He stopped at midnight, a little confused at how much work he’d done, and the unusual colours in it.
* * *
On Sunday morning the work still looked good, but he wasn’t inclined to add anything just yet. Instead he went walking again. He remembered to take his proper camera this time, and spent a couple of hours taking pictures of particular houses he’d noticed on previous strolls.
After snapping a series of an especially perfect Storybook cottage, he turned to see a man watching him. Not merely a man, in fact, but a policeman, in khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt. David felt instinctively defensive.
“Beautiful, huh,” the cop said, however. He was young, with short brown hair and a pair of dark glasses. “Always been one of my favourites.”
“I can see why,” David said, surprised. “Know anything about it?”
It turned out the cop did, from the name of the original builder to its current occupants. Then he seemed to realise there was probably something else he should be doing, and nodded, before starting to leave.
“Lucky place to live,” David said. He was speaking largely to himself, but the cop paused.
“Luck doesn’t have a lot to do with it,” he said, before walking away down the street.
* * *
Though he returned to the cottage late morning and spent a couple of hours in the company of his canvas, David did not make any progress. The momentum of the previous day had dissipated. He felt fine. He felt inclined to work. Yet… it wasn’t there.
Yesterday’s link in the chain was not connected to today’s. That happened sometimes. Just as it had once happened, six years ago, that a house he and his wife had wanted very much to purchase had fallen through because the chain of buyers had broken apart. One night it was all in place. By the following lunchtime it was gone. They lost the house.
Often David placed the beginning of the end of their relationship on that morning, that loss. The truth was probably that the chain of I-love-you-I-love-you-too had started to break long before. Even non-events throw shadows. Everything is contingent.
Knowing that the last thing you should do when the work isn’t happening is to stand banging your head against it—sometimes you can painfully bore your way through a blockage, but more often you end up tinkering, ruining the freedom of what you’ve done before—he went downtown for coffee.
He did not sit looking at the wall he was currently trying to portray. He knew enough about it already. What he needed was to clarify his ideas for the shadows he’d be casting upon it. Whose hidden presence did he want to evoke? None of the people he’d observed near it yesterday, that was for sure. Their gilded non-lives didn’t speak to him.
He watched the girl behind the counter inside, wondering if she would do. She was young, somewhat attractive, though carrying the extra pounds around the lower half that Californian women often seem to affect, presumably the result of some Scandinavian influence in the genes. She was very affable, dealing with locals and tourists much the same, and presumably had a real life of some kind. David found it hard to imagine what it would be.
He sat drinking another cup of the seductively complex coffee, and failed to come up with anything. He toyed with it being a couple of tourists’ shadows. A man and a woman, stopping for refreshment while driving up or down the coast. An air of tension, perhaps. Her wanting to enjoy the drive, him concerned with covering the miles to wherever they were booked for the night. Both of them, in their contradictory—and conflicting—ways, merely wanting the best for each other. Would David be able to evoke that through shadows alone?
It wasn’t difficulty that eventually made him go cold on the idea—when it comes to art, difficult is good. It was more the suspicion that no one, himself included, would give a crap when it was done. He needed something with a little more grit.
Finding grit in Carmel—now there was a challenge.
* * *
As he walked out of the alley onto the main street, he realised that in the six, nearly seven days he’d been in town, he hadn’t seen a single person who didn’t look as if they would have a perfect credit score. Also, that this was precisely what he’d been looking for. A Carmel wall, but with the imprint of someone who did not belong. That was the tension that would make the image worthwhile.
He wandered the central streets, on a mission now. After half an hour he still hadn’t seen anyone who stuck out. Everybody dressed the same, spoke the same, walked and shopped the same. It occurred to him that it would make as much sense to stay in one position and keep an eye out for someone passing, and so he did that instead, lighting a cigarette to keep him company.
“You can’t do that,” a voice said, immediately.
David turned to see a middle-aged woman smiling sternly at him. “Huh?”
“Smoking. On the streets. It’s not allowed.”
David looked around for a sign. He was used to this kind of restriction, though generally you had to be within twenty feet of an open doorway the public might use, which he currently was not. “Really?”
“Really. Town ordinance.”
She smiled again, more tightly, and strode up the street. David flicked the end off his cigarette, stowed the butt in the pack, and watched her go.
He spent the rest of the afternoon looking for grit. He walked a long way. He smoked a cigarette once in a while, careful to cup it in his hand, to hide it from passers-by. This, and the task he’d set himself, made him feel as if he was undercover.
When he gave up at five o’clock, he hadn’t seen anyone who looked mildly disadvantaged, never mind actively poor. He’d caught sight of a few Mexicans, engaged in yard-work or carrying sheets to or from vacation rentals, but it wasn’t the economic bracket that mattered. He’d seen no one who… he wasn’t even sure what the umbrella term would be. No one homeless. No one who looked like they’d ever been on medication stronger than some discrete Prozac, or Xanax to smooth out the bumps.
Living in San Francisco—or pretty much any modern town, he’d have thought—brought you into unavoidable occasional contact with someone who seemed to have been jammed into the world sideways. A corner-shouter. A crazy person. Even a simple down-and-out.
In Carmel, not so much. In fact, not at all.
Maybe there was a town ordinance for that, too.
* * *
On the way back to the cottage he stopped off at the grocery store. He brought a few snacks toward an evening meal at home. He also bought a bottle of wine.
After supper he sat out on the front deck and watched the world go by. It went by, smoothly, and without grit.
* * *
He went into the studio early the next morning, though his head did not feel great. He left again after ten minutes and went walking instead. He was more methodical than on the previous day, tracing the streets in a grid pattern. He saw houses he’d never noticed before, though none that looked cheap. He saw a somewhat run-down motor vehicle, but it was vintage rather than simply old.
He still saw no one to disturb the ineffable calm of the locals. No one who smelled. No one sitting with their hand held out, slumped beside a cardboard sign and a patient hound. No one with a battered acoustic guitar on their lap. No one with dreadlocks or dusty clothes.
At one point he thought he saw someone in a long black coat, some distance away, in shadows down a side street. Not just a coat, but wearing a dark and crooked hat, too.
This seemed sufficiently distinctive—and out of keeping with the locals’ usual pastel modes of dress—that he hurried down the street to get a better look, but either the person had moved on or had never been more than a trick of the light.
David considered himself no bleeding-heart liberal. He’d volunteered for neither soup kitchen nor shelter in his life. When confronted with such people on his home turf in the city, he experienced the same feelings of discomfort, fear and irritation as everyone else. Here, though… here, it niggled at him. He wasn’t sure why.
It wasn’t t
hat the town was pissing him off. He liked it well enough, and still hoped to do good work in it. It simply seemed… strange. Could you really have a town in which there were no off-notes, nobody wonky, no misfits? Did such a policy have to be enforced, or was Carmel somehow self-regulating, a delightful painting in which no discordant elements had been incorporated, and for which there was simply no room—a work of living art rendered from a fixed palette in which there were no colors to evoke the discordant?
In the afternoon he went to Bonnie’s once more. He hadn’t intended to, had in fact grown bored of looking at the wall there, and believed he already knew what he needed to put in front of it. He seemed to have become mildly addicted to their coffee, however, and as he was about to pay, he realised something else might come of his visit.
“Do you live here?” he asked the barista girl.
“All my life.”
“Like it?”
“Well… sure.”
“There ever been any homeless people here? That you’ve seen?”
She stared at him for a moment, then laughed.
He went home, but he did not paint.
* * *
He’d told himself he put the second bottle in the basket just so he wouldn’t have to come by the market again the next day. By the time the first was finished, however, he was no longer that guy. He was the other guy. He knew there must be a link between these two men, some way one flowed into the next, but he’d never been able to spot the point where one ended and the other began.
It wasn’t like he had a drinking problem. Sometimes he simply drank too much. It tended to make him cheerful and mischievous rather than depressed or maudlin. The problem lay not with how he was when he was drunk, but how he felt the following day.
If there’s anything that breaks the chain of creation, it’s a hangover. Try telling that to The Other Guy, though. He won’t listen. It may well be from him that inspiration comes in the first place, but he’s not the guy who has to stand there making stroke follow stroke in the hours of daylight, and so he just doesn’t care.
About a third of the way through the second bottle, the idea dropped into David’s head. He could see right away that it was dangerously close to the kind of thing some of his long-ago art college buddies might have undertaken, far too seriously. It was unlike anything he’d ever done. Unlike painting at all, in fact.
This wouldn’t be art, though. This would be research. A step towards finishing the painting that was beginning to languish in the temporary studio. Sometimes the artist has to step into his work, after all. Perhaps it is that process that provides the solution in which events float.
He went indoors, colliding with the doorframe on the way, and made the remainder of the wine last as he worked.
* * *
As he walked up the street the next morning, David realised that he’d unintentionally added extra touches to his work in progress.
Doesn’t matter how long you brush your teeth, when you’ve consumed two bottles of wine you’re going to be exuding it the next morning one way or another. It seeps out of your pores. His head hurt, causing him to squint against the shafts of sunlight that made it down through the trees on his way toward the centre of the village. He’d slept terribly, too—it turned out the floor of the garage was just as uncomfortable as it looked—which conferred valuable extra detail. Often when you create something it’s the unintentional or unconscious touches that make all the difference—so long, of course, as the chain is operating.
He got his first sideways glance just as he made it onto the main street. A man wearing immaculate blue shorts, a blue shirt, and a blue cap looked at him, then away, and then back again. He seemed like he wanted to say something.
David looked back and grinned.
The man stayed silent, but walked quickly away.
Score, David thought.
He continued up the street, concentrating on shambling. It wasn’t hard, given how rough he felt. Just before he turned down the alley toward Bonnie’s, he coughed. It was supposed to be merely a throat-clearer, but the vast number of cigarettes he’d smoked the night before elevated it into a consumptive cacophony that lasted twenty seconds, and culminated in hawking a mouthful of beige phlegm into a flowerbed.
Looking up, head swirling, David saw that a middle-aged couple had stopped in their tracks and were staring at him with identical looks on their faces. It was hard to describe their expressions, though if you came home to find the dog had shat in the middle of your bed, you’d probably make something similar.
David waved, and lurched off up the alley.
The girl behind the counter watched his approach. He knew this was going to be an interesting test. She’d seen him the day before. They’d even had a conversation.
He stepped up to the counter, swaying slightly as he peered up at the board.
“Just a coffee,” he said. “Twelve ounce.”
She reached behind for a cup, not taking her eyes off him. He pulled out the motley handful of loose coins he’d put in his pocket in preparation. It took him quite a while to count out the correct amount. The girl watched, holding back on handing over the cup until he was done.
He filled the cup, added milk and a lot of sugar. Smiled crookedly at the girl as he left. She was still watching, and had not said a single word.
Out in the courtyard he sat at the table in front of the white wall. Had she really not recognised David? Hard to tell. Could be that she’d been left speechless by the transformation. He didn’t think so, though. He was pretty good at his job. He thought she had no idea who he was, and her reaction had been to what he appeared to be.
It’d taken him five hours. First thing he’d tackled were his clothes. At first he’d thought he might be able to get away with using some of his painting gear, but one glance told him that—to his eye—they were too obviously what they were: clothes someone had used to paint in. The balance and distribution of the colours weren’t right.
So he’d gone into the bedroom and found his second pair of jeans and an old-ish shirt. The jeans had always been kind of long in the leg and so the bottoms were ragged and a little dirty, a good start. The shirt was white and in good condition, but he’d worn it on the drive down from San Francisco and it had lain crumpled at the bottom of the linen basket ever since.
Working slowly and methodically—within the confines of the fact that he’d been well on the way to shit-faced drunk by then—he’d tested colours and textures, and then, when satisfied, got to work, layer by layer.
He was a firm believer in the maxim that you can always add but never take away, and so when he was almost done he set the clothes aside and got to work on his face and arms. After a while he hit on a combination of paint, water and dust from the garage floor that seemed to hit the mark. He ran his hands through his hair occasionally, ensuring some of all this got lodged there too.
He finally went back to the clothes and layered in over the creases, then bent and rubbed them against the wall for ten minutes, perfecting the shiny look that comes from dirt and filth that’s been lived in for so long it becomes ingrained, part of the garment itself.
He put the clothes on and lurched into the house. He checked the overall impression in the mirror in the bathroom, and went back to the studio for a couple of final touches, but by this point the wine was done and so was he. In a last-minute inspiration—aided by the fact he simply couldn’t be bothered to lurch back to the bedroom—he lay down on the garage floor.
Pretty quickly he got to sleep, via the intermediary of passing out.
* * *
There was a polite coughing sound, and he looked up to see someone standing over him. Not just someone, in fact, but a policeman—the young cop from yesterday.
“Hey,” David said.
“Like you to come with me, sir.”
“Why?”
The cop reached his hand out toward David’s arm. He didn’t actually touch it, but the implication was clear.
Somehow, it turned out, it was possible for two people to look even less like they were there, while still remaining physically present.
David drained the last of his coffee and stood. By accident, his thigh banged against the edge of the little metal table, causing his stirring spoon to fall noisily to the flagstones. “Pah,” he muttered, with vague enmity, before starting to follow the cop up the alley.
As a final touch, he turned back to the couple. “Assholes,” he snarled.
The cop was waiting out on the sidewalk. David realised that rather than feeling nervous, or scared, he felt excited.
“What?” he said. “I wasn’t doing nothing wrong.”
The cop looked at him steadily. “Kind of a departure from photographing houses, isn’t it?”
David realised the policeman wasn’t dumb. He kept silent.
“So how come the drifter disguise? Which is pretty good, by the way.”
“Didn’t fool you.”
“It’s my job to keep my eyes open, keep track. It’s how I know who lives in which house, too. So—what’s up?”
“I’m just trying something.”
“You got a problem with the people who live here?”
“No. Just… I thought it would be interesting. To see how they would react.”
The cop nodded. He looked along the street. Most people were going about their business in the usual serene way. A few, mainly on the other side of the street, were watching. It was doubtless a while since they’d seen a cop talking to someone other than to cheerfully pass the time of day.
“I understand the joke, sir,” he said. “Some people won’t.”
“Don’t you think it would do them good? To be reminded?”
“I’m not talking about them, sir,” he said. “And anyway… no, I don’t think it would. If you’ve got some big thing about social equality, why not go back to the city and do something about it?”
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 30