The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  Let it burn, Bunk says again, and the deadness in his voice scares you. His mesmerized stare at the flames licking, crackling, devouring—that scares you, too. You don’t understand the hypnotic allure of destruction. You understood that initial rush, that flood of wonder and adrenaline, but not this flat-eyed stare when everything around you is heat and blaze. Destruction scares you shitless, and you run home, alone. You change clothes. You hide your singed-hairless forearms under long sleeves.

  The aftermath? You were not caught, Bunk was not caught, no houses burned, and the woods came back strong and true: first as lush, bright green life springing from the scorched ground, then as trees thicker and straighter than before. This, you think twenty years later, was exactly the wrong lesson for you to have learned. Where were the consequences? Where were the fucking consequences?

  Today—when skylines burn in night-green, when the president’s faits are accompli, when smoke rises from spent casings and molten steel and charred skin and newspaper ink and your neighbor’s Good morning!—you imagine yourself there again, standing in the woods while the trees are burning, desperately turning to Bunk and finding him lock-limbed in a firegasm, already transformed into someone you don’t know.

  It is Bunk’s crackly, dead-leaf voice that now rasps in your ear: We lit that place on fire, man. We burned that motherfucker down.

  Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gachet

  1. On the avenue des Champs-Elysées (March 1889)

  The calliope chuffs merrily as the wooden horses and their child riders bob and spin. The horses are bright, newly painted, white and silver and chestnut and gold. It is warm and sunny, and the air smells of spring—of greening buds and warm gingerbread in the vendors’ stalls and rich brown mud churned up by little feet. Thrushes and blackbirds warble in the trees. Laughing children ride in goat-drawn carriages. A soft breeze luffs the pennants knotted to the carousel’s spire.

  Dr. Gachet’s head is light from afternoon brandies with Père Tanguy, the color merchant. He watches as the carousel turns, as the children and their horses disappear from view and then reappear. He is an old man, nearly sixty-one, of uncertain health, and he feels he is entitled to simple pleasures such as this: watching children and horses disappear, reappear, disappear, reappear. Always going, never gone.

  Inside his black satchel (along with a stethoscope, six brown-glass bottles of Dr. Gachet’s Healthful Elixir, and several packets of dried foxglove) are the seven tubes of paint and two new flat-ferrule brushes he has just purchased from Tanguy. He is not yet sure what he will paint when he returns to Auvers and sets up his easel; perhaps he will attempt that Cézanne winter landscape he has in his vault, or one of the still lifes Émile Bernard sent as payment for treating his ulcers. (Lately, he has derived far greater pleasure from copying works he loves than from wasting supplies on the capricious nothings of his own conception.) Whatever the subject, he will paint, he must paint. He is an old man. A lonely widower. Of uncertain health.

  He is walking away when a single gunshot pops from somewhere within the Bois de Boulogne. He should not be alarmed—duels are commonplace in the woods—but a sudden panic knots his gut. Two men with guns; just one gunshot. One man has survived, and the other’s time is done. This is a certainty he finds terrifying, and he breaks into a run, away from the death in the woods, away from the children whose laughter now feels shrill and oppressive, toward the safety of Tanguy’s cluttered shop, with its oily air and paint-spattered floor. The outer world goes silent as his own fast breaths and pumping pulse and ringing ears fill his head.

  2. In his garden with the artist, Auverssur-Oise (May 21, 1890)

  “I am an expert in the field of melancholy,” Dr. Gachet says as the two men smoke their pipes. “So believe me when I tell you that you are ill only insofar as you must be ill because you are a great artist. Melancholy afflicts all the great artists.”

  Puff.

  “And, one suspects, it afflicts other great men as well—the great philosophers, revolutionaries, poets, statesmen, and homeopaths. Perhaps also the great chefs and botanists, vintners and swordsmen, conquerors and color grinders. I would not be surprised if the great men in all fields, high or low, were so burdened. Goatherds and carpenters, jugglers and boatswains, accountants and chimney sweeps, theologians and haberdashers, swindling gypsies and dung shovelers, trombone players and hackberry harvesters. But particularly, most powerfully, most certainly, most inevitably, melancholy afflicts the great artists.”

  He shakes the crumbs of bread crust from his plate onto the ground. A fat chicken totters over and pecks contentedly. Across the garden a duck quacks, and a rabbit creeps through a green-and-yellow snarl of moneywort. “My prescription for you is work,” the doctor tells the artist. “Work, and more work. Many colors on many canvases. And, let us not forget, a soupspoon of my Elixir each night before you sleep.”

  He feels the artist studying his face, his eyes, the space he occupies.

  “You and I are very much alike,” the artist says. “Alike as brothers.”

  Puff.

  3. Signing the work (late May 1890)

  The artist delivers his first Auvers canvas to Dr. Gachet like a child bringing home a good mark from school, trembling with excitement and pride. “It is excellent,” the doctor says. “Inspired and inspiring.” He resists the urge to touch the brushstrokes that have been conjured into a cluster of thatched cottages on a soft golden hillside. He shakes the artist’s hand vigorously, claps him on the shoulder. “I am unabashedly optimistic about your treatment,” he says.

  The artist’s eyes are all pupil, and they tremble and jerk. “I must go,” he pants. “So many things call out for my eye, my brush.”

  Dr. Gachet shoos him toward the door. “Go. Work is how great men make their marks.”

  The door slams, and after Dr. Gachet gets up to close it properly, he returns to his writing table to work on his article—an important piece, to be sure, correcting some of the most alarming provincial misconceptions about public hygiene—but he finds himself unable to concentrate, unable to stop his knees from bouncing or his feet from tapping the floor, unwilling to stop the warmth that rises in him each time he swivels in his chair and looks at the fresh canvas leaning against the wall on top of his tea table. He puts down his pen and takes up a brush.

  Within a few hours, he has executed what is, to his eye, a perfect copy. In the lower left corner, he signs his nom d’art, Paul van Rijssel. Then he reconsiders and brushes it out. He experiments with new signatures, rubbing out each one before adding the next, in a new color:Paul van Rijssel

  P. van Rijssel

  Dr P. Gachet

  P.-F. Gachet

  Paul Gachet

  Paul-Ferdinand

  Paul

  Paul van R.

  Paul van G.

  Dr P. van G.

  Dr van G.

  Paul-Vincent

  Vincent-Paul

  When he finally steps away and shakes his head clear, paint stains cover his hands and his clothes, and a smeary blob of Verona green and ocher and burnt sienna has spread, blotting out half of a straw-colored hill. He hurls his brush against the wall, then razors the wet canvas into ribbons.

  4. Contemplating the tragus (May 23, 1890)

  While the renters are taking dinner in the ground-floor café, Dr. Gachet is behind the auberge with a long, paint-spattered ladder he has found in the grass. He leans the ladder against the building, tests his weight on the bottom rung. A creak, a little give, but sturdy enough. He climbs, catching a splinter in his little finger and suffering a whirl of vertigo when he dares a look down. He wriggles through the attic window, which has been propped open with a stick, and drops himself onto the floor in the room the artist rents for three francs fifty per day. It is a hot, dark, squalid cell. The walls are bare. There is a cot and a chair and a small dressing table and the lingering smell of pipe smoke and armpits and raw plaster.

  On the table is a letter to the artist’s b
rother. At the top of the page, the artist’s handwriting is crisp and well-spaced, but with each sentence it becomes more cramped, anxious. Dr. Gachet leans over the table and reads. This is what a good doctor does, he tells himself. A good doctor must see how the patient is thinking, must gauge the progress of their work together. A drop of sweat falls from his chin onto the paper. He does not wipe it away for fear of smearing the ink. Halfway down the page, he finds the following words:I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all he is much sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much, so that’s that. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch?

  When the artist returns from his meal, Dr. Gachet is sitting on the cot, waiting with the letter in his lap. The artist seems confused by the doctor’s presence. His pipe dips as his lips slacken. The doctor stands, and he takes the artist firmly by his thin wrist. “I have something to show you,” he says, not caring that he hears an angry shake in his voice.

  They do not speak as they descend the narrow stairs and exit through the café, where the innkeeper’s wife, collecting plates from tables, looks up peevishly to see what all the stomping is about. Dr. Gachet tows the artist behind him as they walk swiftly up the steep, crooked streets, feels the other man’s pulse quickening beneath his hand. He feels his own pulse thumping in his neck. The artist stumbles on loose stones, no doubt exaggerating his poor sense of balance. The scent of lilac is heavy in the dusky air. They pass the old church and keep walking until they reach the walled cemetery, a stone field of Ici Repose scored by a grid of yellow dusty pathways. The artist seems not to notice that they are surrounded by the dead; he stares off into the whispering wheat fields beyond.

  Dr. Gachet removes his blue jacket and drapes it over the stone wall, places his cap upon it, then takes off his shirt and rips it in two. With half the shirt he blindfolds the artist, and while he is tying the knot, he studies the artist’s nubby ear. Lower half of left ear excised, he notes, by means of a diagonal incision, beginning posteriorly toward the top of the ear and cutting anteriorly through the tragus. Hemorrhaging likely was extensive. He runs his thumb over the hardened scar tissue along the line of the cut. The artist tilts his head, leans into the doctor’s hand, as if to say, Carry this, please, carry this.

  Dr. Gachet places the other half of the shirt in the artist’s hand. “Put it on me,” he says, and the artist, with his long, bony fingers, blindfolds him. The doctor can smell his own sweat in the fabric as well as traces of dinner on the artist’s hands—rosemary, goat cheese, some kind of berry.

  They hold hands and stride through the cemetery, Dr. Gachet leading them toward the open grave in the northeast corner that was dug that morning for old Madame LaChance. They bark their shins on gravestones and trample flowers and kick-scatter tiny rocks on the pathway until at last they step together into nothing.

  Inside the grave, they slip off the blindfolds. Warm pain thrums in the doctor’s ankle. Dirt streaks his waxy, sagging belly. The artist sniffs at the sweetly loamy air.

  The doctor gestures upward, and together they look up at the rectangle of sky in its frame of brown earth. Night is falling in a mad indigo swirl.

  “A beautiful sky,” the artist says.

  “So you see,” the doctor says, “it is not the worst thing, to fall in a ditch.”

  “We are very much alike, you and I.”

  “Stop saying that. I am your doctor.”

  A crow alights at the grave’s edge and looks down at them, its head atilt in curiosity.

  5. Dr. Gachet, with the heartbroken expression of our time [#1] (early June 1890)

  Midafternoon in the garden. On the red garden table: foxglove in a vase and two novels by les frères Goncourt. My pose, he says, is modeled on Delacroix’s painting of the poet Tasso in the asylum at Ferrara, a pose that suggests that all the world’s melancholy is bearing down upon me.

  “I enjoy painting portraits,” the artist says. “It consoles me up to a certain point for not being a doctor.” I tell him not to be absurd. He tells me to hold still.

  I hold myself still and listen to the music of his work, to the slap and whisper of brush on canvas. I watch the blue smoke curl from his pinched lips. I feel the air around me turning bluer and bluer. “So much blue,” I say.

  “Cobalt,” he says.

  Ah. Of course, cobalt. All around me is cobalt. I am bathed in cobalt, drenched in cobalt, drowning in cobalt. I feel in cobalt. As the layers of paint accumulate, my understanding deepens along with the color. I understand that all I have ever known is cobalt, except for occasional periods of ultramarine and Prussian blue and indigo and slate blue and bice blue and cerulean and king’s blue and aqua and blue céleste and robin’s-egg and lilac and cyanine and lapis lazuli. What I would not give to live in viridian! To dance in vermilion! To love in Paris yellow and madder lake!

  But no. I am but a tiny sun-scorched face peeking out, in vain, from the greedy, gulping maw of cobalt. All the world’s melancholy, bearing down upon me.

  It is a wonder my neck does not snap.

  6. Strolling with Henriette (June 24, 1890)

  After dinner, Dr. Gachet feels a burn in his stomach that several spoonsful of Elixir do not extinguish, so he decides to go for a walk. He heads down the hill into town with his goat, Henriette, who follows attentively at his heels, only occasionally falling behind to nibble at the irises that grow along the road. A small girl rushes out of a house to pet the goat. She feeds Henriette crusts of bread and chunks of cheese, which she offers in a grubby palm, until an anxious mother’s voice calls her back inside.

  Dr. Gachet and Henriette leave the road near the auberge and make their way through knee-high grass to the dilapidated barn where the artist has been storing his many new canvases. It is dark and gloomy inside. The walls are naked wood, with bits of straw poking out from between the boards. The goats in their pens call out when they smell Henriette and scrape their horns against the wooden gates. At the very rear of the barn, in a filthy hay-lined sty, are the artist’s works, some on the walls, some jumbled together on the ground. The doctor sits among the canvases and marvels, while Henriette wanders through the barn, sniffing at the other goats.

  Two months from now, after the burial, Dr. Gachet will stand in the same spot, choosing which of the paintings to keep for himself, the artist’s brother having offered them in gratitude to those who looked after the artist in his last days. Monsieur Ravoux, the innkeeper, will claim but two—the portrait of his daughter and a rushed study of the Auvers Hôtel de Ville—before he shakes the executors’ hands and leaves. Dr. Gachet, giddy at all the beauty and genius on display, will choose more than a dozen before he hears someone clear his throat and he feels compelled to stop himself because of the absurd and maddening demands of decorum. “Roll them up, Coco,” he will tell his son, in whose dark eyes—heavy-lidded and deep-set like his father’s—roils the same hunger for art.

  But tonight, as Henriette sniffs and nibbles, Dr. Gachet just sits and looks at these images: the swaying wheat fields and the vineyards, the trees undulating in the wind, a pair of children with knowing smiles, the thatched huts and yuccas, his own twenty-two-year-old daughter glowing angelically in the garden. He sits and marvels at the greatness before him, sits and allows himself for once not to feel lonely and not to feel the weight of melancholy and not to worry about his fickle beat-dropping heart, sits and allows himself to believe—deeply, for once—that he is helping, helping this artist work and live, helping this world become more beautiful, more bearable.

  He sits there until Henriette comes up behind him and licks the back of his neck, telling him it is time to go. He hums to her as they climb the hill to his house, even improvises a sprightly little song:Henriette, Henriette,

  La plus jolie des toutes les bêtes,

  Que penses-tu dans la tête,

  Henriette, Henriette?

  And he does not care if anyone hears, if anyone sees, if anyo
ne knows that he is an old man who sings to goats.

  7. Head over basin, with daughter Marguerite (June 28, 1890)

  She takes a handful of powdered saffron from the pouch and spreads it through his wet hair, kneading and stroking as the powder becomes a thin, grainy paste. She rubs small circles on his scalp, then grasps pinches of his hair, gently tugging as she works the dye in, root to tip. As careful as she is, orange stains spread over his skin at the forehead and temples and will take weeks to wear off.

  An hour later, she rinses him. He regards himself in the mirror. Even wet, his hair is still several shades lighter than the artist’s.

  “Again,” he tells her, as orange droplets fall from his face, dotting the towel wrapped around his neck. “More. Redder.”

  8. In the garden, at gunpoint (July 17, 1890)

  The gun is Dr. Gachet’s own. Last week he gave it to the artist, who said he needed it to scare away crows that were plaguing him as he painted outdoors. Each afternoon since, the pastoral quiet has been disrupted by gunfire as the artist bangs away up in the fields. And just an hour ago, the dairy farmer Jomaron came pounding on the doctor’s front door in a state of vexation. That lunatic is frightening my stock, he complained, and their milk now has the bitter taste of fear. The farmer was unwilling to accept that this was a sacrifice to be made in the name of art; instead he accepted thirty francs in recompense.

  And now the black bore of that very gun is inches from Dr. Gachet’s face. The artist holds it with two hands that tremble with rage, the barrel tracing paths across the doctor’s forehead and back, across and back. Dr. Gachet looks the artist squarely in the eye, as if there is no gun between them, and asks why he is so upset.