Forsaken - A Novel of Art, Evil, and Insanity Page 3

  “Now remember: mom’s picking you both up at 2:30, so don’t leave okay?” Dan said.

  “Okay.”

  “Who do you find after class?”

  “Tommy.”

  “And what do you do if a stranger tries to talk to you?”

  “Scream and run to a grown up.”

  “Smart girl.”

  He gave his daughter a kiss on her sunlit hair. She returned it with a hug of surprising strength. The experience of that desperate hug in that crescent parking lot that morning, like so many others since he’d become a father, was both uncomfortable and foreign to him. He didn’t remember his parents, didn’t know if they had planned or even wanted to be held by him the same way his daughter now clung to him like the last bit of sunlight before a dark night. No matter what memory he tried to draw upon for instructions, a way to act, a word to say, a behavior or emotion he was supposed to display, he came up empty. All he could say was: “And remember: don’t be scared, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Now go make some friends.”

  He watched her walk off, slow at first until her kindergarten teacher, a homely but not altogether unattractive woman in a floral print dress, greeted her by squatting down, shaking her hand, and waving back at Dan.

  His phone vibrated in his pocket. He checked it, surprised as a number he hadn’t seen in months flashed across the Caller ID. His stomach dropped as that piece of glass behind his eye began to swell. Mr. Glass was waking up.

  Bad day for a headache.

  Necromancy

  LECTURE ROOM 42-14, known to the graduate students as The Archive, sat on the west end of the university in the fourth floor of the Fine Arts Building. There, the sunlight poured through the wide windows, flooding the room with a lazy glow that made the paintings come alive in the late afternoon. It was what Dan loved so much about the room. It had moods, emotions, feelings, all depending on the time of day and year. And, if one knew the room the way he did, it could breath life into the artwork within like the kiss of a god.

  “Restoration, ladies and gentlemen, is the closest we will come to performing miracles.” He started his introductory lecture the same way he had on the first day of each semester over the last four years: script memorized, improvised, able to be changed or discarded if needed. “It is, in a sense, the art of resurrecting an artist’s original and pure vision. Taking something old, forgotten, and peeling back the layers of age and time and even death and decay itself, in order to present it as new.”

  He paused before the sixteen graduate students seated at workbenches, all hand selected, accepted, and even financially motivated to be in room 42-14. He knew them all by name, first and last. He even knew some of their family stories, childhood dreams, motivations and determinations that led them to this moment.

  He had to know everything about them.

  At the workbench before each student sat a painting of their choosing that they would spend the next semester restoring under his supervision. Some came from the sizable collection at the university museum itself. Others from as far off as England or Beijing or points between. Insurance policies had been taken out, backgrounds checked. Millions of dollars were now entrusted to students whose work Dan had to catechize and scrutinize and professionally sign off on before each piece would be shipped back to its owner, as close to new as an old painting could be.

  “Pretty boring stuff, this artistic necromancy we perform.”

  The students gave a polite laugh. They always did at that part because, he knew, most were scared. In this room their careers would be made or unmade. Of the dozen seated before him, half at least would find themselves pursuing other careers in five years. Restoration was a small field, and the jobs were few and far between.

  “So let’s face it: we’re not Rembrandts or Rackhams. Sure, some of us may be talented with a brush or a palette, but when it comes to creating, we’re not gifted. If we were, we’d be off at a gallery, wined and dined while some lawyer and an actor fought over a painting of a soup can and a ham sandwich. We’re like lifeguards for the Olympic swim team. Artists create. We resuscitate.”

  More laughter from the students. Dan looked at each of them, smiling. There was Sergio in the second row, who’d worked his ass of to get out of some shithole in Brazil after his brother was gunned down. There was Hyuk-Jin, who’d assisted in the restoration of some of Korea’s oldest palace interiors, pieces older than Dan’s own country. Vicky from Vermont, the daughter of a famous vegan artist who alternated between performance art in numerous global cities and chaining herself to trees in numerous global forests.

  And then the door opened and a student with hazel eyes and ink black hair tiptoed in. A student who had spent the summer restoring frescos and oil paintings half a world away. A student who, until that very moment, Dan thought had seen the last of his lecture room. For a brief second the glass behind his eyes heralded her return like a frantic Geiger counter.

  Karina smiled at the other students and took a quick seat behind an empty workstation, dropping her leather satchel on the table and meeting Dan’s eyes with intensity. “Sorry,” she mouthed, and a sanguine smile formed as she glanced at his tie.

  He cleared his throat. “Boring stuff indeed, this line of study we’ve chosen to pursue. But outside the artists themselves, we’re the next of kin the masterpieces they’ve made. If we do our job, we’re as close as the world will come to da Vinci or Van Gogh, or...”

  He pressed the remote on his smartphone. The projector behind him lit up with a wall to wall image of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  “--a Michelangelo,” he said and turned to the image of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling. It was old, brown, muted of color and lifeless, like a photocopy of a textbook from a few decades ago. It was an artifact.

  “Take his most famous work. Over five hundred years old. Events have happened beneath it that we can’t even imagine. Countless lives, come and gone. Nations born and broken. Was this his vision? Was this his ode to the glory of God and man and all of creation?”

  He pressed the smartphone again. The projection was replaced by the same image from the same perspective, only it had been cleaned, restored. The colors were vibrant, the image itself three dimensional, as if a portal to heaven had opened at the edge of that lecture room.

  “Or was this?” he asked.

  Karina smiled again, and, for a moment, he locked eyes with her and that black hair that hung halfway to her hips, shimmering like an optical illusion. He had missed that hair, missed the touch, the smell of it, the way she put it up in a topknot or beneath a baseball cap when she worked late into the night on her paintings. She had the body of a classic movie star, back before curves and cleavage were replaced by skin and bones. Yet she hid it away behind a boyish attire, with hoodies and thumb holes cut into the sleeves, a secret she carried with a confidence often mistaken as indifference by her classmates.

  Her expression shifted from a smile to a quick flit of the eyebrows and Dan realized he had held his gaze a little too long. The students were trying to figure out if his speech was over. Hyuk-Jin appeared on the verge of clapping. Dan cleared his throat.

  “Our job, your job, is to be the mouthpiece of the dead. To reach backwards, through the fog of time and decay and neglect, and to pull the artist’s pure vision to the surface, to show the world what time has forgotten. Boring stuff, indeed.”

  The students all laughed again, all except Karina. She just smiled and pushed a lock of hair from her eyes.

  The Reluctant Gardener

  THE ROSE FELL into the basket with an effortless clip. It was a sound that Linda enjoyed almost as much as the sound of her children laughing outside. But today there was no laughter, and she had only her thoughts as company. Thoughts that haunted her in the sudden emptiness of the house and the still calm of the garden.

  She once had dreams and pursuits for her future, a future that included a small boat and a few years living out of it with Dan a
s they chased the sun the length of the equator. She had always been a gifted cook and baker, at least that’s what her friends had told her. The compliments and dinner guests had, at one time, been frequent, and she had started writing a cookbook. Now it sat unfinished, a pile of recipes next to the computer in the study, a word document and an incomplete title. She had written poetry too, haikus, had even been asked to write the inscription upon her father’s grave when he passed away two summers ago. She had spent weeks tweaking those words until she had given up and deferred to a simple epitaph chosen by the pastor back in Greenwich.

  Those goals, those possible futures that had all laid out before her as clear as a country road, had now been filed away in drawers and chests, locked deep and covered by pictures of her children as they grew up. Beneath birthday cards, written first in crayon and then in pencil. Beneath baby blankets and trinkets that she felt a compulsion to keep. Those dreams had been set aside until she no longer called them dreams but rather hobbies, and dismissed them with ease.

  Hobbies. How that word reduced a flame of passion to a simmer. Yet of those hobbies, only one, her rose garden, kept her interest season after season.

  Clip went the shears as another rose fell into the basket. She noticed that some of the petals were becoming looser. It saddened her that the slow arrival of autumn, just in time for the beginning of school, would soon signal an end to those lovely reds and whites that had decorated the house since April.

  Seven springs ago when they’d moved into the house she’d taken an immediate interest in gardening. And now, after seven cycles of the seasons, she felt a small corner of the yard had attained some semblance of the dream she had in her head for all those years. She envisioned a happy little house, a cottage, tucked away like some European hamlet and bursting with greenery in a secret backyard. Flowers, she imagined, that every year would return like old friends. An herb garden she could pick from and cook with for her children until her children grew up and one day picked from and cooked with for her.

  Yet the house and backyard had both proven too large for her original vision, the soil too difficult, the rocks beneath it too many. Each season she revised her image of home until a small part of the yard, the rosebushes, not only matched but exceeded her dream. Dan had his job and his art. The kids had their school. What did she have? She had hobbies, she thought. Hobbies and roses and a now empty house.

  Well, not entirely empty.

  “Ginger! Stop that,” she said, and the dog stopped digging along the redwood fence.

  Clip went the shears and the final rose landed among the others in the basket. She took her gloves off, wiped her forehead, and glanced up at the belly of a passing airplane on the final approach to SFO. From the blue sky a shape swooped and landed with a splash in the stone bird bath by the edge of the yard. The bird flailed about in the shallow water, squawking, pecking at its feathers and thrashing about the brackish water. Its bathing was spastic, violent, as if it were attacking the water, or perhaps the reflection it saw within it.

  There was something foreign about the bird, something askew. It was a blue jay, but not like the blue jays that she’d seen in Northern California before. It was crested with a white mask around its face. Its wings and tail feathers bore white speckles between the blue and black lines. She had seen it before, she thought, but she couldn’t remember where.

  As she pondered that Ginger seized the chance and jumped after the bird, missing by several feet as the bird flew to safety above. Linda smiled at the silly dog of theirs, those few instincts to hunt so useless and unthreatening, and she thought that should Ginger somehow manage to catch an animal she would have no idea what to do with it.

  “Come on,” she said to Ginger who stared upwards at the tree and the bird. “Let’s go inside.”

  In the kitchen she arranged the roses in a dappled blue and violet vase then placed them on the counter above the sink. There they would catch the sunlight in the afternoon and, if she was lucky, last well into the week. A hobby indeed, but one her family could enjoy as well.

  Outside, the blue jay squawked from a branch above and Ginger let out a frustrated howl.

  “That sounds good honey,” Dan said into the phone. “Do you have any preference?” He searched for a pen among the mess on his desk and scribbled Chinese or Greek food on the notepad, then crossed out Chinese.

  “No problem,” he answered.

  His office was on the second floor of the Fine Arts Building, overlooking the quad. While one of the larger offices, he had managed to fill it with years worth of stuff of indeterminate origin. It had become, as one of his students noted, what a museum gift shop in hell might look like. Some items held sentimental value, such as the century old twin lithographs he’d brought back from their honeymoon in Peru that depicted various Spanish merchants; the hand painted ostrich egg he’d bought at auction five years ago; or the art encyclopedias given to him by his graduate school mentor in a brief moment of clarity after the first stroke but before the second.

  Other items were passing novelty at best, little more than kitsch given to him by various friends, colleagues, and students; like the ties, they were kept more for amusement than appreciation. His top shelf alone housed a Botticelli Venus coffee mug, two lamps shaped like Adam and Eve, and a set of Angkor themed book ends, mass produced in China and probably containing trace leads.

  “Okay hon, will do. You feel better, maybe take a bath or something?”

  A knock at the door, little time to respond, and with a creek it opened. Dan held a finger up to the visitor, recognizing the perfume. It was Clive Christenson’s X. He knew this because he had bought it five months ago.

  “Yep, love you too honey. Gotta go, bye,” he said and hung up.

  Karina closed the door behind her and he immediately stood up. She greeted him with large smile, closing the distance between them in quick steps. Then she wrapped her arms around him in a tight embrace.

  “Oh boo-bear, I’ve missed you!” she said.

  She kissed him. Twice on the cheek and a third time on the lips, holding it longer than he did. Then he broke the space between them and took her by the hand to the couch on the other side of his desk.

  “You’re back,” he said, intending it as a question but it had come out as a surprised statement. “How was Italy?”

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  “I haven’t checked,” he said, feeling the glass behind his eye rattle at the lie.

  “So Nathaniel didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Nothing,” she said, waving off the question as her eyes fell to his chest. “You got my tie? Do you like it?”

  “I did, I do. Yeah, thank you.”

  “Oh Dan, you should’ve seen it. After Florence we went to the Golfo di Taranto. A month, working on this fresco in this tiny church. Five hundred years old, can you believe it? The fumes, oh the fumes and the heat, they actually made us sick. And what you said today, in class, I felt that, when we were there I just... I didn’t know how to say it. Not like you do.”

  She had said it all so fast, a burst of enthusiasm and manic energy. He was having trouble processing her return, and now her words felt accelerated.

  “Sit, please,” he asked. “Do you want something to drink?”

  “No, no nothing, I mean... do you really like the tie?” she asked, still smiling with intensity in her eyes, something he’d seen glimpses of before summer vacation, something he’d hoped would fade with time apart. Instead, it seemed to have grown like a cancer.

  “It’s just the right color,” he smiled as Mr. Glass twitched with the threat of migraine.

  “Crimson, I know, you’re favorite. I spent all day looking for it. Come here, let me see it on you.”

  She adjusted the tie, fingers tracing up his chest as she pulled it tighter. He knew those fingers, knew how tender they were when working on an old canvas that could crumble with the wrong touch, or the blood they could draw
when dug into his back.

  “Why didn’t you return my calls you jerk?” she smiled, slapping him on the chest. “I missed you.”

  “Yeah, I missed you too.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.”

  The glass behind his eye hummed as he flashed a smile. Not the wide, toothy kind that he’d used before to dodge his wife’s questions and sell her on some elaborate excuse about his late arrival or weekend seminars. It was a small, weak smile punctuated by a sigh that made his nostrils flare. He knew the next part would be hard. She wouldn’t accept it, she hadn’t before.

  “Karina, listen... I thought we talked about this?”

  “About what?”

  “This. Us.”

  “Well,” she batted her eyes as if thinking. “Talking denotes communicating, by its very nature. And you haven’t returned my calls all summer.”

  “I didn’t know I had to.”

  “That’s because you weren’t communicating, silly.”

  “Let me rephrase. I thought we came to an agreement.”

  She shrugged her shoulders as if the question were being asked to a toddler trying to worm her way out of a confession. “Well, maybe we did. But that was when I was going to stay in Italy.”

  “What happened? Why didn’t you?”

  “Nothing happened. It’s just... the longer I was there the more I missed you. The more I thought: ‘Why do this?’ You know? I just, I couldn’t do it Dan. It hurt so much.”

  “Karina...”

  “I know what you’re going to say... but I can’t share you. I know, I’m selfish. Call me crazy and maybe I am. Maybe I’m just a dumb girl with a crush on her teacher...”