Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  But when they were, truly, spent, he gave her his beautiful, sad smile, and went out, and locked the door.

  For a day she thought it was part of the game. It’s going too far, she said. Let me out of here. I have things to do. I’ll miss my plane!

  Yes, he said, you’ll miss your plane.

  This isn’t fun anymore.

  Fun?

  Let me out.

  I can’t lose you.

  You’re serious.

  Of course.

  I am too. Let me out.

  Nothing.

  I’ll come back. You know that.

  You were leaving.

  For three months! To Kyoto, to study! You can visit. Or even come with me. We talked about it.

  You were leaving me.

  No! She wasn’t sure, at that moment, what her “no” meant.

  He’d taken great care with the suite. Statues, prints, and scroll paintings from his collection, precious works, he’d placed them in her rooms for study, for contemplation. A bronze bodhisattva he knew she loved, Imari dishes, a perfect-register edition of Hokusai’s “Great Wave.” Hokusai, his many influences and his tragic life, would have been the subject of her dissertation. Terence knew this, and he brought her books, museum catalogs, art DVDs. Whenever he thought it time, or whenever she asked, he replaced works with new ones, to give her a different perspective, a change. Many works had traveled in and out of her prison in these two years, but the heavy bodhisattva and the Hokusai remained. She wouldn’t part with them. From the bodhisattva she tried to learn patience, to study calm. Two or three times she waited through periods of weeks and then talked to Terence again, without heat, kindly, rationally, explaining how she loved him, how she’d always come back, how he’d never lose her but this was no life for her. He never believed her and of course by now he was right.

  He was right, also, to give her the art in her rooms. Without it she’d have gone mad. Whenever he left her she selected a piece and centered her attention on it, searching for whatever it had to teach, fighting down the panic, the hopelessness, the fear. Concentrating some days on color, some on shape, some on line or on just one square inch, she worked as she had when she’d been a promising graduate student, and Terence her lover and wealthy patron.

  And of all the works, the Great Wave was the one to which she returned most often.

  The sliding, striped blues of the sea; the dots of white foam and the reaching fingers of spray; the calm peace of Mount Fuji, so small in the distance; the towering curve of the Wave itself, seemingly impossible to escape. A rogue, unexpected and unforecast, it had come from nowhere on a clear bright day to overpower and subdue the men in the small, shelterless boats.

  The men: Nagano, Hirose, Kimura, Ikeda, Hirahara, Ozeki . . . She knew all their names. Isakawa, the lead man in the front boat, had told her. She’d learned who they were, and heard parts of their stories, over the two years she’d been here. Even the ones in Isakawa’s boat, the ones the smaller wave obscured, she knew them all, where they’d come from, their fears and strengths, and though Isakawa wouldn’t talk about either their situation or hers, she knew how desperately they longed to survive the Wave and get back home.

  They were equally desperate, she trapped in her opulent underground cell, with every comfort but freedom, the men on the wild, open sea, cold and wet and with nothing weighty they could cling to.

  It was after her first escape attempt that Isakawa told her the men’s names, their stories.

  In her first months here, after the talks with Terence, after he smiled sadly each time and shook his head, after she finally had admitted to herself persuading him was impossible, the idea came to her, so simple she was ashamed she’d not thought of it before. At the end of her swim one day, as he held out her robe, she clamped onto his arm, pulled and pushed and threw him into the pool. To the sound of his wild splashing, she took off, naked and dripping, up the stairs.

  The door at the top was locked.

  The key, where was the key? In Terence’s own robe? She spun to look back to the pool and there was Terence, his breathing strained, his face blank, dragging himself out.

  He took away the art, and all her clothes, leaving her nothing but white walls, white sheets. She couldn’t turn the lights out. At intervals he came with rice in a white plastic bowl with a white plastic spoon. He didn’t speak.

  Finally he brought back a small scroll painting, hung it from a nail. The immensity of her gratitude frightened her.

  She understood the lesson and things returned to the way they had been. When he rehung the Great Wave—the last piece he brought, in the slow process of restoring her prison—and he was gone and she was sitting in front of it, Isakawa, speaking for the first time, told her about his love for and fear of the sea.

  Thrilled for a voice that wasn’t Terence’s, she asked Isakawa his name, asked him about the other men, asked about the rogue wave, asked whether they’d been through times like these before. About the Wave he refused to speak, and her imprisonment likewise was a subject from which he turned away. But over many weeks Isakawa told her about his wife and grown sons, with fishing boats and families of their own. He spoke about Nagano’s three young daughters, and the flowering plum trees Hirose tended alone since the death of his wife, and the glorious autumn colors on the flanks of Mount Fuji visible from the village for which they’d been making when the Wave arose. She talked with Isakawa about the blue of the sea and the glowing white of the foam and the clear yellow sky and she realized that to rise against Terence as literally as the Wave was rising against the boats was her only chance.

  The swims had made her strong, and the bronze bodhisattva was her first thought. She lifted it, tried its heft, but though it was not large it was solid and it was too heavy; she could carry it, but not swing it, not, she thought, dependably use it to cause damage or death. She surveyed the other works in her prison and tried to imagine their use and realized, finally, that the sole possibility was the only one framed in glass: the Great Wave.

  Many times, she imagined the scene. She would be holding the print when Terence unlocked the door, perhaps to fetch her for her swim. Seeing what it was as she swung it, he’d be shocked for a moment, unable to move. She’d smash it into his face, and when the glass broke, she’d use shards of that, too, to destroy him. Then she’d take the key from his pocket and she’d be free.

  I’m sorry, she said to Isakawa. Please apologize to Nagano, to Hirose, to Kimura. Because the print, of course, would also be destroyed, when she acted. There are others, she told Isakawa. None that I’ve seen as perfect as this one, but many others. In the world. There, out there.

  He didn’t reply.

  In fact, from the day she decided that to be free she’d have to sacrifice the print, Isakawa didn’t speak again.

  She rehearsed the event in her mind, and she rehearsed the actions. She took the Great Wave off the wall, held it, swung it, rehung it, and studied it, waiting.

  And when the day came that she decided was the one, she gripped the print and stood listening for the click of the lock.

  The door opened, and—

  She could not do it.

  The perfect, sliding blues, the immaculate whites, Fuji in the distance, and all the men, all the boats; she held the print and couldn’t lift it, swing it, crush him with it.

  Terence looked at her, confusion showing.

  It has a crack, she said. The glass, here.

  I don’t see anything.

  I look at it for hours sometimes. I know every atom. The glass is cracked. If the crack gets larger it might tear the print. Please, take it to be reframed.

  He saw no crack; there was no crack. But he smiled and said, Yes, of course.

  And now there was nothing left.

  The next time he came to take her for her swim she was ready, wrapped in her thick robe, sitting and staring at the wall where the Great Wave had hung. She stood, not too eagerly, so he wouldn’t suspect. She walked wit
h her arms folded, hugging the robe’s warmth, and she asked Terence about the print, how the framer was doing, how soon it might come back. He told her it would be soon, and he must have seen nothing out of place because without incident they reached the end of the corridor that led from her prison suite to the pool.

  She burst into a run. Not stopping to shed the robe, she leaped into the welcoming cold. Terence’s shout echoed behind her, but was soon lost as water closed over her and the bodhisattva, hidden by artful draping of the robe and by her folded arms as she walked, tied around her waist with strips torn from the white silk sheets. The bodhisattva dragged and held her down. It was not, this beautiful bronze piece, heavy enough to keep her under if she fought against it, but she did not. She let it ballast her as she gulped in water, to weight her even more, and she fought her body’s panic, its desperation for breath, while inwardly she laughed: breathing was how she’d always fought panic, before.

  Through the water’s flowing surface she could see Terence on the pool’s edge, waving his arms, shouting, screaming. She couldn’t hear him.

  As the blackness seeped around the edges of her mind the voice she did hear, the last one, was Isakawa’s.

  We didn’t make it home, he told her.

  None of you? Nagano, to his babies? Hirose, to his trees? Kimura, Hirahara?

  We didn’t make it.

  No, she said, this time fully understanding the meaning of her “no.” No, we didn’t.

  New York Times bestselling writer KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH writes in whatever genre she pleases. She's won awards in all those genres, and hit best-seller lists in most. She tends to mix genres, particularly in her science fiction. (Her Retrieval Artist series features mysteries set on the Moon.) Her mystery novels, published under the name Rusch, include Spree and Bleed Through. She's published several collections of her award-winning mystery stories, including Secrets and Lies, which collects her most acclaimed stories. She also writes mystery set in the 1960s as Kris Nelscott. Her latest mystery novel, published as Nelscott, is A Gym of Her Own from WMG Publishing. To find out more about all she does, go to kriswrites.com.

  The Thinker by Auguste Rodin

  THINKERS

  BY KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  1970

  Leo’s blood, warm against her cold hands, steamed in the frosty night air. Like hot coffee in a paper cup.

  Lisa tried not to giggle, because she knew the giggle would be hysterical. She ran a hand over Leo’s face. He was leaning against the marble edge of the empty pool surrounding the Fountain of the Waters, legs splayed, head pointed toward Wade Lagoon.

  Irv was just staring at him, and Helen—God knew where Helen had gotten off to, because Lisa didn’t. Her ears still rang from the explosion, which had been louder than she had expected.

  Cold night, dry night, and when that happened, sound traveled. Which meant someone would be here soon to investigate.

  Lisa peered over her shoulder, looking past the sculptures jutting out of the fountain, saw light from the full moon glinting on the ice on the terrace. The Cleveland Museum of Art formed the backdrop, big, rectangular, and official, like some government office building. A man hunched near the stairs, facedown on the marble tiles.

  Then she realized it wasn’t a man at all. It was the statue, down, damaged, but not destroyed.

  God, she thought it had been destroyed, the way the pieces had sailed by her, slamming into everything.

  Slamming into Leo.

  Irv was rocking, mouth working. He couldn’t be hit, could he? He wasn’t even looking at her.

  She was covering one of the wounds on Leo’s side with her hands. But his face was dripping, and she couldn’t tell in the silver moonlight if his eyes were half-closed because he was unconscious or if they were half-closed because they were damaged.

  “We have to get him out of here,” she said to Irv. Her voice sounded tinny, flat, faraway. Her ears were plugged, her face aching from either the cold or shock or something.

  Irv didn’t even look at her. Maybe he couldn’t hear her.

  She grabbed him with one bloody hand. “Irv!” she shouted, then realized that was stupid.

  People had to be running here. Someone had probably called the police by now.

  And if they heard her shout, they would have a name.

  But no one lived near the art museum, that she knew of anyway, and the students at Case Western University lived blocks away. Students wouldn’t run toward the sound of an explosion, would they? They would think it was something planned.

  She hoped.

  Irv blinked, his eyes focusing on her.

  She pointed forcefully at Leo, then carefully mouthed, We have to go.

  Irv nodded. She had been right: he couldn’t hear.

  He slipped his arms under Leo, and lifted him easily.

  “Where’s Helen?” Irv asked.

  Lisa shrugged and raised her hands in an I don’t know gesture. She reached for Leo, wanting to stop the bleeding on his side, but that side was now pressed against Irv.

  Lisa waved her hand toward the van, east of here, on one of the back streets near the university, which had seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  So stupid now.

  She hadn’t expected pieces of the statue to go flying. Or rather, she had, but not at them. Leo had said they would be driving away by now. He had said they would be inside the van, where they could see it all, but not be near the explosion.

  Lisa had asked specifically, because she didn’t want to be nearby when the bomb went off. It was her worst nightmare—or damn near, anyway. Worst would have been pieces of her flying alongside pieces of the statue, like Diana in New York, identified by a piece of her thumb.

  Her thumb.

  Lisa shook her head, realized she was a little dizzy. She was probably in shock too. Not thinking clearly.

  At least she was thinking clearly enough not to yell for Helen. Helen, whom she’d last seen raising a Magic Marker and grinning, saying, “There. Now it’s done,” and Leo saying, “C’mon, we gotta go,” and Helen laughing, her familiar trill too loud in cold.

  Now, Helen was missing, and Irv was trudging down the path like a soldier in a bad World War II movie, Leo’s legs bouncing against his hips. Then Lisa shook her head again. All night—movie and TV references in her brain. Was that all she knew? Was that why she had done this? Had all those naysayers been right? Were kids—her generation—were they desensitized by all the violence in the movies, on television? Or was it the war? Or inspiration?

  And God, she had to move. She had to find Helen.

  Lisa looked down at the snow in the base of the fountain. A hole in the snow where Leo had been. A hole that was formed by his body, and probably melted by the hot blood leaking out of him.

  They were leaving a trail, one the cops could track if she wasn’t careful. If she didn’t hurry.

  Her hands were getting cold again, and they were clammy. Blood, clotting. Leo’s blood. She hadn’t worn gloves—she’d needed her fingers free, or so she had thought.

  She bent down, grabbed a handful of dirty snow, used it to wipe off the blood, hoping that would be enough.

  Then she walked toward the museum, afraid that she would see Helen downed, just like the statue, damaged and useless, ruined against the stones.

  2015

  First day on the job and Erika still stopped on the terrace near the statue of Rodin’s The Thinker and stared up at its ruined legs. She ran her fingers across the bent edges, like she had done three times before: first, when she considered an internship at the Cleveland Museum of Art; second, the day before the application deadline; and third, the day she walked in for her interview.

  Each time, the statue had caught her, made her hesitate. It reminded her of that vet who had shown up in her life-drawing class freshman year. She’d been nervous enough drawing naked human beings, but this guy—he had wheeled in on an ancient, rickety wheelchair, then stopped at the base of the platform w
here a naked man lay on a sofa.

  The naked guy, maybe thirty, ripped and gorgeous, had nothing draping his privates. But he looked so bored, as if he spent all his time naked—and maybe he had.

  Erika had heard the university paid good money for life models, particularly those who could sit still for more than an hour. No fidgeting, no shifting. She couldn’t imagine doing anything like that, sitting naked in front of a circle of art students as they sketched each and every flaw.

  Not that the guy on the divan had a single flaw—that she could see, anyway, and she had been looking closely at him.

  Until wheelchair man had come in, screaming. He’d hoisted himself onto the platform, peeled off his prostheses, revealing ruined thighs, and then told the students staring at him in shock: This is life, this is what the human form looks like. Not that.

  And he had looked at the life model with great contempt, as if the life model had been the one to hurt him.

  Then the vet grabbed his prostheses, shoved them back on, and levered himself back into the chair. He had wheeled his way out, leaving her shaken.

  Although the professor had given Erika her only A of that year. Because she couldn’t get him out of her mind. So instead of drawing the life model as he was, she drew the life model and the vet, which, apparently, she had been supposed to do. The prof had actually invited the vet in. It had been a show, to remind the artists that life was more than perfection, that art was more than perfection.

  But she liked the perfection, and the control that art gave her. Which was why the statue, this ruined Rodin, disturbed her so much.

  Cast by Rodin himself, or at least, under his tutelage, the sculpture was one of the last he would ever make. It was sold directly to Ralph King, who donated it to the museum, and the museum in its infinite wisdom, had placed the bronze outside without properly protecting it.

  It had a green patina now, one she hadn’t wanted to touch the first time. But she still found her fingers moving upward, fingering the ruins, thinking about how art changed, how nothing was permanent, not even famous bronze sculpture that should have survived as the artist intended for centuries.