City of Saints and Madmen

Roger Mandible, who, unbeknownst to Shriek, had created his subtle amber shades from the earwax of a well- known diva who had had the misfortune to fall asleep at a cafe table where Mandible was mixing his paints. It madeLake snicker every time he saw it.

After a moment,Lake walked over to Shriek and the gentleman and engaged in the kind of obsequious small talk that nauseated him.

“Yes, I’m the artist.”

“Maxwell Bibble. A pleasure to meet you.”

“Likewise… Bibble. It is exceedingly rare to meet a true lover of art.”

Bibble stank of beets.Lake could not get over it. Bibble stank of beets. He had difficulty not saying Bibble imbibes bottled beets beautifully…

“Well, you do… you do so well with, er, colors, ” Bibble said.

“How discerning you are. Did you hear what he said, Janice,”Lake said.

Shriek nodded nervously, said, “Mr. Bibble’s a business-man, but he has always wanted to be a—”

Beet? thoughtLake; but no: “… a critic of the arts,” Shriek finished.

“Yes, marvelous colors,” Bibble said, this time with more confidence.

“It is nothing. The true artiste can bend even the most stubborn light to his will,”Lake said.

“I imagine so. I thought this piece might look good in the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint.”

“ ‘In the kitchen, next to the wife’s needlepoint,’”Lake echoed blankly, and then put on a frozen smile.

“But I’m wondering if maybe it is too big… ”

“It’s smaller than it looks,” Shriek offered, somewhat pathetically,Lake thought.

“Perhaps I could have it altered, cut down to size,”Lake said, glaring at Shriek.

Bibble nodded, putting a hand to his chin in rapt contemplation of the possibilities.

“Or maybe I should just saw it in fourths and you can take the fourth you like best,”Lake said. “Or maybe eighths would be more to your liking?”

Bibble stared blankly at him for a moment, before Shriek stepped in with, “Artists! Always joking! You know, I really don’t think it will be too large. You could always buy it and if it doesn’t fit, return it — not that I could refund your money, but you could pick something else.”

Enough!Lake thought, and disengaged himself from the conversation. Leaving Shriek to ramble on convincingly about the cunning strength of his brushstrokes, a slick blather of nonsense thatLake despised and admired all at once. He could not complain that Shriek neglected to promote him — she was the only one who would take his work — but he hated the way she appropriated his art, speaking at times almost as if she herself had created it. A failed painter and a budding art historian, Shriek had started the gallery through the largesse of her famous brother, the historian Duncan Shriek, who had also procured for her many of her first and best clients.Lake felt that her drive to push, push, push was linked to a certain guilt at not having had to start at the bottom like everyone else.

Eventually, asLake gave a thin-lipped smile, Bibble, still reeking of beets, announced that he couldn’t possibly commit at the moment, but would come back later. Definitely, he would be back — and what a pleasure to meet the artist.

To whichLake said, and was sorry even as the words left his mouth, “It is a pleasure to be the artist.”

A nervous laugh from Shriek. An unpleasant laugh from the almost-buyer, whose handLake tried his best to crush as they shook goodbye.

After Bibble had left, Shriek turned to him and said, “That was wonderful!”

“What was wonderful?”

Shriek’s eyes became colder than usual. “That smug, arrogant, better-than-thou artist’s demeanor. They like that, you know — it makes them feel they’ve bought the work of a budding genius.”

“Well haven’t they?”Lake said. Was she being sarcastic? He’d pretend otherwise.

Shriek patted him on the back. “Whatever it is, keep it up. Now, let’s take a look at the new paintings.”

Lakebit his lip to stop himself from committing career suicide, walked over to the table, and retrieved the two canvases. He spread them out with an awkward flourish.

Shriek stared at them, a quizzical look on her face.

“Well?”Lake finally said, Raffe’s words from the night before buzzing in his ears. “Do you like them?”

“Hmm?” Shriek said, looking up from the paintings as if her thoughts had been far away.

Lakeexperienced a truth viscerally in that moment which he had only ever realized intellectually before: he was the least of Shriek’s many prospects, and he was boring her.

Nonetheless, he pressed on, braced for further humiliation: “Do you like them?”

“Oh! The paintings?”

“No — the… ” The ear wax on your walls? he thought. The beets? “Yes, the paintings.”

Shriek’s brows furrowed and she put a hand to her chin in unconscious mimicry of the departed Bibble.

“They’re very… interesting.”

Interesting.

“They’re of my father’s hands,” Lake said, aware that he was about to launch into a confession both unseemly and useless, as if he could help make the paintings more appealing to her by saying this happened, this is a person I know, it is real therefore it is good. But he had no choice — he plunged forward: “He is a startlingly nonverbal man, my father, as most insect catchers are, but there was one way he felt comfortable communi cating with me, Janice — by coming home with his hands closed — and when he’d open them, there would be some living jewel, some rare wonder of the insect world — sparkling black, red, or green — and his eyes would sparkle too. He’d name them all for me in his soft, stumbling voice — lovingly so; how they were all so very different from one another, how although he killed them and we often ate them in hard times, how it must be with respect and out of knowledge.”Lake looked at the floor. “He wanted me to be an insect catcher too, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I had to become an artist.” He remembered the way the joy had shriveled up inside his father when he realized his son would not be following in his footsteps. It had hurtLake to see his father so alone, trapped by his reticence and his solitary profession, but he knew it hurt his father more. He missed his father; it was an ache in his chest.

“That’s a lovely story, Martin. A lovely story.”

“So you’ll take them?”

“No. But it is a lovely story.”

“But see how perfectly I’ve rendered the insects,”Lake said, pointing to them.

“Yes, you have. But it’s a slow season and I don’t have the space. Maybe when your other work sells.”

Her tone as much as said not to press her too far.

With a great effort of will,Lake said, “I understand. I’ll come visit again in a few months.”

The invitation to a beheading was looking better toLake all the time.

WhenLake returned to his apartment to work on Mr. Kashmir’s commis sion, he was decidedly out of sorts. In addition to his disappointing trip to the gallery, he had spent money on greasy sausage that now sat in his belly like an extra coil of intestines. It did not help that the image of the man from his nightmares blinked on and off in his head no matter how hard he tried to suppress it.

Nevertheless, he dutifully picked up the pages of illustrations he had torn from discarded books bought cheap at the back door of the Borges Bookstore. He set about cutting them out with his rusty paint-speckled scissors. Ideas for his commissions came to him not in flashes from his muse but as calm re-creations of past work. Lately, he knew, he had become lazy, providing literal “translations” for his commissions, while suppressing any hint of his own imagination.

Still, this did not explain why, following a period of work during which he stared at the envelope and the invitation where it lay on his easel, he looked down to find that after carefully cutting out a trio of etched dancing girls, he had just as carefully sliced off their heads and then cut star designs out of their torsos.

In disgust,Lake tossed the scissors aside and let the ruins of the dancing girls flutter to the floor like exotic confetti. Obviously, Mr. Kashmir’s assignment would have to await a spark of inspiration. In the meantime, the afternoon still young, he would take Raffe’s advice and work on something for himself.

Lakewalked over to the crowded easel, emptied it by placing four or five canvases on the already chaotic bed, pulled his stool over, retrieved a blank canvas, and pinned it up. Slowly, he began to brushstroke oils onto the