Plowing the Dark

23

Tell me, Jackdaw asked her. Where? Arles, Adie answered. Where is that, exactly? In the South of France. You know France?

Don't abuse me. I may not get out very much. But I could find it on the Net.

Oh, sweetie, forgive me. I'm sure you could. It's an old Roman town, in Provence. When I was a girl, we used to play a game.

We?

My sister and I.

In the South of France?

No. In our bedroom. The running average of those nine bedrooms, swapped every two years, across the air bases of the Free World.

Did your sister have a name?

Elise. My mother's fault. She was looking to enliven a very banal life. Elise and I used to lie in bed, across from each other, after lights-out. Hold our eyes open with our fingers, until we could see in the dark. We'd chatter away, turning the cracks in the ceiling into the Shire, Moria, Mordor…

Been there. Made that map.

After a couple hours, Elise would fall asleep. Weak-fleshed girl, my sister. I'd lie underneath my covers, feeling abandoned. I became the last vigilant person on Earth. The whole, dark bedroom would tighten around me. Yd lie there like a stone effigy, feet to the east, toward Jerusalem. With enough time — and eleven-year-old insomniacs have forever — I could turn my coffin into a snug ship's cabin. A first-class berth on a transatlantic crossing.

Jackdaw nodded, replaying the trick in his own theater. After a while, just by squinting into the dark, 1 could make out the nighttime ocean through the starboard portal. I worked out this detailed saga — my sister and 1, recently orphaned, heading back to the Old World in the luxury befitting our recently recovered state. Back? Recovered?

I've no idea where I got all that crap. One troubled little cookie, I guess. Yd lived in Germany, Turkey, Japan. But my fantasies always left me orphaned in New York. Anyway, in the dark, whatever Air Force barracks we were holed up in passed for a great stateroom. Walnut and brass. Tooled leather chairs. And I and my recently widowed sister—

Widowed? I thought you said orphaned?

Widowed, orphaned: depended on the night. You boys just don't get it, do you?

Go on. You and your widowed sister…

Me and my widowed thirteen-year-old sister furnished our cabin with a suite of priceless paintings that anyone who belonged to our same elevated station would instantly recognize.

Know that elevated station. I lived underneath it as a kid.

Oh, don't poor-mouth me, Acquerelli. You're as middle-class as they come. What was your father, a university professor?

Electrical engineer. Berg and Nordstrom.

There. So let a little girl indulge her harmless false consciousness, will you?

Go on. Your priceless painted masterpieces.

"Our art treasures," Elise always called them. Hold it. I thought she was asleep?

I got her up now and then. Eventually, I taught her how to play in the day.

You could see them by daylight? The pictures? Oh, the pictures were real. You had priceless art on the walls of your bedroom? Fake real. Not imaginary, 1 mean. Ouch. My brain. Someone hit the Reset.

My mother used to buy us prints of famous paintings for our walls. Our Gallery of Visual Instruction. Cheap reproductions to remind the two of us of just how much our mother sacrificed to bring us into the world.

Sacrificed?

Her father sold insurance. Reasonably well-off. He warned her not to marry Air Force. She thought she was in love. She thought it'd be romantic, raising kids on air bases around the world. It wasn't. Raphael was supposed to compensate. The Hudson River School She was indiscriminate, so long as the thing said "culture." She told you all this?

In every way but words. It worked, I guess. We girls both bought in. Sometimes, in daylight, Elise and I would parade in front of the prints, saying, "Oh yes, we had to have them. Even though they cost us our millions."

Another planet. One of us is from another planet. Would you be so kind as to tell me to whom you are referring? Well, it sure the piss ain't me, sister.

Her laugh went up the wrong pipe. Choking on her spittle made her laugh all the harder. She flapped her arms. He would have patted her on the back, except that it involved touching.

She caught her breath. Yd lie there in the dark, in that luxury stateroom, nursing this story in my head about bringing our millions back from exile in the form of the world's best bullion. The only truly priceless commodity: human genius. Things there would never be more than one of. Something harsh took over her face. Jackdaw looked harder away.

First there was that spoiled little blond Infanta, always bursting into our private stateroom as if she owned the joint. And then that sly, pretty girl at the half door. Our mother went to her grave insisting she was a Rembrandt, even after the Rembrandt scholars ruined her forever. For a long time, we had the world's most ethereal newlyweds, with their fantastic scrub brush of a dog. Their alcove seemed to open off our own cabin.

Show me, he told her.

Oh, I put them all in the jungle. Every painting that hung in any of the bedrooms I've ever lived in. You've seen little parodies of all of them. Except one.

That one being…?

The Bedroom at Aries. The bed by the shores of the Mediterranean. She spoke in a trance, her eyes resting ten meters past the front wall of the Cavern, her voice addressing a thing long out of earshot. The devastating one. All tilted and wrong. The bedroom of a man our mother made the mistake of telling us had gone mad.

She looked at him: you know the man I mean? Jackdaw nodded. But he didn't know.

That room was my father's. My father was the madman. God, we saw so little of him, growing up. So absent, so enraged. Captain Klarpol, the silent warrior, gone for months at a stretch, flying those horrible machines ten times bigger than any house we lived in, dropping God knows what on God knows whom. And when he did come home, we three always paid for the latest round of missions. He… we… I thought: If I could just give him something. Find out what he needed…

A quiet room somewhere, by the other Mediterranean. The far shore, where they never got posted. A fictive, all-restoring summer home.

I'd peek out at this room, from under my down comforter. I'd gaze into that periscope, looking back into a miniature, blazing version of our room. Bed, chairs, washstand, shaving mirror, floor, shuttered window. Even the madman's own paintings, leaning out at crazy angles from the painted wall…

You could see all this? In the night. From across a dark room.

Well, see, that was the thing. I never could decide whether I actually saw them, or whether I just supplied all the brushstrokes from daylight viewings. And that got me thinking. Got me started playing the game.

Wait. I thought that was the game.

No, no. The real game. The game of free the shutters. Ocean crossings are never smooth, you know. You always hit some longitude, two nights out of wherever it is — Le Havre — when the sea rises up and bites you. The prevailing winds, the North Atlantic currents. Or maybe the captain just passes out on the ship's wheel at 3 a.m., after a bout with the aquavit.

She stared off at a bitter old friend. Images rose up around her— detailed, familiar still lifes she'd kept in deep storage for twenty years or longer, now back in vengeful retrospective.

I'm really sorry, he said. But I have no idea what you're talking about.

No, of course you don't, do you? The snarl surprised her. She recovered fast, waving off her lapse. Ocean liners pitch. It's what you pay them to do. It's how you know they're ocean liners. And it was up to me, in my first-class berth, to preserve the laws of physics aboard ship by making the paintings shift when the cabin did. I'm not sure I want to hear about this.

Now, Jackie. You're the big advocate of interactivity. The first time it happened, it was an accident. I was looking without really seeing, and the bottom left of the Infanta frame, well, fluttered. I saw a ripple, something wrong in the comer of my eye. Like the shift in a branch that turns out to be a walking stick.

Trying to avoid the big mammal's notice.

Well, maybe this painting was doing just that. Because as soon as I whipped my head around for a good look, nothing. Scared stiff.

That's what I figured. So I decided to lie in wait. Pretend I was busy noticing something else. I held my breath, as motionless as those pictures were pretending to be. And that's how I saw it again. I knew it was impossible, but I'd always suspected it. The frame around the Infanta shifted again.

Your ocean liner…

… listed toward port, and our gallery of visual instruction tipped with it. Don't you dare laugh. It really happened. And it scared me shitless.

I believe you. I'm not laughing. I… believe you.

Every slide of the pictures against the wall made the ocean swell beneath me. God. There's nothing more powerful than an eleven-year-old girl concentrating in the dark. Over several months, I trained myself to see the twitch, even when staring at the pictures dead on. First my body would yaw inside, then the frames would slip. After a while, I could rock the frames at will. No more than a few camel ham width. But visibly tilting, whenever I said so.

You're lucky you didn't drive yourself completely nuts, he said. Then

caught himself.

Funny thing was, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Something everyone should be able to do. I'm not saying it was effortless. It was exhausting. Sometimes it took hours. Clearing my mind of every thought except waiting. Concentrating on not concentrating. Waiting for the wave to hit my body. Wait without waiting. She shuddered at the description, panicked all over again. I had to nudge at the paintings without trying. Tug at their corners with the side of my eye. They were stuck in amber, all the thickened time that had settled on them since they were painted. I had to glance past this crust to rock the picture underneath. The moment the idea of pushing came into my mind, I had to start all over. I didn't move them; I let them move. Then one day, I graduated to the game's next secret level. I let myself into that lopsided bedroom. You — you've really never seen it? Sorry. I've been busy.

Inside that painting there's another painted window, floating above the madman's bed. I could see it from my own crooked bunk, even with no light from my own window. The painted shutters are deeply wrong. They're way too big. Too much wood to close over the casement. There in the dark, I couldn't decide whether they floated in front of the window frame or behind it, folding into the bedroom or fanning outside. I had to find a way to close them, make them fit the frame. One night, without warning, I found I could wiggle them.

Time to wake the sister. Wake the sister. Please. Not at all. Time to oil their hinges. Each night that I exercised the shutters, they got a little easier to open. Pretty soon, Elise had barely fallen asleep before I was stealing off to the painter's bedroom. And as soon as I got there, the breezes would start to blow. I loved it. My private little secret, which I had the good sense to hide from everyone. Making the wind blow. Making the ground move beneath my feet. All the things that pubescent girls eventually learn to do more prosaically.

Jackdaw turned away, hiding his rush of color.

I got… too good. Too skilled at animation. Each of the objects in that painted room wanted its turn. I made gusts of southern wind twist the towel and slap the cyan shaving minor against the wall like a float slapping a dock. I got so I didn't even need breezes. I made the drawer in that crippled little bed table slide open unsponsored. I worried that the scraping would wake up Elise. But I couldn't stop. Couldn't keep from trying out new games… A night came when the room jumped, all by its lonesome. Started shaking before I gave it the mother-may-I. The chairs began to slide across the sloped floor. Horrible. I had to look away. But when I looked back, they'd start drifting all over again. Worse, the bed began creaking, from the weight of invisible bodies. It no longer had anything to do with gravity or wind or the ocean rolling. I wanted off the boat. I tried to steer our bedroom back to dry dock. I repeated the proof, over and over: the Earth was solid. The paint was fixed.

She pointed one finger up into the air. St. John of the Cross.

Then it was… like you said. The thing I should have had the sense to be afraid of all along. I walked past the room the next morning, in daylight. And saw the clack of a loose shutter. At last I figured what was happening. Hereditary. I'd go insane. As raving as the painter, whose private things I was stupid enough to play with while he was away.

You weren't about to lop off any body parts?

Don't. Even. Joke. I asked Elise if the paintings ever seemed… strange. "Our gallery of Visual Instruction?" She was a dozen games behind me. "Oh, perhaps to others. Never to us! Don't forget: we had the wisdom to pay millions for them…" I could have wrung her neck. I was frantic with imagination. I went back into the room and copied it, trying to make it stop. I fixed each furnishing at its exact distance from all its neighbors with a number-two pencil on blue-ruled paper. Then, to keep the colors from drifting, I went at it with my own paints. Once I got the folds of the towel down, it would stop flapping. When I found the exact lip of the shutters with my brush, they'd never move again. Her chin muscles twitched: almost never. I thought that if I could paint this room… thought that if I could get the colors right…

She stopped long enough for Jackdaw to hear them — the creakings downstairs, the middle-of-the-night shutter hangings, the armed father, family violences in some godforsaken Air Force barracks in yet another host country that did not want you there. When Adie resumed, her

voice was perfect again.

Just a hysteric child's voyage, I guess. It passed with puberty. But all through my teens, I couldn't look at a painting without repainting it. You know how childhood nightmare goes. You roll it back, demon by demon. Twenty years later, all that's left is a colorful story. That's how you learned to paint?

Adie smiled, the crisp Crosshatch of a technical pen. That's how I learned to copy. I never could make my hand do anything interesting without an original nearby, threatening me.

But you're so good. You drew all those… things! Her smile smeared outward into wet charcoal. Lovely, reassuring trinkets that have sold everything from book jackets to fake Belgian chocolates. Never mind. Copying keeps fruit on the table. And it's landed me this job, on the bleeding edge of whatever we're on the edge of. You never told your sister? Elise? Sort of. Years later. When we were out of school and both bussing

tables at MoMA. What did she say?

She said that I should get counseling. That Mom and Dad had fucked us over good, between the two of them. That going to a shrink was the best thing she'd ever done for herself. This was just before Elise moved uptown in the wake of the art bubble. Ah. Our millions!

Did you… ever…?

Go to a shrink? No. I went downtown and tried to become a painter. It didn't work. But neither did Elise's therapy, in the long run. And hers was more expensive.

Did your mother ever…?

Died, Adie interrupted. At Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. A very unromantic death.

Did your… father ever see… anything that you made?

That depends. She looked away, on a mythic place where gifts really reached their recipients. Nothing she'd ever made — offering, bribe, buyoff, retaliation — had ever come close to hitting its mark. That depends on what you mean by "see."

Jackdaw heard the current in her. He searched out the lab for a place to flee. But the chance for flight was over. This painting. This bedroom of yours? You sure you want to.. animate that one?

No. I'm not sure. I've never been sure of anything in my life. Except that that place is beautiful.

Jackdaw nodded, ready to go there.