The
painter forewent breakfast. He walked in the direction of Jacques’
neighborhood with the rental tuxedo over his shoulder. Little attention
was paid to the leaves twirling overhead, although the commotion did loosen
a few more thoughts.
The abrupt ending of his nightmare was strange. The way the voice of the flashlight-bearing intruder became that of the police officer brought to mind something he once read in a book on Chaos/Complexity Theory. It was an illustration on how the mind creates the time it takes to finish telling a story in a dream, retroactively. The dream used in the illustration was the classic one about events leading up to the explosion of a bomb.
At the point of detonation, the subject awakes to find the alarm clock ringing. The mind in effect rewrites the storyline backwards, from the time the alarm goes off, and then convinces the dreamer the events leading up to it were sequential and existed in real time. Michael wished all the elements of his nightmare could be so readily dismissed: that a kiddy television program could explain away the scream of a child.
When he knocked on Jacques’ trailer, the door opened with a low
moan. The resident peeked out like a red-haired troll from under a toadstool.
It was odd seeing the little man out of costume, though some of his face
paint had survived a tussle with a pillow. He offered the painter no salutation
on turning to scratch the crotch of his briefs.
Michael laid the borrowed tux over a stack of videos. “I’m sorry to wake you.”
The man swallowed a slug from an open whiskey bottle. “I’ve been up for a while.”
The visitor made a pass at small talk. “It was quite a party.”
Jacques’ mood was darker than what could be accounted for in a simple hangover. An official-looking letter bearing the school’s insignia lay on the mattress beside him. He stumbled out of a fog for words. “I just got a phone call from a friend. They found Moses dead over on the construction site late yesterday.”
“Moses?”
“Moses Harbinger,” he explained. “An old wino who hung out on campus.”
“The guy with the metal detector?”
Jacques’ stony expression softened with an anecdote. “I once heard him tell a kid childhood cancer was caused by space dust, and that dead pets weren’t allowed into Heaven.”
Michael nodded. “We had a similar conversation.”
“He started out as a painter here, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” Jacques picked up the letter and crumbled it. “This town has a way of being unkind to alumni who stick around too long. I guess that’s why people like me want to stay in school for as long as possible, to put off the truth the world has no use for us.” He tossed the wadded piece of paper back on the bed. “I don’t know what I’m going to do about funding for school next year. My part-time job won’t cut it.”
Sympathy was not a natural fit for the painter.
The dwarf broadened the topic. “Do you ever think all this art stuff is making you lose your marbles?”
Michael deflected. “I think it’s an occupational hazard. I’m sure OSHA has some guidelines on it somewhere.”
Jacques smiled, but stayed in his dreary vein. “Moses may have been off his rocker, but he was more alive than most of the people who live in this town.”
The painter was struck by the irony. “When you’re an artist, you’re afraid of either having too much passion, or too little.”
Jacques agreed. “It’s the deal you make with the Devil, I guess.”
Michael interjected, “Have you ever heard Nietzsche’s dictum: ‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star’?”
“He went nuts, didn’t he?
Michael explained, “One day he came to the aid of a horse that was being flogged, and collapsed. He was taken back to his rooms where he wrote several letters. In one he claimed to have attended his own funeral—twice.”
“I guess there isn’t much daylight between genius and insanity, is there?”
“It’s the deal with the Devil—as you say.”
Jacques repelled the bleak prospect. “I once heard John Nash, the guy from A Beautiful Mind, say the trick to not being insane is to pretend you’re sane, and then it just becomes habit.”
The visitor thought aloud. “I’m lucky, I guess. My best friend and I feel as long as we can use each other as sounding boards, we’re still grounded to the real world. We’re each other’s canary in the mineshaft.”
“Unless you both go off the deep end together.”
Both men chuckled hesitantly, as if they were engaged in gallows’ humor.
Jacques, whistling past the graveyard, squatted on a milk crate to expand on his point. “But, you know, who’s to say what sane is? The first time I ever heard someone talking on a cell phone, I thought it was some delusional guy talking to his radio. I thought to myself: How is it that someone who looks well-groomed, has all his teeth, and in no other regard seems wanting, should find himself talking to a radio out on the street like some homeless guy? Of course, it took several more incidents like that before I acclimated to the new reality.”
Michael added, “I guess at a certain level sanity is a mutual contract between its members.”
The performance artist, looking around at his dire living arrangement, tinkered some more with his idea. “When your life is whittled down to the dimensions of a dumpster, you either hit a wall or pretend it’s not there. Those who opt for the latter have the right idea. What’s needed is a new back-story. If you want a happy ending, then you start with one and reverse-engineer back to the beginning. Tear out all the preceding pages and start over.”
“Can you do that for yourself?”
Jacques’ brief moment of optimism faded. “If the Devil is open to renegotiation, perhaps.”
The painter tried to sound a positive note. “But you’re right. It’s never too late for a new beginning.”
The dwarf was now in full retreat. “A new beginning is too much like a happy ending, I'm afraid: It works better on paper than it does in practice. There’s always a next day. There’s never not a next day.”
Michael was forever torn between topics of interests and conversations he had no desire in pursuing. Feeling the mood wanting to deepen, he looked to the door in a fidget.
Jacques could see his eagerness to leave, so rose to be the gracious host. “Thanks for returning the monkey suit.”
“No—thank you. And for the camcorder.”
“Did it work?”
Michael sidestepped the question. “What was originally on that tape you gave me?”
Jacques went blank for a second, then remembered. “It was a tape I made of myself last spring on campus. It was a little dark. Not good enough for my portfolio—but not bad enough to throw away.”
“Were you dressed as a gargoyle?”
“Ah. So you looked at it.”
Michael smiled, sidestepping again. “Last night, did you see me with a young woman in a wedding dress?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t get her name.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.” Jacques, affecting a pose, looked to his grungy window. “Her name is Emma. She works at the coffeehouse. She’s probably there now.” He added, parenthetically, “She’s one dancing star that’s apt to burn.”
Michael was notoriously uncurious where he had a stake in an outcome. He threw the man another amicable smile before departing.
As he walked along, the painter reflected on his exchange with the performance
artist. Jacques wanted to feign normality by hiding in plain view as a
lawn ornament, but surely he only drew attention to himself. This likelihood
brought to mind the graduate student’s shrewder observation about
some of the townspeople and their persona non grata relationship
to the community: If being ignored was what Jacques truly sought, then
perhaps being ostracized for being too different would tantamount
to the same thing.
Much more was going on here than first met the eye. An unstated dichotomy always exists between college and town life. On the one hand, places like Stonesthrow give the appearance of being enchanted little villages, where perpetually young students play at being grownup with their quaint boutiques and their parents’ credit cards. On the other hand, those older faces in the crowd, like Moses Harbinger, clearly do not fit in anymore. Such folks stay too long in youth and, in not leaving at their appointed hour, turn into pumpkins.
Michael hoped he would not fall victim to the same unhappy fate.
Chapter Nine/ Back/ Contents Page
Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.