An unseemly amount of time passed as Ferry worked the shots in his mind, and I critiqued my work. I wondered if I should kill Nate now or wait until the witnesses had vacated the premises. The nerve-wracking inspection had nearly sent me into a full-blown anxiety attack
“I gotta tell you, Bastian. When I found out you were working again, I expected something caliginous. I never thought you’d recover the vibrancy you had captured when you were with Sylvie. You’re the only man I’ve ever seen that could depict love, admiration, and sheer devotion with a paintbrush, and do it with elegance.” Ferry’s booming voice carried throughout the room and into the living room.
The chatter from my couch had ceased when he spoke like they were all on pins and needles, waiting for his assessment.
“I assumed anything you did going forward would be dark and somehow demonstrate your torment. I wasn’t expecting this.” He shook his head slowly, and the surprise gleamed in his eyes. “The way the shadows undulate across the piece creates a different work of art at every angle, and all of them are bright, illuminated strangely, refulgent. Seriously, Bastian, this is your best work yet. The textures, the colors you achieved—what the hell is it?” Ferry got right up on the wall, so close he could have licked it, and scrunched his eyes to determine the medium.
I cleared my throat, hoping to extract the nerves that had my muscles coiled tightly. “Umm, cream cheese mixed with berries and vegetables. There’s other stuff in there, too.”
“What the hell made you use food?” He turned to me with bewilderment in his piercing gaze.
“I didn’t have any supplies.” I looked to my toes as though they would save me. “I haven’t had the desire. I lost my spirit when I lost her.” I shrugged and kicked my foot at an imaginary object on the tiled floor. “I recently had the itch. A tingle in my hand. I can’t really explain my urge.” I rambled, but I couldn’t stop. “I laughed it off at first, but the next thing I knew, I was in here pulling shit from the fridge and pantry to come up with anything that would work.” I hadn’t even taken a breath. “Moved the furniture out of the way and just fell into focus. A couple of days later, this is what emerged.” My fingers found the back of my neck and tried to rub away the tension.
“Sometimes brilliance is born from necessity. Glad you went with it. The question becomes…how do we immortalize it? Since it’s perishable, we have limited time before the food turns and the colors will change and be lost. I don’t know how any of this will work, but here’s my thought.”
Ferry wanted to capture several shots over multiple days in a life to death sort of motif. Brilliance to murky. It could be showcased as one piece with several prints. Neither of us knew how long it would take to completely decompose, but Ferry wanted it from inception to decay.
“What do you think, Bastian?”
“You want to photograph it over several days, knowing it will lose the appeal it holds today and turn into something ugly and unrecognizable?”
He turned to me with a grin. “That’s exactly what I want. Life is macabre. It turns to shit quickly and without warning; it’s an elusive bitch. One day it’s a plethora of illumination, the next its putrid pestilence. People try to hide that, so I’m thinking the middle days, when the colors start to lose their crispness, we use obvious filters in an attempt to cover the loss. Symbolic of the way people cover up the mess in their own lives. I think it makes sense for you.”
Ferry was right, not that I had doubted him. It did make sense. Personally, I was at the decay phase. I’d put as many filters on my life as possible to hide it or cover it up, but the fact was, daily, I thought of my own demise and how I would take my own life to escape the pain. The only reason I hadn’t done it was fear—plain and simple. Fear of the unknown. If there were something beyond this, why the fuck would I want to leave here to go there? To endure more of this, or worse, a more fucked up version of the same shitshow? At least this pain was familiar. If I knew there were nothing but darkness, a definitive end on the other side, I would pull the trigger today, end it all.
I was a selfish bastard and a coward at that, but it was the truth. Nate—my only real friend—knew it. It was the reason he checked on me daily and why he tried so hard to help me find an outlet.
“Yeah, it does.”
“These are the colors of your soul, Bastian. What people don’t understand is that everyone’s colors continuously change in life. Through the ups and downs, they go from pinks and purples to deep shades of amber and crimson, to grays and almost unrecognizable blacks, and hopefully, back to greens and hues of yellow or gold, anything that signifies life. They become your aura—like a kaleidoscope, ever-changing. You’ve turned your wheel for the first time in years. Find the colors of your life again.” He gripped my bicep and gave it a squeeze of encouragement.
I nodded, acknowledging I’d heard him but unable to express my thoughts. I was in unrecognizable blacks, but there was color in the peripherals of my world for the first time in half a decade.
He strolled out, leaving me staring at my soul.
Ferry talked to the people in the living room, and one by one, they brought equipment into the kitchen: softboxes, cameras, lenses, reflectors, and all kinds of other shit I couldn’t identify. I stayed out of their way while they set up. They danced around in choreographed movements, obviously having worked for Ferry for years. An intricate scarlet F adorned each black case, and his assistants wore solid black with his signature monogrammed on their sleeve.
Ferry entered, his expression stoic, and they disappeared. When he picked up a camera, I motioned toward the door so he could work, but he shook his head. “Stay.”
I overheard the faint gasps of his staffs’ surprise that he hadn’t asked me to leave.
“Ignore them. I normally work alone. This,” Ferry said, motioning to the wall, “isn’t normal.”
Most artists created in solitude. I thought. It was really the only way I’d ever worked. Even in college classes, it seemed each student managed to find their own little nook to work in isolation, and we left each other alone. I’d never studied someone else’s creative process.
Ferry truly was a genius behind the lens. I couldn’t see what he was after until he had moved. At times, rapid clicks captured his vision, and at others, ten or fifteen minutes would go by without any noise. Once or twice, he shifted the light, but mostly, he used his body to manipulate it instead.
When he finished, he looked as though he hadn’t slept for days. He clapped twice, and his gang filed in to pull out equipment, but none of them touched the cameras again.
He held out the camera. “Wanna see?”
I straightened my spine and pulled back my shoulders when I pushed off the wall I’d been leaning against. “Really?” My voice cracked like a pre-pubescent teen. “You don’t want to edit them first?” I was surprised he would allow anyone to see a raw photo.
He laughed so hard his shoulders shook. “I don’t edit. Either the photo’s right, or it’s not. I don’t manipulate it to get the lighting I want or distort an image. The only editing I will do is ensure that there’s nothing in the image other than your work. I might crop out a piece of wall that snuck in.” His smile was genuine, and it finally dawned on me, he sincerely believed in what he did here.
This wasn’t a pity shoot or a ploy to humiliate me publicly. Ferry had seen something.
And when I looked at the display on the camera, scrolling through the shots, I saw it, too. It left me without words. I didn’t have a clue how this would all unfold, but even if Ferry was unable to do anything more, this was beyond any expectation I’d had.
I shifted my focus from the camera to him.
“Told you.” He picked up his other cameras and walked out. “See you tomorrow night around seven, Bastian,” he called out as he left. “Hope you can stand the stench as that thing starts to rot.”
I followed a few paces behind and escorted him, his staff, and Wilt out. Nate still sat in the same place he�
�d been hours ago.
With my audience gone and the door closed, I faced my best friend. “What the fuck just happened?”
He stood, his presence dominating the room. “Your comeback.”
4
Chapter Four
I lingered in a bewildered high when my thoughts turned to Sera, the reason for the twitch in my hand and the piece on my wall. All of this came back to her, and if I wanted to keep my spirits and creativity up, I needed her around. Yet the only way I could reach out was through the computer. I grabbed it from my nightstand and brought it to life.
Facebook filled the screen. I smiled at the colors and familiarity of the site, the comfort. What a joke. After searching, I found her name and the green dot beside it.
Me: Hey. You around?
She responded instantly.
Sera: How are you? I haven’t seen you online.
Me: Good. Things have been crazy here. How are you?
Sera: I’m slightly stressed with the gallery opening in a few days. You’re still coming, right?
Me: Absolutely.
I had completely forgotten about the commitment. Fuck. Dragging out the cell phone I’d purchased when Nate took me to get supplies, I realized it was almost one in the morning. But I dialed my best friend anyhow.
Sera: I really appreciate it, Bastian.
The phone rang as I continued to type. Nate didn’t answer, and it went to voicemail, so I called back. He hated it, but he’d pick up if I called twice. True to form, he did, likely thinking something was wrong.
“Bastian? You okay?” The groggy slur of his words threw me for a loop. He was winded and sounded drunk.
I chose to ignore the fact that I’d woken him before I forgot why I had called. “Hey, Nate. I need you to do me a favor.”
“Yeah?”
“I told Sera I would come to her gallery opening on Thursday, but I can’t go alone. Will you go?”
“You called me in the middle of the night to ask me to be your date to your wannabe girlfriend’s art thing? You know I have a job, right? One that I have to be at in less than seven hours.” His irritation rang through loud and clear, but I overlooked it.
He’d forgive me in the morning because he was afraid I’d off myself. And while I shouldn’t take advantage of that, this was the first step toward living again, not merely existing.
“Well, yeah.”
“Fuck you, Bastian. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“So, is that a yes? You’ll go?”
“Night, Bastian.”
“Nate! Seriously, will you go with me?”
The fucker just laughed and hung up. I tossed the phone aside, knowing he wouldn’t let me down. Every once in a while, it dawned on me just how much I loved the ugly fucker. I’d never tell him, but Nate was the only thing that had kept me alive for years.
Sera and I spent hours online, not that we shared anything of importance. It was just the same surface-level nonsense of the get-to-know-you phase. We had a lot in common, but that didn’t surprise me. Although, the number of people she knew that I used to run with did. I’d figured with our age difference, and as long as I had been absent from the community, the key players would’ve changed, but not so.
Her stories of patrons still discussing my work flattered me, even though it wasn’t true. Sera was as sweet as Sylvie had been. My wife had had this knack for making a person feel like they were the most important thing in the world. And she did it without ever telling a lie or fabricating a word. It was only one of a laundry list of qualities I’d loved about her.
The similarities didn’t stop there. It was little things that brought my wife to mind when I talked to Sera: the things that made them both laugh, the way she’d pick on me in jest. Both women were playful and had a zest for life. From what I had gathered, Sera had enjoyed a picture-perfect life in her short twenty-five years. She saw good in the world and had traveled to beautiful places to study and work. What I wouldn’t give to go back six years, before Sylvie got sick, before death touched my life, when my outlook on the future was bright.
When dawn started to break through the windows, I realized how long the two of us had been chatting. For the first time in years, hours had passed in a flash with no recognizable pain or deafening silence. I had been able to think about Sylvie without crippling grief.
Me: Random question.
Sera: Shoot.
Me: Where did your mom come up with the spelling for your name? It’s unusual.
Sera: Ugh. She’s a hippie, and so is my dad.
Me: Oh, so it was just to be different?
Sera: No. It’s short for Seraphim. She still insists on calling me by my full name, but no one else does. I stopped that in elementary school. It’s strange, and I never liked it.
Sera: Apparently, my parents tried for years to have kids and couldn’t. They gave up in their thirties. My mom begged God to send her a little angel, but He never did.
Sera: About a year after they stopped trying, my mom got pregnant. Seraphim means an angelic being. A seraph is the highest order in the heavenly hierarchy of angels. They’re closely associated with light and purity.
Sera: She refuses to shorten it to Sera because that takes the meaning out of the name. She’s crazy. I love her but seriously, coo-coo. Haha
Karma. I believed strongly in the world providing what a person needed as it was required. Although I wasn’t fond of the flipside of that coin—the universe took what wasn’t needed as well. Everything had a time and a purpose. When its usefulness no longer existed, a high power took it. This angel was exactly what I needed at this moment. I just wondered what she needed in return.
My lids weighed too much to continue to hold them open, and my eyes burned from staring at a screen for so long. The fatigue stole my ability to contemplate the meaning behind Sera appearing in my life. I managed to tell her goodbye, and then I drifted off to sleep.
For five years, Sylvie had plagued my dreams or maybe graced them. Every night she came to see me; it was a curse and a blessing. I slept to see my wife but would wake to the loneliness I could only escape in my dreams. Sylvie’s face was still full of life in that alternate state, like the day we married, not how she’d left me when she was sick. Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes full of wonder. At least once a night, she would throw her head back and release her deep, throaty laugh. That was the most real way to see her—a raw, guttural, deep laugh that came from the soul. I had cherished that sound more than anything in the world, including her singing, and God, could she sing. Although it wasn’t just the noise. I had loved the way her throat moved when her head tilted and how her hair swayed down her back. She was my epitome of perfection.
For the first time in years, Sylvie hadn’t visited me, although I didn’t realize it when I first woke. It wasn’t until I noticed the dark circles—that normally surrounded my eyes—were gone. And my thoughts shifted to Sera, bringing a smirk to my lips. That was the moment it dawned on me, Sylvie hadn’t come to my dreams.
My thoughts spun out of control, and the smile faded. I’d stood up my wife, and she had to be mad. I shook my head as the irrational thoughts bombarded me faster than I could fight them off. Tears welled in my eyes at the dishonor I felt for her memory. Rationally, I couldn’t control my subconscious, but emotionally, I felt punished for flirting with Sera.
Sylvie hadn’t come to prove a point.
I focused on my breathing to quiet my mind and still my thoughts, the in and out of the air, my lungs constricting and expanding. And when I’d finally stopped the barrage, one final thought took up residence. If my brain had generated meetings with Sylvie to protect me from life-threatening depression, those encounters in my sleep might disappear entirely if I moved on with my life. The idea of never seeing my wife again, never hearing her sing, never talking to her, and that laugh—it was more than I could bear.
Regaining focus on the man in the mirror, my eyes were bloodshot. And the tears still fell. I ached, an
d the pain hurt in a way that words couldn’t express. It was no different than if she’d died yesterday. The hole she’d created took more of me than it had left.
“God, I miss my wife!” I screamed at no one just before I cursed whatever being was responsible for the loss. “Why the hell did you take her? Why?” The grief staring back at me was too much. Without thought, my fist shattered the judgment in the mirror.
Out of nowhere, Nate wrapped around me, restraining my struggle and pinning my arms to my side. “Calm down, man. You’re not alone. Come on.” He spoke softly, repeating himself, as if he said it enough, eventually, it would sink in.
Unfortunately, grief wasn’t rational.
And over the last few years, Nate had taken multiple punches to the face over that sorrow. Yet, he never complained. He simply suffered with me, at my side—always. He dragged me from the bathroom to the bed. There I buried my face in my hands with my elbows on my knees. I should be more concerned about my hand, but I couldn’t get beyond the loss.
“What the hell happened, Bastian?”
I didn’t respond immediately, but Nate was patient. He knew I’d talk when I was ready, and he leaned against the wall to wait.
“She didn’t come last night.” I almost couldn’t stomach the words and had to swallow hard to keep from losing my stomach.
“Sylvie?”
I choked on a sob and nodded.
“Maybe she doesn’t think you need her anymore?” Nate acted like it was the most natural thing in the world for my dead wife’s spirit to move on without me—or to have been present to begin with.
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