by Evan Lewis
loud bark of joy, and I can’t tell if she’s joking. I laugh too, not really caring.
After the truth-telling she kisses me on the forehead, and says “Wish me luck, darling.” And I do, fervently. But she doesn’t need it. She’s far too practiced, too professional, too wonderful for anything to happen, and the dust always makes it into the pouch, and it slowly fills to just under
I start bringing a flask, hiding it about my person, because I never see her without first being influenced. So I drink more. I find it harder and harder to walk without stumbling, as more of my attention is diverted to the creature by my side, but I, naturally awkward, appreciate the fluidity of speech that comes with the drink. She thinks it’s cute. That probably doesn’t help. I bring two.
She leaves before dawn, every day. She tells me to close my eyes, and so I do. I feel the warmth of a body close, so close to mine, and the slight pressure of her lips on my own, and then her presence fades. When I open my eyes she is gone, and I feel a pull, as from a failing gravity, in my insides.
But I am always confident she will return. And she does.
Then, one day, she doesn’t.
The first night I am too bewildered to be scared or angry. The second night I am not.
I walk my route, in order to keep my mind off of her absence, but I see the imperfections in each piece of art, the ones she orchestrated, that I was a party to, and I start to walk faster, and faster, until I’m sprinting down a hall of priceless treasures, with no one to tell me to stop. My jacket whips at my sides, and I rip it off, tossing it onto a nearby sculpture, surely someone’s masterpiece, reduced now to a lowly coat rack. I scream for her as I’m running, and only now does it strike me as odd that I do not know her name.
She does not appear. I shout myself hoarse in vain. I drink the whole of a flask at once, then a second.
I run, and I run, and my steps become less sure. Liquid drains from my stomach, becoming the much-looked-for catalyst for action that I need, because it is connected with her.
In a fit of inspiration, I decide that she will come back if I continue the ritual without her. I decide I am being tested. In an effort to scrape a painting, I raise my flask towards the nearest and, very carefully, force it through the age-worn canvas.
The machine finally decides I may be a threat. Alarms sound, and I am found by police ten minutes later, under the punctured masterpiece, sobbing.
Sobriety brings a painful dawn. Holding cell. Alone. Throbbing head resting in crook of arm, arm resting on concrete bench. The ground is strewn with small chunks of the worn concrete, evidence of mistreatment, and there is a metal toilet in the corner. The window outside the bars lets in a torrent of violent sunlight, and I shut my eyes against the attack. Suddenly, though, the offensive stops. A shadow passes, comes back, remains stationary.
I open my eyes. She is there.
She isn’t though. She is as she was when I first met her, capable of little more than forward motion and affirmation. The playfulness, the love, the joy has been surgically removed; all substance, no smile. With difficulty, I rise to meet her.
As I trod the six or so steps separating me from my love, or the shell of my love, the room becomes amorphous, fluid, susceptible to change, and tiny ripples of force roll across the floor with each placement of my foot. The ripples smash into one another, form waves, crash up and down the walls and ceiling, restoring the room to its basic components; stones, then pebbles, then dust, then atoms, until we’re standing together, facing one another in the clean light of a dawn streaming out in every direction, to the limits of our vision and very probably beyond.
“Why did you leave me?” I ask, hearing my own petulant tone in my ears and cringing, yet still not regretting. I need to know.
She raises her head, and I can see a face devoid of emotion, eyes closed, yet twitching slightly, as if holding something back. “You aren’t like me.”
This is the worst thing she could say, and yet I expected it. There is a fundamental incompatibility in our relationship; I am real to everyone, while she is real to me alone. “Can that not be changed?”
She looks pained. She knows the answer, as do I. I find that part of me knows almost everything, while part of me experiences all with fresh eyes. “Yes,” she says, reciting the script I have written with such care, such precision, so that, when the time came, I would make the right choice. She is no less myself than I am. She knows that, as do I. The part that needs saving, the part that can experience newness, the crux of me, has no idea.
The girl stretches out her arm in front of her, and the pouch of dust is there. The remains of a thousand-thousand artists’ intents. I walk up to her, and, as I grab the pouch, my hand brushes against her palm, and I feel a shudder of intense longing. She shuts her eyes tighter, visibly in pain, holding back the tide. I know what to do; how could I not, when I’m the one telling myself to do it?
I undo the drawstring, being careful not to spill even the slightest bit of the dust, as it is a potion, whose every ingredient is essential. I raise the bag to my lips, and, pausing only slightly, begin to drink.
My body fights back almost immediately. It is, after all, the one to be sacrificed, severely underutilized, mistreated, never reaching its full potential. So it will be shirked. I continue to drink the dust, of all ages, of all places, of all beauty, so that I will become like, not the artist, but the art itself, at its inception, before it can be corrupted by the physical world; an idea. Just that. Nothing more.
The world around us quakes, and the omnipresent dawn begins to break apart, great swaths of sky falling out of existence, revealing arbitrarily sinister blackness. Still I continue, gulping down the dust, until, just as the last of the sky blinks out of existence, I finish.
The concern on the girl’s face is evident, as the force behind her closed eyes presses up against the last fleshy barrier. I can see it; the only light in our dark, dark world is coming from her eyes, filtered pink by her eyelids. We are the only things in existence to the limits of our vision, and certainly further.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” the girl asks, “You still have a choice.” She puts her hand on my shoulder, and I know that, even if I did, I wouldn’t take it.
I nod, and she smiles, and it is wry and sad and hopeful. She opens her eyes, and a world explodes outwards, stars flinging themselves at the black, and at me, and soon all is white, and lovely, and peaceful, and warm, and I sink into those feelings, and I swear I can feel myself dissipating, like a particularly stubborn gray cloud finally giving in to an otherwise perfect day.