“Where are you!?” he screamed and banged his hands against the canvas, feeling it sink inward. Once, twice, three times. Again and again and each time the fabric stretched, the smooth canvas grew thin and began to give way.
“Where are you!?” he screamed again and he reached both of his hands back, fingers stretching into open claws, and if he had to tear the fucking painting apart strand by cursed strand he would.
His hands swung toward the painting with all the force he could muster, and he screamed at that mocking white emptiness until his fists connected with the fabric.
But they didn’t break through.
Instead, they sunk into the canvas.
Ripples shot outward across the white canvas as if he were reaching into something wet and warm and liquid. His arms sank further into the white canvas and he felt warm shapes swimming past his fingers in a great emptiness.
“Where are you?!” he shouted again, sinking his arms up to his elbows in the whiteness. He felt something large and unmoving in the nether beyond and his fingers wrapped around it and he pulled.
The pain was instant and unbearable and unlike anything he had ever felt. White hot light shot out from behind his eyes. Fingers penetrated into his own skull, deep into his brain, squeezing and tugging the very strings of his fabric.
There had been fireflies and an old house and so many steps into a dark basement. There had been lies, mountains of them, and a girl with strawberry hair had cried into the arms of an old man with a white collar.
Dan screamed, releasing his grip on the object inside the white canvas, and as he did the pain that had torn into his skull and brain, those fingers inside his own head, loosened and receded and color bled back into his world.
No, no no no, he thought. He had come so far, he had opened the door and taken this curse upon himself and even if it meant tearing his own sanity out he couldn’t turn back.
Again, he thought. Do it Do It DO IT!
He screamed and thrust his arms through the canvas and into the nether beyond. He felt that same shape in the white void, his fingers wrapped around it, and again he felt that pain behind his eyes, unbearable beyond any pain he’d imagined. Flesh tore and bone cracked as that piece of glass deep within his skull vibrated white hot and the world turned to light.
Karina lay on a bed of feathers and he choked her.
“No!” he screamed and she disappeared and he was choking a woman in a white uniform as rough hands held him down and drew a needle from the brightness.
“No!” he screamed again and squeezed and from the brightness thunderclouds formed in symmetrical patterns until they bled black with rain and became inkblots spreading across a grey sky over dead fields.
He squeezed the object inside the white nether again and electricity arched through his body and he now held wires and paddles to a faceless head as a static hum of a million cicadas exploded and a shaking body arched off the bed. Only now there weren’t paddles and wires in his hands but the staple gun, and Tommy was staring in wide amusement as Marty shielded his face. But Marty was no longer there and his own paint soaked hands were holding Jessica’s newborn shape as Linda looked on with tired and proud eyes. Then that newborn baby barked twice and his hands were empty and bandages lined his fingers and the walls and the floor were white and soft and in the center of the room sat David, hands outstretched, reaching forward through time.
As Dan clasped David’s hands in his own Mr. Glass screamed and shook as hooks tore into that tiny shard deep inside his own grey matter. His eyes swelled as they were pulled back into his head, as if something were yanking his very optic cords down into the base of his mind. Fingers twisted and tugged deep inside his head and his whole brain shifted and rattled, swelling and thrashing itself against his skull. His bladder boiled, warmth spilling down his legs as the brightness overtook him but he never let go.
He screamed. Into the endless void, into the negative space, into that world of light. And as he screamed his brother’s hands tugged back, fingers clasping around his own as that piece of glass sliced through time and memory and his body spasmed in pain.
And he gave a final tug, pulling on that white hot object inside the canvas, and he felt the shape within the canvas snap and shatter and break free and all inside him went numb. At the same time as it emerged from the liquid canvas, the very glass behind his own eyes, the very source of his headaches and whispers, exploded into a billion soft shards, and he gasped and cried out as the negative space unraveled.
Color grew, slow at first. Starting from the corners of his vision, the scarlet faded back into that wallpaper that he and Linda had chosen years ago when they had moved in. Then oak bookshelves materialized in brown, and the polished hardwood floor, and the creme colored ceiling.
The blue drapes that hung over the windows.
The photographs.
His own arms.
The overwhelming whiteness of the canvas before him, rippling like a pond of light.
And in the center, held between his wet hands, lay the thing he had pulled from the canvas.
It was a child of ten years old. He knew this, because, for the first time in years, he recognized the face.
It was the face of his younger brother.
It was the face of Daniel Rineheart.
My Brother’s Keeper
THE GIRL WITH strawberry hair cried softly, clutching that same doll she carried every day at the orphanage. Her legs were splayed from where she had fallen backwards and collapsed on the old wood steps. Only a half hour ago she had been laughing and chasing shadows after she had counted to fifty, and now she wept in a forgotten basement.
Father O’Malley stood over the old wood trunk and with a grunt he pried the rusty railroad spike from the latch that had held it closed. There was a hiss of air and dust and, as he opened the lid, his hand rose to his mouth, covering it.
“My God,” he whispered. “What have you done?”
David shook his head, unable to answer, and even that action felt loose and surreal. From somewhere, deep behind his eyes, he felt a strange pinch, as if somehow, curiously, a small piece of glass had become lodged inside his head over the last hour. The pain grew as he approached the old wooden trunk.
He saw bloodstains on the inside of the lid. Splinters ripped from the very wood itself in thin strands. Handprints and fingernails and long lines like some horrible, final painting.
The old railroad spike clattered beneath his feet as he took another step forward. He saw fingertips and knees, some of them raw and ground to the bone. He saw hair, black and matted with sweat and little pieces of wood.
And he saw the face of his brother.
Daniel’s face was frozen in a final mask of terror and betrayal. His mouth hung wide, his jaw cocked to one side, swollen and dislocated. One eye had filled with blood and was rolled back into his skull like a scarlet marble. The other eye stared straight at David, as if Daniel had been waiting in that exact pose in all the hours since his older brother had left him locked in that chest. Waiting to see him one last time.
“What have you done?!” Father O’Malley asked again, but David couldn’t stop staring at that final look of horror on his brother’s face. For a brief second, he thought he could hear Daniel speaking, as if somehow there was still breath coming from between those chewed lips.
But it wasn’t the breath or life.
It was a slow hiss, a burbling sound of liquid escaping from deep in Daniel’s body. A sound, years later, he would hear again as Linda's father died in the hospital by his side.
“What have you done?!” Father O’Malley cried out.
“I just...” David whispered. “I just wanted to scare him.”
Here in Art, Denial
DANIEL DIED SOMETIME between five-thirty and six-thirty, according to the doctor, but David knew better. It was at five ‘til six when his heart stopped beating, the same time that David felt the glass, sharp and warm, crystalizing behind his eyes for the firs
t time.
He never recovered from the death of his younger brother, nor would the children at the orphanage let him.
“Crazie Davey,” the kids called him until he beat one so bad that he would never walk without leg braces. After that the orphans left him alone, as did the faculty and Father O’Malley as well as any prospective family once they learned of his past. He was tainted, he thought. Contagious.
He preferred it that way. Alone.
He kept his brother’s bunk bed the way it had been before the accident and he guarded it with a feral ferocity against anyone who would disturb the pile of art books and paints his brother had always loved.
Daniel, who had been meek and weak and born sickly to parents that had forgotten them both. Daniel, who had always tried to keep up, too slow to keep pace, too timid to stand up to the bullies, too scared to sleep during the thunderstorms that scoured the plains during the summer. His little brother, who had looked to him perhaps as if to God; to protect him, to care for him, to even love him. And who, in turn, David had forsaken in one cruel prank.
And David thought that if their parents could have forgotten about them, written them off like a bad mistake and moved on, could he too forget what he had done? If Daniel had once thought of him as a God could he, perhaps, bring back the departed? Could he undo the past?
The glass grew bigger.
And he thought of the tornados, and how Daniel had cried every summer when the distant sirens rang out. Or when the storms swept across the dark fields and shook the old building with thunder and lightning, and how Daniel too had shaken and whimpered. And on nights like those, when the air was charged, he went to his brother’s empty bed and left books that he had found from the library, hoping that one day, perhaps, the bed wouldn’t be empty and the conversations he imagined in his head would soon be real.
And the glass grew warm and sharp.
And then one night Daniel was there, waiting.
In David’s mind, of course, there remained that nagging doubt, that little piece of glass behind his eyes that shook when his brother appeared, healthy and happy, his fingers wrapped in bandages, his scars healing.
They counted shapes in the clouds and chased fireflies in the fields together. They talked into the night and all the while the glass grew. But he didn’t care if he kept the other kids awake because his brother forgave him and all was right again and he was no longer alone.
But all wasn’t right.
And one day he came back from class to find his brother’s bunk bed gone and several doctors waiting there for him. And when they called him a liar and a killer he felt the glass behind his eye vibrate and the world went white hot. When his vision returned his fists were shaking and covered in blood and cuts and he was being held down as one of the nurses produced a needle and when he struggled he felt the metal break off in his arm and there was another needle and then a brightness that lasted for years.
In that brightness there were dreams and voices.
Dreams of rooms and tests and pieces of paper that held mirror images of black and white ink with butterflies and rabbits and voices asking what he saw within them. There was the incessant clicking of pens as they filled out forms and tests, the cold metal on his temples as the electricity hummed like summer cicadas. The mumblings of a dozen different doctors all talking through him but all the while he only saw his brother standing behind them, silent and sad.
The room remained the same, only the doctors changed, and on some days they brought things for him. Books on art from a library they said he could see one day if only he talked and opened up but whenever he wanted to his tongue grew heavy and his fingertips burned and the migraines grew until the brightness overwhelmed him and that shard spoke to him from behind his eyes. And when the doctors asked: “Who is Mr. Glass?” he never told them what it held within.
Doors opened and doors closed until the face he saw in the mirror when the men with the white coats shaved him grew foreign and absurd. And he remembered thinking: if he didn’t remember his own face, his own reflection, if he had forgotten what he looked like, what else could he forget?
And he felt that piece of glass growing again, day by day.
And his brother stopped visiting so he began talking, first in grunts and then sentences and finally in elaborate stories, but every time they wanted to discuss that old house in the field and the basement beneath it he grew sick. He smelled rot and heard a distant girl sobbing and that piece of glass vibrated until the headaches took hold and the world went white.
And he remembered words spoken at him, words like “Transfer” and “Further Treatment,” and then they were replaced with words like “Budget Cuts” and he knew that if he lied and smiled and said he was sorry for something he couldn’t remember that the doctors would sign the forms on his eighteenth birthday.
So he talked, telling himself it was all a lie, and they listened, telling him he was healing.
And on his eighteenth birthday he thought of his brother and wondered what had happened to him and realized he was gone, that he been transferred to another institution, far away, and perhaps he’d see him again. That he was sick with disease and he had to let go and move on.
And he felt sorry for David. He forgave him, years ago, for what he had done. But David was gone and these days only Daniel remained. And when he signed that name on the check-out form at the hospital the nurse gave him a sad smile but he didn’t care.
There was no David, only Daniel who walked out through that open door, with a new life and a new name, into a future of his own making.
The Nether
IN THE DARKNESS of that locked chest Daniel had cried out and no one had answered.
He had called out for his brother, the only family he knew, and he kept calling out long after his body had gasped and the color of the world had parted and the wet nether beyond had swallowed him.
There, among the darkness, he felt rage and sorrow. Rage at his hero, his older brother, the one who had abandoned him to that tomb. The one who erased him, smudged him from his memory, chipping away at the only evidence that he had existed. The coward, who forgave himself for something he had forgotten.
In that dark sea where so many swam past in peace, he found himself unable to let go, unable to forget, even though over time he had been forgotten by the only person he had loved. And in that darkness his sorrow and rage transformed him into something else, something he no longer understood. His name became a hollow construction, a sound spoken by a tongue he longer possessed, whispered by children as a warning, never to hide in dark places. A name, now carried by that traitor who had left him to die, forsaken and alone.
In that great rift beyond existence he watched as the last light, that brother, that beacon that connected him to the world he had known so briefly, yet loved so dearly, as that warm connection faded and all memory of him was severed by the only blood he had.
The years moved on. Others swam past but he remained. The world existed without him. The world didn’t need him. The world erased every trace of his small, happy, pathetic little existence like an indifferent wave wiping footprints from the sand.
The quiet of that vast nether no longer sustained him, only fueled his loathing, his sorrow, and his rage. It transformed him into something else, moments caught in memory, flashes of a lifetime cut short, scattered and twisted. And when he remembered those moments of life they shifted and changed. He no longer saw the world that he had so briefly lived among, but only a perversion of it, an abstraction, infected with sorrow. He no longer saw himself nor remembered what he had once been. All he felt was an endless hole, a void, as if all was unbalanced and wrong.
And then there was another beacon among the great darkness, a vast light, and the closer the entity that had once called itself Daniel swam to that light, the brighter and warmer it became. It spoke in an old woman's voice as it reached into the nether with blind eyes that saw far beyond the living curtain. She found him lost and hurt amo
ng the nether and opened the door for him to spill back into the world.
The birth was not without pain, as all births are, and he had spilled forth in broken patches, in emotions and memories and wet colors. Moments from an ill remembered life, distorted and tainted with spite. A girl with hair the color of strawberries who had cried out. A boy, featureless and forgotten with a stolen name. A room, old and brown that reeked of earth. A clock he had once seen, hands now frozen at the moment his mortal body had broken. Trees and wide open skies and those shrill blue jays and the hum of cicadas on a summer night. Every image emerged twisted and changed from the nether, and when he tried to recreate them all he heard was his name being used by another man, a faceless shadow who had once called him brother, and yet now had forgotten his very memory.
Yes the birth had been painful, and he had hurt the old woman, no different than a child pulling the wings from and insect. He was growing strong now, focused, and his memories were growing clearer. As he continued to spill back into a world rife with color and sound and emotion and taste, his rage grew and he felt those weak bones of the old blind woman, that heart so frail, and the more of him she pulled from the nether the more he wanted to hurt her, to feel his power.
And when she was finished, when his second mother bore him forth unto the world and there was little more of herself to give, he whispered a name to her. A name once his own, now stolen and tainted. She was finished with him, and he was finished with her. He had guided those weak hands of hers as she had birthed him in something he had once loved, color and paints, something he had marveled at and hoped one day, long ago, to create.
A gift for his brother.
Balance
THE GLASS BEHIND his eye no longer hurt, no longer even existed. From the place it had sat for all those years, a warm calm now spread from his head to his toes. He stared into the white canvas that contained the body of his dead brother, hands still gently wrapped around that small, pathetic head.
Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 33