The panic in my voice overcame her doubt. "I'll dress as fast as I can."
***
As we rushed to the clinic, I described what had happened. Clarisse phoned the doctor the moment we arrived. While we waited, she put disinfectant drops in my eye and gave me something for my rapidly developing headache. The doctor showed up, his sleepy features becoming alert when he saw how distressed I was. True to my prediction, he reacted as if I'd had a breakdown. I shouted at him to humor me and saturate me with antibiotics. Clarisse made sure it wasn't just a sedative he gave me. He used every compatible combination. If I thought it would have worked, I'd have swallowed Drano.
***
What I'd seen within the cypresses were tiny, gaping mouths and minuscule, writhing bodies, as small and camouflaged as those in Van Dorn's paintings. I know now that Van Dorn wasn't imposing his insane vision on reality. He wasn't an Impressionist, after all. At least not in his Cypresses in a Hollow. I'm convinced Cypresses was his first painting after his brain became infected. He was literally depicting what he had seen on one of his walks. Later, as the infection progressed, he saw the gaping mouths and writhing bodies like an overlay on everything else he looked at. In that sense, too, he wasn't an Impressionist. To him, the gaping mouths and writhing bodies were in all those later scenes. To the limits of his infected brain, he painted what to him was reality. His art was representational.
I know, believe me. Because the drugs didn't work. My brain is as diseased as Van Dorn's… or Myers's. I've tried to understand why they didn't panic when they were stung, why they didn't rush to a hospital to make a doctor comprehend what had happened. My conclusion is that Van Dorn had been so desperate for a vision to enliven his paintings that he gladly endured the suffering. And Myers had been so desperate to understand Van Dorn that when stung, he'd willingly taken the risk to identify even more with his subject until, too late, he had realized his mistake.
Orange is for anguish, blue for insanity. How true. Whatever infects my brain has affected my color sense. More and more, orange and blue overpower the other colors I know are there. I have no choice. I see little else. My paintings are rife with orange and blue.
My paintings. I've solved another mystery. It always puzzled me how Van Dorn could have suddenly been seized by such energetic genius that he painted thirty-eight masterpieces in one year. I know the answer now. What's in my head, the gaping mouths and writhing bodies, the orange of anguish and the blue of insanity, cause such pressure, such headaches that I've tried everything to subdue them, to get them out. I went from codeine to Demerol to morphine. Each helped for a time but not enough. Then I learned what Van Dorn understood and Myers attempted. Painting the disease somehow gets it out of you. For a time. And then you paint harder, faster. Anything to relieve the pain. But Myers wasn't an artist. The disease had no release and reached its terminal stage in weeks instead of Van Dorn's year.
But I'm an artist — or used to hope I was. I had skill without a vision. Now, God help me, I've got a vision. At first, I painted the cypresses and their secret. I accomplished what you'd expect. An imitation of Van Dorn's original. But I refuse to suffer pointlessly. I vividly recall the portraits of Midwestern landscapes I produced in graduate school. The dark-earthed Iowa landscape. The attempt to make an observer feel the fecundity of the soil. At the time, the results were ersatz Wyeth. But not anymore. The twenty paintings I've so far stored away aren't versions of Van Dorn, either. They're my own creations. Unique. A combination of the disease and my experience. Aided by powerful memory, I paint the river that flows through Iowa City. Blue. I paint the cornfields that cram the big-sky rolling country outside town. Orange. I paint my innocence. My youth. With my ultimate discovery hidden within them. Ugliness lurks within the beauty. Horror festers in my brain.
***
Clarisse at last told me about the local legend. In the Middle Ages, when La Verge was founded, she said, a meteor streaked from the sky. It lit the night. It burst upon the hills north of here. Flames erupted. Trees were consumed. The hour was late. Few villagers saw it. The site of the impact was too far away for those few witnesses to rush that night to see the crater. In the morning, the smoke had dispersed. The embers had died. Although the witnesses tried to find the meteor, the lack of the roads that now exist hampered their search through the tangled hills to the point of discouragement. A few among the few witnesses persisted. The few of the few of the few who had accomplished their quest staggered back to the village, babbling about headaches and tiny, gaping mouths. Using sticks, they scraped disturbing images in the dirt and eventually stabbed out their eyes. Over the centuries, legend has it, similar self-mutilations occurred whenever someone returned from seeking the crater in those hills. The unknown had power then. The hills acquired the negative force of taboo. No villager, then or now, intruded on what came to be called the place where God's wand touched the earth. A poetic description of a blazing meteor's impact. La Verge.
I don't conclude the obvious: that the meteor carried spores that multiplied in the crater, which became a hollow eventually filled with cypresses. No — to me, the meteor was a cause but not an effect. I saw a pit among the cypresses, and from the pit, tiny mouths and writhing bodies resembling insects — how they wailed! — spewed. They clung to the leaves of the cypresses, flailed in anguish as they fell back, and instantly were replaced by other spewing, anguished souls.
Yes. Souls. For the meteor, I insist, was just the cause. To me, the effect was the opening of hell. The tiny, wailing mouths are the damned. As I am damned. Desperate to survive, to escape from the ultimate prison we call hell, a frantic sinner lunged. He caught my eye and stabbed my brain, the gateway to my soul. My soul. It festers. I paint to remove the pus.
I talk. That helps somehow. Clarisse writes it down while her female lover rubs my shoulders.
My paintings are brilliant. I'll be recognized as a genius, the way I had always dreamed.
At such a cost.
The headaches grow worse. The orange is more brilliant. The blue more disturbing.
I try my best. I urge myself to be stronger than Myers, whose endurance lasted only weeks. Van Dorn persisted for a year. Maybe genius is strength.
My brain swells. How it threatens to split my skull. The gaping mouths blossom.
The headaches! I tell myself to be strong. Another day. Another rush to complete another painting.
The sharp end of my paintbrush invites. Anything to lance my seething mental boil, to jab my eyes for the ecstasy of relief. But I have to endure.
On a table near my left hand, the scissors wait.
But not today. Or tomorrow.
I'll outlast Van Dorn.
After Matt's death in June of 1987, I collapsed. The day-after-day month-after-month tension of watching his painful decline had weakened the part of my brain that controls stress. A circuit breaker failed. No matter what I tried to do — take a walk, watch television, read, eat — my body was in a constant state of emergency. Stress chemicals rushed unchecked through me. Panic attacks repeatedly hit me. My mind swirling, my heart racing, all I could do was lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, experiences I wrote about in the non-fictional Fireflies (1988).
Gradually, with the love of my family and friends, I began to climb from the darkness. But the gap of three years between the publication of The League of Night and Fog in 1987 and The Fifth Professions 1990 gives an idea of the black hole that almost swallowed me. It took even longer for me to return to short fiction. The following story's unusual technique communicates the psychological state I was in. If you've ever taken a fiction-writing class, you know that there are three main viewpoints: first person, third-person limited, and third-person omniscient. Each has strengths and weaknesses. But there is a fourth viewpoint, one that is almost never used because of its limitations: the second person. Instead of "I" or "he" and "she," the author tells the story as "you." It's unconventional and problematic, but why not try it? I thought. Just on
ce. To violate a taboo. To add to the lack of convention, I decided to use the present tense. But for a purpose. After all, the way a story is told ought to have something to do with its subject matter. Here, the main character is so stunned by what he has gone through that he feels detached from himself and thinks of himself as "you." Past horrors are constantly being replayed in the present tense of his savaged mind. "The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves" received the Horror Writers Association award for the best novella of 1991.
The Beautiful Uncut Hair of Graves
« ^ »
Despite the rain, you've been to the cemetery yet again, ignoring the cold autumn gusts slanting under your bowed umbrella, the drenched drab leaves blowing against your soaked pantlegs and shoes.
Two graves. You shiver, blinking through tears toward the freshly laid sod. There aren't any tombstones. There won't be for a year. But you imagine what the markers will look like, each birth date different, the death dates — God help you — the same. Simon and Esther Weinberg. Your parents. You silently mouth the kaddish prayers that rabbi Goldstein recited at the funeral. Losing strength, you turn to trudge back to your rain-beaded car, to throw your umbrella on the passenger seat and jab the button marked defroster, to try to control your trembling hands and somehow suppress your chest-swelling rage, your heart-numbing grief.
Eyes swollen from tears, you manage to drive back to your parents' home. An estate on Lake Michigan, north of Chicago, the mansion feels ghostly, hollow without its proper occupants. You cross the enormous vestibule and enter the oak-paneled study. One wall is lined with books, another with photographs of your precious father shaking hands with local and national dignitaries, even a president. As you sit at the massive desk to resume sorting through your father's papers, the last of them, the documents unsealed from your parents' safe-deposit box, your wife appears in the study's doorway, a coffee cup in her hand. She slumps against the wall and frowns as she did when you obeyed your repeated, so intense compulsion to go back — yet again — to the cemetery.
"Why?" she asks.
You squint up from the documents. "Isn't it obvious? I feel the need to be with them."
"That's not what I meant," Rebecca says. She's forty-nine, tall, with dark hair, a narrow face, and pensive eyes. "All the work you've been doing. All the documents and the meetings. All the phone calls. Can't you let yourself relax? You look terrible."
"How the hell should I look? My father's chest was crushed. My mother's head was… The drunken bastard who hit their car got away with just a few stitches."
"Not what I meant," Rebecca repeats. Using two hands, both of them shaky, she raises the coffee cup to her lips. "Don't make sympathy sound like an accusation. You've got every right to look terrible. It's bad enough to lose one parent, let alone two at once, and the way they died was" — she shakes her head — "obscene. But what you're doing, your compulsion to… I'm afraid you'll push yourself until you collapse. Don't torture yourself. Your father assigned an executor for his estate, a perfectly competent lawyer from his firm. Let the man do his job. I grant, you're a wonderful attorney, but right now it's time to let someone else take charge. For God's sake, Jacob — and if not for God, then for me — get some rest."
You sigh, knowing she means well and wants only what's best for you. But she doesn't understand: you need to keep busy, you need to distract yourself with minutiae so that your mind doesn't snap from confronting the full horror of losing your parents.
"I'm almost finished," you say. "Just a few more documents from the safe-deposit box. Then I promise I'll try to rest. A bath sounds… Lord, I still can't believe… How much I miss… Pour me a Scotch. I think my nerves need numbing."
"I'll have one with you."
As Rebecca crosses the study toward the liquor cabinet, you glance down toward the next document: a faded copy of your birth certificate. You shake your head. "Dad kept everything. What a packrat." Your tone is bittersweet, your throat tight with affection. "That's why his estate's so hard to sort through. It's so difficult to tell what's important, what's sentimental, and what's just…"
You glance at the next document, almost set it aside, take another look, frown, feel what seems to be a frozen fishhook in your stomach, and murmur, "God." Your breathing fails.
"Jacob?" Your wife turns from pouring the Scotch and hurriedly sets down the bottle, rushing toward you. "What's wrong? Your face. You're as gray as — "
You keep staring toward the document, feeling as if you've been punched in the ribs, the wind knocked out of you. Rebecca crouches beside you, touching your face. You swallow and manage to breathe. "I…"
"What? Jacob, tell me. What's the matter?"
"There has to be some mistake." You point toward the document.
Rebecca hurriedly reads it. "I don't understand. It's crammed with legal jargon. A woman's promising to give up two children for adoption, is that what this means?"
"Yes." You have trouble speaking. "Look at the date."
"August fifteen, nineteen thirty-eight."
"A week before my birthday. Same year." You sound hoarse.
"So what? That's just a coincidence. Your father did all kinds of legal work, probably including adoptions."
"But he wouldn't have kept a business affidavit with his personal papers in his private safe-deposit box. Here, at the bottom, look at the place where this was notarized."
"Redwood Point, California."
"Right," you say. "Now check this copy of my birth certificate. The place of birth is…"
"Redwood Point, California." Rebecca's voice drops.
"Still think it's just a coincidence?"
"It has to be. Jacob, you've been under a lot of strain, but this is one strain you don't have to deal with. You know you're not adopted."
"Do I? How?"
"Well, it's…"
You gesture impatiently.
"I mean, it's something a person takes for granted," Rebecca says.
"Why?"
"Because your parents would have told you."
"Why? If they didn't need to, why would they have taken the chance of shocking me? Wasn't it better for my parents to leave well enough alone?"
"Listen to me, Jacob. You're letting your imagination get control of you."
"Maybe." You stand. Your legs unsteady, you cross to the liquor cabinet and finish pouring the drinks that Rebecca had started preparing. "Maybe." You swallow an inch of the drink. Made deliberately strong, it burns your throat. "But I won't know for sure, will I? Unless I find out why my father kept that woman's adoption agree-merit with his private papers, and how it happened that I was born one week later and in the same place that the woman signed and dated her consent form."
"So what?" Rebecca rubs her forehead. "Don't you see? It doesn't make a difference! Your parents loved you! You loved them. Suppose, despite Lord knows how many odds, suppose your suspicion turns out to be correct. What will it change? It won't make your grief any less. It won't affect a lifetime of love."
"It might affect a lot of things."
"Look, finish your drink. It's Friday. We still have time to go to temple. If ever you needed to focus your spirit, it's now."
In anguish, you swallow a third of your drink. "Take another look at that adoption consent. The woman agrees to give up two babies. If I was adopted, that means somewhere out there I've got a brother or a sister. A twin."
"A stranger to you. Jacob, there's more to being a brother or a sister than just the biological connection."
Your stomach recoils as you gulp the last of the your drink. "Keep looking at the consent form. At the bottom. The woman's name."
"Mary Duncan."
"Scot."
"So?" Rebecca asks.
"Go to temple? Think about it. Have you ever heard of any Scot who… It could be I wasn't born Jewish."
***
Your uncle's normally slack-jowled features tighten in confusion. "Adopted? What on earth would make you think — "
; You sit beside him on the sofa in his living room and explain as you show him the documents.
His age-wrinkled brow contorts. He shakes his bald head. "Coincidence."
"That's what my wife claims."
"Then listen to her. And listen to me. Jacob, your father and I were as close as two brothers can possibly be. We kept no secrets from each other. Neither of us ever did anything important without first asking the other's opinion. When Simon — may he rest in peace — decided to marry your mother, he discussed it with me long before he talked to our parents. Believe me, trust me, if he and Esther had planned to adopt a child, I'd have been told."
You exhale, wanting to believe but tortured by doubts. "Then why…" Your skull throbs.
"Tell me, Jacob."
"All right, let's pretend it is a coincidence that these documents were together in my parents' safe-deposit box. Let's pretend that they're unrelated matters. But why? As far as I know, Dad always lived here in Chicago. I never thought about it before, but why wasn't I born here instead of in California?"
Your uncle strains to concentrate. Weary, he shrugs. "That was so long ago. Nineteen" — he peers through his glasses toward your birth certificate — "thirty-eight. So many years. It's hard to remember." He pauses. "Your mother and father wanted children very much. That I remember. But no matter how hard they tried… Well, your father and mother were terribly discouraged. Then one afternoon, he came to my office, beaming. He told me to take the rest of the day off. We had something to celebrate. Your mother was pregnant."
Thinking of your parents and how much you miss them, you wince with grief. But restraining tears, you can't help saying, "That still doesn't explain why I was born in California."
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