The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  My memory didn’t work while I posed for him. I don’t just mean the way I talked about remembering before. I couldn’t remember how it felt for time to pass. I couldn’t remember ever speaking. Sometimes I forgot my own name.

  Air hung still in the studio while he worked. He wanted, and reached, as if diving into deep water after a receding light. I dived beside him, though I could not see the light he chased. Maybe he couldn’t, either.

  “He’ll chop you up when this is done,” Rache joked. Good roomie, always looking out for me. “Store you in the freezer. Some Craigslist killer shit.”

  At least, I hoped she was joking.

  The money let me take fewer shifts. Acting dropped off the ambitions list, for the moment—I didn’t need more people watching me. I paced the apartment like pacing a cage. I wrote compulsively, but where before I’d shaped my bones to words, now my work felt like the words had always been there, waiting for me to sift white off the page and reveal them glistening black. My play’s last act skewed weird, full of silences and dread. The windows in my head through which light came were shut, and I’d opened others to let in the dark.

  I studied Crispin, but learned less than you’d expect to learn about someone you spent a summer with naked. He mixed his own paints, ground his own pigment. Steve had known him in art school, said he was weird even then, old-money weird, and he got weirder after his mother’s illness, a cancer of the mind that warped her first, made her suffer, turned her inside out before it let her die. There were rumors that they cut it out of her and he kept it after; there were rumors that he watched them do it, that he sat with the growth and asked it questions as it floated in green. Mean rumors. But I could see where they came from.

  Crispin made his name young, and his fame grew as his work got strange. He hadn’t shown in years. The auction price for his last painting, Still Life with Wriggling No. 9, was a four with so many zeroes after it I thought there must have been a typo—until I checked the price for Still Life with Wriggling No. 8.

  With that kind of money, he could afford to pay me double.

  He used last names exclusively, and knew everyone’s—the mailman’s even. He rotated between three shirts and two pairs of ratty khakis. He kept a fiddle in his apartment, though he never played that I saw. He skipped meals often; we ordered sandwiches once, and he said that was his first food of the week, this being Wednesday. Once I arrived to find a large man crying on the stairs outside Crispin’s apartment; Crispin gave no explanation. I didn’t ask for one.

  Sometimes, in his eyes, I thought I saw worms turning.

  We made four paintings that summer. I saw none of them. After the final session, he passed me two envelopes instead of one. The envelope with the cash was cheap, unmarked, and extra fat; the other was of textured paper and addressed in spidery calligraphy to Ms. Deliah Dane.

  “An invitation,” he said.

  “You’re getting married? You should have told me.”

  He didn’t hear the joke. “We are putting on a show.”

  I HAD, AS who doesn’t, a nice black dress for formal events, and on the night of the opening I for once made it all the way to midtown without a single catcall. So it was a good day, at least until I reached the gallery.

  The galleries where my friends showed were ripped-jeans joints for the most part, dresses on a strict irony-only basis. That wasn’t the deal at the 512. Cloth-of-gold, labels, gossamer, yes. My nice black dress looked bargain basement in this crowd. Some of the men wore tuxedoes, which I didn’t think you were allowed to wear except to weddings, funerals, and inaugurations. Then again, the gentlemen—and I use that term loosely, based on where their eyes went when they thought no one else was looking—the gentlemen at the 512 for Crispin’s opening seemed like they went to a lot of those.

  Tonight the 512 was a white box, walls the color of one of those old fifties asylums where men used to check in their wives for ‘rest.’ Aside from the buffet table, the gallerist had set up four black velvet booths, and lines of patrons waited outside them. Black tripods near each booth displayed a cream paper card, typed, actually typed, on Crispin’s Underwood. To the left, Face. To the right, Back. To the rear, Nude 1 and Nude 2.

  That was all.

  Of course Crispin would show the paintings, but I’d expected still lifes too, the flower bowl, a broken dead thing, some relief from me. All these so-called gentlemen in their tuxedoes had come to see pieces of me naked. I felt scared, and a little flattered, and a lot more angry that I felt either.

  Crispin wasn’t hard to find. The room had four corners, and the front two were too near the door for his comfort. My first guess was wrong—the crowd there surrounded a woman I took for the gallerist, an elegant scarecrow laughing at a joke I doubt I would have found funny. I wormed through the crowd again, past the lines outside each nude and the buffet table. Crispin leaned into the far corner, staring at his glass of white as if wishing he could make it darker. In this sea of evening dress, he wore rumpled wool slacks, that same green shirt, and a blazer with a loose thread in the left shoulder. His shoes had never felt the touch of shine.

  “Just me?” I said.

  Wine slopped over the rim of his glass, and he looked up; his smile seemed warm at first before he remembered to turn it cruel. “You came.” But I’d seen enough. The coldness was a mask, though he wore it well.

  “No flowers. No still lifes.”

  He shrugged, that first slip covered now. “Those weren’t good enough. You are.”

  I wanted to shout, but didn’t. The chatter and the drifting atonal music and the clink of glasses against teeth forbid me that. I realized I was alone—there was an empty circle of floor around Crispin even here, all these people watching him as if he were a tiger or a shit-throwing ape. What did that make me? His target, or prey, and I wasn’t about to let these inauguration-goers cast me in either role.

  “Look at them if you want,” he said.

  “What’s with the curtains?”

  “I will allow indirect light only, under these circumstances. No one but a buyer gets to see them unveiled.”

  It’s hard to storm away in heels, but practice makes perfect.

  “Deliah!” I heard while forcing my way through the crowd to the door. At first I mistook the voice for Crispin’s, though it was all wrong—female, for one thing, and happy, and using my first name. I turned and saw—

  “Ms. Agent!” Shannon Carmichael, to be exact—I realize I haven’t given her name before. A full woman, billowing out of the mass of blacks and grays in a bright orange dress, arms wide and one hand wined; she reminded me charmingly of an octopus rising through ocean murk. If you can’t see how an octopus might be charming, don’t blame me for your lack of imagination. If I’d been caught in anything so simple as a bear trap I would have chewed my arm off to get away, because oh my god my agent had seen me naked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Crispin’s show, of course,” she said. “His new project! Have you seen them yet?”

  “You know Crispin?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I didn’t realize he was such a thing. I just—” But if she’d seen the pictures and didn’t recognize me, why clue her in? “I know him from around.”

  “I wish you and I got to the same around. He’s a recluse, you know, never comes to anything. You must see this Face!”

  She grabbed my wrist and pulled. That woman has better traction in heels on hardwood than most semis I’ve known on open interstates. By this point the lines had died down, replaced by clots of chatting socialites near each booth, and Shannon pulled me past those with an apologetic smile and no drop in speed. I heard snatches of conversation:

  —cold like space, only the colors—

  —imagine what it would look like on a wall / can’t imagine a wall to hold—

  —conversation starter, or, you know, ender—

  —those eyes, deeper than wells, and all the world inside—

  —audio c
omponent, maybe, in the frames, I heard pipes—

  And something about “jog” and “Sabbath” from a young Chinese woman leaning against her date, drunk or faint. Sweat beaded through her makeup. Her hands twisted, fingers twining, locking, gripping as if to break.

  Shannon shoved me through the velvet, and I tripped, my only thought that I would tumble somehow through the painting and ruin what, fifty grand at least of Crispin’s opening, if not more—

  But I caught my balance, and looked up, and stared into an unfamiliar face.

  I couldn’t see it all. They’d covered the booth with cloth, so inside everything should have been shades of gray, but wasn’t. The face on the canvas shone. She pulsed in a rhythm exactly out of time with my own heartbeat.

  No wonder Shannon hadn’t recognized me. Crispin broke my face, or peeled it apart. I was fissured and fused and melted and monolithic, distorted into something more real, full, there than I had ever felt. My painted eyes were pits you could tumble down and fall for a million years into blackness charged with sick galaxies of staring, slitted orbs, space filled with the piping of a mindless master whose music was a scream.

  Craquelure legions danced in the fissures of my skin. The red muscle of a peeled-back cheek was a field that grew unholy thorns, and corpses twisted in my hair, pecked by carrion birds. Yet they were only shadows, brushstrokes, suggestions my mind added to a canvas face that did not resemble me at all.

  Or did it? And were those in fact suggestions, or was something moving beneath the paint?

  I can’t write what I saw, and I call myself a writer. But saying you can’t say something, that’s one of the old tricks, right? And—hell.

  I looked at me. I mean, the canvas I looked at fleshy me with my eyes that were doors, and something behind pressed out, against, through those doors. I reached to touch my cheek, trembling, and as I did I remembered museum field trips and Miss Alva saying “Deliah, don’t touch,” and of all the damn things that saved me. I drew back my hand and the painting was paint again.

  I stumbled out, glazed, sweating. The lights and walls and shirt fronts were too white. I held out a hand, but no one steadied me. I saw a blur of faces—and a spark of sympathy in that Chinese girl’s eyes, before her date guided her off toward the wine.

  Something grabbed my hand, and I barely contained a scream. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Shannon, her smile still plastered on.

  “That’s a word,” I said.

  “A different world, seen through the intermediary of the model. Morrison wants to buy the lot.” She introduced me to the man behind her, a thickset robber baron type with white hair and bushy mustache and the tuxediest of tuxedoes. “Morrison, this is my client, Deliah Dane. She knows Crispin.” With a conspiratorial edge on Crispin’s name and the word knows. Morrison took my hand and said something vacant and polite, and Shannon added, “You absolutely must see the Nudes.”

  I wanted nothing less. “How long was I in there?”

  “Five minutes,” she said with a glance at her watch. “Or so.”

  That felt too short, and too long.

  Morrison cleared his throat—did he recognize me?—but before he could speak or I could recoil, the scarecrow clinked her glass. All eyes turned upon her, and she effused—for a scarecrow—about Crispin and how glad she was “all of you” had come, meaning everyone with money to spend, and she asked Crispin to say a few words.

  “I have to go,” I told Shannon, and as I slid through the crowd toward the door Crispin read from notes typed on index cards.

  “—to portray a deeper world than the one we see. Vision is a kind of—exploration, frontier seeking: each sensory impression is a sheet disguising a universe of processes, not all—amenable to human understanding. And in that dialectic between our naïve comprehension and the vast and pitiless truth, we find—”

  The door closed, and rain and the buzz saw of taxi tires through puddles replaced him.

  I TORE UP the doom-ending of my play that night, but I couldn’t think of anything to write in its place other than “and monsters ate them all,” so I stopped. I lay awake listening to Rache and her boyfriend have messy sex on the other side of my bedroom’s thin walls. Even that sounded wrong.

  But I am a professional, and I keep my word, so even though I barely slept that night I was still on time for my next session with Crispin.

  HE MET ME at the door with a glass of scotch, a bonus envelope, and a bouquet of star lilies. “They sold,” I said, and set the lilies down, and he said, “Yes,” and “All to the same buyer.”

  “Morrison.”

  “Morrison Bellkleft, yes,” he said. “For a considerable sum.” He sat, silent, and waited. I drank.

  Whiskey warmth eased the next bit: “Those portraits don’t look anything like me.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “No. Hell, your roses don’t even look like roses. Not like normal roses.”

  You don’t say that kind of thing to a client who’s paid you better than you’ve ever been paid before, but I was done not knowing. Knuckle on temple, he considered. He had a silence like glass.

  “Have you ever watched someone you love die?” He spoke flat. “Not just known they were dying, but sat beside them, felt their pulse, watched their eyes as they failed, again and again, to understand what was happening—then the horror when they finally got the joke? Only to forget it all, and minutes later remember once again.” He stood and walked to the window. “There comes a moment when the doctors stop giving them water, you know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The world is sick. Life warps itself. We ignore—everything. We blind ourselves to the writhing truth of the rot beneath our skin. We call a storm sky black, when the fiercest storms are all awash with color. I was taught to paint what I see. I force myself to see deeper, truer. To see beneath, below, beyond. I hide my work so its unveiling will shock the viewer, and open a gate to the truth they’ve ignored.”

  “I know truth,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You think I don’t? Rich white guy like you, you think you have an inside line on how messed up shit really is?”

  “No.” He turned: a silhouette. “The world is horror, and sickness, grotesque realities we suppress and ignore. That’s the space to break open, that’s the frontier. Not stars. What’s under the flesh.”

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Art isn’t moral.”

  “Bullshit. It’s my body you’re painting.”

  “It isn’t you,” he said. “You’re just the gate. You’re the best model I’ve ever had. I’m trying, so hard, to get this right. To show them.” I recognized the pleading from boyfriends past, but this felt more sincere. Diving, always diving, toward some light he could not see. “I need this.”

  He pointed with his head toward a massive canvas by the wall. Eight feet across, five feet high. White, and waiting. For me.

  “Will you help me?”

  And God help me, I said yes.

  WE STARTED THAT day. I wake up some nights thinking we never stopped.

  Modeling for a work that size differs in degree and kind from sitting for smaller portraits. The canvas looms over the studio. Crispin, working, disappeared behind it. I heard him breathe, I heard the serpent-over-rock slither of his brush. My watch and his ticked just out of time.

  Pressure built inside me, and out.

  He posed me on the divan, rising as if from sleep. The poses had been simple before: stand here, sit, turn your head. This time, Crispin wanted to catch me in the moment of waking: one arm back, eyes half-lidded, mouth open. When we got the pose right, hunger and fear mixed in his eyes.

  It hurt worse than any posture I’d ever held. Half-risen, half-lying, pressure on my left arm while my right drained of blood, legs parted and one foot trailing off the divan, it wrecked me. After the second thirty-minute sit I was all sweat and jellied nerves. I collapsed on the bed for our break.

  Too soon, we star
ted again.

  But pain’s not all I mean by ‘pressure.’ In the shadows of Crispin’s room, under the weight of his gray eyes, which rose and set over the canvas like twin moons over an alien world, I felt something immense press against me from below. His earlier paintings broke me open—cracked like an eggshell in his hunt for that unspeakable truth. But now, I felt the truth he saw through me. There was a universe beneath us, a blasted, writhing, whimpering world. Great pale cities towered on planes of black ice beneath eclipsed suns that were themselves eyes. Worms coiled and hissed in the shadow-corners of Crispin’s apartment. Strange lights reflected in his pupils, or caught, and glowed there as embers.

  The horror grew on my second sit, and my third—the horror, and the excitement. On my subway rides home Crispin’s expression remained before my eyes, his rictus grin, triumph and pain and effort, like a man lifting a weight he can’t quite bear.

  Rache says my dreams that month were restless and mewling.

  But the work continued, the pressure built, and the season of storms arrived.

  A MONTH AFTER the show, Shannon—Ms. Agent—called me. I stared at the phone too long, wondering if I should answer, thinking guilty thoughts about my abandoned manuscript and that night in the 512. But I picked up on the third ring, just before the call cut to voicemail. “How have you been, Deliah?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Working.”

  “And Crispin—how’s he?”

  She didn’t know about my work with Crispin, and I did not enlighten her. Few professional relationships improve when one party has seen the other naked. “Well,” I said.

  “I thought you might want to know—the paperwork finally cleared, and Morrison has all four paintings from the 512 show. Hasn’t unveiled them yet. He invited me to see them under full light for the first time. He remembered that you know Crispin, and hoped you might join us.”