“Mr. Grissul, what appeared?”
Grissul remembered himself and found a tone of voice not so exhausting of his own strength, nor so wearing on his listener’s patience.
“The face,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “It was right there, about the size of, I don’t know, a window or a picture hanging on the wall, except that it was in the ground and it was a big oval, not rectangular in any way. Just as if someone had partly buried a giant, or better yet, a giant’s mask. Only the edges of the face seemed not so much buried as, well, woven I guess you would say, right into the ground. The eyes were closed, not shut closed—it didn’t seem to be dead—but relaxed. The same with the lips, very heavy lips, rubbing up against each other. Even complexion, ashy gray, and soft cheeks. They looked soft, I mean, because I didn’t actually touch them in any way. I think it was asleep.”
Nolon shifted slightly in his chair and looked straight into Grissul’s tiny eyes.
“Then come and see for yourself,” Grissul insisted. “The moon’s bright enough.”
“That’s not the problem, I’m perfectly willing to go along with you, whatever might be there. But for once I have other plans.”
“Oh, other plans,” repeated Grissul as if some secret, hidden deep and long, had been revealed. “And what other plans would those be, Mr. Nolon?”
“Plans of relatively long standing and not altered since made, if you can conceive of such a thing these days. Are you listening? Oh, I thought you nodded off. Well, Rignolo—the painter, not the one you might be thinking of—has made a rare move. He’s asked me if I would like to have a look around his studio. No one’s ever been there that I know of. And no one’s actually seen what he paints.”
“No one that you know of,” added Grissul.
“Of course. Until tonight, that is, a little while from now unless a change of plans is necessary. Otherwise I shall be the first to see what all that talk of his is about. It should really be worth the trouble, and I could invite you to come along.”
Grissul’s lower lip pushed forward a little. “Thank you, Mr. Nolon,” he added, “but that’s more in your line. I thought when I told you about my observation this evening—”
“Of course, your observation is very interesting, extraordinary, Mr. Grissul. But I think that that sort of thing can wait, don’t you? Besides, I haven’t told you anything of Mr. Rignolo’s work.”
“You can tell me.”
“Landscapes, Mr. Grissul. Nothing but landscapes. Exclusively his subject, a point he even brags about.”
“That’s very interesting, too.”
“I thought you would say something like that. I would also think that you might be even more interested if you had ever heard Rignolo discourse on his canvasses. As if he painted them . . . Well, you can see and hear for yourself. What do you say, then? First Rignolo’s studio and then straight out to see if we can find that old field again?”
They agreed that these activities, in this sequence, would not be the worst way to fill an evening.
As they got up from the table, Nolon had a last look at the window across the street. The light that once brightened it must have been put out during his conversation with Grissul. So there was no way of knowing whether or not someone was now standing there, perhaps observing them. Buttoning their long overcoats as far as their scarved necks, the two men walked in complete silence across the park where the earth glowed aquamarine below lusterless stars like the dead eyes of countless sculptured faces.
“Don’t just walk stepping everywhere,” Rignolo told his visitors as they all entered the studio. He was a little out of breath from the climb up the stairs, wheezing his words, quietly muttering to himself, “This place, oh this place.” There was hardly a patch of floor that was not in some way cluttered over, so he need not have warned Nolon, or even Grissul. “You see,” he said, “how this isn’t really a room up here, just a little closet that tried to grow into one, bulging out every which way and making all these niches and alcoves surrounding us, this shapeless gallery of nooks. There’s a window around here somewhere, I don’t know, under some of these canvasses, I suppose. But those are what you’re here for, not to look out some window that who knows where it is. Nothing to see out there, even so.”
Rignolo then ushered his visitors through the shrunken maze composed of recesses of one sort or another, indicating to them a canvas here or there. Each was held somehow to a wall or leaning against one, as if with exhaustion. Having brought their attention to this or that picture, he would step a little to the side and allow them to admire his work, standing there like a polite but slightly bored curator of some seldom-visited museum, a pathetic figure attired in loose-fitting clothes of woven . . . dust. His old face was as lifeless as a mask; his skin had the same faded complexion as his clothes, and just as slack, flabby; his lips were the same color as his skin, but more full and taut; his hair shot out in tufts from his head, uncontrolled, weedy; and his eyes showed too much white, having to all appearances rolled up too far toward his forehead, as if they were trying to peek under it. The combination of these facial features gave Rignolo something of the look of an idiot in ecstasy.
While Nolon was gazing at one of old Rignolo’s landscapes, Grissul seemed unable to shake off a preoccupation with the artist himself, though he was obviously making the effort. But the more he tried to turn his attention away from Rignolo, the more easily it was drawn back to the flabby skin, the faded complexion, the undisciplined shocks of hair. Finally, Grissul gave a little tug at the sleeve of Nolon’s coat and began to whisper something. Nolon looked at Grissul in a way that might have said, “Yes, I know, but have some sense of decorum in any case,” then resumed his contemplation of Rignolo’s excellent landscapes.
They were all very similar to one another. Given such titles as “Glistening Night,” “Marriage of Sky and Shadow,” and “The Stars, the Hills,” they were not intended to resemble as much as suggest the promised scenes. A visual echo of the non-abstract world might strike home on the periphery of one’s vision, some effect of color or form, but for the most part they could be described as extremely remote in their perspective on solid reality. Grissul, who was no stranger to the specific locales purportedly depicted in these canvasses, could very well have expressed the objection that these conglomerations of fragmented mass, these whirlpools of distorted light, simply did not achieve their purpose, did not in fact deserve connection with the geographical subjects portrayed therein. Perhaps it was his intuition that just such a protest might be put forth that inspired—in the rapid, frantic voice of a startled sleeper—the following outburst.
“Think anything you like about these scenes, it’s all the same to me. Whisper to each other, my hearing is wonderfully bad. Say that my landscapes do not invite one’s eyes to pass into them and wander, let alone linger for the briefest moment. Nevertheless, that is exactly their purpose, and as far as I am concerned they are quite adequate to it, meticulously efficient. I have spent extraordinary lengths of . . . time within the borders of each canvas, both as maker and as casual inhabitant, until the borders no longer exist for me and neither does . . . that other thing. Understand that when I say inhabitant, I do not in any way mean that I take my clumsy feet tromping up and down staircases of color, or that I stretch out this body of mine on some lofty ledge where I can play the master of all I see. There are no masters of these scenes and no seers, because bodies and their organs cannot function there—no place for them to go, nothing for them to survey with ordinary eyes, no thoughts to think for the mighty brain. And my thoroughfares will not take you from the doorstep of one weariness to the backdoor of another, and they cannot crumble, because they are burdened with nothing to convey—their travelers are already there, continuously arriving at infinite sites of the perpetually astonishing. Yet these cities are also a homeland, and nothing there will ever threaten to become strange in an unpleasant manner. What I mean to say is that to inhabit my landscapes one must, in no f
igurative sense, grow into them. At best they are a paradise for sleepwalkers; but only those sleepwalkers who never rise to their feet, who forget their destination, who even forget they exist at all. On their way to an ultimate darkness beyond dreams, such sleepwalkers may pause to loiter in these lands of mine, which neighbor on nothingness and stand next door to endlessness. So you see, my critics, what we have in these little pictures is a not quite utter annihilation, but an incomplete and thoroughly decorative eternity of—”
“All the same,” Grissul interjected, “it sounds unpleasant.”
“You’re interfering,” Nolon said under his breath.
“The old bag of wind,” Grissul said under his.
“And just where do you see the unpleasantness? Where, show me. Nowhere, in my view. One cannot be unpleasant to one’s self, one cannot be strange to oneself. I claim that all will be different when one is joined with the landscape. For the initiated, each of those little swirls is a cove which one may enter into and become; each line—jagged or merely jittery—is a cartographer’s shoreline which may be explored at all points at once; each crinkled wad of radiance, a star basking in its own light, and in yours. This, gentlemen, is a case of making the most of one’s talent for pro . . . jec . . . tion. There indeed exist actual locales on which my pictures are based, I admit that. But these places keep their distance from the spectator: whereas my new landscapes make you feel at home, those old ones put you off, hold you at arm’s length. That’s the way it is out there—everything looks at you with strange eyes. But you can get around this intolerable situation, jump the fence, so to speak, and trespass into a world where you belong for a change. If my landscapes look unfamiliar to you, it is only because everything looks different from the other side. All this will be understood much more clearly when you have seen my masterwork. Step this way, please.”
Nolon and Grissul glanced blankly at each other and then followed the artist up to a narrow door. Opening the door with a tiny key, Rignolo ushered his guests inside. It was a tight squeeze through the doorway.
“Now this place really is a closet,” Grissul whispered to Nolon. “I don’t think I can turn around.”
“Then we’ll just have to walk out of here in reverse, as if there were something wrong with that.”
The door slammed closed and a for a moment there was no place on earth darker than that little room.
“Watch the walls,” Rignolo called through the door.
“Walls?” someone whispered.
The first images to begin to appear in the darkness were those crinkled wads of radiance Rignolo spoke of, except that these were much larger, more numerous, and after all became more radiant than the others bound within their cramped little canvasses. And these emerged on all sides of the spectator, above and below as well, so that an irresistible conviction was instilled that the tiny, gravelike room had collapsed or expanded into a star-strewn corridor of night, the certainty created that one was suspended in space without practical means of remaining there. And reaching out for the solid walls, crouching on the floor, only brought confusion rather than relief from the sense of impossibility. From faint pinpoints, very precise, the irregular daubs of brightness grew, each taking on any of the infinite shades between silver and bluish-gray, each ragged at its glowing rim. And each grew to a certain size, where it held. Then another kind of growing began: threadlike filaments of light, grayish-green in color, started sprouting in the spaces between and behind those bulbous thistles of brilliance, running everywhere like cracks up and down a wall. And these threadlike, hairlike tendrils eventually spread across the blackness in an erratic fury of propagation, until all was webbed and stringy in the universal landscape. Then the webbing began to fray and grow shaggy, cosmic moss hanging in luminous clumps, beards. But the scene was not muddled, no more so, that is, than the most natural marsh or fen-like field. Finally, enormous stalks shot out of nowhere, quickly criscrossed to form interesting and well-balanced patterns, and suddenly froze. They were greenish-blue and wore burry crowns of a pinkish color, like prickly brains.
The scene, it appeared, was now complete. All the actual effects were displayed before the spectator: actual because the one further effect now being produced was most likely an illusion. It seemed to the spectator, or might seem, that deep within the shredded tapestry of webs and hairs and stalks, something else had been woven, something buried beneath the marshy morass but slowly rising to the surface.
“Is that a face?” someone said.
“I can begin to see one, too,” said another, “but I don’t know if I want to see it. I don’t think I can feel where I am now. Let’s try not to look at those faces.”
A series of cries from within the little room got Rignolo to open the door, which sent Nolon and Grissul tumbling backwards into the artist’s studio. They lay among the debris of the floor for some time. Rignolo swiftly secured the door, and then stood absolutely still beside it, his upturned eyes taking no interest in his visitors’ predicament. As they regained their feet, a few things were settled in low voices.
“Mr. Nolon, I recognized the place that that room is supposed to be.”
“I’m sure you did.”
“And I’m also sure I know whose face it was that I saw tonight in that field.”
“I think we should be going.”
“What are you saying?” demanded Rignolo.
Nolon gestured to a large clock high upon the wall and asked if that was the time.
“Always,” replied Rignolo, “since I’ve never yet seen its hands move.”
“Well, then, thank you for everything,” said Nolon.
“We have to be leaving,” added Grissul.
“Just one moment,” Rignolo shouted as they were making their way out. “I know where you’re going now. Someone, I won’t say who, told me what you found in that field. I’ve done it, haven’t I? You can tell me all about it. No, it’s not necessary. I’ve put myself into the scene at last. The infinite with a decor, the ultimate flight! Oh, perhaps there’s still some work to be done. But I’ve made a good start, haven’t I? I’ve got my foot in the door, my face looking in the window. Little by little, then . . . forever. True? No, don’t say anything. Show me where it is, I need to go there. I have a right to go.”
Having no idea what sort of behavior a refusal might inspire in the fantastical Rignolo, not to mention reprisals on the part of his anonymous informant, Nolon and Grissul respected the artist’s request.
*
Into a scene which makes no sound, three figures arrive. Their silhouettes move with distinct, cautious steps across a clearing in a field, progressing slowly, almost without noticeable motion. Around them, crisscrossing shafts of tall grasses are entirely motionless, their pointed tips sharply outlined in the moonlight. Above them, the moon is round and bright; but its brightness is a dull sort, like the flat glow of whiteness that appears in the spaces of complex designs embellishing the page of a book. The three figures, one of which is much shorter than the other two, have stopped and are standing completely still before a particularly dense clump of oddly-shaped stalks. Now one of the taller figures has raised his arm and is pointing toward this clump of stalks, while the shorter figure has taken a step in the direction indicated. The two taller figures are standing together as the short one has all but disappeared forwardly into the dark, dense overgrowth. Only a single shoe, its toes angled groundward, and a square patch of trouser leg are visible. Then nothing at all.
The two remaining figures continue to stand in their places, making no gestures, their hands in the pockets of their long overcoats. They are staring into the blackness where the other one has disappeared. Around them, crisscrossing shafts of tall grasses; above them, the moon is round and bright.
Now the two figures have turned themselves away from the place where the other one disappeared. They are each slightly bent over, and for some time their hands are held tightly against the sides of their heads. Then, slowly, almost with
out noticeable motion, they move out of the scene.
The field is empty once again. And now everything awakes with movement and sound.
After their adventure, Nolon and Grissul returned to the same table under the trees that had been their point of departure earlier that evening. But where they had left a bare tabletop behind them, not considering the candleflame within its unshapely green bubble, there were at the moment two shallow glasses set out, along with a tall, if somewhat thin bottle placed between them. They methodically looked at the bottle, the glasses, and each other, as if they did not want to rush into anything.
“Is there still, you know, someone in the window across the street?” Grissul asked.
“Do you think I should look?” Nolon asked back.
Grissul stared at the table, allowing moments to accumulate, then said, “I don’t care, Mr. Nolon, I have to say that what happened tonight was very unpleasant.”
“Something like that would have happened sooner or later,” Nolon replied. “He was too much the dreamer, let’s be honest. Nothing he said made any sense to speak of, and he was always saying more than he should. Who knows who heard what.”
“I’ve never heard screaming like that.”
“It’s over,” Nolon said quietly.
“But what could have happened to him?” asked Grissul, gripping the shallow glass before him, apparently without awareness of the move.
“Only he could know that for certain,” answered Nolon, who mirrored Grissul’s move, and seemingly with the same absence of conscious intent.
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