DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 4)

He walked me to a wall and, with a flourish of his hand, presented a painting of ancient Greece. Great. Aristotle thought some people were born to be slaves.

“This is A Reading from Homer,” he said, “by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Romanticism from 1885. Look at it.”

I did. For quite a while. The key to entering one of Uncle Mason’s prints was to relax your brain and not think about what you were seeing, to just let it wash over you, but that was an impossibility right then. I was too angry and was swimming against the current. I saw the painting and wanted to scream at every gray vein in the marble. I wanted to grab the woman in repose, slap her hand away from her man’s, and shake her. I wanted to shake her and disrupt the whole languid scene, stir the placid blue of the Aegean in the background into tumultuous stormbidden sackcloth.

But I kept watching the still-life play before my eyes. I couldn’t deny there was something welcoming and comfortable about the vision. My shirt and shorts felt clingy, like they were tugging at my skin. The fur-tunicked man on the ground was lying prone, a faun having settled into a field for a nap. The stone of the agora looked more relaxing, more agreeable than a plush sofa. I started to hear the voice of the poet, the lines of ancient Greek dactylic hexameter pinging off the strings of the cithara across the frame. The scent of the sea filled my nose. I gave myself over, and I was inside.

“How do you feel?” Uncle Mason asked me.

“Calm. Relaxed.”

“Good. Now tell me what’s happening here.”

“A poet’s reading Homer,” I said.

“For what purpose?”

I looked around the agora, hoping to find the answer etched in marble.

“Have you ever read Homer?” Uncle Mason asked.

“In school, yeah.”

He indicated the scene before me with an upturned hand.

“This is a class?” I asked.

“Absolutely. Homer was the bedrock of Greek and Roman education practically from the moment he started writing.”

I stared into the faces of the four students. They were transfixed by the poet, by the words from the scroll. I could read the flaring lights in their eyes, having spent most of my life seeing rows of faces struggling to stay awake at their desks.

“What’s with them?” I asked.

“The students?”

“Yeah. He’s laying on the floor, she’s reclining, those two are leaning against the wall. What kind of classroom is this?”

“That’s the question,” Uncle Mason said. “When did I say this was painted?”

“1885.”

“When you hear that year, what do you think of?”

“Not this.”

“Right. So, what do you think of?”

“Men with pocket watches and pince-nez. Women in ostentatious hats and huge skirts.”

“What else? What big things were happening at that time?”

“I don’t know. Queen Victoria. The Industrial Revolution.”

“Exactly. The Victorian Era, the Gilded Age, the Belle Epoque. This was painted at a time when rapid industrialization was ushering in seismic changes in the way all of civilization functioned. It was changing so drastically, so rapidly, that a lot of people found the whole thing confusing and frightening. A lot of them weren’t sure how to adjust, just as we’re now living through a radical change in societal expectations due to the digital revolution. Don’t be surprised if in your lifetime the term ‘digital revolution’ ends up being capitalized. Now, based on what I’ve just told you and what this scene depicts, can you make an educated guess what one of those big changes of the Victorian Era brought?”

“Education?”

“Standardized education for all. It’s because of the Victorian Era that you guys sit at desks arranged in ranks and files. Formalism in all things was one of the key virtues of the day.”

“Okay,” I said, “but I still don’t get what this painting has to do with that?”

“Before we came in here, I told you the title, who painted it, when it was painted, and what else?”

“Romanticism.”

“Right. Now I’m going to clue you in on something most people should know but have forgotten. The word ‘romantic’ has nothing to do with being in love.”

I looked at Uncle Mason like he was speaking in tongues.

“It’s true. Look at this painting. What does this image have to do with love? Nothing, but we associate the word with it because of love stories. Quick—name a love story.”

“Romeo & Juliet.”

“Good. How does it end?”

“They both die.”

“Good. Name another.”

“Uh, Before Sunrise.”

“How’s it end?”

“They go their separate ways, and we don’t know if they meet again until the sequel.”

“Name another.”

“Um… that, what’s that German book about the guy who kills himself for a girl?”

“Sorrows of Young Werther. You’re starting to see my point?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The word ‘romance’ comes from Anglo-Saxon and Old French words that meant ‘Roman.’ The word ‘roman’ is right there in ‘romance.’ And you’ve already taken enough world history to know how much European history is predicated on one kingdom or another using the legacy of the Roman Empire to give itself legitimacy. Romance is about loss and trying to reclaim what’s been lost.” He turned me to face the agora. “That’s what Alma-Tadema is trying to do. He wants the staid, formalistic existence-by-rote of his time to learn from the vibrancy of what has come before but no longer exists.”

I thought of all the times a teacher had delayed the start of class, trying to wrangle two kids back into their assigned seats. I remembered the occasional lively discussion in a room between the teacher and the students, instigated by an idea or morsel of knowledge expelled from one of the kids, how adroitly the teacher would talk around the subject without admitting that all they knew about it had come from the curriculum-approved study guide. It had always made me feel like the police outside our home had stepped aside and allowed the intruders entry. With a few words, Uncle Mason had made the assortment of gold stars and stickers that had adorned my elementary school quizzes stink of industrial runoff, and I saw them spilling into the rivers and oceans. All those uplifting pieces of signage that had graced the walls began to emit the pro forma honk of the teacher from Peanuts. Every shred of positive reinforcement I’d ever received, from teachers or coaches or my parents, took on the bark of a pedagogical sadist warning me to eat my meat if I wanted my pudding. I felt confused, twisted, a snake oblivious to the fact that the tail it was devouring was its own.

It was only after we’d exited A Reading from Homer that Uncle Mason told me about the man who’d commissioned it: Henry Gurdon Marquand. Gilded Age industrialist and banker. “The irony,” Uncle Mason explained, “was that he was almost single-handedly responsible for the popularity of the Old Masters of the era. He was considered a trendsetter in the art world, and it was the formalism and technical precision of the Old Masters that determined how he valued them.”

I turned back to A Reading, appraised it again, then turned back to my uncle and asked with some volume, “What the fuck?”

He looked at me like he was about to pick me off at first.

“How am I supposed to take that seriously?” pointing to the painting. “The whole thing is hypocrisy.”

“Well,” Uncle Mason said, “you have to bear in mind that, like Carnegie and a lot of other industrialists of his day, Marquand thought it was his duty to bring culture to the people. He could afford to collect the finest works of art and create a metropolitan museum for them to be housed in and exhibited for the benefit of people who couldn’t.”

“Yeah, but wasn’t he also an archangel of avarice like Carnegie and Rockefeller and all them?”

“Was he?” he asked. “You’ve heard stories of what Carnegie and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and Morgan did to their employees and competitors and their customers, and you can walk into any bookstore and find volumes on any of those guys that will tell you even more horror stories.” Uncle Mason held up his pointer finger and said, “But what do you know Henry Marquand did?”

After a brief but irritating eon I said, “Okay. So, what did he do?”

“I don’t know either. I’ve never found anything on him online beyond his artistic legacy. He probably did have business practices we would call predatory. Why wouldn’t he? And I’m sure if we took a deep dive into the Library of Congress or something, we’d find them. But this is all beside the point. You know why all those guys thought it was their duty to bring culture to the plebs?” He took a dramatic pause, then answered, “God.”

“What?”

“They genuinely believed that, as good Christian men, it was their responsibility to help elevate society.”

I screamed, “How about paying their employees a fair wage? Letting them unionize without calling strikebreakers in? Health care?”

Uncle Mason had a finger in each ear. “Anna, honey, it’s so reverberant in here. Please.”

“Omigod!” I kept throwing my hands up, shrugging as if I was trying to buck my head off my shoulders. “Uncle Mason, what is the point of this? What are you trying to teach me?”

“The point is to get you to look at history through the eyes of the people that lived through it. I want you to look at them as people just like you and me.” Uncle Mason stepped toward me and stood inches from my face, looming over me like Christ on the cross above the altar. “We know more now about the natural world and how it works than ever before. We have millennia of recorded history from all over the globe and a multitude of perspectives on all of it to learn from. Innovation and advancement is occurring more quickly than it ever has. We right now are the most intelligent population that has ever inhabited this planet. And we still know nothing! We’re all flailing about, scared out of our wits, trying to put all this together into something that resembles a kind of order.” Uncle Mason marched over to A Reading from Homer. “The greedy cutthroat who commissioned this was as clueless as you and I are. He was trying to make sense of a universe that feels chaotic and arbitrary. Anna, no one is absolutely virtuous or absolutely sinful.”

“Hitler,” I said.

“Loved animals,” he countered.

My lower lip drooped, hairline fractures spider-webbing my heart. “Apologists always trot that bit out.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t take a step in my direction. But for the first time ever he frightened me. “Anna,” he said, “I introduced you to my gallery and agreed to teach you about history because you’ve always struck me as having good critical thinking skills. But I’m going to have to re-evaluate that if you’re just going to stand there and parrot self-serving rhetoric you got off Twitter.”

It was cold, almost robotic. For a moment he sounded like a man who knew how to get away with murder.

I was too frightened to pass judgment, to even form an opinion. I had to look away. As I turned, I caught in the background the gentle flag of the long black curtain over Guernica.

Uncle Mason put his hands behind his back. He rocked on his feet as he said, “Can we continue our lesson?”

I nodded, my head still pointed elsewhere.

He took me across the gallery, to a large load-baring pillar in the middle of the floor, patchworked with a number of smaller paintings, nothing like the enormous vistas we’d entered previously. We stood before one that was maybe a foot and a half by two and a half feet.

“This is Indians Spear Fishing by Albert Bierstadt,” Uncle Mason told me, then crossed his arms.

The last thing I wanted at that moment was to give my uncle what he wanted, but his arctic tone was still whipping around, and I heard the elegiac whistle of a heartless wind. I wanted to wrap myself in blankets and sit in front of a fire.

The painting was already in front of me. I lifted my head and focused my eyes. To my surprise I found the crippling chill receding, the ghostly wind dying in the light of a sun beginning to escape the horizon. I couldn’t deny the painting its grandeur, its elegance, its full-throated choir’s song for the natural world. The pink and yellow of the sun spilled over and into the background. I could feel the cool blue cotton candy wisps of the low hanging clouds brush past my fingertips. Every shade of the woods’ stippled green, from shadow-cloaked near-black to sun-baked almost-yellow, popped off the canvas with the warm alarum of rustling leaves and the call of birds in the thicket. The waterfall cascaded with a roar that lulled and crashed into the rocks like a leaf settling onto a gentle river. And the river was a spotless mirror held up to the heavens, reflecting infinity upon itself. And in the middle of it all were the Indigenous People in a canoe, a tiny hillock of furs among them, fishing with spears. Afloat beneath the rocky monolith of nature’s wondrous power, they simply existed, unaffected by the vampirism of modernity, desiring nothing but to live in the flow of the world as it was.

Bierstadt’s work simply opened its arms and allowed me to drift into its virgin wilderness. I hadn’t even noticed I’d entered the painting, and now that I was there, I found myself in a thrall that made my heart trill. I could feel the blood coursing through my body at a gallop backed by the steady race of drums. The idyll was a rollercoaster at a Kiss concert. Goosebumps rose on my arms. I was trembling, a six-year old entering the world’s most famous theme park for the first time, eyes as big as the moon, tears threatening.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” Uncle Mason asked me.

“It’s…” I couldn’t finish a sentence. The audacity of adrenaline was overwhelming me and stealing the words from my mouth. “It’s spectacular,” I finally got out.

Uncle Mason nodded. “That’s a fitting description. When Bierstadt painted this in 1862, landscapes were largely about spectacle, especially when they were of the American West.”

“This is… this is what they mean when they say God’s Country.”

“Yes, it is.”

As a child does when she can accept that the source of her excitement is real and tangible, my breath started to calm. “It really is glorious,” I said.

Uncle Mason said, “That was the point, to make God’s glory palpable.”

I turned to him. “What do you mean?”

“1862,” he said. “Transcendentalism was happening. The Civil War was happening. So was westward expansion, and the government promoted the hell out of it.

“The first time Albert Bierstadt ever went west of the Mississippi River, he was part of a government commission. The U.S. had all these tracts of land that went further than you could see in every direction.” Uncle Mason pointed to the mountainous wall swallowing the right of the frame. “All those deposits of stone and minerals.” He pointed to the river. “All those natural highways and the fish to pluck out of them.” He pointed to the woods on the left. “All that timber and the land beneath it to cultivate.” He pointed to the Indigenous fishermen. “And not that much standing in the way of it all. All that land at the disposal of the United States, placed at its feet by the grace of God, and remember that God gazed down on America and chose it to be his instrument.”

Uncle Mason’s arm swept across the unsullied splendor before me. “See how exciting Manifest Destiny is?”

DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 3)

We passed beneath an architrave, turned a corner, and stopped before a large painting over six feet tall and nine feet wide. Half a dozen white men dressed like Puritans lorded from on-high.

“Have you ever seen this painting before?” Uncle Mason asked.

There was something familiar about the faces wreathed by the long hair spilling from under those absurd hats. “I want to say yes, but…”

“Maybe when you and your friends are rolling a blunt?”

“Uncle Mason!”

He smiled. “I was a teenager once too, and I’m not your father.”

I shook my head and scoffed as I turned back to the painting. “I don’t know how to roll a… Wait a minute,” I said. “The cigars.”

“Dutch Masters,” he said. “This painting is on that box because that’s who these guys are. The Syndics of the Drapers’ Union.”

“What’s a syndic?”

“The syndics were a five-man board of governors who oversaw Amsterdam’s union of clothmakers.”

“Two paintings about Amsterdam, blunts. I think you’re more into herb than any teen I know.”

“Kindly shut up. Their job was to judge the quality of cloth made and sold by guild members and make sure it met the standard.” He pointed to the man furthest to the right. “See Joachem de Neve feeling the tapestry laid out?”

“You know the guy’s name?”

“I know all of them.” His finger led me from the right side of the painting to the left. “Aemout van der Mye, Willem von Doevenberg, Volkert Jansz, Jacob von Loon.”

There was a sixth man standing behind them who caught my eye, probably due to his lack of headwear. “What about him?” I asked. “In the background?”

Uncle Mason’s grin grew more satisfied. “Good eye, Anna. That’s Frans Hendricksz Bel. He was a servant for the Drapers Union.”

“So, he doesn’t get a hat? What is it with men and hats?”

“He commissioned Rembrandt to paint this.”

“I’ve heard of him!”

“And this may be his most iconic piece. Without Bel it would never have been created.”

“Why’d the employee have to commission a painting for his bosses?”

“Well, I’m sure the union itself paid for it, but he was the point man between them and Rembrandt. He told Rembrandt that it was going to be hung above the fireplace in the Staalhof, where the syndics met. He gave Rembrandt the dimensions of the space and told him what he wanted the painting to convey.”

“What was that?”

Uncle Mason gave me a knowing look. “Ready?”

“We’re going in?”

“Remember how you did it last time?”

“Sure.”

Uncle Mason stepped behind me. “Okay, whip it out.”

“Eww!”

I let my eyes float over the brush strokes. They traced Rembrandt’s signature over the beige and brown of the wall. They fell to the golden chestnut of the crown molding, and I ran a mental finger along its polished gleam.

Uncle Mason whispered, “Look at the perspective. We’re looking up at them, as if they’re seated above the mantle of the fireplace, watching us, judging.”

I did, and we were in the Staalhof. The syndics were giants before us, and we were mice that had ventured into the room. They were staring at me with something not far from condemnation. They reminded me of my parents, looming over me as a child, considering my punishment after I’d done something wrong.

I didn’t like it. They made me feel small. I kept looking at their black robes and wide white collars, and I again thought of the Puritans. Of how they heralded the extinction of the Native Americans. Of witch trials and paranoid anti-intellectualism.

“How do you feel?” asked Uncle Mason.

“Pissed.”

“Why?”

“They’re passing judgment on me.”

“Not on you,” he said. “They’re not considering you.”

“Of course they’re not.”

“They’re considering the syndics who will come after them. In Calm at a Mediterranean Port we saw Amsterdam trading with the Duchy of Naples, but is that the only polity they traded with? No way, right? These men are responsible for what today would be a multi-million dollar-a-year industry, one that every facet of life in Amsterdam was dependent upon. These men knew their job wasn’t just to ensure the money kept rolling in, but that the lifeblood of their entire society kept flowing. They knew how integral they were to keeping the people of Amsterdam alive. That’s an epic responsibility. These men took that responsibility seriously, and they wanted their successors to do the same.”

I heard what Uncle Mason said, but I was trapped deep in a cold lightless cave, and the search party calling my name passed the mouth and disappeared. The only one in there with me was the servant. “Why’s he smirking?” I asked. “Bel. What’s with him?”

Uncle Mason looked at the servant and the slight upturn of the right corner of his mouth. “I’ll be damned. I never noticed it before. Good job, Anna. I suppose he’s a little proud of the role he’s played in the union fulfilling its responsibility. He commissioned the painting. I guess he’s allowed a little extra commemoration.”

I stared at the servant’s smirk. It seemed to grow without changing into an idiot’s Cheshire flash of ivory. I felt like I was watching a cow dance into an abattoir and nuzzle up to the butcher.

“Can we go now?” I asked.

Uncle Mason looked at me. For a second his eyes belonged to the Dutch masters above us. “Sure,” he said. “We’ve got a lot more to see.”

DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 2)

The sun had set, but the sky still shone a fading purple. The leftovers had been packed up and put in the fridge to be taken home at the end of the night. The housekeepers were cleaning the kitchen. The little kids were out of the pool, and the one or two who had given their parents a hard time about it were scowling in time-out. The technicians Uncle Mason had hired were setting up the fireworks in the tennis court. I was standing about ten yards behind my mother, my grandmother, Uncle Drake and Aunt Kim. I only caught snippets of their conversation. Mason this, Mason that. When’s he going to settle down? Nothing but backbiting.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Uncle Mason motioned with a cock of his head, Follow me.

We passed through the dining room into the foyer, down a long hallway that I knew led to his office. The air I was breathing turned rarified even before Uncle Mason had swung open those doors. It didn’t matter that the office wasn’t some Wonka-esque phantasmagorium, that it was exactly the temple of fiduciary consequence you would expect a businessman to have. None of that mattered. I was where you children didn’t get to go, and I was there at Uncle Mason’s invitation.

We crossed the room to a small door I assumed was a closet. But closets don’t have locks on them. Uncle Mason unlocked the door, then turned back to me. “Remember, this is between us, right?”

For a nanosecond I experienced a victim’s frisson. For a wisp of a moment I wondered if this was going to end badly for me, but I shook that off. Anyone else, maybe, but not Uncle Mason. “Just us,” I said.

He opened the door. It was pitch black inside. Uncle Mason reached in and flipped a switch that clacked with a breaker’s baritone. A staircase led beneath the house. Uncle Mason motioned for me to enter first. He followed me through the door and locked it behind us.

I reached the foot of the staircase and found myself in a sort of antechamber of basic cinderblock walls, no furnishing. A single white door sat in one wall to the side. To its right was some kind of aperture, and within it was the mouth of a black rubber chute just big enough to fit your hand in. Above the door was a plaque of alder, an inscription burned into it:

I paint my own reality.

                  Frida Kahlo

Uncle Mason stood before the chute’s aperture. “Don’t bother trying to get in here without me. I’m the only person in the world who can get through this door.”

He stuck his hand through the aperture, into the chute. He stood for several seconds before he flinched and withdrew his hand. A tiny drop of blood was pooling from a puncture in his palm. He grabbed the doorknob with his uninjured hand and led me into his art gallery.

It was vast, beyond cavernous, unspooling before me like a carpet in all directions, maybe further even than the confines of the compound. With plain concrete for a floor and stark white paint on the walls below waist-level, its simplicity was an eyesore. But the paintings, a legion of paintings from every conceivable school and era, blanketed the walls to the ceiling. They fit together in a harlequin tapestry that left no breathing room between the frames. Their colors were thick and sweet like melted chocolate, and yet they glowed like fish that swam in the most inhospitable depths of the ocean.

When I was a kid, I’d gone to the Madsen Museum of Art on a field trip. The effect had missed me completely, and I wrote off art with a capital-A. But there was an elusive bait floating through the subterranean expanse, an enticement that seemed to dart behind corners as my head turned. It wasn’t just an art gallery. To call it that doesn’t do it justice. It felt more like an ancient temple or some majestic cathedral. The air inside was so still, I didn’t even feel it as I walked. I could smell the faint vestige of some alien potpourri. I could taste it. The illumination pooled perfectly upon every exhibit, but the thick lines of yellow light on wood and metal shimmered with sentience.

Uncle Mason stood back and let me take it all in. He didn’t want to break the spell with unnecessary speech. He just watched me with a smile that was two parts thankful and one part relieved.

I turned a corner and hanging just above eye level, ten feet away, was The Night Café. Even I recognized it. “That’s a Van Gogh!”

“It’s not the original,” Uncle Mason said. “None of them are. They’re all prints.”

I looked around the gallery, trying to fathom what I wasn’t seeing, why replicas deserved such ostentatious display. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“Every print I own is one of a kind.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Night Café prints for sale online.”

“Not like this one. There are maybe ten people in the world who own prints like these. And no one has a collection as extensive as mine.”

I looked at him. “Okay. So, what makes them so special?”

I followed him across the gallery to an alcove subsumed in shadow. He said, “Look at this one here.” It was a large landscape, an idyllic scene from hundreds of years ago, of a bay with a ship below a lighthouse. The sun was setting behind some pink clouds and the whole picture had an amber-emerald hue.

“This is Calm at a Mediterranean Port,” said Uncle Mason. “From 1770 by Claude-Joseph Vernet. Neoclassicist. Forty-four and a half inches by fifty-seven and three-eighths inches.” He took me by the shoulders and positioned me directly in front of it. “Now, I want you to just look at the painting. Don’t think about it or try to understand it or appreciate it. Just look at it.”

I had no idea how I was supposed to do that, but I did as Uncle Mason said. I stood still and looked. My brain kept flicking the back of my ear, sneaking its attention off to one passing thought or another like a child trying to wander off in a grocery store. I wouldn’t let it. It took time, several minutes before my focus surrendered and turned itself fully to the picture in front of my eyes. They went right to the ship in the water. Crewmen were unloading it. The sails were billowing in the breeze even as the fluyt sat anchored in the bay. The hull, its dark boards rich as syrup, was backlit by the setting sun. I could almost feel the heat on my shoulders, smell the brine on the air. Then I heard birds. Gulls were circling above the ship, and I could hear them crying out against the blue-yellow gradient behind them. I could hear the seawater lapping against the dinghy in the lower foreground. Fishermen were hoisting a net from the small craft, and I could hear them too, speaking to one another in a language I didn’t understand. I could hear them as truly as I could hear Uncle Mason behind me.

“Look.”

I didn’t feel any crackling of cosmic energy, didn’t hear some ethereal hum of magic. I didn’t feel any kind of gravitational lurch into the canvas. There was only the barely perceptible movement of air around me, then I blinked, and I was standing on a stone quay in a port on the Mediterranean Sea. I was under a real sky with a real storm cloud that was just starting to roll in. The gulls above the ship were flying. The fisherman pulling his net out of his boat, wrapping it around his shoulders, was maybe thirty feet in front of me. I could distinguish the scents of the two men smoking their pipes. Two different kinds of tobacco. The smoke and the smell didn’t even bother me. Nothing could bother me. I was in eighteenth-century Europe.

From behind me I heard, “Remarkable isn’t it?”

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even turn around to look at him with my slackened jaw and bulging eyes. I didn’t understand, but it was all so miraculous that I didn’t care.

Uncle Mason blew all the stress and anxiety out his nostrils. “Vernet,” he said, “he was one of the only landscape painters of the eighteenth century to always put people in his paintings. I think he saw them as inseparable from the scene. And of course they are. Imagine this image without the fisherman and the sailors, without the prostitutes waiting for a prospective john to come ashore with pay to burn. There’d be no ships in the harbor. No birds overhead. No fishing lines arching into the water. The town would look like an abandoned ruin. It wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful.”

I regained enough composure and ignored just enough bewilderment to turn around. Uncle Mason was basking in the yellow-orange of the sunset, letting the light iron the lines out of his face. The silver in his hair had been painted gold. He had his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, like he’d been taking a leisurely stroll on the beach at dusk during a week’s vacation, and he’d stopped at the shoreline to let the ocean run over his feet.

“Is this real?” I eked out.

“You mean, are we really in eighteenth century Italy? No.”

“Is that where this is?”

“Most likely it’s somewhere in the Bay of Naples. Vernet lived in Italy for twenty years and painted a lot of landscapes around the bay.” He pointed to the largest vessel in the painting-come-to-life. “See the flag there? In the late eighteenth century that was the flag of Amsterdam, and they would have traded with Naples.”

“Uncle Mason,” I said, “what is this? Is this time travel?”

“Not the way you’re thinking of it. Look around. Has anybody noticed two strangers in weird clothing speaking a strange English dialect?”

I looked at the fisherman and sailors and prostitutes lounging and talking and working on the dock. They were oblivious to our presence.

“They can’t see us?” I asked.

“They’re not real,” he answered. “We’re in a painting, not the past.”

“How is this possible?”

“Money makes a lot of things possible.”

“That’s not an answer. How’d you do this?”

“I didn’t. People much smarter I am did this.”

“Who?”

He gave me a paternal tilt of the head. “Right now that’s not something you get to know.”

“What? C’mon. How can you show me this and not tell me who’s responsible?”

Uncle Mason almost laughed. “Anna, I just brought you into a living painting, and that’s not enough for you? Look where you are. Listen. Breathe. Taste the salt on the air. You are experiencing life through someone else’s eyes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Life is perspective?’ ”

“Sure.”

“And have you ever heard an artist or a writer or musician say that their responsibility is to tell the truth as they see it?”

“Yeah.”

He turned me back to face the Bay of Naples and presented it to me with a wave of his arm. “Look. We only ever get to experience the world through our own perspective. Everything, every event, every idea has to pass through the prism of our unique subjectivity. But here the subjectivity is completely different from your own, and you get to live that. That’s invaluable.”

I cast my eyes over the scene, looking for what Uncle Mason was showing me. They darted around from one detail to another, across the expanse of oils in motion. My eyes went to the fluyt in the middle distance, and for the first time I noticed a sailor in a red shirt leaning over the side of the deck. He was shouting something to the sailors in the gig pushing away from its port side. I again looked at the fishermen in dock and noticed their hats. Then I noticed everyone’s hat. There were so many different ones: Phrygian bonnets, clericals, chapeaus, wide-brimmed pirate hats. There was a man in a green-and-white turban with robes to match. One of the fishermen was cleaning his catch, and working beside him on her knees was his wife. She had to be his wife. Her dress was drab and utilitarian, good for physical labor. She wasn’t sporting the colors of the women lounging frame-left. They had to be prostitutes, as Uncle Mason said. The one with her back to me had a long pipe with embers glowing in the bowl, sending a lazy trickle of smoke upward.

I saw everyone in the painting and found myself picturing what it would look like if they weren’t there. Uncle Mason was right. It would’ve been a cemetery, a monument to dead stone. As beautiful as the sky was with its pale blue fist slowly closing over its luminous gem of a heart, as intoxicating as the mountain was awash in champagne pink, as much as the Mediterranean gleamed jade and rippled a lullaby into my ears, it would have been pointless without the people.

Uncle Mason put his hand on my shoulder. “C’mon.”

Before the words had vanished, I was back in the gallery with Uncle Mason standing beside me. I listened for the soundtrack to an Italian harbor and heard only reverberant absence. “How long have we been gone?” I asked.

“For all intents and purposes we never left.”

I looked around the gallery, at all the paintings, all the possibilities. As I turned round and round, the gallery a dizzying swish pan of opportunity, one grabbed me by the throat.

It hung alone in a remote corner, behind a wide curtain of black muslin. The still-pungent memory of the Mediterranean port evaporated, and the gallery was empty save an enshrouded taunt that was waving its arms, jumping up and down, and hollering my name.

“Well?”

I pried my attention away from the swath of mystery and turned to my uncle. “So, what now?”

He smiled. “I told you in the painting that money makes a lot of things possible. But none of those things are worthwhile if they don’t lead to some kind of wisdom. That’s what your lessons are going to be about. Not about names and dates and maps and a lot of information divorced from any semblance of life. Your school has that covered. You can memorize all the trivia you want, that doesn’t make you smart. It’s how you think about that trivia, how you add it all up and come up with an answer no one can provide you with that’s important. That’s intelligence, and wisdom walks hand in hand with it.” Uncle Mason gave me a look that was two parts affection and one part warning. “Are you up for it?”

I didn’t even think about it. “Yes.”

He gave me a warm slap on the shoulder as he walked past me. I followed him, the unknown painting veiled in black whistling for my scrutiny.

DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 1)

I broke into a sprint as soon as I saw Uncle Mason’s car pull up to the front door. He’d been in Hong Kong on business and come straight from the airport, but even in absentia he’d made sure everything would be ready for the Fourth of July party. The housekeepers had cleaned every inch of every building. The pool and hot tub had been filled and chlorinated. The landscapers had trimmed every piece of greenery in the compound. The only thing missing had been him.

I threw myself into his arms as he got out of the car. “Hey, Anna,” he chuckled. “How you doing, kid?”

“What took you so long?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry,” he said, leading me to the house, his arm around my shoulder, mine around his waist. “I was hoping to be here before you guys arrived, but they were late refueling the plane in San Francisco, then we had to circle over Philly for a while, and on and on.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sounds like a sorry excuse.”

“I got news for you: that’s largely what adult life is—a series of sorry excuses.”

“Well, do better.”

“I fully intend to, fancy pants.”

I was seventeen, that age when precociousness morphs into arrogance, when you convince yourself that you’ve got the world all figured out, but you’re too frightened to actually deal with it. Uncle Mason had been my favorite—period—since I was twelve. That was when he moved back to Jersey, had the compound built, and based his business in Madsen.

The other kids had always been content to enjoy his property like it was an amusement park, but I liked talking to him. I could tell him about what was going on in school, and he’d teach me all the forbidden knowledge, everything beyond the purview of my textbooks. I could tell him the truth about what my friends and I had done this one night, even about boys, and he’d listen like a friend. And his two cents would be worth a million dollars, because he never wagged a finger or glared at me from under a furrowed brow. He’d take the time to understand where I was coming from. He’d remember when he was my age and share his own stories and never worry that I’d get the wrong idea. He’d always spoken to me like an equal. Even when he was talking about “adult life,” it was never with the stink of condescension. I got the sense that he hated it as much as I did, that he was giving me tips for how to handle it in the future, rather than drawing me a map and warning me not to deviate from the path lest I fall to my death.

He wasn’t like the rest of the family, and the rest of the family felt the same way. Mum-mum and my aunts were in the kitchen preparing the salad and sides for the barbecue. My mother had just joined them as Uncle Mason and I walked in.

“Hi, Mason,” she said. To call it perfunctory would be generous.

“How are you, Sue? Hey, Mom,” he said and kissed Mum-mum on the cheek.

“Oh,” my grandmother said, “so he’s here finally. Only two hours late.”

“I was thinking of you the whole time,” was Uncle Mason’s reply.

My mother pointed to me, and asked him, “Did she tell you she made honor roll?”

“No, she didn’t,” he answered, beaming.

“I always make honor roll,” I reminded my mother.

Her smile withered, and she gave me a look that contained the sum total of five hundred fights. She turned to Uncle Mason. “Listen,” she said, “I need to talk to you,” and raised her eyebrows in conspiracy.

I translated, “She wants to talk about the divorce.”

“Anna!”

“Am I wrong?”

“It’s a separation.”

“Whatever.”

“Okay,” Uncle Mason said, “Let’s talk.”

My mother looked at him like he’d just farted at the dinner table. “Well, go say hi to everybody first. I still have to get all this ready.”

Uncle Mason turned to me. “Hang with me.”

He greeted the rest of the women in the kitchen with kisses, ignoring the begrudging politeness with which they barely lifted their heads. He exited the main house to the patio, and I followed as he made his circuit. He greeted the elder statesmen of the clan, Uncle Pete and Uncle Francis and the like, in their seats on the patio. He shook their hands and asked how each of them was doing. They regaled him with tales of their most recent stress tests and how much fluid was pulled out of their knees, but they never bothered to ask about him. Some of the younger kids en route to another side of the pool ran past him. He greeted each of them by name, sometimes to no answer at all. He greeted the family matrons at their table in the shade by the pool. They all complained about how much worse their husbands were getting. “We’re going to have to take the keys from your uncle soon. The man can’t drive anymore.” “Do you know anyone at Saint Drausnius? Because Dr. Acampora wants to put your uncle on Coumadin, and I don’t think he needs it.” Then there was, “Barb, my hairdresser, her daughter’s recently a widow. You should meet her.”

That last one triggered Aunt Ginny. “What happened to Melissa?”

Aunt Theresa turned to her older sister. “Ginny, Melissa broke up with him years ago. Remember? We all thought she was the one…”

The other old women joined in, oblivious to Uncle Mason’s continued presence. The smile never left his face. If anything he accentuated it. Once they’d finished telling him to meet someone and give his mother some more grandchildren, as if she didn’t have enough, Uncle Mason moved on to the men of his generation gathered around the grill on the far side of the pool. They shook his hands, all smiles, but it only took a few minutes before they were needling him about politics.

“So, did the tax cut do anything for you, or do you still hate Trump?”

Uncle Mason said, “Well, I’d have preferred it if that money had gone to rebuilding dams or fixing bridges, so me and a few others are starting an NPO f for infrastructure improvement.”

I don’t think they heard him at all. They just kept going, not even insulting him but insulting Obama and Democrats in general and socialists, which I guess is what all Democrats are to them. I was a little surprised the n-word didn’t pop up. And Uncle Mason just stood there, taking it, never rising to challenge them, the smile never leaving his face.

I said, “Yeah, God forbid someone with money not hoard it all for themselves.”

My Uncle Rick said, “Excuse me, little girl, you’re speaking to adults.”

“And you’re insulting the man who invited you into his home. Who are you to lecture anybody?”

Before Uncle Rick could reply, Uncle Mason put his arm around me, turned me, and started escorting me away. “Anna, honey,” he said, “I got this. Thank you, but I got this.”

“They’re rude,” I spit.

“I know, but listen. I’m going to finish saying hi to everyone, then I have to talk to your mother. I’ll find you.”

I accepted the dismissal and wandered off. All I did for the next hour or so was wander. The little kids were all in the pool, playing games or trying to top one another with increasingly precipitous jumps off the high-dive. The girls who were all slightly younger than me were tooling around the three-hole golf course behind the house in motorized carts, practicing for the days they would get their licenses, getting a little taste of imaginary liberty. My younger brother, Felix, was with the other boys on the tennis court, using the net and surrounding cage for whatever asinine competition twelve-year old boys engage in, until one either breaks something or hurts himself, and a parent has to stomp over and put an end to it. I couldn’t find any of my older cousins, likely because they were hiding where they could imbibe one controlled substance or another with impunity.

I ended up leaning against a tree in the rolling pasture of Uncle Mason’s front yard. If there’d been rocks, I’d have kicked them. To my left Uncle Pete and some of the other older men were playing bacci. To my right some of my older cousins and younger uncles were playing bag toss. I could hear the kids in the pool playing. Everything around me was intact and functional, and I kicked a pinecone across the grass.

I don’t know how long I was there before Uncle Mason showed up. “Now,” he said, leaning against my tree, “where were we?”

“What’d my mother want? Money?”

“What makes you say that?”

“The divorce.”

Uncle Mason paused, then asked, “What have your mother and father told you?”

“Exactly what parents are supposed to: it’s not your fault, we still love you, all that.”

“Do you not believe them?”

“I believe them, but don’t bullshit me. They keep calling it a separation, but when mom has to step out of the room every time a lawyer calls, what am I supposed to think?”

“Why do you think your mother would need money?”

“ ‘Cause Dad makes more than she does, so he can hire better lawyers.”

“Do you miss your dad?”

“I see him and talk to him.”

“But he’s not in the house anymore.”

“That’s on her. He wanted to work things out. She didn’t.”

“Well, Anna, things haven’t been right between your parents for a while.”

“Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. It was always her voice I heard screaming when I was in my room. They would wait until Felix and I were supposed to be asleep, and then they’d talk, and she’d end up screaming. I never heard him raise his voice.”

He flashed me a lopsided smile and asked, “Did you ever open your door? Listen from the top of the stairs?”

I gave him a shit-eaten grin of my own.

“Yeah,” he said, “when my parents would fight, I would sometimes eavesdrop. After a while I realized I was hearing things I didn’t want to hear. When you’re a kid, you don’t realize your parents are as clueless as everyone else.”

We walked across the yard for a time, silent. I was grateful that he didn’t tell me that I would understand one day, long after that moment, when it would be of no use to me.

Uncle Mason said, “But tell me about the fun stuff. What about you and your friends? What are you guys excited about now?”

“Right now I’m not talking to them. Dakota… okay, right now Dakota is probably shacking up with her track coach.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s really happening. She admitted it to me and Janelle. And Janelle is thinking about sneaking down to Baltimore to meet this guy she started talking to online.”

“That’s not smart.”

“That’s what I told them. Both of them. I told Dakota she’s being statutory raped by Mr. Harlington, and Janelle could end up dead. She doesn’t know this guy. She doesn’t even know if he’s really the guy in the picture he sent her.”

“And they’re pissed at you for not supporting them.”

“I don’t know what they’re pissed at. Like, I’m their friend, and I’m just supposed to tell them to do whatever they want, even if they get hurt? No. That’s not a real friend.”

“Well, you’re right about that. Thing is, Anna, most people don’t want real friends.”

“If I was going to do something stupid, I’d want them to tell me not to.”

“But you wouldn’t think it was stupid.”

I couldn’t find a counterpoint to that, so we ambled over to the edge of the lawn in quiet. We walked along the fence of pines that ran the boundary of the compound.

“What about school?” Uncle Mason asked. “How are your grades?”

“I’m honor roll. Maybe you haven’t heard.”

He chuckled. “What’s your favorite subject?”

“I love English. My teacher last year, Mr. Lench, he’s great. Like, I get Shakespeare now. I swear to God. Like not every word obviously, but we read Macbeth, and he taught us to not be intimidated by the poetry and just get that these are people with very understandable desires and fears. It’s awesome.”

“Fantastic. You really should see Shakespeare live. The text itself is great, but there’s no comparison to seeing actors performing it. I’ll take you next time there’s a good staging.”

“That would be amazing.”

Uncle Mason nodded. “What else?”

“I like History too, but my teacher’s…”

“What?”

“No, it’s just my teacher last year. She was—okay so, she’s teaching us about the French Revolution, but she’s giving a way-too simplistic version of why it happened. Like, her origin is kind of like a Marxist reading of it, but it’s not even that close. It was just the first two estates versus the third. She doesn’t take the liberal nobles into account. She doesn’t consider that poor parish priests were all for reform. She completely skipped over how important the wars were.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Without the wars the French Revolution goes in a different direction. There’s no Reign of Terror.”

Uncle Mason asked, “Where’d you learn about the French Revolution?”

“I listen to history podcasts.”

“I thought podcasts were just comedians talking to each other.”

“They have podcasts about everything now. Search a topic and you’ll find a podcast on it.”

“Huh. So, how did you respond to her erroneous version of history?”

“First, she said I was wrong because that wasn’t what she was teaching. Then, I got detention for telling her she was teaching lies.”

“Oh, Anna, don’t ever tell a teacher they’re wrong. And don’t ever prove it in public.”

“Why?”

“People have gone to war rather than admit they were wrong. You tell someone in a position of power that they’re wrong, especially in public where they can be humiliated, all they hear is someone challenging their authority. From that point forward you’ve got a target on your back.”

“Yeah, Ms. Miklos hated me after that.”

“See?”

“Then she shouldn’t be a teacher.”

“If we only listened to people without flaws of their own, no one would listen to anybody.”

“So what, I should listen to Uncle Rick and Co. when they start shitting on Democrats?”

“Don’t conflate listening with obedience. You listen to your opponent so you can learn who they are, where they’re coming from, what they want, what they’re afraid of. You learn everything you can about your enemy, then you use that knowledge against them.”

“Yeah, and in the meantime white nationalists get to scream hatred and run over peaceful protesters because they elected rich versions of themselves.”

“ ‘You say you want a revolution?’ ”

I was barely able to spit the words out. “I-I feel sometimes like this country needs one.”

“We line the villains up against a wall, right? But then we’re no better than they are.”

“You can’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.”

Uncle Mason chuckled again. “Kid,” he said, “you know what rhetoric is?”

“It’s like spoken propaganda, right?”

“Rhetoric is persuasive language. That’s all. From the beginning, going all the way back to ancient Athens, it was all about persuading people to do what you wanted them to do and feel how you wanted them to feel. And even in the ancient world, long before psychology was a field of science, smart people recognized that human beings were governed by emotion much more than they were intellect. The Greeks and the Romans both recognized that rhetoric had nothing to do with presenting facts and parsing through evidence. Word usage, inflection, body language were all much more important. Rhetoric isn’t about intellectual arguments. It’s about emotional manipulation, and there’s no greater motivating emotion than fear. I’ve listened to every word you’ve said, and when you said, ‘You can’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance,’ you told me that you were so scared, you were prepared to deny another human being their humanity. That you can rationalize behavior you find revolting and hateful in other people when it’s for the greater good. And I think you already know that every holocaust and mass killing and act of terrorism, all the darkest acts in history were committed for the greater good.”

I scrunched my face into a knot of adolescent sulk, as if someone had spit my own bile into my mouth.

And as if on cue, Uncle Mason said, “And right now you’re angry because I just said you were wrong.” He looked at me with a smile. “Right?”

I looked up at Uncle Mason, confounded that a man so cultured and enlightened could be unfazed in the face of doom. “It’s scary,” I said.

He put his arm around my shoulder. “Sure it is,” he said. “You know it’s all fucked up, but you don’t know what you can do about it. That’s scary. And that’s why you listen to the other side. Sun Tzu—know your enemy. Knowledge is power, and the more you know, the less helpless you are.”

We’d rounded the front yard and reached the driveway. I didn’t want to go back, be around everyone, hear all the celebratory self-obsession. No words, well intended as they were, were going to turn the world upside-down.

Uncle Mason saw it. “I have an idea,” he said. “If you’d like to learn something that could prove useful, that is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll show you during the fireworks. I’m correct in assuming you don’t care if you miss them?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“Okay, but there are two conditions. One, this is our secret. You don’t tell anyone. Not even that I’m going to show you something during the fireworks. No one knows anything about this. Not your mom, not your friends. You tell no one. Agreed?”

“Not a word.”

“Two, this is a lesson. I want you to learn from this experience. This is not going to be about thrills and spectacle. You are going to learn. Do you understand me?”

“Okay.”

He nodded and smiled. “I’ll come get you just before the fireworks start.” A little conspiracy for two.

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 4 - The End)

The Goddess, the Artist, and the boxed-up statue sat in heightened chairs around a table in the back of the bar. Amidst the din of inebriated trivialities the two women nursed their drinks, Nella a vodka-cranberry, Ieajaita a beer.

“I think there’s something to the idea of the Muse,” said Nella. “You know? I mean, like, the actual Muses from Greek mythology.”

Ieajaita smiled. “Do you?”

“Well, look at it this way: the idea of art being a fundamental part of a human being basically exists in every pagan religion. Greco-Roman obviously. And in Hinduism you have the Apsaras.”

“The twenty-six dancers of Indra’s court, /” said Ieajaita, “each the embodiment of a different art.”

Nella nodded, her face pained. “In the Vana Parva they’re supposed to seduce virtuous men.”

“The Vana Parva does not say ‘men.’ / It states, ‘persons practicing rigid austerities.’ ”

“Yeah,” Nella smirked, “but we know what that means.”

Ieajaita leaned forward. “Saraswati, / goddess of art and wisdom, / is essential to Brahma’s mechanism / of cyclical creation.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that every civilization that ever lasted was a patriarchy. The matriarchies get wiped out.”

“Does that disqualify / our necessity?”

Nella scoffed. “You should ask my father that.”

Ieajaita leaned back. “The man does not approve of your vocation.”

“He doesn’t approve of taking on student loan debt for me to go be an artist.”

“And for what occupation / has your father / agreed to indebt himself?”

“Physical therapy. His least objectionable idea.”

Ieajaita nodded and allowed a moment of silent thought to pass. She said, “My father too derided My calling. / He considered it a travesty, tantamount to sin.”

“What d’you do?”

“My job, dear girl, / as meant to be.”

Ieajaita’s smile washed the scars on Nella’s heart. The Artist opened her mouth to speak, but she swallowed every word that pricked her tongue. She closed her mouth and looked away.

“You remind me of a boy,” said Ieajaita. “I knew long ago. / A tad younger than you are now, / his talent was unparalleled, / his passion without peer. / But sadly he practiced his Art among / ignorant men who balked at his proclivities. / His medium was the human heart / in all its splendor and buffoonery, / and he deployed his Art in aid / of his father and his kin. / But in this boy’s time and place / the Art was the realm of the feminine. / For the masculine to practice was / to invite a sentence of death.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“And yet the boy persisted, / for to not embrace The Promise / that resided in his heart / would have incurred a far worse fate.”

“Did they kill him?”

“Would have, were it not / for the women of his ilk, /” said Ieajaita. “They claimed the boy as one of their own. / An adept with a wand, / and so natural a weaver, / they could not in conscience geld / an ergi of such potency. / They fed him henbane twice, / ensconced him in their twine, / and once unwound, their cocoon / revealed him in her distaff glory.”

Nella sat, mouth ajar, lost in a dense tangle of the story’s fantastical shadows and the illumination beaming through the wood above.

Ieajaita’s eyes invited belief, insisted on it. “The Art unveils Truth, / even to those who live by the bridle, / and Truth is a River that nourishes all.”

Nella swallowed. “They remade him.”

“Through The Art.”

Nella met Ieajaita’s gaze. “You make art sound magical.”

“Only, my girl, / because it is.”

“I feel like I’ve heard the story before.”

Ieajaita leaned toward Nella. “It may never before have graced your ears, / but know you Truth—assuaged are your fears.”

“I just realized You never told me Your name.”

“Must you hear a symbol / to know of what it speaks?”

Nella’s breaths grew fast and loud. Ieajaita placed Her hand on Nella’s, and the boisterous surroundings vanished. There was only Ieajaita and Nella, everything else erased by consequence.

Nella whispered, “I knew. Somehow I knew.”

Ieajaita near-chanted, “The spirit coursing through your tender hands / was born in water flowing recherché. / You know the number not who beg and pray / to swim, consigned to trudge across the sand. / Possess you talent foreign to the mind / but well acquainted with the well-sprung blood. / It Speaks to Me in torrents, as a flood / baptizes Truths that only you will find. / But you must grasp your due, invoke your touch / of whimsy and your gloom to turn a stone / expunged into illuminated psalm. / And lift your head you must to do as much. / The fearless Artist never is alone, / for only she will God sit in her palm.”

Nella braced herself for the sky to open and speak to her. “What do I need to do?”

“Only relent, /” said Ieajaita. “But be warned: / you will never be the same.”

“I don’t want to be.”

Ieajaita nodded. She tossed two twenties onto the table, picked up her boxed statue by the string, and motioned for Nella to follow her.

They exited the bar, turned down an alley, then turned down another. Ieajaita and Nella faced one another in a sliver of shrouded space between two buildings, on an single plane choking on the lightlessness. Their faces stood inches apart.

Ieajaita took Nella’s hands. “I love Artists, /” She intoned. “They are My people. / I only regret / that I cannot do more.”

Nella’s lip quivered. “Please,” she whispered. “Help me.”

Ieajaita barely nodded as a tear welled. She removed the glove from Her right hand. The alley bloomed white, as Ieajaita placed Her hand over Nella’s eyes.

The bus screamed to a stop at the corner. Ieajaita and Nella stepped off and started down the street, Ieajaita holding the woman’s hand, leading her, while Her other hand held the statue in its box. Nella’s eyes floated in syrup, lost in sweetened magnificence. She was jetsam on The Endless River.

Ieajaita turned to her as they neared 433 Mellon. “It won’t be long, / my dear girl.”

Nella didn’t hear a word.

Ieajaita took her by the shoulders as they neared the porch. “There are steps before you. /” She said. “Raise high your roof beam, carpenter.”

Nella’s head stared across the water, blind to the material world, as she lifted her feet and ascended the stairs.

Ieajaita swung open the front door and walked Nella through. She closed it, then led the young woman through Her bedroom, to the door to the basement. She turned Nella toward Her, grasped the sides of her head, and aimed her eyes at Her own. “Nella, my dear, you are almost there. / You need only make a brief descent. / Keep in mind the lyre of Orpheus, / and follow the music down your path.”

Nella, feeble-minded, smiled.

Ieajaita bowed Her head. She opened the door to the basement, and turned Nella around. “Go, dear child.”

Nella started down the staircase.

Ieajaita closed the door and headed back through Her bedroom. She went up to the second floor and opened the door at the top of the stairs. She walked into the bedroom, unoccupied save for dozens of pieces entombed in wooden boxes and paper wrappings. Ieajaita placed Nella’s statue amongst the other boxes. Let your discovery augur your greatness, She prayed, then closed the door as She left the room.

She returned to the basement. She heard Her friends feeding beneath the stairs before She’d fully descended. She walked to the opposite wall and slumped to the floor, ignoring the stains on the ground.

She stared into the black beneath the staircase, saw the shadow-cloaked churnings of the Charchilla and Aberras as the moist sounds of slaughter drooled across the room. She spun her mind back to paintings and etchings and sculptures She’d once granted credence, long lost works whose Creators’ names have been exiled to anonymity. She remembered their imaginings, representations of the horrors that were Her friends. Ground littered with mortal remains, survivors fleeing with mouths open in terror, nightmares drawn into the waking world. Try as She did, She saw none of that beneath the stairs.

When the sound of crunching bone came to a halt and blood ceased to drip onto the floor, the Charchilla and Aberras padded out from beneath the staircase, into the dying halogen of the basement. Ieajaita waved them over. They curled up beside Her, the Charchilla on Her left and Aberras on her right. Ieajaita stroked Aberras’ exposed spine. A tumor popped and flecked Her cheek, and Ieajaita pet the Charchilla’s open wound.

“Medication fades apace, /” she said, “faster than a friendly face.” A tear escaped Her eye. “Await the day that I may die / on the sword that’s my own lie.”

HENBANE GRAVITY (Pt. 3)

Ieajaita followed the macadam to a massive six-tiered nautilus, three floors above ground and three below. Albright’s Gallery hosted the work of the city’s aspiring painters, sculptors, illustrators, and photographers. The curators required no fees for admittance and took no commissions from sales. Madsen’s visual Artists, aspiring and otherwise, could exhibit their work to any and all interested.

Those interested were in short supply. The spectators pacing through the gallery talked among themselves about everything but the work before them. They choked on the scandals spilling out of the news cycle, standing on the shoulders of far-off calumnies. They traded judgments on their friends and neighbors, trading in gossip from the peak of an upturned nose. They dwelt on their dinner plans with the rigor of a physicist attempting to pick a lock on the cosmos. Flipping through television channels only half-paying attention.

Ieajaita could relate. She ascended the escalating spiral and let Her eyes listen to the walls. She looked upon paintings in oil and watercolors, illustrations in pencil, ink, and charcoal, sculptures in clay and stone, photographs, in both black-and-white and color, printed on paper and glass. She passed one photograph: black-and-white, high contrast, deep focal length, digital. It was a view of a building, some wide-assed edifice squatting somewhere in the city. Long, straight shadows sliced across the bone-white face of the building. Pure formalism.

Ieajaita could have run Her hand over any piece and not once come away with fingers coated in the fine, vestigial dust of Inspiration. There was merit to be found in that gallery, but nothing Spoke, not to Her or any others. The Artists had dipped their toes in Her realm, but they longed only for applause. A panoply of indifference, visions for the blind.

She circled the gallery’s uppermost tier and started Her descent, when ahead and out of view sounded a foghorn of a voice, strident and fearful. “Obviously the cup is vaginal. You’re all familiar with that symbolism. But note the scythe protruding out of the cup like a straw.”

Ieajaita followed the voice to an emaciated woman standing before and indicating the highlights of a collage. The composition was pure classical, right down to the geometric equations. It was a depiction of a view with which She was all too familiar: Nargory restored and Her Divine Queen resurrected. But it was no invocation. This was a hologram, a fractal Frankenstein’s monster. Each item had been drawn in moue-faced pixels, then shrunken like a head, copied, printed, cut out, and pasted together with its clones. Pinocchio pieced together from Geppetto’s homunculi.

“Lyuemper,” the collagist said, “is the only goddess in mythology to hold a scythe. Every other scythe-bearer, including the grim reaper, is unmistakably male. And reaping the harvest was a male’s job. But here’s Lyuemper of the Vanfiri carrying a very large and emasculating blade.

“If you go through all the old Vanfiri myths, the Uros-and-Lyuemper stories all follow the same formula: Uros does something Lyuemper doesn’t like, she calls him on it, he begrudges her wisdom. So Uros is only the petty, angry father figure because of his wife’s ceaseless hectoring. And she’s the philanderer, not him. Lyuemper is the Ur-embodiment of the female threat, and every misogynistic depiction in religion and folklore can be traced back to her.”

Ieajaita turned, swallowing Her fury, the taste of rust settling on Her tongue, and started down the spiraling gallery. One of the great virtues of Art was what the audience brought to it, She knew, the downside being that some saw blue and called it red. Had the truculent dilettante been looking for something other than the indignities she’d suffered, she might not have come to such a pig-ignorant fucking misunderstanding.

Ieajaita knew the truth. She had been there. Lyuemper had been The Great Mother. Man had needed Her advocacy to counterbalance Uros-on-High’s judgment. Discipline tempered by love. And Her infidelity: to whom was She to have shown fidelity? To Uros, King of All Gods? How could She not have remained faithful to the omnipresent and irresistible? Would metal spurn a magnet, or the earth its moon? Lyuemper’s fidelity had been to man, all of man, and She had remained faithful to The End. She had given Life, and it was not The Great Mother’s failing if cowardly bottom-feeders didn’t know how great a gift Life was. The Goddess of The Arts knew, and, like all Gods, She knew the alternative.

Ieajaita neared surface level when She felt the sudden gravity of henbane. She stopped. Someone was Speaking, the voice a thread woven through the air. Ieajaita followed it down the sloping floor. Every piece She passed stood mute. The other visitors pantomimed their inattention, Her every sense committed entirely to the Creation’s voice. At first she’d heard only a vague, intimated immediacy, but as the lure grew, as she neared the gallery’s depths, the taste of rust was consumed by mandrake. Black swallowed the winding corridor, leaving only a white glow that ballooned as She neared. What was it?

It was Her. A statue of The Goddess of The Art. Two-and-a-half feet tall, carved of cedar. The gouges were imprecise, sometimes violent. The posture was tired. Accented with hairs of watercolor, the paint seemed to be fading before Her eyes. A far cry from antiquity’s polish.

But that distance heralded Truth. This was not a depiction of traditional beauty in gleaming stone, of genuflection before a now-extinct glory. This was not the Ieajaita Who had traversed the cities of a civilization unknown even to legend, Who had sat before supplicants and graciously accepted their lionization, Who had with only a wave of Her hand blessed the Artist with the power to realize his or her most honest visions. This was a depiction that had never before been Created. It was Ieajaita as She was now.

The statue was Speaking to Her, Her own voice crying out in a nonsense meter. How? Ieajaita’s knees weakened and Her head bobbed in champagne. The surrounding blackness, already total, grew even darker, and the bursting white of the statue filled Her eyes with tiny pulsars that throbbed a rhythm conceived in strangeness. Ieajaita closed Her eyes.

“Do you like it?”

The young woman stood like a camphor bowed by storm. Her pale eyes, swimming in starlight, shrank into her skull. She was an entire world’s feelings embarrassed to a single point.

Ieajaita collected Herself. “I do, /” she said. “Very much indeed.”

“Thank you,” she said, then stood mute for moments, before she said, “Nella Davies. This is my piece.” She offered her hand like a rabbit peeking out its hole.

Ieajaita shook. “Very pleased to meet you, Nella, / and congratulations on an / exemplary piece of sculpture.”

Nella stage-whispered, “Thank you,” through a sheepish grin.

“I’m fond of your choice of degradable materials. / What prompted it?”

“Um…” she started, “well, I-I like working with a lot of different materials. You know, it all depends on what you want to do. And with this one I just hadn’t worked in wood for a while, so I grabbed a block of cocobola I had laying around, and… I just started carving without really thinking about it. And as it started to take shape, I just kinda felt like it should be in something that wouldn’t last. You know? Like, it’s more important that this sculpture is for right now and not, like, a hundred years in the future. You know? And that’s why I painted it in watercolor.”

“An astute choice, /” said Ieajaita. “And, may I say, / Your technique is remarkable, / Precise but passionate.”

Nella’s head drooped. “Thank you. I, uh, I actually think my technique is my weak spot. I was just kinda in the zone with this one.”

“All too apparent. / But tell me: / Why paint it?”

“Well, I figured since, like, all those statues from antiquity were painted, this one should be.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. Just, like, as I was carving away at it, it just took on this female form that, I guess, it was… it felt like it was something that would’ve been made back then. You know? Like, even though it’s not marble and it’s not supposed to be anyone special, it just felt like… like it was this embodiment, this representation of something great but indefinable that we all have in common.”

Ieajaita smiled, nodding. She turned back to Herself. “Yes.”

Nella stood beside Her. “What do You feel when You look at it?”

Ieajaita gave Herself over to the statue and said, “I feel a kinship with unknown eyes, / a stranger’s voice that could be mine. / Everywhere I’ve never been / feels familiar. I’m one / link in a chain that / spans the breadth of / the entire / planet / earth.” Ieajaita turned to the sculptress.

The young woman beamed, her hair cast out of her face, her head high. “Thank you. Thank you so much. That’s all I wanted. That’s all I want people to feel, that they’re not alone.”

“I would like to buy your statue. / How much will you take?”

“Serious? You seriously want to buy it?”

“I never announce / disingenuous intentions.”

“You really like it that much?”

“It may be the finest piece I’ve yet to see / In all my time in Albright’s Gallery.”

“Then I want you to have it. No charge.”

“Please, my child, / don’t be foolish.”

“If you like it that much, I want you to have it.”

Ieajaita stood between Nella and the statue. “Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors. / You offer your work without recompense / and pussyfoot in speech and posture. / You are an Artist, / and you must be the first to endorse your own legitimacy. / Do not devalue yourself or your endeavors.”

Nella felt the knife twist and lowered her head. “I know. You’re right.”

“Then raise your head / and demand your pittance.”

Nella inhaled, raised her head, and said, “I’d ask 500 for this, but I’m not going to. I don’t have any good explanation, but I don’t want to charge you. And just so you know, I have charged people before. I usually make money off my work. But I don’t want your money.” She pointed to the statue. “You get it, and people don’t usually get it. So let me thank you and give you the statue.”

Ieajaita examined her in silence, tilting Her head to a more advantageous angle. “Under the condition, /” She said, “that I may buy you a drink / and plumb your mind for greater attitudes / and loftier considerations.”