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Now
John lights the match and it slips between his fingers and lands in a puddle by the dumpster. He swears, tries again. This time the flame rises, casting a bobbing light across his cupped hand. He inhales. Gasoline fills his flared nostrils. It smells good.
Ten months ago
Zero has kept them well over his promised ninety minutes. Eva and Sigint’s eyes have long since glazed over, and John can feel Para-Medic’s heel tapping impatiently under the table as Zero drones on. John shakes himself. He stopped taking notes half an hour ago, and instead is doodling idly in the margins of his notebook to keep his focus. He can see Eva’s ample cleavage from where he’s sitting, he thinks, in a moment of nearly divine inspiration. Even as he watches, she rolls her shoulders, stretches her arms in front of her. Her breasts squeeze together. He draws boobs, pair after pair after pair of them, some uncovered and some not, until he feels his skin prickle and looks up to find Para-Medic watching him, hawklike, from across the table. John blushes deep red and snaps his notebook closed, crosses his arms on top of it for good measure.
“—and I’ve kept you all past five again, we’ll continue next week,” Zero is saying. Eva immediately stands up from the table, followed by Ocelot and Sigint. Zero packs up his briefcase and leaves too. It’s just Para-Medic and John now. He hurries to the door, but she is faster.
“Snake!” she says.
He grimaces. “Yeah, about the drawings—”
“They’re good!” she says. “Do you have any more?”
He hesitates. “Well…”
Her eyes are kind and curious. He considers her for a moment, then sits back down at the table. He flips back to the beginning of the notebook. She rests one manicured hand on his shoulder, leans in to take a look. There is Zero, unmistakable with his long scar and frown, next to Sigint, with his newly cultivated afro carefully rendered with the flat side of a pencil. John flips forward a few pages. There are scattered drawings of mushrooms and plants on one page; a series of tangled snakes on another.
Para-Medic laughs. “Thinking of Tselinoyarsk?”
John looks away. “I was hungry.” He flips to the next page, which is taken up by multiple drawings of a doe-eyed figure with long eyelashes and a frown.
“Eva again?” she says.
“Ocelot,” John says, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world.
“Oh,” she says. “Of course.” She drums her fingers on his shoulder, contemplative. “Snake—how would you draw me?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “I only draw what I feel like drawing.”
She laughs. “And you haven’t felt like drawing me yet?”
“Nope,” John says.
Para-Medic smiles. “Fair enough,” she says. “The plight of the flighty muse plagues every great artist, I suppose.”
He frowns. “But I’m not an artist.”
“Sure you are,” she says.
“I don’t make paintings,” John insists. “Just these.”
“You don’t have to make paintings,” Para-Medic says. She thinks for a moment. “Snake,” she says, “come to the art museum with me on Friday.”
“Do I have to?”
“No,” she says. “But I’d like you to. If you want.”
He grumbles a little, but finally nods. “Fine,” he says, and puts his notebook into his bag and leaves.
It’s early enough that the museum lobby is not crowded yet. John approaches her with his nearly-drunk coffee in one hand, feeling very out of place indeed in the fancy domed room with his eye patch and worn wool turtleneck, and she sets down her shopping bag on the marble floor and hugs him. “It’s great to see you, Snake.”
She pays for his ticket at the booth, and they enter the first gallery. It’s full of dark oil paintings in gilded frames, the light and shadow of figures and objects rendered with pristine brushstrokes.
“See,” John says to her, “I’m not an artist. I could never do any of this.”
She laughs a little. “You and me both, Snake. But hold that thought.”
The next room is smaller, full of brightly colored paintings. The brush strokes are looser, the figures less precise. John likes these more.
“I still could never make any of these,” he says, surly. His turtleneck itches.
“Let’s keep moving,” Para-Medic says. They enter the next room. John frowns. One piece immediately catches his eye.
“This can’t be art,” he says, walking up to it. The date on it is much more recent than any of the other pieces they’ve seen so far. “It’s just a blue canvas.”
She smiles, and watches him.
He turns back to her. “Who would buy this?” he says.
“Sometimes it’s not about who would or wouldn’t buy something,” she says carefully. “Although I hear this one recently sold for somewhere in the millions.”
“Why?” John says. “It’s just blue. There’s no skill involved. I don’t get it.”
She snaps her fingers. “Exactly!” she says.
“Exactly what?”
“Snake, don’t you see?” she says. “You had a reaction to it! It’s art!”
“Hm,” John says. “Well, I don’t like it.”
“You don’t have to like it,” she says. “You just have to have a reaction.”
John can feel the start of something burning in his brain, at the back of his skull. He knows the wheels are beginning to turn. “So you can be an artist just by really pissing people off?”
“Well, when you put it like that, yes,” she says. John feels like he’s been lit on fire. He grins.
They walk along the street outside of the museum afterwards. John points to a dandelion growing up through the sidewalk.
“It’s yellow,” he says. “There’s my reaction. It’s art now.”
Para-Medic just nods sagely. “Yes,” she says. “Just as the robin was art, and the sweets wrapper was art, and the hole in the fence was art.”
John looks at her. “Come on,” he says. “This has all got to be bullshit. Are you making fun of me?”
“I’m not, Snake, I’m really not,” she says, earnest. “I just wanted to show you that art comes in lots of forms. Your drawings are not any better or worse than anything we just saw in the museum, or anything out here, either.”
“Yeah, but is it really art if it’s not hanging in a museum?” John says. “What is art anyway? Is all of this art? Is none of it?”
She smiles. “That’s the best part,” she says. “You get to answer that yourself.”
He bites his lip, worries it between his teeth a little. “What if I don’t have an answer?”
“Then that is your answer,” Para-Medic says. “Art is just a way of looking at the world. However you look at it is the right way for you.”
“Hm. Well, I don’t like that much,” John says, feeling a bit like his fire from earlier has gotten put out. “I’d rather have someone tell me the right way. I think I’d choose wrong.”
Nine months ago
“Can it be art if it’s not pretty?”
She laughs over the phone. “What does it mean to be pretty?”
“Well…I mean…” He can’t answer for a moment. “To be aesthetically pleasing, I guess.”
“To who?” she says. “Remember, something that’s pretty to one person might be ugly to another person. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, I guess that’s true.” And he hangs up.
“Can it be art if it’s not on a canvas?”
“What do you think, Snake?”
“Well,” John says, “when we were at the museum, they had sculptures and things. Those weren’t on canvases. But I mean drawings and paintings. Like—could you put paint right on a wall?”
He can hear the smile in her voice when she responds. “Is there anything stopping you?”
“My landlord,” he admits. “But I see your point.”
“Art is much more than putting paint on a canvas, Snake,” she says. “Or a wall, or what have you.”
“If you say so,” he says as he hangs up on her.
“Started making a collage of my old field notes,” John says. “Can that be art?”
“Yes, Snake.”
“Even if I don’t use paint?”
“Yes, Snake,” she says again, ever-patient.
“Even if I didn’t draw anything? Just used glue?”
“Yes, Snake.”
He sighs. “You’re impossible.”
“Always.” And this time she hangs up on him.
“Got a good one for you this time,” John says proudly. “I glued some leaves to a canvas. Bet that can’t be art.”
“Sure it can,” she says patiently.
“But it won’t last,” he says.
“Nothing really lasts,” Para-Medic says. “I heard that the Mona Lisa is so yellowed with varnish that you can barely see Da Vinci’s original brushstrokes and colors underneath. But they’re too afraid to take the varnish off and redo it, in case they ruin it forever. But in any case, all paintings decay eventually—restoration is just a temporary fix. And the earth is doomed to be swallowed by the sun someday, anyway.”
John teases the telephone cord between his fingers. “So why do we do anything at all?”
She laughs. “Tapping into nihilism, now, Snake?”
He grumbles a little. “Is this supposed to be making me feel better?”
“Maybe,” she says. John gets back to gluing leaves.
Eight months ago
They’re meeting for coffee every other week now, on top of the phone calls.
“So I’m an artist now, apparently, but—do you consider yourself an artist?” John says.
The rain pounds the sidewalk outside, and she ponders the question. “Well, I’d like to think I’m one,” she says. “Art and science go together, I think. Art is just one way of looking at the world. Science is another. The human body is art, I believe.”
John grunts. He lifts his mug to his lips. “If you say so.”
The baristas have begun to reserve the window table for them.
“It’s just a bunch of newspaper,” John mumbles, shrugging off his coat and unfurling his latest piece across the little table. “I put black paint on it. Not even close to being art.”
“Interesting commentary on censorship,” Para-Medic says, and smiles. John groans.
“Damn it,” he says. But he smiles too. He stands up to go order their drinks.
“It’s a wasp nest,” he says into the receiver, staring at it balanced on his desk. “I didn’t make it. I only found it. It can’t be art, right?”
“Well, you drew attention to it,” Para-Medic says. “There was intent.”
John purses his lips, scratches at his beard. He keeps staring at the nest. It seems to stare back at him. The paper almost looks like storm clouds swirling around some foreign planet.
“Can there be art without intent?”
She thinks for a moment. John can hear her fingernails tapping on the desk in that familiar way. “I think that if you see art in something, then that is the intent,” she says.
John sighs. “If you say so,” he says.
Now he can hear her smile, really smile, through the phone. “I knew you were going to say that.”
He’s having more and more fun with it now, and he can’t stop. He picks some grass, glues it to a red canvas. It sits on his desk for weeks and he watches the green strands turn to bitter yellow. He buys a completely new journal and hacks it to pieces with his pocket knife, then sweeps up the remaining scraps along with whatever dust was on his floor and sprinkles it onto flypaper, so that it sticks. Finally he stretches his own canvas—a giant one, bigger than he is tall—and gets down on his hands and knees on it, spreading paint around with his bare hands. When he’s done he covers it all up with black. He feels satisfied.
Seven months ago
“You know what, I think we should put on a little show,” Para-Medic says. “Rent a gallery space—invite everybody. We could make an evening out of it.”
“Hm,” John says. “Whatever you say.”
“Great!” she says. “I’ll start looking for galleries, set up a date…all that.”
“Okay.”
“Snake?” says Para-Medic.
“Yeah?”
“It’s always good to hear from you.”
That catches him off guard. “You too,” he says. It’s nearly automatic. But he means it, he thinks.
“I’m really glad you’re doing all this.”
He smiles a little. “So am I.”
The gallery is full of black-tie spectators.
“Quite a turnout,” Zero is saying. “Snake, I’m impressed. I never took you for a connoisseur of modern art. Para-Medic’s rubbing off on you, I see.”
John grumbles a little in response. He’s never been one for champagne, but it’s free. He lifts the flute to his lips. Para-Medic swoops in and confiscates it before he can take a sip.
“Better not,” she says.
“Why?”
“I was hoping you’d drive us home,” she admits, looking shifty. John groans. Ocelot, Eva, and Sigint are drinking champagne by the biggest canvas, the black one, in the back of the gallery. Zero avidly ponders the nearest piece, tilting his head back and forth to look at its carefully rendered black and white stripes. John almost smiles, remembering how he had made the straight lines with masking tape.
“You say nobody knows the artist’s true identity, Para-Medic?” says Zero.
“Not a soul,” she lies smoothly. “He prefers to stay out of the spotlight. A genuine eccentric. I read that it’s supposed to be some sort of meta-commentary on the state of the media.”
“Hm,” Zero says, and moves along. John wanders too, with Para-Medic at his side. There’s the big black canvas, and the grass, and the leaves, and the journal pages, and well-dressed people standing in throngs around each of them, speaking in low tones and gesturing with champagne flutes. Even the wasp nest is mounted on a platform at the center of the gallery. It looks good. They all look good. Para-Medic leans in, rests her palm on John’s shoulder.
“They’re loving your art,” she murmurs. “Look. Everyone is captivated.”
John looks at Ocelot again, at his high cheekbones and gray eyes and regal face, and feels a little sick.
She’s working late after the show. He knocks on the door to the lab, watches her look up from the desk and wave him in.
“What’s going on, Snake?”
He sits down at the bench dejectedly. “I don’t know,” he says. “I thought I’d be happy about the turnout for the show, I guess.”
“But you’re not?”
“But I’m not.”
She folds her gloved hands in her lap. “Want to talk to me?”
He doesn’t speak at first. He scratches under his collar, frowning at the table as if the right words will come flooding into his brain if he looks hard enough.
“Is it still art if nobody knows about it?”
She looks down at the floor for a while. Then she looks at the ceiling. John looks up too. Her eyes trace along the long, meandering stain on the tiles there. He hears her breath hitch slightly, before she locks eyes with him, scoots her chair over, and beckons him closer with a small smile.
“See these?”
John bends over the desk, peers into the microscope. She fiddles with the knobs for him before the blurry shape swims into focus on the slide.
He frowns. “What is it?”
“A human chromosome,” she says. “Amazing, isn’t it? All that wound-up DNA…everything that makes you a human, it’s right here. Too small to see with the naked eye, and we’re still not even close to understanding how it works, even with all our best tools. But even so, with or without our knowledge, it still exists…and it allows us to exist…”
John stares at the chromosome floating in its vast liquid expanse on the slide. He takes his eyes away from it for a second, dizzy.
“We have the capacity to process stimuli,” Para-Medic says. “That’s beautiful. Art, science—it doesn’t matter.” She looks towards the slide again. “And these are the key to everything.”
John manages a grim, bracing look in her direction. He looks away again. “They don’t know it was me,” he says.
“No,” she admits. “But they know that somebody, somewhere, cared enough to put an idea down on paper. That means something, Snake.”
“If you say so,” John says.
She drums her fingers on the desk for a little while.
“A lot of the world doesn’t even know what you do, Snake.”
“I know that.”
“But if you ceased to exist, the world would not be the same. You uphold normalcy,” she says. “That’s important. Very important.”
He thinks of Ocelot’s too-familiar face again, thinks of another face just like his, and feels another wave of sickness wash over him. “Is it?”
“Come here, Snake,” she says, and he allows her to put her arms around his back. They stay like that for a long time.
“You still want that ride home?” John mumbles after a while.
She surfaces from the embrace. “Oh,” she says, and gives him an easy smile. “No thanks, Snake. I think I’ll stay here a while longer.”
Now
John takes out his pocket knife as he tosses the match into the dumpster. It ignites immediately, a breathy, low sound. He looks down at the canvas on the ground. He gets on his knees, pulls the blade out with his teeth. The air is cooler down here, but getting warmer with each second. He nicks his tongue on the knife and tastes blood. It tastes good. He hesitates for a split second, knife in his fist, poised and ready. Then he plunges it into the canvas, rips it in two, carves apart that brown bob and the big brown eyes and the knowing smile. With his other hand, he hikes up his shirt and traces the scar on his belly, running his fingers over the neat, regular sutures. The heat is singeing his eyebrows, his mustache, his beard. It feels good.
He contemplates the shredded canvas for a moment. Then he tosses it into the fire. He watches the canvas burn, watches the fire lick across the fabric and darken her mangled face. He spits on the flames.
Pretty, he thinks.