Suzanne laughed. ‘Amazing! It is as though you have tried to live my life over. For my son also is an artist, creating renowned shadow plays.’
Irene felt insulted by the revelation. To include the accomplishments of her son in her inferior measure was especially aggravating. But she felt not herself, too out of sorts to respond to the challenge.
Suzanne lifted her glass towards the ceiling. ‘To the echoes that resound throughout the spheres!’
Irene lost her taste for wine. ‘What is the year?’ she asked demurely.
Suzanne shook her head as she swallowed. ‘You must not be so rigid. We belong to the ages.’
‘The stuff of legend,’ Irene quoted.
‘Well, we all have different stories.’ Suzanne turned her head and smothered laughter with her hand, turning it to a cough. When she recovered, she went on, ‘And we are all mutable. Details become inexact; biographers become interpreters; hearsay, gospel. But consider the alternative: to be only the people we are. Do you see the great fallacy of the artist’s life—that striving for total individuality, for self-realisation through self-expression? It is a glorious delusion. For by climbing the higher tier, we are exposed to interpretation, and so belong least of all to ourselves.’
The white screen lit up and applause erupted from the patrons. Irene was greatly relieved. She anticipated the spectacle as eagerly as she no longer wanted to speak with Suzanne.
‘Come, we must go,’ Suzanne said as she rose, grabbing Irene by the arm.
‘But I want to see the shadow play.’
As Suzanne gazed towards the screen, Irene thought she read a curious expression of yearning and resentment on her face.
‘It is light from behind and the figures that eclipse it. It is no mystery worth our time. Come. It is changing again. We must leave before it becomes too cramped and Satie is truly dead.’
Irene tried to watch the change. She saw no movement, but each time she redirected her gaze, some other element was different. The space narrowed and the walls curved in towards the ceiling so that the room took on the character of a tunnel. The busts disappeared, and the art shrank once more and rearranged itself, though not quite as neatly as it had begun. The chairs aligned in rows and faced forward as the crowd settled respectfully, all slightly older than Irene remembered.
‘Come on!’ Suzanne insisted.
The grip on Irene’s wrist was tight and she felt nearly dragged through a crowd of spectators. She tried to excuse herself, but soon found it impossible to identify whose body she jostled. Her hat fell over her eyes. The grip on her wrist snapped free, and Irene tripped, hurling forward; she put one hand out as she yanked the obstruction from her sight with the other.
She watched the newspaper tumble down the steep sidewalk, blown by the cold wind coming off the bay. ‘San Francisco,’ she said, and she knew she had no need to see the date on the paper to guess the year. It was cold and overcast and in every way Monday.
The clack of a metal latch turning drew Irene’s attention. A woman opened the glass door beside her and asked, ‘Were you waiting to come in?’
Irene meandered through the small gallery. She was surprised to see that she didn’t remember any of the other works that were shown, and felt momentarily ashamed she’d been so chagrined about her photos that she had apparently failed to even notice two multimedia pieces that were, at least for the time, quite inventive. But she knew her experience was not about them. She regarded her nude body in black and white. Lewis had created a narrow depth of field to blur focus on different compositional elements, but the photographer’s lurid eye dominated every image. Irene conceded it might not have been entirely his fault; the boldness she drew upon to reveal herself translated unfortunately as wantonness. Still, they weren’t as bad as she remembered, even if she came off as a hussy.
‘These pictures are terrible,’ Suzanne said.
Irene hadn’t noticed her come in. Her hair was a black cascade crashing down over one eye. She wore a Romeo Void t-shirt with three neat razor cuts in parallel.
‘I know,’ Irene said, ‘but check out the hottie.’
‘You have a lovely figure,’ Suzanne allowed, ‘but better for painting, I think.’
‘We all have to leave our mark.’ Irene squatted and pointed at a small, dark spot on the wooden floor. ‘There.’
‘Blood?’
‘Yes.’ Irene touched the dried droplet with affection. ‘You should have been here Saturday. There was quite a row about the photos.’
‘A fight? Over you?’
‘Of sorts—a heated discussion. Thomas took exception to the character of the photos; he thought Lewis was being deliberately exploitative. But I saw something else in Thomas’s anger—something I had no idea was there before. Milo will be born in a year.’
‘They fought in the gallery? Appalling.’
‘No. There was no fight. Thomas gets nosebleeds if he is too worked up.’
Irene waited for a retort, but the other woman seemed stunned blank. It was as though that last detail was too pathetic to elicit abuse. Laughter swelled in Suzanne’s throat, but she fought to suppress it. The effort was charitable, and allowed Irene to hear the story as an outsider, so that she, too, saw the humour of it. The women burst together.
‘Of course, that is not how the story went,’ Irene added. ‘Ask anyone today and they’ll tell you Lewis hit Thomas.’
‘That is just as well: Better to be struck, even if the blow went unanswered, than to bleed without being hit!’
‘Exactly. There was no benefit for anyone involved to correcting the story. It even gave the show a little undeserved, extra ‘heat’ among the bohemian glitterati.’
The curator approached them. ‘Can I help you ladies with anything?’
‘Yes,’ Irene said, ‘I’d like to buy all of these photos.’
The curator’s practiced expression of delight turned genuinely quizzical as she shifted gaze between the photos and Irene. She seemed to consider several questions before she asked, ‘Are you a relative?’
Suzanne intervened, ‘A kindred spirit.’
‘Ah.’ The curator was clearly unsatisfied with the answer. ‘You understand the photos must remain on display for the duration of the show?’
‘No, I must have them today,’ Irene said. ‘You may contact the artist. I am sure he won’t mind at twice the asking—including commission, of course.’
The curator cocked her head, dubious of Suzanne’s intent. She shot one last glance at the photos as if reassessing—and instantly dismissing—their artistic merit. ‘Allow me to make a phone call,’ she said, and moved to a small table at a back corner of the gallery.
‘You realise it couldn’t possibly have happened like this,’ Suzanne said.
‘But it adds an element of mystery, don’t you think? Besides—what was it someone once told me? “You must not be so rigid”.’
‘But we don’t live in the real world.’
Irene looked at herself in black and white—tawdry, desperate, but dreaming beyond the ignominy of the situation. ‘Have we ever?’ Expecting no reply, she took Suzanne by the hand and asked, ‘Where do we go next?’
After declining Erica’s offer to stay and help him for the hundredth time, Milo swept the floor of the small theatre under the café. It was his ritual of conclusion—not bowing to the applause, and not conversing with the enthusiastic small crowd of patrons from the farthest reaches of the U.S. and beyond until the last had gone. It was his time truly alone in the theatre, after the demands of his muses had been satiated. He had done it for the three years before his mother disappeared, and for the twenty years since.
Milo was troubled this evening, and called upon the unalterable calm of his ritual to ease his thoughts. After the house lights came up, he had come out from behind the screen to meet his appreciative (if diminutive) audience as usual. Just as he shook hands with an elderly couple from Manila, he noticed two women exiting the theatre. One attractive woma
n he had never seen before, but her companion looked exactly like his mother, though not as he had ever known her. She was too young, younger even by a generation than she had been when she disappeared. But the look of mischief was as enduring as the face was altered. As sure as he was that this young double could not be her, he very nearly called out, ‘Mother!’—but how could he do that?
STRONGER THAN ALL STORMS
I wish I could say I went hiking in Wayne National Forest and then became lost, but the truth is I never had any well-defined sense of location or direction, and didn’t care if I didn’t, as I had no intention of ever exiting the woods. I was certainly unprepared for any venture other than the one I had in mind; I had no backpack or sleeping bag and no provisions, not even a snack or a bottle of water. I left my car by the side of the road with a note saying I’d had engine trouble and had caught a ride to the next town to arrange a tow. The only thing I took from it was the revolver with which I intended to end my life.
I was not morose or self-loathing. I very much wanted to live. Unfortunately, a parade of doctors had informed me I had no choice in the matter. They were all terribly curious about my rare cancer, and assured me repeatedly that, while they had no hope of saving me, the data they gathered might one day help them save another life. They may well be right about that, but when it became clear to me that the only thing left to record was the timeline of my demise, I excused myself from their care. I felt cheated of my life, and so became selfish of my death.
My family is not close, and I have moved too often to develop long-term friendships beyond those of my youth. My school friends I have kept in contact with irregularly, and, as they have all remained in our hometown, I was always the odd man out on those occasions I returned. Nevertheless, I am not a misanthrope, and I like to think I have a generally agreeable personality. So I knew there would be some to mourn my passing, just none to whom I felt I owed more time before the event.
Those were the circumstances that led me to wander through the forest with a gun in my hand one summer Saturday evening. The heat had been moderate for the season, and in the fractured shadow of the canopy, the air was close and humid but pleasantly cool. Other than the one very wrong thing in my body, I was otherwise healthy, and though lingering weakness from my treatments left me periodically winded, I progressed into the woods with limited difficulty.
The thing that disturbed me most about the idea of suicide was the unfortunate mess it left. I was determined to do my best to not burden any poor soul with the grisly discovery of my corpse. I hoped predation would make quick work of my remains, but to ensure as much time as possible for the process to take place, I walked deep into the forest, eschewing anything that looked like a trail, trying to imagine the most desolate spot to leave my flesh. I had put an outgoing letter in my mailbox for my carrier to pick up on Monday; it would inform my sister of my passing and the circumstances thereof, and that my body would never be discovered—hopefully discouraging anyone from the attempt.
Though I was at peace with my plan and my goal, as I said, I did not want to die. Perhaps this disinclination made it impossible for me to be satisfied with any potential final resting place. Also, the day was fine, the walk strangely invigorating to my failing body and spirit. I couldn’t imagine leaving the world when there was a moment of joy left to wrest from it.
And then the weather turned. The sky darkened and lowered; wind whistled through the hollows as through the cracks in a tomb, and I was frightened again of death. I tried to steel myself, reasoning that the last good was gone for me, and now was the time—but now it seemed sad, too sad, a capitulation rather than an escape from my body or a refutation of my fate. It was just as I didn’t want it to be.
Rain began to fall in large, cold drops, a few at a time. I didn’t know what to do. Should I try to wait out the storm? Where?—and why? The sky broke suddenly; the smatter of drops became a deluge in an instant and smothered the waning light of day. I squinted into the near-black torrent and realised I was truly lost. It occurred to me release was in the palm of my hand, but when I looked at the gun, it seemed the most useless tool imaginable in the situation. I tucked it into my belt, but when a cold rivulet ran from the barrel down my backside, I tossed the thing at a rotten trunk.
I laughed with release. I had delivered myself from responsibility—let the storm kill me! I entreated it to do so. I called for lightning to strike me down. I begged a God I was not sure was listening to do me this one favour. I clambered through the clutching undergrowth and mud towards higher ground, chasing my death. I pulled myself from trunk to trunk, up a hill to a bald slab jutting flat from the rise like an altar placed millennia ago for just this occasion. I crawled to the edge and pounded the rock with my fists and yelled again to the turbulent dark above me. Attempting to stand, I slipped and tumbled back down the embankment. I let my body go: I did not try to correct or control my descent, in some vague hope that I might hit a tree or rock in just such a way that I could die painlessly.
Instead, I stopped with a dull thump against the same rotten trunk where I had hurled the pistol. I retrieved it. How could I not?—we had been delivered to each other.
The rain continued to pour. Thunder rumbled in every direction. Somehow, out from the roar of the tempest I parsed a tapping sound I could not identify. I hobbled in the direction from which I imagined it emanated. I passed around the base of the hill I had toppled down so ungracefully, on through a depression between inclines to a flat hollow beyond. The tapping became louder until I recognised it was no quiet sound at all, but a violent banging muffled by the downpour. The trees thinned and opened. Twin sprites of lightning racing across the clouds illuminated a most unexpected scene.
Deep in the heart of the forest I had stumbled upon a kind of settlement—or what had been a settlement. Wrecks of a half dozen buildings that might have been cabins faced each other across a muddy clearing patchy with overgrowth. No wall stood complete; naked, rotting timber leaned in angles against dark mounds of refuse. A few brick fireplaces were recognisable, crumbling to various forms of pyramid. I manoeuvred around an unidentifiable hulk of black iron sunk into the earth that I might look directly at the most remarkable part of the tableau: At the end of the ruined rows, facing the empty town stood a house in good repair. On the apex of the peaked roof of this wood-planked cabin I beheld the silhouette of a man hammering at the coarse shingles. His broad swing was powerful but methodical, as though he was unhurried or undisturbed by the conditions in which he was forced to work. I, on the other hand, was anxious to be out of the rain. I stumbled through the grabby mud. I hailed the man but he appeared not to hear me. I yelled again, loud enough, despite a mouthful of rain, for him to hear, but he paid me no mind. He seemed consumed by his work. I guessed that if there were a considerable leak inside his house, he might be disposed to complete repairs with alacrity. Now was clearly not the time for a chat, even if the weather little affected him. Still, I was surprised that he didn’t offer even a wave by way of acknowledgement.
Though I had no wish to be up on the roof with him, it seemed reasonable that if I hoped to enjoy his hospitality, I should at least offer to help. I did not see a ladder from my position, so I circled the house. I returned to the front without discovering by what means he got onto the roof. I called again, but only half-heartedly, as it seemed as unlikely as before I would be met with a response. When I was not, I ducked onto the porch. Here, there was but limited relief, as the porch was narrow, and the rain swept sideways. The windows of the home were intact and clear, but the interior was dark. I tried the handle and the door opened. I went inside and hurriedly closed the door behind me.
The figurative use of ‘finding shelter from a storm’ is so prevalent that it is easy to forget the exquisite satisfaction of obtaining the real thing. I wiped my face with my hands and shook the water to the floor. I breathed musty—but dry!—air with deep appreciation. A flash of lightning through the curtainless windows revealed an
uncluttered, broad room with a fireplace opposite the front door. I guessed the lack of ladder meant the man had gained access to his roof from inside his house, and I wondered again if I should attempt to join him. While manners indicated I should spend as little time within a stranger’s house as possible before announcing myself, attempting to do so would lead me through a dark house that I wasn’t sure was otherwise uninhabited—though I couldn’t imagine any other inhabitant could sleep through the dual sounds of storm and carpentry. It occurred to me that the rustic home might not have electricity—though if there were light to be had, then, again, I should expect a second occupant to have lit a lamp. Perhaps the man sensed the coming storm and sought to affect repairs before it arrived, and instead found himself caught in the deluge. Understandably, he had then not been back inside to light a lamp. I felt I should be welcome to do so myself.
As I had wished to not be dissuaded in my suicide attempt (which seemed even then so very far in the past), I had left my phone at home, and so could not rely on the glow from its display to guide me. So I stepped from flash to flash across the room, making slow progress to the fireplace and mantle above, where an oil lamp rested. I felt dust on the glass. During one flash I could see that the oil in the lamp was low and clouded with unknown silt. I thought it must be a back-up—or that I had been entirely wrong about the lack of electricity—and wondered if it would light. Blue-tip matches lying nearby were fragile and their tips stubborn to spark. Five broke before success. The lamp did light, though it protested by sputtering incessantly, so that what light it gave off was unreliable and died in the dark corners it was meant to dispel.
A reek of something like mouldy vanilla emerged from the dubious oil and seemed to profane the startlingly dry air in the cabin. Given its location in the forest and the ubiquitous damp that had surely brought the other structures to ruin, I would have expected the wood to have been soaked deep with earthy and green smells, even with the fastidious care clearly given it. Instead, the air was so stale it was crisp, if such a thing can be. The wood of the floors, the walls, and every naked stick of furniture (such as there was) was a dull, sandy blonde. I turned to see my every step recorded in a layer of dust.
The Hidden Back Room Page 30