Stories From the Plague Years

by Michael Marano

  He hung a blank canvas behind a small paint-smeared table and chair.

  Rough, scarred, and much-spackled plaster marked the wall. “Leave,” he said. “You’ll know when to come back in.”

  I stood outside the French doors separating the studio from the living room. Foam obscured the windowlettes of the doors, yet spaces allowed me to peer through—as must have been his intent. The man with whom I wished to spend my redefined life came to the table with a tray holding his gun and brushes. He seated himself and placed the postcard before him. The sight of his raising the gun to his mouth was as agonizingly slow in my suddenly brimming sight as would be the sight of him driving nails through his own flesh.

  My vision ripped with the ripping of his skull.

  I hung in the eye of the sun, unblinking in the forever of the shot.

  A lifetime of dawns erupted behind my sight.

  Then the grain of the wood floor onto which I’d collapsed filled my vision.

  Consciousness was a sodden burden I did not want.

  I stood from the fallen bundle I’d become, opened the French doors.

  Through the blue veil of smoke, I saw the beatitude of him standing from the table, rising as red and rose-pink matter slowed its cascade upon the canvas.

  Within the viscous, blossomed smear, the face of the portrait scabbed itself into visibility. No longer a self-portrait, it was now made valid by a true artist having seen it and transposed his pure sensibility upon it. The image on the postcard was reborn, re-visualized to be what it should have always been. I came to myself as I saw in the crimson portrait’s eyes a new profundity.

  The portrait’s eyes were now those of the man who would make me his lover this night. I would be granted an infusion of the same spirit through his blood. The immortality of great Art would be attainable for me through the angel-destructive taking of his spirit.

  “We’ll burn this canvas in the morning. I’ll not dirty my brushes with it. But I needed you to see.”

  “I’m glad I saw.” My words were church-whispered soft.

  He smiled. “I’m glad you’re brave enough to be glad. But this is not my Art,” he said, hefting the canvas off the wall. “I’d not summon you to my life if it were. You’re worthier than that.” He dropped the canvas by a pile of rubbish near what had been a wooden ice box, and then crossed the studio to where the tarped canvas leaned. “This is my Work,” he said, pulling away the tarp.

  Masterpieces as collage, Completed. Transposed, dragonfly-wing translucent. Works that had been wrongly called “Great Works” were made valid by their being rewritten and re-painted through my mentor’s perceptions and blood.

  His vision and his courage recast Renaissance Madonnas and cubist landscapes. Still-lifes and portraits were fully realized and improved by his giving himself to their redemption. The images shifted and blazed in front of each other, as if each session’s work had been done on panes of air-thin glass.

  He offered me this Beauty. He offered to let me take it within me—my Completion, like that which he’d given to the “great works” the world had misguidedly thought to be already timeless and eternal.

  Blood is his Art. And his Art is his Gift.

  What matter that the body may be too fragile to endure the immortality the Gift offers? What matter the eventual loss of life to become as eternal as his Art? His Art sustains him. It resurrects him each day as he lifts Art from the dust in which it had been buried.

  That night, for the first time, I knew pleasure unmitigated by latex.

  He bestowed the Gift of his Blood and Art to me. Sired, Complete, I woke the next morning knowing I’d found a Homeland nourished by the rivers that flowed within my lover. I left his bed to find my Sire placing my battered book on his shelf, next to other books by the same prophetess who had germinated in me the desire I’d just known fulfilled. He slid the book in a space on the crowded shelf, as if he’d just taken it from there.

  “Your first item moved in,” he said.

  We laughed. Embraced. Made love and re-quickened my blood with his blood. My veins felt cut into my flesh, etched as are the depth-giving grooves my lover makes on his canvas with trowels fashioned from shards of his own jaw.

  It happened on Monday morning. A bourgeois joke. Fodder for greeting cards and coffee mug slogans to amuse those whom my lover’s Work was destined to elevate. The banality of the moment when disaster chose to strike pained him the most, at times. I shared his anguish that Mediocrity had dealt him such humiliation.

  As always, on that Monday—my furtive glance and the single shot. The shattering red fog and the willow-tree spray of blood and bone and flesh. Then, in the world-stunned silence, the rustle of his brush-strokes as he redeemed an image of Redemption as painted by a medieval primitive.

  I waited, while he worked, in a place where time seemed to sleep. Then I heard the distinct click of him setting down his brush crafted from a splinter of his femur. I took fruit and mineral water from the mini-fridge in the living room—a gesture that served Art more than did entire lifetimes nominally dedicated to Art—and heard the rare treasure of him calling me by name.

  I went through the French doors, and glanced upon Beauty—the new layer added this day to the Work. It was the image of a dying knight carried to Heaven by the reputed mother of Christ. My lover had dared the ancient fresco to magnificence, finding a way for it to truthfully catch the fires of Heaven that it had before lyingly portrayed.

  He stared at the canvas as I placed the tray on the book of medieval art I’d freed from the library.

  “I can’t find it,” he said.

  I looked. The kit with which he patched the canvas sat by his brushes and gun. A lesser lover of a lesser man would have said, “It’s right there.”

  Yet I failed him in another way by saying nothing.

  “Look . . . at . . . the . . . Work,” he said.

  My eye was drawn to the scrap of eye in the painting’s far corner. His martyred iris still reflected his soul.

  “Look . . .” he said.

  I ran my eye over museums-worth of sublimity.

  And realized with a shock. . .

  . . . no patch today.

  I turned. His patching kit was unopened in its ribboned box, as I’d placed it for him.

  “I can’t find the bullet,” he said.

  Together, we ran our fingers over the wall, to see if the bullet was embedded in the plaster beside the canvas, in wood or a metal stud behind the plaster. The abattoir-perfume of the canvas made me giddy as I stood closer to it than I ever had. Yet still I kept my focus to his task.

  As one, we both looked to the floor.

  And I felt a burning migraine-like pain as he lowered his head . . . a sharp, weighty pressure atop the loam of my brain.

  The pain I felt was an echo, reaching me from his blood. The cry I let out was a leakage of the cry he held tight in his throat.

  The sudden pain that subsided in me endured in him as it made twisted branches of his body. His knees fell from under him and he held his head in his blood-caked hands.

  “It’s still inside me.”

  The days that followed still shame me.

  I was jealous of the bullet.

  Jealous of his obsessive thinking of it, of the constant circular caresses he made on his scalp as it gnawed at him from within. I hungered for the caresses he no longer gave me.

  The bullet sported in the paradise of his mind. An unthinking bit of stone had through accident attained the beatification for which I prayed. Yes, it hurt his thoughts—yet it was closer to him than I was . . . entangled in the lattice of his genius. It was an unborn half-self to him: what I longed to be, above and beyond the conjoining of blood we shared.

  And through that which is and ever shall be his Gift to me, I felt the bullet change his blood. Since he had Sired me, my own blood had the sweetness of honeyed milk in my veins. Now, that was tainted with metallic hurt, a sou
r buzzing eroded from the stone lodged in his mind. Lead infused my vision. At times, all Berkeley itself became tinted with greyish cobalt in my sight.

  My lover’s Work dried on the canvas—it took an opacity that dimmed its layers. Though still beautiful, since it failed to be renewed each morning, the Work lost vividness—rearing suns aligned in harmony became as one sun.

  And I lost something as well, no longer replenished by the exquisite spirit he granted me each time our love-making re-enacted the moment of his Siring me. Even with the taint of the bullet in him, I hungered for such renewal.

  Yet my needs were unimportant. My lover was not painting. Art was not being redeemed. That to which I’d dedicated all I ever could be was suffered into stasis. I was cut off from my own life—a bluefly tapping against the window of where I as a person should live. To re-enter, I tried to awaken his passion . . . for his Art, and for me.

  I brought him new books of art to look on and redeem.

  The person I had been might not have suffered the wound of my lover leaping from the couch and flinging into my face the damp, oil-and-blood-stained cloth that had been on his brow. The person I had been might have said what he said to me: “Why are you hurting me like this?”

  He grabbed the books and flung them to the floor. His teeth ground like a handful of pebbles. “You’re happy,” he said. “You’re fine. I gave you all I can of me. You have parts of me I can’t touch anymore. And you resort to cheap taunts?”

  “I want you to work.”

  His voice became like that of a sick child. “That’s very funny, coming from you.”

  “Your work is important to me.”

  “So, I should work?” Again, his voice was child-like, like that of a boy sorry he has broken the favourite plaything of another.

  “Yes.”

  “You’d just love that wouldn’t you? If another shot got stuck? Why not let me have two hot little pebbles in my head? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To be the strong one? You jealous . . .”

  He held his head, sat on the sofa. “. . . jealous little shit,” he finished. He glared at me. “‘Two hot little pebbles.’ That’s not very good, is it? Certainly not worthy of you.” He stood, walked shakily to the bookshelf and pulled from behind a row of novels the rolls of vellum-like paper on which I’d begun this account. He held them to me. “You’re the artist now? You’re trying to write like the ‘poetess’?”

  “I’m . . . trying . . . to document what you do.”

  “I gave you this.” He shook the papers that I’d made into scrolls, so they’d have the solemnity they deserved. “I gave you your words. But you can’t use them to describe what I do. I gave you all I’d learned from ‘your’ precious ‘poetess’, because you’re that important to me.”

  “You’re everything to me. . . .”

  “Then why do you bring me art to look at? You taunt me with a need to create that I can’t fulfill?” He looked down upon the art books I’d freed for him . . . looked down upon the images only half-finished by Cézanne the way a starving man would a full and steaming plate. The images seemed to hunger for my lover as well . . . desiring his vision and blood to dream them into wholeness.

  He dropped the scrolls and fell to his knees, touching the books. He sobbed the way I had when he rewrote my blood. I tried to hold him, to help him to the couch.

  He pushed me away, then pressed his hands against the back of his head.

  “You’re worse than the fucking bullet.”

  I returned to work. I rode the train from Berkeley to my empty job, which seemed all the more hollow now that it had no purpose than to support our basic living. The drudgery I endured had once served the redemption of Art. Now it served the mere paying of rent. I sat surrounded by drones never touched by the sublime as I have been. I looked to the empty faces my lover’s Work would have touched with fire. I pitied them. They were not ready to receive the Work that would free them from their prisons, that would bring to them the higher plane for which they were too afraid to reach.

  And I pitied myself. I was suddenly in fact that which I had mimicked.

  I tried to read a newspaper. The words blurred to a wall of grey. Yet as I tried to read, the roar of the train . . .

  . . . took a solidity . . .

  . . . that stood upon the loam of my brain. The sound of the train became the buzzing of the bullet in my lover’s mind; it compressed itself into an impacted tooth of metal in my thoughts.

  Sublimation . . . the passing of a thing from one state to another. Isn’t that what my lover’s blood does? What Art itself does? The pain at the back of my head was the call of my body for the bullet—just as the dull eyes of those around me was the call for the semblance of life my lover’s Art would bring. The bullet’s sound, its sourness, its pain, infused me through my lover’s blood. Could it not crystallize into me? Could it not flow as solution to me and metastasize in my mind? Drawn as gold was once believed to be from base lead?

  Thus, could my lover be freed to create his Art?

  I changed platforms at the next stop, and returned home to realize I’d no idea we owned so many mirrors.

  That was the thought that jangled in my shattering mind as I arrived to tragedy and desecration.

  My lover had taken the mirrors from the bedroom, from the medicine chest, from the hall, even a shaving mirror I’d forgotten we owned, and placed them on easels of varying height so he could see reflections of reflections of his newly-shaven head as he brought the electric hand-saw I used to make his canvas frames to the base of his skull.

  The buzzing in my mind externalized itself; it left me to become the light-strobing buzz of the hand-saw as it lay jammed with a thumb-sized shard of skull. In that strobing light, my lover writhed, unable to raise his hands to the shark-bite wound he had inflicted upon himself and gouge the hated nugget from his mind.

  I knelt to him, held him as the Madonna held her Son in the Pietà my lover had once amber-trapped in his blood.

  Spray had geysered the studio that was no longer a studio, now that my lover’s blood and tissue had haphazardly smeared the Work. His palsied hand, unlike the sure hand that brought the gun to the loving smooth roof of his mouth, had plashed gaudy rain upon the canvas. The translucent layers had blended into each other, had made the Work appear nothing more than cloth dropped on the floor of a slaughterhouse.

  I unplugged the saw. The lights above stopped strobing. The buzzing fell silent. I replaced the shard of skull from where it had been torn.

  “Don’t speak,” I said. “Don’t say a word.”

  In that place where time held itself hostage to our plight, I knew what martyrdom he wished.

  A woman screamed upon seeing us, apparitions smeared with what she could only know as “blood.” Yet it was also our Gift—our shared legacy. I’d not let anyone steal or sully it.

  It was wasteful to spill our Gift upon the train platform. My lover, his head bandaged with duct-tape and dishtowels, paid the mid-morning commuters no heed as we shoved past them. All we could focus on was the oblivion promised him upon the track down which eighty tons of careening metal rushed.

  I stood to his back as he dove before the train as if into pure and cleansing waters.

  I knew joy, and release, as my lover was pulped to moist, red clay . . . as he found the sublimation that would free him. No one could steal his Gift, now that the Art it allowed him to create had been taken from him. No lesser talent would ever desecrate or appropriate his blood for their own revisualizations. He’d not become paint for lesser talents, not while his flesh and blood and marrow were dispersed so thinly. I smiled to know he was free.

  And I split along that smile, casting my blood upon the wind-swift metal canvas of the train. I shattered along my skeleton as the first flesh from which my lover had crafted me burst upon the track. My dissolution had none of my lover’s fire, had none of the profundity of his Art.

  I hoped to ascend, t
o find myself in the sublime heaven my lover had painted with that Gift from which I’d been conjured.

  But I found myself earthbound by a small metal nugget with the weight of a thousand suns. I . . . my lover’s least creation . . . reached to him through the liquidity that joined us, through the blood-spirit-thought that defines our Gift and that now forms my words.

  We cooled together, two careless smears, blended as are cheap pigments by the hoses of those who washed us away.

  For Marian Anderson (1968–2001)—neighbour and friend during the dark years. You left us to endure darker years without you.

  WINTER REQUIEM

  David watched a red streak of November sunset turn to a bloody serpent hung in the darkening sky.

  He knew, sitting in the wine-coloured dusk beneath the eaves of a great oak, that the vision was a phantom conjured by the seeping toxins in his blood. He chose not to dispel the vision by blinking or glancing away. It didn’t threaten him as did most others; it was not vivid nor clear enough to possibly be real. It had the quality of art. He found comfort in the serpent’s rich color, its slow smoke-like undulations.

  After a long moment, the serpent became still, and slowly lost its shape to become again a burning cloud in the west.

  When dusk gave way to moonlight, and the scent of autumn’s dead leaves meshed with that of smoke from fireplaces miles distant, and the sound of the brook that ran through the grove of oaks to the south became sharper with the cold night air, David stood and leaned on the branch he used as a walking staff. In his youth, not so very long ago, he’d secretly called this hill “Weathertop,” and carried a staff as a prop when he imagined himself a peer of Gandalf. Now he needed a staff to negotiate the terrain; the illness that had turned his blood to slow poison had also given him gout.

  He hobbled down the hill toward the house where he’d grown up, past fields he’d once run and played in, now brown from the withering touch of Fall. When he reached the yard he was sweating with exertion, despite the night air. Drowsy greyness filled the corners of his sight, as if another phantom would accost his senses. At the door, he stood a moment, and breathed deeply until the greyness passed.