Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘Kid, if you were any uglier, I’d swear you were my daughter.’

  Even though she went for a run this morning, before finding room in her cabin baggage for her trainers, she isn’t in the least bit tired. But she puts on the eye covers and waits until Wally is snuffling and slack-mouthed before sneaking off to turn the lavatory into a purgetory. Then, she brushes her teeth, arranges her belongings and takes out her laptop.

  ‘It’s a rare condition.’ Gael spoke Wally softly to wakefulness, his jowl bathed in milky afternoon light that poured around him and kept him half-drowned in stupor, susceptible as a child in a blankie. A mug of fresh mint tea steamed on Gael’s sill. Vapour snaked through the space between them. The snack baskets had been replenished. At long intervals, Wally pushed single Reese’s into his mouth and let them melt like lozenges. Gael had opened the pack and offered them to him. She didn’t like them, no, she’d said. The fact was she loved them to the point of mewling, but they were food for the listener and the listener only. Peanut butter glues the tongue to the hard palate. Instead, she’d taken a pistachio macaron and twirled it between her fingers the way Harper did poker chips.

  The particular condition is extremely rare, she explained. The first time it happened was the Sunday following his Holy Communion. He had just received the Eucharist in earnest – not for show, nor as a means to an end – and was kneeling in the pews beside their father. She hadn’t been there to see it. She’d refused to sit up front with them. She’d snuck outside and climbed the wire mesh netting of the basketball court as an alternate route to the heavens. So she didn’t see it happen, but later she could piece it together: Guthrie’s body had shivered, stiffened and convulsed, eyes roaming the skull-cathedral. Jarleth would have shushed the nearby parishioners – warned them not to overreact, the boy has just fainted – and carried him out for fresh air. Though it might have been a blessing to choke on the body of Christ, it was with utter conviction that Jarleth Heimliched the sacrament out of his son, fracturing two ribs in the process. He was angry when nothing came flying from Guthrie’s windpipe. He was furious at the flock that had scuttled out for a gawk, the biddies who cried cursed, who cried ambulance, who, fumbling through their purses, cried: Is it 911 or 999 or 666 or what. He was livid when nothing came of the allergy checks that followed, the MRIs, X-rays, ultra-sounds, EEGs, blood tests. Through the months of not knowing, the sharp but delicate bones of Guthrie’s face took more knocks than a list of bad jokes.

  Her only brother. She’d imagined lesions on the soft tissues of his personality. But he himself imagined something else, he confessed to her once, holding his bruised ribs. He imagined a mark somewhere deep within him the size of God’s thumbprint, both small and larger than anything we know of. He would crawl into her bed, having understood early that the way to fall asleep is to stop listening and he couldn’t stop listening to God. He could only stop listening to a sinner, like his sister. He would clutch her spare pillow and gaze at the pages of her grown-up magazines taped to the walls until his eyes glossed over and he was carry-outable. Then began the process of elimination. All we can do, said the doctor, is test each reasonable hypothesis. Later, much later, a neurologist proffered a verdict. A word that makes us think of a spectrum: on one side, fantasy, on the other, falsity. Untruth. Unreality. And Guthrie was no liar, though Jarleth promised him he could lie and still be God’s beloved child. ‘Where would the church be if St Peter didn’t lie?’ he said, all negotiation. The way of His world is complex, he argued. Guthrie cried and cried and clapped his ears. The way you did, Wally. Only, when he did it, what burst wasn’t an eardrum.

  Somatic delusional disorder. A recurring non-bizarre delusion. A syndrome. When there’s no synonym, how do you explain it to the sufferer? Wally worked the peanut butter with his tongue. Why not tell the kid? he was thinking. This was clear. Could you not just say: You’re completely sane, brother. You’re a hundred per cent sane except for one itsy-bitsy madness. You think you’re sick and you’re not. Here it is in writing.

  This is where the delusion comes in. Any attempt to disprove the epilepsy would wind up reinforcing the delusion – the brain’s hijacking – as Guthrie’s evidence was his own experience which no one else would want and no one could have excepting fellow sufferers. One in twenty-six people develop epilepsy at some point in their lives and the thousands of descriptions of seizures he’d read described his own. Although his aura was unusual, he could admit. Very few patients experience auras like his.

  ‘Auras?’

  Wally had been listening.

  Gael ordered a bottle of red from Pamela when she came to refill their water glasses. Pigheaded. Old World. With a bouquet of cobwebs. Pamela strained to smile at Gael’s command. These passengers were in another world – the kind of place you only get to pass through once, like the shadow of a total solar eclipse. The flight map glowed on Wally’s screen. Two hours forty to destination and dinner had yet to be served. This place couldn’t be returned to. Chateau Destieux 2008, Saint-Emilion Grand Cru Classé. No need for tastings, no. Gael ordered the Devon crab, apple dill and avocado with smoked salmon and oscietra caviar. The grilled Aberdeen Angus beef, oxtail croustillant, braised root vegetables, red wine, horseradish and port sauce. The chocolate hazelnut cake and scotch sorbet. Absorbed by her every word, Wally couldn’t pronounce his own. He held a peace sign up to Pamela: times two. But give us forty minutes to find our appetites, Gael said, and looked at Wally, who halted the peanut butter cup’s journey to his mouth and put it back onto its paper, gently as a string of pearls onto a neck.

  An aura is the first symptom. It’s a kind of warning. A blessing, according to Guthrie. Not all people with epilepsy have them and they differ depending on where in the brain the neural malfunction takes place – where the electrical storm strikes its lightning. You might smell or taste something off, lose sensation on one side of your tongue, have déjà vu, lose sensation on one side of your tongue, have déjà vu, see zigzag patterns or hallucinations, hear something shrill or grating, feel fingers raking your insides, queasy-making, lose control of your bowels. Overpowering sensations. Seldom pleasurable. The aura can be the seizure itself, if it’s a partial. With Guthrie, it only marks the first phase of a full grand mal: the foreplay to violent convulsions, loss of awareness, clinching blackout. He breaks into a prickly sweat and becomes unresponsive to sound. Catch him quick, before his eyes roll. The light follows.

  This is the rarest type of aura. Tears stream. The light, he reports, is euphoric. A white dome growing into the blackness that constitutes the whole world for as many milliseconds as there are between Achilles and the tortoise. No people, no landscapes, just the colour – no colour and all colours at once – in a conception of space based on a different understanding of how the body exists in its environment. Geodesic, he once said, wherever he got that word from. Not from his dropout education. He didn’t have the words to begin with to describe it. He still doesn’t, but he seeks them out. He called the colour zinc once. Now, he knows it’s a colour there’s no paint for. It’s not comparable to anything, because it’s beyond the known spectrum and he can only see it when he fits. After, it’s a sense memory and the shade is all wrong. He aches for its warmth and sobering clarity, deathwish. He turns bluish and thrashes after it – the light. Thumps his head. The blackouts last only a moment, but when he comes to, he doesn’t speak for minutes, hours sometimes. He trembles until he finds a place to fall asleep. Later, there’s a new crack somewhere, outside or in. And we weren’t brought up in Japan, where cracks are patched with gold epoxy. In Ireland, cracks are borne brazenly or privately and are damnwell unadorned.

  ‘Your brother sees a colour we don’t see?’ Wally asks, stumped.

  Gael looks into his eyes. ‘And if you’re an artist,’ she says, ‘that’s either the purest form of torture or– ’

  ‘He’s an artist?’

  Gael lifts her chin, like an umpire.

  ‘Your brother?’
r />   ‘Didn’t I say?’

  Wally clocks the luggage encumbering the cabin. He sits up and cradles his glass in both palms. The wine and the baseball cap and the airline pyjamas add up to one thing: patron. ‘Are you, uhm …’ His mouth clacks with residue peanut butter. ‘… his manager?’

  Gael shakes her head in a don’t-be-daft sort of way. ‘I don’t like to think of myself as his agent. I’m meeting with gallerists on his behalf. He’s my brother. He won’t fly. There’s a lot of things he can’t do for himself.’

  ‘That figures.’

  ‘His condition’s …’ Gael looks a long way ahead and takes a mouthful of wine. She does her best to summon a surge of emotion; restrained below hardened layers of herself like a hundred-mile-deep low-magnitude earthquake. Some people sleep straight through that sort of thing, Wally. Fools miss it completely, unprepared for the tsunami that can follow. The daylight outside has eased and pinkened. Two hours twenty to destination. Green encroaches on their flight maps. The scent of dinner preparations carries down the aisle but she waits and waits, holding off while Wally’s lips do this dance of pursing, relaxing, pursing in the corner of her eye. He has to be the one to ask for it. Just as he’d had to don the pyjamas.

  At long last, it comes in an effort to sound offhand. ‘What’s he do, landscapes? Portraits?’

  ‘No.’

  Wally’s lips try out all sorts of responses, none of which he’s satisfied with. ‘What else is there? Still life? Nudes? Whatdotheycallit, life drawing?’

  Gael inhales deeply and doesn’t let the breath out, as if she’s been putting up with this man because of his wealth and gender and elderliness and rightly so, young lady. She stands up and begins to manoeuver the luggage. ‘It’s easier just to show you. But I don’t know how they’ve packaged this inside. Let me see.’ Wally makes no objection. He sits on the edge of his seat and pushes up the rim of his cap. This is his privilege. A private show. The case is a steel-reinforced leather portfolio like a giant briefcase. When she carries it by its shoulder strap, the case reaches her ankles. It weighs fifty pounds, filled. And the three hundred euro it set her back. Spending so much on the case made her feel better for having taken all five paintings, rather than just the one he had gifted her. With any luck, he won’t notice their absence. And better to have them out in the world than growing mould in that dank cupboard.

  Inside are sheets of foam padding. With her back to him, she pulls some out for effect. ‘Close your eyes, Wally.’ She checks his obedience. Then she carries the best three along the aisle and tries to arrange them to fit. They’re not canvases. Guthrie had retrieved a bunch of school desks from a skip – too viciously vandalized to be sanded down or painted over. He’d dismantled the desks for their lids and pried off decades of Wrigley’s with a butter knife. Each painting takes up two desk lids nailed roughly together, with thin strips of wood running along the back so they don’t bend. The rust from the nails has bled into the edges of the white paint. The way they’re laid out, the hinged vertical rectangles makes them look like shutters. Only, they do the opposite of shutting light out. They’re darkness’s negatives. More dramatic vertically, she decides. Height trumps breadth. Besides, there’s no space for them all lengthwise. She transforms them into vertical diptychs, just like that.

  Alexi is assembling the dinner trolley at the end of the aisle and Gael holds up her hand up to him: five minutes. He bows. Then, she points at the lights and makes a twisting motion. It’s a touch too dark. Alexi turns on overhead lighting selectively through the cabin, biting his lip as he comes back and forth to check the effect on the works of art. Finally, he points to the paintings and then from Gael’s head to her toes and he mouths: Wow. Mourns is too strong a word, but Gael pities the fact that this exchange would never have happened with Pamela. No matter how much you pay them, women never want the best for one another.

  Wally’s breathing loudly, as if having his eyes closed is effortful. ‘Can I look yet?’

  ‘Just a sec.’ She shifts them around, so the brightest one is in the centre and the one with the dark stripe is to the left. The wheezing loudens as everything else falls silent.

  ‘If you’re robbing me, no attorney on God’s greenbacks can help you.’

  Is that a hint of discomfort she hears? She laughs lightly. She doesn’t tell him to open his eyes. They might still be shut for another minute for how quiet he is, how heavy is the labour of his lungs. He seems to be waiting for the paintings to come into focus. Blinking doesn’t make them less abstract. But then it happens. They do come into focus. Wally’s black eyes mirror the panels of categorical white. Not clouds, but stratosphere?

  ‘Oh boy,’ he says solemnly, almost resigned. He sticks his head out and tucks it back, like a chicken walking, only he’s rooted to the spot.

  They are more beautiful than Gael remembers. Their limit of colour; the leftmost bold stripe of black-brown, where the blackout creeps in; the thin-as-floss shapes hinted at beneath the huge whitewash layers in the middle; on the rightmost, the injury of scraped-off moments, like the ones he loses, every time, revealing brilliant yellow prints beneath – the marks that look in some places like angry scratches and in others like structured appeals; the distressing texture all over, given by the graffiti base layer, silts and filaments. The whiff of white spirits.

  ‘Are these …’ Wally starts to say. ‘I mean, it’s the aura. Right? I know that.’ He breathes heavily. ‘Is there a title?’

  ‘Just numbers. A catalogue of fits,’ Gael says. ‘These are 8, 13 and 21.’ She watches this sink in, then adds: ‘Acrylic on desk.’

  Wally gets up and inspects the pieces individually, asking if they’re a set or separate. Separate, Gael replies. She’s bringing over a sample of his work before making a shipment. It’s important to see the materials up close. He does classic representational work and all that, but everyone wants the auras, she says with an air of nuisance. And since he’s constantly trying new ‘medication’ and he strictly does one painting per fit, sooner or later a placebo pill – Dilantin, Epilim, Trileptal, Zonegran (she does air quotes) – will bring an end to these ecstatic paintings. He’ll move on to something else, beyond the expression of catharsis, and maybe these will become collectors’ items, like Van Gogh’s briefly lived white period. Gael gives her most frivolous laugh at what she’s suggested, which could only be a joke.

  Still standing, Wally has his back pressed against the window, trying to see the artworks from a distance. His hat is pushed high. ‘There’s a guy called Twimbly paints something similar,’ he says. ‘Twombly. He’s huge. I seen him in the Frick. Very modern. He’s good.’ Wally glances away from the paintings for a split second only. ‘But his stuff’s not as … Not like this. With the story and all.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Gael says simply.

  A pause. There’s something a little frantic in his tone when he says, ‘And he can draw, too?’

  ‘Draw? Since he could hold a pencil. I have pictures on my phone, I think …’ She lets her voice trail off, staring at the paintings dreamily. Who needs proof he can draw? is the unspoken challenge. Surely you’re not a man who second-guesses his own instinct. The blood of the beef reaches them, despite the air conditioning. Their appetites are back, larger than before. Gael takes a deep breath as if gathering the courage and energy to put them away again, which must be done. Wally coughs nervously, then goes to his closet to rummage through his waxed-canvas duffel bag. For an inhaler? He turns to her, tosses open his chequebook.

  ‘Okay, kid. What’s the hammer price?’

  Gael does her best to blush, about to lift number 8 back to its home. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s dollars to doughnuts I’m having one.’

  Struggling to be polite, Gael says, ‘I’m glad you’re a fan, Wally. Really. But I can’t jeopardize my meetings–’

  ‘Take em wherever you gotta take em,’ he says. ‘Just put a red sticker on that one. Mail it to me after.’

  Gael smiles a
gain, sliding number 8 carefully back into the portfolio, between sheets of foam.

  ‘I’m not kidding,’ Wally says, ever so slightly aggro.

  Gael considers him. He reminds her of a younger version of herself. ‘I appreciate that,’ she says.

  Wally starts scribbling so forcefully his hat falls to the table and knocks over his wine glass. Pamela comes rushing down the aisle with tissues she must have been blotting herself with. ‘Not now, Laura,’ he tells her without looking up and she halts, stunned. Gael ignores the apology Pamela is hovering around for. The woman’s got tissues to hand, after all, and there’s only one sort of white flag in America. Wally tears off the cheque and holds it out to Gael, who lets her hand hesitate as one does before swatting a giant hornet. Four zeros led by a five, she sees, folding the cheque.

  ‘I appreciate it,’ Wally says.

  Gael gives him a chastising look. ‘I’ll need your address.’

  US Customs is the great democratizer. Isn’t that how the saying goes? It counts for nothing that she’d come through the priority lane and that a chauffeur service awaited her in the arrivals hall. The customs official didn’t like the look of her luggage, which was only one up from not liking the look of her surname, one up from not liking the look of her headwear. Of course, Gael hadn’t declared her newly acquired goods over the value of ten thousand dollars burning against her left breast where she’d slipped it into her bra for safekeeping. The paintings, she argues, were only worth the hundred bucks of paint that went into them. The wood had been free. She’s not a professional artist or anything. She’s taking them over to a friend, Harper Schiada, who she used to live with in London. They’re a gift for her – a good enough friend that she’d like anything made by Gael.