by Stacey Longo
“Really?”
“Yes!” His eyes became even brighter. “As though a switch had been flicked. Hormones raged in me like any other boy, but I lusted not for girls, but to paint. One day I was fair, not too bad, but by no standards good. Then after a few weeks with this desire I was…was…”
“Brilliant,” Charles said softly, and Lewis nodded. “Have you sold any of your paintings?” He dropped his eyes and plucked some invisible lint from his shirt. “They’re remarkable.”
“No. I haven’t sold any. I paint for myself and each painting seems to hold its own magical quality.” His eyes shone even brighter, if that were possible. “As though parts of me were transferred into their production. I can’t bear to part with them, if you can understand.”
“I think I can. After I’ve finished some of my drawings, I’ve looked at them and have been shocked that I’d actually drawn it, you know, because it seems too good to have been done by me. I’ve even placed some between plastic sheets and don’t dare touch them with my bare hands because the oils on my fingers might smudge them. It may sound like too much…but I don’t know, some of them just look that good. At least to me.”
“I don’t see it as too much at all. Each of our works is a reflection of ourselves.” His irises were now like bright neon circles, and Charles got the feeling he no longer was seeing him as much as he was something else. “Though the degree varies. With each delineation we imbue some emotion and personal desire. It’s passion that moves the world, boy, that shapes reality. Cherishing our works is only natural.”
“Yeah.” He took a sip of apple juice and had a thoughtful look. “I want to sell my drawings one day, as long as I can keep the originals.”
“May I see your work some time?”
“Uh, sure.” He shrugged and finished his cookie. “Yeah, I’ll bring some tomorrow if that’s cool.”
Lewis turned his head, as if mentally checking his schedule, then regarded Charles for a minute before nodding.
“Well, um, do you think I could look at your paintings some more?”
“The same ones?”
“You have more?”
Lewis rose and walked from the kitchen; Charles followed, wondering how there could possibly be more. He guessed that there were at least one hundred and fifty paintings in the Purple-Plush Room—as he’d begun to think of it. If more meant greater than one or two additional paintings, as he assumed, then he was lost as to how the man could have found the time to complete them all. These were paintings on full-sized canvases he was talking about; a painting took time, especially ones of such quality. He didn’t see how it was possible…unless…
Unless he painted all day.
Looking at Lewis’s back, Charles felt this guess rang true, or mostly true. If not all day—because a person had to eat, sleep, use the bathroom, and other stuff—then most of the day.
He shook his head because that couldn’t be right. If he painted all day, or even most of the day, then surely there would be paint on his hands, his perfect white shirt, and spotless white jumpsuit. The smell of paint would at least linger on him—but it didn’t. His clothes, feet, and hands, especially his hands, were always without mark, much less a spot, or even a speck of paint.
What Charles wanted to know was how he did it. How he painted so much and performed duties that all other adults did, such as shopping, cleaning around the house—as he must do with compulsive vigor, by the looks of things—and The Big One: working. Charles was led upstairs and to the left, along a hallway exactly like and directly above the one downstairs.
None of the many bordering doors were open, but painting beside painting hung on the walls, as in every hallway he’d seen. There was no essential order or pattern as to how the paintings were hung in connection with others neighboring it. He saw an orange juice carton and a glass filled to the brim alongside a painting of a man staring in horror at his tibia, which jutted through his skin like the head of a jagged spear.
Another painting was of a small dog, a mutt. With big eyes and an outstretched tongue, it smiled as only dogs can. Two paintings—a case of spilling marbles and one of a Chinese fan—separated the painting of the dog and another one that seemed to depict the same dog, only in this one the dog was lying on its side with dull eyes, tongue hanging out between its mouth as white foam bubbled over it.
At the end of the hall, Lewis opened a door on the left. Charles stopped at the threshold and gazed around. The room was identical to the Purple-Plush Room, and he knew he would soon be referring to it as the Maroon-Plush Room for the same reason he’d named the former. There was also the same amount of paintings hung on all four windowless walls; at least, that’s what it looked like without the benefit of counting.
As before, Lewis flicked a switch to encase the paintings in fire, simultaneously emphasizing each while causing them all to remain equally noticeable. And again, Charles slipped off his shoes without conscious thought and walked to the middle of the room like a sleepwalker.
For a while he had no intelligible thoughts, stray thoughts, or stray images. He walked the border of the room, craning back his neck and bringing his nose within inches of some paintings. His mind was totally entranced with the paintings. Everything upstairs was blank, as if it had earlier been wiped clean in preparation of the beautiful and filling input he received.
Charles was immersed in a sea of ecstasy he couldn’t escape even if he wanted to. His eyes would land on a painting and then it would swim among his mind; the depictions seemed to reach for him, wanting to pull him into their reality.
A painting of canvases, stacked atop each other until they reached the ceiling of the room they were stuffed into, seemed to brush against him. If asked to, he could have sworn that he felt their coarse surface; that he felt the soft petals of the roses that comprised the bouquet; that he felt the press of the librarian’s finger.
It was real. In his mind, for that time, it was real! It was as though he had stepped into some alternate reality and was lost among its creations, its oddities. The colors bloomed and burst behind his eyes and filled his being for the moment they had their close up; he actually reached out a few times, trying to grasp what, in his mind, was right before him.
The smell of the old lady’s perfume was faint, but he thought—knew—he could smell it. She was depicted from the waist up, sitting at a table with a cup of tea in her hands, and she was…she was…
He closed his eyes for a moment, and backward as it seemed, the image became sharper; the senses of the images became sharper.
…She was sad about her cockatoo, which she’d awakened one morning to find dead in his cage.
Charles opened his eyes again and swept them over the wall, falling on a painting of a woman peering into a mirror. Her face was pressed close and her fingers traced the small wrinkles at the sides of her eyes that Charles knew hadn’t been there the night before.
Yes, that was right! The girl was worried because her appearance was everything to her, and the wrinkles made her look older, uglier. Charles knew this, just as he knew that the squirrel in the next painting over had that look on its face because poison was coursing through its veins, and for the first time, he wondered how he knew.
The bizarre situation hit him like an unexpected slap, with just as much sting and surprise, and just as seeing all those still crows yesterday had caused him to question his being there, he questioned being here.
His eyes began to clear and his mind unraveled from around his entrancement. He surveyed the room as before, not with awe this time, but with the type of confusion that has an affair with realization.
He looked over the paintings and wondered how it were possible that he’d
(olor u)
felt—
Wait! There it was again—that whisper, that “ollur you.” He squeezed his eyes shut—hard—but no greater focus came.
Ollur? “Other” maybe? And who is “you”? What was it? It seemed important.
&nb
sp; Lewis’s words came to him then: …It’s passion that moves the world, boy, that shapes reality.
They only confused him further, and as he tried to incorporate what meaning they must represent with “ollur” or “other”—what was it?—he felt it all slipping away, the elusive shadows fading farther and farther into the dark.
Charles blinked quickly, then turned toward the doorway with a dazed stare.
Lewis was there. He smiled and Charles didn’t like that smile. He didn’t like it at all, because his words continued to echo (…passion that moves the world) in his mind, and he suddenly knew—as he’d known why the old lady was sad and why the squirrel made that face—that they were bad words, with dark meaning hidden below.
Charles, eyes shackled to Lewis and still blinking, began to believe his first impression of the man: that he was psycho, and not at all only weird. His mother’s voice spoke to him then, as it so often did when he was in doubt or flustered.
Shhh, darling. I love you.
Her voice was soft and he relaxed. He loved that he could still hear her; that he could still picture her face. She hadn’t begun to fade as he feared would happen. He knew it would be bad when she did.
He began to walk toward Lewis and hoped the man would confuse his blinking and smiling for amazement of his paintings.
The carpet felt like marshmallows beneath his feet, but he only noticed it in an offhand type of way, as a person might notice the steady whir of a fan on the nightstand beside them while they read.
Let it go, Charlie; let it go and if it’s supposed to, honey, it’ll come to you.
So he did. He let it go and stopped blinking. When he reached Lewis, he said, “Wow,” and thought he might make a good actor some day because he detected no suspicion in the man’s eyes.
***
Once home, Charles dropped his duffel bag to the side of his bedroom door after shutting it. Compelled as never before, he walked quickly to his desk and swept one arm across it, wiping off the clutter of sketches that littered it.
He flicked on his lava lamp, then grabbed a piece of drawing paper from the side drawer and a pencil from an old soup can stripped of its label to show ribs of corrugated aluminum. The pencil was sharp, as were the rest that stood in the soup can, and he set it right above the sheet of drawing paper. He rose slightly and pulled his chair farther forward. He wiggled his bottom until he was comfortable, kicked off his shoes. They made soft thumps when they hit the carpet.
Closing his eyes, he placed his hands on the blank sheet, then lightly ran his fingertips over its surface, as though a drawing were a pre-existing thing embedded in the paper that must be brought to its surface with a pencil after a mystic connection were made.
He felt lighter, less in control, operating in a dream. He’d reached that connection. He opened his eyes and lifted the pencil with his right hand. He rolled it between his fingers and leaned forward, until his left arm was bent to support his head. The pencil descended to the paper as if guided by something more.
Charles looked up. What he saw was the framed photograph of his mom. She was smiling and her chin rested on her interlaced fingers as her elbows supported her from the kitchen table. The bracelet—a thing she never took off—made of tiny, segmented wood pieces of filigreed carvings and held together by a baby blue string of yarn, encircled her wrist. The bracelet now hung over one corner of the frame. Her eyes were big in this picture, full of life. Big and beautiful, and it was the very reason he had this photo in this very spot, where he spent most of his time, because she was so happy. When he doubted the truth he felt, but which was so contrary to what happened, he had only to look up and see her face for reassurance.
They shared the truth, and as she’d told him often as a child: It doesn’t matter what people think, Charlie. What matters is what you know to be true. He smiled at her, and all doubt faded away.
The pencil kissed paper, and for the next hour, the potential of that kiss was proven to be, more than Charles could have ever believed, indeed beautiful.
When finished with the drawing, he wiped his hand across his forehead and it came away with a thin sheen of sweat. He dropped the pencil he’d used, which was no more than a nub now, into the wastebasket beside his desk. He exhaled and leaned back in his chair, tipping it onto its hind legs until his knees touched the underside of his desktop and he could lean no further.
For a while, he focused on his lava lamp and shook his shirt by the front to create some wind because it stuck to his stomach and chest. When he did lean forward, so that the chair rested upon all four legs again, he shifted his eyes to his drawing.
It was perhaps the best he had ever done, and his mind—or was it his mom?—whispered, that’s because it’s really your first.
The depiction was of a baseball sitting on top of a bed. The ball wasn’t signed by a big leaguer or stamped with a lipstick kiss by some lingerie model. It was just a plain baseball, round with the proper stitching and imprinted with the proper emblems. It was perhaps—although he knew the longer he looked at it that there was no ‘perhaps’ about it—his best drawing not mainly because of its beauty, although it was far more skillfully drawn than any before. What really made it his best was the fact that once he looked behind him, at his bed, he understood that whisper.
He laughed out loud, really laughed—not that it would alarm his Aunt Christie. She’d taken him in, but he took care of himself. The laugh was eclectic, a mixture of joy, disbelief, and a bit of madness.
***
He woke earlier on Saturday morning, as he did every weekend morning because his paper route required it. At first, while he bundled the papers, he could barely keep his eyes open, but then he remembered the night before and looked about his room at the evidence that proved it was no dream. Sleep fell from him and he doubled his efforts and was out the door five minutes later.
This time, however, he discarded habit and rode his bike. Once he came to the bottom of Mr. Mortimer’s hill, he let his bike fall because the incline was too steep. He set the newspaper in front of the door and hurried back to his bike; it was too early to wake Lewis and he was so excited about what he’d discovered the night before that he didn’t even consider the thought. He’d completely forgotten that he’d promised to show the man some of his drawings.
Crows cawed in his wake and leaves fluttered up briefly as if born by a whirlwind as he passed. The entire way home he leaned over his handlebars, head thrust forward, mind consumed with one…very…amazing thing.
Hopping off his bike without first stopping, his heart seemed to swell so that it almost hurt with the anticipation that he couldn’t wait to satisfy.
As he ran toward the door, his key already exhumed from a deep pocket of his cargo pants, his bike rolled more wobbly until it finally careened into the side of the house.
His breath came fast and hissed through his teeth for several moments because he couldn’t join the key with the lock.
It slid in, and after that, it took him about five seconds to unlock the door, pull the key back out, step in, kick the door shut with his foot, bound up some twenty stairs, dash along twenty feet of hall, and enter his room.
Once inside, he halted but his eyes roamed frenziedly, as though he’d hit some huge spider’s invisible web. As he had that morning, he looked upon the results of each of his drawings. He remained still, released a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding, and moved forward. The first item—no, that did no justice. The first creation—yes, that was it!—he touched was the baseball, because it was the first thing he had drawn. He cupped it in the palms of his hands as if it were an invaluable gem of the most fragile construction. Turning it over and over, he brought his head close. He smelled it, and found that it smelled real (He guessed what he meant by that was it smelled “normal”, as a new baseball should). For a moment he’d feared it might turn rotten in his hands and dissolve through his fingers. It was smooth and possessed the grip that oddly coexisted with the sensation th
at it would slide from his fingers. Closing his palms around the baseball as though to compress it, he felt its hardness, and a large smile moved in to own his face. He rolled the ball around and the resulting sound was like canvas brushed with a knife.
A giggle escaped him and he let the ball drop back to his bed. A coat, bearing a lion with jaws opened wide to roar, hung over his dresser; he put it on and hugged himself, rubbed his arms, pulled at the collar.
Next, he turned on his TV and the game system mounted beside it that hadn’t existed until some seven hours ago. There were four game cases stacked on top of the TV. He opened one and placed the game inside into the system. A minute later he was killing zombies and blowing shit up for no other reason than that he could.
He left the game on and grabbed one of the cookies that sat upon a plate on his desk. It was chocolate chip. He took a bite and resumed looking around his room at his creations, and seconds later his jaw stopped as suddenly as the pistons inside of an engine when the ignition is cut. For a moment he stood bewildered while his mind chipped and scraped at something he remembered Mr. Mortimer saying. The tools of his mind were too slow, so that in their lagging, more thoughts crowded in to conceal the insight that for a moment had shouted for attention.
It was gone, however, and as the feeling of the partially chewed cookie resting against his tongue and teeth returned to him, he realized he couldn’t even remember what the insight was about, or why it seemed so important.
Charles began to chew again, with a languor befitting a cow at first, then with increasing speed. He shrugged his shoulders and listened to his mom, knowing it would come in time.
The sun slanted over the surfaces near his window, and extended in two rectangular panes allowed by the glass, and rolled over his feet and shins when he neared.
When he finished eating the cookies, the sun shone full through his window and left nothing in shadows.
The entire day Charles couldn’t suppress the smile that dimpled his cheeks and displayed his teeth, and he didn’t try. His Aunt Christie commented on it during dinner, and he responded with a shrug as if to say, just one of those days. She shrugged herself and continued eating, not minding, and hardly noticing, that he nearly inhaled his food and chewed with his mouth open on top of that (an insuppressible smile had that effect), and was back to his room in a matter of minutes.
