His smirk, the way it ate up his face, the way it accentuated the suddenly taut bones in his neck, made the flesh around his mouth a vassal to his mirth, sickened me.
“Where do you think it came from?”
I ignored the question, turned away, said, “I have a canteen of water in the front, near my desk. But keep talking. Keep telling me about your book.”
He frowned as I walked past him into the main room of the gallery. From behind me, his disembodied voice rose up, quavered, continued. A thrush caught in a hunter’s snare, flapping this way and that, ever more entangled and near its death. His smell had coated the entire gallery. In a sense, I was as close to him searching for the canteen as if I stood beside him. Beyond the gallery windows lay the real world, composed of unnaturally bright colors and shoppers walking briskly by.
“So I never finished it, Janice. What do you think of that? I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. I wrote and wrote. I wrote with the energy of ten men each evening. All texts I consulted interlocked under my dexterous manipulations. It all made such perfect sense…and then I began to panic. Each word, I realized, had been leading me further and further away from the central mystery. Every sentence left a false trail. Every paragraph formed another wall between me and my thesis. Soon, I stopped writing. It had all been going so well. How could it get so bad so quickly?
“I soon found out. I backtracked through the abyss of words, searching for a flaw, a fissure, a crack in the foundation. Perhaps some paragraph had turned traitor and would reveal itself. Only it wasn’t a paragraph. It was a single word, five pages from the end of my silly scribblings, in a sentence of no particular importance. Just a single word. I know the sentence by heart, because I’ve repeated it to myself over and over again. It’s all that’s left of my book. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure. I was still searching for the canteen under all the canvases.
“Here it is: ‘But surely, if Tonsure had not known the truth then, he knew it after traveling underground.’ The word was ‘truth,’ and I could not get past the truth. The truth stank of the underground, buried under dead leaves and hidden in cold, dry, dark caverns. The truth had little to do with the surface of things.
“From that word, in that context, on that page, written in my nearly illegible hand, my masterwork, my beautiful, marvelous book unraveled syllable by syllable. I began by crossing out words that did not belong in the sentence. Then I began to delete words by rules as illegitimate and illogical as the gray caps themselves. Until after a week, I woke up one morning, determined to continue my surgical editing of the manuscript—only to find that not even the original sentence had been spared: all that remained of my once-proud manuscript was that single word: ‘truth.’ And, truth, my dear sister, was not a big enough word to constitute an entire book—at least not to me.” {Or my publishers, come to think of it. If there had been any publishers.}
I had found the canteen. I came back into the room and handed it to him. “You should drink some. Rinse out the lie you’ve just told.”
He snorted, took the canteen, raised it to his lips, and, drinking from it, kissed it as seriously as he would a lover.
“Perhaps it is in part a metaphor,” he said, “but it is still, ironically enough, the truth.”
“Don’t speak in metaphors, then. How do you tell truth from lies otherwise?”
“I want to be taken literally.”
“You mean literarily, Duncan. Except you’ve already been taken literarily—they’ve all ravished you and gone on to the next victim.”
“Literally.”
“Is that why you brought this horrible rolled up ball of an animal with you?”
“No. I forgot I had it. Now that I’ve brought it here, I can’t let it die.” {Actually, Janice, I did bring it with me on purpose. I had just forgotten the purpose.}
He sidled over to the golden ball of flesh, poured water into his hand.
He looked up at me, the expression on his face taking me back to all of his foolish explorations as a child. “Watch now! Watch carefully!”
Slowly, he poured water over the golden ball. After a moment the gold color blushed into a haze of purple-yellow-blue-green, which then returned to gold, but a more vibrant shade of gold that flashed in the dim light. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no—it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling from the top of the ball, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of phosphorescent starfish.
Duncan dribbled still more water over it. Each of its four arms shone a different glittering shade—green-blue-yellow-purple—the edges of the blue arm tinged green on one side, yellow on the other.
“A starfish,” I said.
“A compass,” he said. “Just one of the many wonders to be found belowground. A living compass. North is blue, so if you turn it like so,” and he reached over and carefully turned the starfish, “the arm shines perfectly blue, facing as it does due north.”
Indeed, the blue had been cleansed of any green or yellow taint.
“This compass saved me more than once when I was lost,” he said.
I stared at my ungainly, stacked frames. “I’m sick of wonders, Duncan. This is just a color to me, just a trick. The true wonder is that you’re still alive. No one could have expected that. You suffer what may have been a mental breakdown, go down below, return with a living compass, and expect me to say…what? How wonderful that is? How awed I am by it all? No. I’m appalled. I’m horrified. I’m angry. I’ve failed at one career after another. I’m about to open my own gallery. I haven’t seen you in almost ten years, and you shamble in here, a talking skeleton—and you expect me to be impressed by a magic show? Have you seen yourself lately?”
I can’t remember ever being so furious—and out of nowhere, out of almost nothing. My hands shook. My shoulders had become rigid blocks of stone. My throat ached. And I’m not even sure why. {Because you were scared, and because you were my sister, and you loved me. Even when you were mad at me, I was your family.} I almost want to laugh, typing this now. Having seen so many strange things since, having been at peace lying on a floor littered with corpses, having accepted so much strangeness from Duncan, that starfish seems almost mundane in retrospect, and my anger at Duncan self-indulgent.