But now, lying here, the time for play-acting is past; he has no energy for it, but contents himself with the simple thought that Jeffrey is there, on the other side of the lens, sharing his room in silent communion.
Three years after the whole arrangement began, Officer Li had come to Walter with some new information regarding Jeffrey’s online activities. He showed him the digital artworks his son had begun to send out around the globe, told him Jeffrey was so highly skilled at hacking there wasn’t a computer system anywhere on the planet he couldn’t penetrate. He was causing quite a stir, apparently, while managing to keep his identity a total secret.
Initially, Walter struggled to understand why on earth his son didn’t want people to know it was his digital still lifes and virtual bouquets they were receiving. What was the point otherwise? What if someone else claimed the glory? “He’s tossing aside the chance to really make something of himself in the eyes of the world,” he’d complained to Li, “just as when he shut himself away. He and I are not at all alike in this. It must be his mother in him.”
It was then Li told Walter that Jeffrey had given himself the moniker Lone Wolf, “an apparent reference,” he said, opening his notebook, “to the French painter Paul Cézanne.”
Walter had shot him a look.
“Master Yeung has been gathering information on said painter, research which has been fairly extensive over a period of some months.” Li showed Walter the spreadsheet, documenting his monitoring of Jeffrey’s online activity.
“Also,” Li continued gently, “he recently ordered a copy of your — your late wife’s book on the subject. He has been studying it closely, I believe, given how often he searches its terms.”
Li was nothing if not thorough, and his loyalty to him has been second only to the doctor’s. Friends they could never have been, but inseparable they had become, by default.
It was all to do with Annie, of course it was. But it was he, Walter, who knew Annie, not Jeffrey. It was Walter who thought about her every day, and it was Walter who knew what Annie would have wanted him to do. Walter’s strategy had to be one of long-term investment.
He instructed Li to do whatever it took to facilitate the dissemination of Jeffrey’s artwork and protect his anonymity. “But he must never know — never, Li — that I am assisting him. It would ruin everything.”
These past few weeks, since his confinement, his dear wife has been in his mind even more it seems, every waking and sleeping moment. So much love Walter has felt, and so much guilt and confusion. He has interrogated his memories of her and of their marriage to the point he no longer knows what he remembers, what he knows.
He has been confronted by the notion that, had she lived, Annie would not have liked the person he has become. But he also likes to think that, had she lived, he would not have become that person.
So it was her fault, was it? She wasn’t a real woman at all, but your image of a woman, a nullifying force for good, smothering your own drive for power and domination — is that it?
He lets out a low, rattling sigh. Why can he not have one clear thought without those apples challenging him, torturing him? How much longer will it go on?
His hours of contemplation in their presence have revealed more about himself than he thought possible, and it has not been pleasant. Collecting art was a way of trying to get closer to Annie, placing her in his mind and in his heart, trying to imagine her liking him for it. But, in the end, instead of bringing them closer, it pushed them apart. His lack of real feeling for any of the paintings has only highlighted the gap between them. He used to be so certain of everything but, even if she’d survived the crash, would their marriage have survived?
You failed her. You treated Annie’s love of art with a secret contempt.
Such pain. He could curl up tight, tight as an apple.
It is only as he approaches his end — because he approaches his end — that he has opened up to what a painting might be able to show him, something he’d previously dismissed as pointless.
The idea for the painting machine was to prove to himself, and everyone else, that what these artists did was nothing special, nothing he need try to understand. He was wrong about that, as he has been wrong about so much else.
Walter had hoped that Jeffrey’s awareness of his illness, his watching him shrink and shrivel, would be enough to persuade him out of his rooms. If this was a movie, there’d be a touching bedside reconciliation. That film he’d gladly fund. But his deep sadness at his own unutterable stupidity has only grown these last few months, along with the depth of Jeffrey’s silence.
The only glimmer, for Walter, was being able to witness, along with everyone else, Lone Wolf’s tribute to Leslie Cheung. ‘Flowers for Gor Gor’, so seemingly real he thought he could smell them, had delighted and disturbed Walter. Their scent had drifted across his bed, called up and mixed with the memory of the flowers he’d plunged into when frantically searching for his baby son on that awful day. ‘Flowers or Gor Gor’ was utterly beautiful, even he could see that, and it broke his heart.
He is able to pass a hand over his music player, still has the strength, just about. The voice of Leslie Cheung drifts across his consciousness… ‘In my days of emptiness, questioning the meaning of life, you were there…’ this listening to his music a way of being close to Jeffrey, whose vaguely remembered voice and Leslie’s recorded voice merge…
Jeffrey’s life of self-imposed isolation is the same as the life Walter chose for himself after Annie and Walter Junior died. Walter had wanted Jeffrey around because he looked like his mother, but it also pained Walter to see Annie there, in Jeffrey. The child became a living memento mori; the face and form of Walter’s dead beloved and the sole repository of all his hopes.
That first time he’d seen Annie, over thirty years ago, drifts across now… ‘With courage we faced the challenge of life…’ Her slender figure leaning against the wall in the art gallery, the intriguing sense of meeting one’s match… perhaps a myth, his delusion of instant compatibility.
He’d resented Jeffrey for living, a perverse reaction that he should have arrested the moment it arose. But that would have required a level of self-doubt, a level of awareness he did not possess back then. Now, he’s not sure whether Jeffrey reminded him how much he had loved Annie, or whether he reminded him of his doubting that love. His son was a living admonishment, a second memento mori and this one for his marriage. Walter had put the child Jeffrey in his own room and only went there when he could face him, which was not often. Then, ten whole years ago, Jeffrey had put himself in there and never come out, just how Walter had shown him. ‘If there’s a chance for me to live again, I hope to meet you in the journey of life…’
How wrong to think he could control everything. By overcoming their struggles to start a family, he had learned nothing tangible from those difficult early years…
‘Thank you for sticking by me in the stormiest days, and keeping me company in this journey of life.’
Giving in to her desire to drive her and his sons herself… he has tried and tried and tried not to blame her… But he had loved her… he did love her…
‘Our separation is transitory. I can only hope that through the fire of my love I live on in your heart…’
What he would give for Annie to hold him in her arms. He tucks a hand under his pillow and feels there his wife’s slim book, Shadow is a Colour as Light is, as cool and dry as her own hand.
*
Jeffrey lies on his bed, quite, quite still. He breathes deeply, calmly. He has taken to lying down with Walter when he sleeps, though Jeffrey does not always fall asleep himself. He keeps his father’s bedroom on permanent display so as to be always next to him, stares for hours at Walter’s desiccated and wizened body. His hair all gone, so shrunken he barely registers on screen, he is a ghost already.
Sometimes, he alternates between guarding Walter and gaming; long-form quest games being his preference, projecting himself int
o those alternative worlds to while away the indistinct waiting time. He plays so long he enters into another kind of meditative state, projecting himself into the alternative worlds of his father’s mind, merging with scenes that replay on the screens, or in his imagination, visions Jeffrey makes up, like he’s writing his own Walter Yeung fanfic, in which he himself appears.
In this present moment’s half-vision, half dream, the clattering whirr of his desk fan becomes the motor of a huge sliding door, which is the entrance to the Yeung family mausoleum. His inner camera pulls back and he watches his avatar padding barefoot across a vast stone floor.
It’s a scene from countless games and movie spin-offs; the inside of some ancient catacomb containing sought after treasure but fraught with many dangers. But where are Jeffrey’s weapons?
He has none, but a flaming torch materialises in his hand and, emboldened, he slinks through unchartered space until he stops at another opening, a black hole through which he must enter.
He passes through the doorway to find a body’s form laid out on a grandly ornate catafalque, a sheet of midnight-blue velvet covering it. Jeffrey pulls the sheet away to reveal his father’s face, restored to plump health below his shock of thick grey hair, re-grown.
Suddenly, Walter’s eyes flick open and Jeffrey jumps back. “Father!”
As the echo of his cry falls away, a call comes from somewhere else inside the space; a mellow, soft voice he doesn’t recognise but seems to know. “Jeffrey? Jeffrey?”
He pans round and creeps further into the dark, the torch lighting a halo of ground around his feet.
Eventually, a wall emerges from the bluey-black void before him. It is lined with carved niches and, in one of them lies a small body shrouded in what appears to be a white tablecloth. Beside the niche, a printed label of the kind you might find on an art gallery wall. It reads, Walter Yeung Jr. (1988-1990).
Jeffrey pulls back. So these are the trials to be faced, the tribulations to overcome, the battles fought, all while unarmed. The next niche along contains another, adult, body, this one uncovered but whose shape he can barely make out. He brings up the torch to read its own label: Gor Gor (1956 - 2003).
He releases a huge sigh, strong enough to extinguish the torch he is holding plunging him into pitch darkness. Before he descends into panic, a dim light source glows from a niche above those of his two elder brothers — the real, and the wished for. He is able to make out a figure slowly rising out of a dense covering of flowers that lift up and fall away until his mother is standing there, smiling. She comes to him then, hugs him tight in her arms.
It’s over too soon. She vanishes and his arms tingle with the residue of her hold. It is time to leave, but where, he thinks, where is the hidden treasure? There is always a treasure. Oh, it was that hug, of course…
He retreats through the space, back towards his father’s corpse. There is light this time, rows and rows of torches illuminating the tomb. Walter’s eyes are closed and he appears to be at rest.
But Jeffrey spots something bulky and square beneath the midnight-blue sheet that he hadn’t been aware of earlier. What’s this — bonus treasure?
He pulls the midnight-blue cover away and it pools on the floor. His father’s arms are crossed over his torso, gripping a small gilded frame. Jeffrey peers down at the obscured canvas, but can’t make it out.
He pulls and pulls at Walter’s arms until, at last, one stiffened limb falls away and there is Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Jug, his mother’s favourite painting.
Jeffrey springs up from the bed, his heart pounding with the clarity of his vision. He couldn’t have planned it better himself.
Sophie, New York — 2010
Sophie came to a halt on the Met’s grand staircase, the one leading up from the Great Hall. She was experiencing a strange kind of déjà vu, or was it a memory? An image flash triggered by another sense, but she couldn’t put her finger on what; maybe the metal sensuality of the banister under her hand, or the heady smell from the spectacular arrangement of flowers that drifted down to her, or the sandpapery shuffling sound her pumps made on the stone steps, or… no, she couldn’t yet figure it out.
Joel came back from the bathroom, had been feeling unwell, he said, and climbed the stairs. He looked pale, fragile, grey round the eyes, and the front of his hair was slicked across his forehead from splashing water on his face. She should ask if he was feeling better, but such enquiries could open up into all kinds of mess and she was feeling pretty brittle herself right now.
As he drew level, she said, “Remember when he came to the exhibit?” nodding towards the giant poster hanging above the main ticket desk. There was Marius Woolf, imposed onto a backdrop of Mont Sainte-Victoire in darkly brooding profile, advertising the movie tie-in ticket deal. “Christa had to Google him when his agent confirmed, because she’d invited so many people she could barely remember who was who. When we saw that LaChapelle photo-shoot we screamed! Him all oiled-up by the motel pool in his satin kick-boxing shorts like that…”
Christa had even used one of those vivid, hyper-real images — Marius lying naked on an inflatable lounger, floating in the blue-green pool itself — as her screensaver, for a while, and, in the run up to the exhibit, their nerves and excitement mounting, his delicious ass became a reference point for anything they considered remotely praiseworthy or wonderful.
“When he arrived we weren’t sure it was really him, because he looked so different. Now he ends up starring as my favourite painter in a movie. It’s so weird, right?”
Joel didn’t answer. He still looked dizzy, as if unsure where, or who, he was. “Do you really want to go do this?” she asked him. “Are you sure you’re up to a movie?”
Despite his fragile appearance, his response was clear and certain. “Sure I am, Soph. I’d love to see it with you. C’mon, course I would.” He put on a deep, blockbuster-movie-trailer-voice: “Marius Woolf is Paul Cézanne.” It was a relief to see him joke. “I do remember that we lived off his money for two whole years,” he added with a queasy smile. “Christ knows I couldn’t provide for us after my dad cut me off. My skill set wasn’t exactly prodigious.”
She’d been anxious about letting those paintings go, at the thought of someone else owning her self-portraits. When she’d told Christa she wanted to keep Sophie #1 for herself they were worried the deal might fall through if he couldn’t have them all, but the memory of how super nice he was about this meant she became aware of Joel’s centering of his own feelings, yet again, in the story of her success.
“And do you also remember that I made a choice, Joel, to use that money to focus on my painting? You would finish your first collection, we agreed, which you did. And it got published. I’ve no regrets about where that money went, and if it was the same situation in reverse we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
“You’re right, Soph,” Joel said. “I’m sorry. I’m… I don’t know. Sorry. Let’s keep going.”
She’d become better at challenging the pull of his vulnerability, though her own strength confused her because it was fragile too. She could challenge him like this, but immediately felt guilty for it and, on top of that, there was just the sheer, urgent drama of Imogen’s needs and thinking what was best for her now that Joel was better, now she knew the cause of everything that had happened.
It was difficult resisting the pressure from all sides; from her mom and dad who, every phone call these days, were urging her to give him one more try, for Immy’s sake, or from the friends who encouraged her to go it alone, all ready to print their Sophie #1 t-shirts and cheer her into the future, and those few much closer to her, like Christa, who knew the situation’s complexities and what a shambles she was, people who’d care for her no matter what she decided, but who she didn’t want to let down, nevertheless. How to know what’s right in the face of all that?
“At least if the movie’s dire we’ll have seen the paintings again,” Sophie said, by way of co
nciliation.
They were at the top of the stairs by now and Joel stopped and gazed to the bottom. Sophie was afraid all of a sudden that he was going to launch himself into the air, imagined his broken body sprawled on the stone ground below. The déjà vu returned, and she felt, vividly, Joel pulling her down with him, shattering her.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “our staircase at home looked to me as big as this one. I was made to sit at the top for hours, totally quiet and absolutely still. It was one of my punishments. I’d listen to my father’s friends and business associates, his secretary and his PA, all moving around and talking to each other. They didn’t know I was there — I was invisible — and I found I could project myself into them if I tried hard enough.”
They’d been together a while before Sophie realised exactly how wealthy Joel’s father was, and then how much Joel despised him. The first time Sophie met his father, she sensed a vibration emanating when he held her hand for too long, as if he was trying to consume her, taunting Joel through her, intimating that he could take her if he wanted. “Oh she’s a fiery one, Poop,” was what he said when she’d pulled away. She was glad when Joel and his dad finally split for good, though that relief didn’t last long because it took the lid of everything.
“The only time I kind of liked my dad,” Joel said, “was when we weren’t in the same room, but I could still hear him. I liked to know he was there but now I know it was like monitoring a snake. If he was going to attack I needed to know exactly what was coming.”
Where was this all coming from today, Sophie wondered. Should she be worried? He wasn’t agitated, or angry, looking everywhere except at her. She didn’t think he was playing one of his past games.
He moved on into the light-bathed corridor filled with the Rodin sculptures whose dark bronze greedily absorbed the atrium’s diffuse light, and Sophie followed. They drifted together through the nineteenth century galleries, as they had done many times before. It felt as if no time at all had passed since they were last here, despite everything that had happened since. Still, now that they were speaking again, there was a whole future ahead of awkward meetings in nice places, which they’d never escape, linked as they were and always would be by their daughter. People moved on, apparently, incredibly, which was as unimaginable to her as inhabiting a different body, being another person entirely.
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