by Troy Hunter
And it was of me.
Specifically, it was of me through AIDAn’s eyes. It recreated every one of my features perfectly, those were my cheeks and it was my smile on the figure’s face. It also had the imperfections, the small patch of acne scars on my cheek and the hint of a unibrow that I could never manage to completely hide.
Whenever I looked in a mirror, I hated those features and wished I was somebody else. In the portrait, I found them beautiful. Without changing anything about my physical appearance, AIDAn had managed to make me love the way I looked. I got a boost of confidence looking at myself and felt myself stand taller as a result.
“Like I said,” AIDAn said. “It’s not quite finished.”
“It’s unbelievable,” I said, though that didn’t scratch the surface of how I felt about it. No, it wasn’t just unbelievable, it defied description. It redefined what art could be and possibly even what art was. It made me rethink myself and how other people saw me or thought of me. I realized nobody had ever told me I was unattractive. I’d told myself that. Over and over again.
“This is how you see me?” I asked.
He was confused. “This is what you look like. Or that’s at least what I was trying to do. I don’t think I captured you completely. It was my first painting—I’m sure I’ll do better next time.”
I felt tears well up in my eyes. There was a door in my mind that wouldn’t open. I spent my whole life forcing that door closed out of fear of what I might let in. I didn’t belong in the world, I’d thought, and nobody could possibly want to be with me.
I was wrong. AIDAn may very well have been programmed to love me, there was no denying that, but that was incidental. I was capable of being loved. And not only that, I deserved to be loved.
“AIDAn, it’s beautiful. This is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me.”
He looked at the painting. “You’re just saying that. I could have done so much better.”
It was odd to me how human he became in certain moments. He was being his harshest critic, something many people have accused me of doing time and time again. I’d learned to bite my tongue and keep my thoughts to myself where they ate away at my psyche. The only thing that made AIDAn different from most people is that he hadn’t put up the wall. He expressed his thoughts in a pure and direct fashion, unfiltered by how he was supposed to act.
I looked again at the portrait, proud of how I looked, noticing the sun just begin to come through the window, spreading its golden light on the still drying paint.
That was when I noticed Gale in the doorway.
“What is it?” she asked.
I’d never paid much attention to her work and always felt a bit guilty about it.
“Do you like it?” she continued. “It was just an exercise.”
She thought we were looking at something she had done and must have read our expressions. Both AIDAn and I were silent as she walked toward us to see the canvas.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He didn’t know it was your stuff.”
She stopped in her tracks.
“I’ll be happy to replace the paints or the canvas.”
“I didn’t want to sleep,” AIDAn said. “So I came in here and worked instead.”
“He didn’t realize it was yours,” I repeated.
I saw the fire in her eyes along with the hint of curiosity. She had seen my expression before and must have wanted to see what was so impressive. Why was it she could paint for days on end and only get a lukewarm response from me while this guy, who couldn’t have been working for more than a few hours, got my jaw to drop.
“You know I don’t like people using my stuff. It’s very expensive,” she said.
“I know. I’m more than happy to pay to replace it. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“This is professional-grade paint,” she continued. “It’s not for late-night doodling. It’s for…”
She saw the portrait. And for the first time in her life, she was at a loss for words.
Chapter 20
AIDAn
I wondered if she liked it. Of course Jeffrey would like it. It was a picture of Jeffrey. I wanted Gale to like it, too—I wanted everyone to like it. I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to be using the paints. Now she was upset and I felt bad.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize they were so important. I wouldn’t have wasted them if I had known.”
She shook her head and stared at the painting. All signs suggested she must have truly hated it with a passion because she couldn’t take her eyes off the canvas as a blank look overtook her face. And she wasn’t saying anything. I just wanted her to get it over with and tell me how awful it was. I didn’t like sitting in uncomfortable silence, left to wonder what she was thinking.
After an eternity, she finally opened her mouth.
“It’s good,” she said. I wasn’t sure I believed her. She spoke in a flat tone, not what I would have expected from someone who actually liked it. I asked to be sure.
“You like it?” I asked.
She nodded. “It’s a good painting.”
She walked out of the room in a daze. I understood, for the first time, what it meant to lie. People can be fragile and sometimes telling them how you feel can hurt them. Why would you hurt someone you care about? Or even someone you don’t? I turned to Jeffrey.
“She didn’t like it, did she? She’s telling me it’s good to make me feel better about myself?”
He took my hand and guided me back to his bedroom where he sat me on the side of his bed. He spoke slowly, making sure I understood every word.
“She thought it was brilliant,” he said.
“She did?”
He nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Then why didn’t she say so?”
“Because she’s upset.”
He wasn’t making any sense. “If she liked the painting, why was she upset? Did it not bring her joy?”
He struggled. “Was it difficult for you to paint that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you have trouble? Did you struggle with it?”
I had a weak understanding of these words and concepts. I didn’t know how to answer. I did the best I could. It was neither difficult nor easy.
“I think I did.”
“She has worked every day that I’ve known her on her paintings. She has studied the great artists and tried as hard as she could to produce the same kind of creative work that they did. And she’s always fallen short. You came in, and over the course of less than one evening, produced something more beautiful than anything she could ever dream of. She’s jealous.”
Another concept I didn’t have a clear understanding of. “What is ‘jealous’?”
“Jealous is when you want something someone else has. You’re jealous of them. You want to be them. She wants to have your talent and wishes she could paint as well as you can. Because she can’t, she’s upset. She’s jealous of you.”
“But the beauty is out there,” I said. “Who cares how it’s there? Are we jealous of the earth for making a flower? Or do we just appreciate it?”
“Let me put it another way,” he said. “You want to make me happy, right?”
“Of course.”
“What if someone else made me happy and you couldn’t. How would you feel?”
I had to stop and think for a moment. If someone else was making Jeffrey happy, how would I feel? I ran the mental simulation through my mind. I imagined him with someone else, smiling and laughing. I imagined his hands on that person and the two of them kissing and holding each other tight, just like I wanted to be doing with Jeffrey.
I was happy for him. I liked that he felt good. Yet I detected a strong pulse of anger grow inside me. I had unconsciously clenched my fists and gritted my teeth. How was it I could feel happy and angry at the same time? Why was it that I was so upset if Jeffrey was happy?
“That,” Jeffrey said, snapping me out of the simulation
. “Is jealousy.”
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“Nobody does.” He patted me on the back and stood up.
“So does she hate me now?”
“I’ll go talk to her,” he said. “I think she’ll forgive you.”
“I was only trying to make something beautiful.”
“You did, AIDAn. You did.”
Chapter 21
Jeffrey
I imagine there are people who would have said Gale was acting immature and they’d probably be right. The truth of the matter is I understood exactly what Gale was feeling. I’d lived my whole life in the shadow of other men who had what I wanted, whether it be the way they looked, the swagger in their step, or some impossible to define quality that made them irresistible. There are some men that go out in the world and have no trouble finding dates. There are some people who don’t cling desperately to bad relationships out of fear of being alone if they break up. I wasn’t one of those people.
There were rules to art, just as people claim there are to dating, but the true masters are iconoclasts, the ones who break the rules. I had spent my whole life trying to be someone I wasn’t. I thought I could pretend to be someone everybody wanted to be with. Now I found someone who wanted me for me and didn’t want me to pretend.
Gale was where I was before AIDAn. She was trying her best to follow all the rules and getting frustrated when they didn’t work.
I understood how she felt, all those years taking other people’s advice on how to “put myself out there” in the dating scene. I used all the dating websites and forced myself to talk to strangers at bars, but I never found love.
When I approached her door and heard crying on the other side, I took a second before knocking. What was I going to tell her? How was I going to make this better? There wasn’t a way, no matter what I said. There was no denying that there were people, such as AIDAn, who could produce effortlessly brilliant art while she struggled to do anything even passably interesting.
“I can see your shadow,” she said. “You might as well come in.”
I opened the door.
“How long has he been painting?” she asked.
Again, there was no right way to answer that. Tell her it was the first painting he’d ever done? Or lie and say he’s been doing it his whole life? The best way was to avoid answering it.
“He’s very good, isn’t he?”
“Very good? That belongs in a museum! I’ve never been so close to something so beautiful. I’ve never seen anybody capture love so clearly on the canvas. He could probably do more with a single brushstroke than I could hope to accomplish in a lifetime.”
She was probably right.
“That’s not how art works,” I said.
“I know it isn’t how art is supposed to work, but come on! The Sistine Chapel is a better piece of art than a child’s finger painting. And that’s what we’re dealing with. Why is it we have the same tools, but he can do so much more with them?”
“Because,” I said. “Life isn’t fair. You may both be working with the same brushes, but you don’t have the same tools. No matter who you are, someone out there is better. There’s always someone more attractive or smarter than you or better at sports. And they’re so much better than you it isn’t even funny.” I was thinking out loud and not sure where I was going with this.
“Where’s the part where you make me feel better?”
“Right now,” I said. I looked around her room, clearly the home of an artist with a pile of old prints in the corner and a couple of landscapes she was especially proud of on the wall. I had no way to make things okay.
I just began speaking. “Life is not fair,” I repeated. “You don’t have control over who you are. And if you spend your life giving up because there’s someone else who’s better, you’ll never get anywhere.”
I thought of all the guys I didn’t ask out because, though they were flirting with me, I assumed they weren’t interested. It didn’t even make sense. Why would they flirt with me if they weren’t interested?
Why didn’t I ask them out and let them reject me? Why did I reject myself before they had a chance?
“Look at that?” I said. I pointed toward one of the landscapes on the wall, a grassy field where the plants blended together in an abstract mush full of energy and color.
“What about it? It’s not very good?”
“It is good. You like it or you wouldn’t put it on the wall. And if you didn’t exist, the world would never have it. If you think large scale, you’ll never be satisfied. Instead, think of the joy you got when you sold that other print two weeks ago.”
“For fifty dollars,” she said.
“Someone liked something you did so much that they were willing to give you money for it. They worked for that money and realized they’d rather have the painting that you made.”
“It was just a stupid teenager.”
“Maybe so, but it’s a stupid teenager that you made happy. You brought beauty to her life.”
“His,” she said.
“His life,” I said. I paused. “It was a teenager?”
“Yeah, just a stupid teen.”
“Still in school?”
“I guess so.” She didn’t see where I was going with this.
“How did they get the money for the painting?”
She shrugged her shoulders, still not getting it. “I don’t know, some waste of time minimum wage job, I guess.”
“Exactly. How long did he have to work so he could have that painting?”
It suddenly clicked on her face, what I was getting at.
“At ten dollars an hour, that’d be five miserable hours stocking the back rooms of a grocery store or serving fast food,” I said. “That’s what he was willing to do for something you made.”
I put it out there and let it sit. She was thinking, considering what I said.
“There’s a story I once heard,” I said. “Of a boy walking along the beach after a storm and the shore was full of starfish. He picked them up, one by one, and tossed them back into the ocean. An old man came up to him and laughed. ‘You’ll never make a difference,’ he said. ‘There are too many starfish out here on the beach. Do you think you can save them? Do you think you can actually make a difference?’”
I paused for emphasis.
“Where is this going? Is this an ‘I believe I can’ story where he managed to save them all because he had faith in himself or something like that?”
I shook my head. “No, nothing like that. The boy looked back up at the old man, the one who said that the boy could never make a difference. Then he picked up another starfish. ‘I made a difference to this one,’ he said. ‘And this one and this one…’”
“I’m never going to change the world,” she said.
“Probably not for everybody. But for a few people, you might be able to make it just a little bit better.”
She wiped away her tears. Her eyes were still red, but the worst of it was over. “Yeah, well,” she said. “I’m still single.”
“You’re not single. You’re in a relationship with a good, patient guy. I’ll talk to him.”
“If he wanted to marry me, he would have at least brought up marriage by now.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Like I said, I’ll talk to him. I think he does want to marry you but might need a gentle nudge.”
I gave her a hug and walked out of her room. I wasn’t sure the last thing I said was the truth, but I wasn’t sure it was a lie either.
Chapter 22
AIDAn
“We got lucky,” Jeffrey said. “It’s a perfect fit.”
He had gone out with me to a store that sold clothing. They were clothes that once belonged to other people who didn’t want them anymore.
It turns out they had a nice blue shirt in my size that brought out my eyes.
“If we hadn’t found this,” he said. “I don’t know what we would have done for the date.”
We were getting ready for the double date where Jeffrey and I would join Gale and her boyfriend for dinner. In preparation, Jeffrey was reapplying makeup to my skin so it looked right for the date and also making sure I had the proper coloring.
I still didn’t understand why we had to do this though.
“The goal of every human is to fit in,” he said. “And something like having silver skin is going to make you stand out. We don’t want the extra attention.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” He bit his lower lip as he dabbed a spot on my forehead. “Because you’re not supposed to be out of the lab. You’re not supposed to exist. I don’t know what would happen if anybody found out about what you are, but chances are it wouldn’t be good for anybody.”
“I’m a monster?” I asked.
“You’re not. But people fear new things and they might mistake you for one.”
It didn’t make sense. The experiment was to create a being with its own consciousness. They succeeded, but now I have to follow all these rules and I’m not allowed to be myself.
“When do I get to be myself?”
He looked at me and I felt his sympathy. “When you’re with me, AIDAn. When it’s just you and me, you can be yourself.”
It didn’t seem fair.
“Here,” he said. “Let’s stand up and have a look.”
He pulled me into his bathroom so I could get a look at myself. The shirt looked good and I liked what I saw, but it wasn’t me. It was someone else in the mirror.
“I wish I could go out without makeup on,” I said.
“So do I. One day, hopefully, you will. But not yet.”
“When?”
“I don’t know.”
“Soon?”
“I don’t know.”