And when the picture’s done, it’s all right.
There are angels with wings, and big white fluffy clouds, and lots of glowing halos, and a harp. And there’s a man on a throne—an old man with a beard—who, one assumes, must be God.
And the man kind of likes it!
But then he tilts his head.
There’s something about the picture that isn’t right.
Hmm, says the man.
He stares at it awhile.
Then he takes a big brush and paints it white.
I’ll do it again tomorrow and it’ll be better, the man says.
He turns out the lights and goes to bed.
But for some reason, he can’t sleep. He lies there in the dark.
Guess I’ll do it better now, he finally says.
So the man gets out of bed and paints another picture. But this time, the picture is even worse. The halos are all crooked and God looks slightly crazed—like a hungry man trying to sell insurance.
Ugh, says the man, and takes a step back.
We’ll try again tomorrow, he says.
He picks up the big brush and paints the canvas white.
And then he turns and goes back to bed.
It takes him a really long time to fall asleep, and when he does, it’s no fun at all. He keeps dreaming that he’s painting terrible pictures of Heaven.
Dammit, get it right! a voice calls out.
So at the crack of dawn, the man gets up and starts to paint again. He doesn’t even have his coffee first.
I gotta get this picture done—and done right! he says.
But the third picture is infinitely worse.
This third picture doesn’t look even a bit like Heaven. It’s all a sickening, flickering shade of red. The angels look enraged, and a few are holding pitchforks.
And God isn’t there—he’s gone away.
Oh God, the man says.
He slashes up the canvas. He balls it up and shoves it in the trash. He breaks up all his brushes, pours the paints straight down the drain.
It’s okay, he says. It’s all alright!
I just have to not paint any more pictures, he says.
Okay, he says. Time to take a walk.
He opens up the front door and heads off down the street.
What a nice day! he says.
But something’s off.
Yes, the sky is blue, and yes, the sun is out, and yes, there are birds in the air. And yes, there are couples walking past and kids at play.
But something’s different—though what, he cannot say.
The man peers about—searching, squinting hard—and after a while, he starts to see: the passersby are regarding him with strange and furtive looks.
And he smells something burning on the breeze.
Smoke! the man thinks. Is there a fire somewhere?
He cranes his neck around, trying to see.
Somehow, the temperature seems to have risen.
The man reaches up and undoes his collar.
I don’t think that loosening your collar’s gonna help, a man passing by says, with a leer.
Strangely, this man appears to have a forked tail—and cloven hooves? That seem to clatter as he comes near?!
Oh God! the man yells.
He turns and runs away—straight into the midst of a swirling crowd.
They’re all cackling at him—demons and devils!
He turns his eyes quickly to the ground.
Please, God, the man says, just let me get back home!
That prompts roaring laughter from all around.
The man claps his hands over his ears and turns and runs.
Once home, he locks the door and pulls the window shades all down.
The man hides in the bathroom.
What do I do, what do I do? he says.
Suddenly he remembers the painting.
It must be because of that, he thinks. I have to get it right! If I paint Heaven right, this nightmare will stop!
Okay! says the man, and claps his hands together.
Then he remembers he poured his paints away.
And the canvas, too, he thinks, is gone.
He looks toward the door.
But there’s no way he’s going out there to buy more.
And at that very moment, the walls begin to crack—and through the cracks, the man sees only fire.
He tries to back away, but there’s nowhere to go.
Then two dark eyes appear inside the fire.
Well? says a voice.
But how? says the man.
These few moments left are all he’s got.
And suddenly the man laughs—and he paints a perfect Heaven.
He does it on the floor, in his own blood.
Gabriel Metsu, Man Writing a Letter, c. 1664–66
HELEN McCLORY
So I’m not a docent now, but in my years in that field I became familiar with the idea that there are many paintings that have an atmosphere. Put it that way. I’m not talking about hyperactive eBay entries, ugly amateurish work that gets boosted by having a legend attached. I don’t judge anyone for trying to keep their pockets lined in such a creative way. It’s a kind of art in itself, in my view. But I’m speaking of classical works, with reputations that don’t need that kind of thing to make them memorable. Ones you’d know in a second, or have a sense that you should, anyway. I have had the good luck to stare at many iconic paintings from my little stool, getting to know them really well, getting to understand each colored inch of them, and, another benefit, seeing how other people respond to them; silent appraisals, grunts and little gasps, funny comments, the movements folks will make trying to orient themselves to something they have seen a hundred times before in other, lesser frames. And some of these paintings, just a very few, have a different kind of presence.
Which paintings, you’ll ask, haunted sunflowers? Or did the many heads of Marilyn start wheedling from that Warhol number? I know you’re going to take it wrongly, on purpose. You don’t believe in presences. You don’t believe in me. But you’re sitting with me, and listen—I’m only going to tell you about the one thing, and I’m not going to stutter. The ghost isn’t a metaphor for my boredom, my depression, my failed marriage, or my bad left leg. I saw it, that’s the truth.
I met him in the Smithsonian Gallery of Art, when he was on loan from Dublin. You can probably guess the setting for the encounter: late on, right as the gallery is closing up for the night, lights going off, and I’m putting my things away in the locker and hear a noise—come on. I’m a docent. I’m not in the building late, that’s security. So it was early, before we opened. The morning was streaming in through the skylight. That particular gallery had been newly hung, mostly Vermeers. I want to make some joke about teeth, but I can’t think of one right now. Teeth, Jesus. This was the first chance I’d got to look at him, and I was taking my time. I liked to do that, get a good first look fresh, before other people came between me and the work, with all their impressions rubbing over before I had the chance to make mine. So I went up before him and took my time. The man writing a letter is wearing some fantastic black silky coat and his white linen sleeves and neckline are all ruffles. There’s a hat perched on his chairback. A painting on the wall behind him of an autumn countryside and animals. He has long, wavy fair hair and delicate features, looks about fourteen. You could say he’d be any gender. He’s writing that letter on a desk by a window in the left part of the frame—I suppose that’s why they put him with the Vermeers. That man loved a leftward window. The most beautiful part of the painting is the spectacular arrangement he’s got for a tablecloth. It’s opulent orange-reds and blues, looks like an antique carpet. He’s a rich boy, my man. He looks like he might be writing a college admissions letter, though I know there’s a companion piece to this, Woman Reading a Letter, so I guess it’s something to her. His eyes are looking down and mostly closed.
At least, they were at first.
I’m not easily
scared. You think I haven’t seen things, working with the public so close for so long? I have seen the way folks behave when they think no one’s watching, and I’m no one to them. That lesson I learn over and over. I’ve heard men howling, old men weeping, little kids hissing and walking backward from Francis Bacon pictures that crackle with malign intent. I’ve faced down Rothkos that pulled my soul half out like a string of flags from my throat. I have seen somebody try to stab themselves in front of Botticelli’s Venus, and I was only at the Uffizi on holiday. I have seen paintings move before. Seen them jump off the wall when no one’s touched them and the fittings are high-tensile backings installed months before. But I swear, I stood in front of Man Writing a Letter, a peaceful painting, in high actual daylight and watched his fingers start to move his white quill over the page.
I could hear the sounds from the street outside. The street outside the painting. Carts rolling. A dog. People carrying on lives that were not there. I looked at the globe behind him and saw how papery yellow it looked, like a skull. I saw the thick red of the tablecloth so clearly I could have been feeling the grain of it myself, with my own fingers. All this, could be I was imagining it, yes, caught up in the details, getting a little lost in them. I stood and allowed myself to believe that. I’ve seen masterpieces that can do almost as much, like I said. But just as I was going to make my turn to the stool, to look for the first folks coming by, I saw him move his whole head and look at me.
He opened his mouth. Sweet mouth it is. I was terrified by its sweetness, and I saw his small teeth, which were wet, which nobody’s ever seen, and he put the pen down, and got up. The length of him, standing in his black frock coat and trousers, white shirt. He moved forward a little—the painting is close in on him, he had so little distance he could go. He plucked his hat off the back of the seat and put it on his head. He was getting ready to get down.
Then I don’t know what he did, because I got myself out of there.
Of course I had to go back to work after a little bit. You think I just ran out on a good docent job? I stayed my distance from him, glad when the room was chock-full of people, all looking at girls pouring milk from jugs. From across the room I kept him in my indirect line of sight. Paintings demand an emotional response from you, some more than most. Part of it is the quality of the work, part knowing how much older they are than you. That boy who is a man is three hundred and fifty-odd. Time enough for him to grow a self, and use it, when he can. Maybe I was just tired, you’ll say, thinking a painting looked at me. With the idea, maybe, that I’ve felt invisible in this line of work. Maybe no, I say. It was him that was that tired of being seen.
Instrument of the Ancestors
TROY L. WIGGINS
Back in the day Darius, Tavis, and Fred would go to Greenbelt Park, stumble down to the banks of the Mississippi, and skip rocks. Even though they weren’t supposed to. Darius loved the river, loved the sour smell of ancient rot and the moody, low noises of unseen things splashing in the muddy water. It was their Saturday fall ritual until Fred went under.
“It’s like breathing through somebody else’s mouth,” the Tavis of Darius’s memory said from way back. “Disgusting, how hot it is outchea.”
Fred smiled his goofy, lopsided smile. “Why you thinking about breathing in other boys’ mouths? You gay, ain’t it, Tavis?”
Fred was right, of course, though Tavis didn’t want to admit it. Darius knew that Tavis thought about other boys’ mouths all the time. Nobody cared about that. Tavis was Tavis, usually quick with a husky laugh or a soft smile. Except for this time. Instead, his response was to shove Fred. Fred was giggling even when his foot slipped on a piece of crumbling moldy wood, and Darius could still hear crystal clear through the decades the wet slap of Fred’s head against a cosmically positioned rock.
They don’t remember how the blood trickled down Fred’s temple. Just that he fell into the water and was swallowed without a trace. Neither Darius nor Tavis were thinking about other boys’ mouths then, at least not in that way. They cussed. They prayed. They ran. What else could they do?
Fred’s mother, Harriet, didn’t shed a tear at the news.
“The river just takes sometimes,” she said. “It gives and it takes, just like the Lord. We got plenty of ancestors in that river. Fred’s one of them now. Oh, my baby.”
Darius snapped out of his dream and found himself standing in the window of his seventeenth-floor office looking out over the Mississippi River. He didn’t even remember approaching the window. He felt half wet, like a towel wrung out and thrown across the floor. His office was full of buzzing, the disquieting clash of cicadas. For a moment he was a boy again, staring in horror at the river that had swallowed his friend.
“I gets weary and sick of tryin’ . . .”
Something tingled at the edges of his perception, like he wasn’t alone. It was his phone, he realized, stumbling to his desk. A 504 area code? You never knew these days. He tapped his earbuds.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” a husky voice greeted him. “Is this, uh. Is this Darius Beasley?”
“Yeah, who is . . . wait. Tavis?”
“Uh, yeah. I got your number from your mom. How you been?”
“Don’t call me after fifteen years with no ‘how you been?’ What you want?”
Tavis’s chuckle incensed Darius even more. “You never did have time for bullshit. But bear with me. Have you, uh. Have you heard from Fred lately?”
“Man, get the fuck off my phone—”
“Wait!” Tavis shouted, and the quaver in his voice made Darius pause. “Man, listen. I know you think I’m bullshitting but I’m serious. You know I been kinda everywhere since I left the city a few years back. I’m in the Gulf working on the oil shit and man, I swear to God I heard Fred’s voice calling me. Body all achin’, he said. He told me I wouldn’t get no rest until Judgment Day.”
“Bullshit.”
“It wasn’t just one day either, man. It was like a month straight. You know his birthday just passed. When the last time you talked to his mom?”
“They put her in that home some years back. But whatever, man. I’m not about to play with you. You ghost for fifteen years and this is what you come back with?”
“I’m serious, D. I’m on a Greyhound heading home. I’ll be there in the morning. Will you meet me tomorrow evening? By the river where we used to go? Please? This shit is bugging me, man.”
“Whatever,” Darius snapped, and ended the call.
Tavis’s haunted voice followed Darius home. He was so distracted that he didn’t notice the rusty nail on his doorstep until it pierced straight through the sole of his oxfords and into his right foot.
“Goddamnit,” he swore, hopping into his house. He threw down his bag and flopped onto his couch, then gently removed his shoe. It’d only barely penetrated the skin—one small bead of blood welled up in the center of his foot. It was rusty, sure, but he didn’t want to go to the emergency room tonight. He hit it with some alcohol and wrapped it in gauze. Then he made a little dinner, brushed his teeth, and went to bed.
The voice came to him in the night.
“Show me that stream called the river Jordan
That’s the old stream that I long to cross . . .”
Darius normally slept late on Saturdays, but when he woke at 3:45 in the afternoon he saw that Tavis had called six times. He’d sent a couple halting texts as well:
I’m here. At Lamplighter Inn. Goin 2 see ma then headed 2 river.
Meet me there.
Darius turned the request over in his head. Tavis wasn’t deserving of forgiveness. But he didn’t deserve to be alone. His thoughts were interrupted by someone singing an old song in a boy’s voice, an echo of days long gone.
“I get weary and sick of tryin’
I’m tired of livin’ an’ scared of dyin’”
Darius shot out of bed.
“Fred?” He frantically searched the room. His phone buzzed. It was Tavis.
Headed 2 River.
Meet me there.
“River ain’t changed since we was kids,” Tavis said, trying to break the silence. It was fall but the bugs and fish were still out. Darius picked up a rock, skimmed it across the thick water. It skipped six, seven times before sinking beneath the surface.
“The fuck you doing here, Tavis? And why you calling me? What you want?”
Tavis shrugged. He looked rough in his oil-spattered coveralls and work boots. His fingernails were black, face gaunt, stubble sickly gray. Darius felt embarrassed in his leather boots and cable-knit sweater.
“You should have stayed,” Darius managed. “You should have stayed and dealt with it.”
“Like you had to?” Tavis snarled. “I’m not you, and you damn sure ain’t me. I couldn’t just deal with it. I couldn’t stay here.”
“Why the fuck not!” Darius advanced on Tavis, shoved him. Tavis was taller than Darius, but leaner. He stumbled over a rock. Both men froze. Brush rustled in the gloomy distance.
“Long low river,” a voice echoed off the trees in the low twilight. “It just keeps rolling along.”
Both men recognized the voice.
“Fred?” they called.
“No,” the voice said. A shrouded figure appeared in the trees. “Fred’s gone.”
Tavis had produced a knife from his coveralls. Darius motioned for him to put it away. “Stop playing games and show yourself.”
The shrouded figure hobbled into view. It wore a long blue raincoat and pulled the hood away to reveal an old woman’s face. The two men recognized her instantly.
“Ms. Harriet?” Tavis said. “I don’t—”
“Hush your wicked mouth,” she said, jabbing a finger at Tavis, who snapped his jaw shut so fast his teeth clicked. Tavis moaned in pain.
“What are you doing out here, Ms. Harriet?” Darius asked in a whisper. “And how can you speak in Fred’s voice?”
“Y’all took him,” she murmured, so low that Darius could barely hear her. “Y’all took him and for fifteen years I had to let y’all be until I could find a way to make you pay. But my ancestors showed me how. And it’s time.”
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