I got to the studio the following morning and before doing anything, I slushed Eric’s mold and let the plaster set till lunch. During lunch I took the mold apart. The bandage pretty much fell off and as I tore the alginate away, Eric emerged perfect to every pore, hairs captured from his brow, scalp and chin made the cast even more real, even closer to life, an impression laced with life’s signature and DNA. There held in my hands his amazing likeness with nostrils so deep it seemed as if he could still draw breath. There in my hands, Eric as last seen on earth, as relevant in that instant as it would be till the end of time. Honest and unembellished, telling tale of his life and death, spirit and soul, serenity and struggle within every parameter of its surfaces. There in my hands, in cool plaster, he smiled back at me with his mouth and his eyes, that miracle of geometry that I had said good bye to only hours before. I could feel the hairs standing on my forearms and back of my neck as tears revisited me, catapulting me back through every moment that had led to my holding this incredible hallowed object in my hands. I stood there, gazing into Eric and saw my life’s events like so many dominos in a linier cascade of precise sequence. To have removed or repositioned a single domino would have authored an entirely divergent path, one in which I may have never known Eric or one in which I would have never come to the studio that would teach me how to do this thing. A different life, a different everything would have been the only possible result. I could hear deeply in my head the strange song of those crashing and clacking dominos, singing differently than any song that had ever quite been, full of tangents and strange timing and horns and strings, full of percussion and coral interludes, of rests and rolls, crescendos and syncopations only half written and unique to only me. For the first time I had a notion of the gravity and importance of what I had actually accomplished. There in my hands, I held this thing made in little more than an hour or two that was more poignant and profound than anything that I had ever created in half a million hours of practicing my crafts. In the days that followed I spent a few hours, here and there reinforcing the cast and welding together a simple stand. That Friday I presented the cast to Bette for the first time.
