Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  It had to be hard for her, he thought. And when he thought of it as a way to make things easier for both Carolyn and Derek, well, it didn’t seem so bad, did it? And a man in Lipton’s condition wouldn’t get too close a look, after . . . well, after. Browning remembered a poem:

  Now view yourself as I was, on the spot—

  With a slight kind of engine. Do you see?

  Like this . . . You wouldn’t hang me? I thought not.

  And in fact, they didn’t. Indeed, it appeared that no one even checked—Browning wouldn’t have been surprised if Derek had been a DNR. He saw Lipton’s obituary in the paper and thought about the appropriate interval for consoling Carolyn.

  He had begun walking around that time.

  And he was walking still, years later. Once he got into the habit, he guessed, it carried on from inertia.

  After Derek had died, Alan had imagined that he might encounter Carolyn on an afternoon, moving around the city as one does, or more to the point, as two might. And one afternoon, he did see her as he walked.

  She was sitting on a bench at a park, talking to a man in a suit. And from that day, he wouldn’t have been able to say why, but Alan Browning knew his chance had never arrived and never would. It had been futile—the aches after she had chosen Lipton, the waking nights, the last times he had filled Derek’s prescription. All he had done was set Carolyn down a different path to a different man, a man who wasn’t him and who never would be. He may even have eased her way.

  He turned back to the pharmacy and never walked back to that park, even after he read about the second wedding. Instead, his walks ranged in the opposite direction, crossing the flat brown earth at the city’s edge and beyond. He would try to blank his mind as he stepped, focusing only on the length of his stride, the intake of breath. He counted steps as if the process were a mantra.

  And as the months and years passed, he managed to put the thoughts of what he had done somewhere deep inside himself. If someone had asked him—but no one would, because no one knew—he might have said that he had forgiven himself for a moment of human weakness. He had done a lot of good before and after that moment, after all. And really, perhaps he had even helped Carolyn (Oh, Carolyn!) and Derek Lipton, with Annandale’s “slight engine.” The words Annandale and Ampurdan blended somewhere below the surface of his mind. Annandale Ampurdan Ampersand Carolyn—they fit the rhythm of his steps, even though he didn’t hear the beat as he walked.

  He settled into the route where he had seen Jordan Hopkins, and would occasionally see the boy, throwing a ball into the air and catching it, watching ants conduct their business, or doing the other things that young boys do to fill their afternoons. Usually they would smile and nod, but occasionally Alan would ask him if he had found treasure. The boy would say no, not today.

  “How about monsters?”

  “No, not them either.”

  “Well, it’s not all bad then, is it?”

  The boy would shrug and toss his ball again. “Have you found any monsters, Dr. Bowling?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But I haven’t been looking for them either.”

  “What have you been looking for?” Toss. Catch.

  “I’ve told you before—when you’re looking for nothing in particular . . .”

  “You can count on finding it,” the boy finished. Toss. Catch. And Alan Bowling would make his way back to work and finish the day and go home and listen to music or work a chess problem and might not think of the Liptons at all.

  And the years passed, and an older Alan Bowling turned the store over to an older Marshall, who was still younger than he was. Jordan Hopkins had grown up, and was away at pharmacy school, of all things. Bowling secretly hoped that the boy would return to Ampurdan and take over the store one day, but he really didn’t expect it. When people left Ampurdan—those who could—they tended not to return.

  Carolyn hadn’t (Oh, Carolyn!). Was she still alive? Bowling didn’t know. A phrase of Bach might still call her to his mind, but it was the memory of a memory. He remembered the coolness of her lips, and the desert glass of her eyes, glass that reflected him, placed him outside but had never held him within. Or those may have been what he thought he should remember, and it was the memory of the should that he held and summoned from time to time.

  But he still walked most days. The climate in Ampurdan was dry most of the time, and the afternoons were still pleasant enough for an old man’s walks. And it was on one such walk when he saw a stir of motion—a bird, a fox, a rodent? He was never sure—and he misstepped and his ankle twisted and he pitched into a gully worn into place by rains long gone.

  He felt the hip go when he hit the bottom, and the pain took his breath away as he drew his hand across the dust and pebbles to his side. But there wasn’t pain below that. He tried to roll from his left side to something like a seated position, and that was when Alan Browning felt, then saw the blood on his hand. He looked farther down and saw the bend—no, the angle—in his thigh, and the rhythmic darkening of the ground around the leg.

  He remembered anatomy from his freshman year: femoral artery; very dangerous, a man could bleed to death quite swiftly unless a tourniquet was applied. Browning reached for his belt, but he was very old and very tired, and his fingers didn’t want to listen to him anymore. And Browning knew it, and he didn’t really mind, because he had walked a long time over many years.

  He suddenly felt cold, and he blinked hard, and for a moment he thought he saw Carolyn sitting at the gully’s edge, perhaps some gray in the dark hair, eyes somewhere between blue and violet. It’s good of you to be here at last, he thought, or said, or thought he said, but then he blinked again, and saw Derek Lipton, and slips of prescription papers, and then the man from the park, and then Jordan Hopkins, and then Carolyn once more (Oh, Carolyn!). And then he swallowed, and they were all gone, and he was just an old man dying at the bottom of a gully in Ampurdan, and there was nothing after the ampersand with no more will to connect things, and as things turned gray and faded further, he realized that he had found what he had been looking for all along.

  Absolutely nothing.

  DAVID MORRELL is the author of First Blood, the critically acclaimed novel in which Rambo was created. He holds a PhD in American literature from Penn State and was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. His numerous New York Times bestsellers include the classic espionage novel The Brotherhood of the Rose, the basis for the only television miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl. An Edgar and Anthony finalist, an Inkpot, Macavity, and Nero recipient, Morrell has three Bram Stoker Awards and the Thriller Master Award from International Thriller Writers. Bouchercon, the world’s largest conference for crime-fiction readers and authors, gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award. Visit him at www.davidmorrell.net.

  Cypresses by Vincent van Gogh

  ORANGE IS FOR ANGUISH, BLUE FOR INSANITY

  BY DAVID MORRELL

  Van Dorn’s work was controversial, of course. The scandal his paintings caused among Parisian artists in the late 1800s provided the stuff of legend. Disdaining conventions, thrusting beyond accepted theories, Van Dorn seized upon the essentials of the craft to which he’d devoted his soul. Color, design, and texture. With those principles in mind, he created portraits and landscapes so different, so innovative, that their subjects seemed merely an excuse for Van Dorn to put paint onto canvas. His brilliant colors, applied in passionate splotches and swirls, often so thick that they projected an eighth of an inch from the canvas in the manner of a bas-relief, so dominated the viewer’s perception that the person or scene depicted seemed secondary to technique.

  Impressionism, the prevailing avant-garde theory of the late 1800s, imitated the eye’s tendency to perceive the edges of peripheral objects as blurs. Van Dorn went one step further and so emphasized the lack of distinction among objects that they seemed to melt together, to merge into an interconnected, pantheistic universe of color. The branches of a Van
Dorn tree became ectoplasmic tentacles, thrusting toward the sky and the grass, just as tentacles from the sky and grass thrust toward the tree, all melding into a radiant swirl. He seemed to address himself not to the illusions of light but to reality itself, or at least to his theory of it. The tree is the sky, his technique asserted. The grass is the tree, and the sky the grass. All is one.

  Van Dorn’s approach proved so unpopular among theorists of his time that he frequently couldn’t buy a meal in exchange for a canvas upon which he’d labored for months. His frustration produced a nervous breakdown. His self-mutilation shocked and alienated such one-time friends as Cezanne and Gauguin. He died in squalor and obscurity. Not until the 1920s, thirty years after his death, were his paintings recognized for the genius they displayed. In the 1940s, his soul-tortured character became the subject of a best-selling novel, and in the 1950s a Hollywood spectacular. These days, of course, even the least of his efforts can’t be purchased for less than three million dollars.

  Ah, art.

  It started with Myers and his meeting with Professor Stuyvesant. “He agreed . . . reluctantly.”

  “I’m surprised he agreed at all,” I said. “Stuyvesant hates Postimpressionism and Van Dorn in particular. Why didn’t you ask someone easy, like old man Bradford?”

  “Because Bradford’s academic reputation sucks. I can’t see the point of writing a dissertation if it won’t be published, and a respected dissertation director can make an editor pay attention. Besides, if I can convince Stuyvesant, I can convince anyone.”

  “Convince him of what?”

  “That’s what Stuyvesant wanted to know,” Myers said.

  I remember that moment vividly, the way Myers straightened his lanky body, pushed his glasses close to his eyes, and frowned so hard that his curly red hair scrunched forward on his brow.

  “Stuyvesant said that, even disallowing his own disinclination toward Van Dorn—God, the way that pompous asshole talks—he couldn’t understand why I’d want to spend a year of my life writing about an artist who’d been the subject of countless books and articles. Why not choose an obscure but promising neo-Expressionist and gamble that my reputation would rise with his? Naturally the artist he recommended was one of Stuyvesant’s favorites.”

  “Naturally,” I said. “If he named the artist I think he did . . .”

  Myers mentioned the name.

  I nodded. “Stuyvesant’s been collecting him for the past five years. He hopes the resale value of the paintings will buy him a town house in London when he retires. So what did you tell him?”

  Myers opened his mouth to answer, then hesitated. With a brooding look, he turned toward a print of Van Dorn’s swirling Cypresses in a Hollow, which hung beside a ceiling-high bookshelf crammed with Van Dorn biographies, analyses, and bound collections of reproductions. He didn’t speak for a moment, as if the sight of the familiar print—its facsimile colors incapable of matching the brilliant tones of the original, its manufacturing process unable to re-create the exquisite texture of raised, swirled layers of paint on canvas—still took his breath away.

  “So what did you tell him?” I asked again.

  Myers exhaled with a mixture of frustration and admiration. “I said, what the critics wrote about Van Dorn was mostly junk. He agreed, with the implication that the paintings invited no less. I said, even the gifted critics hadn’t probed to Van Dorn’s essence. They were missing something crucial.”

  “Which is?”

  “Exactly. Stuyvesant’s next question. You know how he keeps relighting his pipe when he gets impatient. I had to talk fast. I told him I didn’t know what I was looking for, but there’s something”—Myers gestured toward the print—“something there. Something nobody’s noticed. Van Dorn hinted as much in his diary. I don’t know what it is, but I’m convinced his paintings hide a secret.” Myers glanced at me.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Well, if nobody’s noticed,” Myers said, “it must be a secret, right?”

  “But if you haven’t noticed . . .”

  Compelled, Myers turned toward the print again, his tone filled with wonder. “How do I know it’s there? Because when I look at Van Dorn’s paintings, I sense it. I feel it.”

  I shook my head. “I can imagine what Stuyvesant said to that. The man deals with art as if it’s geometry, and there aren’t any secrets in—”

  “What he said was, if I’m becoming a mystic, I ought to be in the school of religion, not art. But if I wanted enough rope to hang myself and strangle my career, he’d give it to me. He liked to believe he had an open mind, he said.”

  “That’s a laugh.”

  “Believe me, he wasn’t joking. He had a fondness for Sherlock Holmes, he said. If I thought I’d found a mystery and could solve it, by all means do so. And at that, he gave me his most condescending smile and said he would mention it at today’s faculty meeting.”

  “So what’s the problem? You got what you wanted. He agreed to direct your dissertation. Why do you sound so—”

  “Today there wasn’t any faculty meeting.”

  “Oh.” My voice dropped. “You’re fucked.”

  Myers and I had started graduate school at the University of Iowa together. That had been three years earlier, and we’d formed a strong enough friendship to rent adjacent rooms in an old apartment building near campus. The spinster who owned it had a hobby of doing watercolors—she had no talent, I might add—and rented only to art students so they would give her lessons. In Myers’s case, she had made an exception. He wasn’t a painter, as I was. He was an art historian. Most painters work instinctively. They’re not skilled at verbalizing what they want to accomplish. But words and not pigment were Myers’s specialty. His impromptu lectures had quickly made him the old lady’s favorite tenant.

  After that day, however, she didn’t see much of him. Nor did I. He wasn’t at the classes we took together. I assumed he spent most of his time at the library. Late at night, when I noticed a light beneath his door and knocked, I didn’t get an answer. I phoned him. Through the wall I heard the persistent, muffled ringing.

  One evening I let the phone ring eleven times and was just about to hang up when he answered. He sounded exhausted.

  “You’re getting to be a stranger,” I said.

  His voice was puzzled. “Stranger? But I just saw you a couple of days ago.”

  “You mean two weeks ago.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  “I’ve got a six-pack. You want to—?”

  “Yeah, I’d like that.” He sighed. “Come over.”

  When he opened his door, I don’t know what startled me more, the way Myers looked or what he’d done to his apartment.

  I’ll start with Myers. He had always been thin, but now he looked gaunt, emaciated. His shirt and jeans were rumpled. His red hair was matted. Behind his glasses, his eyes looked bloodshot. He hadn’t shaved. When he closed the door and reached for a beer, his hand shook.

  His apartment was filled with, covered with—I’m not sure how to convey the dismaying effect of so much brilliant clutter—Van Dorn prints. On every inch of the walls. The sofa, the chairs, the desk, the TV, the bookshelves. And the drapes, and the ceiling, and except for a narrow path, the floor. Swirling sunflowers, olive trees, meadows, skies, and streams surrounded me, encompassed me, seemed to reach out for me. At the same time, I felt swallowed. Just as the blurred edges of objects within each print seemed to melt into one another, so each print melted into the next. I was speechless amid the chaos of color.

  Myers took several deep gulps of beer. Embarrassed by my stunned reaction to the room, he gestured toward the vortex of prints. “I guess you could say I’m immersing myself in my work.”

  “When did you eat last?”

  He looked confused.

  “That’s what I thought.” I walked along the narrow path among the prints on the floor and picked up the phone. “The pizza’s on me.” I ordered the largest supreme the neare
st Pepi’s had to offer. They didn’t deliver beer, but I had another six-pack in my fridge, and I had the feeling we’d be needing it.

  I set down the phone. “Myers, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I told you.”

  “Immersing yourself? Give me a break. You’re cutting classes. You haven’t showered in God knows how long. You look like hell. Your deal with Stuyvesant isn’t worth destroying your health for. Tell him you’ve changed your mind. Get an easier dissertation director.”

  “Stuyvesant’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Damn it, what does it have to do with? The end of comprehensive exams, the start of dissertation blues?”

  Myers gulped the rest of his beer and reached for another can. “No, blue is for insanity.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the pattern.” Myers turned toward the swirling prints. “I studied them chronologically. The more Van Dorn became insane, the more he used blue. And orange is his color of anguish. If you match the paintings with the personal crises described in his biographies, you see a corresponding use of orange.”

  “Myers, you’re the best friend I’ve got. So forgive me for saying I think you’re off the deep end.”

  He swallowed more beer and shrugged as if to say he didn’t expect me to understand.

  “Listen,” I said. “A personal color code, a connection between emotion and pigment, that’s bullshit. I should know. You’re the historian, but I’m the painter. I’m telling you, different people react to colors in different ways. Never mind the advertising agencies and their theories that some colors sell products more than others. It all depends on context. It depends on fashion. This year’s ‘in’ color is next year’s ‘out.’ But an honest-to-God great painter uses whatever color will give him the greatest effect. He’s interested in creating, not selling.”