It is a drought-stricken September after a rainless August and a dust-dry July. You and Bunk walk along the trail, kicking through brittle, crackling leaves. Bunk stops, and in his hand suddenly is one of the red paper packages. He unwraps it and says, Check this out, and snaps a flame from his fifty-cent Bic and lights it and tosses it into the air, where it becomes a sparkly gunpowder butterfly — eight jacks per wing on a thorax of fuse — and all this before you can say, Wait.
The sound? It’s a cartoon sound: when a man is startled and his derby hat spins off his head. Fweeee! Math lesson: fweeee! x 16 = the shit you’re in. But for a moment it equals glory: the fireworks spray spark trails of red and purple and gold and blue as they sizzle and wheel and whirl and spit and squeal. It is a chaos of motion and sound and color that to you (a thirteen-year-old suburban goodboy) is epiphany, is rapture, is power and light. And then it is sixteen spinning fire sticks MIRVing through the air.
And then it is sixteen small fires igniting around you. You try to stamp them out; you dance from fire to fire, but f lames keep springing back up in the places you’ve just leaped away from. The air turns autumn-smoke gray. At first the smoke teases you with chestnut-cart sweetness, but then it turns to black choking guilt, and panic rises in your throat and nose. Bunk is standing still. Let it burn, he says, and you quit trying to stamp out all those fires, because you believe he knows something you don’t. It’s a moment of self-doubt masquerading as trust in someone else, that’s what it is, and then the flames spread, feeding on the forest, chain-igniting, now waist-high, now chest-high, now head-high, now high-high, and you snap back into yourself, knowing that this is fucked up, something is deeply fucked up and about to get a million times more fucked up, and you are a party to all this fucking up, you’ve fucked up, you’re a fuckup, boy howdy you have really fucked things up this time.
Let it burn, Bunk says again, and the deadness in his voice scares you. His mesmerized stare at the flames licking, crackling, devouring — that scares you, too. You don’t understand the hypnotic allure of destruction. You understood that initial rush, that flood of wonder and adrenaline, but not this flat-eyed stare when everything around you is heat and blaze. Destruction scares you shitless, and you run home, alone. You change clothes. You hide your singed-hairless forearms under long sleeves.
The aftermath? You were not caught, Bunk was not caught, no houses burned, and the woods came back strong and true: first as lush, bright green life springing from the scorched ground, then as trees thicker and straighter than before. This, you think twenty years later, was exactly the wrong lesson for you to have learned. Where were the consequences? Where were the fucking consequences?
Today — when skylines burn in night-green, when the president’s faits are accompli, when smoke rises from spent casings and molten steel and charred skin and newspaper ink and your neighbor’s Good morning! — you imagine yourself there again, standing in the woods while the trees are burning, desperately turning to Bunk and finding him lock-limbed in a firegasm, already transformed into someone you don’t know.
It is Bunk’s crackly, dead-leaf voice that now rasps in your ear: We lit that place on fire, man. We burned that motherfucker down.
Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gachet
1. On the avenue des Champs-Elysées (March 1889)
The calliope chuffs merrily as the wooden horses and their child riders bob and spin. The horses are bright, newly painted, white and silver and chestnut and gold. It is warm and sunny, and the air smells of spring — of greening buds and warm gingerbread in the vendors’ stalls and rich brown mud churned up by little feet. Thrushes and blackbirds warble in the trees. Laughing children ride in goat-drawn carriages. A soft breeze luffs the pennants knotted to the carousel’s spire.
Dr. Gachet’s head is light from afternoon brandies with Père Tanguy, the color merchant. He watches as the carousel turns, as the children and their horses disappear from view and then reappear. He is an old man, nearly sixty-one, of uncertain health, and he feels he is entitled to simple pleasures such as this: watching children and horses disappear, reappear, disappear, reappear. Always going, never gone.
Inside his black satchel (along with a stethoscope, six brown-glass bottles of Dr. Gachet’s Healthful Elixir, and several packets of dried foxglove) are the seven tubes of paint and two new flat-ferrule brushes he has just purchased from Tanguy. He is not yet sure what he will paint when he returns to Auvers and sets up his easel; perhaps he will attempt that Cézanne winter landscape he has in his vault, or one of the still lifes Émile Bernard sent as payment for treating his ulcers. (Lately, he has derived far greater pleasure from copying works he loves than from wasting supplies on the capricious nothings of his own conception.) Whatever the subject, he will paint, he must paint. He is an old man. A lonely widower. Of uncertain health.
He is walking away when a single gunshot pops from somewhere within the Bois de Boulogne. He should not be alarmed — duels are commonplace in the woods — but a sudden panic knots his gut. Two men with guns; just one gunshot. One man has survived, and the other’s time is done. This is a certainty he finds terrifying, and he breaks into a run, away from the death in the woods, away from the children whose laughter now feels shrill and oppressive, toward the safety of Tanguy’s cluttered shop, with its oily air and paint-spattered floor. The outer world goes silent as his own fast breaths and pumping pulse and ringing ears fill his head.
2. In his garden with the artist, Auverssur-Oise (May 21, 1890)
“I am an expert in the field of melancholy,” Dr. Gachet says as the two men smoke their pipes. “So believe me when I tell you that you are ill only insofar as you must be ill because you are a great artist. Melancholy afflicts all the great artists.”
Puff.
“And, one suspects, it afflicts other great men as well — the great philosophers, revolutionaries, poets, statesmen, and homeopaths. Perhaps also the great chefs and botanists, vintners and swordsmen, conquerors and color grinders. I would not be surprised if the great men in all fields, high or low, were so burdened. Goatherds and carpenters, jugglers and boatswains, accountants and chimney sweeps, theologians and haberdashers, swindling gypsies and dung shovelers, trombone players and hackberry harvesters. But particularly, most powerfully, most certainly, most inevitably, melancholy afflicts the great artists.”
He shakes the crumbs of bread crust from his plate onto the ground. A fat chicken totters over and pecks contentedly. Across the garden a duck quacks, and a rabbit creeps through a green-and-yellow snarl of moneywort. “My prescription for you is work,” the doctor tells the artist. “Work, and more work. Many colors on many canvases. And, let us not forget, a soupspoon of my Elixir each night before you sleep.”
He feels the artist studying his face, his eyes, the space he occupies.
“You and I are very much alike,” the artist says. “Alike as brothers.”
Puff.
3. Signing the work (late May 1890)
The artist delivers his first Auvers canvas to Dr. Gachet like a child bringing home a good mark from school, trembling with excitement and pride. “It is excellent,” the doctor says. “Inspired and inspiring.” He resists the urge to touch the brushstrokes that have been conjured into a cluster of thatched cottages on a soft golden hillside. He shakes the artist’s hand vigorously, claps him on the shoulder. “I am unabashedly optimistic about your treatment,” he says.