The Chalk Artist

by Allegra Goodman

  “What poem?”

  “For Poetry in Action.” She studied the planner. “Start with the exposition. You can choose a Dickinson poem to analyze and memorize it at the same time.” She looked up. “You’ll need to come in every day.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. First of all, he had never heard of meeting with a teacher every day. Detention, yes. Private tutoring? Nobody did that. And he had work. He was bagging leaves after school. He had begun with his mother’s yard. Then he’d cleaned up Maia’s place. His mother said that she was proud of him. His sister said nothing. She suspected him, but he ignored her. He wasn’t angry with Diana anymore. He barely thought about her.

  He lived alone, he worked alone, raking yards on Fayette and Amory and even as far away as Kirkland Street. He had filled forty giant bags with the fallen leaves of a giant copper beech. His arms were hard, his hands rough and cracked, because he didn’t wear gloves, but he was more than halfway to a new BoX.

  “I have a job.”

  Nina met his gaze with her gray eyes. “Adjust your schedule.”

  He said, “I have to do my—”

  “Sorry.”

  He persisted. “I have a lot of—”

  She interrupted, “I don’t care.”

  —

  Nina wasn’t sure that Aidan would return the next day. Even when he showed up in class, she doubted he would meet her after school again. He looked so distant leaning back, his legs stretched out before him. His body told her, I’m here temporarily.

  After school, she regretted telling him everything at once. She had surprised him, but he wouldn’t stay surprised for long. She had presented a stark choice, but on consideration he might not care. If he called her bluff, she would have to go to DeLaurentis. A whole investigation would follow. She would have to explain why she had never mentioned Diana’s journal before, and she would have to answer questions about her own behavior, her impulsive visit to Diana, her threat to Aidan, her flouting student privacy. There would be consequences for her as well as him. She stood in her empty classroom and she waited, but Aidan didn’t come.

  At last, Nina started loading her bags with student papers. She was about to leave when she saw Aidan’s face in the window of her classroom door. Quickly she dropped her bags behind her desk and ushered him inside.

  “You’re late.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Take a seat.”

  They sat together at two student desks, and she handed him a vocabulary worksheet, the first assignment that he’d missed.

  He looked at her uncertainly. Was she planning to sit there while he did these? That seemed to be her intention. She actually watched him fill in blanks with misanthrope, jocular, protean, lassitude, inchoate.

  “You know the words.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  She heard the challenge in his voice and countered, “I didn’t know that you had time to read.”

  He looked up and she saw a flash of fear in his blue eyes.

  “Just keep working,” Nina said.

  Every day after that, they met in her empty classroom after school. They sat together at her desk and read Dickinson. She had him type his analysis on the classroom computer, where she could see him. “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died” is an eerily calm poem about death. The narrator is detached from the situation…

  “What are you saying here?” She pointed to his opening paragraph.

  Aidan searched Nina’s face for clues, trying to find the words she wanted, hoping to fulfill his obligation fast.

  “You’re not interested in any of this.”

  “Not really.”

  She was sitting with her elbows on her desk, her chin resting in her hand. She was very serious, and very beautiful. “What if I say you have to be?”

  “You can’t make someone interested,” he pointed out.

  She ignored this and handed him his analysis. “Go ahead and read it to me.”

  “Aloud?”

  He caught the hint of a smile and he thought, Oh yeah. Otherwise she couldn’t hear me. But when he started reading, she challenged him.

  “Are you sure you want to say death doesn’t bother her?” she asked. “How do you know? How can anybody know?”

  “True.” He considered his own words. “I’ll say it seems like death doesn’t bother her.”

  He kept reading, and she bent her head to listen. It amazed her that he had plagiarized a paper. He wrote clearly, choosing his words well. He was more than capable. What was it then that had compelled him? Gaming in itself, or Daphne?

  Tears welled up, but she didn’t think that Aidan noticed.

  He saw more than she realized. He saw her sadness. He saw her ink-smudged hand, her forearm where her sleeve fell back, her small wrist. He saw her head dip slightly. She was exhausted.

  At first he watched for those moments when she let her guard down, the split second when she almost fell asleep. He willed her to lay down her head so he could rush outside.

  Gradually, however, Nina drew him in. Shaking off sleep, she had such an edge about her, an intense concentration. She reminded him of someone, and he kept searching his memory. Who was it?

  “Remember the speaker,” she said of the Dickinson poem. “Who is speaking?”

  “Someone dead.”

  “And what does that sound like?”

  “Calm,” Aidan said. “Numb.”

  Nina was leaning forward, intent on every word. When she pulled back, he caught the resemblance. She was like the doctor at the hospital, listening to his heart.

  —

  Day by day, Aidan began to catch her moods. Sometimes she was sleepy, sometimes miserable, sometimes bored. He forgot about escape. Her determination fascinated him. Her eyes closed for just a moment, but she never put her head down. She sat up straight and she was Miss Lazare again. “Here,” she said, “I think you overstate your case.”

  Her knowledge scared him. Not her knowledge of literature, but her knowledge of his secret life.

  “You need to memorize the poem.” She passed him her thick book, the complete Dickinson, its paper jacket printed with blue and green leaves.

  “I can memorize it now.” He read the poem rapidly to himself and then turned the volume facedown on the desk.

  “Don’t do that! It’s old. You’ll break the spine.” Protectively, she gathered her book up again.

  Startled, he blurted, “Sorry.” Then, trying to appease her, he recited the poem rapidly all in one breath, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died— / The Stillness in the Room / Was like the Stillness in the Air— / Between the Heaves of Storm— / The Eyes around…”

  She waited until he’d finished and then she said, “No. Say it like you mean it.”

  “But I don’t mean it,” he answered, sullen, because she was not impressed.

  She looked at him steadily, without anger, without reproach. She could have snapped at him. She could have walked out, but she said nothing, and she stayed.

  Gazing back, he saw his teacher’s patience, vast and still, spread out before him like an inland sea.

  At last she ventured, “You’re a good student when you’re in school.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve read your transcript, obviously.”

  She wanted more than anything to bring Aidan down to earth, but that was not the effect she had on him. She seemed to him enchanted, dangerous, a mermaid in the Whennish Sea.

  When she was dissatisfied, she barely looked at him. When he worked harder, she nodded, as though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t praise him. Her determination drew him to her. Lovely and difficult to please, she sent him off to prove himself in thorny fields, and set new tasks as soon as he was done.

  She said, “When you recite, you have to slow down and think about the meaning of the words.” But when he recited again, “I heard a Fly buzz…” he was thinking about her. He was imagining her elusive smile.

  “ ‘I heard a Fly b
uzz—when I died’ is an eerily calm poem about death,” she said, quoting his essay back at him. “The narrator is detached from the situation.”

  Briefly, he felt it. Detached from the situation, he watched Miss Lazare sitting at her desk. He saw himself, looking into his teacher’s eyes.

  Collin felt as though his world had changed to black and white. He had known magic. Nina had touched his life with gold. Now he could not reach her. He could not get back to where he’d been.

  In games you could redeem yourself with points or jewels. You could trade gold for freedom, or even give an extra life away. In EverWhen you always had some recourse. Collin envied Everheads counting down to Launch Day in their ordered companies, their banners rippling overhead. He wished that he could run away and take his place among them. He wished that he could quit his job and disappear. Such was his guilt, his increasing sense of shame. Then he thought, No. Quitting was just what Peter wanted.

  Monday morning, Collin walked to the bus stop, although he thought more than once of turning back. Waiting, he remained uncertain, but when Arkadia’s shuttle arrived, he boarded. He would not give up. He had seen his horses thundering through the dining room. He had seen them with his own eyes, and they weren’t pretty. They had silenced everybody.

  The other hellions on the bus were quiet. How much did they know? Had they seen him confront Daphne at the party? She was not riding the bus, but had they spoken to her? Maybe they thought he was a coward, crawling back. I can’t win, Collin thought suddenly. He’s got me to the point where I look like a quitter if I leave and a punching bag if I return.

  Collin hunched down alone in a window seat. Just do your job. Just do your work and you’ll get paid. He told himself this, but he thought of Peter. His harsh words, his frown, his cold dissatisfaction.

  When the bus stopped, he roused himself to follow the others, stepped off with furious determination. To do what? He hardly knew. He wanted the impossible, the life he’d had before—his work, his love, his happiness.

  Exiled from Nina, Collin found himself alone at Arkadia as well. In the next days and weeks, Peter reorganized pods so that Collin worked with all new people on background—texture and detail, condensation on rock faces, mists and shadows, damp stains on stone.

  Collin was not the only artist reassigned as the launch approached. Even so, Collin sensed that Peter was isolating him. No one disabused him of the notion. Obi, Akosh, Tomas, and Daphne kept a friendly distance. They smiled and even played Ping-Pong with him on occasion, but they kept the conversation light. No gossip, no commiseration.

  Daphne approached with cheerful caution, never once alluding to the drawings or the party or her tears. Only once was she at all real with him.

  Collin passed her desk and startled her. She cleared her screen with a quick swipe of the hand.

  “What was that?” Collin said. “Was that your new marketing plan?”

  “New project,” she admitted.

  “For UnderWorld or something else?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  Of course new projects cropped up all the time. Stealth mode was common, but Collin understood that he had been excluded once again.

  “You’ll get through this,” Nicholas told Collin in the sound booth.

  “Maybe.” Collin had been rendering stalagmites in UnderWorld’s caverns, and dragon bones, and mountains of slick guano. He was beginning to wonder if he would ever draw a face again, and yet he toiled on, sometimes bitter, sometimes laughing at himself. He was drawing bat shit, after all.

  Work got even worse. Peter moved him to color correction. For days he didn’t draw at all. He studied sequences at his workstation, analyzing the tint and continuity of dragon scales in the dim light, underground. His hands hovered over the keyboard, and, like a caged panther, his imagination turned and turned upon itself.

  He stood and stretched his arms. He spun around and he saw dragon scales on every surface. Every cubicle glowed silver. He had never been so tired or so bored, and he wanted to bust out of there. Pride prevented him. Don’t give up now, he told himself. Don’t let Peter win. He forced himself to work, imprisoned in his chair. The days stretched out, hour after hour.

  —

  On Launch Day Collin watched news reporters arrive, trailing long black cables. He watched the hallways fill with virtual mist, an atmosphere of mystery advertising aeroflakes. From a distance, he watched Viktor speak.

  “Today we are announcing that OVID will support all Arkadian games. Not just UnderWorld, but EverWhen as well. We are opening portals for world-jumping so that players can move seamlessly from one game to the next.”

  The metallic kiss of cameras.

  “A world without edges,” Viktor said. “No screens, no frames. You go where your imagination takes you.”

  I wish, thought Collin.

  He wandered through the building, and there was food, and there were kegs. There were demos. Reporters standing at the Gates and dueling in the halls. Bright as a harvest moon, a virtual clock was counting down to midnight. The illusion caught Collin’s attention, but he could not forget the maze of cubicles beneath.

  He paused for a moment at his desk. On impulse, he pocketed a black pen and five packs of sticky notes. Then he headed outside.

  The wind hit hard. The evening was bitter, and he was glad. It was quiet outdoors. No speeches, no demos, but as he rounded the corner of the building, he heard voices.

  “Hey, hey, ho, ho. UnderWorld has got to go.” Shoulder to shoulder, members of Christians Against Gaming Exploitation were marching in the west parking lot, a dozen young men and women carrying hand-painted signs. CU IN HEAVEN! JESUS PLAYS FOR KEEPS.

  Collin stared at the picketers bundled up like carolers in their knit hats and Christmas sweaters. One in particular, a paunchy guy in rectangular glasses, called out to Collin. “Hey, man, listen!”

  Collin studied the protestor’s round face.

  “The Lord tests the righteous, but His soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.”

  Wearily, Collin said, “Hi, Darius.”

  “Repent!” cried a young woman in a reindeer sweater. Her long hair spilled out under the brim of her candy-striped hat. Her eyes were bright, her nose and lips and eyebrows ringless.

  “Hey, Emma,” Collin said.

  He took the early shuttle back to Cambridge, but it was dark when he got off in Harvard Square. He stood for a moment on Mt. Auburn Street, just watching the students, and the construction workers, and the homeless veteran, and the people carrying rolled yoga mats. He glanced at Grafton Street and the Harvard Book Store, where Nina used to meet him.

  His heart rebelled against his loneliness. His body ached from hunching at his desk, and now his fingers flexed. He walked across the Square to Grendel’s. He hurried down the stairs to the old dive, and all the green lamps on the tables welcomed him.

  “Collin!” Sam cried out as he approached the bar. Tiny, sharp-eyed, hospitable, she brought a pint without his asking. “You never call, you never write.”

  “Hey.” Kayte was still waiting tables. “How’s Nina?”

  Collin didn’t answer, and she didn’t press.

  He sat at the bar and watched Sam mixing drinks as Grendel’s music pounded all around him.

  “What’s it like there?” Sam asked.

  “It’s just work.”

  “Come on, give us some dirt,” Kayte called out as she passed through to the kitchen.

  “I got nothing,” Collin said.

  “Empty-handed,” Sam said.

  “No.” He felt in his jacket pockets and pulled out the sticky notes. He lined them up on the bar along with the pen.

  Sam said, “Oooh, exciting. Little pads of paper.”

  “Pick a color. Any color.” They were all pale office shades. Pink, blue, green, yellow, white.

  “Green.”

  He drew a leaf on a green sticky note. A simple maple leaf, outlined in black pen.

&nbs
p; Sam said, “You quit your job.”

  “No.” He turned back the first sticky note and drew the leaf again. On every page he drew the maple leaf in a slightly different position.

  “So you like it there.”

  Like is not the word, thought Collin. Liking the job didn’t enter into it.

  “Nice,” said Kayte, who was looking over his shoulder.

  He sensed several people watching. Two girls sitting next to him leaned closer as he drew another leaf.

  “Oh, I get it,” one girl said, as he drew the maple leaf for the twentieth time, edges curling in an imaginary wind. Her name was Emily and her friend was Kira and they were going out for Kira’s belated birthday. Emily was bright-eyed and heavy. She had blond hair but dark eyebrows, and she wore a low-cut shirt. Kira was heavy too, but softer and quieter. Her eyes were dark with eyeliner and she had beautiful black hair all down her back. She looked like the girls Collin had known in high school. He drew a leaf on the last sticky note and gave the whole pack to Kira. “Happy birthday.”

  “Oh, wow,” said Kira, uncertainly.

  Emily said, “It’s a flip-book.”

  Kira held the pack of sticky notes and flipped them with her thumb. The maple leaf drifted, rising and dancing and falling to the bottom of the last page. “It’s so pretty,” Kira exclaimed. “How did you learn to do that?”

  “You’re terrible,” Sam told Collin.

  He was already drawing a flip-book for Emily. This one wasn’t nearly as beautiful. It was just an ice cream cone melting in the sun. “You’re so good,” Emily exclaimed.

  “No, ice cream is boring.” Collin gave up halfway through. “I’m doing something else.”

  The two of them waited quite seriously, and a few others stood behind them. Even Sam leaned over the bar.

  “Okay, let’s try this.”

  He took his black pen and drew a line across a blue sticky note. A line sagging ever so slightly. A telephone wire. Then he drew a bird on the wire. A black bird, alone and hunched. He turned the page and drew the bird again. He turned each page and drew the bird spreading its wings.

  When Collin finished and thumbed through the book, his audience watched the bird take flight, soaring and swooping in the air until at last it flew off the page.