The Unfinished World Page 4

  Once, when she was ten, Louise hated Clarence. Just for a day. She mixed her mother’s underglazes in a bucket, hoping for something pretty, and was disappointed when the mixture turned a flat brown. When her mother found out, she locked the door of her studio and wouldn’t speak to Louise for a week.

  After a few days, Louise complained to Clarence. You deserve the silence, he said. You broke her special paints. I won’t speak to you, either.

  Louise’s heart was a white-tipped, furious squall. She told Clarence this was what had happened to Mother and Father. Mother was full of silence and Father was full of guilt, and the air was so heavy with accusations between them it could never be cleared again. She spilled over with rage, spending it on lamps and tables and chairs, until Doctor Lloyd had to drive out and give her a shot to calm her down. Clarence came to see her that night, shamed and sorrowful.

  I’m sorry, he said. I don’t want to fight ever again. She held her drug-heavy hand over his golden head like a benediction. She was all too ready to forgive, and she told him she always would be. I will never hurt you with my silence, he said. I will never be like Mother. He curled into her chest like a comma and let her sleepy strength wash over him, let it give him brave dreams.

  The dark is heavy tonight; the stars have disappeared behind a wall of clouds. The air feels thick, like something is waiting to happen. Louise is up late because she is starting to be concerned. She is waiting with her heart hinged open for her brother to come home.

  Noel calls, speaking in riddles at midnight. We’d like to create a chimera, he says. Can we do that?

  Any impossible life is a chimera, Louise says.

  Homer’s chimera, says Noel. Part lion, part goat, part snake. Is that impossible life, then? Impossible for you?

  Louise considers. She doesn’t like the idea. It seems a mangling of nature, red in tooth and claw and refusing to be a sideshow. You know, she says, when explorers brought the first platypus back, scientists cut it apart looking for the stitches. They were sure someone had sewn a duck’s bill on.

  But couldn’t you? asks Noel. Couldn’t you make something new if you wanted to? Like being god, yeah?

  Like being god, agrees Louise. She doesn’t believe in god, but Noel already knows that. That isn’t what he really means at all.

  She imagines the chimera breathing fire behind the wall of clouds tonight, just beyond her vision. Just beyond what she can understand. She shivers and watches the driveway for any signs of life.

  Clarence arrived two weeks early, a birthday surprise for their mother, and there wasn’t time to get to the hospital. Doctor Lloyd came to the house and delivered Clarence in their parents’ bedroom, while Louise and her father watched terrified from the doorway. It took six hours for her brother to be born.

  Louise’s father and mother held hands after and smiled, exhausted, but happy because they were still in love. They were so absorbed in each other that Louise was first to hold the screaming Clarence. She stroked his strange, wrinkled skin, covered in dark golden down, and he quieted, raptly absorbing her blurred face.

  Looks like he loves his big sister already, said Doctor Lloyd, and Louise looked solemnly up at him.

  Of course he does, she said. The doctor felt a strange sadness at that, as if he could read a prophecy, as if he could hear the warning bells, buried in the baby’s soft whimpers and in the sister’s solemn phrases.

  Louise is shaping a black bear’s ears when the doorbell rings. She flicks on the security camera monitor, sees a blond young woman, very pretty in a loud, artificial way. She’s wearing a tracksuit scattered with sequins and a good bit of hair that isn’t her own. Louise considers briefly as she’s mixing Bondo and fiberglass resin, but decides not to answer the door. She’s never interfered in Clarence’s amours before, and she doesn’t see now as the time to start. The young woman is crying, thick dark mascara tracking new shadows into the terrain of her lovely young face. Louise reaches up and shuts the monitor off. She picks up her knife, makes a small opening between the skin and the cartilage of the bear’s right ear.

  The doorbell rings again. And again. And then again. Louise sighs, puts down the knife. She takes the stairs two at a time and throws open the door. He’s not here, she explains to the tracksuit. It’s pink, she sees, pastel pink as a cartoon stomach.

  I know, she says. Louise folds her arms. She stares, and Pink Tracksuit crumples further, sitting on the step and gasping. She is clearly in the throes of some kind of hysteria.

  Would you like to come in, says Louise, and it is not a question. She tries to pry the girl up by the armpits but Pink Tracksuit is not having any of it. Her mouth keeps working, glossy lips twisting around sobs and half-syllables that seem to keep getting caught before they can emerge. Look, says Louise, not unkindly, I really don’t know where Clarence is. He hasn’t been around for days.

  They shoot him! The words fly from Pink Tracksuit’s face like a strong headwind; the spell is broken. Now the language floods the dam, in Russian, in English, in something halfway both, but in between the sobs and the foreign words a phrase, repeated over and over again until Louise is certain it must be true, and is frozen to the step with the horror of it. They shoot him, she says. They shoot him and he is dead.

  Clarence and Louise outside in the dark. They are teenagers here, brains and bodies growing faster than they can understand. Their parents are mostly gone, but not yet dead.

  Look at that moon, says Louise to Clarence. It’s surprised at the world tonight. See how its mouth is hanging open?

  The Man in the Moon, Clarence tells her, is made up of terrible catastrophes. Firestorms on the terrain.

  Louise and Clarence, doing what they’ve done since they were small: their backs on the front lawn and eyes stretched toward the stars. It really has got a face, though, Louise says. It’s not entirely metaphorical. She sketches on the sky with her finger: mouth, nose, eyes.

  But that’s my point, says Clarence. The things that caused all that damage, those mouth craters and so on, mostly took place forever ago. Before we were even here.

  You’re saying, says Louise, that it’s so typical of our species to give human features to the sad things in space?

  I’m saying the world doesn’t need our stories. The world is doing just fine without a plot.

  Then why bother making all these stories? Louise asks. Why make art at all?

  Clarence shrugs, scratches at a mosquito bite on his shoulder. Because what else are we going to do?

  Louise is an arrow. She is a blade. She is a flight through the air and a touchdown in skin. She is a bloody hole and she is endlessly spinning down the black, falling through the void, sounds filtering through a second too late, like a badly dubbed film. Filtering screams and footsteps, scuffling in the drive. A thick and heavy, world-ending thud. She watches the road ringed in black, her brother’s shadow flying over. Her eyes are red and dry as desert clay.

  A car screeching away down the dusty drive.

  Louise standing over the long blond body.

  Clarence’s eyes, open, clouded as the past. She is already forgetting what they looked like clear.

  Why do we have no memories for the things we love? she wonders. But Tony.

  Tony the Tiger.

  Tony the trophy.

  Tony, who has dropped her dead brother in this dirt road with less reverence than one of the Big Man’s dogs. Tony, who has proved a thug, a villain, a gangster with her heart flattening in his fist.

  Tony the dead body, slumped over the backseat.

  Tony’s life pooling onto the leather seats. A skinning knife in Tony’s heart.

  The Big Man will consider it fair, in the end; above all else he understands vengeance. He understands what love burns away, and what it leaves behind.

  The Logic of the Loaded Heart

  If John is three, and John’s mother is six times his age, how old was John’s mother when John was conceived in the back of Al Neill’s pickup truck afte
r a Styx concert in Milwaukee? If John’s parents spend 100 times zero days being actual parents to John, how many days’ total is that? Does your answer change if John’s mother sometimes bought him Mr Pibb and lottery tickets when she stopped at the gas station on her way home from work?

  Extra credit: Please calculate the probability that at his mother’s current age, John will drop out of school and work in a burger joint while playing lead guitar in a heavy metal band called The Slaughterhouse Four.

  When John is six, his father goes to prison for attempted robbery of the Rocky Rococo Pizza in Delavan, Wisconsin. Please calculate the probability that The Slaughterhouse Four will open for Def Leppard at the Minnesota State Fair in what will be the brightest shining moment and impossible dream of John’s life.

  At thirty-six, John has three ex-wives, one current wife, and nine children. (Holy shit, John.) If John still works in fast food, and his youthful good looks have sunken like a shipwreck with the passage of time, how many women in this bar will go home with him tonight?

  How many women will go home with John tonight if John’s band, now called Shards of Death, is playing tonight at this bar? Does that number increase or decrease if John is wearing a T-shirt that says “Swallow or It’s Going in Your Eye”?

  Amy has had five Amstel Lights, and her blood alcohol level is .08. If John is fifteen years older than Amy, how many hours will it be until she wakes up in his apartment, hungover and horrified by her poor decision-making?

  If John’s wife comes home from her night shift at Perkins at that precise moment, and her anger level is rising at a rate of 3 millimeters per second, what is the volume of John’s wife’s anger after the approximately fifteen seconds it takes John to put on his pants?

  Extra credit: How many minutes until John’s wife threatens to take the kids and the money and leave? How many days until John’s wife sneaks into the basement at three in the morning and puts holes through his favorite electric guitar with a long series drill bit?

  John hires a man to kill his wife, and agrees to pay him 30 percent up front, and the rest when the job is completed. If the total amount is $100,000, how much will the hired man get up front? And how many years will the judge subtract from or add to John’s sentence if he was high on crack cocaine when he ordered the killing? Bonus question: If John is $11K in debt and agrees to pay a contract killer $100K, how long does John have to live?

  John’s band has had four names—but not at the same time. The first year, John changes his band’s name and then he changes it again at evenly spaced intervals over the course of twelve years. How many years separate each name change, and how many years will the names “Viking Fists” and “Ogres’ Blood” cause the judge to add to John’s attempted murder sentence? Does it even matter? Will John have a new life in prison? Will it be better, or maybe at least cleaner, tidier, than the one outside?

  Bonus extra credit: If John’s mother at fifteen and his father at twenty were given extraordinary foresight, would they have fallen in love? Would they have stood in line, in the raw cold and rain, for those Styx tickets? Would they have listened to the nostalgic-yet-aspirational lyrics of “Come Sail Away” and thought, We could set an open course for the virgin sea? Would they have climbed into the back of that pickup truck in the afterglow, nails and bolts under bare skin and school and plant shift not withstanding? Would they have purchased extra condoms at the five-and-dime? Would they have wanted to preserve all they had—or would they have taken a chance, anyway, because when love sings down the microphone and strikes you, who can say what would happen if you failed to swoon and fall at its feet? Who can say whether A leads to B leads to C or how many apples John ended up with in the end? Who can say why the loaded heart defies all logic, like an unfinished word problem, like a riddle written in the human dust of a crowded barroom?

  Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting

  One: The time traveler leaves her craft in a copse of trees near the center of the park. She walks quickly—as quickly as she can these days, with her aging knees and hips. She buys a flimsy little card and takes the subway downtown till she reaches the poorest part of the city. She finds the artist at home amidst the squalor, paints scattered, no hot water, barely room for a dirty mattress. Downstairs a baby cries. He is so young, the artist, a white smooth face in the dark of his walk-up. She supposes this will be easy—from the empty, hungry tilt of his face, to the stooped posture from painting under this sloped attic roof. She tells him her name, the name of a very famous sculptor: a lie. She tells him she has heard rumors, but finds he has no talent, that his paintings are no good: a lie, also. She tells him he should move back home to Modesto, become a dentist. There is money and there is security in dentistry. There is emotional stability and happiness.

  The artist looks at her, aghast but defiant. The artist knows his way around this kind of truth.

  When the time traveler returns to her own time, she heads straight to the third gallery on the third floor of the museum. The painting still hangs—a vast, moon-filled abstract, shapes building to a woman, curves like rolling blue hills, lit from within and without. The room is crowded with people who have seen it only on holo screens, breathless in its physical presence. The dates under the artist’s name, bookended by the long-ago b. and d. The painting is now titled In Spite Of.

  Two: The time traveler counts three, and throws the dummy onto the highway as the bottle-green Ford comes barreling over the bridge. After the smash-up, she calls the young artist collect from a Modesto diner. There’s been a terrible accident, she says. Long recovery ahead, come home for good, she says. When she gets back to her present and sees the painting, she isn’t exactly surprised. The artist never had much filial feeling.

  Three: The time traveler sits at dinner with the artist’s muse and the man she has hired to seduce the artist’s muse. The muse is pretty, her eyes a soft gray and her hair a bright gold. She is tall and strong, with large breasts and hips, and the man has been happy to do his job. The time traveler buys bottle after bottle of wine for the table, until the man puts his hand on the muse’s thigh and her face softens into a sweet smile. The time traveler is no voyeur, but she stands for a long time under the muse’s open window, listening to the low moans float onto the warm summer air.

  She returns to her own time and the painting still hangs. Now it is titled Forgiveness.

  Four: The time traveler steals the artist’s rent from his dresser drawer. His landlord, she knows, is an unyielding sort. Now the painting is smaller, much smaller, but it is still the single occupant of the room and it still sucks the air from the room and it still lights the room from within and without. Fuck, says the time traveler, and the tourists standing nearest her shift uneasily in polite Midwestern disapproval.

  Five: The time traveler posts an acceptance letter from a California dental college, complete with a nine-hundred-dollar bonus if the artist enrolls in the next two weeks. The painting is bigger again, and the bio on the wall mentions, as a humorous bit of trivia, that the artist briefly considered dental school. Can you imagine, it says. The artist as a dentist! The time traveler resents the exclamation point, as do all the dentists who pass through the museum.

  Six: The time traveler sets explosive charges under the apartment, and blows them when no one is home. Upon return, the painting is still there, and now a tour guide is lecturing on the painter’s subsequent madness. The artist, he says with an air of enlightened detachment, claimed to have created a series of paintings using his own waste—which his wife unfortunately destroyed. The tourists make faces.

  Seven: The time traveler sets fire to the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.

  Eight: The time traveler pours acid on the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.

  Nine: The time traveler paints over the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.

  Ten: The time traveler steals the unfinished painting and buries it in the past of the past. The painting is sti
ll there.

  Eleven: The time traveler curses, cuts, spits on, slashes, saws in half, kicks, pours water over, blowtorches, burns to bits, eats the ashes of, smashes the easel around, throws out the paints for, and washes her hands of the unfinished painting. In triumph, she returns to the museum.

  The painting is still there. It hangs, suspended, “like an artfully falling ocean,” says a pretentious young gentleman in a straw boater and suspenders. The time traveler thinks of artfully falling anvils instead.

  Twelve: The time traveler steals the unfinished painting and takes it back to the future, where it disappears like smoke upon arrival. And the painting is still there, is still there, is still there, is still there—is still hanging in the gallery and now it is titled Perseverance. The time traveler feels the unfairness of this keenly. She has persevered. She has not succeeded. She has not made him see his own sad end, there in that bedroom with his failures and his guns and his useless, incomprehensible war with the painting. All that genius given, all that misery marked for both of them.

  Thirteen: The time traveler finds the muse at her lunch. She watches the muse eat her sandwich with gusto: tomato and cheese on thick slabs of crusty bread. She watches the muse gulp down wine, watches her strong white teeth and her smooth white throat. The time traveler sighs. She was more in love with life than with him—she’d never have believed how black and long the days could stretch over her, mean and empty, like shadows in the winter. She takes out the pill, drops it into the muse’s wineglass. She leaves before the gray eyes can close. She still needs them to see, just for a moment until the timeline catches up.