by S. T. Joshi
Some forethought before confronting Palazzo would have been preferable, but last night he was too exhausted, and now he was busy navigating. Resigned to winging it, he parked alongside the List Building. So where in all this cement did the division head hole up? The gallery attendant dislodged her designer-punk self from a semiotics primer and answered him audibly the second time. There was an elevator, but climbing the fire stairs to Palazzo's floor possibly delivered more oxygen to Justin's brain.
The door beside the room number was open. Into the breach! This could have been the anteroom of any dentist or accountant, save for the pricier art on ivory-white walls. The trophies included Lichtenstein, Ben Shahn, David Hockney. Justin stopped there. Conspicuous enough consumption for his blood. The receptionist wore tortoiseshell glasses and her brown hair in a bun, and would have looked bookish apart from an ingrained pout. He requested an appointment sometime that day with Palazzo. She didn't know if he'd be in or not and didn't bother asking what his business was, which made him suspect that Palazzo had warned her about him. Through the closed door behind her, he could hear someone tromping around and the scrape of a wastebasket across tiles. Neither of these people seemed to have a very high opinion of him.
He smiled broadly and said he'd wait, that he had all day. He took one of several squeaky leather seats along the wall, and she began typing with unnecessary force at her computer. She sighed a lot. Justin zoned out, to conserve energy. He owed all he had to his refusal to go away, and today was shaping up as no exception.
Half an hour crawled by. He approached the desk, cleared his throat, and asked the frowning secretary for a blank reimbursement form, in case Palazzo had misplaced the one from the gallery director. She claimed not to have any. The door behind her opened silently a hair's breadth, and Justin's eyes chanced to meet the eye that peeked out. The door closed swiftly but silently.
The receptionist's phone chirped several seconds later, while Justin was still watching the door. She swiveled away from him and whispered. She hung up, and the inner door swung wide as if proclaiming Hail fellow, well met. The ever-impeccable Palazzo briskly invited Justin in, but didn't proffer a handshake.
Justin hadn't finished taking the liberty of sitting down when Palazzo launched into preemptive strike. "You've come back at a very exciting time! Great things are underway all over campus. And we're a part of that too, you and I."
Justin greeted this with the polite reflex of a weak nod. Misgivings were already fluttering in his stomach.
"This university is gearing up for the biggest phase of growth in its history, thanks to a hugely successful capital drive. And we're going to be enlarging this department too."
"Enlarge it how? Where is there room? What are you going to do, declare war on the library next door?" The prospect of even more demolition of his beloved old Providence made Justin queasy, and outraged, and remorseful at displaying his work here.
"Oh, we leave that to the professionals." Had Palazzo actually chortled? "So you see, we have tremendous amounts of funding tied up in all this. I don't find any record of contributions from you, though."
That smelled much more like guesswork than the results of research, and not terribly astute guesswork either. Justin's misgivings were fluttering harder.
"If I remember what you're up here for," Palazzo ventured, "I'd consider it a personal favor, and an appropriate gesture, if you'd regard the money in question as a donation to the future of our department." Justin was amazed at how ghastly an ingratiating smile could look.
Easy, now! "Listen, I had an understanding with the gallery director. A deal. There are e-mails to that effect. I put a lot of time and effort into installing the exhibit here on short notice, and I'm getting nothing out of it myself. I really need what you owe me."
"I don't owe you anything." How quickly the worm turned! "She didn't consult with me first. She went over my head, and not for the first time. You made your deal with her, not me. There's plenty I could have done with that wall space for two weeks."
Justin shrugged and spread his hands. "That's not my problem. I came to town in good faith."
"Well, you invested your faith badly. And yes, it is your problem." With the tiniest adjustment of facial muscles, Palazzo would be gloating.
"You can't be serious. Where is the gallery director, anyway? I'd like to hear her side of this."
"She's called in sick."
Justin wouldn't put it past Palazzo to lie, but he conceded the point. "And I suppose you're going to fire her as soon as she gets well? If you haven't already?"
"Oh no, that would be crude. Her contract is nearly up. We won't renew her, that's all." God forbid that any whiff of discord emanate from Pictorial Arts!
Palazzo had inadvertently helped Justin plot his next move. Si le geste est beau, as the French said. But in good conscience, he had to brave the direct route as last resort. "So are you going to pay my hotel bill or not?"
"How simple do I have to make it for you? No!" Justin had pushed the decorous Dr. Palazzo into quaking like an aspen. Maybe that short fuse had propelled Palazzo's rise to the bureaucratic top, Justin speculated.
"Fine, then." Justin stood up unhurriedly. It behooved him to take the high road, though he'd have been more satisfied, and eminently within his rights, to vent a resounding Fuck you. When Justin began to speak, Palazzo lost his cool altogether and shouted at him to get out and stay out, but Justin doggedly followed through on the grounds that he'd always hoped for the occasion to say what he was saying, whether Palazzo was listening or not. "You know, Doc, for some people, the present represents an accumulation of everything past, like it's all there to some degree as a source of inspiration. For others, the present only represents as clean a break from the past as possible, and the less history there is to get in the way of business, the better. It's just too bad a city like this has you, or anyone like you, in the position you're in."
Palazzo, red, heaving, goggle-eyes hurling malice, was temporarily out of steam.
"Did a word of that sink in?" Justin asked.
Palazzo gathered breath for another tirade, but this time Justin had the drop on him. "Anyway, fuck you," he summed up, ambled out, and closed the door with overweening deliberation till it clicked, amidst new barrage about how vulgar and unimportant he was. The receptionist was gaping at Justin as if he'd blown up the dam. "Boy, he's going to be fun for the rest of the day," Justin forecast. Only when he was on the fire stairs did he realize how much he was shaking.
He paused outside the gallery. A cursory mental survey located reasonably clean blankets and towels in the van, for art-swaddling purposes. He'd removed and stacked three 18" by 24" frames from the wall before the attendant was at his elbow.
"It's all right, I'm the artist," he told her.
"Are you sure it's okay? Isn't this show up for a week or two?" A good do-bee in spite of spiky pink hair!
"If you're worried, call Palazzo. In fact, I wish you would."
She said no more, and was nowhere in sight when Justin set another frame on the pile and debated carrying four at once. He was out to the van and back, and had voted against more loads that size, when Palazzo and the attendant arrived at the doorway. He barked at her to come back in an hour. He stormed in, but halted judiciously out of swinging range while bellowing, "What do you think you're doing? This is unacceptable! What are people going to say when there's nothing on the walls?"
Justin begrudged him a morose glance. "Call it a matter of trust. I don't feel safe leaving my artwork with you. You've already expressed a rather dismissive attitude toward it." He was also, admittedly, loath to stay or return where a grotesque death was in store, were the stars ever "right" again.
"Have you any idea how unprofessional this is?"
Justin shook his head impassively. "Maybe some token on your part would help. Something tangible. Otherwise, I don't know."
"You want money? This is childish! This is blackmail!"
"Well, that's not
how I'd describe it." Justin reached for another picture, but stopped as Palazzo charged from the room. Would he enlist campus security? And make a scene strong-arming an exhibiting artist and "honored alum"? Justin doubted it.
Then the gallery lights went out. Brightness from the doorway made negligible impact in the mineshaft blackness. He anticipated Palazzo would let him stew a while and was reconciled to waiting in the dark. If the stalemate dragged on long enough, how would Palazzo respond to inquiries about the gallery blackout and Justin alone inside? Justin was conversant with feeling ridiculous, but he'd wager Palazzo was not. A drawback in these circumstances!
The dark was coming to seem less absolute. Were his eyes adjusting? No, not exactly, because he still couldn't see his pictures on the walls. Just the same, a glow was spreading through the room, as if someone were almost imperceptibly upping a dimmer switch, to reveal surfaces at right and acute angles to each other, which dwindled to a vanishing point miles beyond the rear gallery wall. And as if it had never been absent but only lurking below a subliminal threshold, ravenous appetite welled up in him again. Nor would it scruple to take a bite out of Palazzo at the least provocation.
He also hungered for what had attained depth and sharp outlines in soothing twilight. He was standing on a mossy slate terrace, facing west. No List Building surrounded him, no highrises rudely interrupted the scarlet horizon of western hills, and even the massive Colonial Revival courthouse on Benefit Street had reverted to rows of antique gables and gambrels. The tallest structure by five stories or so was the bracket-shaped Hospital Trust bank across the canal. A few electric signs lent primary colors to the bricks and masonry of downtown, but only the one for the Old Colony Hotel was within reading distance. Sunset made the gold dome of the Congregational church on Weybosset Street gleam softly. The streetlamps ought to be on in a minute.
Here was the unmodern Providence of his dreams, and of heightened poignancy after a weekend in the brave new Providence. Lovecraft had not emerged beckoning, but that would have been impossible really. This was the Providence of Lovecraft's schooldays, and since Justin couldn't imagine Lovecraft as a child, that version of him couldn't materialize. In any event, it was very beautiful over there, and Justin could have it for the rest of his life, if he simply walked into it.
He was aware at the same time of how short such a life would be, and that the cosmic angler's hidden eye had to be glowering down at him. He also belatedly recognized how cunning the angler had been, to give the fish all the line it wanted, and an illusion of freedom, while that fish spent its strength and the hook stayed embedded in unfeeling lip.
None of this stopped Justin from shuffling his feet eagerly. His hankering for that place was inseparable from the hankering of something that regarded him as food, and he had no means to pull out psychic hook, any more than a fish could sprout hands to save itself. How covertly active had the entity been after the line had gone slack? What kind of orchestrations had been involved for Justin to end up back at List, in the dark?
A phrase from Lovecraft's story echoed at Justin, even as left foot rose in defiance of better judgment: "I am it and it is I." Did the "it" in question feel or understand any of Justin's yearning for the mirage it created for him, the way he suffered its hunger pangs, its anxiety, because Justin wasn't in the net yet, and meals were few and far between? Did Justin want to help assuage that cruel hunger? All he had to do was be eaten!
"Now will you please come out and behave reasonably?" Palazzo's outburst confused Justin and threw him off-balance. It sounded so clear and immediate, but how could that be? Justin was virtually a world away. "What are you doing in there?"
Palazzo was too worked up to be observant, or else from outside the gallery was still in darkness. But Justin soon learned that it wasn't necessary to be him to see what he was seeing. Palazzo was beside him, directing eyes wide with horror north and south, east and west. "Where are we? What the hell is going on?"
Justin, despite everything, smiled wryly. "It's Providence."
Palazzo became even more distraught. "Where's our building? Where's everything that's happened in the last hundred years? All that progress gone! Everything we've achieved! This is terrible! Why are you smiling, you little son of a bitch?"
Justin had been about to tell Palazzo it was all in his head, but stopped himself. Not after that abusive tone!
Palazzo wasn't doing especially well at coping with the situation. He began babbling about what they could do to fix all this. Justin could have suggested leaving the room or taking some flash photography, but why put himself out? And would Palazzo listen to someone as unimportant as him? Remarkable, in any case, that Palazzo was so susceptible to psychic influence, taking the reality of their vista at face value. Maybe he had too much else on his mind to think critically about this. Dotted lines of streetlamps were beginning to incandesce hither and yon.
Justin understood what happened next, because it was also happening to him by dint of celestial meeting of minds. Traveling across any surface obviously entailed the risk of slipping on that surface, particularly at stressful moments. Those who fished through a hole in the ice were always one misstep away from an unfriendly medium. And now Justin's idyllic Providence descended instantaneously from mellow dusk to heavy gloom. Big and low in the gray northern sky floated the denser black of what first seemed the moon in eclipse. But pale stars, and not craters, were scattered across its surface, in a range of sizes from pinpoint to grapeshot. Here was the angler's native sky, as glimpsed through the hole in space where three-lobed eye had glared down and dispensed visions till brief clumsiness dislocated it. If Justin had blinked, he'd have missed it, for there followed a thud that shook the unseen gallery floor and rattled the unseen pictures on the walls, and the hole in space was jammed with frantic, ciliated tissue that bulged like a bubble into the room. On contact with the atmosphere it shone pink, then hot red.
In that span of seconds, a mounting stench of scorching mold and incinerated carcasses made Justin choke, and he reeled at a protracted, inhuman wail that was as much between his ears as in them, and that also spewed from his own mouth. It distorted as if channeled through cheap microphone. The surroundings, mean while, kept flickering between darkness and dim simulation of bygone Providence.
Then further sound impinged on him. Palazzo was still babbling in the same rhythm, at the same tempo, but the syllables had devolved into baby talk, and their volume had drastically risen. Callously or not, Justin felt a burden melt from his shoulders, and a release of tension in his chest. Palazzo going mad had saved Justin from doing the same. This chaos wasn't simply an expression of Justin's lone delusion. He needn't doubt, or abandon, his own sanity!
The entity broke free of vacuum seal between dimensions, and in its wake left unmediated the passage between here and there. A sonic boom knocked Justin off his feet, and the walls in the dark room rumbled, and all his artwork plummeted with a crash of shattering glass. The sour air began to whistle by his face. He lay as flat as possible, and his lunging hands bumped and clung to the cold steel siding of the attendant's desk. Praise the Lord, it was bolted down!
A hole in space, left on its own, couldn't be stable. It had to collapse soon. But the leakage between dimensions was still accelerating, lifting Justin off the concrete floor, when Palazzo flopped onto his belly and grabbed Justin's ankles. Justin's sweaty handhold on the sharp edge of slick metal panel began to loosen. He couldn't hang on much longer in this wind tunnel with patrician dead weight doubling his own. He kicked out as if swimming the Australian crawl, once, twice, and screaming Palazzo lost his grip. Had Justin done what was needful to save himself, or had he outright killed a man? The keening airflow was already beginning to tug less fitfully at him, and with a moral issue assailing him on top of everything else, his overtaxed consciousness gave way, though his fingers knew better than to let go.
Justin opened his eyes to bright gallery illumination. The attendant was standing beside him, stud
ying him fretfully. She evidently knew where to find the circuit-breakers, or at least the janitor. Justin was lying on his right side and had unhanded the desk. He and the girl gawked at each other a minute. He didn't feel impelled to say anything yet.
"You okay? You want me to call the infirmary?"
Infirmary? The word dredged up long-lost campus lore of subpar doctors burning warts off the wrong hand. Last thing he needed now. "Oh no, not those butchers."
She shrugged. "A friend came and got me from upstairs when she heard a noise and saw the lights were out. Was there an earthquake in here or something?"
"Something, yeah." He raised himself on bruised and achy elbow. By the grace of whatever laws governed pressure or gravitation or aerodynamics between worlds in tangent, little had been scooped up from the edges of the room. Most of his photos lay face-up on the floor, though a lot of busted glass had crossed over. "I'm a lucky bastard," he mumbled.
"What?" The girl wasn't going to freak out, was she? "Where's Dr. Palazzo?"
"I don't know." Not the lie it sounded like! "Pretty sure the earth didn't swallow him up."