“And this time?” asked the doctor. “It’s different because there is nothing novel about the pain, and the drama is trite because it’s a rerun?”
“My God, you do understand after all.”
Velocity just spread his hands.
The artist grinned and shook his head. “I even halfway believe he’ll come back to me.”
“Which would do what to your creative juices?”
“Well…probably not turn them into elixir vitae,” Destroyer admitted with a sigh. “More likely turn them into Kool-Aid, or something equally banal. Life has taken on that bland taste of the expected, and one does not savor the predictable tastes of ordinary things. You don’t close your eyes while you explore the taste of a glass of tap water.”
“No.”
“So, I guess what I’m experiencing, Vee, is that deadly emotional plateau where there are no real highs or lows anymore.”
“And you would relish either?”
“Certainly. Relish them; embrace them with every fiber of my being. Intense pain is as much an artistic stimulant as exultation. At this point getting violently mugged would give me something to paint about.” Destroyer rubbed his hands over his face. When he looked at them he was not surprised to see how badly they were shaking. “I’m scared,” he said.
“Scared of what, exactly?”
“Of being at the end of what I am,” said the artist in a small, bleak voice. “Look, you know how I was when I was younger, what I went through. I understand horror. I’ve seen things in those foster homes far worse than the fangs of any vampire or the claws of any werewolf. I’ve felt horror breathing on the back of my neck as it held me in its hands and used me, took me, ripped me apart. I know monsters. Real ones.”
“Yes,” said Velocity quietly. “You do.”
“And you know that coming through that changed me. People talk about surviving childhood horrors, but survival is meaningless. Living is what matters. I crawled out of a den of monsters and knew that I could have become one of them. Easily. Very, very easily. That’s what happens to some people. They feel how helpless they are when confronted by darkness, and they realize how powerful that darkness is. How vast and unbreakable it seems. And for a lot of kids like me it’s easier to just become the darkness and allow it to define them because that work is already done and the template seems so unbreakable.”
“Some,” said Velocity. “Not all. Not most.”
“No. Most creep through life wearing the badge of ‘survivor’ as if it is a medal for a battle won. It’s not. It can’t be. Most often a person has survived because the monster did not want to destroy them all the way. To kill them would be to empty them of screams, of struggle, of fear and pain, and that’s what those monsters feed on.”
Velocity nodded.
“I didn’t survive my childhood. I rose above it. I put one foot on the neck of my monster and used it to boost myself up out of the shit and the shadows and all of the horror.”
“Yes you did.”
“Which is why I never talk about this with anyone but you. Not even Aztec knows.”
Another nod from the doctor.
“My choice was to define myself,” continued the artist, “rather than accept the popular definition. I painted myself into a fresh canvas and I got to choose the forms, the colors, the brushstrokes.”
“Yes,” said the doctor.
“And that’s what gave me the power to paint the things I have, in the past, painted. The pieces that made my name for me. It’s why people can look into my paintings and see things that run deeper than the de facto subject. Let’s face it, if I paint a seascape it’s not really a seascape.”
“No.”
“Instead of looking outward for approval or acceptance or kindness, like so many others like me do, I looked inward. I took my palette knife to the shadows, I cut away the weakness I saw in myself, I let myself embrace the horrors and own them.” As he spoke, Destroyer’s tone never got above a soft, sad, empty whisper. “But when Aztec left me this last time I realized something about myself that is a new level of horror.”
“And what is that?” asked Velocity.
“I’m empty,” said the artist. “My colors have dried out and my paint box is filled with dust. No, that’s too cliché. My paint box is filled with dime-store watercolors, and everything I try to do now is rote, routine, rinse-and-repeat. God, before you got here, Vee, I was thinking about cutting my wrists or maybe jumping out of the fucking window. Really. And you know why? Because if I finish another goddamn painting, I know—absolutely know—that no matter how pretty it looks, no matter how much people oooh and aaah over it, there will not be one drop of real blood in it. All I have left is technique. Can you…can you imagine how much that terrifies me? To know that even if I continue to sell my canvases—and they would sell, let’s face it—I would do so knowing that nothing I ever painted would be as good as what I’ve already painted. To an artist, that is more terrifying than anything I’ve lived through or imagined. It is to be dead. It’s like being a zombie. Moving, walking, going through the motions but not really alive in any way that matters. Not to me and, ultimately, not to the people who are perceptive enough to know the difference. Not to the people who understand the art I used to be able to do, and who could see it for what it was.”
The music changed again and this time it was a young woman singing “The Coventry Carol.” Both men sat for a moment and listened to it. A woman singing to her sisters about their children slaughtered by King Herod to prevent the rise of the Messiah. There was such plaintive, desperate pain in her voice that it filled the room with sharp edges.
“That,” said Destroyer, pointing to the closest speaker, “is exactly what I mean. That’s what I lost.”
“Ah,” murmured Doctor Velocity. His eyes were filled with kindness and understanding, and there was a small smile on his mouth.
Destroyer looked at him. “What? Am I being amusing?”
“No, you’re not.”
“Then why the smile?”
He cocked his head to one side, lips pursed, considering. “Oh…I had a delicious little thought.”
“Yes?”
“Well…I was just thinking…” He let his voice trail off into a smirk, watching as Destroyer slid forward until he clung to the very edge of his chair. “I was just thinking of something which would be nice to have—I mean, if such a thing were actually possible.”
“Like what?”
“This is purely hypothetical, you understand,” continued Velocity, “but imagine what it would be like if you could collect the essence of spent lives and used incarnations, boil away everything but the emotions—all emotions, no matter how aberrant or mundane—and then contain this distillate into something like a pill. Think about it, Destroyer. It would be a roller-coaster ride of love, hate, agony, ecstasy, humiliation, triumph, degradation, exultation, boredom, excitement, sudden awareness, sexual discovery, first love, love lost: all of it. A pill such as that would catapult your mind through a lifetime’s emotions in, let’s say for the sake of argument, three or four hours, and leave you with the emotional echoes that would have your senses tingling for days, possibly weeks. What a rush that would be.”
“It would be terrifying,” said the artist.
“Yes it would.”
“It would be worse than a hundred haunted houses,” said Destroyer. “It would be worse than being laid naked on a sacrificial altar to some dark god.”
“You’re in danger of getting poetic again,” cautioned the doctor.
“No, I’m serious. I’ve read about human sacrifices and let myself go deep into the heads of the priests with the knives and the victims waiting for that first touch of steel. To want to hold that knife, to believe that it is a pathway to a connection with God…and to be the
sacrifice, knowing that your pain is there to serve someone else’s vision of the world. They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but I don’t believe there are believers on altars. It’s appalling. I was the priest and I was the victim, Vee. I painted it.”
“Yes.”
“This would be worse.”
“It would,” agreed Velocity. “And I bet you would give anything for a pill like that.”
Destroyer came to point like a good bird dog, but soon sagged down with a heavy sigh. “Yes,” he said, then flapped one hand in despair. “Of course I would. Who wouldn’t?”
“Most people,” countered the doctor. “For virtually everyone you would ever meet on the street what I’m describing is a horror story. It’s nightmares and boogeymen and the clawed hand under the bed all at once. I mean…think about what it would be like to swallow a pill with all of Salvador Dali’s dreams. Or those of Picasso.”
“No,” said Destroyer. “I’ve had those dreams. Surrealists, abstractists, cubists—who cares?”
“They were exceptional artists, surely.”
“No doubt,” growled Destroyer with annoyance, “but despite their famous eccentricities, I don’t believe either of them was deeply afraid of much. They affected their quirks and oddness and used them to move like icebreakers through the chilly seas of high society. No. William Blake, maybe. I think he was seeing things that weren’t there even when he was awake. Maybe Richard Dadd. And Frida Kahlo understood pain. But again…she was accepted, she had a circle of friends, of admirers. That was a buffer. I don’t know that she was actually living in horror beyond that of her damaged body.”
“So you wouldn’t take a Kahlo pill or a Picasso tablet?”
Destroyer thought about it. “No. I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. I’d be afraid that I wouldn’t be afraid. I’d be terrified of not feeling anything I haven’t already felt. Let’s face it, Vee, I’m a notorious eccentric myself. People emulate my weird habits, as people emulated Picasso and Kahlo.” He shook his head. “No, I think taking such a pill would only sand the last few edges off what I have left. It would be too familiar a landscape and I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
“Just a thought,” said Velocity.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I can see why you would think that kind of pill would solve everything. Sure, if the right formula could be accomplished it would be so traumatic and overwhelming that it would sweep away any lingering ennui or apathy, but…it’s impossible, or at least improbable. And certainly no help to me.”
“Mm, but think if it could be done,” insisted the doctor. “Think of it, my dear Destroyer—the ultimate trip. Not a head trip, mind you, but a heart trip. Filled with real terrors so intense they would rip you open from head to heart to bowels.”
“Please, Vee, I’m far enough out on the edge now. Don’t make me ache for something like that. You’re asking a drowning man to imagine a luxurious lifeboat.”
Doctor Velocity relented and sat back, again brushing invisible specks from his pants leg. “Forgive me, Des, I was just thinking out loud. I was thinking that if such a pill existed, say a pill with the distilled emotions of someone like poor, mad, lonely, broken, brilliant, self-destructive, beautiful Vincent van Gogh—then wouldn’t it be glorious?”
“Yes,” said Destroyer hoarsely. “But please…stop…”
“Such a pill,” continued Velocity softly, “might look something like this…”
He held up a single small pill between thumb and forefinger. It sparkled like a bright blue sapphire.
Destroyer took in his next breath with a gasp. “What….?”
Doctor Velocity held the pill up so that it caught the glitter of Christmas lights from outside. Reds and greens and yellows seemed to dance along its seductive curves. “Lovely,” said the doctor. “Isn’t it?”
“No,” cried Destroyer, his eyes bugging. Then he said, “Yes.”
“Oh, yes, my friend,” Velocity agreed, grinning a bright and conspiratorial grin. “Yes indeed.”
The artist licked his lips and made small tentative movements with his hands as if he were about to pounce on Velocity to wrest the tablet away from him. He very nearly drooled, then he flinched as if stung and recoiled, shooting the doctor a harsh, accusatory look.
“You’re being cruel,” said the artist. “You’re just playing with me to try and trick me out of my mood.”
The doctor leaned closer, extending his hand. “I said I came here to give you your Christmas present,” he murmured, “and here it is. All of the dangers of a dark mind, all of the dreadful emotions of a fractured soul. All for you, my dear friend. And all true.”
Destroyer nearly swatted the pill from Velocity’s hand. He nearly bolted and ran for the door. Or the window. Or to snatch up the palette knife and stab this smiling man.
He did none of those things.
Instead he stared at the glittering blue pill.
“Please…,” he begged.
“Take it,” said Velocity, his smile as thin as a promise, his voice so very soft. “Take it and let it hurt you.”
Still Destroyer hesitated. The song was reaching its mournful conclusion, and outside, the night sparkled with strange and alien joy.
“Open your mouth and close your eyes,” coaxed the doctor.
After a long, long time, the artist complied, sticking out his tongue. His paint-splattered hands were shaking with the palsy of great excitement, his heart beat so forcefully in his chest that it bruised him, and he felt as if his ribs were ready to crack.
Velocity placed the sparkling blue pill on Destroyer’s tongue.
“Just hold it in your mouth. Don’t chew it, and for God’s sake don’t swallow it whole. Just let it dissolve.”
Destroyer closed his mouth. His whole body was trembling with excitement and expectation.
It took exactly nine seconds for the effect to hit.
Nine.
Long.
Seconds.
Then Destroyer’s eyes snapped wide and he stared with the goggle-eyed intensity of a person who was not seeing a single iota of his surroundings. Those eyes jumped and twitched as amazing vistas opened up within his mind. His mouth hung slack, his hands danced and wriggled in his lap as the first waves slammed into his mind. The horrors were all there, waiting beneath the surface of the black waters of madness. Monsters with long, wicked, sharp teeth. Monsters filled with madness and beauty. Monsters who needed to scream and could not manage to scream loud enough. Monsters who needed to feed and could never consume enough. And in the mind of that nightmare landscape crouched a tiny figure, a child born with bad wiring and the wrong chemical mix in his brain, but who possessed a light that struggled to shine forth. Struggled and struggled, and even though that child had left behind enduring masterpieces, he knew that nothing—nothing—he ever painted could match the things he saw inside the darkness of his head. As if the art was greater than the flesh of an artist could contain. It was truly and comprehensively terrifying.
The child squatted there, paintbrushes clutched in his tiny fists, and screamed and screamed and screamed.
And Destroyer screamed, too.
Cracks snapped jaggedly across the windows. The colors in his paint box writhed like worms. The canvas on which he had been working blackened to charcoal ashes and fell smoking to the floor.
2
Destroyer was not aware of Velocity as the doctor stood and smoothed down his clothes. Destroyer was looking into another kind of universe, and nothing of this exterior world existed. Not for now. Bombs could have gone off around him and not added one twitch to the waves of spasms that were shaking him.
Smiling, the doctor walked to the door and opened it. He watched the artist tremble and shake as year upon year of emotions surged over him with incalculabl
e rapidity.
“Merry Christmas,” said Doctor Velocity. He left before the secondary waves of one-eared Vincent’s life’s emotions crashed down on the soul of the artist. The screams followed him all the way down to the street.
YANKEE SWAP
JOHN MCILVEEN
“Leaving already?”
Damn it! Kat cursed inwardly, cringing as if pincers had claimed the back of her neck.
Randy Oberlein was the personification of “insufferable.” The son of affluent socialites, he was born with a silver spoon inserted so far up his ass he could stir his pancreas. It meant nothing to him that Kat was engaged and very much in love. And pregnant, she mentally added, although it didn’t show yet.
As assistant division manager, Randy was her superior, which put her in an undesirable position as a subordinate. She was a purchasing manager, a station she had been proud of…until she’d actually started the job.
Randy wanted her—had for months—and as far as he was concerned, she was his right…his entitlement. Evidently, “no” was a word he was not accustomed to and had difficulty acknowledging. She had considered reporting him, but he was as sly as he was arrogant, and the best offense she could present was a he said/she said scenario she feared would cost her her job. Her lack of action or reaction only seemed to encourage him.
Hark! the Herald Angels Scream Page 22