Oddly enough, I hoped for him. I felt a sympathetic response to his desire for freedom. My heart raced and my brow broke a sweat, as if it were I and not that ungainly pinkish figure who was stepping from rock to rock, arms outspread for balance, groping for purchase on the slick surfaces, wobbling a bit, straining against gravity and fear. I had no apprehension of an inimical presence as I had detected that morning, and this made me think that it had been nerves alone that had stopped me from escaping and increased my enthusiasm for Colangelo’s escape. I wanted to cheer, to urge him on, and might have done so if I had not been surrounded by the silent members of the board and their faithful intimates. That Colangelo was doing what I had not dared caused me envy and bitterness but also infected me with hope for myself. The next time I was alone at the gate, perhaps I would be equal to the moment.
The wind kicked up, outvoicing the chuckling rush of the river, sending sprays higher over the rocks, and along with the wind, the brightness of the river intensified. Every eddy, every momentary splotch of foam, every sinewy swell of water glinted and dazzled, as if it were coming to a boil beneath Colangelo. He kept going past the midpoint, steadier, more confident with each step, unhampered by the buffets of the wind. Close by the gate the boughs bent and swayed, stirring the shadows, sending them sliding forward and back over the dirt like a black film. The whole world seemed in motion, the atoms of the earth and air in a state of perturbation, and as Colangelo skipped over the last few rocks, I realized there was something unnatural about all this brilliant movement. The shapes of things were breaking down… briefly, for the merest fractions of seconds, their edges splintering, decaying into jittering bits of bright and dark, a pointillist dispersion of the real. I assumed I was imagining this, that I was emotionally overwrought, but the effect grew more pronounced. I looked to Czerny and the board. They were as always—distracted, apparently unalarmed—but what their lack of reaction meant, whether they saw what I did and were unsurprised, whether they saw something entirely different, I could not determine.
Colangelo let out a shout—of triumph, I believed. He had reached the shore and was standing with a fist upraised. The sand beneath his feet was a shoal of agitated glitter, and at his back the bank was a dark particulate dance, the forms of the trees disintegrating into a rhythm of green and black dots, the river into a stream of fiery unreality. How could he not notice? He shouted again and flipped us off. I realized that his outlines were shimmering, his prison garb blurring. Everything around him was yielding up its individuality, blending with the surround, flattening into an undifferentiated backdrop. It was nearly impossible to tell the sprays of water from sparkling currents in the air. The wind came harder, less like a wind in its roaring passage than the flux of some fundamental cosmic force, the sound of time itself withdrawing from the frame of human event, of entropy and electron death, and as Colangelo sprinted up the bank into cover of the forest, he literally merged with the setting, dissipated, the stuff of his body flowing out to be absorbed into a vibratory field in which not one distinguishable form still flourished. I thought I heard him scream. In all that roaring confusion I could not be certain, but he was gone. That much I knew. The world beyond the annex gate was gone as well, its separate forms dissolved into an electric absence of tremulous black, green, and silver motes, depthless and afire with white noise, like a television set tuned to a channel whose signal had been lost.
The board and their retainers moved away, talking softly among themselves, leaving me on the edge of the prison, of the pit, watching as—piece by piece—the forest and river and rocks reassembled, their inconstant shapes melting up from chaos, stabilizing, generating the imitation of a perfect moonlit night, the air cool and bracing, the freshness of the river sweetly palpable, all things alive with vital movement—boughs shifting, fallen needles drifting, light jumping along the surface of the water with the celerity of a charge along a translucent nerve. Even after what I had seen, I stood there a long while, tempted to run into the night, disbelieving the evidence of my senses, mistrusting the alternatives to belief, and so oppressed in spirit that I might have welcomed dissolution. A step forward, and I would be free one way or another. I stretched out a hand, testing its resistance to the dissolute power of the world beyond, and saw no hint of blurring or distortion. Yet still I stood there.
The anteroom is empty of scaffolding, swept clean of plaster dust, and I am sitting in a folding chair beneath the domed ceiling, like—I imagine—a gray-clad figure escaped from the lower portions of my mural. Years down the road I may look back and judge my work harshly, but I know at this moment I have achieved my goal and created something greater than myself. The mural rises up from solidity into the diffuse, from dark specificity into layered washes of light from which less definite figures emerge… less definite, at least, from this vantage. At close quarters they are easily identifiable. Bianca is there, a golden swimmer in the air, and at her side our son, her proof made flesh, born five months after our conversation in this very room. When told of his birth I went to visit her in the newly designated maternity ward of the prison hospital. Sleeping, she looked exhausted, her color weak and cheeks sunken, yet she was beautiful nonetheless. The child slept beneath a blanket in a crib beside her bed, only the back of his head visible. My emotions seemed to be circling one another like opponents in a ring. It was so strange to think of her with a child. Now that she had established the ultimate female credential, the freak detector in my brain emitted a steady beep. It was as if I were determined to paint her with a perverse brush, to view her condition and her Mystery in terms of an aberration. At the same time, I was drawn to her as never before. All my old feelings were reinvigorated. I decided to seek a reconciliation, but when I informed her of this she told me it was not what she wanted.
“You can’t hide what you feel,” she said. “You’re still conflicted.” She gave “conflicted” a distasteful reading and closed her eyes. “I’m too tired to argue. Please go.”
I sat with her a bit longer, thinking she might relent, but when she fell asleep again I left the room. We see each other on occasion. Each time we meet she searches my face but thus far has found no apparent cause for confidence there. I have little hope she will ever find me other than wanting, and the prospect of life without her grows more difficult to bear. It seems I cannot shake the skepticism that Frank Ristelli correctly attributed to me, for despite everything I have experienced at Diamond Bar, I continue to speculate that our lives are under the influence of a powerful coercive force that causes us to believe in unrealities. My chest, for instance. Some weeks ago I noticed a scatter of pale discolorations surfaced from the skin thereon, their hues and partly rendered shapes reminiscent of the tattoo on Ristelli’s chest, and yet when that tattoo achieves final form, as I assume it must, I will with part of my mind seek an explanation that satisfies my cynic’s soul. If the birth of a child from a woman once a man fails to persuade me of the miraculous, is there anything that will overwhelm my capacity for doubt? Only when I paint does the current of belief flow through me, and then I am uncertain whether the thing believed is intrinsic to the subject of the work or a constant of my ego, a self-aggrandizing principle I deify with my obsessive zeal.