《渺小一生》:“你这个计划会进行多久？”
Ali was a photographer who was working on a series called “The History of Asians in America,” for which he created a photograph to represent every decade of Asians in America since 1890. For each image, he made a different diorama representing an epochal event or theme in one of the three-foot-square pine boxes that Richard had built for him, which he populated with little plastic figures he bought at the craft store and painted, and trees and roads that he glazed from potter’s clay, and backdrops he rendered with a brush whose bristles were so fine they resembled eyelashes. He then shot the dioramas and made C-prints. Of the four of them, only Ali was represented, and he had a show in seven months about which the other three knew never to ask because any mention of it made him start bleating with anxiety. Ali wasn’t progressing in historical order—he had the two thousands done (a stretch of lower Broadway thick with couples, all of whom were white men and, walking just a few steps behind them, Asian women), and the nineteen-eighties (a tiny Chinese man being beaten by two tiny white thugs with wrenches, the bottom of the box greased with varnish to resemble a parking lot’s rain-glossed tarmac), and was currently working on the nineteen-forties, for which he was painting a cast of fifty men, women, and children who were meant to be prisoners in the Tule Lake internment camp. Ali’s work was the most laborious of all of theirs, and sometimes, when they were procrastinating on their own projects, they would wander into Ali’s cube and sit next to him, and Ali, barely lifting his head from the magnifying mirror under which he held a three-inch figure on whom he was painting a herringbone skirt and saddle shoes, would hand them a snarl of steel wool that he needed shredded to resemble tumbleweeds, or some fine-gauge wire that he wanted punctuated with little ties so that it would look barbed.
阿里是摄影艺术家，正在完成“亚裔人在美国的历史”系列，他选取了从1890年开始的每个十年中具有代表性的亚裔人在美国的照片，然后针对每一张影像中某个划时代的事件或主题制作立体透视模型，放在理查德帮他做的三英尺见方的松木箱子里。模型中有他从工艺店买来并涂上颜色的塑料小人偶，还有他用陶土上釉后做成的树和马路，他还用一支笔毛细得像眼睫毛的超细画笔画了背景。然后，他会拍下这个立体透视模型，做彩色冲印。他们四人之中，只有阿里有代理画廊，而且他七个月后有个展览。其他三人知道最好完全不要去问展览的事，因为只要一提到，就会让他焦虑得碎碎念。阿里并没有按照历史顺序制作，他已经做完2000年的作品（下城百老汇大道的一段路，有一对对男女，全是白种男人，落后几步的则是亚裔女人），以及20世纪80年代的（两个白人流氓小人偶正在用扳手痛殴一个华人男子小人偶，木箱底部涂了厚厚的清漆，模仿雨后湿得发亮的停车场柏油路面），现在他正在创作20世纪40年代的那张，里头有五十个小假人，男人、女人、儿童都有，代表二次大战期间图利湖拘留营的日裔人。阿里的作品是他们四人里头最费工夫的，有时候，他们自己的案子卡住了，就会晃进阿里的区域，坐在他旁边。阿里一直凑在他的放大镜面前，放大镜下是个三英寸[2]高的小人偶，他正在给它画人字呢裙子和马鞍鞋。他们进去时，阿里几乎头也不抬，只递给他们一团钢丝绒，要他们撕开来做成袖珍版风滚草，或是某一面细目铁丝网，他们需要绑上小结，看起来才会像带刺的铁丝网。
But it was Richard’s work that JB admired the most. He was a sculptor too, but worked with only ephemeral materials. He’d draw on drafting paper impossible shapes, and then render them in ice, in butter, in chocolate, in lard, and film them as they vanished. He was gleeful about witnessing the disintegration of his works, but JB, watching just last month as a massive, eight-foot-tall piece Richard had made—a swooping sail-like batwing of frozen grape juice that resembled coagulated blood—dripped and then crumbled to its demise, had found himself unexpectedly about to cry, though whether from the destruction of something so beautiful or the mere everyday profundity of its disappearance, he was unable to say. Now Richard was less interested in substances that melted and more interested in substances that would attract decimators; he was particularly interested in moths, which apparently loved honey. He had a vision, he told JB, of a sculpture whose surface so writhed with moths that you couldn’t even see the shape of the thing they were devouring. The sills of his windows were lined with jars of honey, in which the porous combs floated like fetuses suspended in formaldehyde.
但杰比最欣赏的是理查德的作品。理查德也是雕塑家，但他只用短暂性的材料。他会在草稿纸上画出不可思议的形状，然后用冰块、奶油、巧克力或猪油做出雕塑，同时拍摄这些作品消失的过程。见证自己作品的消融，让他很开心，但杰比上个月看理查德一件八英尺[3]高的巨大作品（用有如凝固血液的冷冻葡萄汁，做出一对俯冲而下、有如风帆的蝙蝠翅膀）一路融化滴落，最后垮下来时，他发现自己无由地想哭，不过到底是因为一件这么美丽的作品瓦解了，还是因为作品消失时所具有的那种寻常的深奥性，他也说不上来。现在，理查德对融化的物质没太大兴趣了，但开始对引发毁灭的物质有了兴趣，尤其是蛾，而蛾显然喜欢蜂蜜。理查德跟杰比提过，他想做出一件雕塑，表面密密麻麻挤满了在吃蜂蜜的蛾，根本看不出底下雕塑的形状。他那边的窗台上排着一罐罐蜂蜜，里头浮着小片蜂巢，仿佛泡在福尔马林里的胚胎。
JB was the lone classicist among them. He painted. Worse, he was a figurative painter. When he had been in graduate school, no one really cared about figurative work: anything—video art, performance art, photography—was more exciting than painting, and truly anything was better than figurative work. “That’s the way it’s been since the nineteen-fifties,” one of his professors had sighed when JB complained to him. “You know that slogan for the marines? ‘The few, the brave …’? That’s us, we lonely losers.”
杰比是四人之中唯一的古典派。他是画家，更糟糕的是，他是具象画家。他在研究生院时，根本没人在乎具象作品。其他的任何东西，不管是录像艺术、行为艺术，还是摄影，都比绘画更令人兴奋，而且真的，任何东西都好过具象作品。“从20世纪50年代以来就是这样了。”有回杰比跟一个教授抱怨，那教授叹气说道：“你知道海军陆战队那句格言吗，‘少数的，勇敢的’，我们就是这样，孤单的失败者。”
It was not as if, over the years, he hadn’t attempted other things, other mediums (that stupid, fake, derivative Meret Oppenheim hair project! Could he have done anything cheaper? He and Malcolm had gotten into a huge fight, one of their biggest, when Malcolm had called the series “ersatz Lorna Simpson,” and of course the worst thing was that Malcolm had been completely right), but although he would never have admitted to anyone else that he felt there was something effete, girlish almost and at any rate certainly not gangster, about being a figurative painter, he had recently had to accept that it was what he was: he loved paint, and he loved portraiture, and that was what he was going to do.
这些年来，他不是没试过其他东西、其他材质。（那个愚蠢、冒牌、衍生自梅雷·奥本海姆的头发计划真是廉价无比！他和马尔科姆还因此大吵一架，是他们吵得最凶的一次。当时马尔科姆把那个系列称作“人造洛娜·辛普森”，更糟糕的是，马尔科姆说得一点也没错。）尽管他绝不会承认，但他其实觉得具象画家的身份有点软弱、甚至有点女孩子气，而且一点也不像黑帮分子。不过最近，他接受了自己就是具象画家：他喜欢画画，而且热爱画人像，所以那就是他要走的路。
So: Then what? He had known people—he knew people—who were, technically, much better artists than he was. They were better draftsmen, they had better senses of composition and color, they were more disciplined. But they didn’t have any ideas. An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas. And for a long time, he simply didn’t have any. He tried to draw only black people, but a lot of people drew black people, and he didn’t feel he had anything new to add. He drew hustlers for a while, but that too grew dull. He drew his female relatives, but found himself coming back to the black problem. He began a series of scenes from Tintin books, with the characters portrayed realistically, as humans, but it soon felt too ironic and hollow, and he stopped. So he lazed from canvas to canvas, doing paintings of people on the street, of people on the subway, of scenes from Ezra’s many parties (these were the least successful; everyone at those gatherings were the sort who dressed and moved as if they were constantly being observed, and he ended up with pages of studies of posing girls and preening guys, all of their eyes carefully averted from his gaze), until one night, he was sitting in Jude and Willem’s depressing apartment on their depressing sofa, watching the two of them assemble dinner, negotiating their way through their miniature kitchen like a bustling lesbian couple. This had been one of the rare Sunday nights he wasn’t at his mother’s, because she and his grandmother and aunts were all on a tacky cruise in the Mediterranean that he had refused to go on. But he had grown accustomed to seeing people and having dinner—a real dinner—made for him on Sundays, and so had invited himself over to Jude and Willem’s, both of whom he knew would be home because neither of them had any money to go out.
那么，接下来呢？他人面广，认识一些技艺比他好很多的艺术家。他们的素描更厉害，对构图和色彩的感受更敏锐，工作起来也更有纪律。但他们没有任何创意。就像作家和作曲家一样，艺术家也需要主题，需要创意。有很长一段时间，他什么创意也没有。他试过只画黑人，但很多人画过黑人，他觉得自己不能增添什么新意。有一阵子，他又画阻街女郎，但后来也觉得没意思。他画过他的女性亲戚，但发现自己又回到了黑人的老问题上。他画过一系列《丁丁历险记》漫画里的场景，把里头的角色画得非常写实，像真人，但很快就觉得这太过讽刺且空洞，就不画了。于是，他很没劲地画了一张又一张，画街上的人，画地铁里的人，画埃兹拉众多派对中的场景（这批最不成功：在那些聚会上，每个人的打扮和举止都一副随时要让人观察的模样，最后他的素描本子上只有一堆摆姿势的年轻女郎和精心打扮的男子，所有人的眼睛都刻意避开他的目光），直到一天晚上，他坐在裘德和威廉那间悲惨公寓的悲惨沙发上，看着两人张罗晚餐，像一对忙乱的女性伴侣似的在袖珍厨房里闪来躲去。那是星期天，他难得没去他母亲家，因为他母亲和外婆、两个阿姨都去参加一趟很逊的地中海邮轮之旅，他拒绝加入。但他从小就习惯星期天有人做一顿像样的晚餐给他吃，就自己跑去裘德和威廉那里。他知道他们会在家，因为这两人都没钱出去吃饭。
He had his sketch pad with him, as he always did, and when Jude sat down at the card table to chop onions (they had to do all their prep work on the table because there was no counter space in the kitchen), he began drawing him almost unthinkingly. From the kitchen came a great banging, and the smell of smoking olive oil, and when he went in to discover Willem whacking at a piece of butterflied chicken with the bottom of an omelet pan, his arm raised over the meat as if to spank it, his expression oddly peaceful, he drew him as well.
他向来随身带着素描本，那天晚上裘德坐在餐厅那张小牌桌前开始切洋葱时（他们不得不在那张桌子上备料，因为厨房没有料理台），杰比几乎想都没想就开始画他。这时厨房传来巨大的敲击声，还有橄榄油冒烟的气味。他跑进去看，发现威廉拿着一只小煎锅，正用锅底拍打一块剪掉背骨、摊平了的全鸡，他的手臂扬起，像是在打那块肉的屁股，他的表情出奇的平静，于是杰比也画了他。
He wasn’t sure, then, that he was really working toward anything, but the next weekend, when they all went out to Pho Viet Huong, he brought along one of Ali’s old cameras and shot the three of them eating and then, later, walking up the street in the snow. They were moving particularly slowly in deference to Jude, because the sidewalks were slippery. He saw them lined up in the camera’s viewfinder: Malcolm, Jude, and Willem, Malcolm and Willem on either side of Jude, close enough (he knew, having been in the position himself) to catch him if he skidded but not so close that Jude would suspect that they were anticipating his fall. They had never had a conversation that they would do this, he realized; they had simply begun it.
当时杰比并不确定自己接下来的创作方向，但下一个周末，他们去越乡餐馆聚餐时，他带了一台阿里的旧相机，拍下了三个人吃饭，以及在下雪的纽约街道走路的照片。因为人行道很滑，为了尊重裘德，他们走得特别慢。杰比从相机取景窗里看着他们三人一字排开：马尔科姆、裘德、威廉，马尔科姆和威廉走在裘德两边，够近（他知道，因为他自己也曾站在那样的位置），如果裘德脚下打滑就可以抓住他们；但又不要太近，免得裘德疑心他们认定他会摔倒。杰比忽然意识到，他们从没谈过他们要做这件事，而是直接就去做了。
He took the picture. “What’re you doing, JB?” asked Jude, at the same time as Malcolm complained, “Cut it out, JB.”
他拍了照。“杰比，你在干吗？”裘德问，同时马尔科姆也抱怨：“杰比，别拍了。”
The party that night was on Centre Street, in the loft of an acquaintance of theirs, a woman named Mirasol whose twin, Phaedra, they knew from college. Once inside, everyone dispersed into their different subgroups, and JB, after waving at Richard across the room and noting with irritation that Mirasol had provided a whole tableful of food, meaning that he’d just wasted fourteen dollars at Pho Viet Huong when he could’ve eaten here for free, found himself wandering toward where Jude was talking with Phaedra and some fat dude who might have been Phaedra’s boyfriend and a skinny bearded guy he recognized as a friend of Jude’s from work. Jude was perched on the back of one of the sofas, Phaedra next to him, and the two of them were looking up at the fat and skinny guys and all of them were laughing at something: He took the picture.
那天晚上的派对在中央街一间LOFT改装的公寓举行，主人他们都认识，一个叫米拉索尔的女人，他们大学时就认识她的双胞胎姐妹菲德拉。一进门，他们四个人就各自散开，加入了不同的小团体。杰比跟房间对面的理查德挥挥手后，发现米拉索尔提供了满桌子的食物，很是懊恼，这表示他明明可以来这里吃免费的食物，却硬生生在越乡餐馆浪费了十四元。然后，杰比不自觉地走向和裘德对话的那一小群人，一个是菲德拉，一个可能是菲德拉男朋友的胖子，还有个瘦巴巴的胡须男，他认出这是裘德工作上的朋友。裘德靠在一张沙发的背后，菲德拉在他旁边，两人往上看着胖子和瘦子，四个人同时在大笑：他拍下了那个画面。
Normally at parties he grabbed or was grabbed by a group of people, and spent the night as the nuclei for a variety of three- or foursomes, bounding from one to the next, gathering the gossip, starting harmless rumors, pretending to share confidences, getting others to tell him who they hated by divulging hatreds of his own. But this night, he traveled the room alert and purposeful and largely sober, taking pictures of his three friends as they moved in their own patterns, unaware that he was trailing them. At one point, a couple of hours in, he found them by the window with just one another, Jude saying something and the other two leaning in close to hear him, and then in the next moment, the three of them leaning back and all laughing, and although for a moment he felt both wistful and slightly jealous, he was also triumphant, as he had gotten both shots. Tonight, I am a camera, he told himself, and tomorrow I will be JB again.
通常在派对中，他会吸引一小群人，或者被一小群人吸引，成为那三四个人的核心，然后又跑到另一群人中去，花蝴蝶似的到处收集八卦，散播一些无伤的流言，假装分享秘密，借着说出自己恨什么人来诱使别人说出他们恨谁。但这天晚上，他机警而目标坚定地在派对上游走，几乎没喝酒，悄悄拍摄他的三个朋友，而他们三个各自移动来去，完全没意识到有人在关注他们。进去大约两小时后，他一度发现他们刚好彼此紧挨着站在窗边，裘德在说话，其他两个倾身聆听，下一刻，三个人又直起身子大笑。他虽然一时间感到渴望，有点嫉妒，但同时又有种胜利感，因为两个画面他都拍到了。今夜，我就是一台照相机，他告诉自己，明天，我又会变回杰比了。
In a way, he had never enjoyed a party more, and no one seemed to notice his deliberate rovings except for Richard, who, as the four of them were leaving an hour later to go uptown (Malcolm’s parents were in the country, and Malcolm thought he knew where his mother hid her weed), gave him an unexpectedly sweet old-man clap on the shoulder. “Working on something?”
在某种意义上，他从来没有这么享受一个派对，而且似乎没人注意到他刻意的行动，除了理查德。一个小时后，他们四个要离开派对去上城时（马尔科姆的爸妈去乡下度假了，而马尔科姆觉得他知道母亲把大麻藏在哪里），理查德意外得像老男人那样亲切地拍拍他的肩膀：“在进行什么计划吗？”
“I think so.”
“我想是的。”
“Good for you.”
“太好了。”
The next day he sat at his computer looking at the night’s images on the screen. The camera wasn’t a great one, and it had hazed every picture with a smoky yellow light, which, along with his poor focusing skills, had made everyone warm and rich and slightly soft-edged, as if they had been shot through a tumblerful of whiskey. He stopped at a close-up of Willem’s face, of him smiling at someone (a girl, no doubt) off camera, and at the one of Jude and Phaedra on the sofa: Jude was wearing a bright navy sweater that JB could never figure out belonged to him or to Willem, as both of them wore it so much, and Phaedra was wearing a wool dress the shade of port, and she was leaning her head toward his, and the dark of her hair made his look lighter, and the nubbly teal of the sofa beneath them made them both appear shining and jewel-like, their colors just-licked and glorious, their skin delicious. They were colors anyone would want to paint, and so he did, sketching out the scene first in his book in pencil, and then again on stiffer board in watercolors, and then finally on canvas in acrylics.
次日他坐在电脑前，看着屏幕上前一夜的影像。那台相机不是太好，每张照片都蒙着一层雾黄的光，再加上他拙劣的对焦技术，使每个人都显得温暖又饱满，而且轮廓稍微有些柔和，仿佛照片是隔着一杯威士忌拍下的。他停在一张威廉脸部特写的照片上，他正朝画面外的某个人微笑（当然了，是个年轻女郎），然后又看另一张裘德和菲德拉靠着沙发的照片：裘德穿着一件亮蓝色的毛衣（杰比一直搞不清那是他的还是威廉的，因为两个人都穿过好多次），菲德拉则穿着一件酒红色的羊毛洋装；她的头正凑近他，一头深色的头发把裘德的发色衬得更淡，他们下方的蓝绿色粗纹布面沙发衬托得两人散发光芒，有如珠宝。他们身上的种种颜色明亮灿烂，皮肤细致宜人。那些颜色任谁都会想画下来，于是他画了，先用铅笔在素描本上速写，再用水彩画在较硬的纸板上，最后才用亚克力颜料画在画布上。
That had been four months ago, and he now had almost eleven paintings completed—an astonishing output for him—all of scenes from his friends’ lives. There was Willem waiting to audition, studying the script a final time, the sole of one boot pressed against the sticky red wall behind him; and Jude at a play, his face half shadowed, at the very second he smiled (getting that shot had almost gotten JB thrown out of the theater); Malcolm sitting stiffly on a sofa a few feet away from his father, his back straight and his hands clenching his knees, the two of them watching a Buñuel film on a television just out of frame. After some experimentation, he had settled on canvases the size of a standard C-print, twenty by twenty-four inches, all horizontally oriented, and which he imagined might someday be displayed in a long snaking single layer, one that would wrap itself around a gallery’s walls, each image following the next as fluidly as cells in a film strip. The renderings were realistic, but photo-realistic; he had never replaced Ali’s camera with a better one, and he tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed quality the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away the top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.
那已经是四个月前的事情了。至今他完成了将近十一幅画，对他来说是很惊人的产量，十一幅全部取材自这些朋友的生活场景。有威廉在试镜等待时最后一次研究剧本，一只靴子的鞋底抵着身后黏答答的红色墙面。有裘德去看戏，脸部半笼罩在阴影中，就在那一刻他露出微笑（为了拍那张照片，杰比差点被赶出戏院）。还有马尔科姆僵硬地坐在一张沙发上，离他父亲几英尺远，他的背部挺直，双手紧抓着膝盖，两人看着画面外的电视机播放西班牙名导演布努埃尔（Luis Buñuel）的电影。经过几次试验后，杰比把画布的尺寸固定在标准彩色冲印的二十乘二十四英寸，一律横向，而且他想象着有一天展览时，这些画作会排列成一整排，像一条带子一样在画廊的墙面上绕一圈，一张接一张，有如胶卷上的小格子一般流畅。他的笔法是写实的，不过是照相写实；他始终用阿里的那部相机，没换成更好的，而且他试图让每幅画呈现出那部相机拍摄出来的柔和与模糊质感，仿佛有人抚去了表面那层清晰，留下了比肉眼所见更温柔的特质。
In his insecure moments, he sometimes worried the project was too fey, too inward—this was where having representation really helped, if only to remind you that someone liked your work, thought it important or at the very least beautiful—but he couldn’t deny the pleasure he got from it, the sense of ownership and contentment. At times he missed being part of the pictures himself; here was a whole narrative of his friends’ lives, his absence an enormous missing part, but he also enjoyed the godlike role he played. He got to see his friends differently, not as just appendages to his life but as distinct characters inhabiting their own stories; he felt sometimes that he was seeing them for the first time, even after so many years of knowing them.
有时杰比心里会没把握，担心这个计划太古怪、太隐秘了——这就是代理画廊能帮上忙的时候，他们会提醒你有人喜欢你的作品，觉得你的作品很重要，或至少很美——但他无法否认自己从这个计划中获得的愉悦，那种拥有和满足的感觉。有时他会遗憾自己不是画中的一部分，这一系列作品描述了他好友的生活，而他的缺席会让整个故事少一大块；但同时他也很享受自己扮演这种类似神的角色。他有机会用另一种眼光看他的好友，他们不光是他的人生附属品，而且是他们自己故事中清楚分明的角色。有时他觉得，虽然认识三个好友这么多年，但他好像到现在才第一次看清楚他们。
About a month into the project, once he knew that this was what he was going to concentrate on, he’d of course had to explain to them why he kept following them around with a camera, shooting the mundane moments of their lives, and why it was crucial that they let him keep doing so and provide him with as much access as possible. They had been at dinner at a Vietnamese noodle shop on Orchard Street that they hoped might be a Pho Viet Huong successor, and after he’d made his speech—uncharacteristically nervous as he did so—they all found themselves looking toward Jude, who he’d known in advance would be the problem. The other two would agree, but that didn’t help him. They all needed to say yes or it wouldn’t work, and Jude was by far the most self-conscious among them; in college, he turned his head or blocked his face whenever anyone tried to take his picture, and whenever he had smiled or laughed, he had reflexively covered his mouth with his hand, a tic that the rest of them had found upsetting, and which he had only learned to stop doing in the past few years.
这个计划进行了约一个月后，他意识到一旦确定要认真做下去，他当然得跟他们解释自己为什么老带相机跟着他们，拍摄他们生活中那些平淡无奇的时刻，还有他们为什么必须让他拍下去，并且让他自由地进行。他们当时跑去果园街一家越南面店吃晚餐，希望这家能代替越乡餐馆。他说明了自己的计划，讲的时候很反常，相当紧张。他讲完后，他们不自觉地看向裘德，杰比事前就知道问题会出在裘德身上。其他两人会同意，但这帮不了他，他们每个人都得同意才行，而裘德显然是他们四个里面最容易难为情的。读大学时，每次有人想给他拍照片，他就会转开头或遮住脸，而且他每次笑的时候，总是下意识地用手遮住嘴巴，其他三个人都很受不了他这样。直到最近两三年，他才改掉这个习惯。
As he’d feared, Jude was suspicious. “What would this involve?” he kept asking, and JB, summoning all his patience, had to reassure him numerous times that of course his goal wasn’t to humiliate or exploit him but only to chronicle in pictures the drip of all of their lives. The others said nothing, letting him do the work, and Jude finally consented, although he didn’t sound too happy about it.
一如杰比所担心的，裘德非常疑心。“这个计划里头包括什么？”他一直问。杰比拿出最大的耐心，跟他保证了几百次，说他的目的当然不是要羞辱他或剥削他，只是以画作记录他们生活的点点滴滴。其他两人什么都没说，让他去劝说，最后裘德终于答应了，尽管听起来不太乐意。
“How long is this going to go on for?” Jude asked.
“你这个计划会进行多久？”裘德问。
“Forever, I hope.” And he did. His one regret was that he hadn’t begun earlier, back when they were all young.
“我希望是永远。”他的确这么希望。他只后悔自己没趁着他们更年轻时早点开始。
