Page:The Restless Compendium.pdf/134

130 E. BENNETT a door? There wouldn’t need to be one, not now I am here. In any case, I can’t turn my head to look. My perception of this space is ever so slightly blurred at the edges.

Welcome, she says, you are just on time.

Smiling. Her face fills my vision. She looks into my eyes, and she looks at my eyes. She speaks to the space where my face would be.

I can help you with your migraines, she says, but first we will have to do some examination that will include checking your face and your facial muscles.

As she says this she brings both her hands to her own face – she touches it twice, indicatively, symmetrically, with perfectly straight fingers.

So let me get started, she says. I’ll just gently touch your face. Her hand comes towards me. Fingertips blur as they appear in my vision close up.

I’ll just gently bring pressure on your cheeks, she says, and the area of your jaw.

Her gaze is fixed somewhere below my eyes, as her thumbs and fingers move at the outer edges of … what? My vision? Or my face? The four corners of it – upper eyebrow, lower jaw – drawn or dabbed gently on to the space between and in front of us. It’s a mime, this momentary touch, but she definitely has nice fingers.

This is Olivia: her face, her hands, in detail, close up. The shadow on the inside of her right eye is violet, underneath it a little smudge of purple. I am looking at this stylish eye smudge, which is deliberate, like all her movements, and she’s making something about the space between and in front of us palpable, shapely. Of course, she’s an image on a screen: an inscription. And she’s stroking not my face, but my computer screen from the inside. But I strongly feel the contiguity of our rooms, hers opening on to mine with this as the window – this, my screen, my face.

2.

Olivia has called this video ‘CLOSE UP Medical DOCTOR Role Play’. This is a mutual performance. A two-sided role play. I can see her but she can’t see me. She pretends to see me: This is how it works. She looks intently in my direction, and I feel that gaze, tangibly, on my face. She