The painting aside, the most unusual thing in the room was the big, rough, wooden platform, covered with another very nice hooked rug, that had been built on top of the hydraulic lift dead center in the floor. The platform extended about ten feet in either direction down the long part of the room, but in width it was markedly lopsided: on one side it extended eight or nine feet, within a few inches of the wall where the painting hung, while on the other it was built out only a couple of feet. The short side had been counterweighted with a couple of big oil barrels full of hard cement so the platform wouldn’t tip toward the painting. That freed up the space on the other half of the room, which was a mass of shelving jammed with cans of paint and solvents, brushes, mirrors, lenses—all sorts of paraphernalia for painting, projecting, and photographing images. A door stood open between the sets of shelves.
I stepped forward and took a good look at the painting: early morning in a frozen, empty desert. At the bottom of the picture—below the white snow, the dark shadows, and the black sky—the green of the sea almost made my eyes ring. Coming toward the water, increasing in size as they neared it, were footprints stamped into the snow, and lying at the water’s edge was a small blue rectangle. I tried to make it out, but it was only roughed in, just a slap of blue, in sharp contrast to the almost photographic detail of everything else.
I said, “This is beautiful.”
“You think?” a woman said behind me. “I’ve looked at it so long I can barely see it anymore.”
“Why? You get stuck on it?” I turned to see a heavyset, oddly crumpled woman glide through the open door in a motorized wheelchair. Probably in her mid-sixties, but she could have been younger or older; her skin was smooth, but the muscles and tendons of her throat had loosened, and her jawline was a suggestion. She wore a singular full-length garment that owed a design debt to a nightgown, layers and layers of white tulle or whatever that gauzy stuff is that they use on ballerina’s skirts. It buttoned at her plump throat, billowed out to fill the chair, and ended demurely at her sock-clad ankles, which were crossed. The gown had seen whiter days; it was dirty to the point of graying and smeared haphazardly with paint.
Bolted to the left arm of the wheelchair, in a rig designed specifically to hold it, was a battered forty-eight-ounce can produced decades ago to hold three pounds of Hills Bros. coffee. It had about five inches of brown water in the bottom, and a little flotilla of cigarettes sloshed back and forth as she powered up the wheelchair and headed past me toward the picture.
She studied the small blue rectangle for a few seconds as I looked down at the chop of salt-and-pepper hair, and then she said, “I never get stuck. I’ve been interrupted, that’s all.”
“By me?”
She didn’t look away from the painting. “Don’t be silly.”
“What’s that? The blue thing?”
“When I can get back to work,” she said, wheeling part of the way toward me and fishing a pack of Merits out of one of the layers of her garment, “It’ll be Will’s passport.”
“Footprints to the water and a passport right there?” I said. “Looks like a setup.”
She shook out a cigarette and lit it. Then she nodded acknowledgment. “It is. Will is a very undependable boy. It’s a setup from the word go. Will is as alive as you are. In Verdinha, that is, so I suppose he is, as far as you’re concerned, fictional.” She pointed the smoking tip of the cigarette at the picture. “The east coast of Verdinha. Temperate but with occasional cold winters. Language is derived from a sort of bastard Portuguese, religion has borrowed a lot of lace and brimstone from Catholicism, lot of guilt for leverage. Place has a kind of South American zeitgeist.”
“But you made it up,” I said.
She looked at me for a few seconds, and said, “I painted it. If that means to you that I ‘made it up,’ have it your way.”
“Just out of curiosity, why is the picture so big?”
“Got your phone?” she said, blowing smoke away to her right. I’ve never understood why people who smoke blow the stuff away from them instead of just sitting happily in a cloud of it.
I tapped my shirt pocket. “Sure.”
“Get up on the platform. Center yourself and take a picture of it. A horizontal, obviously.”
I edged between the painting and the platform, stepped up, and fiddled with the phone. When I had all of it in the screen, I shot it.
“Well done,” she said. It wasn’t exactly praise. “Now look at your phone. Does it look like a painting?”
“No. Looks like a photograph of a real place.”
“I’m good with perspective,” she said, “but the secret is that the painting is so big. By the time it gets shrunk down to photograph size, every detail has those hard edges you only see in photographic images. Whether it’s a real place or not . . . well, that’s a different question.”
“Amazing.” I looked at the painting from several angles. “So what’s Will up to?”
“He’s leaving Janet, I think. It’s the first step in his new life. They’re newlyweds, on their honeymoon, and he’s planned this for months. There’s a reason he’s doing it in Verdinha. But this isn’t why you’re here. I don’t suppose you smoke.”
“No.”
“Ahh, to have someone to puff with. Well, you’ll have to put up with it.”
“Are you going to finish the details on the passport, or is it so small it doesn’t matter?”
Her nostrils flared, a mannerism I’d read about but never actually seen before. “Nothing is so small it doesn’t matter. My assistant quit, and the passport is too low for me to get to. Stuck in this chair, I can’t bend down that far.”
“So what would your assistant do to help?”
“If I couldn’t get to it by raising or lowering the hydraulic lift,” she said, “She’d raise or lower the painting. The whole thing is on rollers, like window shades, side to side as well as up and down. When I have an assistant, I can pretty much stay on the platform and let the painting come to me.”
“So,” I said, “this picture, as I understand it, becomes part of a portfolio, a trip to a nonexistent country—”
“No” she said, with some heat, “not a nonexistent country. A country I know about but you don’t.”
“Fine. And there are other items in the folio—”
“Letters, tickets, snapshots, diaries, documents,” she said. “It’s different from folio to folio, but there are always documents. No civilization can exist without documents. They’re valuable because they tell you what people think is important.”
“And the items in your folio tell a story?”
She put the cigarette in her mouth and pursed her lips around it, then blew smoke out her nose. “They tell many possible stories,” she said, without removing the cigarette. “The people who look at one, or own it, manufacture their own stories, based on the documents and pictures and other things in the folio, letters or souvenirs or whatever tells them about what may have happened on the journey.” She shrugged. “Or may not have happened. Why Will dumps his bride, for example.”
“They buy the right to establish the truth,” I said.
She tilted her chin up. “Why not? It’s up for sale everywhere else.”
“Can I see some of the documents for, uhhh . . .”
“Verdinha,” she said around the cigarette. “In the wooden box, up on the platform.”
The box, which was about nine inches by twelve and maybe three inches thick, was solid on all sides except the top, which had holes bored in it at regular intervals. “So something can breathe?” I said.
She shrugged again. “In your version of the story, maybe.”
I opened the box. There were some airline tickets, already torn for boarding, baggage tags, a handwritten letter, a couple of snapshots, a marriage certificate, and a US passport, its distinctive blue cover barely c
reased. I opened it and found myself regarding a picture—I would have said it was a photo, but now I wasn’t so sure—of a bland-looking twenty-something male with a big jaw and small eyes, the kind of guy who gets hired part-time at Abercrombie & Fitch. His grin seemed half formed, as though he’d been snapped before he’d finished putting it on. “‘William Leinster,’” I read aloud. “Real name?”
She shrugged, but only one shoulder this time. “If you mean is there really someone named William Leinster, I’d say the odds are strongly in favor. If you mean is William Leinster really that person’s name, or is it an alias . . . well, that’s up to whoever owns, and thinks about, the folio.”
I flipped through the passport. It was stamped here and there in various faded shades of blue, black, and magenta, each dated and initialed. The countries were Loringia, Paronal, the Caliphate of Forania, Porraigne, and Outer Hester. “No stamp for Verdinha,” I said.
“Very observant. Part of the story, no doubt, another puzzle. Looks real, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’m going to roll myself over to the bed, and you’re going to help me get up into it. I’ve been sleeping in this chair for days.”
“Because you haven’t got your assistant?”
“Of course. I can get in and out of the chair on my own when nature raises its insistent head, but I can’t lift myself high enough to get into bed. Once I’m up, we’ll talk about the reason you’re here.”
Following her directions, I got Garlin Romaine out of the chair and up into her messy bed, where she lay, breathing heavily and looking like a Victorian grandmother doll, if there was such a thing. She wrapped both hands around her left leg and towed it to the left, sweeping the magazines aside, then sighed. “What a relief. How bad do I smell?”
“Honestly? Through all the cigarettes, it’s hard to tell.”
She gave a sharp little bark that sounded like practice for a laugh. “Showers. Something else my assistant used to help with.”
“If you don’t mind my asking—”
“She couldn’t take my smoking.”
“I didn’t mean that. I—”
“Of course, you didn’t,” she said. “Steeplechase accident. I was twenty-four. I went one way and the horse went the other, but somehow we ended in the same place, with Rocketeer—that was the horse—on top of me. Permanently disconnected all those tiny low-voltage lines that tell the bottom half of the body what to do.”
“Must have been awful.”
“I made it worse. I lay there for months and months, obsessing over all the places I’d never go, and I gradually realized that many of the ones I most wanted to see were places I’d never heard of. That was when I began seeing my countries.”
“How does it work?”
She scrunched her back against the pillows, and I got up, and she leaned forward as I put one behind her head. “At first I just saw them. They were whole, by which I mean they had their names, their climates, their topographies, cities, towns, languages, histories, religions, all that stuff. I started to draw them, and I kept that up until I taught myself to paint. And then it came to me that every country has documents. So I began to make documents, like Will’s passport over there.”
“Or Suley’s driver’s license.”
“Suley.” She closed her eyes. “The topic at last. She called herself Suley, but her shrew of a mother called her Susan Lynn. Susan Lynn Platz, who thought of herself as Suley, and Jeremy Granger made Suley her legal name, at least on the driver’s license and birth certificate I created, and then he named her again, as Tasha Dawn, of all the stupid, stagey things, and then he made her Tasha Granger, and with every new name things got worse.”
“Suley’s the main reason I’m here,” I said. I looked at Garlin Romaine, crippled at twenty-four, and made a bet that she’d be on the side of a girl whose childhood had been stolen from her. “Granger’s sort of forcing me to . . . well, cheat her, and I don’t want to do it.”
“Honey,” Garlin Romaine said, “there’s nothing left to take. It got worse and worse. The past year or so, what I saw was an animal that had been caged and beaten until it had lost the belief it could escape. Just waited for whatever was going to come next.”
“Why would he do that to her?”
“It’s his nature. She told me once a couple of years ago that the only thing that really interested him was seeing how far he could push his power. Taking people’s lives and tying them in knots, getting people with talent to whore themselves out doing things that were beneath them, just rubbing their noses in it. She said to me she didn’t think he’d be happy until somebody killed him.”
“Eventually,” I said, “I’m sure somebody will.” I went over to the platform, where I’d seen a canvas-backed director’s chair, toted it over, and sat. “So she kept seeing you.”
“I think I was the last person she liked in her whole life. After me it was all Jeremy and the wolves he threw her to.”
“How did you get involved in the first place?”
At first I didn’t think she’d answer. Instead she took a deep drag off the butt, hit the acrid stench of the filter, and glared at it as though it had betrayed her. “You’re a burglar, right?”
It sounded so bald, put that way. “Right.”
“Well, you’re going to have to pardon a bit of skepticism. You swear to me you’re on Suley’s side?”
“I do. And I will. On whatever you choose.”
She dropped the butt, which was almost all filter, into one of the glasses of water on the table. It emitted a short, affronted hiss, and she looked down at it severely, then waved her hand in the direction of the painting on the wall. “When I’d been doing this—this art, this work, whatever you want to call it—for a few years, a friend arranged a show for me in a little gallery in Venice. It was a surprise that I sold three of them, because we’d had a terrible time trying to figure out how to display the stuff, which is supposed to be experienced by going through the folder it comes in. Anyway, it turned out that one woman had bought all three, and that she produced a series about lawyers. Caseload, it was called. Or maybe Hard Case—they all sound alike to me. Overworked public defenders with good hearts and great hair, and the men wear more makeup than the women. She called me up and came to meet me where I was living then, which was a convalescent hospital in Santa Monica, and made me an offer. She’d seen the documents, the passports and customs forms and so forth, in the folios she bought, and she needed some for her show. Subpoenas, arrest warrants, lawsuit filings, ID cards, on and on. Her actors were a little sticky. If the arrest warrant was for Josephine Blow, they wanted it to read Josephine Blow even if it would never be seen in close-up.”
“Actors,” I said.
“Might have been silly, but it was good for me. I did four or five pieces a week, all sorts of stuff, everything from crime-scene reports and arraignment forms to laminated name tags, and then word got out. Within a few months, I had more clients than I could handle, and I had to start saying no so I’d have time to work on my countries. Eventually I met the assistant to a real dickhead of a producer named Frankie Greff.”
“The assistant was Jeremy Granger,” I said.
“I’d said I wouldn’t work with Frankie anymore, because he was a screamer.” She patted the many layers of her gown and came up with the pack of Merits. “So he sent Jeremy, who was, if nothing else, soft-spoken. We got along okay, compared to Frankie anyway. He even bought a folio from me.”
“And then.”
“And then a few years passed, and gradually I began to sell my real work often enough that I could monkey with the prices, make enough to live on.” She put the cigarette between her lips, slapped around the gown for a moment and came out with a lighter. “So I quit the documents. And then, a year later, Jeremy showed up with Suley and Suley’s mother.”
My phone bu
zzed, meaning someone had texted me. No one texts me except Rina, so I said, “Hang on, it’s my daughter,” and looked at the screen.
It wasn’t Rina, It was Anime, and it said, mach one? mach two?
“Sorry,” I said, putting the phone back. Mach One and Two, whatever that meant, would have to wait.
Garlin Romaine lit her cigarette, and through a cumulus cloud of smoke she said, “How old is your daughter?”
“Going to be fourteen at the end of the week.”
“Same age as Suley when I met her, then.”
“Sorry? I thought—I mean, Louie said Suley was sixteen when all this happened.”
“Nope. Fourteen.” She pointed at one of the sets of metal shelves along the wall of the big room. “Shelf on the right,” she said. “Second from the top, on the bottom of a stack of four boxes. Says ‘Suley’ on it. Bring it over.”
I eased the box out and took it back to the director’s chair. Handed it to her. She parked the cig in the corner of her mouth so she could look down without getting smoke in her eyes and popped the lid from the box. Then she rifled through a few odd-size pieces of paper and brought one out, which she looked at for a moment, her face empty, and handed to me.
The girl in the photo, which had been taken in front of a splotchy, neutral seamless-paper background that said “Yearbook,” still had baby fat, the vestigial chubbiness in the face that has little to do with weight and that disappears as the body reshapes itself. She smiled at the camera as though she was afraid it didn’t like her, a pretty but not beautiful girl who badly needed to please. The anxious eyes peered out of an aura formed by a dry frizz of white-blond hair that didn’t go with her skin and eyes.
King Maybe Page 21