by Robert Pobi
He thought that maybe, after all this time, he should feel something. Real emotions like anger or regret or disappointment—anything but the vacuum of apathy that couldn’t even swirl itself into any sort of caring one way or the other. Jake had done a stellar job of dragging his emotions out behind the figurative garage and executing them—the same garage where he hid his collection of pornographic holograms of the dead from his regular life. There were images, now numbering in the tens of thousands, of every lost mutilated soul he had ever seen; his sick little fetish that he kept locked away. Along with anything he had ever felt for the man he was staring down at now.
Jake took a sip of coffee from the vending-machine cup. It was cold now and he wondered how long he had been standing there, lost in his head with the what-ifs and the dead.
He turned away from the bed and walked out into the hall. His father’s old room was three doors down and he went to see if they had finished the final coat on the wall. For some reason, he needed to see that bloody portrait erased from history.
It was well past visiting hours but with Jake firmly entrenched in a homicide investigation, drop-in privileges had been approved. It was the hang time after the patients had taken their meds but before the first rounds of the nighttime staff, and the floor felt empty. There were no old ladies shuffling along in their robes, wheeling IV stands like divining rods to the smoking section. The only noise other than the sound of his boots on the battleship linoleum was the distant chant of classical music and the more immediate sound of a thin, reedy snore. An ice machine hummed off in a small corridor that led to the utility elevator. Other than that, it was quiet.
Jake pushed the door to the room open, worried that they had already filled the space with another patient. The single wedge of light from the hallway exposed an empty bed. He expected to be greeted by the smell of fresh paint and disinfectant but recognized the metallic scent of blood as soon as he was inside. He closed the door, locked the deadbolt, and flipped the light switch.
The bloody portrait still clung to the wall, the pigment baked to black.
Jake stared for a second, wondering why it hadn’t been painted over. He looked at the featureless face, mesmerized. But something had changed—a one-inch line of masking tape ran around the portrait. He stepped closer and saw notations on the tape. There were pencil-marked arrows around the masking-tape frame, pointing outward, with the words CUT OUTSIDE TAPE printed in handwriting that Jake recognized from somewhere.
Before he had backed up a full step, he realized that the handwriting was David Finch’s and he was having the painting removed.
He thought about the mercenary little fuck paying the hospital for the portrait. Then his mind’s eye focused on Finch, in his tailored suit, standing self-importantly under a spotlight on the salvaged floor in his Soho gallery. He’d stand poised just right while the final work by the great Jacob Coleridge was hoisted into place by two workmen using a lift. He thought of the way he would market the piece, leaving a few raw nubs of stud extending beyond the skin of sheetrock like denuded bone. It’s so raw, he would say. So primal. The best work Coleridge had ever done. His last, too.
Price?
He’d shake his head sadly, eyes downcast as if embarrassed at having to discuss something as crass as money.
But you must have an idea of a price!
He’d look insulted, as if the potential client hadn’t understood what he had said. Then he’d slowly let a pensive look bleed into his features, as if the thought of parting with the piece had never crossed his mind but he was beginning to give it some thought. Sure, he was a gallery owner—but he was also an art lover. And some pieces you simply couldn’t put a dollar sign to. But the sincerest thing he’d say, while placing his hand conspiratorially on the potential client’s arm, is that there just isn’t a price on friendship. And Jacob Coleridge was—had been—his friend.
Forget Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, and Willem de Kooning (hand placed reverently over his heart). Did they ever paint in their own blood? I don’t think so. They were/are great. But they were/are not Jacob Coleridge. Coleridge’s work was known for its truth. And after all, what could be more truthful than sacrificing yourself for your art. Bleeding for your art.
Then he’d look back at the painting and say maybe it should go out into the world with someone who would appreciate it. Maybe it deserved to have a loving home. Then he would raise his hand, twitter on the precipice of indecision for a second, then put it back in his pocket, shaking his head and saying, No, I couldn’t. He was a friend.
How much?
A friend! Finch would repeat, fraternal pride in his voice. Wipe a single tear from the corner of his eye.
And after a perfectly measured pause, he’d say, Fifty million dollars.
After all, you didn’t rise to the top of a field so full of navel-gazing as modern art without possessing consummate skills in both theatrics and bullshit. A PhD in ass-kissing didn’t hurt.
The toe of Jake’s boot dented the sheetrock and stopped at the stud behind, puffing out a white cloud of dust. The wall shuddered and a suspended acoustic tile spun to the floor. The second kick, a little higher and to the right, went through the sheetrock, punching out a neat square hole. Another ceiling tile fell like a dry leaf.
By his third kick there were footsteps in the hall. They passed by, searching for the noise.
On his fourth they doubled back.
He reached down into his boot and pulled out the knife he had carried there since he was a teenager. Instead of the clumsy Mexican-made switchblade of his youth, his hand came up with a Gerber titanium airframe knife; standard issue for FBI personnel.
Someone tried the door. Rattled the knob.
“Fuck off!” Jake roared, and thunked the blade a quarter inch into the wall at the top corner of Finch’s indicated cut-lines. He slashed down, the carbon steel sliding through the yellow topcoat, and the wall hemorrhaged white dust. He drew the knife down, then across the bottom, and up the other side.
“I’m getting the key,” a voice said from the other side of two inches of maple.
Jake hauled the bed over to the door, jammed it up against the frame, and locked the wheels; it wouldn’t stop a determined man but it would slow down a single nurse. Then he went back to his father’s blood, pulled the knife out of the wall, and slid it back into his boot.
He kicked out the bottom corners, wrapped his fingers around the ragged dusty skin that hung in shreds around the holes, and flayed a massive strip off the wall in one clean yank that uncoiled him from a crouch to an overhead reach. He took the painting off in five irregular patches, bits of blood and white dust floating in a small weather system above the floor. A few small scabs of paint and blood remained and he kicked and punched these in.
He folded the five latex-and-blood-covered parchments into a quick ball, kicked the bed away from in front of the door, and snapped the big stainless thumb bolt open.
Out in the unsure light of the corridor, a nurse was bounding toward him, jailer’s keys jingling in her hand. She slowed to a shuffle and barked, “What were you doing in there?” She stopped a few paces away, looking like she’d just realized that she was alone in a dark corridor with a six-foot-two madman who tore up hospital rooms in the middle of the night.
Jake held up the folded skins of the painting. “I was told this was going to be painted over. Not sold. Not salvaged. Painted over.”
“That’s medical waste. The hospital can do whatever they want with it. I was told—”
Jake took a step toward her and she stopped, backed quickly up.
His long arm came up, his finger aimed at her head. “I don’t give a fuck what you’ve been told or what you think you have the right to do, lady. This is going to be destroyed. You grok me, sweetheart?”
Her face shifted emotions for a few seconds before the elasticity gave way to a rigid stare. She stepped aside and Jake walked on down the hall, his boots leaving a dusty trail, the portrait
of one of his father’s demons tucked under his arm.
Behind him, the patients who had been jarred awake began chattering like insects.
39
Jake swung into the circular drive and his headlamps lit up the police cruiser sitting on the shoulder, facing west on 27. The cop behind the wheel had a big silhouette and he covered his eyes in the glare of the old muscle car’s lamps. Jake pulled up under the tree, got out, and walked over to the cruiser. When he was a few feet away he saw Scopes grimace and try to wave.
As Jake came up to the cruiser, Scopes rolled down his window. “Special Agent Cole.” He sounded sincere.
“You draw the shitty end of the stick?”
Scopes nodded. “Short straw.” He paused for a minute, looked up at Jake, his face a series of shadows in the moonless night. “I’m sorry about last night. I’m not usually an asshole. I was trying to make everyone feel a little less—I don’t know. Unhappy, I guess.”
Jake waved it away, looked up at the house. “Anything happen?”
“Light’s on in the northeast corner of the house.” He nodded up at the master bedroom. “But nothing’s been turned on or off since I got here.”
“I appreciate it.”
Scopes rolled his eyes. “Making amends.”
Jake turned away.
He walked back to his car and pulled the balled-up blood painting from the passenger seat. It was damp and heavy, like human skin; it was amazing how the salt air out here got into everything, filling the pores with molecules of water that weighed it down.
The lights were off on the main floor and he knew Kay and Jeremy were asleep upstairs, both of them wearing tiny T-shirts and smelling like a life so beautiful he wondered how he had managed to earn it. The painting under his arm somehow felt immediately lighter. And infinitely less important.
He had started asking himself just why he had come back here. His feelings for his old man did not come into play at all and he realized that he really didn’t give a fuck what happened to him one way or another. So what was he doing here? Why had he even talked to the doctor who had phoned him at home in New York? At the first mention of his father he should have said thank you, but we’re not buying, and slammed the phone down. But he hadn’t. And the only reason he could come up with was that his mother would have wanted someone to look after his old man and since there was no one else around to do the job, it had fallen to Jake—the taker of jobs that no one else wants. Like deciphering the last moments of people’s lives.
The part that was getting under his skin—skinned, the voice whispered and he shrugged it off—was that the hatred he had felt for his father, that turpentine-tinted taste of disgust and anger, was long gone. Without the anger, he felt a lot lighter, a lot more flexible, which, when he thought about it, boiled down to better. And wasn’t better the American dream? Everyone wanted to forgive their parents, move on, and build their own fucked-up lives on their own steam. That’s just the way things were done. Amen and pass the doughnuts. So what was the blackness he felt skittering around in the shadows? Why wasn’t he walking around giddy and happy and glad that this was all behind him? The short answer was because something still felt wrong.
The geometry of the studio rose out of the terrain above the beach and in silhouette it looked like the boxes Kay had stacked at the curb that afternoon—asymmetrical, canted to one side, and filled with old booze bottles. Beyond the building, past the horizon at the edge of the world, there was a small break in the clouds and the moon shone through in a single dim spear.
Jake walked past the studio and stood at the edge of the grass where the landscape gave way to a fifteen-foot drop to the beach. The wind was a solid beat now and the ocean was rolling in on ten-foot swells that had finally broken into waves. The swells dropped onto the beach like wet hands, pounding up sand and debris in noisy slaps. Jake absentmindedly scoured the surf to see if Elmo’s corpse had washed up. From the ledge of grass above the water all he saw was black.
Up and down the beach there were no signs of life. From his vantage point on the shelf of grass he could see an easy three or four dozen houses and there wasn’t a light on in the bunch. For a second he felt his chest tighten with the thought that he was the only man left alive, like a character in an end-of-the-world novel, everything around him just wishful thinking. There were no boats out on the water, no planes blinking hopefully in the night sky, no visible signs of life anywhere except for the strobe of the lighthouse to the east. He headed for the studio.
The sight of the three-dimensional bloody featureless men on the walls and ceiling of the studio looked like a backdrop for a magic act and there was something more menacing about them now that it was night. When he dropped the balled-up painting onto his father’s framing table it hit the masonite and tufts of dust mushroomed out. He stared at it, wondering what it was, what it meant, and how the hell he was supposed to deal with his father with the specter of all this extra drama dragging at his heels like some drunken horror-riddled shadow. The ancient Kenmore fridge where his father used to keep enough food and booze to keep the pigment flowing without having to go back to the house was humming like a robot working over a complicated math calculation. Jake pulled it open to get a drink. His eyes swept past the Coke to three big paper bags that contained chunks of lead pigment; his father was old school—the environment on his list of concerns right after a manned mission to the surface of the sun.
He cracked a Coke open on the lip of the tool box and the cap hit the floor and bounced into a corner. He sat down on top of the paint-splattered surface and put half the bottle away in two furious gulps. It was bright and sweet and it brought tears to his eyes and a burp to his throat that he ripped out in one explosive report. He looked around the room to see if he had attracted the attention of any of the bloody men splattered on the space above him.
Jake polished off the rest of the Coke, dropped the bottle into a dust-covered cardboard box, and pushed himself off the steel cabinet. The crumpled ball of the portrait sat on the table, folded in patches of hospital yellow, plaster-dust white, and drips of Jacob Coleridge’s most valuable pigment. Jake circled the table a few times, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes never leaving the bundle sitting under the task lighting like a car bomb waiting to fulfill its destiny.
With the taste of Coke still fresh in his mouth, he began unfolding the portrait like a cabbage, layer by layer, some pieces tucked into others. He slid them around, laying them out in sequence, and for one minor second he knew that in some twisted way Finch had been right; this was art.
When the painting was assembled he took a step back to get perspective and he thought he heard the figures on the walls and ceiling gasp in approval. Even they had to admit that it was beautiful.
Jake stared down at it. He may not have had the talent of his father when it came to mechanics, but Jake understood composition, perspective, and technique. He had always paid attention and the least one could say was that he was fifty percent his father. What he was looking at now was astounding.
Part of that came from it being painted in blood by a half-crazed man. Another part came from his having chewed off his bandages and used his charred, nerveless fingers as palette knives, the split bone and half-broiled cartilage of each finger lending a different edge to the lines in his diminished arsenal. He had lost three fingers—would probably lose more—and Jake saw at least seven distinct lines in the painting. He knew that his father’s natural ability had come out without thought, or premonition—it had come out in the rawest of ways, in instinct.
The portrait was not sloppy or haphazard like a child’s finger painting but controlled, directed. You didn’t need a degree in art history to see the consummate skill in the rendering. It had a raw and honest power that was impossible to ignore. But the skill was incidental; the import was in the meaning.
He went back to the old Kenmore for another Coke and thought about it.
There was no doubt that his father was t
rying to say something, even if it was from behind the foggy curtain of dementia. Little bits of almost-signal were getting through from the other side and what was coming out was…was…
What?
The big what, of course, was, What difference—if any—would figuring out what the old man was trying to say, make? Like deciphering Finnegan’s Wake, at some point the detective has to ask himself, What’s the point?
Was this man—this faceless man—the manifestation of a psychotic episode? Schizophrenics often had religious visions, so why not his father? Because the old man had never believed in God. He had never believed in any sort of higher power other than random chance and pure accident. These renderings had nothing to do with the idea of church or God or Satan. This drawing of the bogeyman was something more immediate, more menacing, than some made-up bullshit—Jake couldn’t explain how he knew, only that he did.
Jake was an expert in examining evidence from someone else’s point of view. But throwing the entire Freudian history of the Coleridge men into the mix pushed him back from any sort of objectivity and he knew that objectivity was where unbiased, untainted, unpremeditated observation was able to function. You throw in the father—son dynamic, especially one as poisoned as theirs, and the results were guaranteed to be skewed.
What did the painting of the man in blood mean? What did the repeated studies of him on the walls mean? Why did he have no face?
And what about the canvases piled around the studio in skewed columns? The highest one looked to be about eight feet and there wasn’t one under six. He walked through the pillars of canvas, shuffling some around, picking some up, examining them, putting them down. Jake knew if his father had painted them, they had a purpose. He wouldn’t—couldn’t—believe that they were just the byproduct of a lifetime spent at the easel, with no greater objective other than to take up time. No hell. No way. If Jacob Coleridge had believed enough to pick up a brush and put it to canvas, it was because it meant something.