“Pardon me, Father, but if there is a God you will find him walking through my father’s work.” He gestured to the painting high on the wall behind him. “Look at that one with the clouds, the angel’s form just slipping out of the mist. You see such clouds and the fact that an angel hides among them shouldn’t surprise you. No one since Turner has painted skies more magnificent than my father’s, and that is simply one particular sample of his powers.”
Gazing at the painting the priest drunkenly attempted to cross himself, and failed. “And that is why you no longer attend Mass, my son? Because our sacraments pale before your father’s great talent?”
“I understand that Father Gavin administers the sacrament, and has for years. He is the one who counsels the ill and the downtrodden. Your duties are strictly administrative, are they not? And yet you are the one whose portrait will be hung in the church hall.”
“Admittedly, I have no talent for people. I never have. Frankly I find the general populace annoying—all their petty concerns, when there are things of such spiritual beauty to contemplate, such as your father’s fine paintings. But I am the older priest—it is our bishop’s wish that I have my painting done first. I would not claim that I am deserving of the honor.”
“And yet you have not turned it down.”
“I have not turned it down.” The elderly priest looked into his empty glass, then filled it slowly, shakily, struggling to spill as little of the precious wine as possible. “You admire your father’s work so much, and you belittle your own. Is it possible you resent your father’s talent, and that is why you no longer attend Mass at St. Anthony’s, because you would be forced to encounter his finest work there—the ‘Three Angels and the One,’ ‘The Thousand Eyes of the Seraphim’ or his magnificent ‘Sancte Deus’? Or perhaps you fancy yourself some condemned child, fallen from grace after disappointing his father? Or a rebel, is that the way you think of yourself, Mr. S.D. Watkins, Painter of Portraits?”
“But, old man, who could be more of a rebel than the priest who hates his parishioners?”
The priest paused, then gulped down most of his glass. The wine seemed to have hoarsened his voice. “Your initials, S.D.? I do not believe I have ever encountered your first name. Surely he did not name you after his greatest painting?”
“My father was an intense, at times obsessive, artist. But he was not insane. My first name is Samuel, middle name Daniel,” the younger Watkins lied.
The priest shone his munificent smile and unfocused gaze on the portrait painter. “I believe your wound is bleeding again, a bit more copiously, I fear.”
Watkins held up his right hand, gazing at it as if he’d never seen it before. The bandage wrapping his palm was soiled and fraying, and so thin it appeared painted on, the texture reminding him, in fact, of a shroud his father had once painted over a contorted Jesus. The heart of the bandage was stained with a starburst black and maroon. “This is no problem. I hold the brush at the tips of my fingers, using my whole arm to move it across the canvas. As my father always told me, ‘When you hold it too tightly, you disconnect yourself from the thing you’ve embraced.’”
“But you’re ruining the page, my son.”
“I’ve changed my mind—we will dispense with further sketching. I will go attend to this, fetch a fresh bottle of wine, and when I return we will begin the painting proper. And I will tell you why I no longer attend Mass.”
Watkins went down into the cellar, grabbed a bottle of wine he had not watered down, and turned to the ramshackle cabinet mounted at a slant to the dirty cement wall. He peeled the bandage off his hand and dropped it. He pulled out fresh gauze from the cabinet, aware of all his paintings staring at his back, but he did not turn around. He groped about the table beneath the cabinet, found a dirty paintbrush, and jammed it into the open wound. He ground the brush into the raw tissues, tried to keep his eyes clear to watch, but they involuntarily clamped shut. He wrapped the clean gauze around his hand with his eyes closed. Overhead he could hear the priest singing to himself.
He painted the background in tones taken from the priest’s flesh illuminated by the flicker of firelight, then gradually darkened the lines so that the edge of a bookcase appeared, then a hot patch of fireplace. The priest stared with eyes wide open, wine glass tilted almost to the point of a nasty spill. Watkins thought he might actually be napping. He began to carve the form out of the bruised tones swimming behind the nodding priest. He looked carefully at the air surrounding the withered head atop the shivering shoulders, and painted what he saw there, the colors vibrating until the features became indistinct. But there was something there, if he could only see well enough to capture it.
“Is it the church’s recent troubles with—indiscretion. Is that what keeps you away, my son? Perhaps some unfortunate incident when you were a boy?”
Watkins was somewhat startled by the priest’s coherence, when he’d been thinking the aging cleric on the verge of unconsciousness. “I would hardly call those troubles recent. And no, I was not fondled by some randy member of the clergy. Not that any of that improves the possibility of my attendance.”
The priest nodded in agreement or perhaps simply in response to some inner, alcohol-induced rhythm. “It is a sad state of affairs. In the priesthood we yearn for the beautiful, for a spiritual life which will raise us above the concerns of the everyday. But we find we must wait so very long. Some find that beautiful spirit in children, and they lose their perspective. They simply lose their way.”
“And you, are you saying you lost your way?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I, for one, have never found any special beauty in children. They are simply loud, and unformed. But have you bought into the news propaganda—do you see all of us as monsters?”
“Many priests came into our home while my father was alive. Some seemed rather ordinary. And others, although I did not ‘buy in’ to their beliefs necessarily, are still among the most admirable, unselfish human beings I have ever met.”
The priest sighed, laughed. “I could not say so, from my experience.”
Watkins concentrated on getting the eyes right. If the eyes were not correct no other part of the portrait could compensate. “So are you saying your faith is not so strong?”
“There is nothing wrong with my faith in God, Child. It is human beings I have trouble with.”
“So you believe there is evil in the world.”
“Are you saying there is not?”
“No, but I would ask why. Your god, my father’s god, is he not omnipotent? If so, how can he allow evil?”
The priest laughed. “Perhaps your doubts of your own originality are justified, S.D. Watkins. The question of evil? Why do the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer? If I could answer that perhaps they would make me a bishop! It goes back to the fallen angels, I suppose. But such philosophical questions are not for the likes of us. You must simply have faith, my son.”
“The fallen angels. The ones who rebelled?”
“Lucifer sought to overthrow God. He had to be dealt with.”
“It sounds like an adventure story. An action movie.”
“Oh, I believe it may be the greatest adventure story of all time.”
“I suppose I don’t believe the spiritual underpinnings of our existence should sound like an adventure story.”
The priest leaned forward. “Son, are you in pain?”
Watkins became aware then that he had been supporting his wounded hand with the stronger one. His inflamed fingers barely kept their grip on the brush. Together they moved around the canvas making marks and elaborating on the hunched form of the priest in the middle of the composition. In the painting the priest’s face was still not focused. The angles of the shoulders were all wrong, or perhaps they were, at last, correct. “It is always painful to see clearly, Father.”
The priest snorted. “It is always painful to imagine more than you can be.”
“Are you referring to yourself? I o
nly paint what I am able to see. My father the great Martin Watkins, painter of angels, he was the one with imagination.”
Watkins calmed himself, forcing his brush hand to move at a more leisurely pace around the canvas, making corrections and adjustments, redefining lines, picking up details, using his pain as a kind of compass, or diviner, to guide him.
“Perhaps we should stop. I believe I may have drunk too much wine.”
“Just stay with me a while longer, Father—I’m not yet ready to take a break. I don’t want to lose the thread that will lead me into your true portrait. Tell me some stories. Tell me about the giants.”
“You mean Fe Fi Fo Fum, that sort of thing?”
“Don’t be coy. Speak to me of the giants in the Bible. They were the offspring of the angels and human women, were they not?”
“Oh, that’s simply part of the Jewish writings. The Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, that sort of thing. Nothing to take very seriously. Please do not tell me you stay away from the church because of giants!”
“Why, Father, the way you said Jewish—are you a bigot?”
The priest said nothing for a time. The only sound was the vigorous scratching Watkins made against the canvas, with too much force and too little paint. Finally the priest replied, “Yes, I am, but I would like to imagine that someday I will be a better man.”
“Sorry. I don’t possess that kind of imagination. Remember, I paint what I see.”
Watkins continued to paint vigorously. Paint and blood splattered his face, dripped down his arm to pool on the canvas.
“The angels had their way with human women, thereby corrupting humankind. It is a distasteful story.”
“But they not only corrupted them sexually—they corrupted them in other ways, did they not?”
“Things we were not intended to know.”
“Perhaps they taught us how to create art.”
“Their offspring were easily recognized. Even after the giants disguised themselves as normal they could be identified by their double rows of teeth, their distortions.”
“Congenital malformations.”
“Oh, I would never say that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t say that.” Watkins’ brush traveled over the sharp shoulders of the priest’s image. The shoulders began to transform, the flesh rising off the body. “But this story of giants, it sounds like the kind of lie you would tell yourself, like I’m a good priest, or I’m not a bigot, or I am this great, undiscovered artistic talent. A lie that makes you feel better about yourself.”
“I don’t believe I understand.”
“Humanity didn’t want to believe they were descended from this mating with angels, so they invented giants as carriers of the tainted blood.”
“Watkins, that is insanity. I will pray for you, my son.”
“Thank you. Your portrait is complete, by the way. I will send my bill directly to the bishop, if you don’t mind.”
“Perhaps that would be best.”
“Come look at it, tell me if it’s an accurate likeness, in your opinion.”
“Why, I have had so much wine. I really don’t believe I can reclaim my feet.”
“Take your time, Father. I will leave it on the easel. If you’ll excuse me I’d best go take care of my hand again.”
Watkins took a last glance at his painting. The image of the priest was still somewhat hunched, but it was rising to its feet, dragged heavenward by the translucent distortions in the shoulders and back and the warped transmutations in the flesh of the chest area, just opening up and catching the air.
“I really don’t believe I can stand,” the priest muttered.
“Have faith. Your faith may comfort you. When I was small I would watch my father paint the angels. Here, and in St. Anthony’s. I know now he painted other things during that period, a number of landscapes, some studies of workers down at the docks, but those canvases were lost among these countless images of angels, floating, sitting, standing casually or at attention, singing, dancing, doing for the most part what human beings do, except that they were larger than life, possessed of a kind of inner illumination.”
The priest stirred enough to say, “Lovely.”
“I suppose. But you know what bothered me? He’d modeled them after relatives, after neighbors, and some of the local priests. Not only their faces, but something about their postures, the general attitudes they expressed. I did not want to see it, but I could not deny my eyes. After that I could not look at any of those people the way I had before.”
Down in the cellar Watkins flipped on the light and gazed sadly at his heavenly host of creations staring out from their less-than-perfect, overworked canvases: their warped backs, their distorting faces, their double, sometimes triple rows of teeth. Their clouds of eyes. Their six wings. Their wings pulled from ruined flesh as if by a giant hand, leaving but a broken stalk of ethereal flesh, and still their mouths forced open, praising all that is holy, Sancte Deus, Amen.
Upstairs he could hear the old priest falling, dragging himself to his portrait, weeping.
BEING RIGHT
Michael Marshall Smith
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter who lives in North London with his wife, son and two cats.
Under that name he has published around seventy short stories and three novels—Only Forward, Spares and One of Us—winning the Philip K. Dick, International Horror Guild, August Derleth and British Fantasy awards, as well as France’s Prix Morane.
Writing as “Michael Marshall,” he has published five internationally best-selling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders and Bad Things, with The Breakers forthcoming. The Servants, a ghostly short novel set at the British seaside, recently appeared under the byline “M.M. Smith.”
“There’s nothing I enjoy more than heading out to a pub with my wife and spending the night setting the world to rights,” admits the author. “Sometimes, however, it can seem that I can do rather more listening than speaking.
“Then one night I discovered, to my bewilderment, that she felt exactly the same. She could not be more wrong, of course, and so from here came the idea of some kind of objective measurement—over not just one evening, but a lifetime ...”
IT WAS MONDAY, the fourth day of their vacation, and the fourth solid day of rain. This didn’t bother Dan unduly—you didn’t come to London, London in February, moreover, if you were looking to work on your tan—and they’d packed accordingly. The city was moreover full of museums, galleries, stores: it had history up the wazzoo, a lot of good restaurants and nearly as many Starbucks as at home. If you could bear to get a little damp in between stops, there was a good time to be had whatever the precipitation situation. The forecast—which Dan knew all about, having been woken by it at 5:30 that morning—said the weather was going to get better as the week went on. Which was hopeful, but either way, it was something you couldn’t do anything about. The weather was simply there. You had to just accept it, adjust your plans accordingly, move on. There was no point complaining. No point going on and on and on.
What you could affect, on the other hand, was jetlag.
If you were flying to Europe—which they had done many, many times since the kids left home—there was a simple procedure to follow. You were going to land in the early morning, so it made sense to catch some sleep on the plane (however fractured and tossy-turny, even a little helps). Then from the minute you arrived on foreign shores you locked yourself mentally to the new slot, and you stayed awake until the time you would normally at home. That way your body quickly got itself into some new kind of understanding, and you were so bushed by the time it came to turn in that you’d sleep regardless. Might be a couple of days where you felt draggy late afternoon, but otherwise you’d be okay.
This is what Dan had done. This is what he always did.
Marcia, she did it different.
Despite the fact they’d discussed it, she stayed awake the whole flight. Said she’
d found it impossible to sleep, though Dan had managed to catch an hour or two—not much, but enough to make a difference, to con the body into believing it had been through some kind of night. Then, when they’d gotten to the hotel just before lunch, she’d started yawning, muttering about a nap. Dan told her to keep going—but mid-afternoon still found her spark out on the bed. Dan left her there and went for a stroll around the surrounding blocks. Sure, he felt a little spacey and weird, but he kind of enjoyed the feeling, and the walk. It served as a first recon of the neighborhood, informing him where the cafés where, the nearest bookstore, all of that. It reminded you, too, that you’d done a pretty strange thing, traveled a long way, and that you weren’t at home anymore. For Dan, this walk was the opening ceremony of the vacation. It said: Here I Am.
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