Empire Dreams

by Ian McDonald

  Paul says yes! Vincent, I cannot believe it! After months of trying I have finally lured him away from his pig-faced Bretons! You shall have your artists’ colony after all! Paul says to look for him early in October. He will write nearer the time specifying the date of his arrival.

  So Paul will come. Vincent clenches his fist in triumph and feels as if he is taking firm grip of sanity again.

  * * * *

  October. The trees are stripped bare. The land lies like a hog beneath the knife. The gray wind rattles the shutters and piles dead leaves in every corner. The patrons of the Cafe L’Alcazar have abandoned the porch to the advancing winter and play their dominoes and drink their wine indoors by the stove. They know October. They respect it. October brings wind and rain and cold nights. And Paul.

  In driving rain Vincent meets Paul off the train from Lyon. There is an almost puppyish devotion in the enthusiasm with which he picks up the artist’s bags and folios and brings him to the Yellow House.

  “Look, Paul, this is the cafe, this is the square, this is the market.” Paul looks and sees a provincial town in an autumn rainstorm. As he dries his coat before the fire he half-listens to Vincent’s evangelistic rantings and watches the firelight play upon his host’s narrow face and dancing hands. In a moment’s impatience he says,

  “People say you are mad, Vincent: ‘Crazy Dutchman,’ they call you.” The faith-fire gutters and fails in Vincent’s eyes. His hands freeze in flight. His soul goes dark as if a cloud has covered up its sun. There is a look of sore betrayal on his face. Paul regrets his impetuousness.

  “If so, then we are all mad, Vincent, every last one of us. Mad with a fine and enviable madness, the madness that drives us to be artists.”

  The clouds pass from the face of the sun. A rare smile flashes.

  “Enviable madness, monsieur? Enviable indeed!”

  So they paint together. When the weather is good, Vincent takes Paul out onto the byways of Provence and shows him the twisted cypresses like green flames and the white stone walls and the red villages. He tries to spark in Paul some of that same vision of the sun that burns in him.

  “The sun, Paul, the sun, everything comes from the sun, it is the center of our being around which our little lives orbit.”

  Paul nods his head but does not understand. And Vincent hears a second voice, within him, saying, “Does it? Is it? I have time, Vincent, plenty of time, when Paul is gone, and he will go, then I will have you all to myself.”

  Then there are the days when the weather is not good.

  When the sun’s face is hidden, they paint indoors. They paint each other, they paint themselves, they paint the rooms they live in, the chairs they sit in, the pipes they smoke; they paint themselves as god and devil inside the doors of Vincent’s wardrobe. As the year moves towards its turn, the weather grows increasingly hostile and opportunities for outdoor work increasingly rare.

  Confinement indoors makes Vincent irritable. More than once his arguments with Paul over art and artistry flare into a fury which sends both men storming out to seek the solace of their own company. Each day the atmosphere in the House of Friends grows sourer. Paul has long realized that whatever Aries may hold for Vincent, it holds nothing for him. Vincent knows that Paul has the Pacific in his eyes: he will leave, and when he leaves all hope Vincent has held for his artists’ colony will perish.

  And all the time, floating like detached cells in the aqueous humor, there is the King of Pain and the madness that surrounds him.

  One night close to Christmas, Vincent stamps out of the house after a furious row, pulling on coat and hat, not caring where he is going except that it is away from the Yellow House. Hot temper and looming failure drive him out of the town, past empty fields and moonlit cypresses as familiar to him as his own hands. The winter constellations hang above him, poised like falling arrows. He turns his face to the sky and feels infinite space swirl and swim around him, as if it is Vincent who is the axis about which the universe turns. Turning turning turning, Vincent is dragged along by the inertia of the stellar motion. He spins beneath the spinning sky and the stars reach down in great cartwheels of light to crush him.

  “Surrender,” commands the voice within, “surrender, give yourself up to the madness. Surrender, be at peace. Give yourself up.”

  “No!” cries Vincent. He snaps himself to a halt. “No! Never!” The sky spins away from him, and he is there. On the beach. By the sea. Beneath the tree.

  The King of Pain sits with his knees drawn close to his chest, head tilted back against the trunk, gazing at the constellations.

  “Hello, Vincent,” he says. “Funny how time flies. Even asymmetrical time.”

  “This is madness!” cries Vincent in denial. “This is not real!”

  “Madness it most certainly is,” agrees the King of Pain. “Real? Tchah! Means nothing here. Pain is real, though; what is more real than pain, Vincent? Your pain? Sit down, I’ve something for you.” Vincent sits. The King of Pain looks into the sky.

  “I never paid you for your work, Vincent.”

  “I never completed the work.”

  “A king can afford to be as generous as he is unpredictable. Tell me, do you expect Paul to stay much longer?”

  “How do you know about Paul?”

  “All human history is mine through the memories of the High and Shining Ones. Paul has his Tahiti; you will find, as you had your Japan, you now have your Provence. Tell me, Vincent, what is it you fear most?”

  The answer is spoken before the lie can cover it over.

  “Madness. Fear. Pain. You.”

  “Ah. But am I not king of this madness, this fear, this pain? It’s only fitting that I should pay you for your work in a kingly, caring coin. This is how I will pay you: I have been refining my powers of late, drawing up plans and programs, making little experiments. Their exact nature is, of course, no concern of yours; suffice to say that my payment to you is the working out of part of them.” Quick as a lizard, the King of Pain’s hand brushes against the side of Vincent’s neck, and Vincent feels something lizardlike wriggle there, dart into his head. “I have implanted you with one of the High and Shining Ones, only this implant is different, the first of a new breed. You are unique, Vincent, you are a prototype, the first human ever to be freed from pain. Do you understand what I am doing, Vincent? I am modifying the areas of your brain that sense pain so that you will never know pain, or fear, or madness again. Only colors, Vincent, only the colors of God’s eyes.”

  The world opens about Vincent like a sunflower blooming and he is back beneath the swirling stars. Again he turns his face to them but this time there is no crazy dizziness, no swirling, gyring madness; there is only light, and colors the like of which he has never even conceived of before.

  In the morning, before his washbasin, he deliberately bites down on his little finger, bites until the blood flows, until his teeth grate on bone. He feels no pain, not the tiniest twitch, only colors: bright, vibrant colors like he is seeing the world by the light of a truer, higher sun.

  At lunch he burns his hand badly on the oven door. The blisters shock Paul out of his sardonicism but Vincent sees only colors, such beautiful colors, the colors of God’s eyes.

  In the afternoon Vincent takes canvas and paints out into the bitter December landscape. The biting cold, the thin-edged wind, only intensify the colors he sees in the eyes of his soul. Even Paul’s sarcasms that evening hang like little golden halos around the oil lamps. The sharp words mean nothing to Vincent. All that matters is freedom. Freedom from pain. Freedom from fear. Freedom from madness.

  * * * *

  “Paul, do you believe there is a purpose to pain?”

  It is the evening before Christmas. Logs in the hearth fill the room with a pale, winter imitation of the sun. Under the pretense of peace, tension is building. Vincent knows Paul is losing patience, with him, with Aries, with Provence. He will soon leave. The colony will fail. That should fill Vincent with
dread and loneliness, but all he feels is a warm rainbow glow that warms his soul as the fire warms his body.

  “No. Pain comes, joy comes, it is like a river. Who can say what will come down the river next? We are all fish fighting our way upstream, against pain, against joy, against everything, and at the end of the journey we die.”

  “What would you say if I told you there is a King of Pain watching us from some distant place whose duty it is to bring meaning to our pain?”

  “I would say it is a horrible idea.”

  “But what would you say, Paul, if I told you I’ve met him?”

  “For God’s sake, Vincent!” Paul’s outburst splits the air like lightning.

  “I’ve met him, and in return for my painting his portrait, he gave me the gift of freedom from pain?”

  “Vincent! For the love of Christ!”

  “And now there is no pain for me, no pain at all, no fear, no madness. Just … colors. Beautiful, bright colors everywhere: only I can see them, like the King’s beach by the side of the Sea of Forever, only I can see it. Now I know what the part of me that feels pain has been connected to.”

  “Vincent! Stop it! Stop it! It’s madness!”

  “What if it’s true?”

  “No! Vincent, for Christ’s sake, stop this! It’s insane!”

  But Vincent has taken the razor from its place on the table by the bed. He has it open, held next to his ear to show Paul, to show Theo, to show the people of Aries, and Provence, and France and Holland and the whole world, and all people in all worlds in all possible times, that there is either the King of Pain or there is the madness surrounding him.

  He starts to cut.

  Paul is shouting something but he cannot make out the words for they are flying about the room like great brilliant butterflies. The room seethes with a wash of colors; everywhere there is color, endless rainbows of color.

  He can feel the blood running down him, down his neck, down his shoulders, down his side.

  Paul is screaming, trying to tear the razor away from him, but Vincent throws him across the room with one jerk of his arm and the colors mount layer upon layer upon layer until the staggering beauty threatens to crush him like a great gray boulder.

  In his right hand is the razor. In his left, the lower third of his right ear. The mighty Gauguin—master, teacher, inspiration, leader—is whimpering in a corner.

  That same night Vincent places his severed ear in an envelope and pushes it under the door of a brothel he knows well while the prostitutes are all out at midnight mass. When he returns home Paul is gone. And all the while the lights spin and the colors fly.

  * * * *

  Dr. Guilefoy is a kind man. He is different from all the other doctors and nurses in the asylum. He has sympathy. He understands the needs of artists. He has a patient, a gaunt, ginger-haired man with a mutilated ear, a man possessed of a frantic, intense energy that disturbs the air around him like the passage of a great wind. Dr. Guilefoy has heard that he is a Dutchman, resident in Aries, a painter, and it saddens Dr. Guilefoy to see him here, by his own admission. So Dr. Guilefoy writes to the painter’s brother in Paris and asks him to continue sending canvas and paint, while he himself visits the Dutchman’s sordid lodgings to collect his brushes and easels and workbooks. He assigns the patient two rooms, one for exclusive use as a studio, and he signs the document giving the artist permission to leave the asylum to paint. Immense therapeutic value, he writes on the release. As spring turns to summer, Dr. Guilefoy notes carefully, and with satisfaction, the patient’s progress along the path to sanity. It is as if the season’s turning is calling forth new life in the Dutchman; he buds, he blossoms, he burgeons into an outpouring of canvases. Dr. Guilefoy inspects them all in his office and marvels at the swirls of color: the titanic looming star-whirlpools of his Starry Nights; the vegetative sentience beyond the asylum door in his view of Saint-Rémy; his fellow patients with their hats and sticks, “like farmers in the third-class waiting room of a provincial station”; the green green ivy and the blooming almond branch.

  From his open study window Dr. Guilefoy can see the patient painting, painting with the furious devotion of one upon whom an angel has laid a pronouncement of doom. Dr. Guilefoy shakes his head and turns to his casebooks.

  The patient’s dementia takes the form of consuming hallucinations which he describes as like being inside a kaleidoscope of colors: the more acute his mental and emotional anguish, the more intense these hallucinations become until he feels, to use his own words, “I no longer exist, I am painting a dream, all there is are colors, all the colors of pain.” Yet the patient persists in claiming that these deeply disturbing hallucinations are not symptoms of insanity, but blessings, gifts of a so-called “King of Pain.” I cannot attempt to define the place of this promethean figure in the patient’s solar pantheon, yet the detail with which he describes the fantastic (and I must confess, horrible) world-to-come this creature of dread and fantaisie inhabits is strangely definite and self-consistent. There are aspects of the patient’s story I simply cannot discredit, and the patient’s belief in this

  “King of Pain” is so unshakable that on one recent occasion, when I questioned it, he swallowed a quantity of paints to demonstrate his freedom from physical pain and anguish. I attributed this unfortunate incident to another of his periodic bouts of insanity, occurring at three-monthly intervals, when the patient hallucinates these brilliant, blinding colors. It is at these times that he claims clairvoyant visions of the King of Pain (even claiming to have an unfinished portrait of him hidden under his bed) and it becomes necessary to restrain him and confine him to his rooms until the episode passes.

  Poor mad Vincent! The man’s artistic genius is beyond question, but warped and distorted by his madness it manifests itself in the swirling chaos of his paintings. I have been in regular contact with the patient’s brother who suggests that Vincent be moved to a retreat closer to Paris where he may be cared for more easily. Such filial devotion is heart-rending, for Vincent is quite mad, I am afraid. I shall not easily forget his shrieked exclamation as we restrained him during his last attack:

  * * * *

  “Don’t you see? Don’t you see? Don’t you understand what he’s connected my pain to?”

  * * * *

  Dr. Guilefoy writes in neat copperplate. In the asylum garden below, Vincent paints paints paints, burning with a fire of unknown origin.

  * * * *

  In the spring Vincent left the asylum to paint a sower. Now it is autumn and again he is leaving the asylum, this time searching for a reaper. But it is the reaper who is searching for him. He is waiting for Vincent outside the asylum walls; the reaper, standing waiting with dusty feet, but his disguise cannot hide the charm in his eyes.

  Vincent knows who he is.

  “After so long, still you will not leave me alone?”

  “The portrait under your bed is still unfinished, Vincent. Time passes differently for me than for you. Asymmetrically, Vincent.”

  “But this is not your place. How can you be here?”

  “A further refining of my powers, Vincent. I have learned to project myself through the past into your objective universe as you have been projected through the future into my subjective universe. I may be nothing but a swirl of virtual particles, but then, ultimately, so are you, and we are both solid enough to appreciate this autumn day for its beauty. It’s good to be free of that place, Vincent. Shall we walk awhile, perhaps?”

  The king and the painter walk side by side in the red dust of Provence. As they walk they speak of many things, or rather, it is the king who speaks, for a painter should not engage in idle tittle-tattle with a king, even a king of madness. King and painter walk together and as they walk it seems to Vincent that with each footstep he takes, the world about him grows less familiar, less recognizable as the landscape of Provence.

  On each side of the dusty lane lie the landscapes of madness. Slaughtered horses, burning windmills, tan
gled piles of tortured metal and shattered glass, a helmeted man clutching a poppy in a water-filled hole, pouch-bellied skeleton children, more horrifying for being alive than they would be in any conceivable death, an endless line of men in gray caps reaching to the infinite horizon, each holding the shoulder of the man before; pale, soft heaps of wide-eyed bodies scooped, torn by metal-mawed machines and dumped, softly, silently, into furnace-mouths; a bumed brick wall decorated with the silhouette of a man, a child, and a leaping dog stenciled in yellow paint and two suns setting in the west; children stuck with ten thousand times ten thousand needles; mills and machines and a million million belching chimneys—

  “Stop!” cries Vincent. “Stop stop stop!” And the King of Pain stops and turns to face him. “What is this place? Why have you brought me here? Why? Why?”

  “This is the road of the years,” says the King of Pain. “The path that leads through time to the edge of the Sea of Forever. This is the future, Vincent, the future which you are helping to shape, the future which shaped me. Take a good, long look at the future.”

  Then Vincent realizes that he can see for a million miles before him and a million miles behind him and a million miles on either side of him and everywhere he looks across the infinite, flat fields he sees pain and suffering and sorrow, agony and anguish, despair and destruction and death, heaped in great rotting floes and drifts across the future.

  “Appalling, Vincent? A future of meaningless, unrelieved suffering. But for the King of Pain. Soon all men shall be as you are, and pain will be destroyed. Take another look, Vincent.”

  And as Vincent looks out over the landscapes of pain, he sees that there is a rainbow sheen on the oily fens and tidal flats and rotting sinkholes, a luminous, numinous aurora flickering over the fused glass puddles and cindered towns and cracked hillsides of the future: on every side the pain of all humanity ranges and all he can see are the beautiful, beautiful colors.

  “Take it back, take it back,” he cries. “I don’t want it, to see all the pain, all the anguish, and be unable to help, to know, to feel; to see only colors—that is madness.”