Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (15 page)

“This is a joke, right?” he said, speaking slowly and carefully, as he always did.

“I wish it were,” said Leo.

“But...but
why
do you do that to yourself?”

“I told you why, Larry. I have to. I have no choice.”

“But you do have a choice. You just stop.”

“If I stop, then the visions stop. If the visions stop, the paintings stop. If the paintings stop, the money stops.”

“You have plenty of money.”

“Are you recommending I stop?” Leo asked, somewhat surprised.

“Well, I care about you. I’d hate to think you’re hurting yourself.” Lawrence, after much restraint, finally looked at Leo’s left arm, his non-painting arm. His
bleeding
arm. “Would you mind?”

Leo didn’t mind, and as he showed Lawrence his mutilated forearm, he studied his good friend’s expression closely. Lawrence sat forward and pushed up his wire-rim glasses. Leo didn’t have to look at his own arm to know what his friend was seeing was seeing. Leo had looked enough.

A small sacrifice,
he always thought.
A blood sacrifice.

The accountant’s face froze, and, as if someone had pulled a plug from the base of his skull, the color drained from the man’s face. Lawrence looked up sharply, and Leo had his answer.

He thinks you’re crazy
, thought Leo, calmly rolling down his sleeve.

Maybe I am.

Leo and Lawrence never talked about the subject again.

* * *

Three months ago, Leo woke up from a dead sleep and knew he was going to die.

It was in the middle of the night and his heart was racing madly. In his dreams he saw a fragmented image, the sort of image that only occurred to him when bleeding.
A vision.
Leo quickly realized the relevance of this.

A vision had come to him
without
bleeding. This was big.

No more bleeding!

Now, if he could just grab hold of this elusive image trying to make its way into his conscious thoughts from his dreams—or from wherever these vision came from. So he lay there in bed and tried his hardest to grab hold of the amorphous vision.

No good.

The harder he tried, the more it slipped away. He likened it to a photograph held just beyond his peripheral vision, a photograph that was slowly burning. And the more he strained to look at it, the faster it burned.

Still, from what he was able to see, it was clear that this scattered picture, this kaleidoscopic hint of beauty, would be greater in scope than any of his past work. It would be, he was sure, his life’s masterpiece.

Leo got out of bed, lit a cigarette, paced his large room, and tried with all his might to grab hold of the chimerical image. But now it was nearly indefinable, taunting him from the edges of his imagination, as if daring him to fully summon it.

And that’s what scared Leo. One way to fully summon this vision, this powerful glimpse of Eden, he would have to bleed, and he would have to bleed
a lot
.

A very troubled Leo went to bed three hours and a pack of cigarettes later.

* * *

The vision stayed with him for most of these three months, haunting his dreams, calling to him, mocking him, challenging him. The glimpses he saw were nothing short of spectacular, nothing short of Heaven.

Leo was terrified.

In some ways, he fell in love with this incomplete jigsaw puzzle of Paradise. In the mornings, when the vision was still fresh on the periphery of his dreams, he would weep at the heartbreaking beauty of its promise. But with each passing minute of consciousness, as the noon sun burned in through his second-story window, the vision would dissipate like the early morning mist. And Leo would weep again because he was never certain the image would return.

One night, upon waking from a particularly powerful dream, he called Lawrence. On the third try, his accountant finally answered in a barely intelligible mumble.

“Leo...is something wrong?” asked his friend.

“Yes.”

The mumble disappeared. “What is it?”

“I’m going to die.”

“What do you mean?”

So Leo told him about it. Lawrence listened quietly, or perhaps fell asleep. Either way, when Leo was done, his accountant said, “Well, you don’t have to paint it, do you?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean?”

“If I don’t paint it, I’ll never paint again.”

“That’s preposterous.” His accountant liked to say words like
preposterous
and
astronomical
, even, apparently, when half asleep.

“No, it’s not,” said Leo. “Think of it this way: this painting, this vision, is the next in line. It’s this one or nothing.”

“Well, can’t you paint it in bits and pieces? Say over the course of three or four sessions? Do you have to, um, bleed all at one time?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because once the vision comes to me in full force, it will never come to me again. I get one shot to document it, to paint it, to record it, and then it’s gone.”

“This is crazy.”

“Yes, it is,” Leo agreed.

“What are you going to do?” asked his accountant.

“I don’t know, but I need to do something. The dreams are becoming less frequent, less vivid. The image is leaving me. I fear it might someday leave altogether.”

“Good. Let it go.”

“Then I may never paint again.”

“You have made plenty of money, Leo. Your investments are through the roof, thanks, in large part, to me.”

“Painting is who I am. Even when I was bad, it was my sole identity.”

“Then go back to being bad.”

Leo had thought of that, and he knew there was no going back.

“The vision is quite beautiful, you know,” he said idly.

“Then paint the fucking thing. Bleed like a bloody ghoul into your disgusting bucket and paint the damn thing. But just know I am fully against this.”

Leo hung up and smoked another pack of cigarettes, then got up from bed and walked calmly downstairs into his art studio.

* * *

Months ago he had prepared for this moment.

He had placed a big fifty-by-thirty inch canvas onto the heavy wooden easel. Twenty-three different tubes of oil paint were lined neatly on the poker table in front of the paint-encrusted palette. He had put in a new light bulb in the adjustable light, and Bach was in the CD player.

Leo changed into a favorite paint- and blood-stained sweatpants. He put on a fresh T-shirt. He seated himself on his rickety stool before the blank canvas. He pressed “Play” and Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
performed on a Flemish harpsichord filled his spacious art studio.

Now, with a rare German Quillon double-edged dagger he had purchased for ten thousand dollars at auction for just this occasion, Leo proceeded to open a familiar scar on the inside of his right forearm, just below his elbow. As he did so, his tongue stuck out like a kid carving his first Jack-o-Lantern. Except, in this case, Leo was carving
himself
.

Blood welled up immediately from the wound, almost eagerly, as if it, the blood, had been waiting all these many months for sweet release. It hurried excitedly down his arm like a child at recess, pausing briefly at his wrist, then building up momentum and burst over the padding of his palm. It corkscrewed playfully around his middle finger and finally dripped free at his nail.

Leo watched it all, fascinated.

And only when that first drop of blood hit the bucket, as the
ping
of it reverberated within the plastic walls and echoed up to his ears, did the vision come to him in full force.

The entire vision.

The complete vision, with nothing left out or merely hinted at.

And it was breathtaking. If ever there was a heaven, this was surely it. Hovering right there before Leo’s eyes, waiting to be painted.

Hurry,
he thought, knowing that this epic painting, this masterpiece-in-waiting would take hours to complete.

Could he bleed for hours? Leo didn’t know, but he was about find out.

With his left hand bleeding uselessly into the bucket, Leo used his right hand to squeeze out the various colors he would need and used his thick sable brush to mix the colors to his liking—all the while blood
dripped-dripped
steadily into the white bucket.

The bucket itself was certainly a ghoulish sight, and Leo himself generally preferred not to look inside it. Looking inside for too long always made him queasy and sick. And now was
not
the time to be queasy or sick. The vision was here, and Leo’s time was limited, literally, by how long he could remain conscious.

Now, with masterful swipes and guided by the vision, he completed the background to the painting in a matter of minutes. Already, the bottom of the bucket was covered with Leo’s fresh blood.

An hour into the painting and Leo’s left arm was cold and numb. He had to knock scabs away twice to keep the blood flowing. He always knew his blood was coagulating because the vision before him would start to fade, wavering like a distant mirage.

The hours marched on. His stomach growled off and on throughout the day, a lonely sound that went unanswered. His left arm had long ago turned deathly pale, as it usually did when bleeding. Leo ignored his left arm. It had one purpose and one purpose only:
to bleed
.

In the vision were various people. Leo didn’t know who they were or why they were in his painting, and he didn’t care. They were part of the vision, and that’s all that mattered. He painted them all. At one point, an old man in his painting seemed to be smirking. Leo cross-checked the image burning in his mind. Something seemed off. Indeed, there was no smirk in the vision. So Leo touched the old man’s lips with his fine brush, and a few strokes later the old man’s smirk turned into a devilish grin.

In the bucket below, Leo’s blood reached the one-inch mark.

His wound tried to scab over again and again. And each time Leo flicked away the pathetic scab. His body, perhaps sensing that something very bad was about to happen, seemed to be doing all it could to save Leo’s life. Leo was tempted to cut his arm deeper, to draw even more blood so that the flow would be too great to scab over, but he resisted. More blood emptying from his body would cut his life shorter.