Big Picture: Stories

by Percival Everett

  “Thanks.” Michael took a long swallow. It was cool and tasted good, but he felt a little out of sorts.

  “It’s really hot in the laundry room, eh?” Gail sat in front of her work at the table.

  “Pretty warm.”

  “You looked sick out there. I’m glad you showered. You look a lot better now.”

  Michael nodded. “Wouldn’t want to look sick.”

  There was a knock at the door and Michael got up and looked through the door window. It was the man from yesterday, with his lawn mower. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said to Gail.

  “What?” Gail got up, came to the door, and looked out. “Didn’t he finish the job?”

  “I thought he had.” Michael opened the door and stepped out into the heat.

  The man pointed at the yard and held up five fingers again. Michael looked at the grass. Gail came out, too.

  “You just mowed it all yesterday,” Michael said.

  The man flashed five fingers again.

  “Thank you,” Gail said, “but we don’t need you today.”

  “I tried to give you ten dollars yesterday,” Michael said. “Listen, I’ll give you another five because you earned it, but we don’t need our grass cut again.” He turned to Gail. “Would you grab a five for me?”

  Gail went back into the house.

  “Can you talk?” Michael could smell the man, recognized the smell from when he had carried the wool shirt before. “Can you hear me or are you reading my lips?”

  The man nodded and smiled.

  Gail returned with the money. Michael took it from her and handed it to the man.

  The man turned away and, somewhat relieved, Michael and Gail turned back into the house. Michael had just closed the door when the sound of the lawn mower split the air. He looked at Gail.

  “That guy scares me,” Gail said.

  “He’s harmless,” Michael said.

  “He’s a nut.”

  Michael looked out the window at him, wearing the wool shirt, struggling to push his mower with the wobbly wheel. “He’s pretty weird, all right. We’ll let him do this today.”

  The man mowed the already mowed lawn and was gone without a knock at the door. Michael suddenly noticed the silence. He got up from his desk and walked from window to window, looking out.

  “He’s gone,” he said to Gail.

  “Good.”

  “Boy, that machine of his makes a lot of noise,” Michael said. “Listen to how quiet it is now.”

  “Yep.” Gail yawned and rubbed her eyes. “I hate work. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it.”

  “How old do you think that guy is?” Michael asked.

  “If he comes back he won’t get any older; that’s all I know.” Gail sharpened a pencil. “I don’t know. Sixty?”

  “I’d bet he’s our age.”

  “Looks sixty.”

  “He does; you’re right.” Michael rubbed the back of his neck. “Of course, I feel sixty.”

  The following morning was overcast and Michael had trouble pulling himself out of bed for his run. Lately he’d had to force himself. He’d had to force work as well; the paintings were staring back at him, mocking him, scaring him. He tied the laces of his shoes and grabbed the nearest shirt, which happened to be the light blue UNC T-shirt. Gail stirred when he opened the door of the bedroom.

  “Michael?”

  “I’m going running,” he said.

  “Is it still dark?” she asked sleepily.

  “No, just cloudy.”

  Her head fell back onto the pillow.

  Michael walked down the stairs, pulling on the shirt. The morning was a bit cooler than it had been and Michael felt it helped him start at a better pace. He ran toward the avenue, crossed it, and turned up a street parallel to it. His strides felt good and long. Then he saw it. At the mouth of an alley, between a house and an old hardware store, was the wobbly wheeled lawn mower. It was parked next to the wall of the store. The store was dark and there was no one around. Michael slowed and then ran in place, staring at the mower. He looked at the house and wondered if the man lived there. He looked down the alley and saw that it opened onto the avenue. He ran that way and glanced around, not really knowing what he expected to see.

  He arrived at home to find Gail collecting her papers at the table. “How was your run?”

  Michael nodded and went to the cabinet for a glass and filled it with water from the bubbler.

  “I’m going to make some breakfast,” Gail said. “Would you like some?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Are you okay?”

  Michael blew out a breath and raised his water glass to her. Gail studied him for a second, then went back to her papers.

  Michael set his glass on the counter and walked upstairs, pulling off his shirt on the way. He called back down to Gail, “Hey, I changed my mind.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Pancakes?”

  “Okay,” she called.

  Michael got cleaned up and collected clothes from the hamper to throw into the washing machine. He made a point of finding and including the UNC T-shirt with the load. He held the shirt for a second over the filling drum of the washer, then dropped it in.

  “What’s wrong?” Gail asked at the table, pancake on her fork.

  Michael unscrewed the cap on the tin of syrup. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Something’s wrong. Is it the painting you’re working on?”

  “Nah.” Michael took a bite. “These aren’t bad.” He paused. “Actually, work is going along pretty well.”

  “Good.”

  “I saw that guy’s lawn mower this morning.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That beat-up mower he used on our yard. I saw it when I was running. I didn’t see him, just the mower.”

  “Oh,” Gail said. “And?”

  “I saw it. That’s it.”

  “Was it everything you expected?”

  “Very funny,” Michael said.

  They were silent for a bit, then Michael said, “People used to believe that forces and spirits could enter into sculptures.”

  “I believe that. I believe that about your paintings,” Gail said.

  “They thought that the spirit the thing represented would enter it.” Michael rubbed his temples. “I think I try to find spirits when I work. I think I’m looking for them.”

  “There’s a lot of power in your work.”

  “I’m not talking about power.” He didn’t exactly snap, but he regretted the way he’d said his last words.

  “I’m going to be late for class.” She stood and grabbed her satchel from the counter, kissed Michael on the forehead.

  “See you later,” Michael said.

  “I love you,” Gail said.

  “I love you, too.”

  Michael cleaned the kitchen and then went out to his studio. He turned on the standing fan and stood in front of it for a few seconds. He didn’t work on the painting he had going, but took it from his easel and replaced it with a blank six-by-eight-foot canvas. He began to cry as he put blues on his palette: cerulean, cobalt—hue and color, pthalo, and indigo. He stared at the blank canvas, but was able to apply only one shade, cerulean. He started at the lower lefthand corner and moved slowly, with short strokes from a small brush, diagonally toward the upper righthand corner.

  He went into the house to cool off and have a yogurt for lunch. He put the load of clothes into the dryer.

  Back in his studio, Michael slowly pushed the cerulean into the canvas, scratching it in since there was so little paint on his brush. He’d always prided himself on the fact that, although he painted abstracts, he never began a canvas without a vision. That vision was subject to change, sometimes great change, but he usually knew what he wanted, what he was trying to express. This time was different. He pushed in more blue. Hours passed and the whole field was covered at last, blue and flat. He wanted to get far away from the canvas, far, far
away, and try to see it like a piece of fallen sky. He recalled a Chinese thinker named Chhiao who claimed that from a certain distance a mirror could see a person, but that person would be unable to see the mirror. So, in fact, one could be someplace and not know it.

  Back in the house, he decided on another run before Gail returned home from school. He grabbed the blue T-shirt and sprinted down the street toward the avenue, slowing as he neared the traffic. He crossed over to the next street and turned toward the hardware store where he had seen the silent man’s mower. The mower wasn’t there and Michael had to admit to himself that he was disappointed, although he was at a loss to say why. He continued his run, cutting it short and arriving home to find Gail’s car in the driveway and the mower man at work on Michael’s close-cropped yard.

  “Did you tell him he could mow again?” Gail asked Michael as he came through the kitchen door.

  Michael went to the sink for a glass of water, looked at her as he drank it all.

  “Did you?”

  Michael walked into the laundry room pulling off his shirt. He opened the lid of the washer.

  “Michael?”

  He dropped the shirt into the machine. “No, I didn’t tell him he could do it.”

  “This is too weird. I’m calling the police.”

  “Let’s ask him not to come back first,” Michael said. “We haven’t actually tried that yet.”

  “He’s crazy.” Gail leaned against the doorjamb. “He scares me, Michael.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to him.”

  Michael walked outside without a shirt and approached the man from behind as he was pushing and pulling the mower around a shrub. Michael tapped the wool-covered shoulder. The man turned without a start. Michael pointed to the machine, motioning for him to turn it off. The sound spiraled into silence as the two men just looked at each other.

  “You’re going to have to leave,” Michael said.

  The man stared at him.

  “You do fine work, but you’re going to have to leave. I’m not going to pay you for this.”

  He turned and reached for the pull start of the lawn mower.

  Michael stopped him, grabbing the long-sleeved woolen arm. “No. You’re scaring my wife.”

  The man looked at the house.

  “You have to leave.”

  The man looked at his mower, at the house, and then at Michael.

  “Please,” said Michael.

  The man dragged the machine to the sidewalk and walked toward the avenue, not looking back.

  Michael went back into the house and said to Gail, “I think he got the message.”

  “Did you have to threaten him?”

  “No.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I simply told him that he wasn’t going to be paid for the work and that we didn’t want him coming back.” Michael looked out the door window.

  “My hero.”

  “Right.”

  Michael looked at the lawn, which had been cut day after day, and saw that nothing made it look any different. But something was better about it. He tried to see where the man had left off in the middle of the job, but there was nothing there, just grass the same height and green-turning-to-brown color everywhere.

  Michael’s run was slow. His knee ached slightly, but he pushed on, taking a different route. He came finally to the alley and there was the mower. It was later in the morning and the hardware store was open; rakes and spades and brooms had been pushed out onto the sidewalk as if they were things people bought on impulse. Michael walked inside.

  “Do you know who owns that lawn mower in the alley?” he asked at the checkout counter.

  “Lawn mower?” the man asked.

  “It’s parked right beside your store.”

  A teenager who was making keys said, “He’s talking about Teddy’s machine.”

  “Oh. That’s Teddy’s machine,” the man said. “He works yards around here. Want to buy it?” He laughed.

  “Where is Teddy?” Michael asked.

  “He’s around if his machine is out there.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  The man gave Michael a long look. “There’s not much to know. He mows people’s yards.”

  “Can he talk?”

  The man frowned. “I never heard him talk.” He turned to the kid. “You ever heard Teddy talk?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then how do you know his name?”

  The man considered the question. “I don’t know.”

  That night Michael held Gail’s head against his shoulder in bed. He stroked her hair. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you.”

  “No, I really love you.”

  “Well, I really love you,” Gail offered, pretending to fight.

  Michael fell into an awkward silence.

  “What’s wrong?” Gail asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “I just love you. Is that all right?”

  Gail didn’t say anything.

  Michael lay awake for a while, feeling his wife’s breathing, counting her breaths, her heartbeats.

  Michael sat in front of the blue canvas. He didn’t work. He just looked at the blue and waited for the sound of the mower out in his yard. He reached forward, touched the still wet oil color, and rubbed the pigment into his fingers. He often had the urge common to painters to eat the paint, and the urge had never been greater than it was now. He took a brush and put more cerulean onto the canvas. The added paint didn’t change the blue on the canvas, didn’t make it darker or more blue, but he continued to apply it: the same color over the same color. He licked the paint from the fingers of his left hand, felt the oil slide down his throat, and imagined it coloring the walls of his esophagus and stomach. With the blue that would not mark the blue on which he painted, he wrote that he loved his wife.

  Michael had a vague, smudged recollection of Gail’s face upside down, framed by her swinging hair. Her mouth was saying, “I love you, Michael.” He left the memory and his eyes opened only to be bothered by bright sunlight. He knew from the quality of the light that his window faced west. The first thing on which he focused was the yellow plastic bracelet on his left wrist that read, LAWSON, MICHAEL, and he felt relieved to find that he was still himself. He looked toward the light and saw that the window was covered with a panel of wire mesh. Michael knew where he was and the rawness of his throat reminded him of what he had done. He was slightly surprised to find that he was free of constraints and that he was dressed in pajamas rather than a gown. There was a plastic pitcher and two plastic cups, one yellow and one red, stacked on the bedside table. Michael sat up and filled the yellow cup with water, although it was still stuck inside the red. He swung his legs around and let his feet touch the floor; his limbs felt unmanageable, heavy. His fingernails had been trimmed brutally short and the tips of his fingers ached. There was a square window in the door of the room with wire mesh in the glass, about nine-by-nine inches. No one was looking in from the other side: an absence Michael noticed with both fascination and despair. He looked at the portable toilet by his bed. He pushed himself to his feet and found his equilibrium, then negotiated the several steps to the door. He tried the knob to find it locked, then went back to his bed where he waited quietly, sitting with his knees pulled to his chest.

  The tumblers of the lock fell, the knob turned, the door opened, and in walked a tall orderly, dressed in baby blue with a crease in his trousers. One hand held a tray and the other pointed a finger. “I knew you was up. How you feeling, brother man?”

  “All right,” Michael said.

  “All right, then.” The orderly put the tray down on the rolling table at the foot of the bed. “How’s that throat?”

  “Scratchy.”

  “Well, we got you some yogurt and some tapioca for dessert.” The young man laughed, a snorting laugh. “Kind of a color-theme-thing going on, wouldn’t you sa
y?”

  “I like yogurt,” Michael said.

  “Good.” He looked at Michael for a long second. “Well, anything you want, you just ask Randy.”

  “Randy.”

  “Yeah, you just ask me. I got the joint wired.”

  “Can you get me a mirror?” Michael asked.

  “Why you want a mirror?”

  “I want to look at my throat. I want to see if it’s blue.”

  Randy sighed and his manner changed. “Sorry, can’t get you that. Your throat ain’t blue, man.”

  “Thanks.”

  Michael watched the door close and listened to it lock, surprised by how little he felt, surprised by how uncrazy he seemed. He lay down on his side, put his head on the pillow, and faced the window, feeling the light through his shut eyes. He fell into sleep and started to dream. He was sitting under an oleander with a black dog that was not his, watching a parade of purple and house finches, jays, and finally, one rufous-sided towhee. He looked at the black dog and the animal looked at him. He stroked the dog’s head while he turned his gaze up through the branches and leaves of the oleander. He found the blue of the sky.

  When Michael awoke he was staring at an expanse of blue, but there was no wire mesh protecting it, no window holding it away from him. He sat up in bed and realized he was staring at his canvas set on an easel. There were two people in the room with him, a woman and a man, on each side of the painting.

  “I’m Dr. Unseld,” the woman said. Her hair was tied back and she wore a brown skirt and a tight white sweater.

  “And I’m Dr. Overton,” said the man, his bald head catching light from the ceiling fixture. His tie was loosened and his collar button undone.

  Michael nodded, sitting up, rubbing his eyes, and making the sheet neat about his middle. “How is my wife?”

  “She’s fine,” Dr. Overton said. “A bit concerned.”

  “I can imagine,” Michael said.

  Dr. Unseld smiled. “Do you remember this painting?” she asked, but didn’t pause for an answer. “This is what you did before you ate the oil color.”

  Michael nodded.

  “Do you recall eating the paint?” Dr. Overton asked.

  “I think so.”