Fell of Dark (14 page)

I think what's most interesting about the Seven Deadlies and the Seven Heavenlies is that they all exist in each other. The Seven Sins mingle. The Seven Heavenlies mingle. But they stand on opposite sides of the room, like boys and girls at a sixth-grade dance, and can't stand to look at each other. I know what I'm talking about.

Some say the Deadlies start with Pride and the Heavenlies with Charity, with Love. It's true. If we put ourselves above everything else, we fall, we fall into anger and laziness and all the others. Love, nothing is harder than love, nothing wants or asks more from us. Love gives us everything that's good in us.

Which of the Deadlies is it hardest for me to avoid, and which of the Heavenlies is hardest for me to practice? Of the Sins, I'm angriest. This makes Satan happy. Patience has a tough time.

When will my anger go away? Nothing takes away from it. It's infinite, but it doesn't belong to me. It was put into me in a locked garage by a man I might never see again, a man I might not even recognize if he stood right here, but it doesn't belong to me.

Anger. I know it will leave me the more I love.

I don't even know what that means, but I know it's true.

Footnote

GEMMA'S SEEING SAM AGAIN,
and Sam looks the same as he did before. He's careless and smirking, but I have no right to judge. I have to turn away from Gemma, especially when she tries to catch my eye.

I have my blood and the promise of some fate, a fate that includes you. Right? You're a sure thing, yes?

Negative Space

I JUST WENT INTO
the kitchen and poured myself a glass of milk, almost to the top. The glass might be five-sixths full. Above the white milk, there's the empty part of the glass.

Would anyone see the glass as one-sixth empty? If the glass were half full, would a person even find it possible at first glance to see it half empty? I mean, I look at the stuff that's in the glass, not the blankness of the other, empty part.

Right?

The invisibility of the one-sixth. I can see the edge of the glass, but even if the material is clear and nearly invisible, it's not negative. It exists. Glass is almost invisible, that's all. But birds die against windows. They fly right into the pane and crack their little heads. And dogs and people walk into sliding doors.

It's never funny when a bird dies against a window, but it's almost always funny when a person walks into a sliding door. Why?

Negative space. The space left inside and outside of the boundaries made by physical objects. This is a tough idea. I'm trying to get my head around it since I just read about it in an article in
Architectural Digest
.

If I make my arms into a circle, the space inside the circle is negative. It has shape but no substance. The space outside my arms, as marked by my face or any other object, would also have a shape, I guess, though harder to tell. When I stand with my legs apart, there's a triangle of negative space I make with the ground.

I can train my eyes to see negative space. It's hard to see it without practice.

Sorry, I have to go back to the glass.

Who would see the glass of milk I have right now as one-sixth empty? Would anyone see the empty space before seeing the filled space? If I poured an alcoholic half a glass of wine, would he only see the part of the glass that didn't have the wine? Would he see the glass half empty?

Sorry, sorry. I'm thinking.

Is the definition of a pessimist a person who only sees what he hasn't got but wants? Would an optimist never see the empty space?

Or is there some other detail I'm leaving out? Is it more complicated?

I don't know. It isn't always bad to see the empty space, is it? Isn't it all right to see both, the filled space and the empty space? You could be in either. I have to try and see everything.

Work

A FEW MONTHS AFTER
my father died, I finally knew he was gone. The smell of his paints and turpentine once stained the air, stained his skin, my mother's hair, and my clothes. I grew up in the smell of his real work, and the smell was gone, disappeared. I went to the small room where he painted. There was an easel, a clean canvas, a stool speckled with paint and graffiti, a worktable, and a coffee can with brushes, pencils, and palette knives. I remember the folded easel against the wall, the canvas on the floor next to the easel, and the stool under the table. No rags, no tubes of paint. Diesel fumes from a passing bus came through the window. My father was gone.

My crying, red-nosed mother gave me an early birthday present. A small set of watercolors in an aluminum case and a pad of paper. I didn't want to open the case of paints, so my mother opened it for me. Inside were eight dishes of dry color, a brush, and an instruction booklet. My mother got a glass of water. She wet the brush and swirled the bristles in the yellow dish. A small pool of colored water formed on the surface. Then she opened the pad of paper and pulled the brush along the first page. When she handed me the brush, I shook my head. “Oh, Erik,” she said. My poor mother. She lost her husband to a car, then she lost me to my first silence.

My father kept a set of miniature fired bricks on a bookshelf in his and my mother's bedroom. I must have first used the bricks with him, sitting on his lap at a card table or on the floor, but I don't remember it. One afternoon, I went into the bedroom to find the bricks. I had to stand on the bed to reach the shelf against the wall where the box sat. I had just enough strength to pull the set out, but not nearly enough to hold it. The box fell on my head and burst open. Most of the bricks fell across the mattress, but enough hit the floor to startle my mother.

“Erik, what are you doing?” She ran into the room and saw the bricks all over the blankets and floor. “Are you all right?” She took me close and looked me over. “You should've asked.”

We got to the floor. “Papa loved these bricks,” she said. “They were his, no doubt about it. He didn't let you play with them alone.” After we collected all the bricks into the box, my mother carried them to my father's workroom. “You can build in here, Erik. Spread out.”

I worked where my father worked, in the shadow of his table. I built towers. I built forts and castles. A few days went like this before I opened the easel and set up the canvas. I imagined my father at work with his oils while I sat with the hundreds of small red bricks. Hours I spent in that room, day after day. My mother stayed away, letting me work alone in the company of my dead father's tools. She announced meals to me through the door, and I would answer either by going to the table or not. She brought me snacks of apple slices and raisins. All along, I kept silent.

One morning, my mother knocked on the door to the workroom and let herself inside. “May I join you?” I turned back to the bricks, and my mother sat down. I remember she tied her unbelievable hair behind her head before getting to work. We built a fort. She got through an entire wall and tower by herself. How did she know how? Anyway, we worked side by side in silence together for days, maybe months and years. When we finished, she straightened herself.

“Ooh, this is murder on my back,” she said. “But I think it's a great fort.”

I swept my arm across it all, an angry little god, destroying it, and pushed the bricks aside. I started again.

Before I began painting the scene of my father's death, I worried he might get angry. What if he came back to paint his final subject? I must have known he wouldn't return. I used a new tin of paints my mother had given to me. Instead of the brush the set supplied, I picked one of my father's brushes from the coffee can. I found a jar on his table and filled it with water. I got to work.

I don't know how long I built with the bricks in the morning and painted in the afternoon. The painting looked more like a comic strip. I painted my father on his bicycle. I painted the park, as I imagined it, and blue skies with birds flying over the trees. I painted a skinny tree, dying of hunger. My father stopped at the weak tree. He talked to it and held its branches. Once the tree swallowed my father and his bicycle, it stood up fat and tall. I'd finished my first and last canvas.

What else could I do but find my mother and show her my work?

I worried I'd failed when she began to cry.

“Erik,” she said, “talk to me. Won't you please talk to me?” She kneeled. “I miss Papa, but I miss you more now. Come back to me.” My mother held me hard. I felt her strong arms across my back and her tears on my neck. My poor, poor mother. I tasted the sweat on her skin and felt the heat of her cheek.

I closed my eyes. Shadows came and wings spread. With the wings came the pain and noise.

“Mama,” I said, “do you hear the train coming?”