The few ink drawings before the paintings started were so badly done they were embarrassing. It was like someone with a shaky hand had been struggling to keep control of the pen; like Aunt Charlotte’s left-handed signature that day she wrote Lachicotte that left-handed check for my bike. And even for that, she said she had been practicing all day.
But despite their clumsiness it was obvious what she had set out to draw: a figure of a little girl standing before a man seated on a bed. The strange thing was that the trembliness of the lines made the figures appear to be slightly moving. The little girl was standing close to his outspread legs. Drawn on a bigger scale, he bulked over her like a sitting giant. Her outer hand loosely held a doll by its arm and her other arm reached out to the man. In the first picture, this arm stopped at the wrist, but in the ensuing drawings there was a hand that moved nearer and nearer to the man’s crotch. Then splotches of color began to be painted over the ink lines until the lines disappeared. The rest of the board was tacked up with progressive paintings of the two figures. A suitcase materialized beside the bed and the doll had been dropped on the floor with floppy legs outspread. The man sprouted a green penis that curved upward. At first you could see its green tip like a small mushroom until gradually it was obscured by the girl’s bowed head being held in place by the seated man’s large hand.
She had used lots of pink and green, the girl being pink and the man green, though there were other colors, too. She had piled paint on top of paint and the man and girl mutated into less human images, grotesque figures in a bad dream, the man’s head becoming anvil-shaped and sprouting stubby green horns, the girl’s face widening into a sinister grimace. Where had I seen this crusted-over paint style, these grimaces before?
You could see the little paintings getting sharper as she gained control of those left-hand fingers. On a paper halfway down the board she had finger-painted some blue words, edged in yellow: ONLY TO YOU, MY LITTLE SHEETS.
That’s why the pictures looked familiar. It was what the old German artist resorted to after the Nazis had forbidden him to paint: watercolors piled on top of each other on heavy pieces of “Japan paper”: his “Unpainted Pictures” small enough to be hidden if necessary.
“I need to get out of here,” I heard my voice saying from a hollow place inside my ears. As I was uttering the words, my floaty mind reached out and brought back Wheezer’s voice saying the exact same thing that day in our apartment when he was handing back the forbidden photograph.
“Such lengths you humans go to color up the evil inside of you,” crowed Cutting Edge. “How many green penises did you count?”
“Shut up!”
“I kept my trap shut till you spoke first.”
“I’m out of here!”
“Oops, watch it! Oh, too late. Oh, dear, dear, dear. Now what are you going to do?”
I had knocked against the trestle table where Aunt Charlotte had left a small work in progress, which I had overlooked when we came in. One of the plastic glasses still filled with colored water slopped over onto the painting, which started to bleed. I ran for the paper towels and he followed right behind. Or from deep within.
“You’re done here, you know,” Cutting Edge observed, as we re-entered the violated studio.
“What do you mean?”
“I have to spell it out for you? You’ve trespassed, you’ve overstayed. You’re not ‘too good to be true’ anymore, you’re too bad to be wanted, even by Filthy Auntie. Especially by Filthy Auntie. When she sees you’ve discovered her filthy pictures she’ll never want to see you again. We need to hot-foot it out of here. You need to be somewhere else before she sees what you’ve done. What’s ruined is ruined. Oh, ruination, we crown you king.”
The little painting-in-progress I had ruined was the girl sitting alone on the bed where the man had sat. From out of a black background, a giant green mask was starting to emerge. The glass I had tipped over was unfortunately the one that held black water.
“You’re just making it worse with all that dabbing, stupid. Besides, what could you possibly tell her when she gets home? ‘Oh, Filthy Auntie, a weird wind blew up out of nowhere and I heard noises in your studio and I went in to see if anything was damaged and I saw the knocked-over glass. I did my best with paper towels and I didn’t look at anything else in the room, I swear.’ ”
“Do you ever shut up?”
“I’m programmed to keep my mouth running till yours stops.”
“But if mine stops it means I am dead.”
“I was waiting for you to catch up. So here’s the plan. Leave Filthy Auntie a nice note. Don’t go on too long and don’t get theatrical. Thank her for taking you in. Say you aren’t too good to be true—you are harboring a cutting-edge baddie—no, dumbass, don’t write that second part, just stop at you aren’t good anymore. Then close with ‘I’ve decided to go somewhere else.’
“Now I’m going to tell you something you won’t want to hear. She’ll be alarmed at first. But she’ll be relieved to have you gone.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I know I’m right. Give up and let me run things. Now you’re going to pocket the rest of Filthy Auntie’s painkillers and take along a bottle of water. Then get your bike—that’s right, put on that helmet. Don’t want shit-boy to spot you riding past his grandparents’ house and saying ‘freaking little loser, he’s gone and copied my haircut!’
“Tell me, Marcus, now we’re out on the beach, pedaling north on your usual route, don’t you feel you’re headed in the right direction? Isn’t it a relief to finally face your awfuls? You aren’t wanted, you weren’t wanted, and you’re not going to be missed. You weren’t wanted back when Mom kept checking her panties and it didn’t come. Then when you were about the size of a bean, she panicked: ‘I can’t do this, not by myself, scraping it out would be kinder than bringing it up poor without a father.’ But when you had swelled to the size of one of those little hatchlings she realized she’d left it too late and submitted to her penance.
“And do you really think when Filthy Auntie received word she was your only kin she ran down to the beach and danced for joy at the prospect of sacrificing her solitary life, not to mention her only bedroom?
“Wait, there’s worse to come. We haven’t got to the thought you were trying not to think, the thought that was too much for poor Evolving Gremlin and sent him wailing back into the ether. Pedal a little faster. No use trying to arm yourself against it because it’s already written on the fleshy, bumpy insides of your pink soul. However, I’ll keep up my cutting-edge standards and tell it aloud in my crumbly voice.”
“Not yet, please!”
“Please isn’t programmed into my vocabulary.”
XXXVIII.