Chapter 1, Part 3

Vagabond

            Whoever it was, the man was still screaming. And it was beginning to become annoying, and not a little worrying. It was far away, oddly muffled, but constant.

            He checked out the window, but there was nothing to see. The screamer was far away, and from the sound of it, in another building. Ugh. Was he hitting the wall? Amid the screams were dull thuds, and the listener could have sworn he felt impacts traveling up the walls and across the floors, like when a car passes with the bass cranked up.

            That aside, it could not have been a better day. It was perfect. Open the dictionary to “perfect,” and there would be this day.

            And it was time to start it.

            Rising, still wobbly at the knees, the man reached over and turned on the water for the shower, relishing the cold shock of the metal knobs as he did. Magically, on command, the water can streaming down, and the man—who had been naked all this time—step-stummbled into the stream.

            Now he screamed.

            Not from rage or anger or endless pain or horror or loss. The water was cold. He had forgotten to turn up the hot water.

The cold droplets took the breath right out of him, and he nearly began heaving again. It was like a thousand needles falling into to him. He had experienced it in so long, his body didn’t know how to reaction. It was almost like an allergy. He had felt anything in so long.

 Noise clamored in his ears. The nausea had not quite receded from his insides, and was looking for an excuse. Quickly fumbling with the knobs, wheezing, gasping, accidentally inhaling water and coughing, he got the hot going. As the cold pulled back, the was another sensation. It was just as alien. He could physically feel his mind flipping through ancient memories imprinted lifetimes ago, searching for a match.

He was not used to this, his body. He had made himself invulnerable in all things. It wrapped him up in a surging, boiling blanket. When it was cold, he snuggled into it, child-like, further, deeper.

And now he threw it off. And the day streamed in.

           

Mirrorball and Bang

            He tapped the pad with his pencil.            

To some artists, a blank canvas, with all its unending nothingness, was terror. For Finn, you couldn’t hold him back.

            It was almost a mania. He had to draw. His studio was practically exploding with scribbles of inspiration. On napkins, newspapers, the backs of business cards. Even Post-Its. And where another may see what looked like a sneeze of ink, Finn saw the embryonic form of art, growing and expanding, out of the ether and into this world. To Finn, a canvas was something not to fear, but holy ground to revel upon, to fill, and ultimately, to thank for letting him change it into something else.

            Most of the time.

            Because now, even as his pencil tapped the notebook, the mania stopped. He had run up against a wall. He had never done so, and he found this new sensation disconcerting, to say the least.

            The drawing was the final in a series, ending in a pieta of two men. One character limp, seemingly lifeless, cradled in the arms of another figure, huge and in mid-stride, made to be walking toward the viewer. But the face… He stopped at the face of the standing figure. Done everything around it, from the ears to the chin to the swoosh of albino-white hair. The hair actually took up most of the scene. In fact, right up until the fact, this was the quickest of the series. As the drawing progressed, he had left it blank, figuring he’d get to it later.

            But now, everything else was done. Everything else was perfect.

            Michelangelo imaged the statues he carved were already in the marble, and he was just bringing them to light.

The rest of the drawing shot out of his pencil faster than any drawing before it. The limp figure’s face was easy: a blissful repose of sleep after an eternally long day (Finn had drawn Alastair sleeping so often it was not even surprising when the man woke up to find himself a model. They were some of the most sensual pictures the art scene had encountered in years) Now there was nothing else left to do, and Finn found himself at war with himself over what kind of emotion the walking figure should being wearing.

Vexed, he turned to a blank page and quickly sketched various emotions. None of them “worked.”

Watchful?

            Sorrowing?

            Ecstatic?

            Condemning?

…Bliss?

No

No

NO

…damn.