by Matt Cardin
Why, then, on that night, after so many years of frustration and mounting desperation, had I finally been blessed with the power to actualize my numinous longing? When the fog began to roll in once more from the black waters, claiming first the breakwater, then the harbor, and then the creaking village itself, I was shocked, overjoyed, elated beyond my wildest expectation, when fingers of moist and delicate whiteness curled lightly about my arm and hand, guiding me to the colors and strokes, the blendings and shadings, that would express at last the color of my soul. I expended no effort, but simply tilted my head back to gaze up into the hazy white void while the fog worked through me to reproduce itself on the canvas.
And when, after a time, I looked back down to examine the results, I was shocked to find . . . nothing. No painting. Not even a canvas. Just an empty easel where I had expected to find my life’s masterwork. Thunderstruck and horrified, I reached out a trembling hand to the empty space and felt it strike a rough and sticky solidity. With tingling fingers I traced its square contours, brushed my fingertips over its wet surface, and although I could see nothing, the tactile sensation of the canvas was unmistakable.
I had almost begun to sob with bewilderment and despair when a sudden suspicion inserted itself into my psyche. Hesitantly, even fearfully, I reached out again for the unseen canvas—and there it was, undeniably present yet completely invisible in the surrounding sea of vapor. And all at once, comprehension bloomed.
Yes, the miracle had happened. The fog had painted itself, using me as the conduit for the expression of its ancient nature. In fact, it had painted itself with a perfection exceeding all human skill. Standing before me on that easel, produced by my own hand through the agency of an unfathomable will, was the absolute artistic embodiment of the white cloud that billowed up from the depths of mother Ocean each night, the cloud that whispered to me of wonders unseen by the crude mass of men but granted as revelations to the devoted few. The painting before me had surpassed art to remake itself as reality.
I raised my arms in ecstatic triumph—and experienced an even greater shock when my right hand presented itself as a smooth and bloodless amputation. All four fingers were cleanly and smoothly sheared off below the second knuckle. In a panic, I grabbed my right hand with my left—and experienced a greater shock still when the missing fingers announced themselves through their intact sense of touch as still present, still healthy and whole. They also bore a thick, wet, sticky coating, and after a moment of dazed contemplation, during which I continued to reassure myself of my hand’s wholeness by rubbing it gently with the other, I held it up to compare it against the backdrop of the invisible, transfigured canvas. Four smooth stumps stood out against a milky field. Then I held up the other hand and saw the smears now affecting its own visibility, appearing as pale, luminous craters in its surface: the result of the stickiness transferred from its mate.
Any passerby during the next few moments must have judged me a madman who filled the night air with whooping, giddy laughter among the sharp rocks of the Eastern Point. And if it is possible to go mad with joy, with rapture, with a dark spiritual ecstasy, then their judgment would have been correct.
It was those events of last night that have given rise to my current design. They are the reason why I sit here in this smoke-filled tavern awaiting the right moment, awaiting a sign from the fog that I am indeed invited to join with it. There will be no more poverty-stricken, half-starved days and nights spent in the seclusion of my drafty room surrounded by mounting evidence of an artistic abortion, an existential failure, a life doomed to betraying its own divinely implanted craving, in the form of piled stacks of half-finished images towering all around me. There will be no more humiliation when not a single tourist will pause on wharf or the sidewalk to look at one of my paintings and offer a word of encouragement. I will endure no more coarse jokes from the fishermen who laugh at a man who fancies himself an artist and yet produces an endless succession of paintings that a quick and uncaring glance can misread as empty canvases. There will be no more misery, no more loneliness, no more disillusionment, no more suffering. There will, in fact, be nothing. I will merge with the great white cloud, and I will arise nightly with it from the darkest depths to creep landward and wrap the village in its burial clothes. I will whisper to its inhabitants of their fate: how they must soon return with me to those submarine chambers whose deepest recesses lie beyond the farthest reach of human comprehension. I will observe and know every hidden corner of the village, all its boats and wharfs and taverns and houses. I will be privy to every aspect of every secret life: the joys, pains, loves, sorrows, and hidden sins. And I will dissolve them all in a cloud of white nothingness. I shall be the shroud, and this town the corpse.
The tavern door opens. A lone fisherman lumbers in, ignores me, joins his fellows at a table. The fog still clings to his beard as he drinks what is surely the first of many drafts. He has failed to pull the door fully shut, and I watch intently as vaporous white fingers slither through the crack and caress the inner edges of the doorjamb.
I rise from my chair, leaving the fishermen and everyone else to their meaningless lives, and make my way to the lighthouse in whose shadow the plan of my salvation became apparent. The bucket in my hand sloshes with a sufficient amount of paint to coat the lighthouse itself. Tonight, it will surely suffice for my own transcendent purpose.
I walk a quarter-mile out onto the breakwater and strip off my clothing. The damp chill of the night air on my exposed skin fails to elicit even a shiver. Dipping my hands into the bucket and starting with my feet, I begin coating my skin with the milky white substance. My toes vanish first, right before my hungry eyes, and then my feet, leaving me standing several inches above the concrete on bloodless stumps. The laughter flutters up in my breast again, and I let it convulse and speak its voice as I continue to work upward. The waters outside the harbor stir with a strange agitation. Shadows darker than the night itself appear to coalesce and hover just beneath the surface, undulating in anticipation. I am coated from foot to neck, and a godlike excitement is welling up in my throat. I massage the paint onto my neck, my hair, my scalp, my face. And it is done.
Except for my eyes. I dread the stinging moment of pain that awaits me as I erase this final trace of my existence, and in the moment of hesitation, a deeper, more substantial fear surfaces. Something whispers of a false bargain and a fool’s bet. The fear is hot and natural, a residue of my earthly life. As such, I loathe it. My two eyes hover in the all-encompassing fog, my last points of contact with the life I have regretted to live, the reddened remnants of a birth that should never have happened.
The churning waters hiss their approval and the watery shadows beneath throb in agreement as I thrust my fingers against my eyeballs and coat them completely. There is no pain, but only an utter, liberating numbness, like the bliss lying on the far side of the stabbing agony from an icy death at sea. I close my invisible, unseeing eyes, and it intensifies. A great, dark light appears from below, shining in a nonspace, an inverted sun rising from a subterranean sky to illuminate the new world of my nonlife. I open myself to infinitude, sighing without lungs and weeping without eyes.
And then, it all stops. After a moment’s suspension between heaven and hell, the expected enlightenment retreats. I am still conscious, still thinking, still aware. I still am. But I am lost in a place that is no place, trapped in a mind that is no mind, paralyzed in a form that is not a body but a nonbody, the antithesis of flesh, something like stone or lead or hard-packed earth but diffuse, without articulation, the depths of the dense black earth in a borderless cosmic cemetery.
The deep fear that had hindered me earlier returns amid and alongside my mounting horror, and for the first time the questions that I have purposely avoided announce themselves clearly. What does the fog want? Why should it use me as its artistic conduit? What possible motive could it have for granting my prayer? The images that I have always nursed, those stupendous scenes of measure
less subterranean caverns, a submarine kingdom whose secrets form the very foundation of the world, return with force.
Has the fog ever really known itself? Has it been able to pierce the wall of its own gloom, to glimpse its own hidden heart? No, it has not. The fog, I now know, is blind. The horror of my current entombment is the horror the fog has always inhabited within the space of its own awareness. It knows nothing of the people and the things, the cities and the civilizations, that it embraces, that it has always embraced, since before human memory. It is completely blind, and equally so to its own self as to the world it enwraps in ancient sheets of funereal white in a perpetual cycle of nocturnal death and sunlit rebirth.
But what if it could know? What if, through some hellish exchange, it could perhaps gain a pair of eyes, and thus a reflective knowledge of its own depth and nature? What would it see when it retreated back to its hiding place at the appearance of the dawn? What secrets might it learn about itself, secrets that have remained hidden since before the foundation of the world? What knowledge might it bring back on its next nightly journey? What might it show to those trapped within its newly enlightened embrace?
If the fog had eyes, might it not go mad at the sight of its own soul? And might it not bring this madness roaring back to the surface world of men and women, villages and harbors, cities and civilizations? Might it not reveal what must remain forgotten, buried, repressed, locked away within those nighted caverns of uncreation, if the consummate disaster, the unmaking of all, is to be avoided?
It might. If it had eyes.
Judas of the Infinite
I observe him sprawled like a tattered rag doll on the nearly deserted sidewalk in this unkempt quarter of the great city. The urine staining the front of his trousers might well be blood for all the occasional passersby are aware, and yet they step over and around his sodden bulk as if he were just another pile of garbage. He flinches as the first few raindrops spatter onto his face and hands from the dimly glowing sky. They catch in his grizzled beard and hang there like liquid diamonds. He groans and hauls himself painfully toward the wall of the abandoned office building, which affords scant protection.
I smile to myself at the thought of his misery, and of the joy that I am about to bring him. This is the day of his redemption, if only he knew. I have come to bring him a peace and fulfillment greater than any he might find in the grimy bottle now clutched in his fist.
I speak to him:
Remember yourself, poor child. Who are you? Where do you come from? What brings you to this state? Remember and be healed.
His brow furrows, his hand trembles, and the bottle slips from numb fingers to crack on the concrete sidewalk. Strong-smelling fluid leaks out to mingle with the rain.
“You—you are here?” he whispers. His voice carries the sound of tears, and I love him all the more.
Yes, I am with you.
The tears well up and begin to spill from his eyes, carving pale tracks in the filth lining his cheeks. “Please help me. Please save me.”
But even as he speaks these words, the first glimmer of long-ago memory resurfaces in his mind, and he gasps. His eyes widen, his hands convulse, and his body shudders, as if with revulsion. “No!” he cries. “No, no, no!” He begins to claw at his scalp, attempting to rip the memories from his brain. The woman passing by on the sidewalk (Mary Beth Wilkerson, from Fair Grove, Missouri, a new resident of this great and crumbling city) shoots him a look of fear mixed with contempt. She worries for her safety, thinks of her children (Rebecca and Will, ages six and four), and clutches her purse more tightly as she hurries on to catch the subway to her neighborhood.
Peace, I say to him. Be still! You have nothing to fear from your memories. It is only by embracing them that you will come to your senses and find healing. Open yourself to me, and be made whole.
My words have their intended effect, and he ceases from his frantic motions and sits quietly for a time. After a moment he opens his mouth. His vocal cords have grown so rusty from disuse that his voice comes out as a dry croak, but yes, he is speaking and remembering, and our reunion is imminent. With a surge of self-congratulation, I regard the darkening evening sky, which has the appearance of a mirror smeared with black ash.
“I haven’t thought back for so long,” he says. “I’ve just lain in alleyways and prayed for oblivion. Please don’t make me remember.”
I leave him with my silence, and his resistance crumbles. The memories well up like his tears of a moment ago, and I watch them play across the screen of his mind’s eye as he relives them.
“Yes, I remember. I remember the life I once had in your service, my life of obsession with everything spiritual. When I was admitted to the order, I thought my life had reached its happy conclusion. I thought I could lose myself in endless contemplation of your glory.” He pauses to bury his head in his hands, and the rain increases from a sprinkle to a drizzle. A sheet of lightning cuts through the low-hanging clouds, outlining massive furrows of seemingly endless depth. A low rumble, like the tumult of a distant war, sounds ominously. So beautiful, I think with pride.
He moans and speaks through fingers tightly pressed to his face. “Oh, God. That empty place, that hole inside of me. What was it? I wanted to know Christ inside my soul, but one day during my meditations I looked too deeply and found a truth deeper than Christ. All the light and joy I was so accustomed to feeling during my prayers was sucked into an invisible whirlpool, and in the dark night of spiritual blindness, I saw a spot like a hole in the wall of the world. It glowed without light. It blossomed like a black rose, and I realized that I was seeing a bloody wound in my own soul. It was so empty inside! So hollow! I felt as if I had swallowed Hell’s abyss, but in the next moment I was horrified because I knew, somehow I knew, that it was the other way around, and that this hole was swallowing me, and that it would devour everything it encountered through me. It would devour the universe itself if I kept feeding it with my attention. I shrieked in my cell and disturbed my brothers, and when they came running, I horrified them all with my talk of a spiritual abyss that would devour God.”
He pauses again, having fallen into a trance of memory. Yes, I coax him, remember it all. Tread the path of memory to arrive at the present.
He resumes his reliving of it. “They didn’t believe me at first, but soon they couldn’t deny what I kept telling them. The unlit candles melting into puddles of wax. The food rotting on the plates in front of us. The statues of the saints growing old and brittle overnight, with their features flaking off like skin from a corpse. My brothers couldn’t deny the horror anymore. They charged me with blasphemy, and even though I was innocent of any crime, I knew they were correct. The spiritual darkness continued to radiate from my center, and I knew that my very presence had become a blasphemy. The thought that I might have become an unwitting host to Satan was as horrifying to me as to them, and I fled before they could shun me. I thought I could escape the horror by fleeing the order, by putting as much distance as possible between myself and my former life. When this failed, I tried to bury myself in oblivion. I tried to shut down my mind with drugs and debauchery. I wanted nothing to do with spirit, with soul, with religion. I just wanted to forget myself and the abyss I carried around inside me. But I couldn’t escape from my own self. The presence was still with me, and I soon found that I could not look at anyone or anything without seeing them begin to fade and wither. Eventually even the debased friends I had made during my life of excess fled in horror or drove me away. Finally, I was left completely alone with a limitless emptiness at my core.”
He struggles to get the words out, and I wait patiently for him to say what he most fears to say. A trillion worlds wait with me, although they do not know it.
“And then I knew that this emptiness was not Satan. For years I had clung to the notion that I was possessed by Satan or one of his demons, and this seemed a comforting thought in light of the other possibility. Satan is subject to Christ and God, Satan wi
ll be defeated in the end, but even God Himself cannot fill an infinite void. I finally had to admit the truth of my deepest fear: that I was the harbinger of a doom worse than Hell. This void inside me could not be Satan, because it was more ancient than even that ancient serpent. I had become host to a faceless face behind all worlds, a nothing at the center of everything, a chaos from which the cosmos has been snatched for a brief instant. I realized that I was beyond salvation or damnation. I saw beyond them both, beyond Heaven and Hell, beyond all opposites and created things into a realm of absolute negation. And this meant that even God could not save me, because the Void was older and bigger than he was.”
The flow of memory subsides abruptly. His last words still hang in the air as he looks around in a daze to discover that he has remembered himself into the present. A thin, persistent rain hisses on the sidewalks and streets, winding its way in serpentine rivulets toward the gutters. I stand over him in burning splendor, my eternal light pouring down on him, illuminating not only his solitary form but also the trillion worlds of my cosmos. Behold: the sparse flow of traffic swishing past on the dampened streets, the rows of street lamps burning in halos of gold amid crystalline threads of rain, the glowering furrows of the sky spilling forth their life-giving water—these are all hallmarks of my genius. The sum of all created things is a diamond-edged tableau of terrible splendor, and its splendor is but a dim reflection of my own.
