Plowing the Dark

14

A woman, dead for a decade, steps out of a yellow Volvo. Walks back into a life that recalls her shape better than it remembers its own.

Of course she chose the worst imaginable moment to materialize. Returned to Karl Ebesen's life just to survey the maximum extent of the rubble. Came back to find him holed up in a decrepit trailer, on a lot that flooded from October to June, subsisting on microwave lasagna and apple chips, living only to get the work out, serving his daily penance with a precision that spooked even his most intense colleagues. Prepared to concede the final slide into bagmanhood.

Not exactly the state he cared to be found in. Not the ghost he cared to be found by, in any state. But that was how ghosts chose their moments. Disruption: the only gift that memory had to give.

Of course the ghost had no idea who she was. They never did. No sense of her death or untimely resurrection. The Volvo returned, day after day, obstinately yellow, to haunt its slot in the asphalt parking lot. Clearly the corpse came here to dog him. The only thing Ebesen couldn't figure out was the reason.

He made himself known to the woman. He paid evening visits to her cubicle, freely showing her the wreck of his present self. He spoke as little as possible, for her voice destroyed the illusion. He just sat in her presence, under the available cover, fussing with acetate stills or marking up old magazines with a greasy highlighter, trying not to stare at her. Hoping to dispel the ephemeral resemblance.

This living woman stayed a dead ringer, although the physical match was, in truth, but slight. Coloration similar, if the light was low enough. Height, build, and other such irrelevancies, close enough to pass. The eyes, cheeks, and jaw were only rough approximations, the best that God's plastic surgeons could restore them to. But the whole was Gail, as much as Gail had ever been.

Even now, Ebesen might have sketched the dead woman from memory and gotten more of her than any of the photographs that had graced her closed-casket wake. But he couldn't reconstruct this living woman's cheekbones from one night to the next. He, whose draftsman's talents had always inclined toward that embarrassing anachronism, the human likeness; he, who might have made a brilliant portraitist, had he lived two centuries ago: he simply could not resolve this Adie's face into its gaunt primitives. His mind couldn't see her to draw her.

He'd felt the same doubt with the dead woman once, when she still lived. Every day that the two of them had spent together. The nagging suspicion that Gail was, in fact, her own succubus. He'd gaze on her illicitly in her sleep, when her musculature dropped its guard and returned to its preexistence, those terms before pain, before gravity, before the assault of sunlight, before the awful contortions that the public mirror induced in all faces.

He'd scrutinize her by lamplight, Eros hovering over his wife with the forbidden candle. He studied her features, unmasked by sleep, searching out what she looked like before she looked like this, looking for the face he recognized, from before he met her, the face that, like a rebus, an Arcimboldo, a hidden-picture game, spread itself out across the landscape of his synapses.

Her features held their own fossil record, her facial bones a skeleton key that picked with a click of recognition Ebesen's rusted lock. The face leapt out of his life's faded photo album, his brain's deepest Marianas, his infant pass-in-review, held on to long after it should have gone extinct. She killed his sense of safety, his feel for error, his certainty of light and dark. The haunted face had survived its own burial. The twitch of this Adie's cheek cut him. Her pits and shadows flirted with a familiarity they refused to settle into. He could not name it, this overlap, or locate the crossover in any aspect of her appearance. Dead love and its living copy: two halves of a torn original.

He took to shaving more often, so as not to spook her. He hung his trousers over the bathroom door when he showered, to steam out the worst of the wrinkles. He worked dish soap on a worn toothbrush against the stains of his shirt collars, watching himself, wondering how far he might sink in the name of revived feeling.

Months after her arrival, the spell broke. Sight did nothing to disperse it. His eye was worthless, in the end. Three stray words delivered him: speech, the medium that Ebesen distrusted above all others. Of all the absurdities, something she said.

She was chattering. Something Ms. Klarpol did whenever he visited. Talking out loud, to anyone, to herself, to her chocolate Lab, the faithful Pinkham, who loved to accompany her to work. Chattering about the absurdly beautiful place she found herself living in.

An island cottage, Karl. Right out of a poem. Circling gulls wake me up in the morning. In New York, it was always sirens.

"New York" and "siren" fused, and Gail stood before him. Each plane of her face materialized, a frantic hologram. He looked up at this Adie, still amusing herself with a running account of her windfall. He stared at her, no longer caring if she caught him looking. The living woman resolved into her own parts, lost to all likeness. Nothing remained of the ghost story but his need to be near it.

He tried to stop visiting her. He started coming by again. She greeted him happily on his return, asking for no explanation. He contented himself with serving as her mascot of bitterness. He dispensed with any threat of recovered respectability. But as he carved mortise-and-tenon furnishings for Vulgamott's architectural fly-through or designed anvil thunderheads for Stance and Kaladjian's Weather Room, he felt the flinch of recollection, the awful willingness of arousal that he thought he'd put to death.

He taught her how to animate. You only need to paint a few eels. Say, one at each two-second interval. Rajasundaran has written morph-ing software that will fill in all the midpoints.

Then he sat back and watched her bring motion to the jungle's fixed planes. Already, bushes rustled and the moon strayed across the child sky. Soon her frozen birds would thaw into a flutter, the snake slink, the monkeys scamper, the flutist weave, and the lions crouch in the perfect impression of stalking.

He watched her paint dozens of frames, creatures in various postures. She painted each cross-sectioned creature as lovingly as the first, assembling them into time-lapse fragments that moved more surely than he did. The Dream awakened, channeling the dead painter's spirit through the hand of this living woman medium.

He heard her, when things got buggy, pleading with the terminal. Please, nice Mr. Machine. Don't be mean to me. I haven t done anything wrong, aside from belonging to the organic life-forms. Karl, the little chips are acting up again. What should I do?

Accept adversity, Ebesen said. It's soul-strengthening.

It's not my soul that needs work, she told him.

He watched her scratch at the drawing tablet. He stood behind her workstation screen while she willed her graphics pen through glad arcs. The lightness of her aping dazzled him. Her fingers played at the existing shapes, exhilarated by their constraint to copying. Something in that virtuosity did not want to be free.

You're good.

Thank you.

Watch out, he razzed her. Not too original, now. They could get loose otherwise, your animals.

She looked up at him. Doubtless she saw a stubble-faced fifty-five-year-old man with soap smears around his collar. She turned back to her cookie-cut time sequences and cooed at them.

That's right, my little beasties. You're getting loose someday, aren't you? That's exactly what you're going to do.

Something in her pet-coddling voice alerted her Labrador, until then curled up, on best behavior, in the corner. The dog padded over to his owner and nuzzled her.

Oh, you too, Pinkham. You too. Gonna cut loose someday? That your plan? Oh yes, you are, my sweetie.

Placated, Pinkham returned to his post and settled back in. Ebesen, too, wandered back to his post. Have you ever thought about work that didn't involve some violation of visual copyright?

She scowled, the look one reserved for the drunken party pest. I'm a good copyist, Karl. All God's creatures should do what they're best at. I know what you're best at I saw your show.

Ah, yes! The latest Wild Kingdom. Mr. Rousseau, version 2.0. She held up a hand-drawn eel of an elephant rearing back to trumpet. She rocked the painted profile in the arc that animation planned for it. I didnt mean Rousseau 2.0.I meant Klarpol 1.0.

N aw. You know the thing is a team effort. The guys wrote all the code. I plundered everybody, totally copycat. All I did was cut and paste Henri's Caesar salad onto lots of lollipop sticks. But wait until— I mean your one-woman show. Your solo opener. Her smile seized up, seeing the ambush. Gail's smile. Not in any curl or turn of the lip. Just its crumple of fear. Its carmine fight or flight. What was the name ofthat shop again? God, I used to know them all by heart. Not to mention how much commission each of them scraped off the top. Near Broadway and Spring Street. Francis Hinger Gallery. Francis Hinger, Adie echoed. The elephant stopped moving. She set it down.

How long ago was that, exactly?

Doesn't matter.

No, wait. I'll tell you exactly when it was. August of… What year is it now? August of 1979.

Opened in July, she said, through the side of her mouth. But who's counting?

Adie Klarpol. Only you were going by Adia back then.

My name.

What were you, all of seventeen? Twenty-seven. Old enough to know better.

Oh, nobody's ever that. A well-received show, as these things go. Some kind of awful literary name…

"Halations" What's so awful about that?

What does it mean, anyway? It sounds like bad breath caused by asthma.

It's a technical term. Describing what I did.

Pastel penumbra halo stains. Lots of high-frequency colors. Not uninteresting. Inkblot tests on minor hallucinogens. Seemingly abstract, until you looked closely enough to make out the ghosted high realism. There was one called Infinite Coastline, if I remember right. Kind of a hand-drawn Mandelbrot, a couple of years before everybody in the industrialized nations dosed out on Mandelbrots.

I cant believe you remember that. I cant believe you even saw the show. I didnt think anyone saw that show. Except my mother, and she only came because I paid her airfare.

Come on. Nice little squib in ARTFORUM. They built you up. The next hot commodity. All set to unfurl.

Karl. Please.

Let me guess. You wanted to change the world. Right? Make a difference? Am I right?

Well, whatever I wanted… She laughed again. Her shoulders came down. She returned to her tablet. The ambush had passed. I didn't exactly produce the cure for cancer.

Were you any good, do you think?

Screw you, Karl. You saw the work. You're the voting public. You're supposed to tell me.

Now. If you really mean to give the last word to the voting public, the only mystery is how you lasted until twenty-seven. Ebesen picked at his fraying sleeve, at some crib-sheet answer inked there. Beautiful was supposed to be back. Craft and exactitude and representation. That didnt even last the allotted fifteen minutes, now did it?

She made herself a pillar of calm. Mary in the bower of roses, by Stefan Lochner. She returned to working at her creatures, under an impregnable halo. Know what's funny? The only people who are willing to pay you a steady salary to paint? Businesspeople? They still kind of like those things.

So that's what did it for you? That's what prompted you to quit the downtown scene and go straight?

Oh for heavens sake. It doesn't matter.

I know it doesn't matter. The last person on earth to tell anyone that anything mattered. I'm just interested.

Leave me alone, Karl. You should talk. She flinched at her own words.

He stood still. All right. I had no idea it was still a live topic.

It's not a live topic.

I just wanted to know what made you…

She cocked forward on her stool, ready to spring. But some late-heard pressure on his "you" scattered the attack. She sat back and inhaled. Art is… pretty sick now, isn't it?

Life is sick. Art's just the recording nurse.

Either way. It's not something I needed to live with all day long.

He started to sing, in a tenor hinting at how it used to saunter, before the osteoporosis. "I got troubles of my own."

Exactly. Exactly! The first through tears, the second through a wet, cracked giggle. What's it to ya, bub?

She sat up, pulled her knees together, and folded her hands on them. Ebesen stood holding his greasy valise, ready to flee at anything that resembled intimacy.

Shit, she said. She wiped her face with the butt of her hands. This is pathetic. She consolidated her body, pulling and tucking. OK. I'm OK. Here. Sit over there. She stood and installed him at a vacant workstation. At least make yourself useful, would you? Here's the palette and the set of brushes. Go on. Make the monkey jump.

It was some proof for the God of the mathematicians that existence offered exactly as many penances as it afforded sins. The two artists worked away in silence. Her hands moved rapidly, like shorebirds, circling. His moved almost not at all, wavering as narrowly as a mantis's. He etched in short crosshatches, with brute, surgical fastidiousness. Each head bent down over its drawing, monks in a scriptorium furnishing a continent with gold leaf and cerulean.

Ebesen painted, satisfied to be Klarpo's apprentice, for as long as it took to pay off her distress. But not a heartbeat longer. An internal timer somewhere between his riddled heart and savaged liver told him the precise moment when it was safe to badger her again.

So what did it finally come down to? The bits of crockery glued to the canvas?

No. I kinda liked those. Wasn't crazy about the price tags…

Was it the prohibition against affirmation? As I remember, your stuff ranked pretty low in the doom-and-detritus department. More of the— how shall we say? — Glad Game persuasion.

She snorted at the caricature. Let's just say that my talents… never really tended toward originality.

Nu? That hasn't stopped half of the ARTFORUM pantheon. The trick out there is exactly the same as it is in here. You just have to find a way of being uniquely derivative.

Don't like it out there. Like it in here. Singsong pugilistic. Safer in here.

I don't get that at all. How can commercial art be safe, when it involves millions of viewers and trillions of dollars, and high art be dangerous when it sells for eight thousand bucks and sits in the foyer of some summer home in the Hamptons?

High art's a bit of a joke, wouldn't you say? The go-go frenzy. The lives chewed up and spit out for the sake of novelty and glam. Reputations manufactured and deflated, fortunes thrown at trash. Then the transaction written up as if it's the stock market. All that fuss about something that's not even real.

What is? Real, I mean.

She shrugged. She waved her hand around her to indicate her captors. TeraSys. Exxon. GM. Things that make this world. Things people believe in. I'll tell you what's real. Microsoft is real. The gallery world is a wannabe dress-up game.

Ebesen threw up his hands. For a moment he was the white-smocked firing-range victim in Goya's Third of May. Then why stay with art at all? Why not ditch picture making altogether and go into a legitimate line of work? Something really real, like sales and marketing? I understand there are a few openings.

Because making the elephant trumpet is not exactly what I'd call art. But it sure beats working.

Oh, I see. Pictures are fun, so long as they don't matter.

In his outburst's aftershock, Ebesen looked up. Adie was cringing again, crooked over her animations.

Don't ride me, Karl. I'm making a living, the same as you. You had more talent than I did. He grunted at his screen. Adie craned over, examining the work of his hands. The monkey lived. In three quickly executed slices, Rousseau's manic marmoset-macaque swung on his branch in a sweep that was pure simian.

She looked up at the bagman, the sorry statesman of all RL eccentricities. Just how much talent did you have?

Ebesen lifted his eyebrows and let them fall. He shuffled to his feet as if the bailiff had just proclaimed, "All rise." He scratched the dog Pinkham behind one ear and vanished from the room. But he came back again, helpless, the following evening.