I’d fallen asleep early, comforted by the rain that drummed softly against the tin roof and the wind that made the warehouse walls slightly shiver. I’d found the space almost two years ago, and it suited me. It was in downtown Salt Lake City, situated close to the old Grand Central Train station in a refurbished district that was still caught somewhere between restoration and dilapidation. There was a homeless shelter around the block to my right and a high-end day spa around the block to my left. Two blocks north there was a row of mansions built in the early 1900s, two blocks south there was a strip mall. The area was a conglomeration of everything, completely confused, and therefore, immediately comfortable. The warehouse had been partially converted to office space, but because of the residential area that butted up to the back, the owner was able to put an apartment on each floor.
I took the top floor apartment and all the open space that went with it, filling the exposed walls and beams with paintings that I had learned were easy to sell, especially when they were personalized. People came to see me from all over the world. I communed with their dead, painted what I saw, and those people went home with an original Moses Wright. And I made a killing doing it. No pun intended.
I’d built a reputation for myself. And I had a waiting list a mile long and a secretary to go with it. Tag had been my secretary in the early days. It had been his idea, after all. We’d been back-packing through Europe when disaster struck and we’d had our stuff stolen while we slept on a train. By the time we got off the train in Florence, I’d made a thousand Euros and Tag had enjoyed a romp with a rich Italian girl who had lost her mother the year before. The girl spoke fluent English, and she literally threw money at me as I rattled off a list of things there was no way I could possibly know unless her mother was showing me. Which she was, in colorful pictures and pastels, very similar to the landscape outside the train windows. The Italian girl cried all the way through our “session” and kissed my cheeks when I was done, but of course it was Tag who got laid, even though I’d sketched a quick drawing of the girl dancing in the surf, the way her mother remembered her best.
I’d been so afraid at first, reluctant to open the creative floodgates, especially when I felt like I had finally found a little space and a little control. I’d told Tag as much.
“I can finally block them out. Not all the time, but for the first time in my life, the dead aren’t everywhere I look. I can block out their memories and their pictures and their desires. I’ve gotten so much better at it. And I feel in control for the first time in my life,” I had said.
“But?”
“But it’s harder for me to paint. With the channel closed, my mind closed off like that, I can’t paint. See, when I pull down the wall, I turn off all the colors, I wash them away. And I need color to paint. I want to paint. I need to paint, Tag. I don’t know what to do. It’s a double-edged sword.”
“So control it. Use it. When it’s hot I turn on the air conditioner. When it’s cold I turn it off. Can’t it be like that? Let the colors in when you’re painting. Turn it off when you’re not.” Tag shrugged as if it was the easiest thing in the world. It made me laugh. Maybe I could experiment.
“Yeah. Okay. But if I start painting pictures of things I shouldn’t, and I get arrested for murder or robbery or some guy comes and hunts me down because I painted a picture of his dead wife having sex with someone else, I’ll let you bail me out of jail . . . or the psych ward.”
“Well, can’t say we haven’t done it before, right? Violence and art. It’s a winning combination.” Tag laughed, but I could see his wheels turning. Before long, we had jobs everywhere.
I painted a mural in Brussels, a chapel door in a little French hamlet, a portrait in Vienna, several still life paintings in Spain, and just for old time’s sake, a barn in Amsterdam. They weren’t all successes. We got run out of a few places, but most of the time, Tag would find someone who spoke English to interpret for me, I would paint, and people would marvel. And then they would tell their friends.
I ended up working my way through Europe, getting paid to create art by opening myself up to something that I’d always considered a curse. And even more importantly, for me, I got to see all the art I’d always dreamed of seeing. I loved filling my head with pictures, pictures that didn’t have anything to do with me or with death. Until one day I realized that life imitates death, especially in artwork. The art of the past is all about death—the artists die and their art remains, a testament to the living and the dead. The realization was a powerful one. I didn’t feel nearly as alone, or nearly as odd. I even wondered at times, gazing at something truly awe-inspiring, if all artists didn’t commune with spirits.
We spent four years traveling and Tag and I split my earnings. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him. His charisma and comfort in every situation made people trust us. If it had been just me, painting pictures about the dead, I have no doubt I would have single-handedly brought back the inquisition and been burned at the stake as a witch, or been sent to a lunatic asylum. Images of Bedlam had danced through my mind more than once when we’d spent three months in England.
Tag’s charisma drew people in, but his attention span needed honing. And Tag wasn’t big on honing in on anything except the next job, the next gig, the next dollar. When we’d come back to the states we’d continued on just like we’d done in Europe, hitting big city after big city, painting for one wealthy benefactor after another. Tag had been a rich kid all his life, a rich Texan—which was a little different from a rich New Yorker—but a rich kid all the same, and he was comfortable everywhere, while I was comfortable nowhere. But to his credit, he made me as comfortable as I was ever going to be, and with his help, I became a rich kid too. We’d spent another year seeing state after state, landmark after landmark, grieving loved one after grieving loved one, until one day we decided it was time to let people come to us.