At night he dreams of Claire. Claire before her anti-Claire screed. Before the red eyes and blouse vomit. Her dark bedroom, moon through the blinds. A poster on the wall. The painting. Her painting. Simon was there the night Claire saw it for the first time at the Guggenheim, the night of the gala, the night the pill bottles rained down upon the rotunda, society patrons looking up, stunned, like turkeys in the rain—Oxycodone smart bombs, tumbling end over end—then covering their hair and running for cover.
Murderer, was chanted from the spiral above.
Profiteer.
Earlier, during the perfunctory handshakes, the copious cocktails, Claire, terminally bored, had wandered away from the clot of gray-haired men and their trophy wives, from bespectacled lawyers in bow ties and society matrons in their gowns with the diaphanous sleeves that cloak their flabby arms. Simon followed her up the circle ramp instinctually, like a satellite compelled by gravity. On the lower levels they scanned the rectangles of the permanent collection. Painting rectangle, photo rectangle. Art. Foot after foot, Claire frowned her disdain.
“Hack,” she said. “Pretender.”
Modern.
Abstract.
Fauvist.
Cubist.
Boring.
And then halfway up the ramp she stopped. Simon, still looking at a Mondrian he thought was maybe not so bad, bumped into her.
“Sorry,” he said reflexively, but Claire said nothing. She’d been hypnotized.
Simon stepped out from behind her. He read the plaque.
A Boy Defending a Baby from an Eagle, by Frederic Leighton, 1851.
Simon looked at his sister’s face. Her lips were parted, the tip of her tongue fixed between her teeth, her pupils the size of saucers. He’d never seen her so still. He turned to the painting.
It was as described. A baby, cherubic, asleep on a white blanket, thumb in mouth, lying on a grassy slope. A huge brown eagle hovered over it, wings extended, frozen in mid-flap, the baby’s diaper in one talon, pulled up to reveal a snowy hip. But the eagle’s attention was elsewhere, its head turned. Because here, to the rescue, was a boy no older than eight, dressed in a kind of soldier’s jacket, his left hand raised before his face, defending against the eagle’s other claw. In the boy’s right hand, frozen in mid-swing, was a hooked scythe, a wall of wheat at the child’s back, as if the weapon itself symbolized a kind of harvest.
But there was more.
On the grass, incongruously, before the baby was an amphora of wine and a still life of food—a picnic clearly set by adults. Where were they now, these adults: mother, father? Adults who may have lain in this very spot not that long ago, drinking their wine, peeling their grapes, flirting, laughing, surrendering to their animal passions. Making babies. Adults who had become parents as thoughtlessly as one falls to the ground. And yet where were they when they were needed most, when the very lives of their children depended on them? Nowhere to be seen, represented in their absence by the wine of their irresponsibility, the picnic of their neglect, leaving the children to fend for themselves.
Claire stared at that painting as the museum filled with donors, with artists and politicians, with philanthropists and pop stars. She stared at it as champagne corks popped, as whiskey sours were shaken and poured. And Simon, standing at her right hip, stared at her. What was she seeing there in the colorful smudges? This was no abstract appreciation, no academic respect. Something personal was happening in the space between his sister and this one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old painting. Around them the lights dimmed and rose, a sign that the presentation was about to begin. Simon tugged at Claire’s sleeve. He was thirteen years old and consumed by fear, fear that they were doing something wrong, fear that they should have stayed with their parents, that their mother would be mad or their father would be disappointed, fear that they were missing something critical.
It was the story of his life, this inability to be where he was. To live in the moment.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s starting.”
But Claire shook her head. “You go.”
Simon swallowed hard. He felt responsible for Claire. Claire who was always wandering off, always talking back, Claire who couldn’t just be nice and do what she was told.
“Claire,” he said.
But she was done talking, and they stayed that way until their mother came to drag them downstairs, lips pursed, pinching their arms a little too hard, smelling of scotch and fear.
*
It’s midnight when the Prophet comes to get him. Simon is sitting on the edge of his bed, his bag already packed. He is like an old woman with a doctor’s appointment, up and dressed at 4:30 a.m., anxious he will sleep through the alarm, worrying their route. What if they’re stopped? What if the guards are mad? What if they tell the doctors and the doctors call his parents? Simon Oliver, jailbreak artist, outlaw. The thought makes him shiver. It is a fantasy both rich and terrifying. To wantonly cast off the rules of society. To say fuck it. Fuck it all.
Could he do it and survive? Or would a bolt of lightning strike him just for asking the question? Sitting on his bed—he has made his fucking bed—he fingers the paper bag in his pocket, focuses on his breathing. Deep in. Slow out.
Don’t think about how many private planes you’ve been on, how many gallons of jet fuel were burned to move four spoiled, selfish people around the globe. Think about what you personally can do to free yourself from the paralysis of this knowledge, the survivor’s guilt of being rich and white and male with your whole life ahead of you.