Crispin's Model

by Max Gladstone

  “Just me?” I said.

  Wine slopped over the rim of his glass, and he looked up; his smile seemed warm at first before he remembered to turn it cruel. “You came.” But I’d seen enough. The coldness was a mask, though he wore it well.

  “No flowers. No still lifes.”

  He shrugged, that first slip covered now. “Those weren’t good enough. You are.”

  I wanted to shout, but didn’t. The chatter and the drifting atonal music and the clink of glasses against teeth forbid me that. I realized I was alone—there was an empty circle of floor around Crispin even here, all these people watching him as if he were a tiger or a shit-throwing ape. What did that make me? His target, or prey, and I wasn’t about to let these inauguration-goers cast me in either role.

  “Look at them if you want,” he said.

  “What’s with the curtains?”

  “I will allow indirect light only, under these circumstances. No one but a buyer gets to see them unveiled.”

  It’s hard to storm away in heels, but practice makes perfect.

  “Deliah!” I heard while forcing my way through the crowd to the door. At first I mistook the voice for Crispin’s, though it was all wrong—female, for one thing, and happy, and using my first name. I turned and saw—

  “Ms. Agent!” Shannon Carmichael, to be exact—I realize I haven’t given her name before. A full woman, billowing out of the mass of blacks and grays in a bright orange dress, arms wide and one hand wined; she reminded me charmingly of an octopus rising through ocean murk. If you can’t see how an octopus might be charming, don’t blame me for your lack of imagination. If I’d been caught in anything so simple as a bear trap I would have chewed my arm off to get away, because oh my god my agent had seen me naked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Crispin’s show, of course,” she said. “His new project! Have you seen them yet?”

  “You know Crispin?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I didn’t realize he was such a thing. I just—” But if she’d seen the pictures and didn’t recognize me, why clue her in? “I know him from around.”

  “I wish you and I got to the same around. He’s a recluse, you know, never comes to anything. You must see this Face!”

  She grabbed my wrist and pulled. That woman has better traction in heels on hardwood than most semis I’ve known on open interstates. By this point the lines had died down, replaced by clots of chatting socialites near each booth, and Shannon pulled me past those with an apologetic smile and no drop in speed. I heard snatches of conversation:

  —cold like space, only the colors—

  —imagine what it would look like on a wall / can’t imagine a wall to hold—

  —conversation starter, or, you know, ender—

  —those eyes, deeper than wells, and all the world inside—

  —audio component, maybe, in the frames, I heard pipes—

  And something about “jog” and “Sabbath” from a young Chinese woman leaning against her date, drunk or faint. Sweat beaded through her makeup. Her hands twisted, fingers twining, locking, gripping as if to break.

  Shannon shoved me through the velvet, and I tripped, my only thought that I would tumble somehow through the painting and ruin what, fifty grand at least of Crispin’s opening, if not more—

  But I caught my balance, and looked up, and stared into an unfamiliar face.

  I couldn’t see it all. They’d covered the booth with cloth, so inside everything should have been shades of gray, but wasn’t. The face on the canvas shone. She pulsed in a rhythm exactly out of time with my own heartbeat.

  No wonder Shannon hadn’t recognized me. Crispin broke my face, or peeled it apart. I was fissured and fused and melted and monolithic, distorted into something more real, full, there than I had ever felt. My painted eyes were pits you could tumble down and fall for a million years into blackness charged with sick galaxies of staring, slitted orbs, space filled with the piping of a mindless master whose music was a scream.

  Craquelure legions danced in the fissures of my skin. The red muscle of a peeled-back cheek was a field that grew unholy thorns, and corpses twisted in my hair, pecked by carrion birds. Yet they were only shadows, brushstrokes, suggestions my mind added to a canvas face that did not resemble me at all.

  Or did it? And were those in fact suggestions, or was something moving beneath the paint?

  I can’t write what I saw, and I call myself a writer. But saying you can’t say something, that’s one of the old tricks, right? And—hell.

  I looked at me. I mean, the canvas I looked at fleshy me with my eyes that were doors, and something behind pressed out, against, through those doors. I reached to touch my cheek, trembling, and as I did I remembered museum field trips and Miss Alva saying “Deliah, don’t touch,” and of all the damn things that saved me. I drew back my hand and the painting was paint again.

  I stumbled out, glazed, sweating. The lights and walls and shirt fronts were too white. I held out a hand, but no one steadied me. I saw a blur of faces—and a spark of sympathy in that Chinese girl’s eyes, before her date guided her off toward the wine.

  Something grabbed my hand, and I barely contained a scream. “Amazing, isn’t it?” Shannon, her smile still plastered on.

  “That’s a word,” I said.

  “A different world, seen through the intermediary of the model. Morrison wants to buy the lot.” She introduced me to the man behind her, a thickset robber baron type with white hair and bushy mustache and the tuxediest of tuxedoes. “Morrison, this is my client, Deliah Dane. She knows Crispin.” With a conspiratorial edge on Crispin’s name and the word knows. Morrison took my hand and said something vacant and polite, and Shannon added, “You absolutely must see the Nudes.”

  I wanted nothing less. “How long was I in there?”

  “Five minutes,” she said with a glance at her watch. “Or so.”

  That felt too short, and too long.

  Morrison cleared his throat—did he recognize me?—but before he could speak or I could recoil, the scarecrow clinked her glass. All eyes turned upon her, and she effused—for a scarecrow—about Crispin and how glad she was “all of you” had come, meaning everyone with money to spend, and she asked Crispin to say a few words.

  “I have to go,” I told Shannon, and as I slid through the crowd toward the door Crispin read from notes typed on index cards.

  “—to portray a deeper world than the one we see. Vision is a kind of—exploration, frontier seeking: each sensory impression is a sheet disguising a universe of processes, not all—amenable to human understanding. And in that dialectic between our naïve comprehension and the vast and pitiless truth, we find—”

  The door closed, and rain and the buzz saw of taxi tires through puddles replaced him.

  * * *

  I tore up the doom-ending of my play that night, but I couldn’t think of anything to write in its place other than “and monsters ate them all,” so I stopped. I lay awake listening to Rache and her boyfriend have messy sex on the other side of my bedroom’s thin walls. Even that sounded wrong.

  But I am a professional, and I keep my word, so even though I barely slept that night I was still on time for my next session with Crispin.

  * * *

  He met me at the door with a glass of scotch, a bonus envelope, and a bouquet of star lilies. “They sold,” I said, and set the lilies down, and he said, “Yes,” and “All to the same buyer.”

  “Morrison.”

  “Morrison Bellkleft, yes,” he said. “For a considerable sum.” He sat, silent, and waited. I drank.

  Whiskey warmth eased the next bit: “Those portraits don’t look anything like me.”

  “Don’t they?”

  “No. Hell, your roses don’t even look like roses. Not like normal roses.”

  You don’t say that kind of thing to a client who’s paid you better than you’ve ever been paid before, but I was done not knowing. Knuckle on temple, h
e considered. He had a silence like glass.

  “Have you ever watched someone you love die?” He spoke flat. “Not just known they were dying, but sat beside them, felt their pulse, watched their eyes as they failed, again and again, to understand what was happening—then the horror when they finally got the joke? Only to forget it all, and minutes later remember once again.” He stood and walked to the window. “There comes a moment when the doctors stop giving them water, you know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “The world is sick. Life warps itself. We ignore—everything. We blind ourselves to the writhing truth of the rot beneath our skin. We call a storm sky black, when the fiercest storms are all awash with color. I was taught to paint what I see. I force myself to see deeper, truer. To see beneath, below, beyond. I hide my work so its unveiling will shock the viewer, and open a gate to the truth they’ve ignored.”

  “I know truth,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “You think I don’t? Rich white guy like you, you think you have an inside line on how messed up shit really is?”

  “No.” He turned: a silhouette. “The world is horror, and sickness, grotesque realities we suppress and ignore. That’s the space to break open, that’s the frontier. Not stars. What’s under the flesh.”

  “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Art isn’t moral.”

  “Bullshit. It’s my body you’re painting.”

  “It isn’t you,” he said. “You’re just the gate. You’re the best model I’ve ever had. I’m trying, so hard, to get this right. To show them.” I recognized the pleading from boyfriends past, but this felt more sincere. Diving, always diving, toward some light he could not see. “I need this.”

  He pointed with his head toward a massive canvas by the wall. Eight feet across, five feet high. White, and waiting. For me.

  “Will you help me?”

  And God help me, I said yes.

  * * *

  We started that day. I wake up some nights thinking we never stopped.

  Modeling for a work that size differs in degree and kind from sitting for smaller portraits. The canvas looms over the studio. Crispin, working, disappeared behind it. I heard him breathe, I heard the serpent-over-rock slither of his brush. My watch and his ticked just out of time.

  Pressure built inside me, and out.

  He posed me on the divan, rising as if from sleep. The poses had been simple before: stand here, sit, turn your head. This time, Crispin wanted to catch me in the moment of waking: one arm back, eyes half-lidded, mouth open. When we got the pose right, hunger and fear mixed in his eyes.

  It hurt worse than any posture I’d ever held. Half-risen, half-lying, pressure on my left arm while my right drained of blood, legs parted and one foot trailing off the divan, it wrecked me. After the second thirty-minute sit I was all sweat and jellied nerves. I collapsed on the bed for our break.

  Too soon, we started again.

  But pain’s not all I mean by “pressure.” In the shadows of Crispin’s room, under the weight of his gray eyes, which rose and set over the canvas like twin moons over an alien world, I felt something immense press against me from below. His earlier paintings broke me open—cracked like an eggshell in his hunt for that unspeakable truth. But now, I felt the truth he saw through me. There was a universe beneath us, a blasted, writhing, whimpering world. Great pale cities towerd on planes of black ice beneath eclipsed suns that were themselves eyes. Worms coiled and hissed in the shadow-corners of Crispin’s apartment. Strange lights reflected in his pupils, or caught, and glowed there as embers.

  The horror grew on my second sit, and my third—the horror, and the excitement. On my subway rides home Crispin’s expression remained before my eyes, his rictus grin, triumph and pain and effort, like a man lifting a weight he can’t quite bear.

  Rache says my dreams that month were restless and mewling.

  But the work continued, the pressure built, and the season of storms arrived.

  * * *

  A month after the show, Shannon—Ms. Agent—called me. I stared at the phone too long, wondering if I should answer, thinking guilty thoughts about my abandoned manuscript and that night in the 512. But I picked up on the third ring, just before the call cut to voicemail. “How have you been, Deliah?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Working.”

  “And Crispin—how’s he?”

  She didn’t know about my work with Crispin, and I did not enlighten her. Few professional relationships improve when one party has seen the other naked. “Well,” I said.

  “I thought you might want to know—the paperwork finally cleared, and Morrison has all four paintings from the 512 show. Hasn’t unveiled them yet. He invited me to see them under full light for the first time. He remembered that you know Crispin, and hoped you might join us.”

  No. Not considering what brief exposure did to me in the gallery. Not even to ingratiate myself with Shannon, whom I owed work, and who wanted to connect me to Mister Morrison Bellkleft of mysterious but ample financial resources. Not even considering how much help Mister Morrison Bellkleft of mysterious but ample financial resources could offer if I ever did finish the play—

  “I’d love to,” I said, and copied the address. Central Park West, of course.

  * * *

  This was a hurricane autumn. Grace was due to curve east and miss us, but her northern lashings whipped up preliminary storms, so rather than walk from the subway I took a taxi, crawling north from Columbus Circle with the great dark park to the right and steel cliffs to the left, beneath sheets of falling water. The driver asked what brought me out on a night like this, but I didn’t answer and we both lapsed into the scared-mouse silence of the storm. Remembering Crispin, I watched the sky—and saw the colors that nested and weltered there, greens, yellows, and oranges, like rainbows bleeding.

  We stopped. Everyone stopped: horns blared. And through the windshield, through the rain, I saw fire bloom ten stories up, from Morrison Bellkleft’s building.

  I checked the address again. Apartment 1001: that would be, yes, the tenth floor, where smoke and tongues of flame flicked into the storm. Shannon was up there.

  “Here’s fine,” I told the driver, handed him cash, and stepped out of the cab into stopped traffic. The rain hit me like socks full of quarters swung hard. Soaked and slick in seconds, hair water-straight and heavy, I stumbled past headlights in wind and thunder and horns, found the sidewalk, ran north. If I were in my right mind I’d have waited; the fire department would come soon—but soon enough? Rain carved the smoke into strange shapes, like bird-winged insects the size of helicopters cavorting in the sky.

  People streamed out of the black building’s doors and back in again, repelled by the rain. In the chaos it was easy to force past the attendants shepherding tenants out. I body-checked my way to the stairs and climbed against the current. Alarm sirens hammered.

  Floor ten, and out. Smoke, haze. I clutched my wet jacket over my nose and mouth. My eyes watered. Only two doors in this hall, not counting the elevator—there, at the far end, 1001, closed. Memories from safety films, check the handle, of course it’s hot, this is a mistake, wrap the handle in your jacket, turn, it’ll be locked—

  But it wasn’t, and I stumbled into hell, choking, smoke everywhere. Morrison’s living room had been elegant ten minutes ago. Now, it was a mess. Soot coated the white carpet. The walls, floor, weren’t on fire—yet. Flowers bobbed in vases beside the couch. Wind and rain screamed through broken windows, lightning flashed, but only the paintings were aflame.

  They stood at each corner of the room, propped on easels. The canvases seemed to have burst out from within, leaving holes of green fire that led to dark writhing depths. I stared into one of those holes, past the flame, though my stomach convulsed and mortal terror squeezed my heart—but I could not look away. What waited past the dark was grotesque, yes, but beautiful. I stepped toward the hole where the painting had been.

 
; I tripped. Shannon lay at my feet, dress torn, hair tangled around her face. I looked back to the painting, into the hole, and I remember being annoyed at the interruption, at her for tripping me—but the easel’s legs gave way, and the frame, and the vast space beyond collapsed to burnt canvas, and I was free, and suffocating.

  I hoisted Shannon onto my back and staggered away from the flames. She breathed into my ear, but I did not understand her words. Maybe they were in another language altogether. I don’t trust myself to write them down.

  I do trust other memories. I trust my memory of footprints on the sooty carpet, prints left by clawed, inhuman feet. And, as I turned to the stairs, I saw, in the roil beyond the window, sharp starry glints of multifaceted eyes, and flickering curved wings. Of Morrison there was no sign.

  I slammed the door behind us, and we rejoined the human current away from the fire.

  * * *

  Outside Crispin’s apartment, the sky was a dreadful yellow. Grace hadn’t swerved yet. Some weather folk still claimed she would. We were supposed to evacuate. We hadn’t.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.” He’d pulled a cloth over the canvas, as always when there was a risk I might look. Beneath, the painting might have been anything—or nothing. The drapery twitched in a draft, though there were no drafts in Crispin’s studio.

  “I saw your paintings,” I said. “From the gallery.” That was what I led with, not the monsters, not the fire. That I had seen the paintings, or what was left of them, seemed stranger in this room than the rest. “Crispin, things crawled out of them. There were holes in the canvas, and on the other side of the holes, I saw…” I could not finish.

  His grip tightened on the brush. “Good.”

  “The police still don’t know where Bellkleft is. My agent almost died!”

  “We’re so close.”

  “Close to what?”

  “The place beyond death,” he said. “The root of the horror. The place where they lie sleeping.” His voice caught. He looked away. “Will you pose for me?”