Radiant Days (19 page)

“You’re complaining about nothing to draw with. You said charcoal, right? Take it,” he commanded. “And don’t drop it.”

I gritted my teeth, then gingerly picked up the glowing coal. Heat seared my fingers, but almost immediately the ember cooled. The tiny flames died to wisps of smoke. I blew on my fingertips, afraid they’d blistered; but there were no marks and, after that first fiery surge, no pain. I held a lump of charcoal that left soft black smudges across my palm.

“See?” said Ted. “Not so hard. Now …” He strode to the opposite side of the cabin, halting in front of one of the tattered gig posters. He pried out rusted thumbtacks, carefully peeled the poster from the wall, and handed it to me. “There,” he said, pointing at the back of the sheet. “Draw on that. Plenty more where it came from.”

The paper was mottled with stains, and in some places images and words from the printed side had bled through. But I smoothed it onto the floor, weighting the corners with beer bottles, and for a few minutes sat gazing at it.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” I said at last. “Everything I was working on—all my best stuff—it was all paintings or drawings of her. Clea.”

“Gotta get back on that horse, Little Fly,” Ted said softly. He stood behind me, and for an instant I felt his hand touch my hair. “Remember what I said? Don’t look back.”

I shook my head. “I can’t forget her—I don’t
want
to forget her.”

“I’m not saying you should forget her.” He crouched beside me. He looked impatient, but also immeasurably sad. “I’m saying you shouldn’t waste your energy on looking back. Because what happens then is you lose her all over again. The only way you keep it alive—whatever it was that made you want to paint her—is if you keep working. That’s all that matters.”

“What about you?” I asked, not meeting his eyes. “You and your band—you were supposed to be so great. But you stopped.”

“Yeah, well, them’s the breaks. I stuck it out for a long time. Too long, probably. And I let other stuff get in the way. You want to know something, Little Fly?” Ted touched my wrist, and then the piece of charcoal in my hand. “None of this lasts. None of
us
lasts. But that”—he pointed at the empty sheet of paper—“
that’s
what matters. That’s what’ll be around after you’re gone. Not you or Arthur; only the stuff you leave behind.” He fumbled a cigarette from a battered pack and held it to his fingertips. A blue flare; he took a drag and exhaled. “Your paintings. His poems. That’s what’s left.”

I stared at the cigarette. “Jesus, how the hell do you
do
that? Is it—is it some kind of magic?”

I thought he’d laugh. Instead, he shook his head and said, “Magic isn’t something you do, Little Fly. Magic is something you
make
. Now get to it.” He stood and walked unsteadily to the ladder. “I gotta piss.”

When he was gone, I sat and gazed at the paper. I made a tentative sweep with the lump of charcoal, leaving only a grayish smear. I swore under my breath and tried again, pressing harder. The tip broke into soft pieces. I flung it down, grabbed one of the beer bottles, and threw it across the room. It struck the bunk, knocking something to the floor. I swore again and scrambled to my feet, afraid I’d hit Ted’s guitar.

But it wasn’t the guitar. It was the jawbone of a large animal, a bone as long as my forearm, from a horse or cow, or maybe one of the mules that used to tow boats like this one. Weathered gray as a piece of driftwood, with four deeply furrowed teeth still implanted in its long curve, and blackened strings that stretched between the two ends of the bone crescent.

I counted the strings—seven—and ran a finger along one. It made a very faint sound, not the twang of a plucked guitar but a sort of hushed sigh, like the release of a long-held breath.

Behind me the ladder rattled as Ted climbed back down. Quickly I set the bone instrument onto the bunk and dropped to the floor.

“Don’t look like you got much done,” Ted observed, glancing at the empty sheet.

“I’m thinking.”

Ted stomped over to the bunk, picked up his guitar, and sat. I picked up the lump of charcoal, studied it for a moment, then began to scrape at one end with my fingernail. When I’d shaped a
blunt point, I gently touched it to the paper and drew a line fine as the vein of a leaf; took the other, thicker end of the charcoal and drew jagged rays pulsing from a black sun.

I sat back, studying my work, and glanced up to see Ted with his guitar, his scabbed fingers turning pegs and tapping strings. He coughed and spit onto the floor; then began to play, so softly that I had to strain to hear. A wordless song that reminded me of something from long ago, a wash of yearning that must have come from a dream, because I could find no name or face to attach to it.

Above us, the lantern swayed as the boat rocked, and I sat, charcoal still clasped in my hand. I no longer saw Ted’s face in the near-dark; only the curve of his skull and lamplight shuttling across his fingers like thread upon a loom. If it hadn’t been for the sound of the guitar, I might not have known a man was there at all, just a play of light and shadow. I felt as I had when Ted played for that small crowd, at once dreamy and more awake than I had ever been. I half expected him to stop, to make some wry remark or light another cigarette. But it was as though he were alone, completely oblivious to me and everything around us.

Minutes passed, maybe hours, and still Ted showed no sign of stopping. I shifted, careful not to make a sound, lowered my head to stare at the sheet of paper in front of me and the solid black shape in my hand. I rubbed my fingers across the charcoal’s tip and began to draw. I drew Ted where he sat sideways on the bunk, cradling his guitar and playing a song I can still hear sometimes, late at night or early in the morning when the sky has a faint greenish tinge. His face looked ancient, seamed with lines
like cracks in a marble statue, his eyes bloodshot and the stubble on his chin more white than gray.

But as he played, the lines gradually smoothed away. There were still deep grooves alongside his mouth, and two furrows between his eyebrows. Yet he seemed younger—almost another person. After some minutes he turned and stared back at me.

For an instant those other eyes gazed out, the deep unclouded green of a lake in spring, at once ancient and childlike, just as he was at once Ted and someone else, his face ravaged by sorrow and some indescribable joy.

But then he turned back to his guitar, calm and detached as though he sat alone in the tiny cabin.

I stared at the sheet in front of me, and began to move the charcoal across it. The page dissolved into light and shadow, black hollows and empty space; a crosshatch of fine lines around his eyes and beneath his chin, a darker wedge where the guitar touched his chest; more empty space where the lantern light rippled across broken fingernails and guitar strings. I smudged edges with my fingertips, and leaned down to blow away charcoal dust like ash.

I don’t know how long it took. All I know is that when I was finished, I knew that it was the best thing I’d ever done.

For a few seconds I felt dizzy, almost sick. Then Ted’s words came back to me in a rush. I let my breath out, not knowing how long I’d held it, touched my hand to the page, and realized, for the first time, that what Ted had told me was true.

Magic isn’t something you have, or find. It isn’t something that
happens to you, or something you do. Magic is something you
make
. And if you don’t make something and leave it behind, it’s not just that it’s gone.
You’re
gone.

Yet if you create something truly great, there’s no need to look back—because it will remain, and live on its own, without you.

I looked up. The cabin had fallen silent. Ted sat on the bunk, watching me.

“Look at this,” I said. I moved the bottles, picked up the sheet, and brought it to him. He set aside his guitar, took the page in both hands, and stared at it for a long time.

“That is beautiful,” he said at last.

“I know.”

He smiled and handed the picture back to me. I looked at it again, then placed it carefully on the floor beside the wall. “I wish Arthur could have seen it,” I said.

Ted began to play again, another song without words, sweetly plaintive. I yawned.

“Tired?”

I nodded. Ted rose, his fingers still moving across the strings, and inclined his head toward the bunk. I climbed into it, pushing aside flannel shirts and rumpled sheets to pull up a worn wool blanket laced with holes. Ted crossed to the far end of the cabin and pulled a stool from the shadows, sat and continued to play.

As I pillowed my head on my arms, my hand grazed something: the bone harp. My fingers closed around it as the memory of Ted’s song echoed inside my head, along with the soft slap of water against the boat’s hull.

It seemed then that Ted began to sing, though somehow it was not a song but a net of words, a silvery fretwork of names and shapes, trees and birds and spangled fish; a boy who looked like Arthur, trudging across a golden desert; a girl who looked like me, standing in a crowded room with a wineglass in her hand. I saw all these things and a thousand more, saw them and heard them, too, tumbled together in a shining, tinkling heap within the folds of a net strung with stars and fish’s scales, glowing liquid streaming from it as unseen hands pulled the net from an endless, indigo sea, and I felt myself tumble into that shining web.

Charleville, France

NOVEMBER 2, 1870

School was still closed. He didn’t hear back from Georges, or Paul Demeny—mail delivery was all but halted by the war. Even newspapers were hard to come by, and when they arrived, the news was always bad. He spent his time hanging out with friends in town, drinking and smoking, shoplifting books until the bookstore closed for lack of trade; also stealing a bottle of cognac that he hid beneath his bed. At home he fought with his mother constantly, arguing over chores, his failure to find a job, the weather.

“I think you should go back to Paris and live on the streets,” his mother announced one morning in early December. He was still in bed. Snow blew against his window and the house was cold, because he’d forgotten to bring in any firewood the night before. “I can’t afford to keep you anymore.”

“Fine, I’ll go,” he retorted, voice muffled as he burrowed deeper into the covers.

But for the moment, he stayed. He was restless and miserable. Yet perversely he found that unhappiness was a spur to write. His life in Charleville was a void, an absence: writing created another life, gave substance to another being, someone who was at once Arthur and someone else, his daemon self.

It didn’t even take entire words: mere letters could invoke that
other world and daemon other. Late that night, after his mother had gone to bed, he stole downstairs and retrieved the oil lantern with its gleaming glass chimney, brought it up to his room, and set it on the plain wooden table he used as a desk. He lit the lantern, keeping the flame low so that it wouldn’t burn out, and angled it so that the window threw back the light’s meager reflection and that of his own face, mouth grim beneath baleful eyes.