This is the Story of a Plumber
It is from this odd and unordinary story that one of the great sculptures by Noah Savett was conceptualized. “A Plumbers Story” has the rhythm of dripping waters and the hush of flowing over an edge.
Water was Noah Savett's silent foe, his nemesis since that day, that awful day, when his toilet became a wellspring of abominations, and floaters, thick and brown, slithered over the porcelain rim, settling on the bathroom floor like languid, grotesque eels. The sight was abject, the smell a nauseating truth that reminded him of human frailty—and of nature's own indifference to his design.
He dialed a plumber with a hand that trembled slightly.
When the doorbell rang, he found himself staring at an unexpected figure: a woman, tall and sinewy, her muscles winding under her skin like cables of steel beneath satin. Here was strength incarnate, a visceral challenge to the chaos within him. Reality shifted at the door, dissipated as it often did at the edge of his strangest moments. It was a mechanism of the mind, this shift, a saving grace that allowed Noah to evade madness by a hair’s breadth.
He led her to the bathroom, her steps purposeful, her silence as dense as the dripping air around them. She knelt—on hands and knees—and slithered toward the valve, the slight protrusion of her uniform allowing just a sliver of her back to reveal itself. The movement held a strange reverence, a kind of ritualistic grace that felt ordained.
Noah’s intellect, quick to assess yet curiously untroubled, slid into a comfortable observational stance. She became a study, a form, a work of art even as she reached to halt the flood of water. Her dedication to this work—absurd and strangely beautiful—stirred in him an impulse to flatter, to extend the rare and unusual kindness he so often withheld.
Life loathed him, he was sure of it. Or perhaps it was he who loathed life. But it was a loathing born from deep urges, primal desires, the kind which seethe beneath polished exteriors yet are never given voice. They lived in him, unexpressed, tangled in the detritus of unmet expectations. But she, this woman, was not such a figure.
“I have been told,” he said, in an attempt to shift the disquieting mood, “that my work repels as much as it intrigues. People look at sculpture, and what they see in its twists, its imperfections—they call sick, unnatural. They are the sick ones, convinced that beauty is merely symmetry, that the ideal is merely an imitation of their own form."
His eyes shifted to the window, toward the trees beyond, their branches stark and skeletal against the dull light. “Beauty,” he muttered, “beauty exists in the contorted—the unrecognizable, the wretched.” He imagined her listening, her form poised over his rusty valve, and felt a sense of unspoken accord, though she did not answer, did not judge.
Noah's gaze lingered, finding strange peace in the barren landscape, marveling at the quiet rebellion of contorted things, the distorted, the overlooked—and for a moment, just a moment, his loathing receded like the remnants of water retreating down a drain.
