A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

  “I’m a little under the weather,” he manages. His voice sounds wrong. He hasn’t spoken in a while.

  She steps out from the office. “Is there anything I can do for you?” The concern on her face is genuine. Linc feels embarrassed, and odd. It’s been so long since someone gave a shit about him. At least, someone human. She reaches up, and feels his forehead. Her palm is cool, as cool as the blue of her sari.

  “You have a fever,” Ms. Doshi says. “Come, I’ll make you some tea. Have you taken anything for it?”

  He opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. His tongue is heavy, with the silt and mud of the marsh. His jaw is a cave full of fish bones and dead plant matter and roots. He follows her, another woman in swirling robes. Robes the wrong color. Everything is the wrong color.

  She takes him to the back office and sits him down. He must have fallen asleep because he finds that she’s gently nudging him awake. In front of him is a cup of spicy tea, a bottle of aspirin, and a thick slice of a green-tinged cake.

  “It’s pistachio-white chocolate tea bread,” she explains. “You looked hungry. Now, take an aspirin.”

  He downs a couple of pills with a glass of water that cools his throat. Then he takes a sip of the tea, and Jesus, it’s delicious. It’s dark and sweet with notes of cardamom and orange. Then he takes a bite of the tea bread. It’s so good that he eats the slice in three, maybe four bites. Ms. Doshi brings him two more slices until he’s sated.

  She sends him back upstairs and tells him to lie down. Linc misses his mother, and thinks about calling her as soon as he gets back to the room. But as soon as he closes the door, he lies down and is out.

  ***

  They file into the room silently, dressed in their best outfits. Women wear dresses made of velvet & lace that sweep the floor, and the men wear suits with starched shirts & ties. There are some women in suits, & a bearded man in a skirt wearing what looks like an Easter bonnet. They are beautiful. Everyone is beautiful, even the ugly ones, like the man with a harelip or the woman with the large growth on her neck. In here, in this space, the harelip is like a tribal marking, a slash of war paint, & the growth on the woman’s neck is a large off-center jewel. The women in suits are handsome, dashing, yet as feminine as they wish to be. The bearded man in the ivory silk dress with a swooping neckline—he was born to wear this dress and that hat with ribbons that disappear into his beard. All of the faces are some shade of brown. All of them wear some article, be it a sash or tie, a jewel or pendant, a boutonniere or a corsage in that wonderful, terrible color. Pink & purple. Purple-pink. Her color. The room they are in is bare, save for some chairs against the walls that form a circle. They all take seats in the circle, as silent as nuns. Then, they start working on various projects. One old black woman with deep-set eyes and hair as white as baking soda works on a doll’s dress, sewing the buttons on the front of the tiny garment. A young girl, ten or so, is building some kind of pyramid out of Legos. A middle-aged man with reddish skin and straight, ink-black hair, whittles a piece of wood. All of them are crafters, creating something. Dioramas, models, clothes, jewels. They work with glue, glitter, wire, nail and hammer, cellophane, mylar, gingham. Some of them write, their pens careening over yellow legal pads, vellum, the backs of envelopes, and even speckled composition notebooks. All of them create things—some ugly and primitive, some beautiful and precise—with their eyes closed. Their eyes, behind their shielding lids, move rapidly, as if they are dreaming. Their hands move independently of their bodies, making, creating, piecing together, joining thread and daubing paint. Everything they make has some element of that sacred hue. The pinkpurple, purplepink. Even the music that is played—the bearded man in the gorgeous gown plays a clarinet—even that sounds like that color. This place, this room, it is a Temple. In the center of the circle, a flower begins to manifest. It spills upwards, becomes a kind of robe, and in the center, stands a woman….

  ***

  Someone is calling his name. From far away. “Linc…. Linc….” Is the voice real? Or is it the cry of some bird? Linc can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. What’s marsh and what’s Bayside Motel. What’s dream and what’s painted.

  Then comes the frantic knocking and he sullenly pushes the cobwebs of sleep and dream aside and stands up.

  “Just a moment,” he says.

  The room is spinning, and his head feels like it’s been swaddled in cotton. But he eventually makes it to the motel room door, and unlocks it.

  There stands Xavier. Short, cute as a button Xavier. His tiny pixie dreadlocks like the fronds of some undersea plant, his brow-line glasses.

  “Are you okay, man?” he asks. “When you didn’t show up for the third day, Howard sent me here.”

  “It’s been three days?” Linc says to himself as much as he does to Xavier. “I…I’m still a little…”

  The tarmac of the parking lot begins to blur. He needs to sit down, soon. He sways in the doorframe.

  “Whoa, there,” Xavier says, as if he were a skittish horse. The thought makes him giggle. “Why don’t you sit down,” he says, leading him into the room. Linc sits down on the bed.

  “Let me get you some—Jesus.” Xavier pauses. He’s looking at the work on the wall. It’s still not complete, but at least the marsh-bells have been colored in. That particular color is easy—she provides it. The other colors—the blues, browns, greens and whites—those he has to mix himself. The piece has grown until it covers the whole wall above his bed.

  “Linc. When did you start this mural? Does the motel owner know about it? Why did you—?” The questions come fast and furious, in a volley. He can’t answer them all. Or, maybe, he can.

  When did you start the mural? I don’t know.

  Does the motel owner know? I don’t care.

  Why did you make this? Because of her. For her.

  He doesn’t say these things aloud. He just sits silently and watches while Xavier takes in the tribute. It wasn’t meant for his eyes, but Linc knew that he would be a good acolyte. He might be a better acolyte. Linc had seen some of his artwork online—he’d done some illustrations for a web-based publication. Haunted black and white faces that peered out from pools of water that were overlaid with leaves in autumnal colors.

  “Oh, man,” says Xavier. “We need to get you to a doctor.”

  The marsh-bells on the wall begin to glow, like lanterns. Like fireflies and the moon and stars. All in that wonderful, amazing color.

  Can’t Xavier see it?

  Xavier sits next to him, on the bed.

  “I don’t need a doctor,” Linc says. “I just need to sleep.”

  “Okay. I’ll…let you rest. I will check in with you in a few hours.” Xavier stands up.

  Linc gently pulls him back down. “Stay with me,” he says.

  ***

  Two brown bodies blend in the motel room. Fingers and arms become vines, find crevices and nooks. Lips join, tongues entwine. They paint and shape each other, with their hands, and their mouths. Seed and soil and souls join in the magenta glow from the marsh-bells on the wall. Penises become stamens, coiling and entering many different orifices. Semen becomes paint and ink when they both take up brushes and pens and work on the mural that mirrors the marsh surrounding them.

  20: Ensemble

  Fuchsia

  Nights were the worst, when the world drained of color and shape. The child could barely understand the harsh language of the pink demons, and understood their cruelty even less. The food was strange in scent and texture, bland and rubbery. The women were even stranger than the men in their stiff costumes which were little more than cages made of fabric. The rituals were endless, days of sitting on hard benches and singing to the carving of a tortured man who hung in the corner of a dark wooden cavern. The weather of this place was abysmal, blistering days that could swing into torrential downpours at a moment’s notice. The morning fogs, the smothering humidity, the stinging biting and burning clouds of insects that were everywhere.
The bitter cold that froze the waters of the marsh and killed everything. The horrors of it stretched from horizon to horizon.

  But, in spite of it, she loved the land of the pink demons, in a way that they could not see or comprehend.

  The daylight hours revealed the beauty of the land. The grass, which was green, brown and yellow. The water, that shimmered in tones of blue and brown and even black. And the flowers in the spring. After the endless palette of the miserable journey—grey, white, brown and endless slate-blue sea—her eyes drank in the color as if she were starved. Rose mallow, purple echinacea, brilliant goldenrod, white asters, all hidden amongst the cordgrass. The butterflies and moths that fluttered among the vegetation were as beautiful as the flowers, white wings threaded with silver or black wings speckled with azure and white. To the child, color was everything. Color was more than just something she saw. The color blue felt like lamb’s wool, gentle against her skin. Yellow tasted like sugar. Bright red things made her itch—she avoided looking at cardinals or flowering crimson bee balm. Purple always calmed her. It was the color of peace and the marsh was full of its balm: petunias, phlox, coneflowers, skullcaps and bull thistles were everywhere.

  The child’s connection to colors almost made her ignore the evil ways of the pink demons. Almost. She saw men with horse bits in their mouths, and raised welts that were rivers of pain trickling down backs. She saw wrists chafed by manacles and fingers blistered by picking tobacco and rice. She heard the pink demons screech out ugly words to those who labored in the sun or in the waterways.

  The language of the pink demons was a violent, rough one. Words rasped against her ears. Eventually, she came to understand it. But she would not speak it. The sounds were like burning rocks in her mouth. To listen to it was to hear hatred. To speak it would be corrosive.

  They gave her a name, Amarantha, and called her Ama. But mostly they called her nigger, or burr head or little monkey or spook. That was if they noticed her at all. “The little nigglet is mute, and probably feeble-minded,” she once overheard a demon say, when she could finally understand their language. Because she was mute and supposedly feeble-minded, her job was to assist the grandmother of the family that owned her.

  Fiona MacCubbin was as wrinkled as a sultana, crowned with a feathery storm of white hair. She was a large woman with a red mole that grew hair on the right side of her face. Even her own grandchildren called her the Ogress due to her grotesque appearance. She walked with a cane, both due to her age and to the hammertoes she had. She spoke in an English thickly flavored with her Scottish heritage, with bits of Scots Gaelic slipping through. The Ogress was the nicest of the demons. She called the girl her ‘little brownie’ and told stories of the Old Country to her. She, too, had once lived by a marsh, and like Ama, had loved and feared it in equal measure.

  The marshlands were a magical place. When she got a chance, she would collect shells and feathers to show the Ogress. Mrs. MacCubbin would comment on or ignore her finds; her lucidity varied from day to day. That was when Ama began drawing the things she saw. At first in mud and dust. The Ogress was so enchanted at her ‘little sprite’s’ scribbles that she let her use her supply of ink and paper to practice.

  ***

  Linc’s mind was the worst one she had ever been trapped in. The images she saw there terrified her. Even Shadrach loved his strange body more than Linc loved his. The hatred the young man felt for himself was as wide and deep as an ocean. As endless, with many different currents. Nights, he would flay his dream self, and rub salt over the suppurating wounds, so that it was raw and infected. Even the red and yellow exposed mass wasn’t enough. His sins flew through its filmy gauze like oil-encased birds, their feathers blackened by noxious chemicals. She saw roach-infested buildings, the floors littered with food and needles. Rooms full of men and women dancing to music that sounded like tea kettle whistles and sheets of metal, dancing not out of joy, but because they had to or else. Low-lit rooms full of antsy manic men, libidos guiding them to each other for frantic couplings. Then there were the crystals that appeared in his dreams. A forest of crystal trees that burned or a river made of the shards. Smoking, snorting and injecting the jagged pieces into his veins. Veins that drained of blood, teeth that rotted in his mouth. The yawning abyss of exhaustion, the hummingbird-quick flashes of euphoria.

  Lincoln was possessed by his hatred. He was poisoned by it, as much as the blood in his veins was poisoned. The soil of his soul was rocky, and she couldn’t find purchase on it. Then, Ama-Fuchsia remembered the beauty of the marsh-bell, the will-o’-the-wisp. The color of her temporary name. Magenta, fuchsia, purple-pink, pink-purple—that was the color of peace, of sanctuary, of dreams. It was a sacred color. She radiated it through his blasted, twisted inner landscape.

  ***

  In the crucible of Linc’s soul, Fuchsia found the name and the life she had discarded and forgotten. When the Ogress died, there had been no need for a mute house slave. They took her artwork away, and sent her to the tobacco fields with its swarm of mosquitoes, click beetles and chiggers, the punishing sun, the hard soil. When she didn’t meet her quota, she was punished. No evening supper, and harsh words in that horrible language. The other people who worked alongside her thought she was strange and kept their distance. They thought she was stupid, or devil-touched.

  Ama-Fuchsia couldn’t remember when she slipped away from the MacCubbin plantation, or what incident had been the catalyst for the escape. She just remembered living in the marsh, moving from islet to forest every day. She’d snatch things from dwellings adjacent to the Shimmer Marsh, food and paper and ink, and abscond into the wetlands, where she could be in the landscape she loved. She had died at one point or another. Transformed, like water into mist, ice into water.

  ***

  If Lincoln’s inner landscape was hell, Xavier’s soul was paradise. It was full of color, carefully cataloged. Where Amarantha felt color like a sensation, Xavier examined it, broke it apart into components, and mixed it together. Color was a puzzle to be solved. Ama learned new terminology from Xavier. Hue. Tint. Shade. Lightwave. Spectrum. Prismatic. Palette. Where Lincoln made deformed organic demonic shapes out of his darkness, Xavier constructed elaborate buildings made of color and light, cathedrals and arcades and statues full of careful calculations. She wandered through Xavier’s creations, aware that he was trying to define her.

  Ignis Fatuus. Eidolon. Ghost. Phantom. Echo. Feral child. Blue light and red light, combined with extra-spectral wavelengths. Marsh-woman.

  ***

  She moves between the two of them, between cold mathematical structures and tropical gloom. Soil enriches soil. Soul joins soul. They seed each other, and she seeds them.

  Iris

  Iris checked Xavier’s room. He was still absent. He’d been gone for two nights. His laptop was still there, so she knew that he hadn’t left town.

  Maybe he and Dr. Lenski hooked up, she thought. She didn’t know for a fact that Lenski was gay. But it would have surprised her if he wasn’t. Tamar hadn’t liked him, for some reason.

  “He sucks the energy out of the room,” she’d told Iris one time. The aura that surrounded him was dull grey. It had the same texture as industrial carpet. It was like mist, in that it obscured any flare of emotion, or, indeed, personality that he might have had. Iris found him pleasant enough, a cheery and unassuming presence. Tamar visited the Whitby-Grayson Museum at least weekly since it had opened, absorbing the artwork, and the marsh woman’s strange influence. Tamar believed Dr. Lenski had a dampening effect. “She’s weaker, when he’s around,” she said. Just before she’d left Shimmer, she called him a “pink demon.” It was an odd phrase. Lenski wore pink, that was true. But he was hardly “demonic.”

  She shuffled back into her room, mildly discomfited. Xavier’s aura had become streaked with whorls of magenta. This didn’t bother her that much. It was inevitable that something would be stirred up by his research. What did bother her was his affect. He avoided
eye contact with her over the week, and mumbled greetings. She told herself that he was just preoccupied with his research, but she couldn’t ignore that he had the same distracted quality Tamar had before she went off the rails.

  She put these concerns aside, and focused on clearing Tamar’s things out of the closet for donation. All of the clothes were ready to go. Iris didn’t fit into any of them and she wouldn’t have worn them if she had. It would feel weird, as if she were putting on Tamar’s skin. There was also a box of her accessories. Bracelets, costume jewelry, and the cloth flowers she pinned to her hair. Toward the end, Tamar had only worn the cloth marsh-bells Iris had made. She kept one, and considered adding it to the pile.

  Iris remembered making the flowers out of tulle, silk, nylon and wire. Each micro-blossom was hand rolled and meticulously affixed to the center of a wool felt ball with tiny beads of glue. The work required precision, and she frequently pricked her fingers. But none of that mattered. The blood drops, or the pain. Because while she worked, she was in that dream sanctuary, in Fuchsia’s presence. It was addictive. She would lose hours, and sometimes, a whole day in that becalmed place. Fuchsia’s marsh was better than the real Shimmer Marsh. The colors there were more intense. The cries of the marsh birds painted the sky. The gulls’ bleat made clouds, cirrus wisps. Frog croaks grew silver mists. The great blue heron was the color of the water, seemed to be made of it, and the black and red ibis’s curved beak was like a pen, etching the landscape into existence.

  Iris came to a decision. She would get rid of the lone cloth marsh-bell. It was a trigger. It was one more thing that reminded her of Tamar.

  Her cellphone beeped, interrupting her reverie. It beeped a couple of more times as she fumbled it out of her pocket.