Chapter Twenty-Seven
TWENTY-SEVEN
The fourteen-year-old boy and the twenty-year-old janitor spent three days painting the wall behind the gymnasium. They painted butterflies and dragons, angels that reached down to touch Joar and Ted when they came to look late in the afternoon, birds that took flight so that Ali’s hair moved in the flow of air. But most of all they painted skulls, skulls everywhere, beautiful and alive.
As an adult, the artist would think that this was the best work of his entire career. He was glad his friends had gotten to see it, because hardly anyone else got the chance.
“It reminds me of Basquiat,” the janitor said on the third day, pointing to the wall filled with the boy’s imagination.
They were alone then, he and the boy, standing on ladders in a world without clocks. The janitor’s gaze flickered occasionally, his hands shook from time to time, and a couple of times his nose started to bleed suddenly. He said it was his allergies.
“I don’t know who that is,” the boy confessed.
“That doesn’t matter,” the janitor smiled, squinting in the sun as if the light hurt his eyes. Then he trotted out everything he knew about Basquiat, which was an awful lot.
“Did your mom teach you all that?” the fourteen-year-old wondered.
“Yeah. Mom’s a teacher, she isn’t even quiet when she’s asleep, if you taped up her mouth she’d find a way to talk about art through her ears,” the janitor said, rolling his eyes.
“Nice,” the fourteen-year-old whispered honestly.
The janitor looked ashamed at that, sometimes you don’t appreciate your own blessings until you see the envy in someone else.
“I mean… she’s great, my mom. I was just a handful as a kid, that’s all. I always hated it when she pointed to paintings and asked, ‘What does that say to you?’ It felt like a test in school. But now I’m starting to realize that it’s pretty much the nicest thing you can say to anyone. One time I asked her why she was so obsessed with what I was thinking, and she got angry and yelled: ‘Because I want to know what’s happening inside you! Because you happened to me! You happen to me every second I’m alive!’?”
The fourteen-year-old, who came from a home where no one happened to anyone else at all, was holding a brush over a naked body he had painted in one corner of the wall. As if he regretted it and was about to paint everything white.
“My parents don’t like me drawing. They’re ashamed. They say I should try to be normal,” he said.
“They’re wrong,” the janitor replied, like it was the most obvious thing on earth. “You’re an artist.”
Sometimes that’s all that’s needed.
“I’m not an artist, I’m—”
The janitor interrupted him so sharply that his ladder wobbled:
“You’re an artist if you create something! You’re an artist if you don’t see the world the way it is, if you hate white walls! No one else decides what art is, no one can stop you loving whatever you like, the cynics and critics can have control of all the other crap on the planet… but they can’t decide how hard your heart beats! Become whatever you want, but don’t become one of them. Art is a fragile enough light as it is. It can be blown out by a single sigh. Art needs friends, with our bodies against the wind and our hands cupped around the flame, until it’s strong enough to burn brightly with its own power. Until it’s an inferno. Unstoppable.”
The boy hesitated for a long time before saying:
“I can’t paint the way the art teacher wants. I can’t paint things . There’s something wrong with my brain.”
“That’s because you don’t paint things the way they look, you paint them the way they feel,” the janitor replied.
Then he quoted Frida Kahlo, who said she painted flowers so they wouldn’t die. And Leonardo da Vinci, who said that art was never finished, only abandoned. The sound of the doors being unlocked inside the boy then should have been heard around the world, the ground should have shaken, that’s how much everything changed inside him. They went on painting the wall until the sun abandoned them.
One day, many years later, a woman wrote in a newspaper that the most beautiful thing about the artist’s pictures was that they felt inevitable. “Once you’ve seen his art, you can’t imagine a world without it,” she wrote. But for the artist it would never feel inevitable, merely improbable. His first painting had friends before it even existed. Who has luck like that?
“Can we paint again tomorrow?” he asked as darkness fell.
“We can paint every day!” the janitor promised. Because that’s what we do, promises like that aren’t lies, they’re acts of rebellion against death. Then he quoted his mom’s favorite poem, by Mary Oliver: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
The boy didn’t answer. But he painted a window on the wall, and inside it he painted a child holding a paintbrush, so it looked like the child was painting from the other side of the wall. As if the janitor and the boy were inside the child’s painting, as if they were the art. Then the janitor looked him straight in the eye and the boy would never forget it, that a look could feel like that.
“Here,” the janitor said, handing him a piece of paper. It said “Christian,” with skulls above both i’s, followed by a telephone number.
The janitor peered up at a streetlamp that had just come on. His nose was bleeding again.
“Are you okay?” the boy asked anxiously.
“Yes, yes, it’s just a nosebleed. That’s my mom’s number, I don’t have a phone at the moment, but if you ever need help, call her. She’s the best. I’m going to tell her about you!”
The boy held the piece of paper to his chest. When they parted he called:
“Tomorrow?”
“Yes! See you tomorrow for more painting!” the janitor grinned, and just before he disappeared into the darkness he turned around and called: “Don’t hurt yourself!”
The first time the artist saw the janitor’s mom, she was standing outside the church. And then the boy wished her all the art in the world, because he had never seen such a desolate person.
“Make sure you keep that job, please, Christian. The principal only gave it to you because we’re old friends,” his mother had said to her twenty-year-old son when he got the janitor’s job.
Then she had sighed to herself, muttering something about who was she trying to kid? He could never paint a wall white, her boy.
Christian hadn’t said thank you, hadn’t said he loved her, because of course he was far too smart for that. Instead he had grinned and said: “You happen to me, Mom. You’re my art.”
How could she be angry with him then? She had been pregnant with Christian when she fled from a war, he was already improbable right from the start. When he was little, the other children used to tease him at school, calling him “refugee,” but when he didn’t know where he belonged she would tell the truth: art was his homeland. Hers too. That was how they survived reality.
Every time they argued the mother would think of Frances Harper, who said that “every mother should be a true artist.” When Christian was standing in front of a painting, she always wanted to know what he was thinking, and when he got annoyed she would quote Marcel Duchamp: “Art is completed by the viewer.” When her son thought she was embarrassing because she talked too much and laughed too loudly, she would throw émile Zola’s words at him: “I would rather die of passion than of boredom!”
So perhaps it was her fault, she often thought, that Christian later sought passion everywhere. Art is nothing for people with armor, you need a thin skin, but someone like that isn’t only sensitive to beauty, but to everything. Seeking out euphoria is a life out of balance. So her little boy grew up, even though she forbade it, and she lost her grip on him.
When Christian was born, his mother held the newborn little body and only felt a single heart beating, first in him and then in her, one and the same. From then on she became twice as scared of the dark. When he became a teenager and disappeared out into the night, she always slept with the light on and her hand on the phone. When it rang, she always answered on the first ring.
He started taking drugs, she hoped he might stop when he got into art school, but it got worse. And how was she supposed to protect him against the world, she who couldn’t even keep hold of her own glasses? When Christian was young, he used to carry around an extra pair for her to use whenever she was looking for the first pair. Once, in a gallery full of sculptures, she left her glasses on a stool. When they got back a group of tourists were taking photographs of them because they thought they were art. Her son’s laughter echoed up into the roof, and that would never leave her dreams.
“It’s a lie that people can’t fly, Christian, don’t forget that,” she said as they walked home that day, and he answered: “Yeah, yeah, Mom, I know.” Then he held her hand, and her skin still tries to remember how it felt, all the time. You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.
She helped him get into a rehabilitation program, he made all sorts of promises and broke every single one. He was drawn to parties like smoke finding its way toward the sky, he loved music, lived for dancing. Sometimes he cycled home, sometimes he traveled in a police car, sometimes in an ambulance. She knew he was living too fast, he was running out of time, but it was like trying to stop sunshine. New treatment centers, new promises, but it never worked.
But then, in the end, she managed to arrange a job for him as a janitor at the school. There he failed to paint a wall white, but succeeded in something much bigger instead. He managed to start a story.
When the phone rang late one night the mother answered on the first ring, always ready for it to be the police and for something terrible to have happened.
“Is it my son?” she yelled into the receiver, still half asleep.
Christian laughed drunkenly on the other end and said: “Yes? Sorry… what time is it? Were you asleep?”
Asleep? She hadn’t slept since he was born, the little brat, she felt like replying. But instead she whispered: “No, no, has something happened?”
He breathed softly and easily into her ear: “I’ve found one, Mom.”
“One what?” she asked.
“One of us.”
Then he told her he had found a boy who saw things on a white wall that Christian could never have imagined. Christian had borrowed a stranger’s phone at a party, just so he could call his mom and tell her, and his voice was bubbly. His mother’s heart was beating so hard then, it was a wonder the buttons on her pajamas didn’t burst off.
Christian shouted happily at the other end of the line: “I’ve never seen anyone paint like this, Mom. You’ll see, you’re going to love it!”
Then he quoted Ragnar Sandberg, whose words his mom had quoted to him throughout his childhood: “He paints like the birds sing.”
His mom nodded with wet cheeks, of course she could hear that her son was high on something, so she just said: “I love you.”
Her son laughed, her only boy, wild and precious. Just before he ended the call, he said: “I love you, Mom. You’re the best.”
When the phone rang the next night, his mother was sleeping so soundly that she didn’t answer until the second ring. That time it was the police.
The fourteen-year-old artist sat with his back against the wall behind the gymnasium and waited the whole next day. When it got dark his friends came and got him, then he sat silently on the floor in Ted’s basement drawing all night. His friends sat around him as if their bodies were shielding a flame from the wind. The next morning they found out what had happened.
“He had a heart attack,” Joar explained, crushed.
They were sitting in a window in the hallway in school, close to the stairs they had covered with soap what felt like a thousand years ago.
“What do you mean?” the artist whispered.
“I heard two teachers talking about it. They said he was a… junkie. He was at a party, dancing, and his heart just stopped beating…,” Joar tried to say as gently as he could.
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN?” the artist yelled.
He didn’t actually want to be given an explanation of how Christian had died. He wanted an explanation of how he could be dead. Because that was impossible. No one can be so alive, and then not.
“Wait…,” Ali pleaded, but it was too late.
The artist had already started running, down the stairs, across the schoolyard, and around the corner behind the gymnasium. As if it might all be a lie, as if Christian had to be there? But instead the artist stopped abruptly in shock, because there were two old men in overalls standing there with ladders and cans of paint. They were painting the wall white.
As the artist looked around in desperation, he made eye contact with the Owl. The man was standing in the window of his classroom, the only place in the entire school with a good view of that wall. The Owl had reported it to the police as “graffiti” and “vandalism,” he had personally called the two men in overalls, because rules were rules, and they had to apply to everyone. Perhaps he had once been a different sort of man, but now he was nothing but ashes.
All the things that the wall had been filled with over the course of a few wonderful days, angels and dragons and birds and skulls, were disappearing, little by little. Before the day was over it would all be white.
Christian’s mother remembered screaming into the phone when the police called, but not how it sounded, her ears seemed deaf afterward. She hardly remembered the funeral, only the coffin, because all she could think was: How can Christian fit in there? He was far too big, her whole world.
She didn’t see them when she came out of the church, but four fourteen-year-olds were standing behind some trees.
When the mother got home, her phone rang, just once. She answered immediately, but heard nothing but sobbing on the other end before the other person ended the call. The next morning there was a drawing placed on top of the grave, it showed Christian on a ladder, with a smile so big it was a miracle the paper could contain it. She had never seen anything like it. At the bottom, in pencil so faint it was almost illegible, it said: “Like the birds sing.” She slept with that drawing on her bedside table, next to the phone, trying with all her strength to force it to ring once more. But it didn’t, not for several months.
Joar and Ali and Ted went to the pier with the artist every day. They tried to get him to draw again, anything at all, but he couldn’t do it anymore. At the end of the spring term he got an F in art. No one ever notices it when summer vacation begins, but there are torn-off wings lying all over schoolyards everywhere then. The artist didn’t speak, barely ate, and his friends were all thinking the same thing: he’s never going to survive this.
But they were lucky, they were wrong. The first day of the vacation Joar found a damn ad in a damn newspaper, about a damn art competition. That was how everything started, again.