CHAPTER 5

Dear Grasshopper,

Evolutionarily speaking, our animal brain evolved to help us anticipate where to find our next meal on the prehistoric savannah. Having met this task, it was not morally compelled to accomplish more. It was not obligated to deliver the whole of reality to us in objective terms. The rational mind is designed to make fetishes of closure, consistency, and symmetry, as well as an economy of means to achieve all three. These prejudices have mostly put us in good stead in understanding our shared world of experience, but are these virtues in one regard merely hobgoblins in another? Or is our desire for a “unified theory of everything” an allusion to something fundamental about our predicament?

Hume said all inductive arguments are finally unprovable. Popper told us theories could never be proven conclusively true, only false; Lakatos said theories could never be proven conclusively false, either. Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that mathematical systems of any complexity presuppose axioms not supported by the system. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says you cannot simultaneously measure both a particle’s position and velocity with complete accuracy. Our reason, whatever its ultimate limits, is at least smart enough to know it cannot know everything. Yet to use reason to check the scope of its own reach is to engage in a curious form of self-contradiction. And herein lies a clue to the true nature of reality.

We sometimes forget that knowledge, as a total concept, is only one more concept of a concept-creating machine: the mind. It is not the box concepts come in, only the addition of one. Resultantly, what is genuinely sought in a “big picture” may well be missed, because the assumption it must be reducible to reason is untenable from the outset. Whether one pursues a super-symmetrical or an inelegantly piecemeal explanation of total reality, the destination is seldom doubted. But what is invariably found is only what can be understood in concepts, or contrived to fit in them. All concepts and theories require fashioned tools, and all tools, queerly and consistently, take on not only the shape of the thing they supposedly touch but also the mind that made them.

For those who believe man is the measure of all things, this is a distinction without a difference; for the rest, it is not a question of knowledge, but the enigma of understanding itself. ~Omar

THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, Part Two

There was still no power in the house, yet Michael set up the borrowed video equipment at his bedside on his return. Eager to take advantage of the remaining daylight, he moved to his studio without further delay or excuse, placed a CD of Schubert’s piano impromptus into his portable player, and began preparing his materials for work.

The painter did not fully embrace the idea he was a visual artist until he entered college. His undergraduate work was experimental, and reflected what he was exposed to in his art survey courses. He cross-pollinated styles and epochs, first by reverse-engineering passages lifted from Dali, Caravaggio, and Ingres, and then combining this knowledge, in Dadaist assemblages, with Pollack’s dripped paint technique and Oldenburg-inspired cloth sculpture. It was not until his last year of graduate school he settled into the role of “serious” oil painter, although he was never interested in current trends in contemporary painting.

He preferred working with small brushes, and began his canvases with opaque colors before finishing with scumblings and 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 applied 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, Michael liked painting unconventional monsters. These monsters were a modern updating of the composite portraits created by the Sixteenth Century Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Arcimboldo portrayed his sitters 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 small toys, flattened egg cartons, crushed plastic bottles, or anything with a descriptive surface. Like another of his favorite painters, Ivan Albright, he was most attracted to minute detail, and given his organic, spontaneous way of working, the final product was more bricolage than “big picture”. This put his compositions closer in form to abstract collage, and in spirit to the odd anthropomorphic juxtapositions found in Pre-Columbian art. This sensibility carried over from boyhood, where early drawings of monsters evolved in the manner of his elaborate maps of imaginary cities: As the creations grew, additional sheets of paper were taped on. This need for greater and greater surface detail made his initial canvases as a young painter claustrophobic. Similarly, Omar noted his strange habit of violating eyes in his earliest efforts, and in some cases the eyes were so “un-eye-like” they made impenetrable creatures even more impenetrable. It was always a challenge for the artist to balance the brain’s need for templates with his capacity for novel invention. Resultantly, his monsters were a combination of whimsy and grotesqueness that made them irreducible to a category.

His destination as an artist proceeded from a pareidolic knack for finding recognizable images and patterns where none were intended. His stated goal in all endeavors was to “liberate the miraculous from the mundane” in the grand surrealist tradition. 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 except for connoisseurs on both ends of this spectrum, it was esoteric work that attracted few admirers, and no acolytes.

Michael’s 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 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 unconventional 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 to 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, socially insecure 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, but of perceiving himself as being relegated to a show of gratitude.

By late afternoon the light began to fade, but the painter’s new opus had enough 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. Where Michael was blessed with a deep store of long-term memory, he was woefully deficient in short-term memory. His balancing act between the unequal spheres involved padding the weaker memory with daily regiment and routine, yet with the move from Chicago the forgetful uncle was out of his element. He needed to leave the house for dinner, so decided to call Aaron from the neighborhood payphone up the street. Gathering momentum, he turned back to the dimming living room to find Brae standing in the middle of it. A dark cerise dress, like a Duvetyne curtain, had concealed her presence.

“Brae?” He caught his breath.

With a calculated look of helplessness, the child held up a sack containing a plastic-wrapped bed sheet. “I got no holes for eyes,” she informed him.

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 hit 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 to the attic to retrieve his utility knife from a toolbox. On his return, he smiled affably while negotiating the growing sheet. The absurdity of its size made him scrutinize the wrapper. “Brae,” he sighed. “This is for a king-size bed. This is more sheet than a little girl needs.”

The sweet child stood at his knee and watched him make two rough holes with uncritical appreciation. He pulled the cover over her head to align the holes before getting in the floor to trim away the excess material around her feet. Returning to the sofa, 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 with 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 girl said nothing.

Rushing up to the bathroom, Michael returned with a Band-aid and 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 kept back from childhood. They were placed on the coffee table, along with a piece of paper and a lit candle to chase away the gathering shadows. With no TV to occupy them, the host encouraged his self-appointed charge to draw; 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 felt as he watched her, although it closely resembled contentment. After a while, concern over seeing the child safely home roused him from their shared company.

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

Brae grimaced at the nickname, yet was reluctant to put down her crayon.

Michael examined the drawing. “What is it?”

“An angel.”

“Did you learn about angels in school?”

“I saw it in the window,” she explained.

“Which window?”

She was not specific.

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

Her expression was one of approval when 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 over her knees to the bandage, 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 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’ll leave the door unlocked for you. Just in case.”

She was satisfied.

The last of the Sun squinted 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, they walked down the leafy brick path to another dark house in the Quadrangle; she stepped up the stoop and pushed against a heavy unfastened door. Engulfed by a shadow in the doorway, the girl’s crimson pleats glowed, drawing off the bloom from her cheeks.

Michael looked over the opaque windows of the house. “Are your parents home?”

Brae gave no reply.

He could not account for his next question. “Are your Mommy or Daddy taking you trick-or-treating on Halloween?”

Her shrug was noncommittal.

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.