The doll did not remember when it had first realized that other people’s eyes were watching its eyes and that they would know what it was looking at by looking at it. This was a terrifying discovery, as if the sightline of the doll’s gaze could betray its private thoughts and intentions to those watchful subjects. Indeed, it was as if they knew the doll’s secret: that the observed could observe in turn. And without a doubt, the doll had been made to be looked at.
It was short in stature, flush at five feet, and from a distance, could pass as a live adolescent girl. Its candy-floss-pink hair and glossy lips would have made it but a cheap caricature of Japanese schoolgirl seduction were it not for a certain sharpness—the blunt angularity of its bangs, the unnatural vinyl sheen of its skin, the reflective polish of its French manicure—that subverted what might have been an otherwise benign presence, as if the sweetness of so much pink was inherently corrupting, inherently striving towards decay.
Of course, upon a more intimate inspection, it was quite obvious it was a doll. Its cheap, fruity-floral perfume could not overpower the distinct smell of latex. Its skin was completely sterile, with nary a pore, hair, or wrinkle. But the most subtle cue came not from the doll’s physical perfection but its eyes: the doll did not blink.
Most who shared the doll’s company found it attractive at first glance, but with time, it became more and more unsettling. For the doll’s gaze never wavered, never ceased, and those strange glass eyes were very large. It would be misleading to describe them as blank or flat. They had been painted with such attention to detail, such desire to deceive the onlooker with the appearance of liveliness, that they achieved an uncanny détente instead: the eyes appeared dead in the sense of a loss of life, rather than an absence of it.
The doll had led a largely unremarkable existence. For many years, it had been owned by a single man in a Toronto suburb, until it was purchased by a feminist artist who housed it in a large, enclosed exhibit full of other dolls, many of which shared its ever open gaze. Doll upon doll lined the four walls of that room so that they made their own inverse, inanimate panopticon; no matter where you stood, the dolls could see you, and see you from every angle.
It was here, within this multiplicity of static gazes, that the doll was made aware of other eyes. It not only had to contend with the gazes of its fellow dolls, but there were the additional gazes of the visitors, those who paid a nominal fee to enter the dolls’ room to stare. And stare they did, their eyes darting and roving over its curves, many with a furtive apprehension, as if staring directly at this inanimate object was somehow disrespectful.
Indeed, visiting the dolls’ room was an unsettling experience. The artist had positioned the dolls in a series of obscene tableaus, tangled up in each other in a porcelain orgy of violent fornication. Glassy-eyed, apple-cheeked faces smiled or pouted as they straddled or were straddled by their plastic partners. Some were missing limbs that had been amputated and replaced by crude, phallic appendages. Dolls with lifelike and abstract dildos penetrated other dolls in any opening possible: open, hinged mouths; missing eyes and empty joint sockets; orifices carved out of torsos, necks, the backs of heads. Gender was irrelevant; most of the dolls did not possess any genitalia. Some were bound and contorted by straps and belts made of heavy rubber. Others had been partially dipped in red or black latex that was polished to such a degree, their bodies reflected the others’ eyes, refracting and multiplying the room’s existing gazes into an infinite regress.
Within this ouroboric spectacle, our doll was the centerpiece. It was easily the most splendid, if such a word could be used to describe anything within the confines of the dolls’ room. Girl-sized and backlit, it towered over the other dolls, casting a long shadow before it. Matching magenta rubber cords snaked around the doll’s torso to support its weight in its erect position; another cord secured around its neck held its head high.
Most disturbing was how the artist had painted the lower half of the doll, smearing its crotch with swirls of red latex, darkened with black, that dripped down the inner thighs. Upon entering the room, the audience was assaulted by this brute force visual of a teenaged girl in bondage, menstruating openly. What they did not know was that its mimicry of the human form was not merely decorative; it was designed for sexual penetration at three points. Like all the other models sold by its manufacturer, the doll’s flexible body could be posed in any number of gymnastic sexual positions. It was in this claustrophobic display that the doll was coronated into a reign of unremitting exposure, arching its back, spreading its shining thighs, and balancing one pedicured foot on the perfectly smooth, neutered surface of another doll’s billiard ball crotch, all the while gazing down at those who would gaze upon it.
The first time the doll realized that others’ eyes were not merely watching its own, but could also follow its gaze, was when the boy who fell in love at first sight came to see the exhibit.
The boy had not wanted to visit the doll’s room. He remembered feeling distinctly uneasy at the prospect.
“You can’t just judge it without seeing it,” his girlfriend said before he finally conceded to accompany her to the new nonprofit gallery in Kensington Market. “If it was merely shocking, it wouldn’t be so polarizing.”
“It’s porn masquerading as art. High school body horror. It’s an edgy version of an Instagram-bait museum.”
“Why are you always more critical of art made by other Asians? She’s a leading Chinese artist in the city and she isn’t doing it by selling peak diasporic pastiche. She’s going to be, like, the next Floria Sigismondi.”
And he knew she knew he didn’t know what she meant by “peak diasporic pastiche” or who Floria Sigismondi was, and therefore could not reply.
The installation could have easily been criticized for its shock value, for offering precisely what the boy had described and not one iota more. Yet, for all those who entered the room, its power could not be denied. The cumulative effect of so many aberrant clusterings of fleshlike protrusions in restraints and latex that suggested an insectile crawling, the primordial contortions of some blasphemous carnal machine turning its proliferation of indifferent visages to yours, engulfing you with countless pairs of unwavering, unblinking eyes, held a mockery as keen as the point of a surgical needle twisting under skin.
The boy experienced this as immediate revulsion. “Are you done? Can we go now?”
His girlfriend nodded tensely in agreement. But just as they turned to leave, the boy was caught in the glare of our cotton-candy-pink doll. It seemed that the doll was looking straight at him. And despite its sweet, manufactured expression, there was a necrotic chill in its eyes that the boy could not tear his gaze from. It occurred to him then that perhaps dolls were not simply empty shells, that perhaps in their monstrous imitation of the human form, they were supernatural beings in some way, like spells being cast. Then, quickly upon the heels of that thought, another followed. And it was this second thought that inspired the boy to return after dark and take the doll home.
The doll was much heavier than the boy expected. He had imagined it to be hollow when it was quite solid, much heavier than a human girl of commensurate size. However, breaking into the gallery was not difficult. After a couple weeks of research and deliberation, the boy had determined that a theft would not be particularly difficult or high risk.
At night, the dolls’ room was subdued in the darkness, as if the aggression of their collective gaze was muted; if the boy could only see the dolls as shadows, he was only a shadow to them. In any case, there was no time for fear or disgust. He deftly cut through the pink cords with gardening shears, allowing the doll to fall into his embrace before carrying it to the trunk of his car.
The boy returned with the doll to his basement apartment without incident until it came to entering the unit. As he tripped on the confusion of shoes that always lay in a pile by the door, the doll lurched from his grasp partway, this sudden movement tearing the thin latex at its crotch. The sight arrested the boy, for it had been so cunningly crafted there that in the silvery light of the moon, it appeared wholly indistinguishable from the aroused female sex; the same tight, folded contours, the swollen pink colour, the slippery glistening. Disquieted by this illusion of perpetual arousal, the boy repositioned the doll, hoisted it over his shoulder, and slammed the door closed behind him.
The doll had not seen anything outside the dolls’ room for a long time, but there was something strangely familiar in the forms it could see now. It remembered the black expanse above with little pricks of light. The sway of these tall, multi-limbed structures with pretty green tips. It knew the milky ball of light in the sky operated according to a mechanism that would make it disappear and reappear, disappear and reappear. And it knew that the fleshy thing whose form was so much like its own, and also so unlike, would want to look at it, for it had once been owned by a boy, although that boy had been paler, taller, and his middle had pouched out, and the skin had flaked off the backs of his hands. And it knew what boys like to do. He would lay it down on a bed like that boy had done, part its thighs like that boy had done, enter it roughly like that boy had done, ejaculate inside like that boy had done, clean it out with a damp cloth like that boy had done, store it inside a garment bag under the bed like that boy had done, until he felt the urge to gaze upon it again with desirous eyes.
So when this boy carefully laid the doll down beneath his covers, it did not understand the formless depth within his eyes, the same depth it had seen when they had first made eye contact, did not recognize what had replaced the flat, finite contours of the lust that hollows out a male’s gaze. Then the boy turned the doll on its side and, with a gentle sigh, curled behind it like a comma, embracing its warming torso, falling asleep as the numbers of the digital LCD display of his alarm clock kissed their pale red luminescence onto the doll’s cheek, counting each osculating minute until morning.
At first, the boy left the doll alone when he left for work. It remained hidden in his apartment, where it would sit in complete stillness behind the thick slats of his bifold closet doors. Unlike the other boy, he left the doll seated upright, leaning against the wall and wrapped in a blanket.
The days were uneventful yet filled with novelty. Each morning, pale fingers of light and heat would appear through the door’s slats at the doll’s toes and track a path up to the crown of its head. A house spider had taken up residence in the corner and the doll observed its movements for hours. Unlike the first boy’s plastic bag or the artist’s room of dolls, the closet offered new and unfamiliar organic smells, subtly shifting places with each other: dust, sweat, moisture, wood. But mostly, the air seemed thick with the boy’s scent.
One day, the boy hid a student newspaper in the closet before leaving. The doll could not read, but rather, it visually traced the typographic rhythms of the text. The headlining pattern of ink formed the following shapes: SEX DOLL STOLEN FROM CONTROVERSIAL ART SHOW. Beside this, the doll saw an unevenly pigmented photograph of itself, strung up on display with the other dolls, its breasts digitally blurred, its gaze directed beyond the photographer outside the frame. It did not recognize itself.
After so many years of deprivation, nights with the boy were overwhelming at times. Each day, he would return home from work well after sundown, whereupon he would seat the doll beside him for dinner and chatter on. Eventually, the doll learned to parse out patterns and associations from these nocturnal emissions of speech, acquiring the names for such things as sky, stars, tree, and moon. It learned the words yours, happy, and safe. After dinner and clearing the dishes, the boy would spend the rest of the evening playing caretaker, murmuring monologues into the early hours of the morning. He began with gently scraping a butter knife against the doll’s thighs to peel off the offending latex, then moved on to what would become a maintenance routine of grooming: brushing the doll’s spun sugar hair, wiping down its poreless skin, and dressing it in soft, pastel textures: a peachy mohair sweater, a seafoam terry cloth lounge set, a lavender velvet slip dress.
As the weeks passed, the boy began to miss work shifts to stay home with the doll. He was vaguely aware that this behaviour was abnormal, had veered away from mere criminality and benign sexual deviation and was accelerating towards territory that was undoubtedly psychologically unsound. But the part of his brain that housed this awareness seemed to lack communication of any kind with the rest of his mind.
After three months had passed since the doll’s abduction, the student newspaper ran its last article on the theft. The case had gone cold. Yet the boy grew increasingly paranoid. He began to cut off contact with the outside world. He feared the doll would be discovered, whereupon it would be confiscated and returned to its rightful owner, who would no doubt reinstate it to its former censorious place in the dolls’ room, hoisted, bound, exposed, and penalized. The boy also understood the dolls’ room was not a world for the doll, that in fact, there was no world for the doll, and so, he became afraid of leaving the doll alone. Indeed, the second thought the boy had thought in the dolls’ room was that he could redeem it, that he could somehow revive the lost life in its eyes. He could still see in unexpected, fleeting angles, the doll’s lovely visage turning baleful, as if in all its years of imitating the human form, the doll had spontaneously generated its own soul, or some ghastly version of one, now trapped in the very material of its objectified existence, ontologically imprisoned. It was as if it knew he was aware of the bleakness in its gaze and was now obligated to offer his presence to it, to become equally objectified in reparation.
Nobody really noticed the boy’s absence, nor did they care. His girlfriend made a few attempts to contact him but gave up without much objection. Cut adrift, the boy spent much of his time curled motionlessly on his futon with the doll. He forgot to eat. His sleep was erratic. Love had seized him.
The boy is dreaming a lovesick dream. The doll is warm within his arms, almost feverish, or is that him? There is an acute burning against his chest. A heavy heart-shaped locket fashioned from gold on a matching chain has appeared around the doll’s neck, resting just above its cleavage. He reaches for the piece but hesitates, looking at the doll, as if to ask permission. Its ever naked eyes brim with its defenselessness; love asks for no permission. As he takes the heart into his palms, the locket is unclasped to reveal the doll’s only secret and only truth: that the observed observe in turn.
A narrow shaft of sunlight from the basement window spills into the closet before inching over the bedroom’s faux-wood laminate floor tiles, climbing up a knubby grey blanket, and resting on the boy’s face before fading into night. The light repeats this cyclical path, shifting almost imperceptibly each time, beginning with the closet and ending with the face. The boy has not moved in many days. His eyes remain open and unmoving, fixed upon some unknown point far beyond the ceiling and clouding over.
Beside the boy’s cold body lies the doll. It does not know how long they have lain like this, nor that the light’s path has been changing ever so slightly each day until one nightfall, when a weak pinprick of sun hits the beveled edge of a mirror on the boy’s bedside table.
The doll notices that its face is reflected within the glass. For the first time, the doll sees itself seeing. Its eyelids finally close shut.
• • •