Chapter Six
SIX
Twenty-five years ago, the summer he would turn fifteen, the artist painted skulls everywhere. First with his fingertips in the air, then with a pencil in his sketch pad, and finally next to his name when he signed the painting which would become world-famous. Only his friends would ever understand what a miracle it was, not that the painting became famous but that it was ever finished at all. That something so great came out of a boy who thought so little of himself.
Because obviously the whole idea was no good, the boy thought. He couldn’t paint, he knew that. The only thing he was good at was running. He had grown up in a neighborhood where children’s heads spin like owls’ to avoid threats, he went to a school where fights broke out in the blink of an eye, where every recess was about hiding and where everything that could be used as a weapon was bolted to the floor of the hallways and classrooms. Stress was the normal state of his body, and that makes you good at running, because you practice every day.
But art? What the hell did he know about art?
When he ran, his friend Joar was always beside him, but always looking over one shoulder, because Joar wanted to make sure he was the one who got hit if anyone caught them. Unlike the artist, Joar was good at fighting, that happens if you get beaten a lot, and Joar was beaten so much at home by his old man that it was a miracle he still had a skeleton. Whenever Joar got teased at school for being short, the artist always thought that if only they all knew just how put down he had been by that evil man, they would have thought it was a miracle that Joar had grown at all.
The artist? He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself. He didn’t belong in school, he didn’t belong in this town, he didn’t belong in his own body. He had cried so much that spring when he was fourteen that he felt hollow. Everyone thought he was insecure simply because he was so quiet, but that was never the problem. It was the things he was absolutely certain of that were the problem: Certain that he was worthless. Certain that his friends were wrong about him. Certain that he was going to disappoint everyone.
But his friends? All they wanted was to make him laugh. Sometimes they succeeded with silly jokes, sometimes with almost-smart jokes, but most often just by running next to him across the whole town, all the way down to the pier, until they were so out of breath that they couldn’t think straight. Then they competed to see who could jump into the sea first, and the artist tore his clothes off as he ran and was just about to leap off the edge when a voice behind him yelled: “WATCH OUT!”
He stopped midstride and turned around.
“Watch out when you jump so you don’t miss the sea, losers!” Joar yelled as he rushed past his friends and jumped in first.
In his defense, he needed the head start to win: not to be mean, but Joar was the shortest in the group, and he definitely wasn’t the fastest. Someone once said he was “two apples tall,” but they sure as hell weren’t big apples. Even so, he was the bravest and strongest of them all, he may have had the smallest hands but he always had the biggest fists. Whenever Joar left a room, it felt as if twenty people had walked out. If you took your eyes off him for a moment he would already have rushed off, throwing himself into a fight with someone twice his size, or jumping off a cliff that no one else dared jump from with a triumphant cry.
The artist didn’t know it then, but that was how he would eventually paint Joar in the picture: his outline blurred, as if you were always on the point of losing him. In the fullness of time the artist would find a way to paint laughter, make everything beautiful, because that was how he wanted to remember those days when they were fourteen. Because there was beauty too.
As an adult, the artist would recognize that the whole of that summer had been full of violence. Full of funerals. When August came, the friends would be different people. By then, Joar would have seen his mother get beaten up for the last time and decided to kill his old man. The summer started and ended with death.
But in between?
In between, the summer managed to be plenty of other things too. It managed to be love and friendship, miraculously loud laughter and magnificently stupid decisions. They put fireworks in mailboxes, rode shopping carts down the steepest hill in town and tried to dry wet socks in a toaster, because what else are you supposed to do when you’re fourteen? Die of boredom?
More than anything else, that summer managed to become that painting, and that was how the adventure began for the boy who went on to become the artist “C. Jat.” He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.
The artist would remember being fourteen as feeling like he was always homesick, because he realized as an adult that that was what the emptiness in his chest was: some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a desert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet. That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.
So one day in June, the artist whispered: “I can try to paint… the sea.”
“Good!” Joar replied happily, because he didn’t know how to say the truth, that he had seen the pills in the artist’s backpack and the cuts on his wrists.
Joar didn’t know how to whisper, You can paint whatever the hell you like, as long as you paint, I’m just scared I’ll lose you if you don’t. The artist had no words either, because he didn’t know how to explain to Joar that his anxiety made him feel like he was drowning. That he was so scared that if he held on to his friends’ hands, he would drag them down into the darkness with him.
They knew each other without words, and sometimes that was unbearable. One day the teenagers would sit in a painting, but that day they were sitting on the edge of a pier, in the longest silence any of them could ever remember existing between them. That was why it was so liberating when one of them suddenly farted.
That laughter? It was a miracle that they didn’t break their ribs, all of them. They all yelled, “IT WASN’T ME!” at the same time, and then they all pointed accusing fingers at each other, and then they jumped, one by one, into the water. How could the sea be big enough to have room for their hearts? Incomprehensible.
When, eventually, they were floating on their backs next to each other, the artist turned to Joar and asked:
“Did you mean what you said? That you don’t think we’ll all be alive when we’re grown-up?”
It was a cloudless, wind-free day, the sea hugged them, and Joar smiled back sadly:
“ You’ll be alive. Not all the rest of us, but you’ll be alive, because you’re going to live forever.”
Not to be mean, but he was wrong.