The truly weird thing was, when I'd gone into that blank at the Monet exhibit, I'd at least still been aware what I was looking at. A pond. And lilies.
But I have simply no idea, to this day, what was actually depicted on the canvas that Jer showed me. Except that I'm sure it wasn't abstract.
A pastoral scene? A garden? A house? Cityscape? Night sky?
I just don't know.
What were the main colours used?
So far as I can remember, all of them.
Jerry shook me rather annoyedly.
"Hey, man!"
"Wh —»
I looked away, with difficulty.
"Dave? I've been talking to ya, like, the last five minutes. You been dropping too many painkillers?"
I looked back at the painting.
Jerry shook me again.
I didn't even say «wh-» this time. Didn't look around. He had to physically put a hand to my face, turn it.
"Dude, what are you on tonight?"
I shook my head, trying to clear it. "Nothing," I replied, trying to hide my own confusion.
Something in me screamed out not to look back at the painting.
"Ain't it great?" Jer was enthusing by this time, though. "And they're all like this, all the ones I've looked at, anyhow. And I don't normally dig this kind of stuff, but these are… such amazing use of colour! Hubert was a genius!"
He set the painting back in place, face inwards. I felt a massive sense of relief.
Now, however, Jerry switched into full Scheming Mode.
"We can't just move them all at once." His tone had become staccato. "What I say is this. We take a half dozen of the smallest ones —»
"You take them. I'm a cripple."
"And we show them around some galleries and stuff, and get some valuations. Man, the ones I've seen aren't even signed. I could say that I did them myself."
Which made me wonder if the art world was quite ready for someone like Jerry Mulligrew.
"And if it turns out they're worth something, yeah? We can borrow Ray's pickup and load it up. We might be sitting on a goldmine here, bro!"
He chose five, in the end, of the little ones he liked the best. Helped me through the window, but then let me limp back home myself.
What had happened back there? Just what had I seen? Colours flashed behind my eyelids, every time I blinked.
There was two-thirds of a bottle of generic vodka waiting for me when I got indoors. I finished the lot during the next couple of hours. Don't remember going to bed.
It was noon the next day when I awoke. I was woken by the phone.
"Dude?"
My tongue just about managed, "Hi, Jer."
"You've gotta get over here!"
"The house again?"
"No, man. April's!"
April was a waitress he'd been dating — if you could call what Jer did that — for the past couple of weeks. She lived a couple of blocks crosstown, on Miller Drive.
"What's up?"
"I'm, like, scared man. She is really out of it. I think she's gone and done some bad stuff."
"Call an ambulance, then."
"Man, get your butt here!"
The hangover drew attention from the pain in my ankle, at least. I went up the short flight of steps to the front door of April's tiny but incredibly neat dwelling. Went to press the buzzer, but the door was off its latch.
I found them both in the elevator sized living room, April sat cross-legged, and Jer hunkered over her, every contour of his body a map of concern.
Her pretty, fine boned face was entirely slack. A trail of saliva depended from her painted lower lip into her lap. A pool was forming.
She didn't seem to blink at all. Her pale blue eyes — were they reflecting something?
"She was like this when I found her," Jerry said, his face screwed up with inner pain.
And it was a familiar one. People like us, with acquaintances like ours? Once every so often, a pal, a girlfriend winds up in this state and finishes up in ER. Quite literally finishes, from time to time.
He'd just never believed it would happen to someone like April. Yes, she did a little blow, like any normal person. But nothing else that either of us knew about.
She was facing something that was propped against her armchair. I couldn't see it from this angle.
"Tell me what happened?" I asked.
"Man, I dropped around to see her last night, after… you know! We smoked some, then fooled around a little. I even brought her a gift. Came back here 'bout ten this morning, and she was like this. Her skin's cold, man, like she's been sitting here all night!"
There were no spoons, candles, or tin foil near her. I inspected her arms, found no tracks.
Then I looked at what she was looking at.
Jerry… shook me.
"Dude, what the hell are you doing?"
I had to force myself to look away.
"That's the gift?"
"I thought, why not? We've got plenty of them to spare."
"Jer, there's something wrong with these paintings."
"Say what?" And, incredulous, he almost laughed. "Man, they're just so great. They're… beautiful. See? I said it. I acknowledged the existence of your kind of beauty."
"Jer, they —»
"It's gotta be some pills or something," he was babbling away, though. "Pharmaceutical smack or something. Man, if I get my hands on whoever gave her that stuff —»
And he would not be told otherwise. He took her in a cab to the local ER in the end, bumming ten off me towards the fare.
I followed them out, refusing to glance back.
April was in a coma, though the people at the hospital could not discover why. It was not drugs. I went to see her the next day. Swore I could see flecks of surplus colour in her open, staring eyes.
The thing that keeps people like Jer going and makes survivors of them — it is their ability to just move on. It's not that he didn't care. Far from it. It's just that he realized, without having to vocalize it, that continued existence depends on — do I really have to use that old "moving shark" metaphor?
Over the next couple of days, he hauled the five paintings — he'd taken April's back — around some dozen galleries.
"What is with it with these fools?" he now complained. "They're supposed to be businessmen, and all they do is gawk? I couldn't get a price-tag out of one of them! And for such beautiful paintings!"
And I finally realized what this was. It was all to do with — immunity. Resistance levels.
A disease goes around, see? A plague. And most people succumb. But a few just have something natural in them that subdues the sickness, makes it less effective.
So it was with Jer. He'd always been aloof towards fine paintings. Totally immune to artistic beauty. And so, when the bug had struck, it had affected him to a degree — but had not felled him completely like the rest of us, apparently.
«Jer-» I tried to tell him for the dozenth time.
But he still wasn't prepared to listen. Maybe that was a part of the paintings' limited effect on him.
When he went home, he looked annoyed enough to do something exceptionally stupid.
Which bothered me enough to go around at ten o'clock and check up on him.
The door wasn't locked. The pungent aroma of California Gold hit me as I went into the hallway.
There were no lights on in Jer's living room. Just the glow of those three screens. That was strong enough to pick out, on the little dining table, an open jar of pharmaceutical coke and a half-empty bottle of bourbon.
Jer was hunkered over the screen of the middle computer, and there was a scanner humming beside him, and several wooden picture frames lay scattered on the floor.
His back was in the way, so I could only see the edges of the image on his screen. It was enough.