Ensemble

by S. P. Elledge

to one another, eager to discover still more surprises, they had flown to Las Vegas together over a long weekend—not to gamble, but to experience what Tsu-Chi thought quintessentially “American.” Although Tsu-Chi was only seven years his junior, he looked a great deal younger. Wherever they went, he had the somewhat embarrassing feeling that people were going to mistake them for father and adopted son, as had once happened at a motel. And Tsu-Chi was very boyish with glee, indeed, as they wandered from recreated Venice to Manhattan to Egypt and so on, while he mocked the tourists and the faux antiquities Tsu-Chi loved. “Now I have seen the world,” Tsu-Chi said, “I can return to China happy.” It was hard to tell whether TsuChi was trying to be funny or not, and they had fought about it soon after at a hotel buffet. It was only later that he realized he had really been angry because Tsu-Chi had already spoken so casually of returning to his homeland.

  Gold-flecked mirrors like murals lined the walls of that huge hotel restaurant, and he remembered watching their reflections all around them as they stood at the buffet line. “Maybe imitations can be better than the real thing,” Tsu-Chi was saying. “You find everything else amusing, why not this?” He did look like he could be Tsu-Chi’s father, with his prematurely graying beard and the slight stoop he’d acquired from logging too many hours in front of the computer. In fact, he could barely recognize himself at all—who inhabits that body? he remembered wondering. Who is speaking these words? Who is thinking these thoughts? “It’s nothing but virtual reality,” he had said, and the figure in the mirror was monkey-see monkey-do. When he was a boy, he remembered standing before his dresser mirror and willing his face to age, watching it progress through the decades, going sallow and silver-haired, lines emerging and eyes sinking into pouches, as he—his true self—waited behind.

  A year after Las Vegas, at his medicine cabinet’s mirror, he thought: Now I’ll never see this face age any further. That was not I who Tsu-Chi once loved enough to hate at moments like that; that was someone I’ve already left behind. But Tsu-Chi was right: he should have just shrugged and laughed at the time and bought another plastic souvenir.

  The office going-away party was an insubstantial little affair. It wasn’t like a birthday or as if he were leaving them for good (how little they knew!), so there had just been sheet cake in the lunchroom and a few pats on the back, not even the usual funny card which would be passed around, signed by all concerned, and left on the recipient’s desk. “Bet you’re really using this time to send out resumes,” he heard at the coffee machine, or “We’ll all be out of here soon enough.” Somehow, everyone at the magazine could tell he wanted to leave with a minimum amount of fuss, and so that last day at work was much like any other: nine hours hunched before his graphics terminal, with a just a few breaks for coffee or to grab something to eat from the deli downstairs. He was illustrating an article about the latest high-speed CPUs, the usual sort of thing, and in his usual fussy way was searching for perfection even after the art director had told him it looked fine as it was. The picture, which he’d built up painstakingly layer by layer in Photoshop, showed several vaguely humanoid microprocessors running an Olympian race, passing a torch onto the newest and fastest. Perfectly banal, something which he would have been ashamed of had his art teachers ever seen it, and yet he was reasonably proud of how accurately he had captured the way wind would blast against flames and togas, and the way the firelight glanced off the silicon with its copper tracery. Ridiculous, too. As ridiculous, he might be tempted to say when he was this exhausted, as his life was turning out to have been.

  It wasn’t that he really minded such tasks; he had never thought he’d be another Picasso, and he liked not having to come up with a subject or style himself, which is always half the artist’s work. At Emerson, he’d never been one of those punkier kids who would disdain the title “commercial artist.” He liked posters and book covers and advertisements, when they were well-designed. In fact, he could admit now that he might even like them as much as Picasso. That used to bother him, but now he liked the way he could dissociate himself from all those old, crude, messy tools of an artist and live—for a few hours a day, at least, not just in front of his computer, but inside it. At times he almost felt a warm, friendly feeling—like saying hello to an old friend—whenever he booted up in the morning and sat down to collaborate with this other, not-so-foreign intelligence. He couldn’t say he always felt the same cozy tolerance for people, which might explain why he had so few friends. Yet, he didn’t feel too lonely, and suspected most of the people he worked with felt much the same way. That was curious, maybe ridiculous, but it wasn’t sad.

  Leia, an old Emerson classmate and his closest colleague at the magazine, had been more than happy to give him the keys to her family’s winterized cabin in the White Mountains. He’d stayed with her there a couple of times in the past, and he knew it was exactly what he needed now: the last and highest cabin of a series of them on a trail near the Presidential Range, where the mountains seemed almost as high as the Rockies and snowdrifts sometimes lingered on through July. The cabin was regularly used by the skiers and hunters in Leia’s family, so there would be heat and electricity and running water, even a TV and stereo if he cared to use them. “We’re working on going wireless, too,” she told him on that last day of work. “That’s ok,” he said, “I’d as soon get away from wifi and the internet and all that. I’ll just be bringing my laptop to play a few old games if I’m bored.” “Primitive!” she answered with a laugh.

  He could have told her everything there and then, let her cry and all that, but something still held him back, and besides, the managing editor came along just then to ask her if she’d had a chance to finish proofing an article on handhelds. “Keep the taps at a drip, and call me if you have any problems,” she said as soon as the editor left, “or don’t tell me you’re not going to want to take your cellphone, either.”

  “Only for your peace of mind.”

  It had been an especially wintry November, and snowbanks were already three feet high along the highways, higher still in the mountains. Even though he was planning to be at the cabin for at least two weeks, or as long as he could hold off before calling the hospice, he had brought a minimum amount of supplies and entertainments. Skiers had come and gone over Thanksgiving weekend and after, so the gravel road to the row of shingled cabins had been plowed and a broad icy trail wound in and out of the woods to each cabin in turn. By the time he’d hauled groceries and backpacks up to Leia’s family’s cabin, he was so sweaty he didn’t feel like building a fire in the woodstove or even turning up the baseboard heaters. Instead he stripped off most of his clothes just to feel the cold air on his skin, as he looked out through the main room’s large mullioned windows down to the snow-covered valley below and up and across to the jagged black and white vertebrae of mountains in the near distance.

  Standing there like that, he was amazed to discover how strong his body still felt, how powerful his limbs and flexible his muscles. This, when he rarely did much more than swim at the Cambridge Y. It was impossible to believe that there was a time-bomb ticking away inside him, set to go off in just a few weeks’ time. Certainly, he’d been especially tired lately, and though the drugs helped, that spot in his stomach always felt tender—at this moment, however, he felt astonishingly healthy. The hospital volunteers had told him it would be like that: “Some days you’ll feel like Superman.” But even Superman was powerless before Kryptonite, they would have wanted to add, had he given them a chance.

  He went to take a shower in the cabin’s tiny bathroom with its little space heater, though the water was cold, and by the time he had dressed again, a fire sounded good. The sky outside the windows was already darkening, though it was only mid-afternoon. The setting sun reflected off the irregular peaks across the way, a sight so pretty it was practically a cliché, he decided: the insufferable prettiness of a first-year art student’s initial undertaking in oils
.

  Tsu-Chi had given him, as a going-away present, an authentic Chinese pen-and-ink set:

  ivory-handled and bamboo-handled brushes and a carbon ink block within a lacquered box; several jade calligraphy seals representing “joy,” “rock,” “cloud,” “tree,” and “remembrance;” a stone to grind the ink against; a porcelain water-cup and porcelain tray for mixing the ink; and a ream of high-grade rice paper. It was the type of thing sold everywhere in Chinatown, and uncharacteristic of Tsu-Chi, who loved anything dumb as Disney or hokey as Hollywood but had never even wanted to see the China trade collections at the MFA or the Peabody-Essex. Still, it was something new to try, and he hadn’t really used pen and ink since Basic Drawing I. The evening of his first night in the cabin he lined up the numerous implements on the rag rug in front of the woodstove: they really were quite nice, after all; Tsu-Chi had obviously not settled for one of the cheaper sets. The polished ivory and jade with gold-painted trimming gleamed pleasingly in the firelight.

  Cautiously, he unrolled a