Apartment 16

Fourteen

Thirsty and thick-headed, Seth sat up in the hot bed and reached for his tobacco and cigarette papers on the bedside table. Disoriented from another long and deadening slumber, he tried to remember the time before he had fallen asleep; it seemed so long ago, yet it was still dark outside.

He lit the cigarette with one hand, while the fingers of his other hand scrabbled on the bedside table to locate the small travel alarm clock. He turned his head to look for it, and then swore, clenching his eyelids shut. The light from the little table lamp, burning the whole time he’d slept, hurt the back of his skull.

Slowly, turning his face away from the scorching bulb, he raised the alarm clock up to his blinking eyes. Six thirty — though he didn’t know whether it was the evening or morning. Or precisely what evening or morning of which day. He even struggled to remember the date of the last day he’d been awake.

A litter of sketches were strewn about the floor and furniture. Aching muscles in his right arm and fingers, still stiff from cramp, attested to a recollection of frantic sketching. He’d slept all day then. Maybe two days. He’d slept through the hours of watery daylight and awoken in darkness. He wondered whether he should be back at work tonight, if the new shift pattern had started. No one had called. It must be a day off.

Wind shook the windows in their peeling frames. Rain pattered against the grimy panes.

Coughing, he clambered out of bed. Tasting the rich broth of cigarette tar in his mouth, he surveyed his work by the light of the bedside lamp. From the radiator to the blocked-in fireplace, under his desk and between the legs of the dining table, his drawings, or fragments of sketches, lay scattered.

A cigarette dangling from his bottom lip and his tatty overcoat pulled around his shoulders, he considered his work, that resembled something that a prison warden might find in the cells of the insane.

The images were shocking. Bestial in their savagery. Absurd. Sickening. Grotesque. But not without merit.

Hastily gulping at water from a plastic bottle, he saw with some satisfaction the life in these drawings. Vitality. A curious animation in the twisted limbs of the dark figures. And in the eyes a cruel intelligence, a sly appreciation of another’s misery, a gleeful seeking of mischief, an incinerating, glaring envy: the eyes of the world. It was like nothing he’d ever drawn, but seemed to be a glimpse of that incoherent inner force he’d always been too afraid to form with charcoal, paint or clay before. The only worthy parts of his pitiful former efforts were those bits that vaguely resembled what appeared before him now; the incongruous shadows and colours his tutors at art school had noticed and been mystified by. Something he was ashamed of. Something he quashed. A streak of expressionism he was too timid to explore. But not any more. It was the only part of his ability worth a damn. It just needed cultivation.

After switching the main light on, he crouched down and peered at the face of an unborn child pressed against glass, its features smudged by an umbra of pickling fluid, but the eyes were clearly Asian. Beside the sketch of the fetus, he found a depiction of Mrs Shafer’s head, messily wrapped in scarves, drawn from three angles, the eyes small as olives and black with fury. Then another of her head on top of an arachnid bulk, the shell smooth and polished like onyx, half covered by a kimono and risen in loathsome provocation to the silhouette of her wizened stick-husband, who teetered on baby steps towards his mate.

There was also a sketch of Mr Shafer’s death mask with grey crumpled papier-mâché features, and another of his puppet body, suspended in the gossamer threads recently excreted by his wife’s abdomen. A final sketch of the elderly residents featured a cluster of eggs, opaque like pearls with a wet sheen, and kept warm next to a radiator in a box of soil.

Seth smiled. It felt odd around his mouth.

But most of the sketches, desperately scrawled as some aperture of his mind opened for a short time, were studies of a single and familiar figure.

Hooded and withdrawn inside the parka coat, protected from unwelcome scrutiny, Seth had depicted the solitary child with the blacked-out face obsessively.

‘Jesus Christ.’ He suddenly looked around the room, at the pile of soup tins stacked on the refrigerator, at the broken wardrobes, at the lurid thin curtains billowing in draughts, at the dried-up carpet and its confetti of paper. He marvelled at how far he’d let things go. It was all the result of working nights. Had to be; the madness of sleep deprivation. And of struggling to get by in London. Of loneliness, despair, the difficulties of coping with the details of existence. Or maybe this was predestined. As though he’d always secretly needed to be here. Cornered and forced to unravel himself, to peel away every layer, to doubt and reconsider everything he had been taught until he was dragged to the depths inside himself where the dark things lived. He had been led to the discovery of a place where three decades of experience had amassed, filtered through, and then sunk, only to re-form as some vile underlying truth. His truth. The truth.

So here it was, his artistic vision.

But did he want it?

Face in hands, Seth peered through the cage of his fingers at the ceiling.

This could be an extraordinary gift he was about to spurn. A great gift carrying a heavy price. To engage with the world on this level — it was seductive. If he had integrity then it shouldn’t bother him what anyone else thought. If he was compelled to cultivate this vision then there could be no room for vanity or dignity. No restraint. He would have to give himself wholly to this submerged world until it consumed him or reached completion. There could be no thought of success or failure. No deadlines. Only a dedication to what he saw and felt.

Dare he?

He looked down. Another brief appraisal of his drawings filled him with disgust, but also with a peculiar excitement that made him uncomfortable. The vision would destroy him; he knew it at once.

Seth sat on the bed, lowered his head between his knees and rapidly sucked a cigarette down to the filter. He thought of the nightmares, the hallucinatory sightings of that boy. God, he was even talking to figments of his own diseased imagination. And there was his uncontrollable anger, his torpor, his inability to function, to clean himself, to feed himself, to communicate with others.

He had a chance to step back from the mad place now. Maybe the remains of his old self were issuing a final warning in a moment of sobriety. Or maybe it was some infuriating and in-built sense of caution that would always step in to prevent him achieving his potential as an artist. He could not decide what to do, and had no one with whom to discuss the crisis. All he knew for certain was that he was frightened of himself, could no longer trust himself, or predict how he might react in any given situation.