Memory and Dream

black’s always been your color.” Izzy would have given her a whack, but she felt too weak.

“Let’s just go home,” she said.

For once she got to sit in the front seat without there being a long discussion as to who had sat there the last time, and considering how much taller Kathy was, she really deserved the extra legroom.

“It’s like what happened to Rochelle all over again,” Jilly said from the backseat once they were on their way.

But Izzy shook her head. “No, I just got beat up.”

“And the cops were almost human,” Kathy said.

Izzy started to drift off as the conversation turned to what shits the police usually were. An image of her attackers floated into her mind as she dozed, but she could make out their faces now. They all looked like Rushkin, which didn’t make any sense at all. She woke when they arrived at the Waterhouse Street apartment, desperately clutching the braidedribbon bracelet on her wrist.

“Did you tie ribbons on the fire escape outside my window the other night?” she asked Kathy later, when the two of them were alone in her bedroom.

“Ribbons? What kind of ribbons?”

Izzy gave her a little shrug. “I don’t know. I guess it was something I dreamed.”

Like she’d dreamed Rushkin killing her winged cat. Attacking Paddyjack. Attacking her ....

Except the ribbons were real—she had the proof on her wrist. When Kathy finally left her so that she could sleep, she managed to shuffle her way to the window. The envelope with the other two bracelets she’d put in it was gone. She pressed her face against the icy windowpane.

“I didn’t mean what I said,” she whispered, her breath frosting the glass. “I don’t care what you are.

I love you too much to ever really send you away.”

There was no reply. John didn’t come walking down the alley and climb up the fire escape to be with her, appearing at that exact moment the way he always did when she wanted to be with him. But then she hadn’t been expecting a reply. She didn’t expect to ever see him again.

That was the second of many nights that she cried herself to sleep over what she’d lost by sending him away.

X

Newford, April 1975

Of all her friends, Rushkin and John were the only ones who didn’t come by to visit her at one point or another while she was convalescing in the Waterhouse Street apartment. A regular stream of visitors were in and out of the place for the whole of the three weeks she was cooped up—never staying long enough to tire her out; just letting her know that they were thinking of her. Even Albina came by.

But she never heard from John. She did hear from Rushkin. Though in some ways she thought he needn’t have bothered. He sent a letter that had nothing to say about what had happened to her or that he hoped she’d get well soon. Rushkin, it seemed, was having his own problems: Isabelle,

As you understand, I must go away for a time. I hope you will continue to use the studio in my absence. I have left a key for you, under the clay flowerpot by the back door.

I can’t say how long I will be, but I promise to contact you before I return so that, should you wish, you will not have to see me. If this should be the case, I will understand. My behavior has been unforgivable.

Yours, in humility, Vincent

But she didn’t understand. Not what Rushkin was referring to. Nor why John had once been able to appear whenever she needed him, week after week, for so many months, as though he could read the need as it quickened in her heart, but that he could no longer read it now.

She was afraid that she’d inadvertently sent him back into the otherworld from which her art had brought him. The painting remained unchanged, it still retained its vitality, but John himself might as well never have existed.

She vowed, in the days as she slowly mended, to bring no more beings across from the before. John had been right. Who was she to play god? Who was she to bring an innocent such as Paddyjack across and then abandon him in the unfamiliar streets of the city? But Kathy disagreed.

“You told me yourself,” she argued. “You don’t force them to come across. All you do is open the door for them. You offer them the possibility of a shape or a form as rendered in one of your paintings, but they’re the ones who choose whether or not they find it agreeable. They decide if they want to climb into the skin you’ve made for them, not you.”

“But if it’s dangerous for them ...”

“Ma belle Izzy, it’s no more dangerous for them than it is for us. For all we know, that’s the way we come into being as well, but we simply don’t remember it. Maybe we were all no more than bits of spirit floating around somewhere and instead of checking out a painting, we got to decide whether or not we wanted to slip inside our mothers’ wombs.”

“But I’m not God,” Izzy said. “I can’t assume that kind of responsibility.”

“I’m not saying you are.”

“But how can I be responsible for them all?”

“That’s where I disagree with John,” Kathy said. “I mean, it’d be no different from how it works with us. You get born and then you’re pretty much left to make your own way through life.”

“That’s not true. We have parents to help us through the formative years.”

“Not all of us do.”

“You know what I mean,” Izzy said.

“Of course I do. But the difference here is that the beings you bring into existence are already mature.

Think of what John was like. If you want to play it safe, just don’t paint any infants or children.”

Izzy shook her head. “I don’t know ....”

“Nobody can force you to do it,” Kathy said. “I’m not trying to force you. But I do think you were given a gift and to not use it, to not give these beings a chance to live—the choice to live—is to abuse that gift. Not in the same way John says Rushkin does, of course, but it’s wrong all the same. Sure it’s a dangerous world out there, but it’s just as dangerous for us and we make do.”

“But why put anyone in a position where they have to risk that clanger in the first place? Don’t you think it would be better to just leave them where they are?”

“I can tell you’re not planning to have children.”

Izzy sighed. “It’s a consideration, isn’t it?”

But Kathy remained firm in her belief. “If they didn’t want to come across, they wouldn’t inhabit the bodies you paint for them. They make the choice.”

“But—”

“Then think of it this way,” Kathy said. “One of the reasons the world’s in such sad shape is that no one believes in magic or wonder anymore. The beings you bring across could well spell the difference between the flat, grey world that most of us see and one filled with actual manifestations of enchantment and mystery. Confronted with the results of your magic, people might learn to look up from the narrow field of vision that lies directly in front of them and actually see the world they’re in and the people they share it with. When that happens, maybe we’ll finally start to take care of it and each other better.”

“It still doesn’t seem fair to make them risk their lives like that for us.”

“It’s not just for us,” Kathy said. “It’s for them, too. You can’t tell me they don’t like it here, or why else would they choose to cross over? I’ll tell you this: I don’t think I ever met anyone so enamored with being alive as John is.”

Izzy couldn’t deny that. “Okay,” she said. “But that’s still an awfully big assignment you’re setting for me.”

“But one worth attempting. I can’t think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don’t care what form one’s art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it’s not doing its job. And I don’t mean just making things that are pretty. I’m talking about confronting the problems we see and trying to do something about it. Trying to get other people to see those problems and lend their help. That’s why I write the kinds of stories I do.”