Black Evening

by David Morrell

  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 nearest 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 terrible. Your deal with Stuyvesant isn't worth destroying your health. 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."

  "Van Dorn could have used a few sales."

  "No question. The poor bastard didn't live long enough to come into fashion. But orange is for anguish and blue means insanity? Tell that to Stuyvesant and he'll throw you out of his office."

  Myers took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "I feel so… Maybe you're right."

  "There's no maybe about it. I am right. You need food, a shower, and sleep. A painting's a combination of color and shape that people either like or they don't. The artist follows his instincts, uses whatever techniques he can master, and does his best. But if there's a secret in Van Dorn's work, it isn't a color code."

  Myers finished his second beer and blinked in distress. "You know what I found out yesterday?"

  I shook my head.

  "The critics who devoted themselves to analyzing Van Dorn…"

  "What about them?"

  "They went insane, the same as he did."

  "What? No way. I've studied Van Dorn's critics. They're as conventional and boring as Stuyvesant."

  "You mean, the mainstream scholars. The safe ones. I'm talking about the truly brilliant ones. The ones who haven't been recognized for their genius, just as Van Dorn wasn't recognized."

  "What happened to them?"

  "They suffered. The same as Van Dorn."

  "They were put in an asylum?"

  "Worse than that."

  "Myers, don't make me ask."

  "The parallels are amazing. They each tried to paint. In Van Dorn's style. And just like Van Dorn, they stabbed out their eyes."

  ***

  I guess it's obvious by now — Myers was what you might call "high-strung." No negative judgment intended. In fact, his excitability was one of the reasons I liked him. That and his imagination. Hanging around with him was never dull. He loved ideas. Learning was his passion. And he passed his excitement on to me.

  The truth is, I needed all the inspiration I could get. I wasn't a bad artist. Not at all. On the other hand, I wasn't a great one, either. As I neared the end of grad school, I had painfully come to realize that my work would never be more than "interesting." I didn't want to admit it, but I'd probably end up as a commercial artist in an advertising agency.

  That night, however, Myers's imagination wasn't inspiring. It was scary. He was always going through phases of enthusiasm. El Greco, Picasso, Pollock. Each had preoccupied him to the point of obsession, only to be abandoned for another favorite and another. When he'd fixated on Van Dorn, I'd assumed it was merely one more infatuation.

  But the chaos of Van Dorn prints in his room made clear he'd reached a greater excess of compulsion. I was skeptical about his insistence that there was a secret in Van Dorn's work. After all, great art can't be explained. You can analyze its technique, you can diagram its symmetry, but ultimately there's a mystery words can't communicate. Genius can't be summarized. As far as I could tell, Myers had been using the word secret as a synonym for indescribable brilliance.

  When I realized he literally meant that Van Dorn had a secret, I was appalled. The distress in his eyes was equally appalling. His references to insanity, not only in Van Dorn but in his critics, made me worry that Myers himself was having a breakdown. Stabbed out their eyes, for Christ's sake?

  I stayed up with Myers till five a.m., trying to calm him, to convince him he needed a few days' rest. We finished the six-pack I'd brought, the six-pack in my refrigerator, and another six-pack I bought from an art student down the hall. At dawn, just before Myers dozed off and I staggered back to my room, he murmured that I was right. He needed a break, he said. Tomorrow he'd call his folks. He'd ask if they'd pay his plane fare back to Denver.

  Hung over, I didn't wake up until late afternoon. Disgusted that I'd missed my classes, I showered and managed to ignore the taste of last night's pizza. I wasn't surprised when I phoned Myers and got no answer. He probably felt as shitty as I did. But after sunset, when I called again, then knocked on his door, I started to worry. His door was locked, so I went downstairs to get the landlady's key. That's when I saw the note in my mail slot.

  Meant what I said. Need a break. Went home. Will be in touch. Stay cool. Paint well. I love you, pal.

  Your friend forever,

  Myers

  My throat ached. He never came back. I saw him only twice after that. Once in New York, and once in…

  ***

  Let's talk a
bout New York. I finished my graduate project, a series of landscapes that celebrated Iowa's big-sky rolling, dark-earthed, wooded hills. A local patron paid fifty dollars for one of them. I gave three to the university's hospital. The rest are who knows where.

  Too much has happened.

  As I predicted, the world wasn't waiting for my good-but-not-great efforts. I ended where I belonged, as a commercial artist for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. My beer cans are the best in the business.

  I met a smart, attractive woman who worked in the marketing department of a cosmetics firm. One of my agency's clients. Professional conferences led to personal dinners and intimate evenings that lasted all night. I proposed. She agreed.

  We'd live in Connecticut, she said. Of course.

  When the time was right, we might have children, she said.

  Of course.

  ***

  Myers phoned me at the office. I don't know how he knew where I was. I remember his breathless voice.

  "I found it," he said.

  "Myers?" I grinned. "Is it really — How are you? Where have — "

  "I'm telling you. I found it!"

  "I don't know what you're — "

  "Remember? Van Dorn's secret!"

  In a rush, I did remember — the excitement Myers could generate, the wonderful, expectant conversations of my youth — the days and especially the nights when ideas and the future beckoned. "Van Dorn? Are you still — "

  "Yes! I was right! There was a secret!"

  "You crazy bastard, I don't care about Van Dorn. But I care about you! Why did you — I never forgave you for disappearing."

  "I had to. Couldn't let you hold me back. Couldn't let you — "

  "For your own good!"

  "So you thought. But I was right!"

  "Where are you?"

  "Exactly where you'd expect me to be."

  "For the sake of old friendship, Myers, don't piss me off. Where are you?"

  "The Metropolitan Museum of Art."

  "Will you stay there, Myers? While I catch a cab? I can't wait to see you."

  "I can't wait for you to see what I see!"

  ***

  I postponed a deadline, canceled two appointments, and told my fiancee I couldn't meet her for dinner. She sounded miffed. But Myers was all that mattered.

  He stood beyond the pillars at the entrance. His face was haggard, but his eyes were like stars. I hugged him. "Myers, it's so good to — "

  "I want you to see something. Hurry."

  He tugged at my coat, rushing.

  "But where have you been?"

  "I'll tell you later."

  We entered the Postimpressionist gallery. Bewildered, I followed Myers and let him anxiously sit me on a bench before Van Dorn's Fir Trees at Sunrise.

  I'd never seen the original. Prints couldn't compare. After a year of drawing ads for feminine beauty aids, I was devastated. Van Dorn's power brought me close to…

  Tears.

  For my visionless skills. For the youth I'd abandoned a year before.

  "Look!" Myers said. He raised his arm and gestured toward the painting.

  I frowned. I looked.

  It took time — an hour, two hours — and the coaxing vision of Myers. I concentrated. And then, at last, I saw.

  Profound admiration changed to…

  My heart raced. As Myers traced his hand across the painting one final time, as a guard who had been watching us with increasing wariness stalked forward to stop him from touching the canvas, I felt as if a cloud had dispersed and a lens had focused.

  "Jesus," I said.

  "You see? The bushes, the trees, the branches?"

  "Yes! Oh, God, yes! Why didn't I — "

  "Notice before? Because it doesn't show up in the prints," Myers said. "Only in the originals. And the effect's so deep, you have to study them — "

  "Forever."

  "It seems that long. But I knew. I was right."

  "A secret."

  When I was a boy, my father — how I loved him — took me mushroom hunting. We drove from town, climbed a barbed-wire fence, walked through a forest, and reached a slope of dead elms. My father told me to search the top of the slope while he checked the bottom.

  An hour later, he came back with two large paper sacks filled with mushrooms. I hadn't found even one.

  "I guess your spot was lucky," I said.

  "But they're all around you," my father said.

  "All around me? Where?"

  "You didn't look hard enough."

  "I crossed this slope five times."

  "You searched, but you didn't really see," my father said. He picked up a long stick and pointed it toward the ground. "Focus your eyes toward the end of the stick."

  I did.

  And I've never forgotten the hot excitement that surged through my stomach. The mushrooms appeared as if by magic. They'd been there all along, of course, so perfectly adapted to their surroundings, their color so much like dead leaves, their shape so much like bits of wood and chunks of rock that they'd been invisible to ignorant eyes. But once my vision adjusted, once my mind reevaluated the visual impressions it received, I saw mushrooms everywhere, seemingly thousands of them. I'd been standing on them, walking over them, staring at them, and hadn't realized.

  I felt an infinitely greater shock when I saw the tiny faces Myers made me recognize in Van Dorn's Fir Trees at Sunrise. Most were smaller than a quarter of an inch, hints and suggestions, dots and curves, blended perfectly with the landscape. They weren't exactly human, although they did have mouths, noses, and eyes. Each mouth was a black, gaping maw, each nose a jagged gash, the eyes dark sinkholes of despair. The twisted faces seemed to be screaming in total agony. I could almost hear their anguished shrieks, their tortured wails. I thought of damnation. Of Hell.

  As soon as I noticed the faces, they emerged from the swirling texture of the painting in such abundance that the landscape became an illusion, the grotesque faces reality. The fir trees turned into an obscene cluster of writhing arms and pain-racked torsos.

  I stepped back in shock an instant before the guard would have pulled me away.

  "Don't touch the — " the guard said.

  Myers had already rushed to point at another Van Dorn, the original Cypresses in a Hollow. I followed, and now that my eyes knew what to look for, I saw small, tortured faces in every branch and rock. The canvas swarmed with them.

  "Jesus."

  "And this!"

  Myers hurried to Sunflowers at Harvest Time, and again, as if a lens had changed focus, I no longer saw flowers but anguished faces and twisted limbs. I lurched back, felt a bench against my legs, and sat.

  "You were right," I said.

  The guard stood nearby, scowling.

  "Van Dorn did have a secret," I said. I shook my head in astonishment.

  "It explains everything," Myers said. "These agonized faces give his work depth. They're hidden, but we sense them. We feel the anguish beneath the beauty."

  "But why would he — "

  "I don't think he had a choice. His genius drove him insane. It's my guess that this is how he literally saw the world. These faces are the demons he wrestled with. The festering products of his insanity. And they're not just an illustrator's gimmick. Only a genius could have painted them for all the world to see and yet have so perfectly infused them into the landscape that no one would see. Because he took them for granted in a terrible way."

  "No one? You saw, Myers."

  He smiled. "Maybe that means I'm crazy."

  "I doubt it, friend." I returned his smile. "It does mean you're persistent. This'll make your reputation."

  "But I'm not through yet," Myers said.

  I frowned.

  "So far all I've got is a fascinating case of optical illusion. Tortured souls writhing beneath, perhaps producing, incomparable beauty. I call them 'secondary images.' In your ad work, I guess they'd be called 'subliminal.' But this isn't commercialism. This is a genuine a
rtist who had the brilliance to use his madness as an ingredient in his vision. I need to go deeper."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "The paintings here don't provide enough examples. I've seen his work in Paris and Rome, in Zurich and London. I've borrowed from my parents to the limits of their patience and my conscience. But I've seen, and I know what I have to do. The anguished faces began in 1889, when Van Dorn left Paris in disgrace. His early paintings were abysmal. He settled in La Verge in the south of France. Six months later, his genius suddenly exploded. In a frenzy, he painted. He returned to Paris. He showed his work, but no one appreciated it. He kept painting, kept showing. Still no one appreciated it. He returned to La Verge, reached the peak of his genius, and went totally insane. He had to be committed to an asylum, but not before he stabbed out his eyes. That's my dissertation. I intend to parallel his course. To match his paintings with his biography, to show how the faces increased and became more severe as his madness worsened. I want to dramatize the turmoil in his soul as he imposed his twisted vision on each landscape."

  ***

  It was typical of Myers to take an excessive attitude and make it even more excessive. Don't misunderstand. His discovery was important. But he didn't know when to stop. I'm not an art historian, but I've read enough to know that what's called "psychological criticism," the attempt to analyze great art as a manifestation of neuroses, is considered off-the-wall. If Myers handed Stuyvesant a psychological dissertation, the pompous bastard would have a fit.

  That was one misgiving I had about what Myers planned to do with his discovery. Another troubled me more. I intend to parallel Van Dorn's course, he'd said. After we left the museum and walked through Central Park, I realized how literally Myers meant it.

  "I'm going to southern France," he said.

  I stared in surprise. "You don't mean — "

  "La Verge? That's right. I want to write my dissertation there."

  "But — "

  "What place could be more appropriate? It's the village where Van Dorn suffered his nervous breakdown and eventually went insane. If it's possible, I'll even rent the same room he did."