I met a smart, attractive woman who worked in the marketing department of a cosmetics firm. One of my agency's clients. Professional conferences led to personal dinners and intimate evenings that lasted all night. I proposed. She agreed.
We'd live in Connecticut, she said. Of course.
When the time was right, we might have children, she said.
Of course.
Myers phoned me at the office. I don't know how he knew where I was. I remember his breathless voice.
"I found it," he said.
"Myers?" I grinned. "Is it really – How are you? Where have – "
"I'm telling you. I found it!"
"I don't know what you're – "
"Remember? Van Dorn's secret!"
In a rush, I did remember – the excitement Myers could generate, the wonderful, expectant conversations of my youth – the days and especially the nights when ideas and the future beckoned. "Van Dorn? Are you still – "
"Yes! I was right! There was a secret!"
"You crazy bastard, I don't care about Van Dorn. But I care about you! Why did you – I never forgave you for disappearing."
"I had to. Couldn't let you hold me back. Couldn't let you – "
"For your own good!"
"So you thought. But I was right!"
"Where are you?"
"Exactly where you'd expect me to be."
"For the sake of old friendship, Myers, don't piss me off. Where are you?"
"The Metropolitan Museum of Art."
"Will you stay there, Myers? While I catch a cab? I can't wait to see you."
"I can't wait for you to see what I see!"
I postponed a deadline, canceled two appointments, and told my fiancee I couldn't meet her for dinner. She sounded miffed. But Myers was all that mattered.
He stood beyond the pillars at the entrance. His face was haggard, but his eyes were like stars. I hugged him. "Myers, it's so good to – "
"I want you to see something. Hurry."
He tugged at my coat, rushing.
"But where have you been?"
"I'll tell you later."
We entered the Postimpressionist gallery. Bewildered, I followed Myers and let him anxiously sit me on a bench before Van Dorn's Fir Trees at Sunrise.
I'd never seen the original. Prints couldn't compare. After a year of drawing ads for feminine beauty aids, I was devastated. Van Dorn's power brought me close to…
Tears.
For my visionless skills. For the youth I'd abandoned a year before.
"Look!" Myers said. He raised his arm and gestured toward the painting.
I frowned. I looked.
It took time – an hour, two hours – and the coaxing vision of Myers. I concentrated. And then, at last, I saw.
Profound admiration changed to…
My heart raced. As Myers traced his hand across the painting one final time, as a guard who had been watching us with increasing wariness stalked forward to stop him from touching the canvas, I felt as if a cloud had dispersed and a lens had focused.
"Jesus," I said.
"You see? The bushes, the trees, the branches?"
"Yes! Oh, God, yes! Why didn't I – "
"Notice before? Because it doesn't show up in the prints," Myers said. "Only in the originals. And the effect's so deep, you have to study them – "
"Forever."
"It seems that long. But I knew. I was right."
"A secret."
When I was a boy, my father – how I loved him – took me mushroom hunting. We drove from town, climbed a barbed-wire fence, walked through a forest, and reached a slope of dead elms. My father told me to search the top of the slope while he checked the bottom.
An hour later, he came back with two large paper sacks filled with mushrooms. I hadn't found even one.
"I guess your spot was lucky," I said.
"But they're all around you," my father said.
"All around me? Where?"
"You didn't look hard enough."
"I crossed this slope five times."
"You searched, but you didn't really see," my father said. He picked up a long stick and pointed it toward the ground. "Focus your eyes toward the end of the stick."
I did.
And I've never forgotten the hot excitement that surged through my stomach. The mushrooms appeared as if by magic. They'd been there all along, of course, so perfectly adapted to their surroundings, their color so much like dead leaves, their shape so much like bits of wood and chunks of rock that they'd been invisible to ignorant eyes. But once my vision adjusted, once my mind reevaluated the visual impressions it received, I saw mushrooms everywhere, seemingly thousands of them. I'd been standing on them, walking over them, staring at them, and hadn't realized.
I felt an infinitely greater shock when I saw the tiny faces Myers made me recognize in Van Dorn's Fir Trees at Sunrise. Most were smaller than a quarter of an inch, hints and suggestions, dots and curves, blended perfectly with the landscape. They weren't exactly human, although they did have mouths, noses, and eyes. Each mouth was a black, gaping maw, each nose a jagged gash, the eyes dark sinkholes of despair. The twisted faces seemed to be screaming in total agony. I could almost hear their anguished shrieks, their tortured wails. I thought of damnation. Of Hell.
As soon as I noticed the faces, they emerged from the swirling texture of the painting in such abundance that the landscape became an illusion, the grotesque faces reality. The fir trees turned into an obscene cluster of writhing arms and pain-racked torsos.
I stepped back in shock an instant before the guard would have pulled me away.
"Don't touch the – " the guard said.
Myers had already rushed to point at another Van Dorn, the original Cypresses in a Hollow. I followed, and now that my eyes knew what to look for, I saw small, tortured faces in every branch and rock. The canvas swarmed with them.
"Jesus."
"And this!"
Myers hurried to Sunflowers at Harvest Time, and again, as if a lens had changed focus, I no longer saw flowers but anguished faces and twisted limbs. I lurched back, felt a bench against my legs, and sat.
"You were right," I said.
The guard stood nearby, scowling.
"Van Dorn did have a secret," I said. I shook my head in astonishment.
"It explains everything," Myers said. "These agonized faces give his work depth. They're hidden, but we sense them. We feel the anguish beneath the beauty."
"But why would he – "
"I don't think he had a choice. His genius drove him insane. It's my guess that this is how he literally saw the world. These faces are the demons he wrestled with. The festering products of his insanity. And they're not just an illustrator's gimmick. Only a genius could have painted them for all the world to see and yet have so perfectly infused them into the landscape that no one would see. Because he took them for granted in a terrible way."
"No one? You saw, Myers."
He smiled. "Maybe that means I'm crazy."
"I doubt it, friend." I returned his smile. "It does mean you're persistent. This'll make your reputation."
"But I'm not through yet," Myers said.
I frowned.
"So far all I've got is a fascinating case of optical illusion. Tortured souls writhing beneath, perhaps producing, incomparable beauty. I call them 'secondary images.' In your ad work, I guess they'd be called 'subliminal.' But this isn't commercialism. This is a genuine artist who had the brilliance to use his madness as an ingredient in his vision. I need to go deeper."