Electrical engineer. Berg and Nordstrom.
There. So let a little girl indulge her harmless false consciousness, will you?
Go on. Your priceless painted masterpieces.
"Our art treasures," Elise always called them. Hold it. I thought she was asleep?
I got her up now and then. Eventually, I taught her how to play in the day.
You could see them by daylight? The pictures? Oh, the pictures were real. You had priceless art on the walls of your bedroom? Fake real. Not imaginary, 1 mean. Ouch. My brain. Someone hit the Reset.
My mother used to buy us prints of famous paintings for our walls. Our Gallery of Visual Instruction. Cheap reproductions to remind the two of us of just how much our mother sacrificed to bring us into the world.
Sacrificed?
Her father sold insurance. Reasonably well-off. He warned her not to marry Air Force. She thought she was in love. She thought it'd be romantic, raising kids on air bases around the world. It wasn't. Raphael was supposed to compensate. The Hudson River School She was indiscriminate, so long as the thing said "culture." She told you all this?
In every way but words. It worked, I guess. We girls both bought in. Sometimes, in daylight, Elise and I would parade in front of the prints, saying, "Oh yes, we had to have them. Even though they cost us our millions."
Another planet. One of us is from another planet. Would you be so kind as to tell me to whom you are referring? Well, it sure the piss ain't me, sister.
Her laugh went up the wrong pipe. Choking on her spittle made her laugh all the harder. She flapped her arms. He would have patted her on the back, except that it involved touching.
She caught her breath. Yd lie there in the dark, in that luxury stateroom, nursing this story in my head about bringing our millions back from exile in the form of the world's best bullion. The only truly priceless commodity: human genius. Things there would never be more than one of. Something harsh took over her face. Jackdaw looked harder away.
First there was that spoiled little blond Infanta, always bursting into our private stateroom as if she owned the joint. And then that sly, pretty girl at the half door. Our mother went to her grave insisting she was a Rembrandt, even after the Rembrandt scholars ruined her forever. For a long time, we had the world's most ethereal newlyweds, with their fantastic scrub brush of a dog. Their alcove seemed to open off our own cabin.
Show me, he told her.
Oh, I put them all in the jungle. Every painting that hung in any of the bedrooms I've ever lived in. You've seen little parodies of all of them. Except one.
That one being…?
The Bedroom at Aries. The bed by the shores of the Mediterranean. She spoke in a trance, her eyes resting ten meters past the front wall of the Cavern, her voice addressing a thing long out of earshot. The devastating one. All tilted and wrong. The bedroom of a man our mother made the mistake of telling us had gone mad.
She looked at him: you know the man I mean? Jackdaw nodded. But he didn't know.
That room was my father's. My father was the madman. God, we saw so little of him, growing up. So absent, so enraged. Captain Klarpol, the silent warrior, gone for months at a stretch, flying those horrible machines ten times bigger than any house we lived in, dropping God knows what on God knows whom. And when he did come home, we three always paid for the latest round of missions. He… we… I thought: If I could just give him something. Find out what he needed…
A quiet room somewhere, by the other Mediterranean. The far shore, where they never got posted. A fictive, all-restoring summer home.
I'd peek out at this room, from under my down comforter. I'd gaze into that periscope, looking back into a miniature, blazing version of our room. Bed, chairs, washstand, shaving mirror, floor, shuttered window. Even the madman's own paintings, leaning out at crazy angles from the painted wall…
You could see all this? In the night. From across a dark room.
Well, see, that was the thing. I never could decide whether I actually saw them, or whether I just supplied all the brushstrokes from daylight viewings. And that got me thinking. Got me started playing the game.
Wait. I thought that was the game.
No, no. The real game. The game of free the shutters. Ocean crossings are never smooth, you know. You always hit some longitude, two nights out of wherever it is — Le Havre — when the sea rises up and bites you. The prevailing winds, the North Atlantic currents. Or maybe the captain just passes out on the ship's wheel at 3 a.m., after a bout with the aquavit.
She stared off at a bitter old friend. Images rose up around her— detailed, familiar still lifes she'd kept in deep storage for twenty years or longer, now back in vengeful retrospective.
I'm really sorry, he said. But I have no idea what you're talking about.
No, of course you don't, do you? The snarl surprised her. She recovered fast, waving off her lapse. Ocean liners pitch. It's what you pay them to do. It's how you know they're ocean liners. And it was up to me, in my first-class berth, to preserve the laws of physics aboard ship by making the paintings shift when the cabin did. I'm not sure I want to hear about this.
Now, Jackie. You're the big advocate of interactivity. The first time it happened, it was an accident. I was looking without really seeing, and the bottom left of the Infanta frame, well, fluttered. I saw a ripple, something wrong in the comer of my eye. Like the shift in a branch that turns out to be a walking stick.
Trying to avoid the big mammal's notice.
Well, maybe this painting was doing just that. Because as soon as I whipped my head around for a good look, nothing. Scared stiff.
That's what I figured. So I decided to lie in wait. Pretend I was busy noticing something else. I held my breath, as motionless as those pictures were pretending to be. And that's how I saw it again. I knew it was impossible, but I'd always suspected it. The frame around the Infanta shifted again.
Your ocean liner…
… listed toward port, and our gallery of visual instruction tipped with it. Don't you dare laugh. It really happened. And it scared me shitless.
I believe you. I'm not laughing. I… believe you.
Every slide of the pictures against the wall made the ocean swell beneath me. God. There's nothing more powerful than an eleven-year-old girl concentrating in the dark. Over several months, I trained myself to see the twitch, even when staring at the pictures dead on. First my body would yaw inside, then the frames would slip. After a while, I could rock the frames at will. No more than a few camel ham width. But visibly tilting, whenever I said so.
You're lucky you didn't drive yourself completely nuts, he said. Then
caught himself.
Funny thing was, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Something everyone should be able to do. I'm not saying it was effortless. It was exhausting. Sometimes it took hours. Clearing my mind of every thought except waiting. Concentrating on not concentrating. Waiting for the wave to hit my body. Wait without waiting. She shuddered at the description, panicked all over again. I had to nudge at the paintings without trying. Tug at their corners with the side of my eye. They were stuck in amber, all the thickened time that had settled on them since they were painted. I had to glance past this crust to rock the picture underneath. The moment the idea of pushing came into my mind, I had to start all over. I didn't move them; I let them move. Then one day, I graduated to the game's next secret level. I let myself into that lopsided bedroom. You — you've really never seen it? Sorry. I've been busy.