If (10 page)

He placed the brush back down and squatted to look through my shelf of records.

“This is quite the collection you have here.”

“Yeah. It was my dad’s.”

“Are you close?”

“We used to be. Are you close to yours?”

“Used to be. Is he . . . ?”
Of course he thought that, who would part with a record collection like this unless they were dead?

“Oh, no . . . my parents were really strict, we weren’t allowed to listen to most music. But on some nights, my dad would come home from work and go into his den, and play these old records. I would come in and sit on his lap or we would dance. He was terrible,” I said, laughing to myself. “On my sixteenth birthday, he had the record player refurbished and gave me his entire collection.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s the best gift I’ve ever received.”

He slid out a sleeve. “Close your eyes. I don’t want you to see what it is until I play it.”

I huffed. “Fine.”

I clenched my hands at my sides as I listened intently to Ash’s footsteps, the record sliding out of the sleeve, him loading the record on the player, and the pop of the needle dropping.

The familiar chords of the piano played and I instantly recognized the Beatles song, “Golden Slumbers.”

I opened my eyes and Ash was already opening up the charcoals. We had a deal, so I started moving, and I couldn’t care about what he was doing if I had to dance. I had to be focused on the music and my body. At first I was nervous, self-conscious even, but whenever I glanced at Ash, he was biting his bottom lip and his hands were flying as his eyes jumped up at me and down back onto the easel in front of him.

There was no reason to feel self-conscious, because we were both in our element. We were even. Of course, the way Abbey Road is designed is to flow from one song to the next. So, the heartfelt melody of “Golden Slumbers” seamlessly flowed into the chanting of “Carry That Weight,” which ends with heavy, almost erotic guitar playing. So I went right up to the back of the easel and played the air guitar and mouthed the lyrics right at him. He smiled, but he was elsewhere, his hat almost off his head, revealing soft silky curls and waves. His tongue hung half out of his mouth as he squinted at the canvas. The iconic last lines of the song played as I softly leapt back to my original dancing area. Then I ran back to the record player and moved the needle up to “Oh Darling,” since I knew this record by heart and I didn’t feel like “Her Majesty” was going to make for a great dance song. When I picked up the needle, he noticed, stopping to look up as though it broke his concentration.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got it,” I said.

This song, I felt in my soul, swaying my hips from side to side, letting my limbs extend and reach. I clenched the fabric of my shirt and tugged it as if it were on fire. As the hook hit, I forgot that the strange and mysterious boy might be watching. It had been so long since I danced for pure pleasure. It was always practicing, or auditioning, or demonstrating. There was no judgment, no fear of rejection, just space to move and expand.

The room was flowing with creative energy. It’s like nothing else in this word—a high, a drug. Metaphysical, even. Just like Ash had tuned me out, I had done the same, but we were linked—my body, his paintbrush. The song came to an end. I reached over and lifted the needle and noticed the silence. Ash wasn’t moving. He had been watching me the whole time. I looked up and our eyes locked.

All the energy that tingled on my skin and guided my body had condensed into the path between our gazes, and we both looked away as quickly as our eyes met. I ducked, looking for a distraction in another record. I pulled out Tom Waits, went right to “Please Call Me, Baby,” and started dancing again.

Ash went back to his own work and I went back to mine. We did this for I don’t know how long, because time vanishes when you’re dancing.

“I’m done,” he finally said, stepping back from the easel. His face, hands and shirt were covered with a rainbow of pastels and paints.

I made a point not to peek, and though I had no way of knowing, I just knew it was going to be good. But Ash didn’t seem pleased.

I walked over and gasped when I saw the work. It was me, but it was a variation of me, exploding with color, in motion, my hair turning into something else otherworldly, wrapping me in endless color.

“This is beautiful,” I said. My face had no scar. If he could see the way I dance in my dreams, this would be it. “I didn’t realize you were painting me.”

“It’s shit,” he said.

I was in utter disbelief. I didn’t know his gift was this extraordinary. He had just slapped this together and it was exquisite.

“This is amazing. How can you say that?” I asked.

“The details, the lines, they aren’t precise enough. I can’t always keep my hand steady enough. And I’m holding back. It’s not the same.”

“The same? As what?”

“Bird, when I see you, dancing to that music,” he paused, and the popping of the needle left on the finished record filled his pause. “When I see you dance, I see you in iridescent blues, pale ribbons of greens, indigos, and pinks. Swirls of orange and gold like a sunset trailing your movements. Flecks of silver that sparkle like the moon reflecting on a dark ocean flicker around you.”

Though his words were poetic and mesmerizing, I didn’t know what to do with them. He uttered them like what he was saying was as plain as day. So I just stood still, blank, letting him express his frustration.

“And this,” he pointed to the painting with the end of the brush, “is not the same,” he said. “It’s not as beautiful or dynamic.”

I understood he meant beautiful in the artistic sense,
but was he just calling me beautiful?

“But you could practice.”

“No, it’s not that I can’t, it’s that I won’t.”

Ash’s hat had fallen off completely, and his wild hair was streaked throughout with paint. He shook his head, snapping himself out of being lost in his own frustration.

When he looked at me, he chuckled quietly, seeing my confusion. “You must think I’m nuts. Sorry, I get a little lost in my head when I paint. It’s why I don’t anymore.”

“There’s nothing wrong with getting lost in your head. That’s why we all do what we do in art.”

He cleared his throat. “Have you ever heard of synesthesia?”

“Synesthesia? I don’t think so, but it sounds familiar.”

“Probably because it rhymes with anesthesia.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“It’s when your senses overlap. You can see sounds, or taste words. I have polymodal synesthesia, which means I have a bunch of those going on at once.”

“Wait, you see sound?”

“That’s one
modal
”—he threw up air quotes around the word—“yeah.”

“That’s incredible. What do you see?”

“It depends. Music is different from, say, a fire truck blaring. Monotonous sounds, like white noise, I don’t see those. And emotions make me see color sometimes, and feel things on my skin and fingertips, and sometimes I taste emotions or words or even touch. I have a really extreme case. Most people have one or two modals, I have more than a couple.”

I glanced at the painting and pointed. “So do you see that?” I asked in disbelief.

“Pretty much, but like I said, it’s not quite right. What I see is way more beautiful.”

He casually threw that world out at me again, and its implication triggered a pleasant fluttering in my stomach. He wasn’t saying it to ingratiate or make me feel better. He was saying it because to him, it was a matter of fact.

“That’s amazing. Does it bother you? To have all that going on at once?”

“Does the color blue bother you? Does the breeze bother your skin? I’ve never known anything else. It doesn’t bother me. It can be distracting. Occasionally it’s tiring. But certain environments can be that way for anyone. Even a normal person can only tolerate a rock concert for so long, even if they love rock. I used to love it. It’s a lot weaker now anyway. Creating art used to help me decompress when it was stronger.”

Just then there was a knock on my door. I wasn’t expecting anyone, and I made my way over to peep through the peephole.
Trevor.

“Hey! What are you doing here?” I asked, throwing open the door and giving him a hug.

“Jordan asked me to pick you up. I’ve been trying to call and give you a heads up. I left a voicemail.” I hadn’t even heard my phone ring.

“What time is it?”

“Almost six.”

“Oh my god! Shit. I have to get ready.”

Trevor glanced up at Ash. “Hey Ash!”

“Hey,” Ash said.

Then I put two and two together: Jordan wanted Trevor to check up on me. Ash ripped the painting off the easel and rolled it up despite it still being wet. “I’ll go.”

“You don’t need to run, you can still hang out with Trevor.”

“No, I should go.”

“You can keep the stuff here. Come by whenever you want to paint. You might need to give me a heads up though.”

He nodded, and began to walk out. “Wait,” he said. “I have a phone now.” It was refreshing and cute the way he referred to it like some artifact.

He pulled out a small black flip phone, and if I didn’t know anything else about him, in his paint covered hair, jeans, and stubble, I would think he was a hipster with an ironic phone.

We exchanged numbers.

I walked him to the door. “I’d like to create with you again,” I said. “And I don’t think you’re nuts. I think you’re brilliant.”

He pulled his hat over his eyes and tugged it back to get his hair out of his face. “Thank you,” he said. And just then is when I noticed he had trimmed his beard since I saw him earlier that day. He turned and walked away.

ASH

Walking down that hallway after whatever the hell that was with Bird, I felt alive, giddy. I didn’t let her see that, but it stirred things in me that I had worked hard to keep contained.

Most people’s souls hide inside of their minds and bodies, but Bird is inside out. Her dancing, with the sweeping transparent ribbons of color that followed, was the embodiment of a divine gift. Her dancing was the closest I could get to heaven without dying.

When she danced to “Oh Darling,” the colors around her intensified, her halo of lavender deepening to a royal purple. Clear angular shapes, like exotic crystals, birthed and died in a glorious explosion like fireworks in my field of vision. The heat she often caused traveled from my shoulders down to my fingers as it often did, but this time it also traveled down my torso and crept down into my groin and it was beyond heaven, it was ecstasy. At that moment, I understood the sensations Bernini sculpted and Caravaggio painted.

There was a reason I kept to myself, isolated, away from those I cared about. Feeling good was dangerous. I needed to be flat, I needed to keep the colors, sensations and tastes as bland as possible. I hated the meds because they stole and dulled everything about who I was. But I had no choice: the meds were a necessary evil to keep my illness from rearing its head.

When Bird was pushing me to paint, she thought I was scared of failing, but I had already failed. I was afraid of getting good again.

She didn’t know it, but this past year, Bird gave me something to look forward to. While the rest of the world had dimmed, she shone as if nothing had changed for me. I could only imagine what she would look like if I stopped taking the drugs—and that was a dangerously tempting thought. Watching her, seeing her laugh, feeling it on my fingertips, reminded me of my old self. The good parts. That was the problem with my illness, it always started out feeling good, but almost never ended that way.

The meds weren’t enough. They didn’t change what happened or what I could become. They dulled the inevitable, they delayed the inevitable, but they could not stop the inevitable.

Bird was tempting a live wire and she didn’t know it. She stood there, her finger on the switch, without even knowing how close she had come every time we met. She was tempting me . . . she was triggering me . . . and I didn’t want to do this to her. I didn’t want anyone else to have the same fate as my sister, Sarah.

Bringing Bird into my life didn’t fit the plan. It went against all the sacrifices I made. I left my art, my soul, behind.

Maybe it wasn’t a switch, maybe it was a dimmer, and she was turning the knob ever so slowly, so that I couldn’t even tell that it was turning, and then the light would be blinding and it would be too late.