"What happened?"
"I told you, no time. I'd have asked for help at the clinic, but they wouldn't have understood. They'd have thought I'd had a breakdown, the same as Myers. You've got to take me there. You've got to make sure I'm injected with as much of any and every drug that might possibly kill this thing."
The panic in my voice overcame her doubt. "I'll dress as fast as I can."
As we rushed to the clinic, I described what had happened. Clarisse phoned the doctor the moment we arrived. While we waited, she put disinfectant drops in my eye and gave me something for my rapidly developing headache. The doctor showed up, his sleepy features becoming alert when he saw how distressed I was. True to my prediction, he reacted as if I'd had a breakdown. I shouted at him to humor me and saturate me with antibiotics. Clarisse made sure it wasn't just a sedative he gave me. He used every compatible combination. If I thought it would have worked, I'd have swallowed Drano.
What I'd seen within the cypresses were tiny, gaping mouths and minuscule, writhing bodies, as small and camouflaged as those in Van Dorn's paintings. I know now that Van Dorn wasn't imposing his insane vision on reality. He wasn't an Impressionist, after all. At least not in his Cypresses in a Hollow. I'm convinced Cypresses was his first painting after his brain became infected. He was literally depicting what he had seen on one of his walks. Later, as the infection progressed, he saw the gaping mouths and writhing bodies like an overlay on everything else he looked at. In that sense, too, he wasn't an Impressionist. To him, the gaping mouths and writhing bodies were in all those later scenes. To the limits of his infected brain, he painted what to him was reality. His art was representational.
I know, believe me. Because the drugs didn't work. My brain is as diseased as Van Dorn's… or Myers's. I've tried to understand why they didn't panic when they were stung, why they didn't rush to a hospital to make a doctor comprehend what had happened. My conclusion is that Van Dorn had been so desperate for a vision to enliven his paintings that he gladly endured the suffering. And Myers had been so desperate to understand Van Dorn that when stung, he'd willingly taken the risk to identify even more with his subject until, too late, he had realized his mistake.
Orange is for anguish, blue for insanity. How true. Whatever infects my brain has affected my color sense. More and more, orange and blue overpower the other colors I know are there. I have no choice. I see little else. My paintings are rife with orange and blue.
My paintings. I've solved another mystery. It always puzzled me how Van Dorn could have suddenly been seized by such energetic genius that he painted thirty-eight masterpieces in one year. I know the answer now. What's in my head, the gaping mouths and writhing bodies, the orange of anguish and the blue of insanity, cause such pressure, such headaches that I've tried everything to subdue them, to get them out. I went from codeine to Demerol to morphine. Each helped for a time but not enough. Then I learned what Van Dorn understood and Myers attempted. Painting the disease somehow gets it out of you. For a time. And then you paint harder, faster. Anything to relieve the pain. But Myers wasn't an artist. The disease had no release and reached its terminal stage in weeks instead of Van Dorn's year.
But I'm an artist – or used to hope I was. I had skill without a vision. Now, God help me, I've got a vision. At first, I painted the cypresses and their secret. I accomplished what you'd expect. An imitation of Van Dorn's original. But I refuse to suffer pointlessly. I vividly recall the portraits of Midwestern landscapes I produced in graduate school. The dark-earthed Iowa landscape. The attempt to make an observer feel the fecundity of the soil. At the time, the results were ersatz Wyeth. But not anymore. The twenty paintings I've so far stored away aren't versions of Van Dorn, either. They're my own creations. Unique. A combination of the disease and my experience. Aided by powerful memory, I paint the river that flows through Iowa City. Blue. I paint the cornfields that cram the big-sky rolling country outside town. Orange. I paint my innocence. My youth. With my ultimate discovery hidden within them. Ugliness lurks within the beauty. Horror festers in my brain.
Clarisse at last told me about the local legend. In the Middle Ages, when La Verge was founded, she said, a meteor streaked from the sky. It lit the night. It burst upon the hills north of here. Flames erupted. Trees were consumed. The hour was late. Few villagers saw it. The site of the impact was too far away for those few witnesses to rush that night to see the crater. In the morning, the smoke had dispersed. The embers had died. Although the witnesses tried to find the meteor, the lack of the roads that now exist hampered their search through the tangled hills to the point of discouragement. A few among the few witnesses persisted. The few of the few of the few who had accomplished their quest staggered back to the village, babbling about headaches and tiny, gaping mouths. Using sticks, they scraped disturbing images in the dirt and eventually stabbed out their eyes. Over the centuries, legend has it, similar self-mutilations occurred whenever someone returned from seeking the crater in those hills. The unknown had power then. The hills acquired the negative force of taboo. No villager, then or now, intruded on what came to be called the place where God's wand touched the earth. A poetic description of a blazing meteor's impact. La Verge.
I don't conclude the obvious: that the meteor carried spores that multiplied in the crater, which became a hollow eventually filled with cypresses. No – to me, the meteor was a cause but not an effect. I saw a pit among the cypresses, and from the pit, tiny mouths and writhing bodies resembling insects – how they wailed! – spewed. They clung to the leaves of the cypresses, flailed in anguish as they fell back, and instantly were replaced by other spewing, anguished souls.
Yes. Souls. For the meteor, I insist, was just the cause. To me, the effect was the opening of hell. The tiny, wailing mouths are the damned. As I am damned. Desperate to survive, to escape from the ultimate prison we call hell, a frantic sinner lunged. He caught my eye and stabbed my brain, the gateway to my soul. My soul. It festers. I paint to remove the pus.
I talk. That helps somehow. Clarisse writes it down while her female lover rubs my shoulders.
My paintings are brilliant. I'll be recognized as a genius, the way I had always dreamed.
At such a cost.
The headaches grow worse. The orange is more brilliant. The blue more disturbing.
I try my best. I urge myself to be stronger than Myers, whose endurance lasted only weeks. Van Dorn persisted for a year. Maybe genius is strength.
My brain swells. How it threatens to split my skull. The gaping mouths blossom.
The headaches! I tell myself to be strong. Another day. Another rush to complete another painting.
The sharp end of my paintbrush invites. Anything to lance my seething mental boil, to jab my eyes for the ecstasy of relief. But I have to endure.
On a table near my left hand, the scissors wait.
But not today. Or tomorrow.
I'll outlast Van Dorn.
After Matt's death in June of 1987, I collapsed. The day-after-day month-after-month tension of watching his painful decline had weakened the part of my brain that controls stress. A circuit breaker failed. No matter what I tried to do – take a walk, watch television, read, eat – my body was in a constant state of emergency. Stress chemicals rushed unchecked through me. Panic attacks repeatedly hit me. My mind swirling, my heart racing, all I could do was lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, experiences I wrote about in the non-fictional Fireflies (1988).