Simon Says (16 page)

The wolf pack is made up of mirrors, wanting everyone else to be nothing but a mirror, too. But an artist (
and aren't we all artists?
) should be something more. I grope for words to explain. "Where does a reflection start? Who begins it? There has to be a source that doesn't live up to any expectation from anyone else, just itself."

Graeme opens his eyes. "Maybe there aren't any sources anymore. Maybe we're just living up to what's been done and seen and believed for so long that it's all there is."

I don't say anything, and he smiles a little. "No. You don't think so, do you?" He glances at the crumpled sketch. "Okay then—what about you, Charles? Don't you do the same thing?" His stumbling words gain strength. "You see yourself as an artist right? But you keep your paintings locked up so no one can look at them. You made up your own mind what people would say about them, and then you just accepted that judgment without even testing it"

No,
I want to say.
I got that judgment all right—from my mother, the kids, the teachers, my father, Steve, Cindy ... even Mr. Wallace and that stupid lemon.

But he doesn't pause to let me answer. "And when you're out there with those people, don't expect me to believe you show them yourself. I've seen you, remember? I know better. You put on a show for them, based on what they expect of you." His voice loses its harshness. "Why me? Why did you draw that for me, and not for anyone else? What's the big deal about my reflecting
other people, wanting to please them, giving them what they want? Everybody does it! You give them what they want in unimportant things so you can do what you want in the things that matter."

I remember telling my parents I'd make good grades, even promising I'd go to college, if they'd just send me to Whitman (
just let me meet Graeme
). He's right, isn't he? That was the same thing. I was satisfying their expectations in order to do what mattered to me.

"What matters to you, then?" I ask him.

He stares at me and opens his mouth to answer, then closes it again. Finally he whispers, "My writing—writing things that mean something to my readers—writing..." And his voice trails off.

I shake my head, thinking of the second novel he's not writing and suspecting that's what he's thinking, also. I try to explain, "Everybody doesn't do it—at least not to the same extent you do." Coming here was so important I was willing to lie to my parents in order to let them think they were getting the son they expected. But I never intended to actually
be
that person. I was always determined to stay myself.

I think of Adrian's charm and Rachel's coolness, and pick my way deeper into understanding. "There's something behind the reflection, some part of them that makes them unique—if they try to please other people by giving them what they want, they're trying to protect what makes them special. They're scared other people will try to change it, or take it away. They're scared of letting anyone get close enough to do that"
I'm scared of letting anyone get close enough to do that.
"You do it
because it's the only thing you know. Maybe they're all worth far less than you are"—
I can admit that much—
"but they've got an inner self they'll do anything to keep safe. They're alive in some way you've never even imagined."

"I'm alive." His voice is almost a whisper. "I've got an inner self that makes me unique. Why didn't you draw what's inside the reflection?"

Did I get it wrong
? "What is inside, Graeme?" That's what I draw—that's what I see in people. If it was too well hidden, then I failed.
I hope I did fail

"How can I answer that?" he asks, his voice almost angry again.

You can't, because there is no answer. I didn't fail—it wasn't there to see.

I try asking, "Why do you think we're here?"

He stares at me as if I've lost my mind. Maybe I have. "To make art," he says.

I nod. So he's sure of that much, at least "That's why we're here at Whitman. I think"—I hesitate—I've never said this to anyone before—"that's why people are here on earth at all. I mean—lizards and cats and trout don't make art Why do we do it?"

"Why?" he repeats, shrugging. "To show people what they're like—what society is like."

"No!" I shake my head, hard. "That's just the start That's what I do with those sketches." I gesture loosely to the crumpled sketch on the gravel, but neither of us looks at it "But that's not what art is really about."

He studies me, frowning. "What do you think it's about, then?"

"Art's about showing people what's possible," I say. I've never tried to put it into words, but that's what I do.

He considers this. "But—is showing somebody what's possible the only way to reach them?"

I shake my head, confused. "What do you mean?"

"In my books, I show people what they're doing and who they are so they'll stop and think about themselves."

"But do any of them think about that?" I demand. "Do they see what they could do to change themselves, or just what's gone wrong?"

He jerks back slightly, as though I slapped him. "I can't tell them what they ought to do."

No, you can't.
I feel the dull ache of regret replacing the anger and betrayal I'd felt before.
I so wanted you to be able to tell me.
"But that's what art should do—offer some hope. Show how things
could
be."

Graeme looks at me steadily. "Is that what your paintings are about?"

I start to say yes—But then I stop. My paintings don't always show how things could be. I haven't really escaped the wolf pack yet, have I? I'm still running from them, hiding from them. And he can't show me how to stop because he doesn't know.

"Well, is it?" he prods.

"I try to make my paintings show what could be." I force myself to be honest "But sometimes the best I can manage is showing how hard it is to strive, let alone achieve."

"Showing who?"

I blink at him, uncomprehending. "What do you mean?"

"Who do you show? What good does it do to protect something no one ever sees?"

I stare at him.

"What do your paintings matter if no one sees a single canvas, Charles?" His voice is stronger now. "Are you going to slash them all to pieces before you die? Or torch them? What good is pouring all this effort into protecting your paintings if they die with you, unseen?"

The fragments of colored glass in the kaleidoscope have shattered their case, silver-tipped shards of mirror flying at me.

"You talk about being alive or dead inside—you might just as well never have lived at all if everything you've created dies when you die. At least my book will survive, and people have read it, and maybe the book made some of them stop and think." Graeme pauses. "It reached you."

"It did," I whisper. "I only came to Whitman because I wanted to meet you—meet the person who was brave enough to expose the game."

The silence grows as I stare, unseeing, at the jagged gravel.

"Charles."

Has he beaten me at last? Or have I won? What was there to win, and when did we declare war?

"Let me see your paintings."

No more than that I know I can refuse. But no one has come right out and just asked to see them. And I hurt him with my drawing (
with the truth
). I owe it to him to And a way to undo the hurt.

I stand up stiffly, brushing loose gravel from my jeans, and he rises smoothly without uncrossing his legs, with that dancer's grace again. I have no words to say as I lead the way down the stone stairs to the fourth floor, unlock the door, and stand aside to let him enter.

Excerpts from
Graeme Brandt's Journal

October 10 (Senior Year)

I didn't really expect Charles to let me into his studio. We'd hurt each other, brutally, even without wanting to, and I couldn't begin to guess at what he was thinking any longer. But I had to ask-and he let me in.

Nothing special about the room, except the little dogleg jut in the wall that crippled the neat rectangular shape. It was a studio, like all the others at Whitman, but I didn't see the room itself at first All I could see was his work.

The room was filled with canvases. They were leaning against the walls, propped up on easels, hanging clear to the ceiling, none of them in any particular order I could see. I felt like I'd left the real world behind and entered a
Star Trek
holodeck. This was a magical universe overflowing with color and structure and emotion. Some of the paintings were so real I felt I could step into them and become-l don't know, more real than I was now. It wasn't always an inviting world they showed, but I could feel the truth. He had one he must have painted since he came here-the trees filled with birds that haunt the shortcut to the dorms. A figure strode through the trees, unfrightened, and for a moment it was me there, knowing where I meant to go, not caring about the screaming birds overhead. Then I knew it wasn't me at all. But it might have been.

Others were abstract, like a starry night van Gogh never dreamed of, with devouring skyscrapers closing in on the
sky. The abstracts teemed with dizzying feelings, which Charles keeps bottled up and only releases in his paintings. There weren't any cute greeting card pictures, or adolescent explosions. He's a year younger than me, but his painting is all grown up. It's not some profound intellectual thing that doesn't make sense to anybody other than the creator, either. That was the strangest thing. It so clearly had a purpose: to communicate. Here, with only him to see them-it's as if they're incomplete, diminished without their intended audience.

What must it do to him to keep all of this locked away? Charles put all of himself into them, and then left them hanging on hold without anyone to see them and understand them. He's left himself hanging on hold, too. Why? Ifs got to hurt worse than having nothing to write, to have all this to paint, and not allow it to be seen.

I looked at the paintings for a long time. Charles never spoke, never stopped me from moving one painting to see what hid behind it And there were paintings that showed me more than he might have wanted. Some were hopeless, or tried to be-a wolf pack closing in on a lone figure. A landscape of gray tree trunks like; prison bars, a single wing straining outward between them, choking darkness behind the trees, and a loose scattering of white feathers on the shadowy ground below. A phoenix torn to pieces by lions, yet rising, reborn, above them. Like the phoenix, Charles kept on painting instead of giving up. He must have had the faith that someday someone would see them, and would understand.

Some were a dizzying blend of the real world and an abstract imagination-l suspect these are his masterpieces. In
these he took reality and made it into possibilities that only he could imagine. That kind of dramatic transformation was what artists used to do, like Michelangelo sculpting a David who was at once vulnerable and beautiful and supremely powerful-a transformation of man into what he should be and could become. But today sculptors transform scrap metal into junk piles and call it art Artists use computers to generate graphics that are supposed to be true to the real world. I write a book that shows us what we are, not what we could be.... And Charles Weston's paintings hang locked in his studio, protected from the world that needs to see them. Why did he come to Whitman to meet me? What did he think I could show him that he doesn't already know?

I turned from the blaze of color and feeling to the artist Charles stood watching me, leaning against the empty wall of the narrow entranceway the jutting dogleg formed. In some ways, I saw him as I'd always seen him-attractive, with beautiful eyes that glitter and flicker and say things he won't put into words. But the protective mask that distorted his appearance in public was gone now. He'd left all his guarded uncertainty outside his studio. He was just waiting, at peace with himself. Right then he seemed more real to me than he ever had before, and I suddenly understood-this was what he had expected to see when he looked at me, because he'd thought my work was the same sort of warning as his wolf pack, or his single wing straining to escape the imprisoning trees.

That was when I saw just how great the difference between us was, and what he had been trying to explain to me on the roof. I'm not like Charles. I can't equal his creative integrity. I can't see the possibilities that he sees, and offer
them to my readers as hope for the future. I can't even find a way to reflect it back to him. I can only write what is, and I've done that I felt ashamed, because I knew I'd let him down, because I couldn't measure up to him.

I turned away-and then I saw it If I'd seen it in a museum, in a textbook, I'd have figured the artist was a genius who'd outlive all the rest of us, not a teenage classmate I'd hoped to seduce. He had captured me, instead, and rather than offering me his body, he was offering me his hope.

I saw a canvas that showed a city under a sunset of swirling, electric, manmade fluorescent colors-vibrant pinks and shimmering reds-the lights from the sky intensified by the neon spots of city streets. The weight of dark clouds, heavy with night, pressed the charged brilliance down to earth. But up out of the neon haze rose a bell tower, sharply etched against the lights. As the clouds pressed down, din% ming the fluorescent gleam, the manmade tower stood forth with increasing power, not giving in to the forces of darkness and nature. This is the human will that Charles believes in and can express more powerfully with his vision than anything I can express with my words.

As I looked at it, the cityscape worked its magic on me. I began to believe I could be something more, after all. If I couldn't remake the world the way Charles could, perhaps it wasn't beyond my gift for words and reflection to transform my image of that world.

And then I realized what I was going to write, the idea I'd been straining to find inside myself but couldn't bring into focus. Now that I've shown the world as it really is, and made Alan a reflection of the people around him, I needed to find a way to transform him-or, if not him, his brother, Kyle. I
wasn't sure how yet, but Kyle was going to find a way to rise up, like that bell tower, to break away from the mirror he'd seen Alan become-the same mirror I'd let grow within me and around me. If I could write that, even if I couldn't change my real world, I could at least see some hope for myself, and maybe show my reader what he could become.