My own goal was more modest. I wanted to create slices of only one feeling—you guessed it—loneliness. I wanted to burn it right into the paint, into the felt mixed in the paint. I wanted it to have all the shades, all the layers of my own wretched experience. I wanted a portrait that actually suffered, suffered in the same dumb animal way that I did.
My task was complicated by the fact that, as a seared, I cannot allow myself to be deeply scanned. The radiation of scanways or holographic equipment would set off the wardens in my cells, and I would burn. Even the radiation from this little pocket simcaster I have here is enough to turn me into a human Roman candle (and, by the way, the next time I pull this out you’d better move your seats away from me). For my portrait, I had to use a passive electrocorticographic reader, a sort of metal bowl over my head with ultrasensitive wave frequency pickups. These are no good for modeling a thinking brain, but they do a fine job in recording emotive states.
So there I sat, at my grand banquet table, with a metal colander atop my bald head, gazing at the portrait of my first wife and allowing my love for her and the utter misery of my singledom to fill up all my spaces, and when there was nothing in my heart but a thousand paper cuts of loneliness, I’d tap the controller and feed my agony to the oil painting. The whole exercise sometimes took hours to accomplish, and it would wipe me out for the rest of the day.
Did the painting share my pain? I don’t know for sure, only that my instruments registered a positive emotive flux in the paint’s processor felt. But how could I know if the recorded feelings were true to life? I couldn’t; so the next day I repeated the process, and the next, and every day thereafter.
I hardly noticed the days and weeks streaming by. I can’t say that my spirit was refreshed by my work. On the contrary, this was pretty mucky stuff I was wallowing in. And it was deep enough to swallow the whole Cass Tower, I thought, all six hundred floors of it. At some point, I had opaqued my exterior windows, convinced as I was that the building was, in fact, sinking into the quagmire of my pain. I was weepy, defiant, and strung out. I ate too much or not at all. I slept sometimes thirty-six hours straight. I invented every distraction I could think of to keep me from the banquet hall and the woman who suffered there in secret. But inevitably I wandered in and hooked myself up to shoot her another dose of my love. I hated myself. I pitied poor me. I cursed the day I was born.
Ah, the artistic process. How much I don’t miss it.
Once or twice I thought the portrait must be finished. I doubted it could hold another drop. I’d leave the banquet hall then and break out the champagne. But the next day I would wake up feeling even lonelier than ever before, and I’d rush into the banquet hall to start a new session.
TO LAYPERSONS SUCH as yourselves, I’m sure this doesn’t sound like a particularly healthful or balanced lifestyle. And I would not recommend it to the viewers at home. Indeed, I had long passed the depth where most people would be crushed by the pressure. But to a true artist, one’s art is like a diving bell capable of taking the artist all the way down.
Then, one day, as I sat gazing at my wounded Jean, Skippy intruded to inform me there was someone at the front door. That can’t be, I told him. Who would risk swimming down here?
“She says she’s your neighbor from the next floor down,” Skippy said.
There were still people below me? “What does she want?”
“To see if you have a fish she can borrow. She’s not sure what kind she wants, possibly a halibut or cod, but she’ll settle for salmon or tuna or whatever you have, as long as it’s from deep saltwater.”
I was flabbergasted. All I could think to ask was, “And do I? Have fish?”
Skippy informed me that I did, over three thousand kilograms of live fish of assorted species in the stasis locker. They were left over from my banquet days.
I pulled the metal bowl from my head and massaged my scalp. I said, “Show her to me.”
Skippy opened a view of my foyer. There stood a woman of middle height, a trace of Asian features on an otherwise plain Western face, expensive clothes, and middle age. An eccentric, no doubt. To have money but to allow oneself to age beyond fifty years was eccentric. And she was a busybody too. Who else but a busybody would disturb a neighbor with such a lame request—may I borrow a fish?
“I see you’ve already let her in,” I said.
“Yes, I did,” said my valet. “Was that wrong? I was following the Leichester Code of Modern Etiquette.”
“Yes, it was wrong,” I said. “Remind me to review that code with you sometime.” To the woman in my foyer, I said, “Hello, Myr Neighbor.”
“Post,” she said to the cams in my foyer, “Melina Post. And you are Myr Harger?”
“I am. My valet tells me you require a fish.”
“Oh, yes, Myr Harger, I do. And the sooner the better. Do you happen to have one I could borrow? I’ll replace it as soon as possible.”
“My valet claims that I have a few in stasis. You are welcome to any or all of them. He’ll take you to the pantry where you can view them. If you see something you like, he’ll see to delivery.”
“Thank you so much, Myr Harger. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
“You’re quite welcome, Myr Post. Good-bye.” I closed the foyer scape, put the bowl back on my head, and returned to my suffering. But the knowledge that a stranger was at that moment trespassing my suite distracted me. I lived like a troll, never shaving or exfoliating. Fortunately, Skippy liked to keep the place clean, and I let him do it, so long as he kept his scuppers out of the banquet hall where I worked.
“Oh, there you are,” said a woman’s voice behind me. I whipped around to behold Myr Post in realbody entering the room. “You have a lovely home, Myr Harger.” Her eyes swept past me and took in the banquet hall, littered with years of detritus and dust, tubes of paint, dried palettes, hundreds of canvases stacked against the walls, towers of recording equipment, ropes of cable—and Jean.
I leaped from my chair, as though caught in a criminal act, and threw a cloth over the portrait, but not before she’d gotten a good look at it.
“My how—” she said. “That’s—” She continued to stare at the canvas. “There’s something extraordinary about that picture, Myr Harger. Please show it to me again.”
“No!” I said, galled by her presumption. “It’s not ready for public viewing.”
My tone startled her. “A pity,” she said, somewhat chastised. “Well, when it is ready, I should be very glad to see it again.”
“As well you should be,” I said. The suggestion that my Jean would someday be on public display disturbed me, though that’s what I’d intended from the start.
Myr Post gave me such a funny look that I became self-conscious. I removed the metal bowl from my head and tossed it on the table. It occurred to me that I was standing there stark naked. With a sick feeling, I glanced down at myself. But no, she had picked a day when I seemed to be wearing a robe. I cinched it tight and gave her a triumphant look.
That must have reminded her of her own mission, for she said, “I hope I’m not intruding,” perfectly aware that she was, “but I’m in a fix, and your valet seems a bit slow. Otherwise, I would never think of troubling you.”
Liar, I thought.
My visitor didn’t appear so old as she had in the foyer, more like my own age, but with weathered skin. She wore rich evening clothes, fit for a banquet, and I smirked, thinking she was years too late to attend one of mine. She began telling me how she had come to need a last-minute fish, but I wasn’t listening. I saw her rub her arm, leaving a pinkish blush on her skin, and this drove home the fact that she was really there. I couldn’t say how long it had been since I shared a room with a real flesh-and-blood person. After so long in my hermitage, the effect was dizzying, and I had to sit down.