I was simply following ideas that sprang up naturally inside me, with no plan or goal. Like a child, not watching his step, chasing some unusual butterfly fluttering across a field. After adding this color to the canvas I set my palette and brush down, again sat down on the stool six feet away, and studied the painting straight on. This is indeed the right color, I decided. The kind of green found in a forest wet by the rain. I nodded several times to myself. This was the kind of feeling toward a painting I hadn’t experienced for ages. Yes—this was it. This was the color I’d wanted. Or maybe the color the framework itself had been seeking. With this color as the base, I mixed some peripheral, variant colors, adding variation and depth to the painting.
And as I gazed at the image I’d done, the next color leaped up at me. Orange. Not just a simple orange, but a flaming orange, a color that had both a strong vitality and also a premonition of decay. Like a fruit slowly rotting away. Creating this color was much more of a challenge than the green. It wasn’t simply a color, but had to be connected with a specific emotion, an emotion entwined with fate, but in its own way firm, unfluctuating. Making a color like that was no easy task, of course, but in the end I managed. I took out a new brush and ran it over the surface of the canvas. In places I used a knife, too. Not thinking was the priority. I tried to turn off my mind, decisively adding this color to the composition. As I painted, details of reality almost totally vanished from my mind. The sound of the bell, that gaping stone tomb, my ex-wife sleeping with some other man, my married girlfriend, the art classes I taught, the future—I thought of none of it. I didn’t even think of Menshiki. What I was painting had, of course, started out as his portrait, but by this point my mind was even clear of the thought of his face. Menshiki was nothing more than a starting point. What I was doing was painting for me, for my sake alone.
I don’t remember how much time passed. By the time I looked around, the room had gotten dim. The autumn sun had disappeared behind the western mountains, yet I was so engrossed in my work I’d forgotten to switch on a light. I looked at the canvas and saw five colors there already. Color on top of color, and more color on top of that. In one section the colors were subtly mixed, in another part one color overwhelmed another and prevailed over it.
I turned on the ceiling light, sat down again on the stool, and looked at the painting. I knew the painting was incomplete. There was a wild outburst to it, a type of violence that had propelled me forward. A wildness I had not seen in some time. But something was still missing, a core element to control and quell that raw throng, an idea to bring emotion under control. But I needed more time to discover that. That torrent of color had to rest. That would be a job for tomorrow and beyond, when I could return to it under a fresh, bright light. The passage of the right amount of time would show me what was needed. I had to wait for it, like waiting patiently for the phone to ring. And in order to wait that patiently, I had to put my faith in time. I had to believe that time was on my side.
Seated on the stool, I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. In the autumn twilight I could clearly sense something within me changing. As if the structure of my body had unraveled, then was being recombined in a different way. But why here, and why now? Did meeting the enigmatic Menshiki and taking on his portrait commission result in this sort of internal transformation? Or had uncovering the weird underground chamber, and being led there by the sound of the bell, acted as a stimulus to my spirit? Or was it that I’d merely reached an unrelated turning point in my life? No matter which explanation I went with, there didn’t seem to be any basis for it.
“It feels like this is just the beginning,” Menshiki had said as we parted. Had I stepped into this beginning he’d spoken about? At any rate, I’d been so worked up by the act of painting in a way I hadn’t in years, so absorbed in creating, that I’d literally forgotten the passage of time. As I stowed away my materials, my skin had a feverish flush that felt good.
As I straightened up, the bell on the shelf caught my eye. I picked it up and tried ringing it a couple of times. The familiar sound rang out clearly in the studio. The middle-of-the-night sound that made me anxious. Somehow, though, it didn’t frighten me anymore. I merely wondered why such an ancient bell could still make such a clear sound. I put the bell back where it had been, switched off the light, and shut the door to the studio. Back in the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of white wine and sipped it as I prepared dinner.
Just before nine p.m. a call came in from Menshiki.
“How were things last night?” he asked. “Did you hear the bell?”
I’d stayed up until two thirty but hadn’t heard the bell at all, I told him. It was a very quiet night.
“Glad to hear it. Since then has anything unusual happened around you?”
“Nothing particularly unusual, no,” I replied.
“That’s good. I hope it continues that way,” Menshiki said. A moment later he added, “Would it be all right for me to stop by tomorrow morning? I’d really like to take another good look at the stone chamber if I could. It’s a fascinating place.”
“Fine by me,” I said. “I have no plans for tomorrow morning.”
“Then I’ll see you around eleven.”
“Looking forward to it,” I said.
“By the way, was today a good day for you?” Menshiki asked.
Was today a good day for me? It sounded like a sentence that had been translated mechanically by computer software.
“A relatively good day,” I replied, puzzled for a moment. “At least, nothing bad happened. The weather was good, overall a pleasant day. What about you, Mr. Menshiki? Was today a good day for you?”
“It was a day when one good thing happened, and so did one not-so-good thing,” Menshiki replied. “The scale is still swinging, unable to decide which one was heavier—the good or the bad.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I stayed silent.
Menshiki went on. “Sadly, I’m not an artist like you. I live in the business world. The information business, in particular. In that world the only information that has exchange value is that which can be quantified. So I have the habit of always quantifying the good and the bad. If the good outweighs the bad even by a little, that means it’s a good day, even if something bad happened. At least numerically.”
I still had no idea what he was getting at. So I kept my mouth closed.
“By unearthing that underground chamber like we did yesterday, we must have lost something, and gained something. What did we lose, and what did we gain? That’s what concerns me.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to reply.
“I don’t think we gained anything you could quantify,” I said after giving it some thought. “At least right now. The only thing we got was that old Buddhist bell. But that probably doesn’t have any actual value. It doesn’t have any provenance, and isn’t some unique antique. On the other hand, what was lost can be clearly quantified. Before long, you’ll be getting a bill from the landscaper, I imagine.”
Menshiki chuckled. “It’s not that expensive. Don’t worry about it. What concerns me is that we haven’t yet taken from there the thing we need to take.”
“The thing we need to take? What’s that?”
Menshiki cleared his throat. “As I said, I’m no artist. I have a certain amount of intuition, but unfortunately I don’t have the means to make it concrete. No matter how keen that intuition might be, I still can’t turn it into art. I don’t have the talent.”
I was silent, waiting for what came next.
“Which is why I’ve always pursued quantification as a substitute for an artistic, universal representation. In order to live properly, people need a central axis. Don’t you think so? In my case, by quantifying intuition, or something like intuition, through a unique system, I’ve been able to enjoy a degree of worldly success. And according to my intuition…” he said, and was silent for a time. A very dense silence. “According to my intuition, we should have got hold of something from digging up that underground chamber.”
“Like what?”
He shook his head. Or at least it seemed that way to me from the other end of the phone line. “I still don’t know. But I think we have to know. We need to combine our intuition, allow it to pass through your ability to express things in concrete form, and my ability to quantify them.”