Sandra nods but thinks: That woman is not “that corner.” She is not “bed number eight.” She is not “the subject.” She is not the three-hundred-and-forty dollar per day Medicare payment. She has a name, a life. She still has a name, a life.
That night Sandra adjusts a heparin lock on the wrist of that woman. She moves with sure, gentle motions. Even through the narcotics the wrist and arm respond to pain. In the dim fluorescence Sandra notices the ancient skin. Sandra notices the pigmentation which looks dull but in fact contains myriad colors of the spectrum, the purplish bruise, bluish veins, the pale white of scars, the dull pink of feminine skin, and as the needle of the IV is seated within the lock the plastic tube is momentarily touched with the deep night indigo of human blood.
I will be alone in a bed like this someday. This will be me.
She may not last.
Umber is important for shadows.
In the bathroom in his apartment, Sandra undressed. As a nurse, Sandra had seen nude people hundreds of times. She hadn’t imagined that she would feel so uncomfortable removing her clothes here and putting on the chenille bathrobe he had advised her to bring for covering up when taking a break.
He was standing by his easel when Sandra entered, laying out tubes and jars of paint, arranging rows of brushes, glancing into the canvas. He mixed some tubes of pigment in with binders which reminded Sandra of thick lymphatic substance. She pulled back the shoulders of the robe, pulled it off completely, folded it and set it away from where he had an off-white cloth draped over a small padded chair.
With her clothes off, in the warm room, she had the fleeting sensation that her breasts were inadequate. Whenever she had undressed before a man for the first time, she had been very conscious of her breasts. All the hideous, silly teenager thoughts—will he think they’re too small, too large, the “right” shape?—all of these melted away as he looked at her. She somehow knew that in his eyes, she just was.
He took up some paint on a palette knife and started on the canvas. His arm moved with bold, confident strokes. She sat still, and when he looked at her again she said, “Do you want me to sit like this?”
She struck a pose which she imagined to be a painter’s subject’s pose—chin tilted slightly upward, shoulders back.
He smiled, but he seemed to be a little distracted. He was like a doctor involved with a patient, lost in that sort of concentration. “Oh, you don’t need to sit still. I’m not putting you in any sort of pose. I’m looking at you for reference, but I’d prefer that you move, that you act natural. Otherwise, it’s too much like painting a corpse. And you also need to, um…” He gestured at her waist with his brush.
She stood up. She normally wore cotton, but for some reason today she had worn a ninety-ten orlon/spandex blend. She liked the feel of it. She kept her eyes on him (he stared into the canvas, seemingly oblivious) and reached behind her midriff. She slipped the middle and ring fingers of each hand into the waistband of her panties and smoothly slid them down off her backside, down her thighs and shins, and stepped out of them. Between some people there are no secrets.
After about twelve minutes of sitting there in the mid-morning sunlight she said, “Have you ever done that?”
“Done what?”
“Painted a corpse.”
He kept his eyes on the canvas. He swiftly moved the brush back and forth from the canvas to the palette. The brush held an umber and gray blob of paint. She wasn’t sure if he was going to answer or not.
“Yes,” he said.
Chrome yellow, in its original form, is exceptionally brilliant—as in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”—but with the centuries it transmutes to a macabre greenish-black.
The boy was carried by wagon to the castle of the Count.
The castle was a stone and beam tower surrounded by a wall. It dominated the hillside and was silhouetted in the dusky light like a brooding, armored and cloaked figure.
Count Senescau had had once been described by his official chroniclers as “Senescau the Great, Father to Orphans, Patron to Widows, Eye of the Blind, Foot of the Lame.” But he had traveled to the Orient during the Crusades, and when he returned he was said to be suffering from some rare unspeakable disease, some disorder which beset him during campaigns in the Balkans and Carpathians.
It was whispered that the Count was blind; it was rumored that he was decomposing and could not tolerate sunlight or fresh air; it was feared that he had become mad and had abandoned Christian philosophies and beliefs for Eastern occult practices.
The boy was admitted into the castle. He trembled. He thought that he would die there.
In the donjon Jews and children were held. Hooded men worked with flaying tools and pinions. None of the cries pierced the stone floor.
The boy was led into a great hall. Count Senescau sat upon a throne carved of ebony and bone. The throne was carved with draconian motifs of claw-and-ball feet, heavily tendoned and scaled reptilian arms, with a riser back on which was carved in bas-relief the screaming face of a dragon.
Two distant torches illuminated the great hall. In their flickering light the Count appeared to be eaten by the shadows, appeared to be a skeleton gauzed in a greenish-black skin.
The Count spoke. His lips barely moved and his eyelids were merest slits through which the boy could see coal-black eyes.
“My clergy tells me that you were caught in a sunflower field with a girl from the neighboring farm. True?”
The boy nodded.
“And she was naked? You looked upon her? Learned her… secrets?”
He nodded again.
A slight smile played over the Count’s face, although it could have been a trick of the lamplight. As his lips parted slightly, the boy saw cruel teeth. The Count reached beside the throne and picked up something to pass to the boy. It was a leaf of hand-pulped and pressed rice paper, a crow quill, and a cork-stoppered jar of ink. (Or was it ink? It was a fluid which reflected the torchlight in glittering scarlet and indigo highlights.)
The Count spoke. “Draw my castle. Draw it from memory. You saw it as you rode up. Draw it. Pour your soul and your will and mind into that quill; place them outside your body for me to see. Your success or failure at this will determine your fate.”
The boy took the tools and crouched on the stone floor before the Count. The lamps failed to cast enough light for him to see the paper. It didn’t matter.
Occasionally the Count leaned forward to stare into the paper over the boy’s shoulder. The scratching of the pen on the grainy tooth of the rice paper was like the scrabbling of myriad tiny claws within the stone walls.
Later, the lamps weren’t burning as brightly and the shadows had deepened. The air in the reception hall had chilled. The boy set down the pen and leaned back away from the paper. The Count reached down and took up the sheet.
He stared into it for a long time. The castle was rendered in perfect detail, but the boy had betrayed himself. The buttresses and parapets of the tower gave the structure the subtle but distinct appearance of a man in aristocratic armor and cloak. The castle walls were cross-hatched to a shade of black similar to an etching, and embedded in the crosshatch patterns were dark and twisted forms, like the insides of a slaughtered animal.
“Don’t you wish that you could capture it all, boy? Don’t you wish that you could somehow go beyond the limits of ink and paint and paper, that your eye could see the Beyond, that you could reach through the Illusion into the Truth? It can be done, boy, and you can have it, at a price…”