Nevermore
by Ian R. MacLeod
Illustration by Mark Evans
Now that he couldn’t afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but to paint what he saw in his dreams. With no sketchpad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling up from the pillow and his mouth dry and his jaw aching from the booze he’d drunk the evening before—which was the cheapest means he’d yet found of getting to sleep—he was left with just that one chance, and a few trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful before he had to face the void of the day.
It hadn’t started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it had probably ended. Representational art had had its heyday, and for a while he’d been feted like the bright new talent he’d once been sure he was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under your fingernails would probably come back into style again—long after it had ceased to matter to him.
So that was it. Load upon load of self pity falling down upon him this morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What had he been dreaming? Something—surely something. Otherwise being here and being Gustav wouldn’t come as this big a jolt. He should’ve got more used to it than this by now… Gustav scratched himself, and discovered that he also had an erection, which was another sign—hadn’t he read once, somewhere?—that you’d been dreaming dreams of the old-fashioned kind, unsimulated, unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological optimism. The hope that there might just be a hope.
Arthritic, Cro-Magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs, knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the controls of his window in the pock-marked far wall, changing the perspectives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across something better. The sun and the moon were blazing down over Paris from their respective quadrants, pouring like mercury through the nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint this scene speeded through him. He’d finished at least twenty paintings of foreal Paris; all reality engines and cabled ruins in grey, black, and white. Probably done, oh, at least several hundred studies in ink-wash, pencil, charcoal. No one would ever buy them, and for once they were right. The things were passionless, ugly—he pitied the potentially lovely canvases he’d ruined to make them. He pulled back from the window and looked down at himself. His erection had faded from sight beneath his belly.
Gustav shuffled through food wrappers and scrunched-up bits of cartridge paper. Leaning drifts of canvas frames turned their backs from him toward the walls, whispering on breaths of turpentine of things that might once have been. But that was okay, because he didn’t have any paint right now. Maybe later, he’d get the daft feeling that, today, something might work out, and he’d sell himself for a few credits in some stupid trick or other—what had it been last time; painting roses red dressed as a playing card?—and the supply ducts would bear him a few precious tubes of oils. And a few hours after that he’d be—but what was that noise?
A thin white droning like a plastic insect. In fact, it had been there all along—had probably woken him at this ridiculous hour—but had seemed so much a part of everything else that he hadn’t noticed. Gustav looked around, tilting his head until his better ear located the source. He slid a sticky avalanche of canvas board and cotton paper off an old chair, and burrowed in the cushions until his hand closed on a telephone. He’d only kept the thing because it was so cheap that the phone company hadn’t bothered to disconnect the line when he’d stopped paying. That was, if the telephone company still existed. The telephone was chipped from the time he’d thrown it across the room after his last conversation with his agent. But he touched the activate pad anyway, not expecting anything more than a blip in the system, white machine noise.
“Gustav, you’re still there, are you?”
He stared at the mouthpiece. It was his dead ex-wife Elanore’s voice.
“What do you want?”
“Don’t be like that, Gus. Well, I won’t be anyway. Time’s passed, you know, things have changed.”
“Sure, and you’re going to tell me next that you—”
“—Yes, would like to meet up. We’re arranging this party. I ran into Marcel in Venice—he’s currently Doge there, you know—and we got talking about old times and all the old gang. And so we decided we were due for a reunion. You’ve been one of the hardest ones to find, Gus. And then I remembered that old tenement…”
“Like you say, I’m still here.”
“Still painting?”
“Of course I’m still painting! It’s what I do.”
“That’s great. Well—sorry to give you so little time, but the whole thing’s fixed for this evening. You won’t believe what everyone’s up to now! But then, I suppose you’ve seen Francine across the sky.”
“Look, I’m not sure that I—”
“—And we’re going for Paris, 1890. Should be right up your street. I’ve splashed out on all-senses. And the food and the drink’ll be foreal. So you’ll come, won’t you? The past is the past, and I’ve honestly forgotten about much of it since I passed on. Put it into context, anyway. I really don’t bear a grudge. So you will come? Remember how it was, Gus? Just smile for me the way you used to. And remember…”
Of course he remembered. But he still didn’t know what the hell to expect that evening as he waited—too early, despite the fact that he’d done his best to be pointedly late—in the virtual glow of a pavement cafe off the Rue St-Jacques beneath a sky fuzzy with Van Gogh stars.
Searching the daubed figures strolling along the cobbles, Gustav spotted Elanore coming long before she saw him. He raised a hand, and she came over, sitting down on a wobbly chair at the uneven swirl of the table. Doing his best to maintain a grumpy pose, Gustav called the waiter for wine, and raised his glass to her with trembling fingers. He swallowed it all down. Just as she’d promised, the stuff was foreal.
Elanore smiled at him. And Elanore looked beautiful. Elanore was dressed for the era in a long dress of pure ultramarine. Her red hair was bunched up beneath a narrow-brimmed hat adorned with flowers.
“It’s about now,” she said, “that you tell me I haven’t changed.”
“And you tell me that I have.”
She nodded. “But it’s true. Although you haven’t changed that much, Gus. You’ve aged, but you’re still one of the most… solid people I know.”
Elanore offered him a Disc Bleu. He took it, although he hadn’t smoked in years and she’d always complained that the things were bad for him when she was alive. Elanore’s skin felt cool and dry in the moment that their hands touched, and the taste of the smoke as it shimmered amid the brush strokes was just as it had always been. Music drifted out from the blaze of the bar where dark figures writhed as if in flames. Any moment now, he knew, she’d try to say something vaguely conciliatory, and she’d interrupt as he attempted to do the same.
He gestured around at the daubs and smears of the other empty tables. He said, “I thought I was going to be late… The underside of the canopy that stretched across the pavement blazed. How poor old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes! And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.
“What—what I told you was true,” Elanore said, stumbling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. “I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we did talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time’s precious, and, at the end of the day it’s been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn’t come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they’d keep. But I thought—well, I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time.”