Boy versus Self: (A Psychological Thriller)

by Harmon Cooper

  ‘What are you doing?’ he whispers into the phone.

  ‘I’m doing to your stupid art the same thing you did to my apartment!’

  Boy takes a quick inventory: he only has one half-started project at Maeve’s. His old paints are there and his human hair brush, but he could make another. He breathes easy, realizing the forthcoming cathartic cleansing won’t be so cathartic after all.

  ‘And your clothes are already in the trash along with your action figures,’ Maeve hisses. ‘I’ve changed the locks, and if you come back, I swear to God I’ll get a restraining order!’ She’s yelling into the phone now, her voice nearing hoarse. ‘I documented everything, asshole!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Maeve,’ he says, chewing on a fingernail. The subway car jolts to a stop. Honesty presses itself against the front of his teeth. ‘It was Glass Wings. I know you don’t believe me, but the things I told you, the things I told you were—’

  Empty dial tone on the other line. Boy turns off his phone and stuffs it into his pocket. Enough calls for one day.

  ₪₪₪

  Sleep schedule.

  Boy can’t seem to fix it. Restlessness through the day and sleepless through the night. He tries alcohol. It only makes him woozy. He tries this breathing technique Friend recommended. It only makes him groggier. The studio space he has been given and the expectations are overwhelming. Pressure weighs him down like a wet chainmail. The pieces he sees in his head will be too difficult to produce in six weeks.

  He’ll fall asleep after thinking for what feels like hours about the people in his life. Strange how they come and go, how they are here one minute and absent the next. Salome. Maeve. Others. They reappear too, like Girl, who he’s supposed to call again tomorrow. Life is a revolving door made of lead that sometimes gets stuck in the upswing.

  Boy’s sitting in the dining room area in an egg-shaped chairs. He has yet to make the studio his. He thought about buying an action figure or two. It would take away from its minimal feel, but it would at least be his personal touch.

  The television in the dining room is on mute. Mayor Bloomberg’s mouth moves up and down like he’s chewing on something. The richest man in New York runs the city and speaks of economic prosperity while nearly two million people are on food stamps. Irony is politics; hyperbolized news media the IV of the masses. The rent is too damn high and luckily Boy isn’t footing the bill. Let them eat pizza.

  Art. Boy needs a theme for his upcoming show. He needs caffeine to keep the imminent crash away. He needs orange juice for breakfast. His eyes are heavy but his heart is thumping fast. His body resembles the recycling symbol missing one of its arrows. Something isn’t right, and it hasn’t been for a long time.

  ₪₪₪

  New York night halfway humid. Street lamps tangerine the macadam of the grand city. The couple next door is sitting on a pair of folding chairs sharing a joint. Red Beard and his girlfriend.

  ‘Hey,’ Boy says, hands in pockets, trying not to be too friendly.

  ‘Join us?’ Red Beard asks. His girlfriend is Dominican or Puerto Rican.

  ‘Sure,’ Boy says, sitting on the stoop. Red Beard hands him the joint. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I used the end of a chopstick to pack it in: best way to make a fatty. Some BC Kush right there.’

  ‘Nice,’ Boy says. The blue smoke fills his lungs and his thoughts instantly compress into a tethered line.

  ‘So what happened next?’ Dominican or Puerto Rican Lady asks Red Beard. She’s bent forward slightly, her shirt gaping open and the tops of her breasts are shining in the hushed lights of a nearby streetlamp. Don’t look.

  Boy’s mind is at the bodega on Flatbush looking for caffeine. Dusty shelves. Smell of tortillas. Drift over there, don’t be social. He tunes back into what Red Beard is saying.

  ‘…That’s what I told him. I said the 7 train stops in Queens. So he’s stuck, no money, plus he’s drunk…’

  Boy tunes out again as his limbs lighten.

  ‘…Damn,’ Dominican or Puerto Rican Lady says.

  ‘Damn,’ Boy repeats. His arms push up against the gritty pavement. His fingers try and stand him up, but his knees buckle.

  ‘So what does Trevor do?’ she asks.

  ‘You won’t believe me. He turns back to the subway and…’

  Leave. Back to brainstorming. Boy’s neurons fire blanks. His body remains in its seated position.

  ‘…He’ll show you the scar if you ask. It’s pretty gnarly. Looks like a giant cigar burn. At least he didn’t get rabies…’

  This is your brain on drugs, any questions? Yes, wait, no, wait, never mind. Boy watches himself stand and take two steps away from the couple. ‘Thanks for the puff,’ he says.

  ‘What you got going on?’ Red Beard asks.

  ‘Just, well…long story. I just got a lot on my plate.’

  ‘My ma always said that a lot on your plate is a reason to eat more,’ Dominican or Puerto Rican Lady says. ‘Life is a buffet – she died from diabetes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Strange confession. Boy looks away, not wanting to see in her shadowy face if she’s serious or not. Go go go.

  He stumbles down 37th street, which loops back onto Flatbush, hanging a left and continuing past Avenue K. The convenient store is dusty and grimy in a way that appears clean on the surface. Typical bodega. Old tamales hide under a plastic top. Shriveled cat turds. A pot of coffee filled with what looks to be crude oil sits on a rusty burner. Moths bat around an orange halogen like kamikaze pilots. The man at the register is 200 pounds overweight.

  Boy walks past the magazine isle. The marijuana is disorienting and he forgets why he came to the bodega in the first place. He spins back towards the counter and magazine faces follow after him. Glossy paparazzi. Shiny onlookers. Flashy headlines. Muscles and celebrities. Media pomp and circumstance.

  Women in bikinis bend over in front of shiny cars on a few of the magazine covers. Who was the first woman to strike a sexual pose in front of an automobile for a photo? Behold what you have created and what we have become. Music and hobby magazines fight for relevancy in an internet world. Sad seeing something go obsolete.

  Obama forcing that stern look he’s perfected that seems somewhat unconvincing. Putin looking constipated or the victim of multiple hemorrhoids. John Boehner head like a tomato or an un-popped zit. The guy who shot Treyvon Martin – misguided vigilante clearly a douche. Shots fired in America; the sun rises and the sun sets, getting darker every time. Sad to watch things crumble.

  Then Boy sees it:

  A health magazine with the famous sketching by Leonardo Da Vinci. The man stretches his arms and feet wide. The radius of a human. A man with long hair imprisoned in a square and a perfect circle. Boy has traced it before, back when he was still studying figures.

  Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. The idea comes.

  Trembling for fear he may lose it, Boy looks back to the fat man at the register. He grabs the magazine, plucks a single tamale on his way to the register, buys some orange juice and caffeine. Boy rounds the corner to his studio, passes Red Beard and his girlfriend who are still smoking.

  ‘Damn, what’s gotten into you?’ Red Beard calls over to him.

  ‘Idea, idea, idea,’ Boy says, fumbling with his key.

  ₪₪₪

  First sketches. Boy scratches notes and ideas into a journal until he falls asleep. The morning light from the sunroof wakes him. He checks the time. Two hours of sleep. Not bad. Not good. His hallucinations may intensify soon. He feels it, but he must get his ideas down.

  Six pieces, seven feet by seven feet, all based on Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Boy wants to examine the world through form, through supposed beauty and measurement. His subjects will be a fat man, a war veteran, a business man, an African girl, a woman with too much cosmetic surgery, a pregnant teenager.

  Each piece will be nude, exactly like Da Vinci’s piece. They will show the radius of human movement inside their varied skin shells. The
soggy lumps of the fat man, the prosthetic legs of the war veteran, the famished frame of the African girl, the watermelon belly and developing breasts of the pregnant teenager, the stress of the businessman evident in his puffy cheeks, the surgery lines of the woman who has had too much cosmetic work done.

  The pieces will first be sketched and shadowed in on their prospective canvases. A monochromatic underpainting. Acrylic paints will be spray-painted over masking film stencils. Final details will be done by brush. He’s never spray-painted acrylics, and he’ll need to do a couple of test runs before he colors in his pencil drawings.

  Boy makes a list of things he needs: a maulstick to rest his arm on as he paints, a spray gun, an airbrush gun, an electric air compressor, a respirator, a pair of gloves, an apron, four rolls of oil primed Belgium linen canvases, measuring materials. With each canvas roll 84 inches by 5.5 yards, he’ll need to cut the large canvases in half. He’ll trim this down, leaving excess length on all sides so it can be pinned properly to the painting wall.

  He’s already checked the supply closet for acrylics. He’ll need a couple of different colors and pencils. There were plenty of 4Bs, but not a single graphite stick. Boy will need this for the shadows and to add depth to the paintings. He’ll also need pictures to use as examples. This will be easy thanks to the internet.

  After breakfast (orange juice and the previous night’s tamale), Boy sends an e-mail to Oggie on the computer upstairs telling him exactly what he needs. He still can’t believe it’s that easy. Oggie replies minutes later, telling him that the order has been placed and it will be delivered sometime tomorrow. This gives him a day to gather research material and make preliminary sketches.

  He begins his research for Fat Man. Google: fat man naked. Countless blubbery images stack up. Santa Claus bellies float over shriveled penises. Boy selects an image of a fifty year old man standing with his arms by his side. His stomach has ballooned to the point where his prick is nearly hidden. Boy prints the image.

  Now he needs an image with a fat man’s arms stretched wide. He will need to use Photoshop to alternate the position of the arms. That reminds him. He opens a new window and prints out several images of Da Vinci’s famous piece. He must keep things to scale. Otherwise, the reference will be lost and the pieces will look disproportional.

  Searching for ‘fat man in a speedo’ gives him a picture of a Samoan man with his arms spread wide. On YouTube, he searches for videos of fat men exercising. He finds what he’s looking for, and rushes down stairs to get his sketch pad. Watching a particular video on repeat, he traces the way the excess fat moves when the body is in motion. Thirty minutes later and his fingers are silver from his pencil work, Tin Man-style.

  Next, Boy searches for pictures of amputees and prosthetic limbs. Art must serve its purpose to comment in ways subtle and blatant on the everyday world the artist was unlucky enough to be born in.

  In another window, Boy searches for ‘soldier tattoos’ and ‘shrapnel wounds’. He prints results from both searches. Later, he will arrange the photos from each search on corresponding sheets for quick reference as he sketches the piece.

  Teenager is up next, and knowing better than to search for naked pictures of teenage girls, Boy searches for ‘naked picture eighteen year old’. He finds what he is looking for, and he feels his groin stir as he scrolls through the photos. Not now. Every time he forgets about his sexual urges, he is reminded of them in some offhand way. It never seems to amaze him how quickly it can hijack his psyche. He resists the temptation and selects a few to print.

  ‘Naked pregnant woman’ gives him more results than he could possibly imagine. He chooses a variety of photos showing various stages of stomach swelling. He does a little photoshopping, playing around with arm positions while still paying attention to the original picture of the Vitruvian Man. After printing a few of his options, Boy loads more paper into the printer. The smell of ink and heated plastic fill the upstairs bedroom.

  Business man. Malnourished child. Plastic surgery freak.

  For the business man, he searches for ‘naked old men’. Of course, this gets him more images than he’d care to delve through. He finds a particular one with an old man sitting on a lawn chair. Age spots are dappled across the man’s body. He’s not exactly standing, but at least Boy can use the man’s skin as a reference point. He finds a video of an old man lifting weights, and watches the way his muscles move under his loose skin. Boy takes a few notes, decides he will have to refer to YouTube videos each time he begins one of the pieces in the series.

  Finding pictures of malnourished African children is as easy as he imagined it would be. He then decides to make the child of Middle Eastern descent, wanting to keep with his theme of contrasting bodies and pictorial commentary. Avoid clichés. He wants the pieces – when lined up next to each other – to show the wide variety of existence and in some way, the meaninglessness of it all. Boy locates the photos he needs, and prints out a few examples. He will have to make some test copies for skin tone on this particular piece. He wants the skin to look weather-beaten, but not too murky.

  Boy searches for ‘plastic surgery’ and comes up with a slew of strange photos. What he’s looking for in particular are photos with surgery lines drawn on them and arrows pointing in various directions. He hasn’t decided how he will capture this yet, but he imagines a picture that is swelling with surgery lines and arrows that makes it look as if the woman is completely covered in tattoos. He prints a few pictures, decides he will do more research when the time comes.

  ‘This should be interesting.’

  Boy twists around, dropping the stack of internet printouts. ‘Penelope?’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Don’t scare me like that!’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Making preparations. Now I have to do some sketches.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Boy asks as he gathers up his papers.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see you, you know, so ‘here’ doesn’t really mean much to me.’

  ‘By the window.’

  ‘It’s been a long time since I actually saw you.’

  ‘You used to paint me.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You could paint me again?’

  ‘Well, the paint fumes get to me, at least back in the house in Austin. I guess downstairs is ventilated so that could work. How much longer will you be visiting me?’

  ‘You don’t like my visits?’ Penelope asks.

  ‘I’m just… curious about all this.’

  ‘I can go.’

  ‘No, that’s not what I meant.’

  Boy sits down onto his bed. Sleep would be nice, and the grogginess from the weed he smoked with Red Beard and Dominican or Puerto Rican Lady last night still lingers.

  ‘Don’t sleep, you have work to do.’

  ‘I know…’ Boy yawns.

  ‘On second thought, maybe you should sleep. You never sleep now.’

  ₪₪₪

  Boy’s at a funeral. Dreamy day weather, manganese hues. Paint the day away and watch time melt to molten steel. Dali spoons. Picasso faces. Frida eyebrows. Pollock splurts. Kusama polka dots. Chairs lined up at the funeral like toy soldiers. All empty.

  A towering man in a black suit leads Boy to his chair. He lumbers away, his head buried into a chewed copy of a title-less book. A color wheel sun turns overhead. Wheel of Fortune. Merry-go-round. Dividing cancer cell.

  Boy sits, temporarily blinded by an aureole of light.

  Snow falls in paper flakes, zinc white on the tip of a sable brush. Boy strikes the snowdrift-filled landscape. He paints a few more strokes. His brush is his wand, his rapier, his penis.

  It’s no longer a brush.

  It’s now a finger, a breakable part of his body, an extension of his spine, an apparatus for creation and destruction. The landscape is sublime. Burnt orange trees, parched brown ground. White accents and false depths. Cross-h
atching highly resolved drawings. The funeral begins and ends before the casket can be lowered. No one attends aside from Boy and the towering man who led him there.

  A pulley connected to two opposite-facing mechanical horses is spun by the towering man. The legs of the Guston mechanical horses gallop in opposite directions, as gears whir and sparks fly. The motion slowly releases a spongy trap door underneath the casket. The casket begins to slide down awkwardly into the hole.

  Boy needs to see who or what is inside. The streaks he’d painted earlier wind chime their way into nimbus clouds. Snow turns black burnt umber. Coal shavings dilute the snow and the Delphic landscape begins to slip away. Boy calls for the man to stop turning the pulley. He feels the urge to climb into the open coffin. He feels the urge to crackle like an old 45 and shake loose his age. He feels the urge to weep and instead, he wakes.

  ₪₪₪

  Late afternoon corona. Boy opens his eyes and his sketch pad falls out of his hands. He wonders where he is for a moment. My studio. Oggie’s studio.

  Deus ex machina, a term which translates to a god from a machine. It refers to classical Greek dramas in which a god is lowered onto a stage by a crane – the machine – and solves everyone’s problems in one fell swoop. It’s a shortcut to a solution, a way for even the most dire of situations to be resolved. Oggie is his deus ex machina. He had been lowered down onto the stage of Boy’s life providing him with an out when the end was nigh, or nigh enough.

  Without Oggie, Boy would have had no one to call after Glass Wings attacked him. He would’ve had to go back to Maeve’s apartment at some point; he would’ve had to face the choir. Who knows what would have been waiting for him there. Maybe nothing. Glass Wings isn’t real. Glass Wings is real. Boy is real. Boy isn’t real. Life is like that.

  What does Oggie actually want from Boy? All gods crave something. All gods have their requirements. Faustian bargains galore. Extensively, he wanted art, but what if Boy can’t deliver? What if his visions don’t ring true? What happens then? All that awaits him is disappointment, which makes Boy wonder even more what he’s gotten himself into.