Mister Impossible

by Maggie Stiefvater

  Before that, he hadn’t understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing.

  This was where he’d found art.

  Declan stood in the small Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, looking at John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo. The dim room, the so-called Spanish Cloister, was long and skinny. The walls were colorful with complicated Mexican tiles and lined with stone fountains and basins. El Jaleo was the only painting in the room, hung in a shallow alcove framed by a Moorish arch. Antique pots rested around its base, tricking the viewer into believing themselves part of the scene in the painting. A cunning mirror stole light from the hall and threw it subtly on the canvas. Gardner had renovated this room especially for El Jaleo, and every part of it was an extension of the painting’s mood.

  The larger a piece of art was, the farther away one was generally meant to stand from it, so Declan was not directly in front of the canvas but rather standing four yards off. He was just looking at it. He had been looking at it for ten minutes. He would probably look at it for another ten minutes.

  A tear prickled his eye.

  “A man in Florence once had a heart attack when he saw the Birth of Venus, if you can believe it,” said a voice beside him. “Palpitations are more common, though. That’s what Stendhal had. Couldn’t walk, he reported, after seeing a particularly moving work of art. And Jung! Jung decided it was too dangerous to visit Pompeii in his old age because the feeling—the feeling of all that art and history round him, it might kill him. Jerusalem … Tourists in Jerusalem sometimes wrap themselves in hotel bedsheets. To become works of art themselves, you know? Part of history. A collective unconscious toga party. One lady in the holy city decided she was giving birth to God’s son. She wasn’t even pregnant, before you ask. Funny what art will do to you. Stendhal Syndrome, they call it, after our lad with the palpitations, though I prefer its more modern name: Declan Lynch.”

  “Hello, Jordan,” Declan said.

  He stood there for a space with Jordan Hennessy, both of them looking at the painting. El Jaleo was both dark and luminous. In it, a Spanish dancer twisted through a dark room. Behind her, guitarists twisted round their instruments and onlookers clapped her on. It was all black and brown except for the striking white of the dancer and the flushed red in details. In person it was obvious how much rigor had been put into the contorted dancer and how little had been devoted to the musicians and the background, forcing the viewer’s attention onto her, only her. The entire work looked effortless, if one didn’t know better. (Declan knew better.)

  “You’re my prospective punter, aren’t you?” Jordan asked. “I should have known. Mr. Pozzi of South Boston.”

  Declan said, “How do you find a forger? Be in the market for a forgery.”

  “Pozzi’s on the nose, don’t you think?”

  Samuel-Jean Pozzi was the subject of one of John Singer Sargent’s most dramatic portraits, a full-length glory featuring his friend Dr. Pozzi, a well-known dandy and OB-GYN, in a blazing red dressing gown. Declan had feared using it as a name when contacting Jordan for a forgery might give the game away, but the potential reward of looking clever was too great a temptation.

  “You didn’t guess it, did you?” Declan lifted his red scarf from his collar. “I’m wearing this scarf in his honor.”

  “Cadmium red,” Jordan said. “Slightly toxic but little risk if handled well. Before I forget—”

  She handed him the keys to his stolen car.

  “Did you remember it takes premium?”

  “Crumbs, I knew I forgot something. I did top up the wiper fluid.”

  “Where is it?”

  “A lady never tells.” She grinned at him. Then she stepped as close to the painting as she was permitted, bending at the waist to study the brushstrokes, graceful as one of Degas’s dancers. Her grin tugged wider as she guessed, correctly, that he was looking at her. Straightening, she lifted her arm and twisted her body, pulling herself into a perfect imitation of El Jaleo’s dancer. There was nothing like the sound of a museum, and the Gardner was no exception. The murmur of other patrons in the adjacent courtyard, the sound of footsteps echoing in hallways, the respectful whispers. Jordan Hennessy was art in front of art in a room that was art in a building that was art in a life that was art, and Declan told himself he had only come here to get his car back.

  Foolish Declan smirked; Paranoid Declan sneered.

  Paranoid Declan lost. Foolish Declan said, in an even tone, “You never finished my portrait. Seems unprofessional to just leave a client hanging like that.”

  Jordan nodded. “And now you want a refund.”

  “A refund won’t fill that hole on my wall.”

  “It’d take multiple sittings. It might be ugly along the way before it’s all said and done.”

  “I trust your expertise.”

  She tapped her fingertips together absently. She didn’t look at him. “You know at the end of the day, it’s still a portrait, right? Just a copy of your face. No matter how well it turns out, that’s never changing. Just a copy.”

  Declan said, “I’m perfecting my understanding of art more every day.”

  Jordan frowned then—or at least she stopped smiling, which for her was as good as a frown. “What would you say if I told you I’d found a way to keep dreams awake?”

  “I would wait for the punch line.”

  “What if I told you this painting would keep Matthew awake if something happened to Ronan? That it had dream energy in it?”

  Declan didn’t answer right away, because a trio of women entered the room, along with a docent. The four of them took an agonizing amount of time looking at the painting and taking photos in front of it and then asking the docent questions about the landscaping before they all trooped into the next room.

  He glanced to be sure they were out of earshot, then glanced to see that Matthew was still sitting on the bench in the courtyard, looking at the flowers. Finally, he said, “I don’t think I’d say anything. I’d listen.”

  And he did, quietly, as she pressed one of her hands into his shoulder to lean close and whisper everything she’d learned about the sweetmetals into his ear. She whispered how she’d realized that they were all art, and she whispered that perhaps this was why she felt so at home in museums. She whispered that this might be why she had been so drawn to John Singer Sargent in particular, and she whispered that she had decided to go to the most famous Sargent in Boston to see if it was a sweetmetal.

  “And it is,” Declan said.

  They looked at the painting in question. Neither said anything for a space. They just listened to the sound of both of them breathing and looking at the painting.

  Jordan asked, “If you were me, what would you do next?”

  He whispered: “Steal it.”

  She laughed with delight, and he memorized the sound.

  “It’s a shame you have mixed feelings about crime, Pozzi,” Jordan said, “because I’m pretty sure you were made for it. But don’t you think the Gardner’s been looted enough?”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I think … I think I’m gonna find out how they were made,” Jordan said. “And if I can, I’m gonna try to make one.”

  She looked at him. He looked at her.

  Declan could feel all his previous goals wandering even further away from him, all of them seeming silly and arbitrary now, the childhood dreams of a kid looking for stability, wishing upon a star that later turned out to be a satellite.

  “Say you’ll stay in Boston,” she said.

  You have to know what you want, or you’ll never get it.

  “I’ll stay in Boston,” he said.

  Ronan thought: This is what I was made for, probably.

  The three dreamers sat shoulder to shoulder, looking down at the Pennsylvanian landscape below, the wind buffeting them hard. Mountain ridges and valleys looked like fingers had pinched the landscape in places and thumbprinted it in others. A broad river
moved northwest to southeast. A smaller river came in from west to east, curled back on itself in rippling serpentine that reminded him of the black snake they’d found at the museum. Farms were cut into rectangles that butted up against wild dark forests. Roads were fine white hairs across it all, like parasitic worms in a dish. From this height, humans were invisible.

  “What do you feel?” Bryde asked.

  Free. Trapped. Alive. Guilty. Powerful. Powerless. Ronan felt everything but the ley line.

  Hennessy sighed.

  Bryde said, “Saving the ley lines is about seeing the pattern. It’s hard to see the pattern when you’re in it, but humans do the same things again and again; they are not that complicated. In a pair, they are individuals. Unique. Unlike. If you have half a dozen, two or three will remind you of each other. By the time you have one hundred, two hundred, you see types repeated again and again. Place two types together; they react a certain way. Place them with a different type; they react a different but equally predictable way. Humans form into groups along the same lines again and again; they fracture into smaller groups along other predictable lines again and again. One hundred and fifty, Dunbar’s number. That is how many connections humans can support before things begin to fall apart and remake. Again, again. Humans dance as elegantly as clockwork stars move across the sky, but they do not see it because they are the stars.”

  They were very far up. Thousands of meters, feet dangling, pressed together on the dreamt hoverboard, cheeks burning with cold, lungs burning with the thinness of the air. The wind moved them this way and that; they were only in danger of falling if they completely resisted the flow. They were not in a dream but it felt like a dream, and for the first time, Ronan felt a little like he understood how Bryde could say there were not two of him.

  Bryde continued. “The nonhuman world has patterns, too. Look at the veins of a leaf, your hand, a tree, gold through rock, a river headed to sea, lightning. And again, again, not just in the visible, but also the invisible. In airflow, particles, sound waves, ley lines, too, veining across this poor, battered home of ours. Again, again, again. Everything predicts everything else. Everything affects everything else.”

  Ronan felt Hennessy shiver. He leaned his skull against her skull, and without pause or snark, she leaned back.

  “It doesn’t take much to disrupt the pattern. Look at that river there. Over the years, silt has built up along its banks, which slows it. And as it slows, it becomes less able to move the silt, so it slows further, so there is even more silt, and so it slows even more. As it slows, the river twists harder away from the obstacle, looking for the path of least resistance. Twist, slow, twist, slow, until the curves are so tight that it becomes just a bent lake here and then a small pond there and then finally the water’s driven below ground. This, too, is what happens to the ley lines.”

  Ronan could almost imagine it. The glowing energy of the ley line glistening across the landscape below, pulsing beneath the mountains, seeping into the rivers. Everything had felt obvious and connected in his last dream, when he was curled inside Ilidorin, and some of that connectivity lingered.

  “Slowly the ley lines get shut down one by one by electricity and roads and trash and noise and noise and noise and noise.” Bryde sucked in a deep breath. “Which is why we dreamers are forced to go from vein to vein as they collapse behind us.”

  “So a dreamer’s just a parasite,” Hennessy said. “We’re nothing without them.”

  “Is your brain a parasite?” Bryde asked.

  “Yes,” she said immediately.

  “Your lungs, your kidneys, your hands? Your heart pumps blood through your entire body. Take away the blood and things begin to fail. Does that make the brain lesser than the blood? The left hand a servant to the veins that power it? We need the ley line. The ley line needs us. The world needs us. Eventually, if we all die—and we are dying, some more quickly than others—so the rest will go. Our passing, a symptom of a bigger disease.”

  “And if we fix the ley lines?” Ronan asked. “The disease goes away?”

  Bryde didn’t answer right away. He let the wind buffet him; that was the way to keep from being knocked off the board. To bend, not break. Then he said, “A healthy body can withstand illness. Can live alongside it. A world full of ley energy doesn’t support dreamers and dreams only along the lines any more than a healthy body is only vital directly along the veins. It is vital from head to toe. Brain and lungs, kidney and hands. Fix the ley lines, and dreamers and dreams simply exist wherever they like.”

  A world where Matthew could just live.

  A world where Ronan could just dream.

  A world where every dream was clear and crisp and easy to navigate, so there were never accidents or nightmares.

  He wanted it.

  It had been so long since he’d wanted something to happen, instead of wanting something to not happen. He’d forgotten what it felt like. It was equal parts great and terrible. It burned.

  “Restoring the ley lines is a game of dominos,” Bryde said. “If we addressed each domino separately, we would never be done. Dominos would be set back up as soon as we turned our backs. And we’d be stopped before we were anywhere close to done. But instead we focus only on the dominos that will knock over many others.”

  “Cool metaphor,” Ronan said. “What are the dominos?”

  “You already know,” Bryde said dismissively. “All the obstacles blocking ley energy. Human noise.”

  “And what is ‘knocking them over’?” Hennessy said. “Please tell me it’s blowing shit up.”

  “Sometimes,” Bryde admitted. “Often.”

  Hennessy made a contented noise.

  “Do other people get hurt?” Ronan asked.

  Bryde hesitated for only a second. “Not if we are creating nuanced solutions instead of hammering our way through. We’re dreamers. We can step lightly.”

  “What’s the first domino?” Ronan asked.

  “That’s not the right question,” Bryde said. “Always ask, ‘What do we do last?’ And then you work toward that. The man who thinks step by step sees only his feet. Eyes up. What do we want?”

  “Save the ley lines.”

  “Step back from that,” Bryde said. “What’s one step back from that?”

  Ronan thought. “Save Ilidorin’s ley line.”

  “One step back from that?”

  Ronan was once again curled in Ilidorin, connected to everything. A thrill chilled him as he said, “The dam.”

  “Yes,” Bryde said. “But there are steps between us and that still, too. There’s no point moving the dam without freeing up the tributaries first. Why throw the switch with no lamps plugged in? First we have to remove obstacles from farther down the line and adjacent lines. Ilidorin’s line will be the first and the hardest. But it is a fine domino. It will knock over many others after for us. Hennessy, you’re quiet.”

  A thin gray cloud passed between them and the world below. The patchwork fields disappeared and reappeared.

  “You don’t bloody need me,” she said.

  “Don’t tell me what I need,” Bryde said.

  “I couldn’t do anything back there. I couldn’t dream a weapon because there was no one to hold my hand. Ronan Lynch here can do anything I could do and lots I can’t. Just cut me loose.”

  Bryde didn’t say, What about the Lace? because he rarely mentioned the Lace out loud unless he had to. He was just quiet for a very long time and then he said, “I won’t drag you.”

  But Ronan would.

  He snarled, “Get over yourself, princess.”

  “What?” she demanded, shocked.

  “Just say you want to do something easier if that’s what you mean, but don’t play the boo-hoo card. Oh, me! My whole family got shot, I’m not going to cope, please beg me to stay and make me feel good.”

  Hennessy twisted as much as she dared to stare at him. “You’re a real piece of work.”

  Ronan smiled meanly a
t her. Somehow he’d just jumped straight to nastiness, but it was too late to rein it back now. “I saved your life. You owe me.”

  “I saved yours. That’s what we call ‘even.’ ”

  “You want to give Jordan a call and let her know you gave up, then?” He couldn’t stop. Acid kept pouring out of him. “You’re setting a timer again, you’re living life in twenty-minute chunks of sleep denial, whatever, sleep deprivation again? Hey, Jordan, they died for nothing, can I crash with you? Thanks.”

  Her expression didn’t change but he watched her swallow, the tattooed roses at her throat shimmering ever so slightly with the movement.

  “And when I bring out all the Lace and blow up the world?”

  Bryde said, “We won’t let that happen.”

  “Ah, but you did, bro. Only reason why there wasn’t more Lace was ’cause there wasn’t enough ley for it, was there? I actually got the Lace out and got our boy here closer to dead at the same time. I multitasked like a mother.”

  She was going to leave them. Ronan could tell she was. He could see every bit of her was ready to give up. Could they do it without her? Maybe. Probably. But somehow the idea of saving ley lines with just Bryde was awful to imagine. Awful like a thunderstorm. Awful. Aweful. Ronan couldn’t think about it too hard, because it made him feel like flinging himself from the hoverboard just to see what would happen. What was real? Falling? Dying? Flying? They were floating a thousand feet above the ground. Real? In a dream there would be no consequence.

  Ronan was just as frightened to feel this impulse in himself as he was by the idea of saving the ley lines with just Bryde.

  “Why do you even care?” Hennessy asked. “The truth. Not more shithead talk.”

  He could feel the impulse to pour more acid, but he held it back. He watched his raven circle far below them, in and out of the clouds.

  His voice, when he spoke, was barely audible against the wind. “I don’t know. I just do.”

  It wasn’t a very good answer, but it was the truth.

  Hennessy said, “Fine. Whatever. But don’t say I didn’t tell you.”