He once watched Amy spend an entire afternoon searching for perfect blue. He’d been sitting on her futon, textbook open, trying to get through a passage on neurotransmitters, but he kept going over the same paragraph again and again. His eyes would drift off the page, would turn to Amy at her easel. She often grabbed whatever was at hand to act as a palette—a saucer, a plate, a piece of tile, even wax paper—and would at times work so frantically that she eschewed brushes entirely, smearing the paint directly onto the canvas with a palette knife, thick impasto textures, wet into wet.
“I have this blue in mind,” she said, “but I don’t know if it actually exists.”
She started with titanium white and Prussian blue, added a hint of yellow. Too bright. So she added a dab of raw umber, blended it with Payne’s grey, created a more stormy blue, richer, almost smoky. But now it was too dark. So she mixed in translucent green and a softer shade of white and added a touch of alizarin red. But still it wasn’t right.
She wiped her knife on a rag, started in again, this time with cerulean blue, adding more green, less umber. A daub here. A tad there. Ochre and eggshell. Burnt sienna. Cobalt blue. More cerulean, less alizarin. But every time Thomas thought she was finished, she would step back, shake her head, and begin anew. Thomas watched her as she eased colours out of the crusted tubes—Amy squeezed her paint the way she squeezed her toothpaste: unapologetically, right down the middle—looking for that one shade of blue among all the endless variations. There seemed to be more alchemy than chemistry involved at this point. He’d gone over to her with a cup of tea—black currant, scented like spiced wood; it tasted the way cedar chests smelled—but she let the tea go cold in the cup. Amy never found it, that perfect blue, but she kept searching.
Thomas had never uttered The Word From Which There Is No Return, that one word, that single puff of a syllable on which so much turns. Thomas knew full well that to be the first to say The Word out loud is to cede advantage. It was a bloated word, that puff of air, one that telegraphed itself in pop songs and poetry; when you heard “up above” or “like a glove,” you knew what was coming. A breathy insubstantial abstract noun, a transitive verb, a chemical imbalance in the brain: four letters signifying nothing (and everything). He’d never spoken it, but he came awfully close that afternoon as she searched for her elusive blue. In the end, he didn’t speak it but held it instead in his mouth, felt it dissolve on his tongue like a sugar cube, doomed and sweet.
Thomas could map Amy’s body by scent alone.
The vinegary tang of turpentine may have clung to her chapped hands, but the corners of her mouth tasted of herbal tea and toothpaste—a strange mix of hibiscus and mint, the essence of Amy—and her earlobes smelled (faintly) of soap. Dove’s moisturizing, to be specific. (She never rinsed enough behind her neck when she took a shower, was rather slapdash about the whole thing, if you asked Thomas.) She couldn’t cook, either. Early on, she’d invited him over for lasagna and he’d pictured layers of parboiled pasta laid down in succulent strata of spinach and eggplant, diced peppers and cottage cheese. Instead, she’d produced a box of Hamburger Helper’s “Olde-Fashioned Home-Style Lasagna™” which she then proceeded to overcook while chattering away about art school. Only in the most ironic sense could it have been dubbed “lasagna.” From a young age, Thomas’s education had included cuisine; he could blend spices and caramelize Spanish onions with an undeniable élan. So when Amy dolloped her rendition of a home-cooked meal onto his plate, he was perturbed, to say the least. “I made it just for you,” she said. It was the best lasagna he’d ever tasted.
As Amy and Thomas walked back through the fallen leaves, he said, “Let’s go for lunch. My treat. Thai?”
But when they got to her studio, Amy headed straight for the bathroom and Thomas was left to wait around, bored and vaguely curious. An industrial loft in an industrial building, Amy’s apartment featured elaborate arrangements of beams and joinery. And windows. Lots of windows.
“You’re the only girl I know who owns a telescope,” he shouted, but the bathroom door was closed and he wasn’t sure she could hear him.
Chipped china plates were laid out everywhere, blotted with paints that had dried and darkened, the reds turning to black, the whites to a muddy grey. She was the first artist he’d ever spent time with, and he’d been disappointed to discover she didn’t use a proper palette—the sort that painters in French berets and smocks might don. He’d never once seen her hold up her thumb or paint flowers in a vase, either. She didn’t even own a beret.
The walls of Amy’s studio were suffering from architectural eczema, flaking off in layers, revealing contour maps of failed colour schemes beneath. Here’s a suggestion! Maybe use some of yer paintin’ skills to slap on a coat of latex, spruce the ol’ place up a bit.
Photographs of her family were lined up along the fireplace, a fireplace he had never seen lit. The usual collection of images: Christmas trees. A lake. Someone’s graduation. One photo stood out, though: it was of a young priest smiling at the camera as Amy’s head rested softly on his shoulder. A priest with Amy’s eyes.
“How come I’ve never met your brother?” he asked.
No response.
“Is it because I’m a heathen? Invite me for supper. I promise I’ll behave. Won’t utter any blasphemy until at least the second course.” He looked closer at the photograph. “Does your brother take confession as well? We couldn’t really tell him what we’ve been up to, though, could we? Might be awkward.” How many Hail Marys does it take to erase a double-fingered G-spot massage to completion in front of an open window? “I know a nun,” he said. “I ever mention that? Kind of a miserable old woman, but she knew my mom. Used to babysit me when I was little. She was like the anti–Julie Andrews.”
Thomas began flipping listlessly through her leaning stack of canvases, 24 by 36, mainly. Thickly rendered images, more cut from the paint than coaxed. He stopped at one, looked closer. It was a thin, pale face. Sharp angles and empty eye sockets.
“Is that me?”
It was.
At which point the bathroom door opened, throwing a secondary source of light across the paintings. Thomas turned to say something glib—but the smile drained from his face. Amy was standing in the doorway, backlit by the bathroom. One hand was clasped loosely over her mouth, the other was at her side, holding a home pregnancy test.
He didn’t need to ask.
“Wait. No. Listen,” he said. “Listen.” He took a step, stopped. Tried to breathe. He would later recall that it felt as though he were falling. “I can’t. Not with everything that’s going on in my life right now, with school, my father.” And then: “I can take care of this, Amy. I know a guy. Your brother, your family—they never need to find out.”
Thomas wasn’t so much propelled from Amy’s apartment as flung. His lab coat and stethoscope followed, sailing out like a parachute and a toy-store rubber snake, after which her door slammed shut.
“Amy, wait!”
Silence from the other side.
“Amy.”
The door opened halfway and Amy’s arm appeared. She handed Thomas his toothbrush and then slammed the door closed again. He could hear the locks going up inside.
“This isn’t even my toothbrush. It’s the one you used to clean between the tiles.”
In the hallway, a security camera peered down at Thomas from behind its dark plastic dome. He could see himself reflected like a figure in a fun-house mirror, and he realized that this moment was being captured and recorded, was undoubtedly being stored on a hard drive somewhere. How long do they keep security tapes before they erase them? He could hear music playing, a faint aria from somewhere else. He quietly retrieved his lab coat and stethoscope. As Thomas walked down the hallway, he could feel the camera on his back the entire way. He tried to take comfort in the fact that this entire scene was probably playing to an empty room. He just couldn’t decide which was worse—that someone was watching, or that no one was.
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CHAPTER FOUR
BERNIE ON THE PHONE, out of breath. Traffic in the background.
“Where are you?” Thomas asked.
“Don’t know. Somewhere. Downtown, I think. What’s going on? Don’t tell me there’s trouble at the lab. I sent Igor out for a brain ages ago! That asshole should have been back by now.”
The reference to Frankenstein was a running joke of theirs. Bernie was Thomas’s unofficial lab partner, fleshy faced and rounded at the corners. Even his glasses were round. He reminded Thomas of a cherub that had eluded its fate and grown up. “Cherub and the scarecrow” is how Bernie described their partnership. They’d been running tests on brain tissues, dying them various colours, trying to trace patterns of thought in the neural pathways, and it wasn’t going well. They’d taken to blaming every setback on their imaginary and highly culpable assistant Igor.
“I’ll be in tomorrow,” said Bernie, still out of breath. “We’ll sort it out then. There’s a problem with the protocols. I swear there’s a step missing. Talk to the lab tech, she’ll know.”
“I’m not at the lab,” Thomas said. “I’m standing in front of Amy’s building. Her lights are still on, but she’s not answering the phone. I walked an hour, ended up back where I started.”
“So what happened? She finally smarten up and dump your sorry ass?”
There was a long pause.
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry. Look, let me wash up. We can meet at O’Malley’s. We’ll get drunk, diss the bitch. You can say, ‘Fuck it, I’m better off without her’ as many times as you like, and I’ll say, ‘Amen to that!’ every time. We’ll stagger home and you can sleep it off. It’s a time-honoured prescription. Goes back to Hippocrates, I believe. Up there with ‘First, do no harm.’ Thou shalt drink away a heartache. It’ll do you good, Thomas. I could use a drink as well.” Bernie could always use a drink.
And so they met, and so it went.
The night unfolded exactly as predicted. Bernie was in fine form, mocking their profs and fellow med students with equal aplomb (the students above them were all idiots, the ones below them all morons), while raising toasts and laughing large. They drank until the tavern began to turn, slowly at first, like a dimly lit carousel, then speeding up as the night went on. Bernie leaned in, caught Thomas as he was going by, shouted at him through the haze, “You’re too good for her! You’re practically a celebrity! I always told you, ‘You’re too good for her.’ Didn’t I always tell you that?”
“You did.”
“So why are you pining away over some second-rate, pissant artiste?”
At this, Thomas protested. “No, not second-rate. She’s good. Good painter.”
“Really? And what the hell do you know about art?”
“Not a goddamn thing.” But that wasn’t true. Thomas had once been an artist, as have we all: Finger paintings. Play-Doh figurines, squished into shape. Watercolour portraits of imaginary friends, paintings disappearing from the playroom—very strange—then reappearing later on.
Bernie turned, called for more drinks in much the same manner as one might call for a medic.
The heightened jocularity of the evening rambled on, self-consciously loud as though performed for an audience. The façade fell away only for a moment, when Bernie said, “At least you have someone.”
“Had someone,” Thomas corrected.
“Better to have loved and lost, right?” It was a snatch of poetry from Bernie’s youth. He left the coda unstated: Than never to have loved at all.
There was a sadness there that Thomas chose to ignore. “Did you know,” Thomas said, slurring his words as well as his sentiments, “that rats dream about mazes?”
“What?”
“Is true. Rats dream about mazes, birds dream about singing.”
“How could you ever know what a bird is dreaming?”
“Lissen. When a rat runs a maze, the location synapses in the . . . in the . . .”
“Hippocampus.”
“Right. Inna hippocampus. Those synapses fire in sequence. Every time the rat retraces the maze, same sequence. An’ when he’s sleeping, guess what? The same sequence fires in his brain. He’s replaying the maze in his dreams, over and over again, trying to figure it out. With songbirds, when they’re sleepin’, the same muscle tensions in their throat occur as when they’re singing. Is true. They dream about singing.”
“And cats?”
“Cats dream about fighting. Is true. If y’remove the—what do you call it?—the inhibitory centre from a cat’s brain stem, that cat’ll go wild when it’s sleeping.” The inhibitory centre causes sleep paralysis; keeps cats and humans and other mammals from sleepwalking or flailing about at night. “Remove that and the cat will arch its back when it’s asleep, will hiss and claw and bite. They’re playing out battles in their little feline brains.”
Bernie took off his glasses, cleaned them on a damp pull of sweater (which only made things worse; his glasses were permanently fogged), and the drinks kept coming. Thomas downed another, then another, shouted into Bernie’s ear, “To hell with her, right? Dozen madder. Emotions, who cares? Dozen madder, right? Just neurochemical pathways in the brain. I need to cauterize ’em, is all.”
“You said it, brother. We’re all just molecules.”
“Damn straight, ’m better off without her.”
“Amen to that.”
They left O’Malley’s and stagger-walked to Thomas’s apartment building, a tony two-storey arrangement of brick and vine, set amid the requisite tree-lined avenue. With one final shoulder-clasping back-slap, Bernie sent Thomas up the front stairs, and when Thomas reeled about to say “S’long,” Bernie was already gone.
It took several tries, but Thomas eventually got his key into the front foyer door. Inside, four separate townhouse-style apartments faced a central hallway. Professional people, for the most part.
Thomas entered his own apartment in a swirl of darkness, groped around for a light switch—the switch was apparently of a migratory nature—before giving up. He stumbled across the living room, opened the blinds to let the moon in. He could see the distant silhouette of Constant Sorrow, a spire with a smudge up top that must have been a cross. X marks the spot.
Thomas turned, faced the empty room.
“My sanctum sanctorum,” he said with a flourish—and a sigh.
Sharp corners of silver and chrome caught the moonlight. Thomas had spent a small fortune outfitting this open-concept space with the latest European home décor, only to have everyone who entered say, “Hey! Ikea!”
“No,” he would reply, testily, “it’s Finnish.”
“Exactly! Ikea.”
“Ikea is Swedish. This is—” Oh, but what was the point. (Amy’s furniture, meanwhile, was little more than a collage of thrift store finds and second-hand giveaways, even—egads!—at least one curbside rescue operation. After she told him—proudly!—where she’d found it, Thomas was never able to sit on that swaybacked, threadbare corduroy couch again. “It was just there by a dumpster! Can you imagine?” she’d asked. Yes. Yes he could. He could imagine it vividly. Who knew what sort of guest, rodent or microbiological, what sort of trace DNA those cushions might host. As far as Thomas was concerned, that couch was little more than a petri dish with side cushions, and his flesh itched psychosomatically for days after sitting on it. “You remember Lars?” she’d asked. “From the gallery? He helped me carry it up.” You’re a better man than I am, Lars from the gallery.)
“And I’m better off without her,” Thomas muttered. Any mantra, repeated often enough, becomes true. That was the theory, anyway.
Staggering through his modular Finnish world—and aren’t those clean corners ideal for the hitting of one’s shins?—he gave a desultory pull on his desktop lamp, shoved some papers out of the way, flopped down on the chair, rolled himself backward.
“Hello, Sully,” he said to the skeleton dangling in the corner. “Nice hat.”
Sully was wearing a nove
lty store pilgrim-style cap, green with a large tinfoil buckle: a souvenir of Saint Patrick’s Days past.
Thomas’s room was cluttered with medical charts, files, textbooks. (“I love it!” Amy had said the first time he’d brought her back to his place. “You’ve got this whole mad-scientist thing going on.”) A microscope, a box of glass slides, chemical dyes. A real brain floating in a container on a high shelf. Another, plastic brain being used as a paperweight. The plastic brain had hinges, and Thomas opened it up like a book. Each layer was carefully labelled: the reptilian brain stem and cerebellum; the mammalian limbic system in midbrain; the convoluted outer cortex of our higher functions. Slice a brain in half and human evolution reveals itself to you, like the rings in a tree, from the higher-order primates of the outer cerebrum to the lower-order mammals in the middle to the dark serpentine appetites coiled in the core. It was all there, our past, our present, ourselves. Snake, vole, ape.
“And what evolutionary purpose,” he asked Sully, “does love serve? Temporary madness, when all is said and done. Good to be rid of her.”
He closed his eyes and turned a slow dervish twirl in his chair. He might have slept like that, head back, mouth slack, had someone not started playing music in the next room. Faint, but clear.
Who the hell plays church music at this time of night?
Then, below the music, a whisper, a warning: “Thomassss.” He jolted awake, looked around the dull confines of his room.
But there was no one there. Only Sully and the darkness.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONFRONTING YOUR EX AT their workplace is never a particularly good idea, less so on four hours’ sleep whilst sporting an apocalyptic hangover and dressed in the clothes you slept in.
Undaunted by the ravages of dehydration, and with residual alcohol still sloshing about in his bloodstream, Thomas made his way with a grim determination, past the winos huddled in doorways beneath their oily sleeping bags, past shopping carts filled with worldly goods. Refugees from Tent City.