the trespasser's art

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The Trespasser's Art

Ranbir Sidhu

The transfer of energy in leg muscles, the shifting weight of the body, the way the foot rises, arcs through the air, falls, heel first and then the length of the foot unrolling onto the ground like a parchment scroll telling stories of journeys far and wide, ending finally with toes pressing against earth, is the simple motion required to make a footprint. Every step is a shallow fall that leaves behind it a faint trace of our passage.

The dirt running path in a public park is incised with prints of Nikes, Reeboks, New Balances, and also with lesser known brands, imports, generics, yet all recognizable as running shoes. They twine and move apart. Anyone who cares to examine the evidence might determine the stride of a particular runner, perhaps the speed by the relative quality of the impact left, perhaps the level of exhaustion by the consistency of the stride. The golf shoe punctures the earth with its spikes. The pressure of a stiletto is enough to rupture a cheap office floor, leaving as its track an insolent ellipsis, while clogs, as they clatter along the hardwood floor in the kitchen you are showing to a prospective tenant will taunt you with the faint burnish of their weary refusal to step all the way into the deep larder you claim is the apartment's crowning feature.

The first markings the police find outside the house are two side-by-side semi-circles pushed into the twigs and leaves on the small ledge at the base of the house. It is here the killer first peered into the window, standing on tiptoe, leaving behind the shape of breasts, first spying the victim. They find other marks: twigs snapped, leaves pushed aside, the indent of one heel in a patch of mud. Inside the house prints are everywhere. One muddy heel follows a dusty footprint in an ugly tango. The victim, who had been preparing to meet a friend at the movies, was wearing tennis shoes which when running along hardwood and linoleum floors make characteristic black scuff marks, like the rapid flapping of a bird's wing caught on too slow a film. That the victim ran from one room to another is evident and that the victim did not know the pursuer is likely for there is no point when the two of them stand quietly together, one surprised at the other's visit, the other making excuses for the sudden arrival. There is a flurry of prints near the body, the marks of a scuffled ending, that could in other circumstances inscribe the passionate meeting of long parted lovers, friends play-fighting, dancers practicing.

In hot sand the print of a bare foot forms a sensual and inviting shape resembling a musical instrument, uninvented yet imagined, that if played lulls all into a dreamy death of summer Sunday where shorter days and blissful memories suspend one in the warm waves of a shallow tide. Following a lover's footprints through a forest one learns the intensity of attention passion focuses. A child plays with briefest immortality when running across wet cement but even before old age the pavement will be jackhammered, new shops erected, another world built up.

When Robinson Crusoe first spied a stranger's prints on the beach he crossed from one world to another. A footprint tells a tale all its own and holds in it the power to overturn worlds, for it records the passage of another who, unsuspected, passed nearby in the night, perhaps a killer, perhaps a lover. Crusoe's tiny state gained its first subject and Friday, as Crusoe called this subject, learned that his feet, free up to that moment, had been a trespasser's feet.

No one struggles harder to hide their tracks than does the trespasser, yet it is always the trespasser who leaves the most flagrant trail. It is the paradox of the trespasser, of the killer, who hides the trail, that the trespasser's greatest wish is to be uncovered, though uncovered only after the trespasser has vanished. When we trespass, when seemingly unnoticed we pass by another who only realizes of our passage after we are already far along down the road, we offer a hint at another world. Centuries later, looking through Friday's eyes, we see him not as subject but as human being and Crusoe as the deluded nationmaker.

Paths cross and new roads, wholly unexpected, open up.

Writers always struggle to trespass, to incise into our work the promise of a future felony. Our words are our tracks and we pray our subterfuges and subversions pass by unnoticed. Words, when written with deliberate clarity, days later, perhaps months, years, must shock with the memory of unsuspected crimes and transgressions, like the warm memory of an incubus arriving in a dream. Words rising new to the reader's mind are the trespasser's footprint, ever leaving a trail waiting to be traced, a murder to be discovered, a violation to be felt, an unimagined path to be followed.