Radiant Days (11 page)

I glanced down at that strangely heavy fish bone with its tarnished silver prongs and, before I could think better of it, jammed it into the lock. The prongs struck something solid. I turned it gently, afraid I’d snap off one of the prongs. It still wouldn’t budge.

Then, as though the keyhole really
was
a mouth, it seemed to open wider. Without warning, the key slid forward and twisted to one side. I braced myself against the door and pushed. The wood shuddered and creaked and, slowly, the door began to move, scraping against the floor. I pulled the key out and pushed harder, until the door opened—just a few inches, but it was enough.

I took a deep breath and stepped inside, closed the door behind me, and turned the rusted dead bolt until it clicked into place.

I stood in an empty room, cold and with walls of the same thick gray stone as the exterior. No furniture. No rugs or curtains, no empty bottles or spent cigarette butts or works; no sign that this was a place where Ted might have slept, or homeless people crashed, or teenagers or addicts partied. Nothing except for yellowish dust on the slate floor, and cobwebs and dead flies in the corner, a few brittle willow leaves that crumbled when I touched them.

Yet for some reason it didn’t feel abandoned. There wasn’t that musty smell you find in empty houses. Instead, I inhaled the same rain-sweet scent as the canal outside, faint as a childhood memory. I crossed to the solitary window, glanced back to see my own footprints in the dust but no others. On the floor was a dark, rectangular spot, marking where a table or bed might once have stood. On the wall above it, someone—Ted?—had scrawled graffiti in white chalk.

Shit on God!

Beneath this was a childishly drawn sun. It looked so much like a crude caricature of my own tag that I flushed: had Ted drawn it to mock me?

But that was impossible. I’d never spoken to Ted before that afternoon, and only Clea and a few of my housemates knew I was the person behind “Radiant Days.” I leaned against the wall and stared at the window opposite me, waning sunlight seeping through the filthy glass. Around me dust motes turned in lazy vortices, as though I were trapped inside a darkened snow globe. I eased myself to the floor and closed my eyes.

I must have dozed, waking when the throb of pins and needles
shot through my leg. I groaned, then stumbled to my feet in alarm.

On the stone wall glowed a brilliant square, a window I’d somehow missed. But when I looked closer, I saw that what seemed to be luminous glass was actually a square of light reflected from the window on the other side of the room.

The optical illusion was startling. The false window appeared so real it seemed as though it would open onto the woods outside. In the National Gallery I’d seen trompe l’oeil paintings, where the artist fools you into thinking there’s a fold of cloth draped across the canvas, or a hidden door embedded in the painting itself.

But I’d never seen anything like that in real life. I pressed my palm against the wall, the stone warm and rough, slightly porous; ran my hand across it to clear away dust and cobwebs. I pulled out my can of spray paint, shook it, and pointed the nozzle at the wall, drawing a yellow arabesque and rayed eye. I signed my tag, set the can on the floor, and stepped back, staring at the image.

Then I reached into my pocket and removed the flannel-wrapped bundle I’d brought from Perry Street. Slowly I unrolled it on the floor. I surveyed the oil pencils, finally picked up the black crayon. I made certain the spray paint had dried, then traced the
A
s in
RADIANT DAYS
in black, the
I
in Alizarin crimson; picked up the Moorish red crayon and outlined the sun’s eye, overlaid this with cobalt so that the colors bled together and a supernaturally brilliant violet eye stared back at me.

I paused, then grabbed the Alizarin crayon and drew first one arc and then another above the blazing words. I thought of Clea and the portraits on the walls of Perry Street: all those paintings
that no one would ever see. It seemed right that they’d be obliterated by a wrecking ball.

And suddenly I wished I could destroy those other drawings, all the ones that Clea had taken. Rage fueled me, and fear; loneliness and longing and a perverse exhilaration: because I was here, alone, with no one to see what I drew, no one to judge; no one to critique it or claim it.

I drew as though this might be the last time I’d ever have the chance. I drew for what seemed like hours, the room illuminated by a strange fitful light that seemed to pulse from the words
RADIANT DAYS
, yellow and onyx and crimson. I heard branches tap against the roof, smelled rust and rain. The ache in my head slowed to the rhythm of my heartbeat and the dreamy sweep of crayon against stone. Only when it finally grew too dim to see did I stop.

In front of me was a whorl of black and red, emerald vines and orange flame, a shifting wheel of shadowy forms like those cave paintings drawn in charcoal and ocher and yellow clay. As I stared, shapes began to emerge from the swirl of color, shapes I’d been only half aware of as my hand moved across the stone: eyes and faces, a hand. Willow leaves and wings, dragonflies and hawk moths.

The longer I looked, the more I saw. Waves, a curve that marked the bend of a river. A crescent moon that was also a boat. The whorl of images seemed to turn, a hurricane brought to life, and the illusion of motion drew my gaze to
the center of the painting, where the rayed eye rose from a fiery sea. I reached to touch the center of the eye, and with a cry snatched my hand back.

The stone wall was hot—not sun-warmed, but
hot
. I hesitated, then held my palm a scant inch from the stone.

I wasn’t imagining it. The section I’d painted was noticeably warmer than the rest. The center, where the sun was, radiated as much heat as an incandescent lightbulb. Gingerly I touched the eye.

“Shit!”

The wall had
burned
me. My fingertip felt blistered, but the skin was unmarked, not even red. Once more I drew my palm toward the wall. This time it was cool.

I touched the sun-eye: dead cold.

I stepped away and absently thrust my hand into my pocket. A sharp pain shot through my thumb. I yanked my hand out and saw the fish-bone key dangling from it. A silver prong was embedded in the ball of my thumb. Carefully I pulled it out, then replaced the key.

Blood welled from the puncture wound. I turned and pressed my hand against the wall, covering the image of the sun rising from the waves. When I withdrew my hand, a red smear like the imprint of a kiss bloomed across the sun’s eye.

I sank to the floor, my head pounding. Maybe I’d imagined that unnatural heat radiating from the wall. The room was now dark. The wind had died, and with it the steady rustling of the willow leaves. Rain pattered on the roof. I cracked the door open and peered outside.

There was no rain. Through the tangle of leaves I saw a sky awash in stars.

I closed the door, yawning. My exhilaration had ebbed with the October light. I felt exhausted. I made sure the dead bolt was drawn, then lay down in front of the door, my head pillowed on my sleeve, the slates beneath me hard and cold as river rock. When I slept, the sound of rain swept through my dreams, and the unblinking gaze of an eye that burned through violet clouds like the sun kept watch.

Outside Charleroi

DAWN, OCTOBER 8

LIGHT FLICKERED BEHIND
his closed eyelids. Arthur steeled himself against the painful intrusion of morning, but when he opened his eyes, the room was still dim. He held his breath and listened, wondering if someone had entered while he was asleep—the lockkeeper or maybe the tramp he’d seen fishing.

The room was silent. He shifted on the narrow cot, and on the wall above his head saw a swath of silver green, a shining pinwheel spun from the aurora borealis or the watery reflection cast by the canal, sap green, pine silver, minnow bright.

Yet the windows remained dark, and there was no other source of light.

He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The pinwheel shivered and spun, broke apart then joined again like liquid mercury to form a rayed eye rising from a sea, buffeted by waves edged crimson and black.

He didn’t stop to wonder if he was dreaming, or still drunk
from whatever it was the tramp had given him: he reached for the wall, covering the image with his splayed palm.

A wave overcame him, a prismatic darkness. His head drooped onto the mattress. His last thought as he plunged back into sleep was that an eye was fixed on him, implacable and radiant as the sun, and that the slate wall had felt strangely warm for October.

Washington, D.C.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT, OCTOBER 8, 1978

I WOKE, DISORIENTED
, my back aching from the cold stone floor. It was dark, except for a faint gleam from the window. I sat up groggily, then stiffened.

Someone was in the room with me. I held my breath, praying that whatever I’d heard would turn into the soft rustle of a mouse or windblown leaf.

It didn’t. I heard a sharp intake of breath and saw a dark shape move on the other side of the room. I swept my hand across the floor, trying to grab something I could use as a weapon, stumbled to my feet and in desperation pulled the key from my pocket, fingers closing around it so that the prongs pointed outward.

“Get out of here!” I screamed, backing toward the door.

The intruder stood, silhouetted against the window, and shouted, “What the hell?”

Only that wasn’t what he said. I couldn’t actually
understand
what he said—his voice was garbled and heavily accented, and he
wasn’t speaking English. Yet the meaning was clear, like listening to a car radio trapped between stations, when you catch only fragments of a familiar voice or song or commercial.

Whoever it was, it wasn’t Ted. I braced myself against the wall, fumbling for the doorknob as I yelled, “Who are you?”

There was the sharp
pffft
of a match. I sucked my breath in as the figure stepped toward me, face haloed by a flame cupped beneath his chin.

It was a boy. Fifteen or sixteen and about my height, with close-cropped blond hair that looked as though he’d cut it himself in the dark: almost a skinhead, save where unruly tufts stuck out around his face. He shaded his eyes with one hand, the tiny flame guttering in the other, and swore again in that same strangled voice, as though the radio had grown more distorted.

“How’d you get in?” I demanded. “Get out, get out!”

I waved my arms threateningly, but all that did was extinguish the flame. The boy stooped. I kicked out, afraid he’d try to grab my ankles, but there was only the flick of another match being struck. The room filled with a sweetly acrid scent, and I looked down to see him crouched in front of some burning leaves. He lifted his face, the meager flames casting a glow on round cheeks, an obdurate mouth, and very pale, coldly assessing gray-blue eyes.