From Black Rooms (5 page)

earned in her entire life. They could pay off the mortgage, have decent health care, send Cal ie to col ege, maybe even travel...

In lieu of a cold shower, Natalie forced herself to remember slogging through the Peruvian mud, pursued on horseback by a posse of Nathan Azure's murderous henchmen. She'd made the mistake of thinking with her wal et one too many times before.

"I wish I could help you," she told Amis, and stepped back from the door to shut it.

He barricaded the door with one beefy hand. "Name your price."

Natalie could barely think over the ringing of the warning bel s in her head. She decided to dispense with the professional courtesy. "I'm afraid I'l have to ask you to leave."

His smile shifted from genial to shrewd. "I have some influence with the Corps. If you won't take money, perhaps I could interest you in, shal we say,

preferential treatment?"

She saw al pretense of being a movie producer run from his face like melted greasepaint. "Who are you?"

"Someone who could help you a great deal, Ms. Lindstrom. You and your family."

The calm self-assurance in his tone told Natalie that he spoke the truth. It also told her that the job might cost her far more than a few months' work.

"I'm not interested." She glowered at the arm that braced the door open. "Now, if you'l excuse me, I'm very busy."

Amis took his hand from the door and backed away, a pitying condescension in his demeanor. "Very wel . But when I'm gone, so is my offer. You'l never have this opportunity again."

"I'l take that chance." She hardened her expression, refusing to blink lest he sense her weakening resolve. Amis chuckled and shook his head, then turned and strode down the front walk without looking back.

Natalie shut and locked the front door, but hurried to the living-room window to watch him leave.

Nudging aside the curtain, she saw Amis approach a gold BMW parked across the street. Behind it crouched Sanjay Prashad's black Mitsubishi Eclipse. Of the three Corps Security agents assigned to intimidate Natalie with round-the-clock surveil ance, Prashad was the only one whose name she knew and the one who worried her the most. The others were paycheck drones who put in their eight hours and went home, but Prashad exhibited the enthusiasm of naked ambition, sitting behind the wheel of his car with the erect posture of a corporateladder climber toiling in his office. When he made eye contact with Amis, however, the agent waved and gave an ingratiating grin--a peon currying favor with the boss.

As Amis drove off in the BMW, Natalie let the curtain fal back into place, a queasy feeling in her stomach. Amis had said he could use his influence with the Corps to benefit Natalie and her family if she agreed to provide his paintings. He never said what he would do if she refused.

To bury her concerns about Amis and his offer, Natalie swept into preparations for her Munch assignment-despite the fact that she hadn't intended to begin until the fol owing day. For a mild-mannered Impressionist like Monet, she might have set up her easel on the condo's balcony or even driven to the local university's arboretum to work outdoors, but Munch's

unpredictability made her want a more secure,

control ed environment. She therefore moved her

decrepit Volvo out to the street and assembled her art supplies in the condo's attached garage. Its connecting door had a dead bolt that she could lock to keep herself in, and her dad and Cal ie out, if things got hairy. Even when she had readied everything she could think of, Natalie gnawed at her thumb in uncertainty as she surveyed the makeshift studio she'd created. On the concrete floor, she'd unrol ed an old nylon sleeping bag to give herself someplace soft to lie down in case the inhabitation was...uncomfortable. Beside her easel, she'd clamped a couple of articulated drafting lamps to the garage's workbench to provide sufficient lighting. In addition to her usual assortment of canvases and paints, she'd laid out a variety of pastel chalks, colored pencils, sketch pads, sheets of cardboard, even

woodblocks and chisels, since Edvard Munch had

worked in several different media and became as

famous for his drawings and engravings as for his oils. Providing the raw materials was the easy part. The chal enge for a Violet who col aborated with a famous artist was to provide inspiration that sparked the individual's unique creativity. Hector, for instance, had caused a sensation in the art world by showing Munch a posthumous photograph of his body laid out on its deathbed, a bouquet of flowers on its chest. Obsessed with death even while alive, the painter found the picture perversely funny. It tickled him to look back upon the event he'd so feared from the detachment of Eternity--to see his own funeral not as an existential cataclysm but as the transitory, rather tawdry affair that it was. The painting that resulted from this epiphany,
Self-Portrait as a Corpse, depicted Munch in an upright
casket, his eyes shut in beatific repose, his face aglow with the flush of a mortician's makeup, arms folded across his chest like a mummified pharaoh. Bouquets of roses, baby's breath, and fern fronds embraced the coffin in bursts of red, white, and green.

Behind and to the right of this vibrant tableau, a dul brown door stood open, the rectangle of its frame leading into darkness. Submerged in the ebony were the wispy gray outlines of an old man with stooped

shoulders and thinning hair--the weary wraith of

Edvard Munch's soul, trapped at Life's threshold and observing the aftermath of his passing with the

resignation of the helpless and hopeless. Many art critics viewed the painting as Munch's wry commentary on the irony of his current popularity: Munch, the dead artist, embalmed and enshrined in his final gaudy glory, was more alive to the world than Munch the immortal spirit.

But the picture resonated more personal y for Natalie. It reminded her of her early Violet training, when she was only five years old. Death is like a big black room, her mentor, Arthur McCord, had told her. You're feeling
your way around in the dark, and you're not sure where
to go. The things you touched while you were alive, the
places you went, the people you knew--all of these are
like closed doors leading out of that room. When a
Violet touches one of these things, she throws open one
of those doors, and your soul runs toward the light.
To Natalie, Edvard Munch had perfectly captured the desperation of the dead.

Whatever the source of the painting's fascination, Self
Portrait as a Corpse had sold at a Christie's auction for
twenty-two mil ion dol ars--a record amount for a Violet painting. Posthumous col aborations general y fetched lower prices than works produced during the deceased artist's lifetime, which investors considered rarer and more valuable since there would always be a fixed number of them.

Natalie could not hope to make that kind of money without the Corps's seal of approval, but a Newport Beach real-estate broker with pretensions of being an art connoisseur had offered her a flat fifty grand for an original (if unofficial) Munch, which was more than she'd made in the last six months. Unfortunately, as with so many of her assignments, the client paid a mere fraction of the fee up front; he would only cough up the rest if he liked the finished product.

Reluctantly trying to put herself in Edvard Munch's morbid mind-set, Natalie had accumulated a half-dozen books on the Holocaust, which she now spread out on the workbench next to the easel. Munch had died in 1944, before the ful scope of the Nazi atrocities came to light, and she thought the artist would find the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau the ultimate

confirmation of his bleak views of humanity and its self-imposed suffering. Natalie became queasy as she glanced again at the photos of corn-husk corpses being bul dozed into unhal owed landfil s, and she tried to quash the feeling that she was exploiting both Edvard Munch and the tragedy of history for her own material gain.

When she had everything in place, Natalie consulted her watch. It was now half-past three. On the days Wade picked Cal ie up at Dr. Steinmetz's office, he usual y took her to a local playground for an hour or so and sometimes treated her to ice cream, despite

Natalie's strict orders not to spoil her daughter with sweets. With any luck, Natalie would have an

uninterrupted hour with Munch before they got back. She'd need to summon the artist for several more

sessions to produce a finished painting, of course, but at least she could dispense with the awkwardness of the mutual introductions, which always felt like a cross between applying for a bank loan and meeting one's inlaws for the first time. Before she started, however, she scrawled a MOMMY

AT WORK! sign on a sheet of sketchbook paper and

taped it to the condo side of the connecting door, then locked herself in the garage. Natalie could not predict what Edvard Munch might do while in her body, but no matter what it was, she didn't want her father or daughter to see it.

With the door secure, she grabbed her canvas tote bag from the workbench and lowered herself into a crosslegged position on the sleeping bag spread in the center of the garage. Before retrieving the touchstone Hector had given her, she spent several minutes practicing her yoga breathing. She did this not only to focus her mind for the inhabitation to come, but also to remind herself that she was the absolute master of her mind and

body--that if anything went wrong at any time, she could switch to her protective mantra and cast Edvard Munch's soul right back into its black room.

With a calm but wary confidence, Natalie began to recite her spectator mantra--a simple child's verse that would keep her consciousness in a state of stasis yet permit her to supervise the thoughts and actions of the artist while he resided within her:

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream.

She reached into the tote bag until her fingers brushed the grainy wood handle of the old paintbrush.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily!

Life is but a dream...

The pricking sensation began in her fingertips, as if the brush's handle had sprouted a thousand tiny slivers. The knocking soul's electromagnetic energy seeped into her skin like a transdermal drug, raising speckles of gooseflesh as it traveled up her arms, across her shoulders, and up the nape of her neck to stiffen the stubble under her wig.

Something did not feel right. Natalie's body rippled, but not with the epileptic palsy that usual y convulsed her during an inhabitation. Instead, the sharp fingernails of a shiver clawed down her torso, and her stomach

shriveled as if freeze-dried. The garage seemed to have swel ed to gargantuan size around her, and the lamps appeared to swing toward her, bearing down on her as if for an interrogation.

Natalie lost the thread of her mantra and contracted into a shrimplike curl on the bedrol . Wrong. This is wrong
wrong wrong.

The lights seared her with brightness as the wal s of the room receded farther into the periphery. Panic pressed her flat on the floor. The roof sped away from her as though she were plunging into a chasm, shrinking to insignificance. The articulated lamps descended like the necks of thirsting cranes, the lights threatening to swal ow the speck she'd become.

Natalie's measured breaths stuttered, stuck in her throat. She shut her eyes and wrapped her arms around her head to blot out the cavernous room, the carnivorous lights. This isn't real! Natalie shouted in her head. It's
just a dream.

The words brought the mantra's refrain back to her. Life
is but a dream! Row, row, row your boat...

As Natalie resumed the mantra, the solidity of the garage condensed around her. With it came the lucidity she needed to realize what was happening. During her research, she had read that in addition to bouts of depression, Edvard Munch had been plagued by fits of agoraphobia. Open, empty spaces seemed to exacerbate his existential fears of meaninglessness and mortality. Indeed, The Scream was inspired by one such panic attack, in which the artist froze in place against the railing of a dreary boardwalk near Oslo, paralyzed by the overwhelming sight of the bloodred sunset. The old vertiginous anxiety must have seized Edvard Munch, now that Natalie had yanked him from the narrow

cloister of his tomb into the wide world of the living again.

As she quel ed the fear they shared, the soul that cohabited her body sat up and surveyed the strange environment of the garage with the weariness of a prisoner dragged from his cel to a torture chamber.

"H
vem er jeg na?" she heard her voice mutter in a
glottal Nordic accent.

Unlike her dad, Natalie had not brushed up on

Norwegian before summoning Edvard Munch, but she

could easily guess the painter's question by the way he clutched at her throat--as if the softness and higher pitch of her voice were due to a bout of laryngitis. Who
am I now?

When summoned, most souls remained disoriented for a bit, not realizing that they resided in the body of another person. But Edvard Munch had been ripped from limbo dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times since his death, by Hector and other Violet artists around the globe, and he touched Natalie's smooth cheeks and delicate hands to ascertain the identity of his present receptacle.
Bienvenue, Monsieur Munch, Natalie murmured to him
in the mind they shared. C'est un honneur de faire votre
connaissance. With chagrin, she realized that she'd
used the same stilted icebreaker in French that her dad had come up with in Norwegian.

Munch rubbed the soft skin of her forearms like an obsessive-compulsive with a rash. "Are we in France?" he replied aloud, his French fluent but guttural. Relieved that the artist was wil ing to converse in the secondary language, Natalie continued. No, this is the
United States. I am a friend of Hector Espinoza and a
great admirer of your--

"You are a woman." The statement had an accusatory emphasis.

Uh-oh. Here comes the misogyny. Natalie reverted to
English in case Munch overheard the thought. She