Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

and you merely slipped off into a deep, all-enveloping sleep. If so, how did anyone know this was true? Who had ever come back from the other side to file a report? He didn’t believe in an afterlife, hadn’t since he had left the church at the same time he left his hometown, and somehow, the idea or its promise appealed to him even less now. When his father had died, he had been alone with him in the bedroom; it was nothing dramatic, his father hadn’t opened his eyes in ecstasy at the vision of heavenly gates, even though he been a lifelong believer. He had merely… gone away, so gradually that it was hard to tell when he had exhaled his last breath, when exactly his pulse had slowed to nothing, when his fingers no longer clutched the crucifix the priest had earlier placed in his palm. Otherwise, in those first few minutes, he was exactly the same in life as in death: his skin was still warm, his eyes were shut like a dreamer’s. He remembered staring down into the drained pool of the condominium complex and thinking it remarkable how unremarkable such a death was.

  The seventh level of the game was drawing nearer, but was possibly unattainable: the sixth level was replete with more cartoonish ghouls and goblins than all the other levels put together; every time he came within grasping distance of a golden coronet or jeweled dagger, a three-horned beastie would swoop down onto the path between his avatar and the treasure, and in the ensuing battle of karate kicks and fireballs, the crown or knife would tumble into a crevasse. The counter at the top of the screen kept score of both his arsenal and his “energy level;” if he lost too many points, he would be kicked back to the fifth level or worse and have to begin his arduous climb over again. He had learned long ago that the best approach to the game was to go slower just when it seemed you could speed up as you tripped over pinnacles and precipices—it was when you were going too fast that your adversaries could more easily spring into your path and knock the last icon you’d won right out of your hands. All the same, going too slowly meant you might run out of energy before you could seize the key which you needed to unlock the door to the next level. What sort of bored software engineers had first designed this game, long ago at the dawn of the digital age? Now only did they have mixed-up ideas about Asian mythology, they violated the usual ethics of labyrinths and rewards. If you were to rescue a princess from

  the evil Mikado, she might run off with your precious golden grail. The hidden chamber at the end of the seventh level might be apocryphal, for all he knew—he’d never heard of anyone who had ever actually attained it, and the screenshots he’d seen in a cheatbook once looked like they could easily be fakes, created just to tantalize and infuriate even the most dedicated of players. The pictures showed a skeletal Buddha-like figure wearing a loincloth, ascetic and darkly Indian in its features, inside a grotto or cave. The figure levitated above the petals of a giant lotus flower, and the colors were the cheap and lurid ones of a Hindu devotional poster you might see in an alley of Hyderabad. And what was your reward? Why, eternal life, of course—and your name on the list of all-time champions. Such an end would be tawdry and anticlimactic and useless; nevertheless, he wanted to see for himself. He wanted to defeat this silly game, not let it defeat him. That was the only reason for playing.

  The cheatbook quoted the old proverb: “If you meet the Buddha upon the road, slay him.” Was that the only way to play the game, like a warrior and not a scholar?

  “Save game,” he would choose yet again some time long after midnight, after subduing the latest poorly animated chimera, then put the laptop to blissful rest, and likewise himself. Lying on his back, looking outside the mullions which broke the sky up into squares the way a painter’s grid would, he saw the stars blinking like faulty pixels, forming no comprehensible patterns except perhaps to astronomers and the ancients. The wind curled around the cabin with its lulling moans, a low-hanging bough scraped the tin roof, something crystalline would snap in the forest beyond. Snow on the distant peaks shone with a pearly light as if lit from within, and like any artist anywhere in any time, he wondered how he could ever dare compete. And then he would sleep.

  Days he now spent with ink and brush, and despite his missteps he was steadily improving. He remembered what one of his early drawing teachers, coincidentally a former propaganda artist for the Peoples’ Republic, had once told the class: “Become one with the brush, then become nothing. Then your hand will do your eye’s bidding.” Had he really said that, or had what he originally said become merged in his memory with the advice in a book of Zen teachings, or even the hackneyed sayings of the dojo master in a movie? It did not matter; the secret really was in seeing the subject at hand not as it was before you, but in your mind’s eye. Memorize contour and shadow, then let your hand move across the paper as if it were guided by no more conscious effort than that given one’s Ouija planchette. In a few sure strokes, the subject could be suggested—not duplicated—upon the page. It was more in what you left out, knowing when to stop. Daily, his sketches were tacked up under the windowsill, until they formed a row of pennants, like Tibetan prayer flags, that would flutter in the draft and curl from the heat of the woodstove.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, then, he found it easier to draw from memory, rather than from any solid household objects he might set before himself. He had begun with a branch of a balsam tree that hung over the edge of a chasm, leaning into the void as if to see the tiny steeples and cupolas far below. There was one much like it off the same trail he would take to see the sun as it mounted the lowest of the eastern peaks. Too pleased perhaps with his ability to capture the spiny needles of the branch, he became careless with the gnarled branch itself, miscalculating the angle with which it must jut over the cliff. Hardest of all was conveying the sense of deep space opening up beyond the farthest frozen tip of the fir-branch; suggesting vast expanses of nothingness so convincingly was the greatest achievement of ancient oriental artists, and so he was left with just a faint smudge at the bottom of the picture that might be fog rising from the depths, or smoke from distant chimneys. No, it didn’t look enough like either of those, although the painting was not a complete failure, and over several attempts at the same or similar subjects, his efforts improved.

  Another time, he tried to portray himself, though he had only a small pocket mirror to work with, and so could catch glimpses of just one eye or one ear, or a bit of cheek or chin, at a time. Nevertheless, he succeeded admirably in putting himself together like a puzzle, and the end result looked realistic enough; if it wasn’t himself, exactly, it was someone who looked familiar, a close relative, perhaps—and so he decided he would mail this one to Guangzhou. He thought of how in about a month or so, Tsu-Chi would open the mailing tube in his teachers’ dormitory; having forgotten by then how different the portrait was from its actual subject, he would be fooled. Tsu-Chi had no eye for art, but he would be proud to have an original inkbrush painting: would he display it for his medical students to see, or would he keep it in its tube, only to draw it out of seclusion when he was feeling especially lonesome? In a month, he would be gone, but Tsu-Chi wouldn’t know that; Tsu-Chi wouldn’t know he was looking at something akin to a sarcophagus rubbing. Oddly enough, that amused him immensely; he liked this melodramatic image of Tsu-Chi holding the smooth rice-paper to his even smoother cheek, like a royal concubine who kisses the blood-soaked sash of her fallen shogun.

  Just as he was completing the self-portrait, the cellphone resting on the kitchen table came to life like a whirring insect out of hibernation. He hesitated, wondering whether to answer it, but it continued to chirrup, so he put his brush into its porcelain cup of inky water and rose to its summons. Someone was calling him from the magazine; he hesitated still longer—he hated to think the new publisher might have questions about any of his projects about to go to press. It was only Leia. She was calling from the office Christmas party—he could hear the music turned up over the ceiling speakers and the mingling of voices and laughter; it was harder to understand her words. Was he all right? Was th
ere enough firewood? Had he remembered to keep the faucets dripping? Was he certain he didn’t want her to check his email? And had he heard the latest about Bush and Romney?

  He assured her that everything was fine, but that he hadn’t even listened to NPR since he got here. “I’ve gone back to drawing freehand,” he told her, trying not to sound annoyed.

  “You sound so… faint,” she said, raising her voice above a new burst of laughter and applause. “It must be the connection. How’s your, uh, stomach?”

  “I hardly notice it anymore. You know, the light here is astonishing. The way everything, these mountains glow at night. And the stars! You could touch them.”

  “You must be going crazy. Everyone else is. Watch some TV and you’ll see why. At least read a newspaper once in a while and keep in touch.”

  He looked over at his portrait, drying by the stove. It might as well be a stranger. And having to talk on the phone like this was being back in the confessional: do this, do that. “Maybe I’m just discovering what sanity