Thanks for the Trouble

  I never would’ve noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out, but now I could see the whole panel shivering with the draft. Funny, Zelda really did seem to know a lot of stuff. Art and history. French and Spanish and who knew what other languages. All of it very much in keeping with the story I’d promised her I now believed. I felt my faithometer nudge up to 38 percent.

  “Come on,” Zelda said. “Let’s check out the exhibit.”

  I always get crazy tired in museums. I don’t know what it is. Something about the air, or the light, or maybe just all that ART, coming at you like machine-gun fire—bam, bam, bam—all those haloed saints and weeping Marys and bleeding Jeses (that’s the plural of Jesus, right?) and yawn-inducing landscapes and dead chickens. Not to mention all that fucking fruit. Seriously, what is the deal with the fruit? Who decided that the best subject for art was a bunch of grapes and a pomegranate in a silver bowl? That guy ought to be beaten to death with an unripe pear.

  Usually the only thing that keeps me awake is all the nudity. Though not nearly as common as bowls of fruit, naked ladies tend to feature very prominently in your average museum. You’ve got your life-size marble sculptures of naked ladies, still somehow as white as a fresh bar of soap. You’ve got your oil paintings of naked ladies frolicking under waterfalls. You’ve got your blocky cubist naked ladies that you only know are naked ladies because the title is something like “Naked Lady Descending Stairs.” I can still remember those middle-school field trips, where we’d be corralled into a conga line and ordered to follow some boring-ass tour guide from room to room, and how everyone would get all nervous and blushy around the naked ladies. I liked to hang back and touch the paintings when no one was looking. It was an early and important lesson in the limited capabilities of watchmen. I’ve stroked the stone thighs of some seriously ancient statues in my day, and nobody’s even raised an eyebrow. Teachers and museum guards put on a big show—“Don’t touch this or you’ll get in trouble!”—but the truth is, they don’t stand a chance against us. They’re the 300, and we’re the fucking Persians.

  Anyway, I didn’t want Zelda to know I wasn’t a regular museumite, so I did my best to overcome my fruit-bowl-inspired sleepiness and look attentive. The exhibit was focused on this guy named Georges Seurat, who painted pictures with tons of little dots, like pixels on a computer screen. I wandered around, glancing at every painting for a few seconds, then moving on to the next one. Meanwhile, Zelda had stopped to stare at this one painting for, like, five minutes, so eventually I went over to see what it was. Study for a Sunday on La Grand Jatte, it was called.

  “I was present at one of his earliest exhibitions,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  I shook my head.

  “The style is called pointillism. Seurat’s idea was that instead of mixing paints on a palette to create the colors he wanted, he’d put all the colors down separately on the canvas, and let the eye of the viewer mix them up. See this grass here? If you look closely, you can see it’s got all sorts of other colors besides green in it. Colors you wouldn’t normally associate with grass. But it’s still grass, right? Isn’t that amazing?” She leaned in closer. “I find I can lose myself in the flecks, if I stare hard enough.”

  And so we stood there, staring, and as my eyes went out of focus, I started to see what she meant. The spaces between the pixels began to shiver, and the colors pulsated and fused. I closed my eyes and could still see them there. A dog made up of purples and reds and greens cavorted against the black background of my eyelids. Trippy.

  We walked on. The museum only had a few of Seurat’s actual paintings; the rest of the exhibit was made up of the work of other people who did similar stuff in the years before and after Seurat, with bigger dots or smaller dots or differently shaped dots or whatever. So maybe it was true, that there was nothing new left to be done, nothing I could show Zelda that she hadn’t already seen. But in spite of that disappointing revelation (and the fact that the work of the pointillists was woefully devoid of naked ladies), I was enjoying myself. Maybe it was because this was the first time I’d come to a museum voluntarily, as opposed to being compelled by an adult hell-bent on my intellectual betterment. I suddenly found myself really thinking about the paintings, in a way I never had before. Why had that painter over there gone to the trouble to put that bird in that tree, or that chubby cloud in that prismatic sky? Why was this fleck silver instead of brown? Every painting was made up of a million separate decisions.

  The exhibition spat us out into a gift shop, where all kinds of random crap that had nothing to do with art was for sale. Zelda threw a colorful wool scarf around my neck and stepped back to observe.

  “Gorgeous. You’re getting it.”

  I checked the price tag: $250.00. This place was so classy, they didn’t even bother writing it as $249.99. Zelda had bought the scarf before I could mount an argument against it. The wad of cash shrank yet again.

  Afterward, we ordered coffee at the museum café and watched people watching the art. Nearly everyone was caught up in the business of reproduction: “serious” photographers with telescopic lenses on their schmancy cameras; art students sitting cross-legged on benches and sketching rough outlines on tracing paper; the professional tourists, with their blinking sea of smartphones held up like lighters during a metal band’s power ballad.

  Why do they all do that? I wrote.

  “Do what?”

  Take photos. Don’t they know there are already tons on the Internet? Why not just look at the art?

  “Beats me, Parker. People are so stupid, it’s a wonder they manage to keep breathing.”

  I laughed. That was a good line; I’d have to use it in a story sometime. Which made me remember a thought I’d had while walking around the exhibit.

  Do you think you could do pointillism in writing?

  Zelda frowned. “I don’t know. What would that be like?”

  I guess you’d just use words. Single words. And try to tell a story.

  “So today would be . . . what?”

  I thought about it. Wake. Diary. Breakfast.

  “Mother.”

  Tea. Believe.

  For a nanosecond, I thought about writing down the L word.

  And so on, I wrote instead.

  “It could work, I guess. But it’s basically just poetry.”

  Oh yeah. It is, isn’t it?

  At that moment, the music of the organ began to echo through the museum. It sounded like an entire orchestra.

  So did this work? I wrote.

  “Work how?”

  Has all this beautiful shit convinced you not to jump off a bridge?

  Zelda laughed. “Well, it certainly is a lot of ‘beautiful shit.’ But I’ve been to the Louvre, Parker. I’ve been to the Prado and the Whitney and the Met and the Frick and every other museum under the sun. So this was hardly going to be the straw that fixed the camel’s broken back.”

  So how can I convince you?

  “Parker, I . . .” She raised my hand to her lips and kissed it. “I think it’s very sweet you’re trying so hard. But I’ve begun to notice a worrying disparity in the care you show me and the care you show yourself.”

  What do you mean?

  “I mean that you’re putting all this effort into making me want to live, and yet you seem to put very little effort into your own happiness.”

  I knew what she was getting at, but it felt good to be worrying about someone else for a change, instead of just obsessing about my own bullshit like I usually did.

  My happiness depends on you being alive.

  “You can’t predicate your happiness on someone else’s happiness. That way lies madness.”

  So what am I supposed to do?

  “For a start? Maybe stop showing me things you think I want to see, and show me things you’d want to see. What makes Parker Santé the happiest?”

  That was a tough one. What did make me happy? There had to be something, but when I thought about what my life had been
just two days ago, before I’d met Zelda, it seemed like a happiness wasteland. I hated school, and parties, and dances, and people. The only things I really liked were unsharable.

  I like to read. And to write. I like making up stories.

  “Yes! Like the story you made up yesterday, about the most beautiful girl in the kingdom. I loved that. Why don’t you write me another one?”

  Right now?

  “Why not? We’ve got time.”

  When she said that last sentence, she glanced at her phone, poised faceup on the table, like a viper that could strike at any moment.

  Okay. What about?

  “Love. Let’s have a love story.”

  STORY #2: THE BOY WHO COULD SMELL DEATH

  THERE ONCE WAS A BOY who could smell death—

  INTERRUPTION #1

  “THAT DOESN’T LOOK LIKE THE title of a love story,” Zelda said.

  I glared up at her.

  “Fine, fine. I won’t read over your shoulder. Your handwriting is abysmal, by the way. Don’t they teach children cursive anymore?”

  You want a story or not?

  “Yes. Sorry. Please finish. I’ll be quiet as a . . . well . . . as you.”

  STORY #2: THE BOY WHO COULD SMELL DEATH

  THERE ONCE WAS A BOY who could smell death. He said that it smelled sweeter than you’d expect—a little like almonds. When he was a toddler, no one believed him. He would pass a stranger in the street and tug at his mother’s skirt.

  “That woman smells wike death,” he’d say.

  INTERRUPTION #2

  “WIKE?” ZELDA SAID.

  He’s a little kid. He struggles with his l’s.

  “I see. Please continue.”

  I will.

  STORY #2: THE BOY WHO COULD SMELL DEATH

  “THAT WOMAN SMELLS WIKE DEATH,” he’d say.

  And his mother would slap him upside the head. “What a morbid little mind you have. Don’t speak such nonsense.”

  Then, one Christmas Eve, at a large family gathering, the boy was sitting on his uncle’s lap, listing all the things he wanted Santa to bring him.

  “A stuffed horse, and some mittens, and a wooden sword . . .” He trailed off. Then he leaned forward and sniffed his uncle’s neck. “Uncle,” he exclaimed rapturously, as if he’d just opened the first present under the tree, “you smell wike death!”

  Everyone in the room went quiet, and the boy was rushed up to his room without dessert. A week later the uncle’s heart seized up while he was in bed with his wife. His last words were “That horrible boy cursed me.”

  The next day the uncle’s widow stormed into her sister-in-law’s house. “I’ll have nothing more to do with you while that demon lives under your roof. He killed my husband.”

  “It’s not his fault,” the boy’s mother said. “My brother was fat as Santa Claus himself. He ate half his weight in bacon every day.”

  “So you’re saying it’s merely a coincidence?” the widow exclaimed.

  The boy, who had been standing at the top of the stairs this whole time, suddenly ran down into the kitchen. “I didn’t kill your fat old husband!” he shouted. “I just smelled death on him. It smelled wike almonds.”

  His mother slapped him upside the head again. “Go back to bed, child!”

  But the gossip mill began to do its ugly business, and soon the boy was notorious throughout the town. Adults avoided him, but the other children felt strangely drawn to him. They’d saunter up when he was on his own—outside weeding the garden, or buying milk at the market—and ask nonchalantly, “So you’re the boy who can smell death, are you?” And the boy would nod, because he’d been taught never to lie. And then they would want to know: “Can you smell anything on me?” And he would say no, which was the truth, because their town was a safe one, and these were only children. Confronting the boy who could smell death became a sort of adolescent rite of passage, like going into the basement of the abandoned house up on Banker’s Ridge and counting to a hundred.

  There was one boy in particular, a handsome but mean-spirited child named Charles, who found it hilarious to harass the boy who could smell death. Again and again, he’d ask, “Hey, freak, do you smell anything on me?” And when the boy who could smell death replied that he smelled nothing, Charles would say, “Well, I smell something on you: my fist!” And then he’d punch the boy who could smell death in the shoulder or the stomach or the nose and walk off laughing.

  But one day, four long years after the death of his uncle, the boy who could smell death did smell something on Charles, and because he’d been taught never to lie (and maybe because he was a little angry after all those years of abuse), he said so. “You reek of almonds,” he said. “I give you a week at the most.” Everyone around gasped, because the boy who could smell death hadn’t ever answered in this way, not in all the years they’d known him.

  Though he pretended to laugh it off, Charles was scared to his very core. The next day he walked to school more carefully than ever, looking both ways before crossing the street, and when he finally made it under the eaves of the schoolhouse, he heaved a sigh of relief. The sound of that sigh was just enough to shiver loose a big slab of ice on the roof, and it caved in poor Charles’s little skull.

  INTERRUPTION #3

  “WHERE’S THE LOVE STORY ALREADY?” Zelda asked.

  I’m getting there!

  “Well, get there faster.”

  You know, you’re pretty impatient for an immortal.

  Zelda just glared at me.

  STORY #2: THE BOY WHO COULD SMELL DEATH

  SOON AFTER CHARLES’S UNTIMELY END, the boy who could smell death was run out of town; the locals simply refused to believe that he hadn’t cursed Charles somehow, or else murdered him outright. The boy wandered alone for a long time, growing gaunt and haggard, eating whatever he could trap or steal or beg, until he came to a town where there lived a girl with silver hair and silver eyebrows and even fragile silver eyelashes. She was also an outcast, because of the way she looked, and when the two teenagers met, they both saw themselves in the other.

  “You look famished,” she said.

  “I am famished.”

  “Go hide in the barn. I’ll bring you something.”

  And so he did. And so she did. And when they were together in the barn and the boy’s hunger had been satisfied, the silver-haired girl asked him how he came to be a poor wanderer, and he told her that he could smell death, and that it smelled like almonds, and that everyone who knew him believed that he carried death with him, like an illness, when really he just smelled it. They called him a demon.

  “They call me that too,” she said.

  “Just because of your hair?”

  “Yes.”

  “People are so stupid, it’s a wonder they manage to keep breathing.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  They fell in love that very instant. Over the few apples the silver-haired girl had managed to steal from the larder, they shared their first kiss. The girl pulled away when she heard the boy sniff.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  But it wasn’t nothing. He had smelled death on her, hidden beneath the tang of the apples and the fresh scent of her hair. It wasn’t close yet, but it was coming. The boy resolved not to spend a single moment apart from her, because their time together was to be so short.

  She ran away with him that very night, and they drifted across the countryside together. They made love under the stars, and feasted on nuts and berries, and bathed in cold, clear streams. Every day the smell of almonds grew stronger, until it was practically overwhelming. The end was near now. The girl could scarcely move but for the boy suddenly reaching out and hugging her to him, as if even one step away from him was a step too far.

  “What is wrong with you?” she asked, though she didn’t entirely mind all the attention.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Then one day they were bat
hing in one of those cold, clear streams, when suddenly a great brown bear appeared from between the trees on the bank. It was ragged and scrawny, a desperate hunger in its inky eyes. And though the boy had never been wrong about the smell before, he set himself to defend the silver-haired girl as best he could. With the sharp pointed spear he used for fishing, he attacked the great beast. He stabbed it once, and then twice, and then it closed the distance between them and gouged a great chunk out of the boy’s stomach. He fell to the ground but continued to fight, slashing out with the stick again and again, until a lucky thrust skewered one of the bear’s eyes. The creature roared in pain and ran back into the woods.

  “No!” the silver-haired girl shouted, and collapsed by the boy’s side. “My darling! My darling!” She dug her face into the boy’s neck and wept great big salty tears, but they were nothing next to the thick gouts of blood that poured out of him, soaking the grass.

  When she pulled away to look at him, she was surprised to find him smiling.

  “Thank God,” he said.

  “How can you say that?” she asked. “You’re dying!”

  “I know,” the boy said. “But I’ve realized that all this time, it was my own death I smelled. Now the almonds are gone, and that means you’ll live a nice long life. Soon you’ll find another boy, one who can only smell your sweet scent, and you’ll be very happy together.”

  “I won’t. If you die now, I’ll kill myself.”

  The boy shook his head. “But you won’t, dear girl.” He tapped his nose. “I’d know.”

  And then he drew his last breath.