The Surf Guru

by Doug Dorst

  “The Guillaumin!” the artist says. “What else?”

  The canvas in question: a portrait of a bare-breasted woman lying on a bed, which Armand Guillaumin traded for twelve bottles of Elixir to steady his own erratic heart. It is a lovely work—the artist was even moved to tears upon first beholding it—but Gachet has not yet had time to take it into Paris for Père Tanguy’s man to frame it.

  “Sacrilege,” the artist spits. “Incredible. Nothing in this world has to tolerate more stupidity than a painting when it is regarded by fools. You are no better than the rest. You know nothing of art.”

  “I know the most important thing of art,” Dr. Gachet answers. “And that is work. Stop behaving like an infant. Be a man, be an artist, and get on with your work.” The artist attempts a retort, but Gachet stands, interrupting him. “I have been very busy,” the doctor says, pointing a stern, steady finger into the artist’s chest. “Busy with many things, not least of which is your treatment.”

  “You are a fraud,” the artist seethes. “I am insane to think you can help me.”

  The doctor still refuses to look at the gun but imagines the artist’s finger softly pressing against the trigger, then lifting, pressing and lifting, pressing and lifting. The only thing between him and death? A few pounds of force and the indecision of a melancholic mind. He holds his ground, holds the artist’s gaze.

  A standoff then, for a long, humid stretch of time, until a door slaps open and Marguerite emerges from the house with the doctor’s afternoon tea. Silently she sets the tea tray down on the garden table—the doctor watches the other man’s eyes following her—then goes to the artist and rubs broad reassuring circles on his back. The artist lowers the gun. He tucks it into the pocket of his blue twill jacket. At a glance from her father, Marguerite returns to the house, and the men sit.

  Dr. Gachet produces a vial of Elixir from his satchel and hands it across the table. Obediently, the artist drinks. He lays his head on the table. “My attacks are returning,” he says. “I see no happy future at all.”

  “Then you must paint more,” the doctor says. “You are an artist. That is your happy future.”

  Dr. Gachet lies awake that night, tormented by suspicions that the artist has begun an affair with his sweet Marguerite, his only daughter. He flips through pages of the Goncourts’ Germinie Lacerteux, absorbing nothing. He wastes his morning pacing through the house and grumbling to himself; at noon he puts on his boots and goes looking for the artist outside. He stomps through the cemetery, along the edge of the wheat field, past Jomaron’s jumpy cows. Turning south, he enters a field of giant sunflowers and walks straight through it, yanking brilliant yellow heads off their stems as he goes and stamping the flowers into the dirt. Pollen clouds the air, and he is seized by fits of sneezing—ten, eleven, even twelve at a stretch. Sweating and panting, he climbs a grassy hill overlooking the field to rest. His mouth hangs open when he looks out over his path of destruction: the trail of headless stalks has left an emerald serpentine through the field of gold. It is a stunning scene, he thinks, one that must be painted. He races back to town, nose running, lungs constricted and burning, to find the artist. An inner voice tells him that a painting of this scene might be the cure for that poor, great man. And the sooner the canvas is completed, the sooner Dr. Gachet can set up his easel, mix his paints, and create its double.

  9. At the artist’s deathbed (July 28, 1890)

  Dr. Gachet dresses the wound, which is level with the edge of the ribs, just in front of the axillary line. The heart was not hit. “The bullet is inaccessible,” he tells the artist, “but you still might be saved.”

  “Then I have to do it all over again,” the artist says.

  He dies the next day.

  When the artist’s brother arrives from Paris and kneels in prayer at the foot of the cot, Dr. Gachet takes out charcoal and paper and begins to sketch, his nerves ajangle, his hands excited. He sketches the sharp ridge of the artist’s eyebrows, the sunken cheeks, the knobby chin, the thin downturned lips; sketches as the artist instructed him to, quick as lightning, sheer work and calculation, with his mind strained to the utmost, like an actor on a stage in a difficult role with a hundred things to think of at once. He sketches with sadness and regret and loss and all the anger and agony that come with gazing at the faces of people you have failed. He signs his finished sketch P. Gachet, adding his name to the provenance of melancholy, to the provenance of art.

  He will give the sketch to the artist’s brother, and in a few weeks will receive a letter from him. I must tell you that it gave my mother immense pleasure to see the drawing you did of my dear brother, it will read. Several people who saw it found it admirable. And Dr. Gachet will run out to the garden and toss the letter in the air and laugh in the purest joy and dance in circles with his arms outstretched while the chickens and ducks and rabbits and cats look on.

  10.With the carpenter Levert (July 31, 1890)

  The artist’s coffin is badly made. As the pallbearers carry it up the winding road, a foul-smelling, dark liquid drips from a crack where the green wood has curled away like a sneering lip. The liquid stains Camille Pissarro’s shoes. Émile Bernard turns away, gagging.

  The next day, an enraged Dr. Gachet kicks open the door to the carpenter Levert’s shop. He pushes the wide-eyed man—much younger and brawnier than he—to the wall, seizes the front of his apron in a fist. “I should kill you,” he shouts. “You are a disgrace. An exceptional artist deserves exceptional craftsmanship.”

  Levert, recovering from the surprise, wrenches the doctor’s hand from his apron and twists the older man, clamping his neck and arms in a firm but painless hold. “I am a fine craftsman,” Levert tells him flatly. “I am also a businessman, and I was paid only enough for cheap wood.”

  The doctor fights against him, his legs wheeling and battering the carpenter’s shins, his shoulders straining in their sockets. Pinpoints of light in primary colors fleck his vision. He sees a hammer lying on a workbench and wishes he could reach it and bury the claw in the carpenter’s skull. Soon, though, he tires, and limp with grief, he begins to wheeze and sob. His tears and mucus glaze the carpenter’s bare arm.

  After Levert carries him to the doorway and pushes him softly outside, Dr. Gachet turns to face the bigger man and taps his thumb against his own chest. “I promise you,” he says, his voice a corvid croak, “that this artist’s bones will not molder in any coffin of your making.”

  A month later, thick boards of the finest Provence cypress arrive at his home, and he goes to work in the salon. The plans, which he has drawn himself—designed according to his own dimensions—are spread over the tea table. When he saws, his cuts are clumsy and crooked, and they leave jags and recesses. When he hammers, the nails bend; when he tries to correct them, they bend in new directions, until he angrily pounds them down and they protrude from the wood, gnarled as olive trees. Drifts of sawdust accumulate on the antique rug. Empty Elixir bottles clutter a corner of the room. He flings scraps of ruined wood through the open door to the garden, where they skitter and thunk on the patio bricks. Each night, his children come downstairs in their nightclothes and beg him to stop.

  11. Dr. Gachet, with the heartbroken expression of our time [#2] (September 1890)

  Instead of a mirror, he uses the first portrait to guide him. It is a rare gift, he thinks, to be able to paint oneself as one has been seen most truthfully—distilled, by a great artist, down to one’s very essence. With a strong and sure slap of blue, he begins his work—another Gachet in Tasso’s pose, at once homage, memoir, collaboration. His mind whirls and he paints, artist and subject in the purest senses.

  Changes: softer sky, a less-jagged blue rain. Remove the Goncourt brothers’ books—those cadmium yellow blocks—a distraction, a xanthopsic redundancy—for is not the essence of brotherliness already concentrated in this very act of creation, this self-portrait of portrait? The foxglove must remain, though—yes, those sprigs of Digitalis purpu
rea, those twinned stems of indigo teardrops—it remains—remains—as does all the world’s melancholy, always bearing down—

  Outside the sun sinks, and the shadows in the room deepen. At one point, his brush hand shakes and tingles so badly that he has to pause to fetch a fresh bottle of Elixir. It is night when he finds himself watching himself from above, watching in the guttering lamplight as his hand, firm and steady, signs the canvas Vincent, watching as his body collapses into a chair, watching as this one iteration of him falls into a long, deep, holy sleep.

  12. At the Folies Bergère, watching Loïe Fuller (March 1892)

  He watches her dance, this American sensation, this ethereal sylph. She pirouettes and spins, her flowing white costume awhirl about her, diaphanous veils fluttering and flaring in light that spins and flashes and wheels and washes in soft creamy white and in cool complementary pairs: pink and pale green, orange and cyan, purple and yellow. She is an unfurling flower, then a flame, then a butterfly.

  The music ceases. A barrage of applause then, and the dancer disappears behind the brocaded curtain. The stage is dark, empty, but Dr. Gachet still feels her shining, sinuous grace, feels it as surely as if it were a thick impasto sky under his fingertips.

  Closing time is called, and although around him chairs are sliding and groaning on the wooden floor, feet are shuffling, elbows are nudging, and voices are prodding barmen with One last drink, please, Dr. Gachet sits quiet and still, his eyes closed, colorful circles and swirls burning the dark inside him. He feels time’s fingers curled around his fragile heart, pinching and releasing, pinching and releasing, teasing and teasing him; one day they will clamp down and crush it in a fist. He sees himself stretched out in a white nightgown while his son sits at his bedside sketching his pale dead face. He sees his son and daughter growing old and silent and alone together in the house at Auvers as they sit and watch the red pigments in the artist’s paintings fade to bloodless pink. He sees a newborn rabbit, finger-sized, squirming in a patch of thistles in the garden, blind and helpless and moist and new.

  A strong arm guides him out into the night. Colors streak and voices yammer and nothing makes sense until he spots that stunted, drunken Toulouse-Lautrec under a gas lamp, wobbling on his cane and addressing a small circle of laughing men and painted women. Dr. Gachet pushes past all the bodies and, breathing heavily, presses a bottle of Elixir into the tiny, crooked man’s hand.

  “What’s this?” the painter asks. “Why are you—?”

  “I can help you grow,” the doctor says.

  The Monkeys Howl, the Hagfish Feast

  It is past midnight. The kid is tired after a long day of marching and slashing through undergrowth and dodging ambushes, but he has been forbidden to sleep. He would like to swim in the cool ocean, but he has also been forbidden to swim or dip or even wade. Nor may he remove his boots to wrinkle his burning toes in the spent waves that bubble over the sand. He has been forbidden even to sit. He has strict orders, from the general himself. He must stand and guard Sergio’s head.

  The kid does not understand why the head must be guarded. Who would want it? It is a dead thing, caked in blood, with a sour, meaty stink that the ocean breeze cannot carry away. Flies buzz dizzily around it, then alight and prowl its terrain.

  The head rests in the dry sand, well above the tide’s reach. The kid nudges it with his boot, rolls it facedown. He finds its weight disconcerting. He tamps it solidly so it will not roll back. The flies resettle upon the head as soon as he takes his foot away.

  Looking out over the rippling black waves, he reaches into the pocket of his worn canvas trousers and with one finger traces the scalloped edge of the photograph of Alvaro’s novia. The photograph is the prize of prizes, coveted by all, and now it belongs to him. He wants to take it out to admire her, but the night is moonless—and, in any event, he cannot afford to be seen with his attention on anything but the head. Still, the image of the woman is clear in his mind, feels like something rare and vital. He has been running through forests and jungles and scorched plains with the rebels since his voice was high and thin; he has never tasted a secret kiss in the shadow of a giant yucca, or peeled off a blouse steeped in cool feminine sweat after a climb up the volcano, or raised a skirt in the salty dark under the wharf.

  He touches himself through a hole in his pocket and is pleased to encounter his own warmth. He handles himself tenderly, with slow, deliberate strokes of his thumb and forefinger, keeping his arm still so that anyone watching him will see only a soldier attentively performing his duty. In the water, creatures phosphoresce, wink.

  Farther up the beach, Alvaro lies open-eyed on his plastic tarp, which crinkles beneath him as he rolls over and back, over and back. He cannot sleep. His feet are covered in sores and blisters and fungus. The sand fleas are biting. The saraguate monkeys are howling in the forest. Most of all, he is angry about the photograph. He is unaccustomed to losing. He is a gambler who leaves little to chance.

  Earlier that evening, after the general had given the order, the entire army circled around Sergio and chanted a countdown from ten; on the beat of zero, Alvaro swung his bolo knife, and the blood arced high and misted dozens of dirty faces. The men clustered around the two pieces of Sergio and watched the blood winding through the sand toward the ocean. They placed bets on how far the blood would run.

  He should not have risked the photograph, but he could not resist; he could tell the other men were going to guess poorly, planting their sticks high up on the beach, underestimating how much blood there is in a man. His bet raised the stakes, forced all the others to search their packs and pockets for their things of greatest value. Then Alvaro silently computed the coagulation time, the slope of the beach, the absorbency of the black volcanic sand, the temperature and humidity, the speed of the wind off the ocean, and he drove in his stick at the water’s edge.

  He should have won. Something was wrong with Sergio’s blood.

  The kid took away quite a haul: two kilos of foot powder; a pocket watch and four rings; a silver revenge charm; dozens of cigars; a necklace of monkey teeth, all polished and sharpened; a vial of bone dust looted from some old saint’s reliquary; many grenades; a glass eye; and the photograph. This kid! So young he can’t keep his hands off himself for five minutes at a time! The photograph must be retrieved soon. It won’t be long before the kid splashes himself all over it.

  Around him, a hundred dark lumps on plastic tarps taunt him with their snoring.

  In his tent, the general drinks. He can afford to be giddy, even though ammunition is scarce and trench foot has taken its toll. His power has grown immeasurably since he eliminated Sergio. It will grow even more when he delivers the head to his enemy, the Queen. He imagines catapulting it over the castle walls into the garden while the Queen is entertaining guests. He laughs as he imagines a startled servant spilling a tray of canapés into her royal lap.

  The general holds out his flask so that he can see his reflection in the polished steel, angles it back and forth, regards himself up and down. Though his belly lolls over the waistband of his shorts, though wiry black hairs sprout from his shoulders and knuckles and ears, though he suffers innumerable tics and twitches, though his nose is but a cone of tin secured by leather straps, he knows that the men all recognize him as a commander of the highest caliber.

  He takes a final drink, emptying the flask. He unbuckles his nose and places it in the leather case that also holds his teakwood chessmen. He stretches out and closes his eyes and fine-tunes his battle plan for when they reach the capital: if they surprise the Queen, a swift fianchetto akin to the Catalan Opening; if not, a frontal thrust reminiscent of the Falkbeer Counter Gambit. He imagines the Queen at his feet, defeated. He takes his stiffening cock in his hand and begins to pump furiously. Most nights this is the only way he can fall asleep.

  In the photograph, the woman is knee-deep in the ocean, caught in a posture of surprise as a cold wave slaps against her bottom. Her back is arched an
d her eyes are wide, her thin brows raised high. Her elbows are tight against her sides, and her hands are at her face in a girlish half clench. Her lips are puckered in a tiny perfect O. Splashes of sea foam blur in the air around her. Her swimsuit reveals more thigh than the kid has ever seen. Her nipples jut, pressing against taut fabric. The photograph is sepia-toned, and she is the color of honey.

  Nothing in the picture shows scale. No swimmers, no birds, no trawlers or tankers or banana boats, just a blurred horizon, dimly streaked light and dark. The kid wonders if she is taller than he is. He must meet her. He believes he will, someday, believes that she will receive him, that his possession of the photograph connects them in some way they both will honor if not fully understand. Such mysteries, he believes, are the very workings of love.

  There is a curved shadow of a finger creeping in from the left border. The kid imagines the finger is his own, that he is the one who snapped the picture. He imagines he can feel the cold water winding around his calves, tickling and numbing. He imagines a softly tugging undertow.

  Alvaro, fully cocooned in his tarp, feels another sand flea bite his ear. He is being eaten alive. He unrolls himself and dances in the sand, a furious chorea of swatting and scratching. A man lying nearby sleepily calls out, “Shut up!” and Alvaro tromps toward him and steps on his neck. The man sputters; his legs wheel, his arms flail, his fingers clutch. Alvaro leans harder, feels his bare sole grinding against cartilage, and then releases. “Next time,” he says through his teeth, “I will snap it.” The man clutches his throat and begins to weep, softly.