by Harmon, Amy
I’d been so afraid at first, reluctant to open the creative floodgates, especially when I felt like I had finally found a little space and a little control. I’d told Tag as much.
“I can finally block them out. Not all the time, but for the first time in my life, the dead aren’t everywhere I look. I can block out their memories and their pictures and their desires. I’ve gotten so much better at it. And I feel in control for the first time in my life,” I had said.
“But?”
“But it’s harder for me to paint. With the channel closed, my mind closed off like that, I can’t paint. See, when I pull down the wall, I turn off all the colors, I wash them away. And I need color to paint. I want to paint. I need to paint, Tag. I don’t know what to do. It’s a double-edged sword.”
“So control it. Use it. When it’s hot I turn on the air conditioner. When it’s cold I turn it off. Can’t it be like that? Let the colors in when you’re painting. Turn it off when you’re not.” Tag shrugged as if it was the easiest thing in the world. It made me laugh. Maybe I could experiment.
“Yeah. Okay. But if I start painting pictures of things I shouldn’t, and I get arrested for murder or robbery or some guy comes and hunts me down because I painted a picture of his dead wife having sex with someone else, I’ll let you bail me out of jail . . . or the psych ward.”
“Well, can’t say we haven’t done it before, right? Violence and art. It’s a winning combination.” Tag laughed, but I could see his wheels turning. Before long, we had jobs everywhere.
I painted a mural in Brussels, a chapel door in a little French hamlet, a portrait in Vienna, several still life paintings in Spain, and just for old time’s sake, a barn in Amsterdam. They weren’t all successes. We got run out of a few places, but most of the time, Tag would find someone who spoke English to interpret for me, I would paint, and people would marvel. And then they would tell their friends.
I ended up working my way through Europe, getting paid to create art by opening myself up to something that I’d always considered a curse. And even more importantly, for me, I got to see all the art I’d always dreamed of seeing. I loved filling my head with pictures, pictures that didn’t have anything to do with me or with death. Until one day I realized that life imitates death, especially in artwork. The art of the past is all about death—the artists die and their art remains, a testament to the living and the dead. The realization was a powerful one. I didn’t feel nearly as alone, or nearly as odd. I even wondered at times, gazing at something truly awe-inspiring, if all artists didn’t commune with spirits.
We spent four years traveling and Tag and I split my earnings. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. His charisma and comfort in every situation made people trust us. If it had been just me, painting pictures about the dead, I have no doubt I would have single-handedly brought back the inquisition and been burned at the stake as a witch, or been sent to a lunatic asylum. Images of Bedlam had danced through my mind more than once when we’d spent three months in England.
Tag’s charisma drew people in, but his attention span needed honing. And Tag wasn’t big on honing in on anything except the next job, the next gig, the next dollar. When we’d come back to the states we’d continued on just like we’d done in Europe, hitting big city after big city, painting for one wealthy benefactor after another. Tag had been a rich kid all his life, a rich Texan—which was a little different from a rich New Yorker—but a rich kid all the same, and he was comfortable everywhere, while I was comfortable nowhere. But to his credit, he made me as comfortable as I was ever going to be, and with his help, I became a rich kid too. We’d spent another year seeing state after state, landmark after landmark, grieving loved one after grieving loved one, until one day we decided it was time to let people come to us.
Tag was tired of playing manager to Moses Wright, and had his own dreams of blood and glory (literally), and I was tired of perpetual homelessness. I’d been a drifter all my life, and I found I was ready for something else. We’d landed in Salt Lake City, back where it had all begun, and for some reason it had felt right to stick around. I’d come back as a favor to Dr. Andelin, who had kept tabs on me and Tag as we’d trotted the globe and managed to stay alive and mostly out of trouble. I had agreed to paint a mural at Montlake, something hopeful and soothing that they could point to and say, “See? A crack baby painted this, and you can too!”
Noah Andelin was so happy to see us, and his genuine pleasure at our success, and our friendship, along with his gentle concern about our well-being, led to dinner and drinks later in the week, and it had been Dr. Andelin who had pointed us toward the warehouse apartments, thinking maybe it was something we would be interested in.
I’d worried about Tag staying put, because Tag needed to move like I needed to paint, and traveling for years had met each of our needs, keeping us both sane. But Tag rented the floor below mine, and instead of an art studio, he turned his open space into a gym and got involved with the local fight scene—mixed martial arts, boxing, wrestling. He did it all, and the activity kept him clean and focused. Before long he was talking about bouts, a fighter’s clothing line called Tag Team, and collecting sponsors to open a new facility for local fighters to train to compete in the UFC. While I painted he pounded, while I raised the waters he raised the roof, and we settled into our respective floors and kept the monsters at bay. It was the closest we’d come to finding ourselves, and we were both learning how to deal.
And now, alone in my own bed, in my own space, with my own things and my own life, I had been awakened by Batman at the end of my bed, and I was irritated by the little trespasser. I turned over and concentrated on the water, on pulling it down on top of me so the boy, my little visitor, would go. I’d obviously picked up the straggler at the hospital today. Shaking hands and signing autographs and trying to paint while a crowd assembled around me was my least favorite kind of job.
I didn’t like painting in hospitals. I saw things I didn’t want to see. And I could always tell the people who weren’t going to make it. Not because they looked any sicker than anyone else. Not because I saw their charts or overheard their nurses gossiping. It was easy to tell because their dead always hovered nearby. Without fail, the dying would have a companion at their shoulder. Just like Gi did before she died.
I’d painted a mural in the children’s ward in a French hospital several years ago. A row of sick kids, cancer patients, had watched from their beds as I created a swirling carnival, complete with dancing bears and cartwheeling clowns and elephants in full regalia. But I’d seen the dead standing at the shoulders of three of the children. Not to drag them down to hell or anything sinister. It didn’t frighten me. I understood why they were there. When the time came, and it would come soon, those children would have someone to meet them, to welcome them home. By the time I was done with the mural, the three children had died. It didn’t scare me, but I didn’t like it. And hospitals were filled with the dead and dying.
The mural I’d done for Dr. Andelin and the Montlake Psychiatric Facility had inspired several more around the valley. The cancer center came knocking about a month ago, applying a little pressure and doing a little hand-wringing, and I ended up agreeing to donate my time and talents to painting yet another hopeful, happy mural. It was good publicity. Publicity that I didn’t want or need. But Tag was looking for sponsors for his club and when he told me one of the hospitals biggest patrons was on his list, I made sure the patron knew my price for the mural was a donation to Tag Team. But the mural had taken its toll on me.
I was tired. Incredibly so. And maybe the exhaustion was leaving me more vulnerable to small ghost boys and memories better left forgotten. Seeing Georgia had messed with my head and brought back the hopelessness of the old Moses. The Moses who couldn’t control himself. The Moses who lost himself in paint. I didn’t ever want to go back to Levan, or Georgia, or the time before. I had never wanted to go back, so over the years I had piled rocks on Georg
ia’s memory, and I’d buried her at the bottom of the sea. But every time I parted the waters and let people’s memories across, my memories of her would rise to the surface, and I would think about her, I would remember her. I would remember how I had wanted her and hated her and wished she would leave me alone and never let me go. And I would miss her.
And when I missed her, I would list the things that I hated. Five things I hated. She always had five greats, I had five hates. I hated her innocence and her easy life. I hated her small-town speech and small-town beliefs. I hated how she thought she loved me. That was the worst thing.
But there were things about her I didn’t hate. So many things I couldn’t hate. Her fire, her stubborn streak, the way her legs had felt wrapped around me, her eyes locked on mine, demanding that I give her everything as I tried to take her without falling in love with her. She had wanted all of it. Every last, private piece.
She was so beautiful still.
I pulled the pillow out from under my head and groaned into it, trying to smother the memory of her stunned face and her wide brown eyes, locked on mine. She was all grown up, with slightly fuller hips and breasts but a leanness to her face that made her cheekbones more prominent, as if youthful flesh had fled her face and settled in better places. She was a woman, straight-backed and steady-eyed. Even when she saw me and realized who I was, she hadn’t shrunk or slunk away.
But seeing me had rocked her. Just like it rocked me. I saw it in the way her mouth tightened and her hands clenched. I saw it in the lift of her chin and the flash in her eyes. And then she’d looked away, dismissing me. When the elevator came to rest and the doors slid open, she stepped out without a second glance, long, jean-clad legs moving in a way that was both achingly familiar and totally new. And the doors shut without me getting off, even though we’d reached the top floor. I’d missed my floor. I hadn’t wanted to get off and walk away. So I let her walk away instead. Little good that had done. I didn’t know why she was there or what she was doing. And she hadn’t smiled and given me a quick hug like old friends did when they ran into each other after many years.
I was glad. Her actual response was more telling. It mirrored my own. If she’d smiled and exchanged empty small talk, I would have had to make an appointment with Dr. Andelin. Several appointments. It might have wrecked me. Georgia had haunted me for more than six years, and from the look on her face when I’d stepped on the elevator, my memory hadn’t left her alone either. There was solace in that. Miserable solace, but solace.
I lifted my pillow and peeked under my arm to see if he was gone. I breathed out gratefully. The little bat had flown. I bunched the pillow under my neck and switched sides.
I cursed and shot up from my bed, flinging the pillow wildly. He hadn’t left. He’d just moved. He’d moved so close I could see the length of his lashes and the curve of his top lip and the way the Velcro on his black cape curled up at the edges.
He smiled, revealing a row of small white teeth and a dimple in his right cheek. I immediately regretted my string of curses and then swore again, the same words at the same volume.
I felt the butterfly wings of a visiting thought tickle the backs of my eyes and I threw up my hands in surrender.
“Fine. Show me your pictures. I’ll paint a few and slap them on my fridge. I don’t know who you are, so I can’t exactly send them to your folks, but go right ahead. Let me see ‘em.”
The fluttering butterfly nudges became fully extended wings that spread through my mind and filled my head with a white horse whose hind quarters were dappled in black and brown, as if an artist had started to fill in the white space only to get distracted and leave the job undone.
The horse whinnied and galloped around a little enclosure and I felt the little boy’s pleasure watching her toss her white mane and stamp her pretty feet.
Calico. I felt her name as he called out to her, the word wrapped around the memory in the only way I could hear it. The horse trotted around the enclosure and then drew close, so close that her long nose grew huge in my mind’s eye. I felt her breath against my palm, and realized not only could I hear the little boy talking to her as he once must have done, but I could feel the stroke of his hand, as if it were my own as he drew it from the patch between her eyes to the snuffling nostrils that bumped at my chest. Not my chest. His chest. He shared the memory so clearly, so perfectly that I sat on the fence with him, and felt and heard the things he’d seen.
“The smartest fastest horse in all of Cactus County.” Again I felt his voice in my head. Not spoken. Just heard. Just there, woven through the memory as if I’d caught not just a snapshot, but a video clip. The sound was muffled and muted, like a home video with the sound turned too far down. But it was there, part of the memory, a little voice narrating the scene.
And then the butterfly memory flitted up and away, and for a moment my mind was empty and blank like a broken TV screen.
Sometimes the dead showed me the strangest things—things that didn’t make sense. Nickels or plants or a bowl of mashed potatoes. I rarely understood what they wanted to convey—only that they wanted to communicate something. Over time I’d come to the conclusion that the mundane wasn’t mundane to them. The things they showed me always represented a memory or a moment that had somehow been meaningful. How, I didn’t always know, but it had become clear that the simplest things were the most important things, and objects themselves weren’t really important at all. The dead didn’t care about land or money or the heirloom that had been passed down through the generations. But they cared desperately about the people they left behind. And it was the people that called them back. Not because the dead weren’t adjusting, but because their loved ones weren’t. The dead weren’t angry or lost. They knew exactly what was up. It was the living that didn’t have a clue. Most of the time, I myself didn’t have a clue, and trying to figure out what the dead wanted from me was taxing, to say the least. And I didn’t like dead kids.
The child stared, his deep brown eyes soulful and serious, waiting for something from me.
“No. I don’t want any part of this. I don’t want you here. Go away.” I spoke firmly, and immediately another image pushed into my mind, clearly the child’s response to my refusal. This time, I clamped my eyes closed and pushed back violently, picturing walls of water tumbling down, covering the exposed earth—the dry land, the channel that allowed people to cross from one side to the other. I had the power to part the waters. And I had the power to call them back again. Just like Gi told me, just like the Biblical Moses. When I opened my eyes the little boy was gone, washed away in the Red Sea. The Red, I-Don’t-Want-to-See.
Moses
BUT APPARENTLY ELI COULD FLOAT. That was his name. I saw it, written in wriggling, poorly-formed letters on a light-colored surface. EL i
Eli wasn’t swallowed up in the waters I called down. He came back. Again. And then again. I even tried to take a trip, as if that had ever worked. Here, there, half-way across the world, there’s no escaping yourself . . . or the dead, Tag reminded me when I complained, throwing my duffle in the back of my truck. The truck was new and smelled of leather and made me want to drive and drive and never stop. I rode with open windows and pounding music to reinforce my walls. But as I headed toward the Salt Flats west of the valley, Eli appeared in the middle of the road, his little black cape blowing in the wind as if he were truly standing there, a forlorn little bat boy in the middle of an empty highway. I ended up turning around and going home, seething at the intrusion, wondering how in the hell he was finding all my cracks.
He showed me a book with a worn cover and dog eared pages, a woman’s voice faint and muffled, speaking the words to the story as Eli turned the pages. Eli sat in her lap, his head pressed up to her chest, and I could feel her wrapped around him, as if I sat there too, in the well created by her crisscrossed legs. He showed me the horse, Calico, and the image of jean-clad legs walking past the table as if he sat beneath it in his own little fort. Ra
ndom things that meant nothing to me and everything to him.
When he woke me at three a.m. with dreamy images of sunsets and horse rides, seated in front of a woman whose hair tickled his cheeks when he turned his face, I tossed back my covers and began to paint. I worked frantically, desperate to be rid of the child that wouldn’t let me be. The picture in my head was one of my own making. Eli hadn’t put it there, but I could see how they must have looked, the fair mother with her dark-headed son, his head tucked against her chest, seated in front of her on the horse with all the colors. The pair on the horse were moving away, moving toward the sunset spilling over the hills, the colors rich yet blurred, reminiscent of Monet, looking at beauty through a pane of wavy glass, discernable yet elusive. It was my way of keeping the viewer at a distance, allowing them to appreciate without intruding, observe without being a part. It reminded me of the way I’d come to see the dead and the images they shared with me. It was the way I coped. It was the way I kept myself intact.
When I was finished, I stepped back and dropped my hands. My shirt and jeans were splattered with paint, my shoulders impossibly tight, and my hands aching. When I turned, Eli looked on, staring at the brushstrokes that, one by one, created life. Still life, but life all the same. It had to be enough. It had always been enough before.
But when Eli looked back at me, his brow was furrowed and his countenance troubled. And he shook his head slowly.
He showed me the soft light of a lamp that looked like a cowboy boot, the way it tossed light on the wall. His eyes were trained on the wall and I could see a woman’s shadow outlined in the light, and I watched as her shadow leaned in and kissed the child goodnight.
