Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity

by Andrew van Wey

  Her hand stopped over his heart, and she took his hand placing it on top. Dan felt repulsed that she thought the action endearing, perhaps even romantic.

  “...but baby, I can’t let you go. What we have is special.”

  He shook his head. “No, what we have is wrong.”

  “Shhh,” she kissed him on his ear, that same spot that his wife knew, and it sent the hairs on his neck upright. His eyes weakened. He thought of closing them, thought of giving in to her embrace. “Now tell me that’s wrong,” she whispered.

  He could smell her scent, the mix of cleaning agents, designer perfume, and the hint of cola flavored lip gloss. She was right. He missed her, missed every exquisite inch. On beauty alone Karina was the most stunning woman he’d been intimate with. Her body took him back to a time when sex didn’t lead to children and a family and responsibility, but to pleasures he’d forgotten.

  He could lie to them, he thought. Lie to his family. He was, after all, good at that. Just one more time and they’d never know.

  “Come away with me Dan.”

  “What?”

  “Come away for the weekend.”

  “No. I can’t.”

  “I booked us a room in Napa.”

  He studied her. “What? Why would you do that?”

  “Why do you think silly?”

  He knew the place she’d chosen. He’d taken her there back in the spring, several times. They had lain beneath a goose feather comforter, drinking wine and staring at the ceiling beams. At first it had been fun, exciting, something that gave him confidence again, an energy to know that someone lusted after him.

  Yet the more weekends he spent there, away at some fictional conference, the more he realized it wasn’t her company he enjoyed; it wasn’t discovering each tattoo hidden away on her firm body; it wasn’t the way she whispered into his ear as they made love. It was that she made him feel younger. That when he closed his eyes next to her he felt closer to twenty than forty.

  But it had been a lie, one that he no longer had the taste to tell.

  “Karina,” he said firmly and scooted back. “We can’t do this anymore. I can’t. We’ve been over this. I have a family.”

  Family. The word made her blink, as if someone had spat in her face, but she did her best to smile through it.

  “So? That didn’t stop you before. It’s just the weekend and I haven’t seen you in months. Make up an excuse, you’re good at that.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  She studied him, his posture, the expression on his face. She studied him way she studied a painting for minutes or hours before picking her tools. There was no love or lust in her eyes, only calculation, and he knew the next words to come from her mouth would be part of a game whose moves she had already plotted.

  “Do you still love me--”

  A quick knock at the door interrupted her question. Dan stood up, knowing both the sound of that knock and that the door wasn’t locked.

  “Dan, it’s Robert,” said an airy voice as the door opened with a creak.

  “Bob, come in,” Dan answered with no other choice but to motion his boss in.

  Dean Robert was his oldest friend at the university and the Dean of the Fine Arts Department. He was an intelligent man, both generous and dangerous, able to weave financing for new programs from a few phone calls, or reduce classes to little more than weekend electives. The old man was childless, twice divorced, and a self proclaimed recovering alcoholic, although Dan never understood how someone who hadn’t drank in two decades could still be considered recovering. Yet the man had a certain fondness for Dan, a soft spot, and Dan counted himself lucky to have an ally at a university so historically conservative.

  “Bob, you’ve met Karina Calloway, right?” Dan asked.

  “Yes, yes of course. How are you?”

  “A little jet lagged I’m afraid.” She shook his hand and brushed some hair from her face with a graceful flick.

  “Karina was in Italy,” Dan said, feeling a sudden desire to keep her from saying anything further. “The book you wanted? Francis Danby was it?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’ll bring it back next week.”

  “Take your time.”

  He took the volume from the bookshelf beside his desk. In his hurry to get her out he’d supplied her with one of his favorites, a first edition in pristine condition, worth a few thousand at least. He cursed himself as he handed it to her.

  “I’ll get out your hair now. Thanks professor.”

  “Anytime.”

  She headed past Dean Robert, who was staring at his shoes as if he’d forgotten to lace them, and paused to give a quick glance back to Dan. She closed the door as Dan sat behind his desk.

  “Have a seat Bob”

  Dean Robert sighed, still staring at his shoes with a crinkled brow. “Dan, is there anything I should know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You two, you’re awfully close. You do know how it looks, I presume?”

  “No, I don’t,” Dan laughed. “But I understand your implication and, frankly, take offense to it. She’s a good girl Bob, a good student. One of my best actually.”

  The old man let out a low grunt, his wrinkled cheeks coming together in a small pucker at the edge of his lips, as if he’d bitten into a something and wasn’t quite sure he liked the taste.

  “Of course, forgive me,” he said.

  “Is that why you came here?” Dan asked.

  “No, no, not at all. Rather, there’s something waiting for you. A special delivery.”

  Dean Robert pressed the elevator call button until it lit up. It was an old elevator, first installed when the building was erected in the postwar boom of the early twenties. Dan thought the tacky style was more appropriate for a Hollywood villa than a fine arts department at a private university. The elevator rumbled from the basement to the second office at a crawl, a trait which earned it the nickname The Turtle from the students who transported paintings between the four floors and the basement.

  “Have a little too much coffee today?” Dean Robert asked Dan, who returned the perplexing question with an equally perplexed look.

  “Come again?”

  The old man gave a slight nod, pointing to Dan’s right hand. His index finger and thumb were gyrating, as if tapping along to some internal song. Dan balled his hand into a fist and shook his head.

  “It’s Jessica’s first day at school.”

  “Is it now? She’s already that old?”

  “Hard to believe.”

  The Turtle rumbled to Floor 2 and Dan could hear the groan of old gears. That old elevator was a tomb.

  “‘For if there were no schools to take our children away, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers,’” Dean Robert said with a smile.

  “Or fathers,” Dan added.

  The Turtle opened its doors with a ding and groan.

  “Indeed,” agreed the old man.

  Anonymous

  THE PAINTING LOOMED, large and baleful, towering a few inches over him at six feet tall and almost five feet wide. His arms, when spread to their widest, could only clasp the edges. While the subject matter was not all together unfamiliar to Dan, no particular artist leapt out in his mind as it often did when he was called upon to identify a work.

  “Interesting,” Dan said. “So who is it?”

  “You don’t know?” Dean Robert sounded surprised.

  “Can’t say I’m familiar with the artist, no.”

  “Funny, I thought you would be. This might help.”

  Dean Robert produced a small piece of card stock paper, no larger than a business card. There on it, in black ink, were the words: ‘Here in art, denial.’ They were written in an almost imperceivable scrawl, as if signed by a doctor or lawyer or someone to whom legibility was of little concern.

  “This? This is all that came with it?” Dan
asked. “This is it?”

  Dean Robert whistled. Miguel, the head of the warehouse, who had been busy eating lunch with his small crew, glanced over as the old man raised a hand.

  “Miguel,” the dean shouted. “Was this it? Uh... es esto? Todo?”

  Miguel nodded. “Si. No tiene dirección, nada. Solamente la tarjeta.”

  “No return address, nothing. Just the card,” Dean Robert echoed. “Courier dropped it off before dawn.”

  “It has, how you say?” Miguel said, pointing to Dan. “Que tiene su nombre escrito en el. Your name is written all over it.”

  Dean Robert let out a hearty laugh that seemed to confuse Miguel. “It sure is,” he said. “Right up his alley.”

  “No frame either,” Dan said, running his fingers along the edge of the canvas.

  “Were you expecting one?”

  “I wasn’t expecting anything. Think it’s a donation?”

  “That’s for you to figure out, isn’t it?” the dean said. “Tell me, what do you make of all this?”

  Dan took a few steps back, taking in the entire scope of the painting. It was a bizarre creation, both modern and macabre. The color palette consisted of earth tones that reminded Dan of driftwood and dark caves. A few dabs of color were splashed around the image; a tattered yellow dress, a golden pendulum on an aged grandfather clock, and the splotches of green leaves on a single, distant tree set in a vast field.

  The composition was simple. It was set inside a nondescript room with red and grey wallpaper and a dusty bookshelf from the turn of the twentieth century. A single open window sat in the middle of the picture, similar in length and width to the canvas itself. It was the only source of light and it cast a dim glow into the room where two figures, a boy and a girl, framed opposite ends of the composition.

  The girl on the right side of the painting squatted among a pile of discarded toys, dolls mostly without limbs or heads. Her faded yellow dress hung in tatters, semi-transparent from the light through the window at the center of the image. Her head was large and distorted, egg-like and disproportionate to her otherwise normal body. The skin on her face was made from a sullied linen, like an old bag of grain stretched over something wet. Her features hung, lazy and ill fitting, like a harlequin doll after a stroke, which obviously bore a symbolic link to the toys on the floor. Dan found that part rather trite and amateur. That artist had, in his interpretation, taken a rather simple twist on the ordinary to make it surreal. Yet there was something innocent and sad about her, as if she was, like the dolls at her feet, wounded and broken.

  Unlike the girl, the boy that balanced the left side of the painting was quite lifelike. He wore patchwork rags beneath filthy overalls. He stared on at the viewer through pinhole eyes that were little more than two dark holes among a scowl of disgust; a bully, ready to inflict pain upon a younger victim. His stance was challenging, poised to fight. His right hand was balled into a tight fist while his left arm disappeared off frame. Dan took particular note of the left arm because, like the girl’s skin, the texture of the boy’s right arm where it exited a filthy t-shirt beneath the overalls was not skin at all but something that resembled cracked leather.

  In the center of the painting, between the two children, sat an open window looking out onto a flat field of grass with a single distant tree beneath a wide blue sky and a setting sun. The warm window and beyond was a stark contrast to the muted colors of the old room. It struck Dan as having an almost ethereal feel to it, even fantastical perhaps. It was as if the artist intended the viewer to be staring at two contrasting worlds, one of color and hope through the open window, and one of dust and decay in that room.

  Against the wall behind the boy stood an old grandfather clock, twice the height of the window. Its glass face was cracked, hands stuck at 5:55, and Dan noted it was missing the pieces at nine, ten, and eleven o’clock. The pendulum, perhaps once a reflective brass, now bore a dusty hue that impressed him with the skill that small detail required to pull off.

  Still, the painting bothered him. Between the children, on opposite sides beneath the window in the center, sat an empty space of flooring and wall. It was as if something belonged there, or something had once sat there but had been removed or painted over by the artist. Compared to the rest of the painting, it seemed abnormally bare, naked. The empty spot beneath the window gave the painting an unbalanced feel, drawing his eyes back to that space again and again, expecting to find something. Yet there was nothing, only the feeling that something was missing and belonged there.

  “So?” asked Dean Robert. “No idea who your anonymous artist might be?”

  Dan walked around the edge of the painting. There was no decorative frame. The canvas itself was pulled taut around the stretcher bars and held to the back by dozens of small nails. The sides, the folds in the back, even the nails were all painted over.

  “No visible signature,” he said. “Doesn’t match anything I’m familiar with. Could just be some no name trying to get their name out. Style, take your pick. Surrealist, photorealist, elements of baroque--it’s a Frankenstein mix. Hell, from ten feet away I’d say it’s no better than motel art, but up close...”

  He ran his fingers over the face of the girl, traced her brown hair and noted the dark tears coming from her distended eyes.

  “What do you see?”

  “Well, the detail is incredible. The brush strokes, they’re hairline, nearly invisible. Yet the paint’s thin so the artist didn’t make many mistakes. Still, it looks like amateur hour.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The composition. What do you make of it?”

  Dean Robert took it all in. He was a man of classics and had little taste for most art made in the last century. He considered most of it little more than mental masturbation and was often the butt of jokes made by other professors behind his back.

  “Well,” the old man puckered his lips. “I would say it’s a rather well crafted mess.”

  “Exactly. There’s no real rhyme or reason to the composition. The whole thing’s unbalanced. The kids, the window, that empty space below the frame. The viewer’s eyes just bounce around, picking things up, like this broken mirror here.”

  Dan pointed to a piece of broken mirror on the floor by the boy. It reflected something off the canvas, behind the observer’s point of view. Thirteen doll heads sat on a shelf in shadows.

  “If the detail weren’t so incredible I’d say the whole thing’s one step up from a Where’s Waldo?”

  “Why is that?” the old man asked.

  “Well, it’s not just images for the sake of oddity or free association. There is, at some level, a narrative happening, and the artist is challenging the viewer to solve it.”

  “The thing gives me the creeps.”

  “As it should. On the right you clearly have some sort of symbol of pain and suffering represented in the young girl, the broken dolls, and the fact that their skin is similar. A loss of innocence perhaps, a trauma, who knows? Contrast that to the left side where you have the challenging stare and aggressive posture of the boy, hand disappearing off frame as if holding a weapon or something.”

  “The skin on his right arm is different.”

  “Could be burnt or in the act of some metamorphosis. The point is we’re really not meant to know, are we? See, the artist obscured the clues, perhaps even discarded some entirely. Imagine trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces.”

  “Between us gentlemen I never understood the appeal of crap like this. Gerhard Richter goes for eight figures while he’s still alive and Casper Friedrich dies broke and insane.”

  “Same stories, different endings.”

  “Point taken.”

  Dan smiled. He’d been down this road with Dean Robert a hundred times. It always ended with the older man shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders before moving on to another injustice of the art the world and how it was all going to hell.

  Dan turned the card over in h
is hand. The backside was blank. Those words: ‘Here in art, denial’ written that childlike scrawl held a vague familiarity, like something seen in a dream. The black ink seemed to shimmer in the light as he rubbed it with his thumb

  His eyes shot back to the painting, drawing lines from object to object, searching for connections within that bizarre canvas. The two children, watchmen before a window to a world of color. Gatekeepers perhaps, or witnesses. For a moment Dan heard Mr. Glass whisper his name into his ear: Daniel.

  Only it hadn’t been Daniel, had it?

  No, it had sounded like his name, only there were three syllables, said slow and lazy, like how Marty managed to mangle his name every time he had a complaint to file.

  Daniel.

  Dan-yull.

  Dan-eye-yell

  The piece of glass shook as the headache slithered back into the base of his head. He hadn’t eaten since noon and it was now almost five. At the edge of his vision small crescents of a migraine aura began to grow.

  “Daniel?” snapped Dean Robert. Dan blinked, and with it went the auras, wiped away for the moment.

  “Yes, Bob?”

  “This thing, it’s your problem, understand? Figure out what to do with it. In the mean time, I’ll have the warehouse move it up to archive. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn out like those Picassos they found in France, rotting away in some old basement. Wouldn’t that be your lucky day?”

  It would be indeed, Dan thought. But as he stared at that anonymous painting, he felt no such luck like that lay in his future.

  All American Supper

  GINGER’S PAW SCRAPED into his thigh as her warm breath wafted up from beneath the dining room table like some wretched updraft. Dan answered her incessant begging with a nudge of his foot that sent her off in search of scraps elsewhere.

  Dinner that night was pizza. He had forgotten to phone in the order at their favorite Greek place, something he realized when he had arrived to pick up an order that didn’t exist. Pizza had been the fallback. It was fast and he could kill the time at the bookstore. He also knew the kids wouldn’t complain about pizza, something they had begun doing regularly with their mother’s cooking, something he silently but often agreed with.