The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

  He raised his hand and began drawing on the air with his finger. Contrails of colour hung before his eyes and he spread his fingers in wondering admiration then began drawing with all ten fingers at once, each one independent and yet each one orchestrated with the others. A spider. A puppet master. He saw cinematic tapestries flowing in time lapse speed from his fingertips: Hieronymus Bosch, the Mouseketeers, Muhammad Ali, the earth itself rotating with its coastlines and mountain ranges beneath a living gauze of cloud.

  Then they were bombing along the beach road in Gilbert’s Bug with the surface of the world flowing over them. Up ahead an owl dropped from the trees and plucked a rat from a ditch. It was so swift, so perfectly executed, that Cyril thought it must have been rehearsed, that it was a scene from a movie, that they were not driving at all but sitting in a theatre, or perhaps—and this sucked the breath right out of him—in a movie, and that therein lay the secret of secrets, that God was Otto Preminger in a beret with a cigarette in a holder clenched between his teeth.

  Gilbert skidded to a halt. He turned to Cyril and stated solemnly, as though declaring a long-meditated decision to renounce the world and join a monastery, that he wanted to be a bird.

  Cyril shattered in laughter.

  Gilbert shoved the Bug in gear and drove on. “I am a bird.”

  Cyril spread his arms, the right one out the window feeling the wind, the left reaching into the back seat. They passed a stone church and Gilbert looped the block like a hawk banking to come in behind its prey. As they entered the familiar gloom, Gilbert said, “I’m leaving my soul to science.”

  Cyril envisioned lab-coated doctors dissecting the mist that was Gilbert’s soul.

  They each took an aisle, Gilbert traveling on down the left, Cyril the right, leaving the middle open to a black scarfed woman kneeling at the altar where candles burned on a tiered iron rack like a silent choir of small spirits. A stained glass crucifixion throbbed in the evening sunlight. The cool cement floor chilled Cyril’s bare feet. He envisioned Roman soldiers tramping the hard dry roads of Palestine. Opening his eyes, he saw Christ gazing at him from an alcove. One of Christ’s eyes flickered, as if winking at him, then it rose into the air—Christ’s eye was taking flight! Cyril staggered. Reaching for balance he grabbed the statue’s ankle, hollow plaster instead of solid concrete, and it toppled, grazing his shoulder and striking the cement floor. Christ’s head snapped off at the neck and rocked side to side and then was still, while the moth Cyril had mistaken for an eye flew off toward the candles.

  Cyril woke before dawn. He hadn’t been sleeping so much as awake and dreaming. Now he was shivering and thirsty. He drank from the tap and then went outside and stood listening to the idling machinery of the city. The eastern sky was turning apple green by the time he reached his mother’s. He entered the dark basement and did not turn on the light because he knew that his father was there waiting for him and that in the light he would vanish.

  “Cyril.”

  “Dad.”

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too.”

  “You’re grown up.”

  Cyril wanted to say not really, that he was still a child, that they could pick up where they’d left off. His father appeared luminous and yet solid. There was a hiss of gas and the scrape of a rasp-lighter and the welding torch spouted its perfect flame. His dad flipped down his face plate and went to work cutting a door in the darkness. He worked his way slowly up one side and across and then down the other with his blue and gold flame as precise as a knife blade. A doorway dropped open like a drawbridge revealing a field of wheat higher than their heads. His father switched off the torch and turned off the valve then flipped up his face plate and hung it on its nail. He stepped through the door from the darkness to the light. The sky was a deep blue and a breeze combed the wheat.

  “Don’t go, dad.”

  “Come.”

  They entered the wheat that smelled of wet grain and hot sun.

  “How far?”

  “All the way.”

  Cyril followed. His father was in overalls with the sleeves pushed to mid-forearm. They moved soundlessly, the wheat stalks flowing past, his father singing slowly, quietly, then louder, in a voice deep and resonant as if rising right up out of the land itself, the land he was born in and had returned to, with its winds that blew across thousands of miles of tilled fields and through birch forests, and even though his dad sang no words, only notes, Cyril understood—

  “Cyril.” The basement light went on, the bare bulb’s brutal glare obliterating the vision to reveal his mother on the stairs in her housecoat.

  He worked on a letter to Connie, achieving a pile of crumpled paper and two words:

  Dear Connie,

  Too formal. He crossed out Dear and in a burst he wrote:

  Hey Connie, great to hear from you.

  He pondered then replaced the period with an exclamation mark.

  I Spy! That’s great. I love I Spy.

  This was true. He especially enjoyed the theme music and the opening credits that showed a silhouette of Robert Culp—undercover CIA agent Kelly Robinson—playing tennis, backhand, forehand, then pivoting with a pistol and blasting some Russian or Albanian as the names of exotic cities slid past: Moscow, Rome, Beirut.

  Where does your episode take place? It’s great you’re doing so well.

  Rereading what he had so far, he discovered that he’d repeated the word great three times. Clunky. He tapped his pencil on the lined letter paper.

  I finished art school and just had my first solo show and sold everything.

  He contemplated, then added,

  I’m moving to New York. Get there much?

  He reversed the pencil about to erase it all then changed his mind and laid the pencil down, discovering that the very act of letting the lie stand for a minute was an exhilarating act of bravado. Two days the letter remained on the table. During those two days Cyril’s moods churned. He felt guilty, he felt silly, and then he became critical of Connie—not harshly, but gently, as if he was older and wiser—and thought she could benefit from his example by proceeding more slowly with her career. Was she taking acting classes or blindly hurling herself into auditions and blowing opportunities?

  On the third day he came home from work with the staccato echo of hammers in his head to find Gilbert at the table, a Lucky in one hand, the letter in the other. He’d shifted the tube-metal chair so that he sat parallel to the table, his legs crossed at the knees, looking the picture of comfort.

  “If you’re still carrying a torch for her you should go to la.”

  “She’s with someone.”

  Gilbert popped the cap from a beer with the opener on his Swiss Army knife and slid the bottle across the Formica.

  Cyril drank deeply.

  “So why are you suddenly writing her? You think these fantasies about shows and New York will what, bring her running?”

  “I was drunk.”

  “A little bullshit can go a long way,” admitted Gilbert.

  “I wasn’t going to send it.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “Send it?”

  “Go to New York.” Gilbert swirled his beer and looked at the sketches tacked to the walls, portraits, landscapes, houses, body parts, bottles, boxes, bugs, forks and spoons and knives. “Anything and everything,” he said. “You need to focus. You have no direction. You need a teacher. A mentor. Isn’t that how it worked in the old days, you apprenticed, mixed the master’s paints, shined his shoes, stretched his canvases?”

  SIX

  FEARING THAT ATthe grand old age of twenty-three he was too old to return to school, even if it was only night school, where all you had to do was pay your tuition to be admitted, Cyril was relieved to see students of all ages. They were mostly women, about a dozen, some in smocks with kerchiefs around their heads, others with elbow length hair and hoop earrings. The instructor was named Sandor Novak. His damp hair and dark eyes droope
d like his moustache, and he moved with slow slapping steps as though his feet were flat and ankles weak. He showed them his own work, which focused almost entirely on dismembered dolls. He’d set their heads like boulders in bleak seascapes with crab claws and screwdrivers and broken rowboats and rat skulls. A doll’s foot, a doll’s butt, a doll’s eyes large and lidless, each rendered with detail verging on the mad. Many students exchanged sceptical glances. Cyril was excited. The juxtapositions of such strange and diverse subject matter was a revelation: suddenly everything had aesthetic potential. Over the following weeks, Novak put the class through exercises where they drew with their eyes closed, with their opposite hand, where they drew whatever they were looking at as though it was upside down or imagined it from the opposite side.

  “They say some dinosaurs had two brains,” said Novak. “One up here.” He touched his temple. “And one in their tails.” He held up his hand. “Let us develop a brain in our hand.”

  Novak brought in models. Rarely were they beautiful. There was a scarred and fat old man with a long beard, a withered female junkie who shivered and scratched, a body builder, an elderly woman who fell asleep, a native woman with beaded hair to her hips and who, afterwards, strolled behind them in a black and red robe inspecting their work. She paused behind Cyril and stood there for what seemed an eternity.

  “Huh.” Then she moved on.

  He evaluated that huh. It was not a harumph, or a sceptical hunh, but a bemused and perhaps even intrigued sound. He had focused on the drapery of her hair as if it was a theatre curtain.

  When Novak looked at Cyril’s sketch he did not say Huh he sucked his teeth. “Well, you know which end of the pencil to use.” Cyril was familiar enough with Eastern European bluntness to know that while it was not exactly a compliment neither was it a complete dismissal. “You are drawing what you think is there not what is there. I’ll give you a trick. If your drawing is going well you don’t need it. But if you’re stuck, this can help. Look for images. You understand? Maybe you look at our lovely madonna of the forest and you see that where her arm meets her shoulder there is a chicken.”

  “Not the chickens again,” she said, overhearing.

  Novak ignored her and spoke louder. “A chicken. Or tree. Or boot. You draw that chicken or tree or boot and in that way you build up the whole from the parts, and each part is its own shape.”

  Cyril discovered that his drawings began taking on what Novak termed interior architecture. He was excited. He began imagining a route forward, maybe even a show, a career. Yet why did a guy with Novak’s talent have to teach? One evening he asked whether Novak could make a living on his art.

  “Ah, the honourable sir has enquired if I, Novak, could survive on the avails of my art alone. I could. But I choose not to. Why? Because I do not wish to become a bitter and loathsome creature. I prefer to remain the sweet boy you see before you now.” His mock beatific expression fell. He frowned. He had many frowns. He could frown musingly, sourly, angrily, whimsically, sadly, even joyously. He could laugh and frown at the same time. Now he frowned reflectively. “You must have talent. A thick skin. And, most important, luck. Luck, luck, luck. So much luck. To make luck you must be clever, or blessed. I know I am not blessed and I suspect I am not so clever, but I believe I have the sweet sad soul of a melted popsicle.”

  Cyril had no idea what any of that meant, but he was inspired.

  Sunday evenings Cyril visited his mother. Paul and Della would be there, and after helping with the dishes Della would dry her hands and inevitably discover her wristwatch and remember how early she had to get up in the morning and they’d escape, leaving Cyril and his mother to Ed Sullivan. She didn’t watch the Ed Sullivan Show so much as gaze at it the way she looked at the cemetery, with a distant and somewhat disdainful curiosity. She regarded José Feliciano as doubly handicapped because he was both blind and Puerto Rican. She liked Liberace’s sequinned outfits and rhinestone rings, though Victor Borge was her favourite because he’d made fun of Hitler in the ’30s.

  She had developed the gravity of a brick. There was some latent danger in her that put Cyril in mind of an unexploded shell that had sat buried for decades. It might go years more or blow within the hour. He knew she had friends, other widows from church, yet he feared that by driving Darrel off he’d condemned her to misery.

  At the next class Cyril spent as much time looking at Novak as he did at the model, evaluating Novak through his mother’s eyes: the narrow shoulders, the slack hair, the flat feet, the sarcasm—a quality they shared—and the fact that they were from the same end of Europe. Of course, Novak was blithely irreverent when it came to religion while Cyril’s mother attended church and took more and more solace in her icons. There was also the little matter of him being Hungarian. They’d fought, however reluctantly, alongside Germany in the war. No, his mother and Novak were not a good match. But wasn’t that for them to decide?

  At first Novak didn’t understand. “A party?”

  “Supper.”

  Novak pushed his lips up under his long nose and asked after Cyril’s father, and learning that he was dead began getting the idea. He frowned his exaggerated frown, each end of his thin-lipped mouth hooking downwards and his coat-hanger shoulders rising in a shrug. “Okay.”

  At first Cyril’s mother was equally sceptical. “Magyar.”

  “Canadian.”

  “Magyar.”

  “So?”

  She regarded him with horror. “They fought alongside the Germans.”

  “Dad fought with the Commies.”

  “They think they’re—” Her hand flapped like a torn flag. “They think they’re better.”

  “He’s a good guy.”

  She sniffed as only she could sniff, nostrils wide, mouth down, implying disinterest and disdain. “Bring him, don’t bring him.”

  Come Sunday the bright blue skirt and yellow blouse and red lipstick and cornflower clip-on earrings said Helen Andrachuk was not so indifferent. On the dining room table were new cloth napkins with red trim, and from the kitchen came the smell of roast pork and apple sauce. Paul and Della were eager to meet this Novak. Dinner was at six. At a quarter to seven Novak still hadn’t shown and Paul, deep into the rye, said the guy must be on Budapest time. At seven o’clock Novak arrived carrying a large bottle of Hungarian red whose label depicted some sort of medieval wood furnace being fed by trolls. He was smartly dressed in a charcoal suit and open-collared cream shirt.

  Paul said, “You’re late.”

  “I missed the bus.”

  “You don’t drive?’

  “I drive when I have a car.” Novak turned and waited to be introduced to Cyril’s mother, taking her hand in both of his and regarding her with a decorum nothing short of courtly. Cyril could see by her expression that she was charmed by such graciously Old World manners. When it was Della’s turn Novak asked if she would model for him.

  “No,” said Paul.

  Della, angered, said she’d love to.

  Paul, angered, said she wouldn’t.

  Novak, amused, asked if Paul would like to model and Della said he’d love to.

  Paul gulped his rye in one go and said he was hungry and took his spot at the head of the table. Cyril saw Novak discovering the collection of Virgin Marys as well as the view out the window of the cemetery. Cyril offered to close the curtains but Novak said no, it was a very entertaining vista.

  “It’s depressing,” said Paul, filling their glasses with red wine.

  “It makes you remember to live,” said Novak, raising his glass toward his hostess and thanking her. She said he was vel—welcome.

  As Paul carved the glistening slab of pork, he asked if Novak was one of those guys who sat in Stanley Park on Sunday doing sketches. Novak said he was very flattered that Paul might think so but no, he was not, though maybe someday he might aspire to such heights. Failing to get a rise, Paul wondered how many Viet Cong the Americans had knocked off today?

  “They
say eleven,” said Novak. “Which probably means two.”

  “Too bad,” she said. Communists of any race or colour were to be crushed like cockroaches. “How long you have—have you—been in Canada?” asked Cyril’s mother.

  “Since ’55. The year before the Soviets paid us their little visit. I saw the tanks on the horizon and went the other way.”

  “A country built on tanks and barbed wire,” said Paul, serving the roast. “And run by pigs.”

  “The pig is an admirable beast,” said Novak through a mouthful of pork. “Smart. A survivor.”

  “Not this one,” said Paul, spearing a piece of meat.

  “I prefer the horse,” said Cyril’s mother.

  This came as a surprise. She’d never expressed any interest in horses or any other animal, except to complain about the crows which haunted the cemetery and cawed raucously each morning and evening.

  Novak agreed that horses were a fine and noble creature, and described once seeing a horse trotting across the Széchenyi Lánchíd—the Chain Bridge—in Budapest during the war. “It had lost its rider but his boots—tall shiny black boots—were both still in the stirrups.”

  “The pigs got him,” said Paul, happily.

  “One can only hope,” said Novak. He raised his glass and they drank to the pig.

  Cyril studied the table. Della, a third generation Canadian of English-Scottish heritage, had long given up trying to fathom the medieval animosities that shaped her husband’s background. Paul, in spite of every intention otherwise, seemed to be warming to Novak, while their mother, Helen, was studying their guest with a wine-fueled glimmer in her eyes. Cyril envisioned life with Novak as his stepfather. Would his mother discover a respect for the arts, and in so doing a respect for Cyril’s own efforts? Would Novak become Cyril’s mentor? Or would Novak and his mother fight, divorce, and Novak walk off with half the house? The guy didn’t even own a car. Had Cyril invited the wolf in the door?