The Colorman (26 page)

Lucy nodded, looked back up at the top of the stairs. “I'm worried about him. I think it might be affecting his mind.”

“What's that?”

“The cancer,” Lucy said plainly.

“Oh, my God,” Rain said. “I'd heard he wasn't well, but I never thought it was so serious.”

“He's sent me away,” Lucy announced, looking neither dejected nor relieved. “He doesn't want to see me anymore.” Her face put on a brief show of sadness.

Rain reached out to Lucy in sympathy.

“No, it's fine,” Lucy said recovering instantly. “It really is fine. It's how we were together. He's released me now. He wants me to remember him in the good years.”

“Oh,” Rain said, not really getting it.

Lucy nodded. “Can you be there for him?” she asked in a small voice.

It seemed like she was looking for reassurance that she could go. It seemed clear she intended to leave, anyway, but she wanted a pass on the guilt.

“Yes. I'll be there.” She patted the woman's shoulder and received a bracing hug. With that, Lucy pulled her scarves over her head and delivered Rain a sad, parting smile.

Rain stood still for a moment, listening to the echoes of the door's slam fade in the quiet. The sharp pattering at the window panes filled the space up again with a wall of sound as the rain increased outside to a gale. Sound, just like color, adjusts its quality depending on what surrounds it, changing in response to the atmosphere, the light, the other colors and sounds in range.

Rain went to the bottom of the spiral staircase and looked to James' office. She called out to him quietly, “James?”

“Yes,” she heard him answer clearly, quietly, too. She climbed the stairs.

While he'd appeared a bit wilted at times, and he had seemed delicate ever since she knew him, it was a shock to see him now. It had been almost two months since she had last seen him. He looked smaller, sitting—half-lying—on the couch in his office. A pillow and blanket lay crumpled next to him. It looked as though he had been living in there.

“Rain,” James said. He looked like the painting Monet made of his wife as she lay dying—all flat and almost at a foreshortened vertical in his repose. Whereas she was cocooned in a babylike swath of white, James' legs poked out at odd angles, and the rest of him melted into the furniture, his blanket and couch and the light and shadow around him made this a composition in blacks and tans instead of the hazy whites and grays of that painting.

James remained motionless as she entered.

“Hello James,” Rain said, feeling awkward. She stood in the doorway, still bundled in her rain gear. The lights on his desk were angled and shed stark shapes all around the room. “Hi,” she said again, trying to regain a sense of ease. It felt like years since she had seen him and she suddenly felt like he was a stranger. Or maybe that this was just someone else. She was nervous. He looked so frail.

“Rain Morton,” James said without opening his eyes. “I'm sick. Did you know that?”

“I heard. I'm sorry to hear it,” Rain said, stepping over the threshold.

“In my mind, not…I'm not so…can't seem to,” James groped for his glasses. “I'm terribly… Did you know, Alice? Did you know your daught—my wi—my moth—your…?” He took his glasses in his hands but neglected to put them on. Just sat.

“I didn't know her,” Rain said, approaching him and sitting in a wooden chair facing the couch.

“You have to paint, Rain Morton. Can you paint for me?”

“Why do I have to paint?” Rain asked gently.

“I didn't let her paint. I wanted her to myself. I was… It was me. I did it to her. Chased her…”

“What do you mean?”

“Will you make paintings for me? I'm making paint for you,” he said, wilting further with each expulsion of breath.

Rain looked around for a phone, thinking she should call 911.

Morrow opened his eyes. “The orphan and the cuckold,” he chuckled hollowly. “The cuckold, the orphan and the suicide.”

Rain stood and walked to the office door.

“No! No! Don't go…” Morrow shifted himself up as much as he could. It was as if he were melting away.

Rain halted at the door. She flipped a light switch and turned back around.

He laughed again. “Ah yes. New light. All new colors. You knew that.”

“I just wanted to see whether I should call an ambulance,” Rain said.

Behind his desk, Rain saw the photograph of Alice Morrow. Her smile was accusing, but charming. The brushes she held toward the camera were worn-out looking, but she looked healthy and alive with wit.

“All new colors on the very same surfaces,” Morrow continued, slumping back again. He nattered on atonally. As if he were reciting an old lecture. “Color…merely a phenomenon of light, an interaction between light and the brain. It's nothing, ultimately. Nothing at all. Energy waves triggering electrical impulses in our brains. ‘The actions and sufferings of light,' Goethe said it perfectly as usual. A wave and a particle, resisting our impulse to own and describe. We can see only a tiny slice of energy waves all around us, and we make such a big fuss over it. Such a fuss.” His voice trailed in and out. “Like it's real,” he said. “Like it's the only thing that's real…”

Rain picked up the phone.

James lay half prone, still propped on one elbow, eyes closed. “You can't even imagine what a tiny slice of the electromagnetic waves—I'm speaking as a scientist now, mind you…the electromagnetic waves that are available…”

Rain dialed.

“…miles and miles of it. Let's see, there's cosmic radiation, x-rays, ultraviolet, then our pitiful share of visible energy, 380 to about 750 nanometers. That's it, a sliver. After that, there's the whole range of infrared and then radio waves, for God's sake…”

She put the receiver back down.

He continued uninterrupted, “…people so convinced of meaning in color, it's absurd. Color has no meaning. It's a pleasure and a balm like food, like good air, a dream. No, it's like food. You need a little of this with a little of that. You need change, you need difference, complements, you see, freshness. An example. Your eye convinces itself of true colors under a candlelight. You still see the tablecloth as white, but it's not white. It's not. What is white? Look at synesthesiacs. I ask you.”

Rain heard the ambulance.

“One synesthete is convinced that Tuesdays are dark yellow.” Morrow attempted a chuckle again. It was clear he couldn't move. He kept on talking in a garbled voice. “But the next one swears it's purple, for God's sake. He'd swear on ten-thousand, gilt-edged Bibles. And nine is the color blue and the name of Ted is orange and it's completely and utterly nonsense! The random connections in the firings of neurons. Who's to say that my sky blue isn't your puce? We just point to the damn thing and say the same thing when that part of the spectrum beams through our retinae.” He laughed again. “Why should one person keep another person?” he went on, as though he'd been arguing about that all along.

Rain went to the landing to meet the paramedics but they were already bustling into the factory. James was still speaking as three large men trundled in dragging brightly colored, plastic cases and a large, orange plastic board.

“Trichromatic, you see? Three types of cones in the eye, three colors to balance and weigh. Having only two leaves one colorblind. Three. You need three.”

“Mr. Morrow?” one of them said loudly into James' face as he flicked a tiny flashlight up and down along each eye.

Another wrapped James' arm in a blood pressure cuff.

“Are you the daughter?” one of them asked Rain. She shook her head. Still listening to Morrow speak, Rain was appalled at how dismissive the paramedics seemed about what he was actually saying. She had to remind herself they were not being cold, but competent.

Morrow's lecture was uninterrupted by al the bustle. His words become a bit louder, a bit more dramatic, and were accompanied by a look of slight alarm on his face, but otherwise he continued on unabated, “…such a small part of the brain anyway, and such a smal slice of the spectrum of recordable energy is visual in the first place. All just really accomplished by particles scattering white light, absorbing it, scattering it. That's it, that's all I've done. Rearranged particles, sorted them out a little bit…”

“Mr. Morrow how are you feeling today?” the first paramedic said into his face.

Morrow regarded him with some concern in his eyes, maybe a slight bit in the tone of his voice too, as he said to the paramedic “…you'd think something that looks yellow IS yellow, somehow is a yellow thing, but it is actually a thing that is absorbing all of the light that is not yellow…”

“WHAT DATE IS IT TODAY, SIR? CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT THE MONTH IS? WHAT MONTH ARE WE IN?” The paramedic's tone remained polite, but he shouted right into James' face. Morrow seemed to register that he was being asked a question, and appeared to consider answering it, but didn't.

“…and so a yellow thing is really a thing that throws yellow energy back to YOU. Not yellow itself, but all things that are not yellow…”

“CAN YOU TELL ME WHO THE PRESIDENT IS, MR. MORROW?”

Again, no answer was forthcoming. All the while, the men worked full speed, inserting an IV, taping it down on his arm, one of their hands held it down securely while another one fit an oxygen mask over his face, but Rain could still hear James talking.

The paramedic said, “CAN YOU STAND, SIR?”

Morrow's voice droned on inside the clear plastic cup. Little clouds of steam obscured his lips as he continued speaking.

“Okay,” one of the paramedics said to the others, “one, two…THREE!” And as the three men, their six arms, the careful support of their six bent legs and three straight backs, lifted James Morrow from his sitting position, across the edge of the couch, Rain couldn't help but see it. See the dramatic gangly pose of David's Morot in his bathtub there for a moment as they swept him onto the orange board on the floor in a fluid, professional, least-possibly-disruptive way.

“Okay, okay, okay,” James said from the floor, suddenly more present. He tried to remove the IV from his arm. He finally seemed to be able to acknowledge what was going on in the room. “Okay, okay, okay,” he trailed on.

“MR. MORROW. PLEASE RELAX, MR. MORROW. ARMS DOWN. THAT'S MY BOY, THAT'S RIGHT.”

The paramedic was gentle and kind despite his shouting and manhandling. Rain, who had been watching from the door, trying to catch everything James was saying, finally let her hand go to her mouth and found her breath catching hard in her throat.

Not for him so much, not for the woman he'd loved or the father she loved or the confused wrecked love between all of them, but for life. Though she'd been orphaned, she'd never before witnessed dying. She didn't know if this
was
dying. Only that it could be dying, and she could see his vulnerability and his hope and firm belief in his continuing to live amidst all the bustle and noise of the three EMTs who had finished their strapping and hooking and buckling and were now hoisting this human being up and out the office door, winding down the spiral staircase and out to the ambulance pulled up on the muddy lawn.

But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn't
a negation of color. It was an acceptance... [Black] will give
you the feeling of totality. Of peace. Of greatness. Of quietness.
Of excitement. I have seen things that were transformed into black
that took on just greatness. I don't want to use a lesser word.”

—L
OUISE
N
EVELSON

B
lack is funereal as mourning, evil as black magic, threatening as a weapon. Black can be witches, bad luck, anarchy, and the theoretical unknowable of the proverbial black box. Blackmail, black sheep of the family and the black dog of depression. The black spot was a death sentence among pirates, their black flag warning of their nefarious intentions. Black hats on the bad guys, the black plague and being blacklisted are all unquestionably negative.

But not all connotations of black lean toward the uncertain or fearful. Sometimes it is taken back purposefully in
black is beautiful
. Black has long-signaled holiness, privilege and good fortune in priests' vestments, limos and black tie, and being
in the black
in business.

Black has a purity that draws many to it, even though the impressionists claimed never to witness true black in nature. And though Van Gogh shunned it, using bright contrasts instead of line, he returned to black just before he died in the form of the scattering black birds in “Wheat Fields with Crows,” his last completed work at Auvers.

Carbon black, graphite, charcoal—blacks are the most elemental of art-making materials. The cooled end of a burnt stick is one of the most ancient tools for drawing. Vine charcoal is the most primitive drawing implement and is still common today. Cennini described filling a pot with lengths of vine and sticks, covering it with clay, venting it with a few holes and putting it into the local baker's brick oven overnight. Artists still make their own charcoal, using metal cans fitted one into the other, a metal bucket covered with tin foil, or even by simply wrapping sticks in foil pierced for ventilation and left for hours directly in the embers of a fireplace or grill.

Black or a near black can be approximated by mixing intense hues, but, in an important sense, black is the absence of color. A surface appears black when all spectral energy is absorbed and none reflected. A black hole of course being the blackest thing there is—or isn't—since all energy is pulled into it. The night sky is black where light traveling outward never makes it back.