THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, Part Two

There was still no power in the house when Michael returned home, yet he went ahead and set up the borrowed video equipment at his bedside. With half his day gone, the artist moved directly to his studio without further delay or excuse. It was not his habit to paint during the day, but with no electricity for lamps he was eager to take advantage of the afternoon light pouring in through the skylight. He placed a CD of Schubert’s D899 and D935 piano impromptus into his portable player and began preparing his materials.

Michael did not fully embrace the idea he was a visual artist until he entered college, but once he did his path of development through it was explosive. He devoured and adapted modernist styles almost on a weekly basis, combining, in Dadaist assemblages, everything from Pollack’s dripped paint technique to Oldenburg-type cloth sculpture. It was not until his last year of graduate school he finally settled into the role of “serious” oil painter.

He generally painted with small round brushes, beginning his canvases with opaque colors before finishing with semi-transparent scumblings and transparent glazes. An undiluted refined linseed oil medium was employed to facilitate the brushwork and add depth and luster to the colors, and later a removable varnish was added to rewet darker shades and even out the reflective sheen of the paint skin. On average it took him several months to complete one painting, and given the slowdown in his work schedule in recent years he seldom produced more than two or three paintings a year.

With regard to his mature style, he liked to paint unconventional monsters. These monsters were a modern updating of the composite portraits created by the Sixteenth Century Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo portrayed the sitters for his portraits as being made out of peculiar objects like vegetables, books, flowers, or fish; by comparison, the skins of Michael’s monsters were made out of very small toys, flattened egg cartons, and crushed plastic bottles. Like another of his favorite painters, Ivan Albright, he was most attracted to minute detail, be it the painted markings on a plastic grasshopper, the reflections in crumpled aluminum foil, or dense patterned pointillism. However, his sense of composition was closer in form to abstract collage, and in spirit to the odd anthropomorphic juxtapositions he found in Pre-Columbian art. Resultantly, his monsters were a combination of whimsy and grotesqueness that made them irreducible to a category.

His destination as an artist was already present in boyhood, where he had an eye for finding recognizable patterns and pictures in irregular surfaces. Drawings from this age included elaborate maps of imaginary cities and monsters, and as these creations grew he taped on more sheets of paper. This need for greater and greater detail made his initial canvases as a young painter claustrophobic, but with practice he was able to organize his teeming surfaces around simpler forms such as female anatomy and cartoon-ish characters. Omar once noted his strange habit of violating eyes in his earliest monsters, and that in some cases the eyes were so “un-eye-like” they made impenetrable creatures even more so. It was always a challenge for the artist to balance the brain’s need for templates with his capacity for novel invention.

To “liberate the miraculous from the mundane,” in the grand surrealist tradition, was his stated goal in all his endeavors. Consequently, he looked in the unlikeliest of places for inspiration and pulled on an inexhaustible memory of things he had heard, seen, and read to make oblique connections. These connections ran the gauntlet from the astute to the absurd, yet with the exception of connoisseurs on both ends of this spectrum, it was esoteric work that attracted few admirers, and no acolytes.

Michael’s diverse and divergent interests were laudable up to a point, but the audience in one medium did not translate to another; and with each reinvention of himself the number of people who could potentially appreciate his accomplishments were rapidly dwindling down to one: him. He had experienced this firsthand in the cool reception of his résumé, where his disparate achievements made him both overqualified and under-qualified for any career he should entertain. What he most excelled at was an adaptive, irreverent way of thinking, but apart from writing his own job description there was no job to attach to what he did. His desire was to be self-employed as an artist, but it was all but impossible for him multitask, prioritize, or envision a long-term goal given the intense character of his pursuits. This inability to focus on practical things was complicated by an obsequious nature, which made him a poor advocate for himself in business dealings. It was not so much a case of being too trusting of others, or too nice, but of perceiving himself as being relegated to only a show of gratitude. All these factors effectively kept him never more than six months away from homelessness.

By late afternoon the light was beginning to fade, but the painter’s new opus had enough of a foothold in the world to merit a sense of accomplishment. He returned downstairs after cleaning his brushes and spotted his calendar still lying on the kitchen table and in want of a nail. As he contemplated where to hang it, he realized, with consternation, it was his nephew’s eighth birthday—to the day. (With the move from Chicago, the uncle had completely forgotten it.) He had to leave the house for dinner, so decided he would call Aaron from the neighborhood payphone up the street. As he was gathering momentum to leave, he turned back to the dimming living room to find Brae standing in the middle of it.

“Brae?” He caught his breath.

The uncommunicative child was holding a bag, and with a calculated look of helplessness.

“What ‘cha got there?” he asked.

The little girl held out a sack containing a plastic-wrapped bed sheet. “I got no holes for eyes,” she said.

The neighbor looked over the package, and assumed she was alluding to the makings of a Halloween costume. “So you’re wearing a ghost suit, huh?”

Her moon face and large blue eyes were hitting their mark.

Prodded by a seldom-tapped paternal pang, Michael was cajoled. “I think we can manage a couple of eye holes.”

He was not sure in which still-unpacked box he would find his scissors, and with no patience to guess, he went up to the attic to retrieve his utility knife from a toolbox. On his return, he smiled affably as he negotiated the growing bed sheet. The absurdity of its size made him glance down at the wrapper. “Brae,” he sighed. “This is for a king-size bed. This is more sheet than a little girl like you needs.”

The sweet child stood at his knee by the sofa and watched him make two rough holes with uncritical appreciation. He pulled the cover over her head to align the holes before getting down in the floor to trim off the excess material around her feet. Returning to his seat, he playfully yanked down the eyeholes and twirled her around. Brae fumbled about before falling on his lap in a burst of giggles. It was only in her leaning forward a bleeding cut above her ankle was noticed.

The neighbor pulled the sheet off her in a gasp. “Did I do that?”

The child said nothing.

Rushing up to the bathroom, Michael returned with a band-aid and some rubbing alcohol. He patched the little girl up with effusive apologies, even though it was clear she was not going to make a fuss over the injury. He left the room a second time, still seeking forgiveness, and retrieved a box of old crayons he had kept from childhood. They were placed on the coffee table, along with a lit candle to chase away the gathering shadows. With no TV to occupy them, the host encouraged his self-appointed charge to draw on a piece of paper; the child needed little coaxing. Twilight was soon on the windowsills, but Michael was so completely under the little girl’s vespertine spell he did not want to budge. He was hard-pressed to explain what he was feeling as he watched her, although it most closely resembled contentment. After a while, concern over seeing the child safely home finally roused him from their shared company.

“It’s time for you to go home, Sugar Booger.”

The child looked up and grimaced at her new nickname, yet was otherwise reluctant to put down her crayon.

Michael bent over to examine the drawing. “What is it?”

“An angel.”

He smiled. “Did you learn about angels in school?”

“I saw it in the window.”

“Window?” he mumbled. “Which window?”

She was not specific.

“Let’s put your drawing on the refrigerator,” he announced.

Her expression was one of approval as she pushed into his leg to eye her masterpiece. Without premeditation, he reached down to pull her up into his lap in a fatherly way. She unfurled in his arms to cuddle, and he was both overwhelmed by the boldness of his move and the tenderness of the embrace. Brae looked down at her knees over the side of his thigh, feeling a natural fit in the curve of his body. Confused, he relinquished the unguarded moment and let gravity pull her back to the floor.

He stood up with an adult’s downward tilting gaze. “It’s almost dark.”

His new friend was first escorted to the refrigerator for the gallery installation of her artwork, and then to the backdoor.

The reticent child paused in the doorway. “Can I come over in the morning and watch cartoons?”

Michael thought on it. “The electricity may still not be on.”

Brae seemed set on the idea.

“I tell you what. I’ll leave the door unlocked for you. Just in case.”

She was satisfied.

The last of the Sun was squinting through the trees running along the western façade of the property. The lowest branches, like lead solder around stained glass, trapped the deepening madder and lapis lazuli below the roofline. The effect was one of hastening an already anxious nightfall. With Brae’s hand in his, he walked her down the leafy brick path to another dark house in the Quadrangle; she stopped at the stoop.

Michael looked over the dark windows as she pushed open an unlocked door. “Are your parents home?”

Brae was standing on the other side of the threshold, and gave no verbal reply.

He could not account for his next question. “Is your Mommy or Daddy going to take you out trick-or-treating on Halloween?”

The child shrugged in a noncommittal way.

The confirmed bachelor cleared his throat. “If they can’t take you, I’ll take you. Okay?”

The little girl nodded before disappearing inside the house.

The neighbor backed away slowly with the closing of the door and waited for a light to come on. When one did not, he was torn about what to do. He glanced at the mailbox. No name was on it, but a letter inside was addressed to The Caretaker of Willis Quadrangle. Brae was presumably Andrew Tommen’s daughter. Seeing he did not know the situation of this latchkey child, he could not necessarily interfere, so reluctantly turned to walk up the block.