The Chalk Artist

by Allegra Goodman

  “Give me a little credit!”

  “Sorry.” Nina’s face was pink, flushed with heat.

  “You’re way too serious,” Collin said. “What’s the opposite of a martyr?”

  “A tormentor?”

  “No. Someone too good.”

  “A savior?”

  “Yeah, you think you have to be a savior.”

  She bent her head. “I was out of line with Diana.”

  “And that’s the other thing. You think everything is set in stone. You screwed up with Diana. So what? We had a fight. It’s over. Just erase and start again.”

  She almost laughed.

  “You see?” He caressed her until she licked his neck, salty with sweat, rolled up his shirt, so that his bare skin slid against hers. He had her to himself again.

  “What was that?” She raised her head.

  Children calling to each other on the trail below. The panting, jingling sound of dogs. “Let’s go back.” She meant to her apartment, where they could be alone.

  The children’s voices faded away. Someone called the dogs, and they ran off.

  They turned toward each other, tousled, pine needles in their hair. “Do you really want to go home?”

  “No.”

  “Then stay.”

  But already mosquitoes were hovering, grazing their wrists. Nina sprang to her feet and shook them off.

  He wished he could draw Nina then. Her white arms. Her waist, where T-shirt and skirt didn’t quite meet. He wished he could do justice to her eyes, not gray but silver in the dappled light. Instinctively he felt in his pockets for a bit of chalk, but he had none. He picked up a stick. “Pick a tree, any tree.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just choose one.”

  She pointed to the pine in front of her.

  “Too close.”

  She pointed to a bigger pine farther away.

  He flung his stick like a machete, end over end, and hit the pine square on the trunk. “Another.”

  She pointed to a maple, even farther off.

  “That’s Peter.” He picked up a second stick and she watched it cartwheeling through the air. It struck the trunk dead center and bounced backward.

  She chose a dogwood, and an oak, another sticky pine, some trees close, and others far away. He threw and threw, and he hit every single mark.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Pure talent,” he teased, but it was true. He was outstanding at stick throwing. Fence climbing. Stone skipping. “I’m good at all the sports nobody plays.”

  She kissed him and she felt his warmth.

  He cupped his hands around her face, and he admonished himself as well as Nina. “Remember this.”

  If Walden Woods banished Arkadia from your mind, the opposite was also true. At work, the outside world felt like a dream, far away and insubstantial. You earned real money, but you barely had the time to spend it. Collin bought himself his dream bike, an Eddy Merckx AX, but he was too busy to shop for other toys. He could afford a new apartment—except he didn’t have a day to look. Maybe it was for the best. He didn’t want to be materialistic—and he loved having money in the bank. He could pay for dinner. He could go to a movie without thinking.

  Long summer days turned into nights, and he slept at Arkadia on the hellions’ black couch. He closed his eyes and imagined his hands on Nina’s waist, his fingers unbuttoning her shirt, her hair tumbling down her bare back. He wanted her, but woke to work and play again. He drew horses for hours, and then he turned to EverWhen to stoke his imagination.

  There was a cove near the Whennish shore where waves washed into tide pools, and you could search for pearls. There was another place he liked to wander, beyond the tree line on EverRest. The world was white, with craggy peaks of ice, the only shelter crystal caves between the rocks. You had to break your way inside, cutting down icicles, which shattered at your feet. In the deepest cave, a race of Dwarves served a white-haired, white-eyed queen. Her eyes were frosty, her hands translucent, her behavior secretive. You knew that she was hiding a rich jewel. Other gamers told you where. She had a ruby for a heart.

  He played so late and worked so long that his own art raced away from him. His horses ran untamed through the Trackless Wood. Lovely onscreen, they overwhelmed you in the round. First you heard them. Hoofbeats coming closer. Then the sound of branches breaking as they tore the underbrush. Magical, unearthly, they surrounded you with tangled manes and flying legs and dark eyes flashing through the trees. Drawing them apart, he developed each horse as a character, the gentle dapple-gray, the chestnut mare with the scar on its right flank, the black high-kicking stallion. No detail was too small to realize, none too difficult to render. Any line he drew might live and breathe in game.

  He sat with Nicholas in his black padded office, and they tried out sound prints for each animal. Collin had no control over UnderWorld’s soundtrack, but it was magic listening to the possibilities.

  “These are for the chestnut.” Nicholas clicked a file on his monitor and Collin heard a quick light step, a sleek rustling, a whinnying, a single twig breaking. “These are for the black.” Nicholas opened another file, and Collin heard the stallion’s pounding hooves, its heavy breath, the rip and tear of brambles in its path.

  “What about when they run through water?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got this muddy sucking sound, and splashing.”

  Even without visuals, Collin could hear the animals fording a stream. “What if one of them slips? One of them could slip scrambling up the bank.”

  “Yeah!” Nicholas said. “You hear them slide and then they’re struggling. You hear them flailing. And then they scream.”

  Nicholas was at least fifty, a veteran of three major games and countless game expansions. His beard was gray and his hair was thin on top, and a lot of times he had to wear reading glasses, but he played all kinds of guitars and he could sing. He was a vocalist of the Bob Dylan variety, singer-screamer-songwriter. “How’s this?” He opened new files: whinnying, running, and footfalls. Clicking on his computer, he adjusted the volume, and suddenly a horse was screaming, thrashing, dying in a ditch.

  Collin flinched, and Nicholas said, “Okay. We’re doing something right.”

  “That was like the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Nicholas leaned back his swivel chair. “Thank you.”

  He looked so supremely satisfied that Collin said, “You love it here.”

  Nicholas thought about this. “Sometimes I hate it,” he said at last. “Sometimes I’m burned out—but I try to stay inspired.” He held up his phone, flashing a picture of his son.

  Of course, Collin thought. You have to support your kid. That changes everything.

  “Sometimes I get bored,” Nicholas admitted.

  Unconsciously, Collin massaged his right hand with his left. “Then what?”

  “I keep going anyway.”

  “You force yourself?”

  Nicholas kept clicking at his keyboard even as he spoke. “Yeah, but you keep going with your own shit too. You keep your little projects going on the side.”

  A sound of bells, no, faint wind chimes, filled the padded room. The sound of wind rustling in the trees, and then soft chords on a guitar, music frayed around the edges, a wordless kind of blues. All this emerged from Nicholas’s speakers.

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s me,” said Nicholas. “That’s my stuff.”

  The music stopped instantly when he closed the file. “Okay, what else you got?”

  “I’m drawing the stallion. Again.”

  —

  That night in the conference room called the Keep, Collin presented his latest stallion to the hellions. He touched his slate and transferred his small drawings to the big electronic board.

  In silence, Peter gazed at Collin’s creation, a horse scarier than any other, a biter and a kicker with a bold head and hard black eyes. It was crueler than Collin’s previous attempt
s. Each of those stallions had caught Peter’s attention briefly, and then, one by one, they wouldn’t suit. They had been too heroic or too noble, or simply too beautiful for UnderWorld. Nobody could say that now. The new horse looked like death, with its gaunt body and vicious mouth, its ragged coat, translucent, dirty white.

  Peter frowned, and Collin steeled himself.

  Peter examined Collin’s work in silence. Come on, thought Collin, but Peter didn’t speak.

  He took the stylus from Collin’s hand. Then, wielding the slender rod like his own wand, Peter touched the stallion’s eye. It took only a moment, but the effect was brilliant, ghastly. The horse’s bright eye filled with blood. Now the stallion looked possessed. Now Collin’s drawing became a character, riveting, repellent.

  The whole room hushed as Peter stepped back from the board. One touch and Peter had transformed Collin’s horse entirely.

  “That’s sick,” said Peter, contemplating his own work.

  A team player would have rejoiced. A humbler artist might have thanked Peter for the lesson. Collin did neither. His feelings were confused. Awe mixed with anger, a sense that Peter had destroyed something. And yet Peter had not destroyed the horse. He had revealed its full potential—and made it his own. All eyes were on Peter, all praise to him. Even Daphne clapped her hands. It’s true—you’re obsessed with him, thought Collin. You can’t take your eyes off him.

  But the moment passed and Daphne was herself again. She was warmer to Collin than before, staying late, after everybody left, laughing, commiserating, showing off her work. She drew up a chair and revealed her new project, posting on fan forums as an anti-gaming activist named Christian Wench.

  “Listen to this.” Daphne read from her tablet, “Rise up against UnderWorld! It is the work of Satan. Destroy this game before it destroys our children!”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “Rallying the troops!”

  “More like aggravating them.”

  “That’s publicity,” she said. “We got a hundred responses in the first minute.” Daphne scrolled through furious comments. “Oh, look. My second death threat. I’m cuming for u cutting off your…” She seemed amused, if slightly rattled, by the hatred Christian Wench inspired.

  “That’s not funny.” He was reading over her shoulder.

  “Oh, come on. I’m trying to cheer you up.”

  Her words startled him. She had never before acknowledged what he might feel, or admitted any impulse beyond the desire to win.

  “I don’t need cheering up.”

  “You looked crushed in there.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Play with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no one’s here.” Her tone was light, but her breath was soft and eager. The building couldn’t be empty, and yet for now they were alone. Other hellions had gone home. Their idle workstations had passed into dream mode, monitors displaying ARKADIA in stars.

  She took both his hands and he let her pull him to his feet. She reminded him of Noelle when she was high. Eager, sweetly wild. In the pale starlight, Daphne’s eyes took on a strange sheen from too much gaming, too much everything. “Come on.”

  He wanted her then. Hands on her hips, he pulled her in, but she sprang back, teasing, “Duel in EverWhen.”

  Insulted, he shot back, “No.”

  “What, then?”

  Of course she knew exactly what he wanted. He stepped closer, but, like a boxer in her hooded sweatshirt, she danced out of reach.

  His heart was pounding, but he kept his voice steady. “I want to draw you.”

  For once he surprised her. “You’ve drawn me before.”

  “I want to draw you like this.”

  She held still for just a moment. His gaze unnerved and attracted her. She followed as he wheeled a swivel chair into the conference room where he had presented the ghost horse that afternoon. “Here. Now.” With a swipe of his hand, he erased the red-eyed stallion covering the board. “Sit there.” He pointed to the chair.

  “What if I say no?”

  Hands on her shoulders, he seated her.

  Now she looked up at him, curious, mischievous, seriously tempted, but he wouldn’t touch her again. He wasn’t a child for her to tease. He backed away to draw her on his slate.

  He sketched her short dark hair, her bright face, the soft folds of her sweatshirt. Fierce, efficient, he drew Daphne’s picture, and she was amused, slightly disbelieving, as she sat for this formal portrait. Boldly she gazed back at Collin, but he controlled the situation. Her expression, sweet and dangerous, belonged to him.

  Finishing his first sketch, he showed her the slate, and she was startled by the likeness. Wonderingly she gazed at her own blue eyes, her parted lips, her body floating in the dark. They stood together looking at her picture and he never touched her, but he had left his mark on her. She was impressed.

  “Once more,” he said.

  He never asked, but she saw the question in his eyes. She unzipped her sweatshirt.

  He drew her with the sweatshirt open to reveal her undershirt, and the leaves inked on her bare collarbone.

  Daphne was serious now, conscious of her emerging image. Her body stilled and her eyes darkened as Collin drew her. Her mood began to match his.

  As before, he showed her the slate. “Again?” She let him slip the sweatshirt off her shoulders.

  Now he drew her neck, with its intricate design of leaves. He outlined her bare arms inked with stems. With total concentration, he drew her tattooed shoulders and the ribbed cloth of her clinging shirt. He maintained his distance, but he had her in his hands. For her part, she never moved. She never flinched as she gazed back at him.

  Collin showed Daphne the slate and then erased it. He erased each drawing and deleted every image for good measure.

  They didn’t speak. He didn’t need to ask. In silence, she locked the door and took off her undershirt. They were alone, and no one could walk in on them. She sat for Collin and her breasts were white, her nipples small and hard. He stepped back and took a breath, but even then, he didn’t think that anyone would ever know.

  No one walked in, but one person saw. Invisible to them, Peter sat in his office, watching Collin’s sketch emerge on his own monitor. He could not see Collin, but he knew Collin’s line. Only Collin drew like that, with such detail and speed.

  “Careful, Collin,” Peter said.

  Even as Collin deleted Daphne’s image, his drawing remained on Peter’s workstation. Line by line, Peter watched the next drawing develop. Daphne’s face, her short, tousled hair, her patterned arms and shoulders, her bare torso. “Careful,” Peter murmured, but Collin couldn’t hear.

  Aidan sat at the kitchen table with his thousand-page textbook spread before him. He was sweating it out in summer school, learning cellular respiration. Oxidative phosphorylation. Cast away in the kitchen, without computer, without weapons, without any other voices in his ears, he gazed at the page, and the diagrams meant nothing to him. He waited, closed his eyes, and looked again. It was easy once he got his mind inside the picture. Once there, he could inhabit each cell’s tiny factory. The hard part was getting in. Only sheer boredom did the trick. The table was bare except for a bag of pretzels. When those were gone, when he was left with salt dust at the bottom of the bag, he glared at his biology text until, like a sulky cat, his imagination came around again.

  His mother said that he had changed, and she was right. She said life was a miracle, and he could see it. Little things like ice cream, or summer cloudbursts. He would think, Here I am, tasting Toscanini’s cocoa pudding. Here I am, with rain streaming down my face. I might have missed all this. He watched sparrows hopping into puddles to wash their dusty feathers, and he thought, How sweet they are; I never noticed.

  He was hungry again. He devoured dinner and then prowled the kitchen late at night, finishing whatever leftovers he could find. His desire to play grew stronger too. As he woke from sickness,
regaining stamina and appetite, he dreamed about his spectral life. Even now, under the table, his right foot tapped nervously—but he held back. Thrill seeker, storm chaser, he couldn’t qwest a little bit.

  He sat in class three hours a day. He met with the school psychologist, Miss Sorentino, who was pale and strange, with huge eyeglasses and a metallic voice. “Who’s better than you?” Sorentino would say whenever something pleased her. Patiently he sat at her desk and stared at her collection of miniature turtles. “This one’s soapstone,” she told Aidan. “This teeny one’s made out of an acorn. This one’s marble. This one’s glass.”

  He did his time. He listened to Sorentino talk about his uniqueness and his future. “What do you think?” she asked. Sometimes she said, “It’s up to you.”

  “I get it,” he told her, and he wasn’t lying. When he thought of gaming, he wrote in the margins of his bio notes, Not now. He knew how fortunate he was. Plagiarism was minor. As of yet, no one had accused him of his real crimes, and he knew better than to press his luck.

  Even so, he felt the tidal pull of UnderWorld. Like water flowing underground, UnderWorld seeped into his ordinary life. How beautiful, how strange, to see dragons in the shadows, and silver in the Charles River. Phantom visions. He could drown in his own thoughts.

  Diana was running down the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” he called out to her.

  “Where I always go.” She had a summer job across the street. Every afternoon she took care of Sage and Melissa’s one-year-old, Henry.

  “Where’s the BoX?”

  “What?” She thought that she had misheard him, he asked so casually.

  “Where did you put it?”

  She stood there in shorts and T-shirt and dusty running shoes. “You said you wouldn’t.”

  “I won’t!”

  “You said you wouldn’t even ask.”

  “I was just curious.” He turned back to his diagram of leaf and tree. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”