasori, words that defined his art: eternal, enduring, legacy, classic.
God, I hate these places, the dust-covered permanent displays that hasn't changed for years…
I wandered around, though my fists clenched and my teeth ground against itself inside my mouth. The puppets pictures, juvenilia, before Sasori ran away and was never found again.
Some doll that looked like a scorpion. Those that looked like Peking Opera, realer than wax replicas, even if I don't agree with this eternal art, I admire how prolific he is. These hundreds of pictures, these puppets, he must have made a thousand…
(and while me, what's the last thing I did? I squeeze clay in my palms, forming nothing, trying to form distorted birds and animals, and I wish I had mouths on my palms that can make the sculptures in my mind, but for some reason I cannot. I cannot create art again, and try as I might I only think of that perfect thing I cannot grasp at. I might as well kill myself now, nothing to show, how can I call myself an artist? Clay is empty, and I've tried it before, turning them to
EXPLOSIONS)
I walked around the empty gallery, alone with my raging thoughts, until I was sick of looking at Sasori's pictures, not art itself but an image of it, then I walked fast the maze of walls to eventually find the exit around here somewhere when I was suddenly stopped by
Transformation I-IV, the installation's label on the floor said, white Helvetica on a black plastic label. I took a step back, there is a circle carpet like a multi-colored Buddhist mandala on the floor. Four chairs faced the four directions. On the chairs sat puppets, sculptures that look almost the same. They were sculptures of the same boy, red haired, pale, pretty. It looked so damn real I was taken aback.
The first was looked like it was still a flesh-and-blood human.
The second one exposed mechanical insides, now half-human.
The third one, had a heart on his hand, and from skin it looked like the flesh was replaced with porcelain or something else, but it implied that it was no longer skin.
The fourth was empty. As if the boy, now a puppet, has already walked away. It was the blank space that caused more dread that I walked away and saw the exit.
The exit led to the parking lot. I turned toward the street to go back home, and then I came face to face with a boy with the same face from Transformation I-IV.
—
I looked at him, then back at the exhibits. My instinct told me to run but for some reason my feet stayed in place. This was so sudden that I felt my sense of reality shift.
He smiled, amused, as if he read how creeped out I was. "It looks like no one's interested in Sasori's exhibits today. I'm taking them, back to the artist, you're lucky this is the last day of the exhibit."
Somehow his voice, and how I saw he was a human and not part of the exhibit, relieved me. I didn't walk away, but instead I found myself following him back to the gallery as he took down the pictures.
"Hey, can I help?" I asked and he nodded.
There were around a hundred pictures, and I took the pictures from the walls. He began disassembling the Transformation I-IV. It was uncanny looking at the boy carting off his replicas to the parking lot. So this Sasori used cute boys like him as his models. This one looked younger than me. I wonder how was it for him to pose for these series of sculptures.
When he was done taking the sculptures away so he helped me take the rest of the frames on display. He stacked the pictures on the cart, and pushed it towards the exit. I followed him, helping him unload the things on the back of a small truck.
"If you're going somewhere, I can take you for a ride," he said. It was already dark outside and his was the last car in the parking lot.
"I think I can use that, thanks... I live nearby, anyway, just along Weaver street," I said, and opened the front seat of the car.
He drove in silence. We found ourselves stuck in the night traffic, though my street was only a turn away. Without thinking, I stole glances at him throughout ride. There was something weird about him that I could not place or describe.
"I'll go down here, thanks again," I said, and he stopped the car outside the gate of the apartment building. I got down and got a last look at him before he left.
"By the way," he said, and in the dark I can only see the gleam of his eyes and the whites of his teeth, he's grinning.
"Transformation one-to-four... is a self-portrait of the artist."
Then he sped away. So that's what was off about him. It was a delayed realization. Forgive my words, but jesus christ, that was... it was Akasuna no Sasori himself. My guts tell me that he's the real thing.
I just came face to face with the artist I loathed but never met (until now). Somehow, I felt at that moment, that my life will never again be the same.
...to be continued