Encounters with Enoch Coffin

by W. H. Pugmire

  “Some intimately,” Enoch replied. He sipped the coffee Trent had served him. He liked his coffee the way he liked his lovers: varied. Today he had asked for it black.

  Trent was pacing the floor of his Brookline apartment excitedly, jabbering a mile a minute as if stimulated by some drug more potent than coffee. Enoch knew the drug well. It was the muse.

  Trent went on, “Well, I saw a very interesting object listed for sale so I decided to contact the agent about it, and this agent is also a local historian so she knows her stuff. It seems an ancestor of Gardner’s had a pretty strange thing happen on his farm, back in 1882. A meteor -- apparently a meteor -- crashed on this farmer’s land. At the core of the meteor people found a smooth sphere of a color that was, according to a contemporary newspaper account, ‘almost impossible to describe.’ Hm?” Trent smiled provocatively. “The sphere had some funny properties, such as ‘attacking silicon compounds.’ But the fallen object’s worst property seems to have been radiation, which took its toll not only on the farmer’s livestock, but on his own wife and sons as well…and eventually poisoned the poor guy himself. When locals came to investigate the deaths, they witnessed a beam of light radiate from the property’s well -- a beam of light of a color that was said to be of an ‘unfamiliar hue.’”

  “Interesting,” Enoch admitted.

  “I guess this was one very freaky light show, and really rattled these guys. Anyway, supposedly the meteor and the strange sphere inside eventually disintegrated without a trace, and the old farmhouse is long gone. The agent told me the area where the farm stood is even today a dead plot of land where nothing will grow, and no one has ever built anything there again. Maybe that in itself isn’t enough to corroborate such a story, huh? Ahh…but then there’s this.”

  Trent turned toward a side table and lifted a riveted metal box, tarnished dark with age. He raised its hinged lid, and turned back toward Enoch as if offering a cigar from a humidor. Instead, what Enoch saw inside the box was a pile of glass squares.

  “What are these?” he inquired.

  “The farmhouse had casement windows composed of multiple small panes, as was the style back in the day. It was from this window that the witnesses watched that weird light show erupt from the dead farmer’s well. Someone had the presence of mind to rescue these panes, and they got passed down into the hands of old man Gardner. Someone with an eye for the unique. Someone who understood they were a treasure worth preserving, whereas another person might have thrown them away. Even the estate sale agent, who recognized them as a historical curiosity, doesn’t suspect their potential value both scientifically and, more importantly to me, artistically.”

  “May I?” Enoch poised a hand over the proffered box.

  Trent grinned, his eyes seeming illuminated from within. “Yes, Enoch…hold one to the light. Look through it.”

  Enoch picked up the topmost square of glass, and as his host had suggested raised it to a nearby window through which glowed bright, prosaic sunlight. Trent watched his friend’s handsome face, upon which the brows soon gathered and sensuous mouth turned down in a contemplative scowl. Enoch angled the glass slightly, this way then that, and next pivoted in his chair to hold the little pane up to the artificial light of a wall lamp. Again, he shifted the glass slightly to observe its subtle effects.

  Trent said, “There’s a kind of iridescence, isn’t there? Like the oily colors in a soap bubble. It’s faint, but it’s there, isn’t it? Imprinted on the glass somehow, the way they say lightning can etch a photograph onto glass. And glass is silica, is it not? Didn’t they say that the funny globe had an odd effect on silicon? But you tell me now, Enoch. What color is that?”

  It was as the young artist had said: the effect was delicate, but undeniable. Enoch set aside the pane to select another one, then a third. The anomalous quality was present in all of them -- a subtle iridescence. But what color or colors indeed? Enoch opened his mouth as if to suggest a hue, but quickly closed it. Once again he started to speak, once again stopped himself. “I don’t know,” he conceded at last. “My God…there’s a ghost of color trapped in this glass, but I’ll be damned if I can put a name to it. It’s not related to any known color, and that’s just not something you can envision with your imagination, the way you can imagine how another planet might look, and the life upon it. This is something that we’ve been denied, even with all the countless sights our world has to show us. It shouldn’t be possible, but --”

  “Yes,” Trent cut him off. “Yes. Impossible color.”

  Enoch rose from his chair, and now it was his turn to pace the livingroom, as he again and again gazed upon the glass square he held before windows, then artificial light sources, back and forth. Having set down the metal box again, Trent watched him, and at last Enoch faced the student and said, “So what are you attempting to do with this find?”

  “In regard to my art? I’m not sure yet. Just because we can see it doesn’t mean we can copy this effect with paint. I’ve been trying to think of a way to record it somehow. Get it into my computer. Maybe find a means of scanning the glass…or if not that, then photograph the glass and -- if that captures the quality -- then scanning the photograph. If I can’t replicate the color with physical pigment, maybe I can move it onto a virtual palette.”

  “You have enough of these panes -- you could still pursue the scientific possibilities as you pursue you art.”

  “Enoch, you disappoint me more and more! You, the pure old-fashioned artist, the man of personal integrity, thinking of money that could be made from this?”

  “Artists do have to eat, young man; pappy can’t carry you forever. Never mind that for now. You have enough of these that you can let me have one of them.” Enoch slipped the pane into the pocket of his brown suede jacket.

  “Hey!”

  “Don’t worry, I am indeed a man of integrity; I won’t try selling your miraculous discovery myself.”

  “But you may find a way to incorporate it into your art before I do!”

  “Me? With my primitive smelly paints? Oh I doubt it. But still, it’s captured my imagination. I want to study it further. You won’t deny me, will you? Perhaps I’ll discover something that might even aid you in your own pursuits.”

  Trent sighed, then shrugged. He knew the older man was right. But also, he was just afraid enough of the odd artist Enoch Coffin that he didn’t care to oppose him.

  III.

  Before he began, Enoch propped the pane on the sill of an attic window so that sunlight might stream through it. Misty suggestions of color spread upon the worn floorboards. Dust motes swam in the beam like alien microorganisms. He stepped into this beam himself, reverently, as if into the glow through a cathedral’s window. This caused him to wonder what his late father Donovon Coffin -- a stained-glass artisan -- might have composed from pieces of this glass.

  Enoch held out his artist’s hands like receptive instruments that might somehow, intuitively, detect and grasp the proper frequency of light. He watched the pastel illumination play across the skin of his hungry appendages.

  He realized it would most likely prove a fruitless -- the word was impossible -- endeavor, but with this appropriated prize as his inspiration he set out to duplicate the pane’s strange tint in a conventional painting. On that first day he tried watercolors, for their translucence and delicacy, but the next afternoon he switched to oils, which he preferred. Yet both approaches resulted in the same: a compounded muddiness that was nothing like the effect trapped in the glass.

  For both paintings Enoch had used the same subject matter: a stone well in a rural setting, created solely from his imagination, and in both paintings he portrayed this well in the deep of night. Uncanny light in a bright, vaporous column churned straight upward into the sky, where it bored through a ceiling of clouds and reflected upon their underbellies. The result in each rendering was not unlike the erupting mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, and was all the more ominous for that. They were not
at all a bad pair of paintings…they just didn’t reveal anything like the color he was attempting to replicate.

  That hue was so elusive in the glass’s faint tint -- what he wouldn’t give to see it in greater, purer intensity! The thought drove him on in his frustrating attempts, and it was this that leant more power to the scene in the oil painting, which he kept working at stubbornly. For dramatic effect Enoch ended up adding sinister trees with their leaves all burnt to ash and the ends of their denuded branches sheathed in glowing luminescence. Branches that appeared to have become sentient, reaching futilely toward the sky as if to hold onto that nameless force, as it returned to the cosmos from which it had plummeted like the essence of Lucifer.

  Eerie green phosphorescence like luminous rot, glowing on the grass around the well and the underbellies of those clouds…

  No!

  A blue phosphorescence, then…

  No!

  An orange kind of glow…a purple and orange kind of glow…

  No and no. Failure and failure. In the end he could only concentrate on the setting itself. His uncanny pillar of light was a cheat…green blending into blue into purple into orange. All terrestrial colors. Never had the limits of his art shackled and chafed him so. Illusion and lies, that was all he was good at, and not so good after all. In the end he flung his mess of a palette away from him in self-loathing.

  IV.

  On the third day following their last encounter, Trent phoned Enoch and they compared notes. Enoch reluctantly described his frustrations with his twin paintings, expecting Trent to use this as fuel to criticize Enoch’s outdated artistic methods, but the younger man actually expressed keen interest in having a look at the art when he had a chance. “It sounds like your intuitions are attuned to the scene,” Trent remarked, “if not the color. Myself, I’ve tried photographing the glass with my digital camera, then moving the pictures into my art software and stealing the color with cloning, adding it to a custom palette, other techniques…but they all seem to lose something in translation. The color either disappears altogether or get changed into other colors, from the common spectrum.”

  “Maybe what we’re seeing is a head trick…a mirage…”

  “Oh Enoch, that we’re failing to capture this phenomenon doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! We have to be more humble than that.”

  “If we were humble we’d never be trying to reproduce this color in the first place.”

  “Well, if lightning can make pictures, then we can do it. What are we if not bundles of lightning in bags of skin?”

  Enoch smiled at the phone. “Sometimes I remember why I decided to be friends with you.”

  “I’m flattered. Well, anyway, my father is working on something for me that might broaden my artistic vision.”

  “Your father?”

  “You shall see, when it’s ready…you shall see.”

  ***

  The next day, Enoch mounted the steps to the attic with uncertainty as to what he might do next to approach the matter of the otherworldly color. He was reluctant to concede defeat, though, as long as he knew the younger artist was still pursuing his own methods. The pane beckoned yet taunted him, like a glass microscope slide containing a species of life that had yet to be identified. As he reached for the door to his studio, he wondered if there were some type of photoreactive paper that he might spread on the floor in the projected beam from the pane, which might accept a transfer of the color. Not a way to work freely with the color, perhaps, but a start along the path of directing and controlling it.

  As it turned out, he found his daunting challenge had already been dismissed for him. He was certain he had left the small square pane leaning on the window sill. Now it was gone. When he approached the window, all he discovered was a fine sprinkling of glittering dust on the sill and partly spilled onto the floorboards.

  Within minutes, Enoch was calling Trent in Brookline. But the student didn’t pick up. Was he attending class? Enoch left a message for him.

  “My boy, I suspect there was good reason your eccentric old man Gardner kept the panes in that metal box, which I further suspect might be made of lead. I just found my sample of glass reduced to dust. I’m not lying, if you find that hard to swallow. I don’t know if it was exposure to light, or the air, or what else that might account for this, but I remind you of the story of the meteor you related, and the sphere within it. You told me after a time both of them dissolved, leaving nothing behind.”

  A beep, as the allotted message time ran out. Enoch set down the phone and turned to contemplate the sparkling dust. Each grain seemed to trap a particle of weird light as its nucleus. Though he had handled the pane by its edges quite a bit, he was now reluctant to make contact with its possibly irradiated remains. He swept up the dust carefully, poured it into an empty pill bottle of light-resistant brown plastic, sealed that in an airtight sandwich bag, and stored the package away in a dark drawer.

  Later that afternoon he called Trent again. When there was no answer, he chose not to leave a second message. But Trent still didn’t pick up his phone when Enoch tried two more times that evening.

  Several days passed silently and Enoch didn’t attempt phoning Trent again. Either the young artist was making no progress and didn’t want to talk about it, or making progress and hoarding his discoveries jealously. Enoch wasn’t one for collaboration -- his vision was too personal, his ego too great -- so he didn’t care much one way or the other. He wasn’t going to beg for attention like the pathetic needy creatures that often haunted his own privacy, so he engrossed himself in his various ongoing projects.

  Then, one night in the wee hours, a call came. Enoch was still awake, not at all unusually, in his attic bent over his scarred old worktable. With a palette knife he had scooped some gel medium, used in conjunction with acrylic paints, from a container and spread it on a small canvas panel. The gel was thick but would dry clear. He made a little concavity with the knife in the center of the goop, then into this hollow he poured the fine grit of a drinking glass that he had smashed with a hammer after he’d wrapped it in an old towel. He then mixed the granules throughout the gel evenly and spread it across the panel to gauge its texture, and so that he might gauge the effect when it dried.

  The call interrupted him in the midst of this experiment, but when he heard Trent’s voice he picked up. He almost didn’t recognize that voice at first, however, and he couldn’t make out the words. The student sounded drunk perhaps, his voice slurred, weak and hoarse.

  “So,” Enoch sneered into the phone, “it deigns to call me at last, talking in its sleep.”

  “Yes, sleep,” croaked the distant, strained voice. “We are all asleep. Our eyes are closed. We do not see.”

  “And I do not see what you’re babbling about.”

  “Even as you sit there in your loft listening to me now, you don’t see the aura your body emanates, Enoch. Not the way I am seeing my own aura at this moment. Like me, fire laps from your skin, flutters and coruscates, twines around your limbs like spectral eels, in ever-changing colors that have no words to label them in any human tongue. Everywhere in your loft, every object organic or inorganic gives off a different aura of different hue. Those old dead floorboards are awash in a glow that even were they gilded would not compare! An ant on your floor is an iridescent scarab to bring tears to one’s eyes! But you of course are the source of most of this glorious light, this terrible color. I know, as even now I wave my hand in the air before my face, and watch the swaths and ribbons it weaves in its wake. To think that you and I sought to paint these impossible colors upon canvas! We are painting these colors upon the air with every step we take! Flames billow from your mouth with every word and breath! Beams flare from those gorgeous eyes of yours! And around your head, in a corona, in a halo: rippling colors to put an aurora borealis to shame!”

  At first Enoch thought his friend was merely ranting, but the more he listened the more his instincts told him Trent was speaking the truth
, if only the truth of madness. “What have you discovered?” he demanded.

  “Too much,” that whispery voice rasped. “Isn’t that the way? When Icarus touched the blaze of the sun?”

  “Tell me what you’ve learned and stop waxing poetic.”

  “When you and I cease waxing poetic we will both cease to be. Our flame will have extinguished.”

  “I’ll come see you in the morning.”

  “You left a message that your piece of glass disintegrated?”

  “More or less.”

  “That’s good, Enoch. It’s better that way, my friend.”

  “And yours?” No answer. “And yours, Trent? Hello?”

  “No. I keep them in their Pandora’s box.”

  “I’m tired of your vague and suggestive talk. I want to come see you right now.”

  “The trains aren’t running now, Enoch.”

  “I have my crappy old pickup truck.”

  “Are you concerned for me or just curious about what I’ve seen?”

  “Both. I’m coming.”

  “If you must. When you get here, let yourself in. The door is unlocked.”

  V.

  It was an hour like purgatory, the streets of Brookline all but deserted, and Enoch parked the beat-up pickup truck he drove when he had to in a free spot a little distant from Trent’s apartment building, walking the rest of the way. His clomping footsteps had a lonely resonance.

  He found the apartment unlocked as promised, but inside it was unlit as well. He made his way into the livingroom carefully, reaching out his receptive hands in front of him and trying not to trip or bump into anything, eventually following a feeble glow of flickering light. He found Trent sunk back in his favorite armchair, with several candles burning on surfaces around him. One candle stood beside the familiar riveted metal box.