by Tatiana Vila
I raised a hand to touch its wooden surface, slid my fingers on its contours and—
“That's one of the most difficult sculptures I've ever done,” Ian's voice said suddenly.
I jerked back my hand and spun around. He was wearing a black and white plaid flannel bottom and a white t-shirt, which, to the touch of sunlight, showcased every outline of his lean muscles.
He looked warm and cozy and, well…hot. Even if I didn't like Ian, I wasn't blind.
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall. “How did you get in here?” he asked in a soft, condemning tone, as if this room was off limits to everyone but himself.
“The door was open,” I said in a rush. “I was just walking around the house and stumbled upon this place.”
A thought flashed across his green eyes and his narrowed gaze vanished. “Lola must've been here cleaning and forgot to close the door.” He walked to the paint-daubed table and picked up the pointed carving tools. “But she should know better than that. I don't like anyone to come in here,” he said while placing the tools inside one of the drawers of a rolling storage cart.
I took that as my cue to leave.
“Wait.” He threw out his arm and stopped me. “I wasn't…you don't have to leave.”
I hesitated, watching his expectant eyes. I knew what he was offering, and I wasn't sure I wanted to accept. I wasn't ready for this part of his mind and soul that was almost as baffling as it was alluring. I wasn't ready for the ramifications that this could bring into our already difficult relationship, because once a door was opened, there was no coming back. That open space would always leave a hole.
Refusing to watch glimpses of an artist's genius however, wasn't something I could do. Especially when the artist himself, who appeared to treasure his work from the view of others like a mollusk guarded a pearl in its shell, was asking me to stay and appraise his sculptures. Even if the artist was Ian, I appreciated the magnitude of his offer.
I nodded and looked at the heart sculpture. “I love that piece,” I said to slice up the veil of awkwardness that'd wrapped around us.
He looked at me and smirked, his smile edged with something else I couldn't quite put my finger on. Then, his eyes dropped and he shook his head, as if in amused surprise. “How ironic,” I thought I heard him say. His words had been too mumbly and low to put a safe bet. “It's one of my favorites, too,” he said after a while.
I walked to the spellbinding sculpture. “I love the rich purple color,” I said, studying its hue and texture. “It doesn't even look like it's made of wood until you look up close.”
“That's the wood's natural color.” He stepped next to me. “It comes from the heartwood of a South American tree. People call it Purpleheart, which if you think about it, is quite fitting for the sculpture.”
A purple heart made with Purpleheart. “Huh. I think you already have a title for this.”
“Nope,” he sighed. “This sculpture had a title way before I started it.”
“Which is…”
“…only known to the artist.” He smiled.
I suppressed a roll of the eyes and decided to let it go. He'd already shared with me enough of his stuff. “So…how hard was this wood to work with?” I asked, moving around the sculpture.
“Very,” he answered, his eyes following my every movement. “Purpleheart is quite dense.”
I stopped across from him and locked gazes with his emeralds. “You're really good, Ian,” I said as honestly as I could, from artist to artist. “No wonder why Aremihc chose you.”
The corner of his mouth lifted in a sweet smile. “Thanks.” And then, an odd sparkle showed up in his eyes, lighting the green in them to a piney warmth.
My stomach clenched. “What?” I asked, uncomfortable.
“It's weird to see you standing here, that's all.”
“Am I really the only one who's been here, besides Lola and you?”
He cleared his throat and left for the long table. “Yep. Though you kind of forced yourself into here.”
I followed him. “I already told you the—”
“I know. I know. The door was open.” He lowered his gaze to what looked like a magazine in one corner of the table and lifted it up for my view. “I, on the other hand, was looking for this.”
I read the large capital letters on the colorful cover. “Oris?” Of course he had a subscription to Oris magazine, the Reader's Digest version for artists. With all the money he had, he could afford himself a hefty monthly subscription to the big artsy cash cow. Me? I favored independent magazines and bloggers. They had more soul.
“Can I have a look?” I said, reaching out my hand.
He shrugged and pushed the magazine into the half-moon of my hand. “Go ahead.”
While he fumbled around in one of the storage cart's drawers, where he seemed to keep all of his sculpting tools, I flipped through the clean, rigid pages of Oris, which made me feel as if I was looking at a class handout of an Economic MBA program instead of an Arts one. How did anyone not see how cold and boring to look at this magazine was? How self-important and—
My thought dissolved. The dark emotional turmoil that'd been roaring inside of me before returned. I read the article's title stretching under my nose with a thorn in my chest.
WHY PEOPLE FALLING INTO COMA
MAY HAVE ITS ROOTS IN ART
By Comus
Shock and disbelief tumbled against each other in my mind as the words seeped through my head, deep into my brain. I could feel cold and hot colors stroking up and down my cheeks and lips. My face must've been a blender of expressions the whole time, something that was confirmed minutes later when Ian asked, “Is there something wrong? You look like a black hole in space just spitted you out.”
I folded the magazine in two and looked up at him. “Read this,” I said, punching a finger to the page where the article was and handed it to him.
He took it with a frown and started reading.
I waited, turning over in my mind the thoughts and ideas the article had seeded in me, examining them like three dimensional objects in which each side held a different hidden message. Could it be? Could those crazy, out of anyone's mind words be true?
Later on, Ian shed light on the subject with a snort. “You can't honestly believe what this man is saying. He's nuts.”
“Is he?” I shrugged, opening my arms in doubt, as if seeking an answer from the heavens. “How do we know that?”
“Do you truly believe artists are behind this because of, what, being so good at what they do?” He emphasized with a shake of his head. “Our job has always been to transport people to other places with our creations; be that a meadow filled with sparkling butterflies or a waterfall with a hot chick in Maui—it doesn't matter. What shapes and colors things around you is your mind, not anyone else's. We artists are just the igniters of that journey. The only thing we can be blamed for is inciting emotions in people, not for dooming them into a weird coma.”
“That's exactly what this Comus guy is saying, Ian. We are the creators of the vehicles allowing people to escape their reality. People that burn with the need of leaving this world if just for a moment.”
“You're not making any sense, Dafne. What does it have to do with us?”
“Everything. If there are really bad people out there trying to use this need to their profit, to gain whatever they're seeking to get, then we are the perfect tools to attain it.”
“And what are these bad people trying to get? The Holy Grail? An army of walking comatose people to rule the world? This is nonsense.” He turned around and snapped the article on the table. “What would anyone get from making people fall into a coma?”
“I don't know. That's what I’m going to find out.” I fetched the magazine and stepped back from his reproving look. “I'll ask Comus to explain what he meant with all this nonsense. He must've gotten this info from somewhere.”
“Dafne, everyone knows Comus lost h
is mind a long time ago. The only reasons Oris agrees to publish his articles are because readers love laughing at the poor man and because he's friends with the founder. Nothing else.”
“He's the only person that has come up with a different angle on what's happening. He's the only one that says this isn't a virus.”
He paused and looked at me. “What do you believe?”
I took a deep breath and sighed. “I don't know. I just…know this doesn't have to do with doctors or virologists or the CDC. This is something more, and if someone else believes this, too, then I don't care if he's a nutcase.”
He caught hold of my wrist before I made a move to leave and lowered his eyes to mine. “Comodore Muslo has schizophrenia,” he said, as if this explained everything.
I closed the distance between us and looked at him with defiance. “So what if Comus is schizophrenic?”
“You can't put your faith in someone who feeds on delusions and voices that aren't there.”
“In whom should I put my faith in, then? Guardian angels?”
He dropped his emerald eyes to the fingers wrapping my wrist and swallowed. “Me,” he whispered and stared into my eyes. “Trust me.”
A black, corrosive feeling rose in my chest with the memory of betrayal, leaving a sour tang in my mouth. I still hadn't forgotten what he'd said to Buffy that night after he'd proposed a truce between us. The echo of those derisive words hadn't faded from my mind yet, no matter what his recent noble persona had done in these two days. Treason was treason, pure and dark. And if it involved playing with me, it was death, resolute and rigid. I could never trust him again.
I looked at him. “I heard you that night…downstairs with Buffy. You told her you could care less about the stupid truce with me, that it was just pretense.”
He frowned, confused at the sudden words, and then, as if realizing what track this conversation was staking, his eyes widened. “You heard—”
“I trusted you. For the first time since I met your insufferable ass, I decided to trust you. And you broke it; you broke that thin ribbon of trust.”
His grip on my wrist loosened. “I didn't—”
“Don't you ever ask me to trust you, because doing it again is as possible as chipmunks taking over the world.”
“Dafne—”
“You had your chance. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to be somewhere else.”
The clasp of his hand tightened on me once more. “Where do you think you're going?”
“None of your business.”
“It's my business when you're in my house.”
“Let me fix that.” I jerked back my hand, trying to free myself from his grasp, but he pulled me back, smashing my body against him. I made myself ignore the warmth of his skin, seeping through his thin white shirt.
“First, you had no business snooping into a private conversation. Secondly, you won't leave this house unless my insufferable ass”—he quoted me through slightly clenched teeth—”is next to your insufferable one.”
My jaw dropped in astonished anger. “Excuse me?” I enunciated very slowly. “Are you threatening me?”
“No. I'm telling you that you won't leave this house alone.”
“Which is still a threat!”
“It's not.”
“It is.”
“Not.”
“Is.”
And just like that, we were back again on the hate boat.
With the tips of our noses being so close, the need to seal that space and hit his forehead with mine felt incredibly strong. I wanted to make insufferable, cocky Ian go through pain. “Like you said, everything that happens in my house is my business.” I told him with narrowed eyes. “That includes stupid conversations you might have. And no, I'm not leaving this house with you. I'm calling a cab.”
“You're not going alone to see that crazy man.”
“Who said I'm going to see him?”
“It's written all over your face, Dafne. I won't let you.” He released my wrist and ran a hand through his tousled brown hair. “If I don't come with you, then—”
“Then what?”
“I'll tell your grandma what you're planning on doing.”
“And what is that exactly?”
He took a deep breath and sighed loudly, as if all the tension of the world had been in that lungful of air. “You're planning on threatening a crazy man that wrote crap about people falling into coma, blaming you for their situation.”
I stepped back, shocked. I was about to say “you wouldn't dare,” but a second after that thought crossed my mind, reality dawned on me. Yes he would, that and much more to get what he wanted. “He didn't blame me.”
“He blamed artists, which you take personally—and you want to beat the crap out of him,” he added on a second thought, as if to strengthen his masterful idea.
I took another step back. “Gran would never believe you. It's way too ridiculous.”
“You need an outlet to take out all that frustration and fury burning inside of you. She'll believe me.”
“No way,” I said, doubt already lacing my voice. I wasn't known to be a gentle person, and even if Gran knew the real me, she could believe the somber circumstances wrapping our lives in this moment might push me to do, well, reckless things.
“Do you want to test it?” Ian offered, producing an iPhone.
God, I hated handing a victory to him, but this time he had me between the devil and the deep blue sea. “Okay. You win. But know that after this, the little, microscopic speck of respect I had for you is forever lost,” I said, putting stress on the eternal time part. “You're worse than Hannibal Lecter, and that's saying something.”
An ashen cloud fell over his eyes, dimming the emerald color to the dry green of tea leaves. His shoulders sagged, as if with disappointment and weariness, and he said, “If being a cannibalistic serial killer from a horror movie stops you from going alone to meet that cuckoo, then I don't care.” He said, his last words ending in a soft mumble.
He seemed far from being indifferent to what I'd said—it almost looked like he cared about what I thought of him—but the mellow Dafne from yesterday and this morning was gone, and the real Dafne who didn't give a hoot about Ian's state of being—at least, that's what I told myself—was back. So in a very Dafn-esque fashion I said, “If you're going to stick with me, the least you can do is prove yourself useful.” I crossed my arms and drummed my right hand fingers over my skin, as a bored queen waiting to be entertained by her court's jesters. “Find Comodore's address and program it into your iPhone's GPS. In the meantime, I'll go to take a shower.” I turned around and started for the open door.
“You're not doing this,” I heard him say close behind me. Then, he was standing in front of me, blocking my way out with furious eyes.
“Doing what?” I said, feigning innocence.
“This Ice Queen bullcrap. You don't need it and I don't like it.”
“And I should care about that why?” I pulled up my eyebrow.
“I helped you. I lied to your grandma back in the hospital to save you from whatever thing you were running away from.”
“I wasn't running away from anything.” I said, leaning forward menacingly.
“It didn't look like it.”
“Are you sure Comus is the one with the delusional mind?”
“Don't put this on me,” he said. “You know I'm right.”
I sighed, exasperated. “That's the thing with you, Ian. You always think you're right, and I'm sorry to burst your ego-bloated bubble but—”
“And there you go again,” he interrupted me, waving his hands in the air, as if asking the heavens for patience, “Throwing everything on me to sidetrack the point of this discussion.”
“The point? What point?”
“You!” He pointed at me, the green in his eyes like two burning forests.
“Me?” Our voices had been rising up in a thunderous cacophony and now, with the anger-ridden sounds booming
off the walls, I was afraid the glass panels above would shatter in sharp-edged little pieces.
“Yes, you! Why else would we be discussing this?”
“Because you're a pea-brained moron, that's why!”
“Yeah? And you're a stubborn, pain in the ass coward!”
“I. Am. Not. A. Coward,” I said, poking my finger into his chest with every tight word that left my mouth.
He clasped my finger and looked at me right into the eyes. “Yes, you are. You're afraid to feel.”
“To feel? Feel what?” I yelled.
I never got to know what was that thing sizzling in his eyes because Lola chose that moment to step into the room. “Mijos, what's the matter with all the screaming?” She took us in, cocked her head and placed her short, chubby arms on her round hips. “Are you fighting?”
At that, Ian released my finger and stepped back. “No, we were just...discussing our differences, that's all.”
She eyed us back and forth, her eyes two ping pong balls darting between the two of us, as if she was figuring out something.
The silence grew uncomfortable, like a big, fat elephant in the room, and when Ian looked he couldn't take it anymore, he said, “I'll go to take a shower in Dad's bathroom. You can take mine.” He turned his head in my direction but didn't look at me. Then, he strode past the entrance and left the room without a word.
Lola found my eyes again and left them there, as if she wanted to make a point with her unwavering scrutiny. I could almost hear her voice whispering into my mind you know what that was, right mija? With Ian?
This time, it was me who was assaulted by awkwardness, so I asked in a soft voice “What?”
