The painter was tumbling down a well of creative stagnation and so he uprooted his life and moved to a strange town and got a job working nights as a cook. But even with the change of scenery and habit he still couldn’t create anything of merit for weeks and so he began to doubt his abilities as well as his decision to move and begin anew.
He had a crush on a girl at work. She worked the morning shift in the back office of the restaurant and never talked to anyone and so he watched her tentatively for about a month before finding the courage to approach her. Hello, he said to her one morning at the end of his shift, smiling, I don’t want to embarrass or offend you but I think you’re a beautiful woman, you’re quiet and reserved and you seem smart. I noticed you might be a bit younger than I am, how young I’m not sure, but one thing I’ve learned through the years is that when a person reaches a certain psychological maturity, age becomes an illusion. You’re negotiating those initial years of adulthood and one thing that’s important to remember is there are some things we can all share with each other, whether they be stories or curative methods or lessons fashioned from time and experience and certainly pain, always pain, but often times each of those things can combine into one cohesive package. And so being an adult, finding another person to connect with mentally, emotionally, spiritually, has nothing to do with how old or how young a person is, but what they have to offer, how they receive and interact with the other person.
As the painter was telling her this she shook her head at him and then she passed on a rather peculiar series of hand gestures and said, as only a deaf person could, I can’t hear a word you’re saying.
That morning he didn’t feel like going home because home was bleak and filled with blank canvases and bare cuts of wood and unused oils and acrylics. He walked down through the commercial district toward the water and he passed through the faith district and all the churches and mosques and synagogues of varied persuasions and denominations stacked next to each other, people walking dazed in and out of them and all of them dressed alike and moving in like manner of attitude and posture, and he realized the only difference between each lot was the architecture of their respective structures. He made his way down through the district of Neophalia and the vast network of bridges there and he stopped to rest in the shade beneath one small bridge and when he looked up to its undercarriage he saw one of the most amazing works he’d ever come across. It was a mural large in size but much larger in scope, a work stretching the entire length of the bridge’s belly and painted in the humble dialect of a master. It was a curious but potent narrative compressing all stages of thought and sprit, an idiom splashed in shades of shades as a volley to the gods: This is the human mind rendered true and real and composed of its own colloquial rites, and how beautiful this truth is, how sacred such offerings are. The painter sat and stared though the mural was faded with age and wear and the spattered shit of birds and other creatures. He was immediately cured of his creative obstructions and walked briskly to his apartment where he called in sick and began work at once on a piece that took him well into the night hours, an oil on wood that he finished feeling utterly alive and exhausted and relieved before finally falling asleep with the title of the work twisting and burning behind the fluttering lids of his eyes, Mirrors.
The next day he woke up in the early afternoon and walked to the kitchen around the corner for lunch. He sat at the bar next to an older woman drinking a martini and he introduced himself.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“I’m a painter,” he said.
“Oh!” the old woman said, delighted. “It must be my lucky day! My house needs painted, and who sits down next to me for lunch but a real life painter!”
“I’m afraid I’m not that type of painter,” he said.
“Oh,” said the older woman. “I see. You’re an artist. I don’t know too much about art. What sort of art do you do?”
“I’m a painter.”
“Well yes, of course,” she said. “But what do you paint? Do you paint people or landscapes?”
“I paint states of mind. I’m more or less a painter of the avant-garde.” And as soon as he said it he wished he hadn’t, for he knew better than most that all art was nothing if not avant-garde, that art by its very nature was at the forefront of humanity’s march across the steaming mouth of the unknown, and what is art if not the light and the bridge, the shield and the key that sanctions and endorses humanity’s greatest leaps?
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Well—”
“Last night an episode of my favorite television program—or maybe it was the night before or the night before that. I can’t remember. Anyway, it’s the program about the talent show full of famous people with unbelievable talents. They dance and sing and oh, how talented they are! Last night there was a famous actor on the show, I can’t remember his name. But oh my, what an excellent painter he was! He painted these beautiful cottages and he painted scenes of grass and he painted portraits of other famous people. Talk about a real artist! I couldn’t believe my eyes! Really, that’s the type of painting you should be doing, young man. That’s what I call Art.”
“That’s really not my—”
“Think about it,” the drinking woman said. “Don’t waste your time on this ‘avant-garde’ hullabaloo. In my day when something was ‘avant-garde’ it just meant that nobody understood it.”
The lady finished her martini and wished the painter well and walked out into the sunshine.
*
The painter wasn’t feeling well after lunch. He’d been having bouts with his allergies and so he looked up a doctor and made an appointment. When he got to the office he sat down and bobbed his head and tapped his fingers to the muzak and then he dug into his bag for a paperback and started reading it and after a while he noticed a man dressed in a suit watching him.
“Pardon me,” said the man in the suit. “I’m always curious what people are reading.”
“Oh,” said the painter. “This is a book of poems by my favorite Australian poet.”
“The title,” said the staring man. “I’m only interested in the title, not the contents.”
“Oh,” said the painter again. “Identity of Circles.”
“Thank you,” said the man in the suit, and leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Then the doctor’s assistant called the painter’s name and led him down a long narrow corridor of empty rooms and into the last room on the left.
“What’s seems to be the problem,” the doctor’s assistant asked.
“Well,” the painter said, and he listed his symptoms, starting with descriptions of the itchy throat and the watery eyes, then mentioning the heaviness in his chest and his stuffy nose. The nurse wrote all of this down and nodded and told him the doctor would be in soon, and then she walked into the hall and closed the door.
After a few minutes the doctor burst into the room looking down at his clipboard and saying, What seems to be the problem.
The painter began listing his symptoms again and the doctor walked over and examined the painter’s foot, he used a stethoscope on the painter’s forehead and hands, and when the painter was done speaking the doctor said, You’re lying.
“I’m sorry?”
“You’re lying,” said the doctor, standing in front of the painter and staring at him. “According to the nurse’s notes, you’re experiencing some sharp pain in your major organs.”
“No,” the painter said. “That’s not what I told her. I think it’s just an allergy flare-up.”
“An allergy flare-up.”
“You know. I’m new in town. Something is wreaking havoc on my mucous membranes.”
“Your mucous membranes.”
“That’s right.”
“Take off your clothes,” said the doctor.
The painter stared at the doctor.
“Come on,” said the doctor. “Now’s not the time to be shy.”
The painter stood and removed his clothes.
The doctor told the painter to lie on his back and the doctor proceeded to press down on the painter’s stomach and chest. He felt about the painter’s lymph nodes and he massaged the painter’s temples and he lifted each of the painter’s arms in turn, counting, one, two, three, then he fondled the painter’s balls, weighing each testicle delicately in his fingers. The doctor stopped to write something down on his clipboard and then he went back to the painter’s balls again, twisting and cupping and rubbing. When he was done he tossed a paper shirt at the painter and told him to put it on.
“What the hell, man.”
The doctor nodded at the painter and said, “I have to check on a patient but when I come back I’m going to take your temperature and then some blood and we’ll run an MRI and perhaps probe your rectum with a microscopic camera and connect a catheter to your penis and we’ll have you lie in a hyperbaric chamber while pornographic images flash before your eyes so we can measure the strength and durability of your erections and then maybe we’ll figure out just why there’s all this madness going on inside your body.”
“But it’s just allerg—”
“Oh, stop it, now’s not the time for whining,” and then the pervert stormed out of the room and the painter dressed quickly in his normal clothes and cracked open the door to the corridor to make sure it was empty and then he sprinted out of the office and didn’t stop running until he was three, four blocks away, and he suddenly realized he was breathing freely through his nose and the heaviness in his chest had disappeared. Very odd form of treatment, he thought. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t work.
The painter was passing by a bookstore and decided to go inside. He asked the woman at the front counter if she had any used poetry and she pointed to a dark corner where sat a very dusty and meager pile of books in the rear of the store and he walked over and leafed through the titles and he realized the stack wasn’t poetry at all but old ratted crosswords and word searches, and he thought maybe he had misunderstood the woman at the counter or maybe she had misunderstood him but then he thought what is poetry but crossings of and searches for words?
He left the bookstore and on the way back to his apartment he was approached by a beggar, a man of middle age who asked if he could spare a book.
“A book?” the painter asked.
“Yes,” said the beggar. “A book. Preferably a novel. I’ve been out here on the streets for eight weeks, fighting for my meals, fighting off the cold, fighting away the killers and thieves and sadistic mendicant pricks, fighting the demons in my own mind, fighting for every minute of rest I can get, and I’ve forgotten what it’s like to get lost in a novel. A novel could help my situation considerably, it could help me forget this shitty world and the hole I’ve dug for myself. I could remember what it was like to create, to paint.”
“You used to paint?” the painter asked.
“Oh yes,” said the beggar. “I was an avant-garde painter in the eighties, one of the original Transcendental Nihilists. There were about ten of us creating all these intersecting landscapes of consciousness throughout the city. Writers, painters, architects, musicians. Have you ever been down to the bridges in Neophalia?”
“Don’t tell me you did that,” said the painter. “Don’t tell me you painted the mural beneath that bridge.”
“Yes,” said the former painter, nodding, staring off into the distance to the shimmering gold sun on water and glass, ripples of light like fire or the hearts of fire. “It took me six years, standing way up on my ladders made of ladders as the seasons turned, looking and pointing above me to the underside of that bridge. It was my salvation, my only child, my masterpiece, and it damn near killed me.”
Then the painter told the former painter about how he happened upon the mural and the impetus it had on his own work.
“Here,” the painter said, reaching into his backpack for a book, a different book than the one from the doctor’s office. He pulled it out and handed it over to the former painter.
“What’s this?” the former painter said, and took the book. The cover was creased and tattered so that the beggar couldn’t make out the title or image.
“It’s a novel, written in blank verse. It’s called The Lost Notebooks,” said the painter. “It’s about a famous American writer named Desmond Paul who begins his career as one of the most brilliant young writers the world’s ever seen. He writes these three novels when he’s in his early twenties and they’re all considered masterpieces almost immediately, all of them entirely original and unlike anything ever written before. Then he disappears, he falls off the planet and no one ever hears from him or sees him again until one day ten years later there’s sudden news of his death. The world’s literati and cognoscenti of all things scholarly and cultured decide to formulate this extravagant memorial service in Desmond Paul’s honor, and at this elaborate service a mysterious woman dressed in all black proclaims that she is Paul’s widow and that he indeed had written other works, he did not spend his final ten years on this planet sitting idly, riddled with disease or addiction. He had in fact been enormously productive, filling over a thousand notebooks full of stories and ideas and other magnificent things and his one dying wish was to have the notebooks properly typeset and printed and released to the public.
“Well, the world goes ape shit for these notebooks. Rumors abound as to what the notebooks contain: The notebooks are the greatest works of literature ever written; the notebooks are entirely incoherent; the notebooks contain cryptic messages that can only be deciphered by priests and upon chanted recitation of the deciphered texts in reverse the gods will be summoned to destroy the universe in seven days; the notebooks contain cryptic messages that can only be deciphered by mathematicians and the hidden messages therein contain an illustrated map of the real lost city where there is located a buried library of immense size with more than a million books bound in alien materials and written in alien tongues with alien themes and hints of innovation which far surpasses the human lexicon, and in these alien books we will unlock the mysteries to happiness and immortality; the notebooks contain one word on each page and will inevitably lead the reader to a mass grave where Desmond Paul buried all the people that he and his wife had murdered over the last ten years of his life; the notebooks contain all the answers to the questions anyone has ever asked, including but not limited to: what is the meaning of life, is there a god, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound, what is really the difference between black and white, who is John Galt, is Elvis still alive or is James Dean really dead or who really killed Tupac, and continued ad nauseam. The notebooks are also rumored to be simultaneously written in fiction, non-fiction, meta-fiction and meta-non-fiction, a wholly inventive effect that allegedly thrusts the reader into a sort of strange reality warp which may or may not magically insert them into different locations and times in the past and future, thus indirectly becoming the world’s first authentic time machine.
“So for the first time in centuries,” said the painter, “literature basically has the world by the balls.”
“So it’s a poem,” said the beggar. “The book in my hands is a poem.”
“Yes,” said the painter. “It’s a novel, written in blank verse.”
“No way,” said the beggar, and handed the book back to the painter. “No thanks, forget poetry. Poetry is for poets and thespians, it’s for people who go to wine tastings and people with romanticized designs of suicide. I never understood it and I never will.”
“Just take it,” said the painter.
“Fuck poetry,” said the beggar.
The painter took the book and put it in his backpack and thought about telling the beggar that the mural beneath the bridge in Neophalia was a poem and that the city itself in all its cruel beauty was a poem, that his life and struggle on the streets and in the gutters was a poem, that how he, a former artist, should know that everything is poetry, everything is a variation upon the multitudes of poems written in all the charming languages of the senses, but instead of saying anything he slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked away from the beggar, alone, toward his apartment and the sun’s indolent westward crawl.
*
He’d been walking around the city so much that he needed a new pair of shoes and so he found the nearest shoe store and a young saleswoman sat him down and asked him what he was looking for.
“I don’t care,” he said, frustrated and exhausted. “Just pick something out for me.”
“No,” the saleswoman said. “With life. What exactly are you looking for with life?”
Strange, the painter thought. Such a thoughtful question to ask someone you’ve just met. I’m not sure, he said. I just want to create.
“You’re an artist.”
He thought about telling her no, he was a dog catcher or a baker or an electrician, but he could deny his identity to others no more than he could to himself.
“Yes,” he said. “A painter.”
The saleswoman smiled and nodded, standing there with her arms crossed. The painter broke free of his melancholy daze and realized that she was attractive, tall and attractive and slightly older.
“That’s great,” she said. “Maybe some time I could see some of your work.”
“What do you do? I mean, when you’re not selling shoes.”
“I’m designing them,” she said. “And I’m in school. Listen, I’m getting ready to close the shop for the night. Would you like to go for a walk?”
“Yes,” he said, and the saleswoman or shoe designer or student brought out a pair of sneakers for the painter to try on and they fit wonderfully, almost magically. He paid for them and threw his old ones away and the two of them left the store and began walking through the streets burning twilight to the sounds of children shrieking away the day’s laziness and the painter could almost hear the sigh of the concrete and the fatigue in the creaking bones of workers and the saleswoman could smell the saltwater-blasted skin of teenagers and the glasses of wine being poured in muted celebration throughout the residential district and the painter swore inwardly never to forget this moment and to use it in a later piece he would title, Crepuscule with a saleswoman, and the painter said, Where are we going?
“I want to take you down to the bridges in Neophalia,” she said. “There’s something there I think you’d like to see.”
The painter didn’t tell her that he’d already been to the bridges in Neophalia or that he already knew exactly where she was taking him. Instead he kept quiet and listened or interjected in soft tones and they spoke comfortably of their personal histories and preferences, they mingled in the occasional haunting vagary and hint of woe and before either of them realized it they were in Neophalia, entrenched in the cornucopia of knotted steel and concrete bridges, and up ahead a construction crew worked on one of the bridges and as he approached it the painter realized the bridge under construction was the bridge with the mural and he knew without looking that they were destroying the mural, sandblasting it to a bleached void. Oh no, he said aloud, and without saying anything the shoe designer reached for the painter’s hand and seized it, and just as quickly and with glaring immediacy the painter knew without reservation exactly what was to be his next project.
“Excuse me,” he called out to one of the construction workers. The saleswoman froze next to him, her hand cold in his. “Excuse me,” he called again. “How long will it take you to remove this painting?”
One of the construction workers looked down at him and removed his mask and said, Say what?
“How long will it take you to remove this painting?”
“This old eyesore,” said the construction worker, looking up to the undercarriage of the bridge. “Should be another day or so.”
Thank you, said the painter, and he and the saleswoman began walking again down through the twisting and arching concrete bridges to the wide expanse of water lapping and sucking its dark and ageless secrets, the water so immense and ancient as to strike fear into all the meditations upon it, the water in constant renewal, perpetual destruction and regeneration of all its creations, forever.
