by Steve Himmer
That evening, when my soup came, a knife arrived with it, and I knew it was for slicing my mushrooms; someone had noticed my project that day. I shaved them into my pot over a small, slow-burning fire, and as they roasted the rich smell filled my cave and my stomach growled. The food Mr. Crane’s kitchen provided was delicious enough, and always hearty, but it was exciting to prepare food I’d gathered myself—unlike the meals I’d made long ago in my apartment, this wasn’t just something to fill up my body and keep it upright, an experiment in ingredient mixing, but food and aromas I’d actually earned through my own hard work and through Mr. Crane’s, too—he’d built the garden, he’d sown shadowy spots where mushrooms might grow, so my harvest was also his. I nearly walked up to the house to ask him to join me, but no, that didn’t seem right.
At best I could have silently held out a mushroom, roasted and darkened and steaming, and we could have eaten together. But if Mr. Crane wanted mushrooms, mushrooms picked from his own backyard, I knew he could have—and had he already?—gone and gathered his own.
And it was a good thing I resisted that impulse to share, as things turned out, because only a short time after eating—not quite half a log had been burnt in the fire—my stomach knotted and cramped and my legs went rubbery and I collapsed on the floor of my cave. My belly churned and moaned and twisted, tighter and tighter like a wet paper towel that refuses to break in strong hands, and seven times I felt myself ready to retch and crawled to the mouth of my dwelling, only to have nothing come up. Until later, when it came up and showed no signs of stopping.
I lay for what I later estimated to be three whole days on my pallet, three long, painful days without pause, moving only to drag my wretched bowels and bile a few yards from the cave. As always my meals appeared in the wall nook, and at one point I swam up through the murk of my sickness to surface in the dark of my cave, and I saw Smithee sliding a tray of food into my niche. At last the mystery was solved, but I was too mired in misery to care. My eyes were hardly open, and he must not have noticed that I was awake, because I watched as he wrote in his notebook and poked through the pinecones and stones and oddly shaped leaves I’d collected, all stashed in one nook or another; it looked like he was making a list. Then he pulled out a camera from his wonderful pocket, not the same camera he’d had by the river but a video camera smaller than I’d ever seen, and he swept it around the walls and the floor of my cave and even over me deep in my blanket nest, all the while mumbling to himself (and, I suppose, to the camera’s microphone) so softly I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
I didn’t think much about what I saw at the time—I couldn’t think about anything, except how awful I felt—but later I assumed Smithee was taking notes for Mr. Crane, maybe for changes to come in my cave. Whatever he was doing there, if he wasn’t in fact a mushroom-induced hallucination, he didn’t stay long and I soon sank back into the swamp of my feverish dreams.
Some time later I was awoken again, by the thundering arrival of Mr. Crane’s helicopter, and crawled outside the cave to be sick one more time. Then I crawled back to bed, where I tried to be as still and as small as a mushroom myself, in hopes the sickness would pass like I’d passed so many mushrooms before finally stopping to look, before trying to think like they thought.
I think Jerome wandered in, too, at some point, but I saw all sorts of creatures in the hot, festering jungle of my feverish mind, so maybe it was him and maybe it wasn’t, but whoever it was laid his hot, heavy head on my leg and made me feel a little bit better. Or at least I dreamt I felt better, which in that sorry state was more or less the same thing.
On what I think was the third afternoon, I woke from dreaming I was a spy—but not a good one—and rolled over to find Mr. Crane standing inside the cave, hands together behind his back. He wasn’t quite looking my way, more off to the side, but he was talking as if I’d been listening and as if he’d already been talking for a long while. Almost like it was still the same conversation we’d had by the river, the last time I’d seen him.
“A man has to dictate his landscape, Finch.” Mr. Crane said. “He has to know who’s doing what where and when and how and, most of all, why. What is that, over there, far away and out of sight of most people, going to mean for me here? No, nothing can ever be out of his sight. Nothing! Perspective must be maintained, his view onto the world must be kept under control at all times—what use is a visionary without projection? Hm? What good indeed.”
I sat up and nodded to show him the interest I didn’t quite have—it wasn’t that I didn’t care, but I had no idea what he was talking about, and I still felt so wretched—but right then he stopped talking. To my shock and surprise, Mr. Crane sat down on the edge of my pallet beside me, right on top of my filthy, ragged blankets with his creased and pressed and clean pants. I hoped that the fleas I’d been battling lately had taken the day off and gone on an outing somewhere, perhaps revolted by my mushroom-tainted blood and in search of redder pastures. The last thing I wanted to do was infest my employer with parasites.
“I do things, Finch. I get things done. I make decisions and they affect millions of people. Dams. Bridges. Whole infrastructures. The roads people drive on to visit their mothers and the pipes they draw clean water from. These things aren’t cheap, Finch. They aren’t free. It takes vision and planning and, yes, it takes money to get these things done. And that money has to come from somewhere. Maybe it comes from somewhere that isn’t as… convenient as running water and indoor plumbing, so they don’t put me on magazine covers, and I’m never the man of the year. Fine. I can live with all that. I have what I need, more than I need. But this.”
And he stopped, right there, in the middle of whatever point he was making, and we sat there, the two of us silent for a long time. I tried to suppress my gurgling stomach and did a fair job aside from a few long, squeaky groans and one loud, thunderous, wet-sounding fart that Mr. Crane ignored with impressive, professional tact. But he had known about the mushrooms, after all, so might not have been as surprised as I was.
“I try, Finch. I anticipate, I predict—I pay other people to predict, lots of people, lots of money, to tell me what’s going to happen and who’s going to make it happen, which is usually far more important. I need to know who I can trust, who I can’t, who’s going to come after me or who I need to go after. You understand what I’m saying.”
Had I done something, I wondered? Was Mr. Crane referring to me, to some betrayal I hadn’t intended? I’d been practicing the flute like I thought he’d wanted me to, I’d been swimming and thinking and I’d eaten the mushrooms, as horribly as that had turned out. Was he mad because I was sick? Was I being blamed for poorly performed—but well-intended!—mushroom hunting? What a way to be fired, I thought to myself, even for someone adept as I was at losing jobs.
“Landscapes, Finch. It’s all landscapes. Views, perspectives, call them what you like, but that’s what matters. Seeing as much as you can and seeing it the way you want it seen and, more than that, having the ability to make other people, all people, see things as you see them, too.”
It no longer sounded like Mr. Crane was talking about me, then he stopped talking and I may have drifted into a fever daydream. But eventually he stood, slipped his hands in his pockets and walked away from my bed, the usual buoyancy back in his step. As his details darkened into a blank silhouette against the sunlight at the mouth of my cave, he said again—I think to himself—“Landscapes.” Then he stepped out of my narrow home and out of sight, leaving me alone with my own twisted and angry organs.
Alone, and—I discovered once I’d recovered and crawled from my bed the next morning—without my flute, which had once more been taken away. Its back and forth trips were becoming annoying.
21
Soon after my failed attempt at mushroom hunting, I returned from a swim to discover a long, rustic box of light wood propped against the inner wall of my cave. Its brass hinges were tarnished but still functional, as was the cla
sp. In fact, the tarnish looked like it almost belonged, like it was part of the metal rather than its decay. Inside the box were a dozen or so tubes of paint and several brushes in various sizes, all smeared and stained, as if they’d been used. There were also a folding easel, a bundle of canvasses, and various tools and devices I assumed were required for painting without knowing how. All my life I’d had a hard time even drawing a circle, and now—apparently—Mr. Crane wanted me to paint for him. I hoped he was more interested in watching me work than enjoying the works I produced. And I couldn’t be sure, but based on the conversation we’d had, I thought I could safely assume landscapes were what he wanted. At least it wasn’t circles I was meant to be painting.
I rifled through the paints and the brushes and knives, hoping for some sort of guidebook or instruction manual or even the simplest pictogram of how to set up the easel. But there was nothing in the box of that kind. The more closely I looked at all of the paint tubes and everything else, the more worn they appeared. The corners of the wooden case were battered and scuffed, though still solid enough to be trusted. The brushes had straight, even bristles, but the glossy finish was worn off their shafts in exactly the spot—I discovered—where my own hand best fit. Even the palette, when I put my thumb through it and made my hand comfortable, had a thumb-shaped smudge on its surface where my own thumb naturally fell and would later leave a fresh layer of smudge, once it had paint on its tip. It was all like I’d been using this paint set for years, except that I hadn’t. I’d say it sparked déjà vu but it didn’t, it sparked the opposite feeling: the sense I should recall doing something that I hadn’t done. As if the palette and brushes and box should feel déjà vu about me and ask if I had painted with them in the past.
After eating lunch, filled with false courage and confidence by my immediate if artificial familiarity with the tools, I tucked the box under my arm and set out to see what I might paint. My first thought was to carry the paints to the roof of my home and paint the view. But try as I might to scramble up the stone wall, as many times as I’d done it before and have done it since, I couldn’t work out how to climb with that long, awkward box making one arm unavailable. So I gave up. Besides, I reasoned, the view wasn’t as interesting at this time of day, and painting the sunrise from memory seemed more difficult—all of those colors, plus the unusual light. Surely I should begin with something simpler, something monochromatic and small and even static.
A leaf, perhaps; a single green leaf.
I thought I might paint Jerome, but I might also spend the whole day looking for him instead, checking his favorite nap spots, and never get to do any painting.
Or I could paint one of those mushrooms. I hadn’t done so well at eating them, but perhaps Mr. Crane’s desire for mushroom hunting would be appeased by a picture for him instead of more poison for me.
So out I went after mushrooms again, thinking as they thought (or as I thought they thought), crouching near tree trunks and bushes with my cheek to the ground as I eyed-out for moist, shadowed spots. It didn’t take long to find a cluster of three good-sized gray buttons in the shadow of a half-rotten tree trunk that something had bored full of holes.
I opened my paint box and tried to set up the easel, only to find that it wasn’t as simple as it appeared. An easel, I thought—unfold the legs and tighten some nuts and bolts and off you go, painting. But it wasn’t like that, at least not for me: each time I straightened one leg of the easel, the other side collapsed to the ground. I felt like an old comedian in one of those silent films, the ones who struggle to paint houses or catch pies off an assembly line and all that. I was beginning to think my easel was rigged, that it was not meant to be used but only to frustrate its would-be user. I wondered if that was the point, what Mr. Crane was really after, and if he was watching my struggles and laughing before the silvery flicker of his monitor the way he might laugh at one of those old slapstick shows.
Maybe, I thought, I could prop my canvas against something else, avoiding the problem of the easel altogether. It seemed like a reasonable idea, so I looked around for some rocks or logs I could use, but it soon occurred to me that Mr. Crane had provided the easel along with the paints and the rest of the kit, and I was probably meant to use it. I was being paid to use the tools he’d provided, that’s what he wanted and he was the boss, so I needed to figure out how to make it stand up instead of pretending it wasn’t there.
And eventually, though not gracefully, I did get the easel together. The trick, it turned out, was to wrap my hands around the jointed knees where the upper and lower sections of each leg were bolted together. I could hold two legs at a time while using my mouth to tighten the butterfly nut on the third, and once I’d figured that out it was pretty quick to get the contraption assembled. Getting paints onto the pallet was simpler—I just squeezed the tubes—but it was hard to know how much of each color I needed for painting a mushroom and even harder deciding which colors to use. There were tiny bands of color around each metal paint tube to indicate what was inside, but after holding them all up against the mushrooms one or two at a time I was disappointed to learn that the color I wanted—an ashy, brownish gray—was missing, so I’d have to mix it myself.
I tried mixing brown and white, but that came out muddier and darker than what I wanted. I couldn’t get it with black and white, either, or black and brown, which I tried just in case. One after another I squeezed my paints onto the palette and swirled them with one another, and though I made lots of colors, some of them ugly and some of them not, I couldn’t find the right shade for the mushrooms. Frustrated, I knelt beside the fallen log and pressed my eye right up close to the fungus, trying to pick out all the shadows and shades in its cap, and then there it was, clear as day like a voice had spoken it into my head: yellow! The mushroom was gray and brown, but it was also yellow. All the other colors of the cap were layered on a pale glow. After that realization, it was like my palette mixed the color itself, so perfectly mushroom-hued was it, and I was ready to paint.
Except that I wasn’t sure how to begin. Should I make a background first, the log and the grass and the sky? Or should I ignore all of that and set the mushroom alone onto a white canvas? Doing it that way seemed easiest, and this was my first time painting, so easy seemed the best way to go. I tried to sketch the shape of the mushroom with my paintbrush, as lightly and simply as I could, but I ended up with more of a blob. I tried to fix that and now had a blob and a smudge. Then it was a blob, a smudge, and the painted prints of three of my knuckles, so I gave up on sketching the mushroom and tried to paint it without any outline to follow.
I looked from canvas to fungus and then from fungus to canvas, back and forth, trying to capture its shape; I held my thumb out before me the way I’d seen painters do on TV, gazing around its smudged tip to the mushroom behind, but something didn’t seem right. The mushroom I’d chosen, the tallest in its trio by the log, had a big black spot on the left side of its cap that I hadn’t noticed before. It wasn’t a perfect example of mushrooms, and if I’d been picking them for food I wouldn’t have trusted it, assuming the spot to be rotten or poisonous or both (and perhaps a similar spot had been my earlier downfall).
What to do? If Mr. Crane wanted me to paint his garden, I was sure he wanted it looking its best. He wouldn’t want a picture of a spotty, rotten mushroom to hang on his wall. I could just pretend the spot wasn’t there, paint the mushroom I wanted it to be, but that seemed wrong, too: I was sure Mr. Crane didn’t want me to lie, to pretend his garden was something it wasn’t. Someone as concerned with getting things right as he was no doubt wanted an accurate picture. I had no choice but to start over and paint a new mushroom.
Frustrated, already fed up with painting, I chose one of the smaller mushrooms beside the black-spotted one, and started painting again. But I’d only made a few strokes with the brush when I noticed that the gills of the second mushroom were hanging loose in an unattractive, unappetizing manner. I wouldn’t want to loo
k at a painting of that, and I don’t know the first thing about art, so there was no way, I assumed, Mr. Crane would want to see it with his refined eye.
So I gave up on those mushrooms and set out to find others more deserving of paint. But hard as I tried, I spent the day moving from one stand of mushrooms to another, repulsed by bad spots or awkward shapes or funny colors. Sometimes I noticed before I started to paint, and a few times I began with my brush before realizing the flaws of my subject, but I never got very far into a painting before being forced to give up and move on. I started over so many times that my canvas looked like a puddle of mud or a big water stain on a ceiling, but I didn’t want to use a new canvas and waste the first one; when I found the right mushroom I could just cover up those mistakes.
But it wouldn’t be that first day, because the sky was already darkening, and I was hungry and ready to rest. An entire day lost to imperfect mushrooms and an afternoon without swimming; I felt dried out, and anxious in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time. So I collapsed my easel (much easier than setting it up), packed my paints, washed my brushes by the banks of the river—lingering a few minutes to wade to my knees, the best I could do—then carried everything back to my cave where a pot of soup and a loaf of bread waited for me in their niche.
As I’d taken to doing, I ate my dinner outside the cave by a very small fire—enough light for me to see what I was doing, to see what I needed to see of myself, but not so bright I couldn’t see past my small circle of light. I’d made that mistake in my first months, building fires so large they blocked out the world, and a large fire burned so long that I never reached the best part of the night, after the logs have all burned to ash and embers don’t outshine the eyes emerging around me in the brush. That’s when I know where I am, where I live, that I have neighbors and I’m part of something much more than myself. That’s when I remember the world, and if I build too much of a fire I forget; I’d already missed out on some swimming that day, and missing my afterglow hours as well was out of the question.