“How did you meet him?”
“One of his showings up in Seattle. I was at art school and not loving it, and I actually skipped class to check it out. Went on from there.”
“And your pieces....” Ritter paused, hands in mid-gesture like he was about to clap a passing insect. “Or your work—”
“I throw whatever I feel at them. Feldman has a good way of bringing that out of you.”
“Bringing what out of you?”
“A Neo-Naturalist turns himself inside-out. He doesn’t dress up his work, encode it in metaphor, in cryptic treasure hunts. The art no longer passes through both hemispheres of the brain. It comes from the stomach, from the heart, from a time and a place even before language, certainly before our current civilization. Splattered full and raw. The human soul needs no translator.”
Ritter regarded him.
“The negative space of humanity,” Wilson said, “is how Feldman refers to it. The stuff unseen and unspoken that completes us.”
“That seems like expressionism.”
“It does express,” Wilson said. “It expresses a renewal.”
Outside, the foliage wavered in the wind. Growing cold. Colder.
“You’ll see.”
Ritter began, “So, Mr. Wilson—”
“Who are you?” Wilson asked abruptly.
“Excuse me?”
“Who are you? Why are you sitting here with me?”
Ritter snorted. These immature, dipshit artists. They were comedians too. They could do anything. Fuck with anyone. They loved it.
But Wilson continued staring expressionless at him.
“Mr. Wilson, I’m interviewing you for Direct Canvas. My name’s Norman Ritter.”
Across Wilson’s face floated a look Ritter had seen just ten minutes ago, at the start of the interview.
“I know Direct Canvas,” Wilson said. “You guys are growing, aren’t you?”
***
III
The Peters Museum proved somehow bigger on the inside than on the outside. Probably an illusion fostered by all these milling people, Max figured. The place was heated with conversation and thought and bodies, many of them esteemed—ostensibly—and older than he. He felt like the one penny in a wallet of bills.
Would any of these people recognize him? Unlikely. Despite recent traction, his career still hung in limbo between the comforts of anonymity and the pressures of an Iconic Voice. But could any artist working today even become such a thing as an Iconic Voice? Especially a “fine artist”? It seemed impossible—today’s ocean was too full, crashed too loudly. Everyone drowned. And, for those who might reach the sunlit shores, the fickle tide would snatch them back soon enough, return them to forgotten recesses.
Max checked his pockets, casually at first. Then, finding them empty, his hands frantically patted his front and back and cargo pockets. All empty.
There was only one other alternative.
“Karen....”
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t have any packets.”
“Packets?”
“Sauce packets, you know....”
“Oh.”
“Could you lend me a stick?”
“What?”
“You have any on you?”
“You quit.”
“This is an emergency. Please.”
Grasping his arm, Karen led him toward the entrance, narrowly avoiding collisions with several crisply-clad patrons.
The contrast was stark between the breath-body heat of the Peters and the chilly dusk.
They sat on the curb, feet planted in the street. A nearby lamppost threw harsh light against the evening. Karen equipped her mouth with a cigarette, lit up. Max watched with anticipation. Karen took a drag and flicked the ashes from the head, spewing them like fireflies into the dark.
She handed the cigarette to Max. “We share. Take a few puffs, but you you’re not getting a full one to yourself.”
Max took it and dragged, smoke filling and possessing him like a mindless ashen spirit.
“You okay?” Karen asked.
“Probably not.” Max took another sip of smoke. “I don’t know. It just all came rushing up to me, I guess, these past couple weeks—meeting you, taking a trip with a near stranger, and...this. I mean, this day has lived in my head for over twenty years. And suddenly it’s just popped up. It’s...weird. Can’t describe it.”
“It’s lived in my head too, Max. But we’re not even sure this Feldman guy is who we think he might be. We don’t have much of anything, really, to go on except fuzzy photos and a vague-ish gut feeling.”
“And my drawings.”
An acknowledging silence.
“I’m not good with gut feelings,” Max said. “I get a lot of them and somehow I still can’t handle them. And this crowd isn’t helping things, either.”
Karen took the cigarette from his fingers, dragged long.
“How can you stand it?” Max said.
“What?”
“This, all this. You just seem to just take everything in stride, like it’s a river and you’ve given up on trying to fight the current or something.”
“Pretty useless to try and fight a river’s current, I’d say, if you’re talking about rough water.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do, that’s why I just said that.”
She finished off the cigarette, dropped it, and crushed it out.
“You ready to go back inside? Grand entrance is any time now.”
“Sure, I guess.”
They returned to the show. Max overheard a conversation between a middle-aged woman and a younger man regarding a piece on parchment paper: long silhouetted humanoids and animals sketched in crude, simplistic display.
“I just love the sparseness,” said the woman. “It’s a complex sparseness. It whittles the beauty of art to its core. See how much life these figures carry? A whole semester’s worth of my freshmen gestures couldn’t equal just one of these in their vibrancy. Quite remarkable, really.”
“‘Excuse me,” Karen said, leaning into the woman’s space.
“Yes?”
“Do either of you know when Feldman is supposed to come out and give his little speech?”
“I’ve no idea, actually,” said the younger man. “I was wondering the same thing myself.”
The timing of the inquiry was exquisite, as near the corner of the wing a man called out to the crowd, “Everyone, may I have your attention please?”
Bodies righting, heads turning, conversation dribbling off.
“My name is Jack McGrath,” said the man, face sooted with beard. “I’m a curator here at the Peters Museum in Twilight Falls, and I’d like to thank you for attending this
