“Just watch.” She pointed in the direction of your father, whom your school principal, Doyle Dixon, was approaching with an outstretched palm. Principal Dixon showed Pa a stack of crumpled money, and you watched your father fight back a lunging impulse to hug the man. Instead, he pocketed the cash, nodded, and presented the painting to his boss.
“Now listen,” Ma said. “Doyle put in the rest himself, and I made him promise he’d never mention our own little contribution. Do you promise you won’t say a thing?”
“You—” Charlie was saying, but by that point Pa had practically skipped his way through the crowd.
“Doyle bought the damn thing,” Pa said. “Told me he’s going to hang it at school. Guess it wasn’t the wreck I was fretting, huh?”
“What have I been telling you?” Ma said, working her grin into submission. “It’s a beauty.”
The sale of this painting, however, had done little for his confidence. “Going through labor,” Pa liked to call his long studio sessions, but as for the results of all those painful gestations? He tossed most of his canvases onto the frequent bonfires he’d make in the fire pit. “Have you heard of installation art?” Pa liked to quip. “Well, I make incineration art.” It had been a very long time since you had seen his work.
But now you were going to Pa’s studio—with Rebekkah Sterling! In huaraches, your father walked on ahead into the desert night, leading the way for a grim, dirgelike march, the hard grind of stones under your feet, bats calling invisibly through the air. You let your family lead you, like a blind man, the blood in your nose beginning to congeal.
At the cabin, you settled yourself on the stain-spangled divan in the darkness, and Pa lit two camphor lanterns. Though you felt the blood pooling back into your nostrils you couldn’t bear to keep your head tilted away from this rare view. Arranged among the stub-choked ashtrays and empty bottles of George Dickel whiskey, his latest paintings, you were sorry to see, were an immediate disappointment. To your eyes, they just looked like a continuation of his artistic thievery.
Rebekkah, however, walked right up to these canvases and paused, as if she had some silent greeting to make to each one. Pa pushed the blunt end of a paintbrush against his lip as he nervously observed her. “They are a little crude,” he at last said. “I know it. I’m having some trouble with my brushes, and I think—”
“No.” Rebekkah spoke to the thickly slathered cerulean sky a few inches from her face. “They are beautiful.”
“Think so?” Pa watched the back of Rebekkah’s head nod slowly.
“Is that us?” Charlie asked. Your brother had noticed something you had not. Near the edge of each frame—beneath the swirling paisleys of a van Goghian starscape, at the periphery of a throbbing field of expressionist colors, amid the animalistic swipes and slashes of abstract brushwork—were four unmistakable figures: your parents, your brother, and you.
“It’s a series,” he said. “Or that’s how I think of them. Actually, it’s based on what I was telling you earlier, about the multiverse. If that’s true about the other universes, then somewhere there must be a whole universe that takes place inside of Vincent van Gogh paintings, right? Another inside of Munch. Kandinsky. And then I thought, what would it be like to live in those other places?”
At the time, you took this cosmological explanation for more of his knockoff canvases as fanciful, sentimental, a little drunken. The whole concept reminded you of the stories that your brother and you, as younger boys, had liked to tell each other about secret passageways, portals to hidden worlds buried in the land, fantasies that you had both outgrown. These paintings embarrassed you a little, on your father’s behalf. In this so-called series of paintings, you saw that Pa had married his life’s two great failures: the confines of his thwarted artistic imagination and his increasingly silent relationship with his family here on this planet. It seemed a little pathetic, Pa’s painting these other universes for his family members when the simpler solution would be just to have actual conversations with you.
“But if there are all these other universes, where are they?” Your brother was always the more credulous, cheery son, untroubled by dark implications. “How do you get there?”
“Don’t know,” Pa slurred in a grave register, as if this were a question that had been troubling him. “Maybe a black hole.”
“A black hole?” Charlie asked. “I thought it was all just dark in black holes.”
“No one knows for sure. Could be blackness or could be that it’s a wormhole. To another universe. The thing about black holes, I read this, is that the science of them is unknowable. To get close enough for a good look, the gravity in there would tear you apart.”
Less than three months later a black hole would open in West Texas, and you would come to see that there was something to your father’s naive cosmology after all. His theory held true of the black hole that would dissolve the floor beneath your feet on the night of November fifteenth: you would only begin to understand the truth—about Rebekkah, your own part in that night’s horrors—just as you lost the ability to describe it. A terrible brightness would break through you. What would make it so terrifying is that it wouldn’t hurt at all.
A beam of light trembled over the thick oils of Pa’s impressionist multiverse, a flashlight shaking in his alcoholic hands. “Anyway,” you told Pa, “Rebekkah is right. They are very pretty.”
And as he grinned, you were grinning, too. Maybe, you were thinking, you didn’t need to perform your unhappiness for Rebekkah, maybe she didn’t want your own sad stories. Maybe it was the possibility of witnessing a better family that had brought her to you? Tomorrow, you had just decided, you would at last spill the secret of Pa’s schoolhouse painting. Despite whatever disappointment you knew looking at his latest output, you were very glad for the promise of this story to tell her, how the three of you had huddled there behind a carnival booth, pooling what little you had to write that day a happier ending for your father.
Oh, of course it would be easy to pity that kid you were then, just a boy feeling the miracle of a freshly touched hand, practicing how to tell his best example of what made his family a family. A boy doomed to a future he could never have guessed. And yet maybe somehow, that night, you were already beginning to rehearse your part in this story? Soon the black hole would open, you would fall to one side, and your family would remain on the other. And after reading all those childhood epics—all those sci-fi, fantasy, survivalist, and tall tales that you so loved, and after all Pa’s talk of parallel universes, too—how not to believe that somehow your own otherworldly bed-bound epic really was foretold? How else to explain that unlikeliest sorrow you and your family were made to endure, the mythological transformations you were made to undergo? How not to believe, even still, that you were chosen?
No, you wouldn’t be able to pity yourself for long. You might have fallen through a black hole, but your family’s fate was equally desperate. They had to stay behind, on Planet Earth.
Eve