Chapter Seven
SEVEN
Twenty-five years later, the world-famous artist C. Jat is standing in an alleyway behind a church with his shaking fingers clenched around a can of spray paint, dying. It would take a huge amount of imagination to think anything else. Everyone dies, of course, every single person, but very few get to understand that they’re dying. That’s why the artist doesn’t want people to know that he is, that’s why he’s hiding from the world, because when it comes to death, the living are pretty crazy. They don’t want to see anyone who’s ill, they don’t even want to think about illness, and if they absolutely have to, they sigh and say things like: “Oh, it reminds you not to take life for granted!”
Not to be mean, but healthy people aren’t quite right in the head, the artist thinks. Surely taking life for granted is the whole point of being here, because what else are we doing? We’re a bunch of lonely apes on a rock in the universe, our breath consists of eighty percent nitrogen, twenty percent oxygen, and one hundred percent anxiety. The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die. So how great must our imaginations be for us to even summon up the enthusiasm to get out of bed each morning? Endless! Imagination is the only thing that stops us from thinking about death every second. And when we aren’t thinking? Oh, those are all our very best moments, when we’re wasting our lives. It’s an act of magnificent rebellion to do meaningless things, to waste time, to swim and drink soda and sleep late. To be silly and frivolous, to laugh at stupid little jokes and tell stupid little stories. Or to paint big paintings, the biggest you can manage, and to try to learn to whisper in color. To look for a way to show other people: this was me, these were my humans, these were our farts. These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love.
That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.
“I… I… I,” says the seventeen-year-old girl in front of him in the alleyway behind the church.
The artist regrets admitting to her that he is ill. He feels sorry for her when he sees that she feels sorry for him, because there’s no cause for that at all. He’s almost forty years old and he’s lived a long life, remarkably long, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. He has seen the world, fallen in love on white beaches, danced to loud music on warm nights, and wasted slow mornings under soft sheets. He has painted and giggled and sung. All the things he never dared dream about when he was fourteen and had cuts on his wrists and pills in his backpack. He has lived, dear Lord, how he has lived.
“I love the way you paint, especially the cockroaches,” he therefore says to the girl in front of him, blinking happily at the wall like he’s just woken up.
Louisa, who has just realized who he is, sniffs back:
“I… I love the way you paint too! You… you’re the whole reason I paint at all!”
This is honestly a few too many feelings for her to feel all at the same time. She’s already had quite a complicated day as it is, you aren’t really in a fit state to meet your idol under circumstances like that. The cat suddenly rubs against her leg, which would probably have been a very tender sign of affection if she didn’t suspect that it was trying to use her pants to rub the snot off its fur.
“I’m not your reason, no one is your reason, your art is your own,” the artist protests gently.
Louisa gasps for air. She has a million questions which she will never have time to ask. Perhaps that doesn’t matter, the artist probably wouldn’t have had any good answers anyway, adults are always a lot more useless than teenagers hope. But unfortunately the artist never gets the chance to disappoint Louisa, because at that moment they hear the sirens. They hear the security guard yell, “She’s down there in the alley!” and the clatter of ugly shoes with uncomfortable soles echoes so loudly in the alley that they can hardly hear their own thudding hearts. They hear other shouts too, from police officers, and then the artist suddenly starts laughing. Because, of course, what’s the alternative? Not taking it all for granted?
“Run,” he tells her, perfectly calmly.
“What?” Louisa gasps, panic-stricken.
The artist flashes her a happy, grateful grin.
“Run, Louisa! I hope you learn to swim. I hope you paint every single wall from here to the sea. Now, run!”
He hands her the can of spray paint he had borrowed, shaking all the way from his fingertips to the end of his nose.
“But… what about you?” she manages to say, but his grin is so wide that his ears ought to watch out.
“I’m afraid I can’t run fast anymore,” he whispers, before adding: “But don’t worry. What are the police going to do with me? I’m world-famous, didn’t you know?”
She’s breathing fast, the way you do when the biggest moment of your life is also one of the most embarrassing.
“Sorry… sorry I didn’t recognize you,” she says, looking at the can in his hand, then pleads with a sob: “Can you keep that? So you can give it back to me the next time we meet? I’ll come back here to look for you!”
The world-famous artist nods.
“Don’t hurt yourself!” he makes her promise, and that’s the most loving thing any adult has ever said to her.
The police come around the corner and she hesitates for just a moment, tears dripping down the collar of her shirt, but then she turns and runs. The artist will never give the can of spray paint back, she will never get the chance to tell him what he really meant to her. It doesn’t matter, he’s with her everywhere now, on every wall.
Life? It’s long.
When Louisa’s backpack disappears from view around the corner, the artist stands and thinks about a pier under a cloudless sky. About being fourteen and floating on your back in the sea and starting to laugh so hard that you roll over and almost drown. Louisa said she thought the artist was world-famous and really rich and never had to be scared now. She got two out of three right, which isn’t bad. But he’s always been scared, scared of everything.
He often thinks about the critics who, when he was young, said his art had no value and that he would never amount to anything. When he became famous, he often wished that they had been right. He thinks about how success accelerates everything in your world, and how his heart could never keep up. He thinks about the incredible fame and the unbelievable amounts of money and the constant panic attacks. He thinks about being best in the world at disappointing everyone, because it so quickly becomes impossible to say no to people who are always reminding you of how grateful you should be. He thinks about paintings he left all his breath in, which were then sold for so much money that old men and women no longer even hang them on their walls, they keep them in bank vaults. He thinks about gallery exhibitions where everyone loved him, because that’s how they make you feel, that’s the trap. He thinks about the men who looked at his pictures with dollar signs in their eyes and asked: “How many of those do you think you can squeeze out in a year?” He thinks about the women who said, “Your pictures really speak to me!” and then talked about the furnishings in their summer houses. He thinks about the unavoidable question from all these people: “Where do you get your inspiration ?”
The artist never dares to look anyone in the eye when he gets asked that. He’s never been able to explain that all his paintings are an attempt to show how beautiful he wishes he actually was. He’s dreamed of being able to say: “Being human is to grieve, constantly.” Because what he really wants to know is: “How the hell do all the rest of you cope?”
Sometimes he wants to yell that everything he paints is about one of his humans dying, can’t everyone see that? His best human died, and he can’t stop feeling sad, he’s sad all the time, sad everywhere. He feels like telling the old men and women who spend fortunes on his paintings that he saw so much violence when he was young that he still feels it on his skin, as if he might get bruised just from existing. Sometimes his nails and eyelashes and hair hurt so much that he scratches himself all over until he bleeds. He hates loud noises. He doesn’t like anyone to touch him. He takes pills to sleep, other pills to stay awake, he drinks too much alcohol. Sometimes he cries so much he throws up. There’s something very wrong with him, he wants to say, and the only time he doesn’t hate himself is when he’s painting. That’s the only time he ever feels like himself. That’s what he wants to explain when they ask about his inspiration, but obviously he can’t, because not even women who like pictures that speak to them want to hear that sort of thing in their summer houses. It would be extremely impolite when one has been so very expensive. So instead the artist always just whispers: “I don’t know.”
Year after year after year. “I don’t know.” He got more and more expensive, and more and more sensitive, until his heart was made of paper, and tore a little more at the edges when he opened his eyes each morning. Everyone he met said he ought to be so grateful, because his life was every artist’s dream, and he felt ashamed, as if he had grabbed the wrong coat from a cloakroom and was wearing someone else’s dream. Because all he dreamed about was not being recognized in the street, and not being adult, and about lying on a pier with his best friends and drinking sun-warmed sodas and reading superhero comics. About being no one at all alongside his very best no ones.
You need to know all that about him, because otherwise you can never understand what’s happening to him now. What paintings on a church wall can do. That there is a speed at which a heart can beat that you can’t remember when you’ve stopped being young, art that is a joy so overwhelming that you almost can’t bear it. How sad it must be, the artist thinks, what an immense loss for anyone who never gets to experience this.
It’s one of the last days before Easter, winter and spring are fighting for everything that’s alive, the artist is thirty-nine years old and dying. The only people who know that are Louisa and one other person. Well, Louisa and one other person and one cat. The artist hears the police officers behind him, but he doesn’t feel scared, he just looks at the paintings on the wall and thinks:
What a lovely day.
The first police officer grabs him by the shoulder, and he really doesn’t mean to paint the police officer, but the artist’s body is so weak that he loses his balance and accidentally points the can of spray paint upward. The paint happens to be pink, and police uniforms happen to be blue, so when the can finally falls from the artist’s hand, the police officer looks like confetti on a giraffe’s tongue. The artist hardly feels himself being wrestled to the ground, he hits his head, scraping his forehead so badly that it starts to bleed. The police officers don’t see a world-famous artist, they just see a homeless man who has defaced a church. That was half true, of course, because he didn’t have a home. He had a huge apartment full of beautiful things until very recently, but he sold everything to buy something else. That was what the box was for, the one Louisa saw behind the trash can. But the artist wasn’t dirty because he was sleeping outside, as Louisa thought, he was only dirty because a fairly crazy girl had collided with him and he had landed on the ground, and the ground happened to be made of dirt. It wasn’t his blanket lying beside the trash can, and it wasn’t his cat either.
It isn’t even a homeless cat, in fact, it has a perfectly excellent home in an affluent part of town where it is very spoiled, it is very much a middle-class cat. It just happens to enjoy sneaking out and living a different life as well, drifting around town all night in the company of artists, looking for adventure and getting its fur dirty. Some cats are just like that.
When the police officers pick the man up from the ground, he’s like a rag in their arms, he seems to be hanging lifeless, the police officers shout something but are suddenly drowned out by a panic-stricken cry from another man. He’s slim and well-dressed, with glasses and thinning, neatly combed hair, and he’s just come rushing out from the art auction in the church. He comes round the corner just in time to see the girl disappear at the other end of the alley. When the artist’s body slides out of the police officers’ grasp, the well-dressed man rushes forward and catches him.
“What are you doing ? Don’t you know who this is ?” the man snaps, angry and distraught in equal measure.
They aren’t the most art-interested police officers in the world, they really aren’t, so they shrug their shoulders in a mildly affronted way. To be fair, there are an awful lot of famous people on the planet nowadays, so many that there hardly seems to be anyone who isn’t famous anymore.
“He was painting graffiti,” one of the officers mutters.
“Are you mad? He’s sick! He definitely hasn’t been painting…,” the well-dressed man bellows confidently, but then he sees the skulls on the wall and stops himself, lets out a deep sigh, and mumbles uncertainly: “Okay, hold on, those are definitely… his.”
Then he looks down at the body in his arms, the artist has lost so much weight to illness that the man could easily have lifted him up. The man whispers sadly: “What happened? I leave you alone for an hour and you get yourself beaten up by the police?”
The artist’s eyes are closed but when he recognizes the man’s voice, he leans his head close to his chest and gasps: “Don’t let them catch her, Ted! She’s one of us!”