Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  That evening, after dinner and their usual routine, Frannie came to her room. Theresa brightened, putting down the book she’d been reading.

  “I found a name!” Frannie said in an excited whisper.

  “What?” Theresa was openly confused. “What’re you talking about?”

  “The painting!” said Frannie, her dark eyes sparkling in the solitary glow of the bedstand reading lamp. “Down in the corner. It was so small and dark I didn’t notice it at first.”

  Theresa felt her body knotting up, not with the familiar tension of anticipation, but revulsion, and perhaps even fear. The painting again. That’s what her sister had come to her about.

  “Frannie, I don’t want to—”

  “Just a single name. J-A-M-E-S.”

  “James?” said Theresa, interested despite her apprehensions. “Is it a first name or last?”

  Frannie shrugged. “That’s what we’re going to find out. Oh, and I also found some writing on the back—looks like a marking pen or a Sharpie. It said Under Your Skin. Probably the title of the picture, don’t you think?”

  “Makes sense,” said Theresa. She was angry with herself for being so intrigued with Frannie’s revelations, but she couldn’t help it.

  “Anyway, it’s something,” said Frannie, as she gave her sister a pat on her leg and stood up from the edge of the bed. “Now I have a good place to start.”

  She was right.

  As the days passed, the painting in Frannie’s room continued to assume a more central role in their lives. Days were still consumed with the bakery, but the evening routine became altered as Frannie spent more time in the study, tracking down the identity of the artist known only as James.

  Theresa tried to pretend she had only slight interest in her sister’s detective work, but they both knew it was just a pose. Frannie came to her with every new development and Theresa listened intently. Several calls to the McLaughry Realtors failed to reveal much because the agents there were reluctant to put Frannie in contact with the previous owner of their house, a Mrs. Virginia Keat, who had moved to Massachusetts to live with her son and his wife.

  But Frannie persisted, and finally reached Mrs. Keat, who provided vital information. The house had been rented for three years to a James Czernak, who was indeed a painter, and his girlfriend, Laura Childress, a sculptress. The couple moved to Boston about six months before Mrs. Keat sold the house to Theresa and her sister, and that’s all Mrs. Keat could tell them.

  But it was enough. Using that information as a springboard, Frannie launched herself into an exhaustive survey of all the art galleries and bohemian organizations to see if there was any record of James Czernak or Laura Childress. Contacting the right people and cajoling the information from them proved to be slow and frustrating, but Frannie seemed driven to know as much as possible about the painting and the man who created it.

  Each night, Theresa found herself drawn to stare at the picture, sensing there was more to it than mere pigments smeared on cloth. There was something else, something strange and intoxicatingly dangerous about it that she could not articulate. Staring into the ebon center of the scarlet eye was like leaning forward, looking into the mesmeric vortex of a whirlpool. What did it mean? What was it doing to them?

  Theresa knew its mere presence among them had, in some way, changed them, but again, she lacked the means to express it clearly. In Frannie, she’d detected a new…intensity in everything she did, a characteristic most obvious when she took her sister to her bed.

  Several evenings later, Frannie received a return-call from one of the galleries she’d contacted in Cambridge. “We’re really onto him now,” she said as she walked into the den where Theresa had been watching a bad movie on the cable.

  “Really?”

  Frannie consulted a notebook where she’d scribbled pages of facts and information. “This lady just talked to me from the Charles River Artists Boutique—she remembers James Czernak. He appeared in Boston about three years ago with crates of paintings and a dark-eyed, brooding girlfriend.”

  “Laura Childress.”

  “Right,” said Frannie, grinning triumphantly as she continued. “Anyway, James pushed his way into the inner circles of the arts community in Boston. The Boutique lady remembers him making several scenes at openings and shows.”

  “What kind of scenes?” Theresa leaned forward, her curiosity piqued.

  “Oh you know—the usual eccentric artist stuff. Lots of screaming and boasting, plus the required public argument with the girlfriend. Anything to make people take notice…and of course remember him.”

  Theresa shook her head. “He sounds like a nut. Or an asshole.”

  Frannie chuckled. “Yeah, probably, but listen. Whatever he did must have worked because pretty soon, he was getting shows and exhibitions for his paintings. He claimed he’d started a new ‘school’ of painting.”

  “A what?”

  Frannie checked her notepad. “He called it ‘Genre Organicism.’ and at first nobody paid much attention, which is usually the case with these kinds of things.”

  Theresa nodded. “But let me guess—pretty soon he was the talk of the Boston art-set, right?”

  Frannie’s grin faded. “Well, I don’t know that yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The Boutique lady said he was too crazy and that I should just forget about him. She wouldn’t tell me anything else.”

  “You’re kidding. Then why’d she call in the first place?”

  Frannie frowned. “Basically…to tell me to leave this guy alone, that he was pretty much bad news.”

  Theresa weighed the information and deemed it pretty sound advice, but she could tell from the expression on her sister’s face, and the burning fire behind her dark eyes that the matter was far from dismissed. Still, she needed her suspicions confirmed. “But you’re not going to do that, are you?”

  “Do what?” asked Frannie.

  “Forget about him.”

  “Of course not! I just got started.”

  The days shortened, and the New Hampshire winter began to tap upon their windowpanes with the season’s first snowflakes. Frannie learned more about James Czernak in bits and pieces, slowly assembling the jig-saw shards of his career and identity.

  He’d stayed in Cambridge for several years, trumpeting his talent until galleries began exhibiting his work, which seemed to be an unending series of pastiches of commercial genre art—the kind seen in advertising and publishing in which the style communicates not only mood, but message, and familiarity. At least that’s what Frannie said she’d been told. And since neither she nor Theresa were steeped heavily in the argot or parlance of the critical art-world, they would have to take their betters’ word for certain parts of the story.

  Frannie told her that most of James Czernak’s critics and customers found his work intriguing despite a sometimes prosaic array of subjects depicted and explored.

  “He was bought and collected, not so much for his paintings as much as what he was saying about them—about the way he created them,” said Frannie one night over dinner.

  By this time, Theresa had given in to the obsession over the creator of Under Your Skin. The painting had plainly become a central icon in their lives, and she had accepted that. If a simple two-dimensional object could exert influence over peoples’ psyches, then it was surely this aptly named picture. She looked across the table at her sister and urged her to continue.

  “What made James’ method of painting unique and of interest to the collectors was how he made his colors, his pigments,” said Frannie. “He created his paints by combining elements of objects from the real world that would become his subjects on canvas.”

  Theresa wasn’t sure she was following that.

  Frannie, now more comfortable with the deconstructionist language of the art-set, continued: “He was trying to absorb the essence of his subject matter, to…ah, capture it not only visually, but metaphysically as well.”r />
  “Frannie, that sounds like such pretentious crap.” Theresa giggled at her own forthrightness.

  Her sister grinned, but shook her head. “Not at all. It’s pretty simple, really, what he was trying to do. Look—if he were painting, say, a butterfly, he would grind up the colors of the bug’s wings into his paints. He would use the natural substances to make the colors. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  Theresa paused, nodded. “Sure, I’ve got that. Why did you have to make it sound so complicated?”

  Frannie looked a bit disdainful. “Because, actually, it is. James started trying to capture the essence of things not commonly seen or palpably realized—things like fear or empathy or sorrow.”

  “Or…desire,” said Theresa.

  And Frannie just looked at her as if struck in the face. It was one of those moments of revelation accompanied by profound, surprised silence.

  “That’s right,” said Frannie. “Wow…like that’s what’s going on in our picture.”

  “I don’t know why I even said that,” said Theresa, feeling embarrassed, confused. “I just…”

  “You sensed it,” said Frannie, unconsciously. “You just knew it—just like I did.”

  “Okay, so if that’s going on, well, then, how did he do it. What’s really happening here? What did he make those paints from?” For some reason, Theresa felt herself recoiling from her own question, as if she didn’t really want to know the answer.

  And none was supplied for another several weeks…until Frannie found James Czernak’s notes.

  Her enthusiasm, curiosity and obsession all rejuvenated, Frannie had embarked on a cellar-to-attic mission to find any other traces of James’ presence in their house. She believed the painting could not have been the only piece of the artist left behind. (And that started Theresa wondering—why had only that one canvas remained? Had there been some purpose in its presence in their attic? Some method to what seemed at first to be nothing more than carelessness?)

  The envelope had been taped to the top surface of a set of built-in cabinets in one of the upstairs bedrooms. It contained lined pages torn from a cheap spiral-bound school notebook, and Frannie came bursting into the den on the night she discovered them holding aloft like the felled trophy of a long-endured safari.

  Theresa felt her pulse jump when she saw the pages, folded errantly as though in haste or lack of concern for precision. “Have you read them yet?”

  Frannie shook her head. “No, I was too excited. And I didn’t have my glasses. Come on, we’ll read it together.”

  Theresa made room on the couch and the two of them sat thigh-to-thigh, leaned over the crinkled pieces of paper. The handwriting was a curious blend of both cursive and printed letters, and was at times barely legible. Theresa could see no reason or system for the abrupt slippages of printed writing into cursive, and then back again. It was the writing of someone in a hurry, or perhaps someone who seldom handwrote anything.

  Slowly, Theresa read aloud the deciphered notes:

  It’s time to move on. Each stage of evolution brings its own problems and joys. But there is true power in what I am doing. I have tapped into something, I am sure of it. I have imbued my paintings with a force, an energy, and strangely, once I’ve accomplished that, I have derived a form of sustenance from the work. It is a symbiotic relationship in the truest, most incestuous sense.

  Each piece I infuse with elements organic becomes an artistic rune, a monolithic marker along the path of the dragon. The path I walk every day. Just as the Old Age priests believed, so do I—that we leave our spoor everywhere, and it is a true tragedy that few of us ever attempt to retrace our steps.

  But I have vowed to not make such a mistake. I will create and never forget the legacy of my beginnings. I can never go forward unless I can also go back.

  The marker combines some of the most atavistic and primal elements I could imagine. In celebration of the lizard, I have extracted the gray magic from the bulb of its hind-brain. The ancient unchanging messages of the R-complex live eternally in the crude wiring of creatures like this one. Elegant in its simplicity. Fierce in its energy. To create and destroy. The unending dichotomy trapped in the reptilian maze of another time.

  And when combined with the wine of the brood-mothers, as I have combined it, there forms not mere pigment, but an alchemical potion. A means of transferal and transfiguration. My pieces thus become the talismans we all seek. The result is a beacon, sending out its terrible heat and light—both a warning and a beckoning.

  Laying down the pages, Frannie looked at her sister. “What does that mean?”

  Theresa shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure. I think we should both read it over a few times and study it.”

  “It sounds like a lot of crazy ranting, doesn’t it?” Frannie handed the papers to her sister.

  “I don’t know,” said Theresa. “James is obviously bright and well-read. Just because we don’t understand some of the language or the references are obscure doesn’t mean that it’s ‘crazy,’ you know.”

  Frannie seemed to consider this. “You’re right, Tess. If we were trying to read a physics textbook, we’d have just as much trouble understanding it.”

  Theresa stood up, still holding the pages in her hand. The note admittedly fascinated her, challenged her. Frannie was right to think it was the ravings of a madman, but maybe not. They’d both sensed something…different about that painting. If not a real power in and of itself, then it was at least capable of producing a psychological or emotional response that was formidable.

  And wasn’t that the desired effect of all great art?

  Theresa felt confused, but suffused with a desire to unravel the mystery. Finally she understood what had been driving her sister so incessantly. Their study was actually a very large library. Uncle Edwin had been a great lover of books as well as an antiquarian collector of rare tomes, palimpsests, and other incunabula; she and her sister had therefore inherited a vast storehouse of knowledge both secular and arcane.

  For the next few days, every spare minute found Theresa in the library, where she accessed and examined countless volumes on art, creativity, psychology, physiology, ancient religions, archeology, semantics, philosophy, mythology, cosmology. She searched for references, parallels, analogs, etiologies, allegories…anything that might provide a key to understanding the complexity who was James Czernak.

  It was also at this time that Theresa spent as much time in the presence of the painting’s watchful, malevolent eye. It remained in Frannie’s room, across from her bed; and so did Theresa. Never, in all the years, had they felt so intimately entwined as now. They agreed something decidedly different was taking place, and if it served convenience to attribute it to the painting, then so be it. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, as the house huddled and held its woodstove warmth, Theresa could feel the slick gaze of that solitary red eye upon her nakedness.

  “I think I’ve figured it out—as best I can, anyway,” she told Frannie, who was sitting in one of the old leather chairs opposite an eighteenth century writing desk.

  “Well, I hope you’ve done better than me,” said Frannie, whose efforts to locate James Czernak had hit a dead-blank wall. She’d traced the artist and his girlfriend into Manhattan to a fashionable loft in Soho, but soon afterward, Laura Childress was no longer seen with him. As his fame and status grew, James Czernak grew more distant from the subculture who had created him. One day, he simply disappeared, leaving a single painting in his studio/loft apartment.

  Theresa held her hand parallel to the blotter, tilted it back and forth as if to say mezzo-mezzo. “We’ll see, sister dearest,” she said, picking up her notes. “But I should tell you right now…it isn’t pretty.”

  Frannie chuckled darkly. “Somehow I had a feeling it wouldn’t be. Go on…I’m ready for it.”

  Clearing her throat, Theresa arose from the desk and walked slowly towards the nearest wall of bookcases. It was as much a dramatic gesture as anyt
hing necessary, and she enjoyed Frannie’s full attention. She also liked the heavy textures and aromas of the room, ever reminding her of the weight and substance of true knowledge.

  “Okay, listen: I think James Czernak believes he isn’t human.”

  Frannie giggled. “Tess, puh-leeeze…”

  “No, listen. I mean he believed he was evolving into something else—some sort of god, maybe. That’s what that reference to evolving or evolution means, I think. He obviously took his role as a creator very seriously and needed to objectify with the…uh, ‘organic’ pigments. Remember that stuff about making his colors and all?”

  “Yeah,” said Frannie. “Kind of creepy, really.”

  “As intended, I think. And that ‘path of the dragon’ refers to these lines of force that surround the earth like magnetic lines, only they’re something different, something like ley lines or feng shui, the oriental equivalent.”

  “You’re losing me,” said Frannie.

  “James was into the earth as the prime energy giver.”

  “You mean like Gaeia—Earth Mother with Chronos and all that?”

  Theresa nodded. Frannie knew her ancient history and mythology, so this should all make sense to her. “You got it. He believed he’d become a conduit for the earth’s natural organic forces. Nature as the only true artist, and that sort of thing.”

  Frannie assumed a more somber cast. “You got all that from those ragged pages? I’m impressed.”

  “Well, it’s more interpretive than anything,” Theresa said softly. She brushed her blonde hair back off her face, continued. “But in all the research I did, I would occasionally find phrases or references or cosmological models that fit what he was saying.”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it. What else?”

  “He leaves his paintings everywhere he’s been.”

  “Yeah, that much I kind of figured,” said Frannie.

  “But he does it the way you would mark your trail in a forest or a maze,” said Theresa. “For a reason.”