8 BRIEF BLESSING OF THE INEVITABLE
8
B RIEF B LESSING OF THE I NEVITABLE
Saz’s black eye permitted the rest of the class to give our group a wider berth than usual. Even Moody seemed a little uneasy as we gathered for our first Friday critique with the five of us sitting front and center, all wearing matching bandages across the same palms, except for left-handed Caroline who had cut into her right. With the windows open and fans turning overhead, there was a permeating chill in the room. Fall staked its claim. I tugged lightly on the strings of my hoodie and shivered—the wound strained with pain, and I squeezed my hand into a fist to focus on the feeling.
An email had arrived in our inboxes that morning from the rest of Rotham’s library staff, announcing that a few items had gone missing from the archive display case. The school requested that anyone who knew the whereabouts of “significant pieces of Rotham history” report to the library immediately. Just reading it had made me nauseous.
“Everyone have a good week?” Moody asked tentatively, perched on her stool with the heels of her tall boots hooked on the footrest.
We stared back in unified silence. Finch gave a delayed nod. Saz touched the skin around her nose gingerly.
“Mine was great,” Phoebe spoke up. “I got tickets to see the new Helen Frankenthaler print exhibition this weekend. I know we’ve been talking about abstraction in my work, Professor Mooden, and I wanted to ask you what you think about—”
“That’s wonderful, Phoebe, really great,” Moody said, “and pardon my interruption, but I would like for us to get started with critique so we can see your piece and discuss what you might be able to take away from the show in relation to your work.”
Phoebe deflated a little but nodded regardless.
Moody smiled. “Alright, it looks like we’re going to get through four of you today, four next week, and the rest of you the week after that. If this structure works out, we’ll repeat the same process every week, so you’re receiving a critique every two weeks or so. First on the list, we have Caroline.”
We watched her hang the canvases in silence. She mastered the drill and level like a carpenter, two screws protruding for two enormous pieces, each one as wide as her arm span. The pale blue of her dress made her a brilliant cutout against them until she stepped back and let us look.
The base layer of paint on both canvases was the thinnest sheen of near-black phthalo green. I hadn’t thought that kind of color could be so full of light. On the left canvas, she’d stippled textural yellow ochre over it along the upper half of the painting, and then on top of the warmth, swans flocked in cold titanium white, their necks craning and tangling and snapping at one other. Clustered within the swans was a humanoid figure holding a red oval to its chest. The oval was lined with just the tiniest fingernail of the white, until it was intestinal and pulsing with heat.
The right canvas was swallowed up by more of that yellow ochre, a color so Caroline that it made me want to touch her and remind myself she was physical. This time the pigment seeped down into a tangled red pit at the bottom of the painting, interspersed with jagged lines that looked like roots unfurling in the dirt. Moody leaned close to it, one finger stopping just a hair away from the painting’s surface as she traced the line of yellow.
“Visceral,” Moody murmured. She straightened and turned back to us as Caroline took her seat. “Who wants to go first?”
Cameron waved a hand. “There’s a real sense of light in both pieces. Normally I find that white can really dull a painting, but you managed to make them glow.” He angled his head in Caroline’s direction, but she remained stiffly composed with her arms crossed over her chest. She’d never been able to receive praise. I could see it in the clench of her jaw—she thought he was patronizing her.
Moody nodded. “Yes, there is a real illumination to those swans, and are those ... entrails? At the bottom of the right piece?” Then to Caroline, she quickly added, “Not asking you to give us an answer yet, just thinking out loud.”
“They are very gory,” Yejun said, after clearing his throat. “They have a kind of butchered quality to them. Not in execution, but you know like, when you walk past a deli, and they have all the hunks of meat lined up in a row.”
Saz coughed. I could hear the laugh she was trying to smother beneath it. Caroline straightened in her seat.
“Right, okay,” Moody said, considering. “Anyone else?”
“This is some of the best work I’ve seen you make,” Finch said, breathy and awed. We watched as she rose and went to the left painting, her unbandaged hand following the outline of the red shape the hunched figure clutched to its chest.
Caroline’s knuckles were white where she squeezed her bicep.
“It’s so possessive,” Finch continued. “It’s like the interior of the body splayed outward. It is gory, and it is intestinal, yeah, but there’s something magical about it. The texture is so delicious, the layers so intentional, this— organ —so vivid and real. It feels like ... a game of Operation. Like you cut into yourself and offered your insides for us to pluck, if we decide to try.”
Moody smiled at Finch with the proud, pleased grin of a parent watching their child out in the world.
“You’re right, Finchard. It is some of her best work,” Moody said. “You’re tapping into something here, Caroline. I’d like to see you push it further.”
Caroline didn’t smile. But her face softened when she nodded, relieved to some extent. She brushed her hair behind her ears and lifted her canvases off the wall, carting them back to her studio without another word.
“Alright,” Moody declared, grinning, “who’s next?”
At a certain point, our first critique crossed the line from real criticism into jubilance. Mars followed Caroline, and while their stitched-together fabric pieces were in the early stages of being stretched over large canvas frames without any paint on them yet, we still all oohed and aahed over the fine sewing and converging patterns turning the surfaces into kaleidoscoped shards of color. Cameron came next with a painting of his father in a field, the same forlorn and Andrew Wyeth–esque realist landscapes dotted with men on horseback he always preferred. This got some praise too, but also scrutiny. They were beautiful, finely done, easy to look at—but then Finch called them digestible , and Cameron’s face shuttered with annoyance.
Then it was Amrita, with three new paintings on paper that were barely big enough to cover her torso. They were luminous, confectionery, packed with color and contemplation. Amrita was always thoughtful. It showed in her work. Each piece was laden with tiny details sketched first in pencil, then inked in graduating layers of gouache. They were rich illustrations—coiled dragons snaking through reeds, beheaded griffins with forked tongues lolling across the painting’s border, fat clouds of smoke billowing around a girl perched on the back of a bull, hands hooked around the horns, trying not to be thrown.
“I call it my menagerie,” Amrita said, eyes trained bashfully on Moody’s shoes.
Moody’s smile returned from wherever Cameron’s critique had banished it. He slumped sullenly in his seat.
“She loved them,” Saz exclaimed after class had ended and everyone else had gone home to reset. We gathered in Amrita’s studio, marveling over the paintings and telling her how beautiful they were, Amrita blushing under all the praise.
“Moody is obsessed with you,” Caroline said as she tipped one of the paintings back and forth, watching the overhead lights gleam off shimmery paint.
“I know,” Amrita said, giddy. She dropped her voice to a whisper and gave us the kind of smile I would have started wars for. “I think whatever we did really worked. I was here all night working on these pieces, and I’ve never felt so good about what I’m making. It just ... comes to me.”
There was such a joyful gleam on her face. Finch seemed doubtful, but she was smiling wryly at the paintings too. “You just can’t admit that you’re a good painter. Caroline too,” she added, though it was a useless olive branch that Caroline shrugged off.
“There’s always room for improvement,” Caroline said loftily. But she looked over her shoulder in the direction of her studio. And I could tell that she was excited—that she thought she was onto something too.
“I’m starving,” Saz declared, plucking the painting out of Caroline’s hands and laying it carefully atop Amrita’s clean desk. “Fuck Bane. Let’s go for a drive and eat something good.”
There could be no denial of it. The ritual and its apparent success inspired a new hunger within us, a shared starvation for more, more, more.
In the days to follow that first critique, we went to the studio all the time—even more than we had before. Now that it felt as if the pieces might be falling into place, we wanted to claim them. We wanted control, and growth, and invention, and pride. I completed a new piece over the course of less than a week. This one felt more vulnerable than anything I’d ever made before. It was a close-up of Saz in the black corn, light all stolen away from the day, hands clutching her nose as blood ran through her fingers and over bared teeth. There was so much brilliance in her face. In the echoing triumph of her grin.
The hunger wicked something more literal to life within us too. We ate like animals—regardless of the hour, in great heaps, summoned by the body clock that dragged us from our beds like a bell in the middle of the night. Overhead light gleamed off the dining table, and the oven’s clock blinked a red hour. We were insatiable and free of self-conscious doubt. I didn’t think about my body and its limits with them. I just pulled up a chair. I let Saz craft me the perfect bite—chickpea and sweet potato and spinach on a fork, everything earthen and rich. The scent of Caroline’s decaf filled the room and I accepted a mug of that, too, cinnamon dusted across the oat milk, heat curdling it into swirls. Amrita stacked salty chips with layers of garlic hummus and held it up in offering. I crunched it hard between my teeth, relishing the sodium and the affection of her hands building it for me. Finch wasn’t there. But I imagined her fed.
In the span of quiet minutes filled only with the noise of our devouring, I’d start to consider all the sleep I was losing. But I couldn’t have gone to bed—I was afraid that I’d never have them like this again, gathered around the table in too-big T-shirts and our underwear, someone’s forgotten music spilling down from a floor overhead, the window opened to let night air combat the radiators. That kind of elation had its limits, and our days in the Manor were numbered. Besides, I kind of liked the wired, hallucinatory effects of my sleeplessness. It felt like accessing a deeper part of myself, something with the potential to be compelling enough to record on a canvas. Still, I knew, in the blackest corner of my heart, that it was a childish thought. I didn’t need to suffer to be a painter.
I used to forget all my dreams. But I started to have nightmares that couldn’t be shaken, my sleeping self always returning to the same white house in the woods where I’d grown up. Everything was as I’d left it: the stairs creaking under invisible feet, paint peeling off the siding, dogs barking in the trees. Familiarity wasn’t comforting—I spent the majority of these lucidities witnessing horrors that would leave me clawing my way back to waking. I watched Caroline part the dark waves of Amrita’s hair along the back of her head before she gently eased the halves of Amrita’s mind apart and slid a hand inside. I pulled Saz from shallow water, her face swollen and blue until it dissolved into a million gnats. I cut Finch down from the rafters of Grainer with her own pocketknife and sat cross-legged on the slats of the porch staring at a television. Nothing played on the screen, yet I always woke with the knowledge that I’d been watching something. An end of some form. An apocalyptic rapture.
It was impossible to fall back asleep after waking. Some nights I turned on all the lights in my room and tried to sketch, determined to make something out of the images I couldn’t banish from my mind. But the Manor had such an eerie quality in the dark, the only distinguishable sound a permeating buzz that never seemed to leave me alone. I googled the symptoms of tinnitus and assigned myself a diagnosis, thinking certainty might help. But all I could do was tune into that ringing hum.
A few nights after the ritual, with Monday on the horizon, I woke from a nightmare and went to refill my water glass. Glowing red Rotham-issued exit signs were the only source of light on the third and second floor, but as I descended the last staircase, I found the kitchen lamp already on and Amrita sitting at the table. She cupped a steaming mug and looked up at me.
“Can’t sleep?”
I shook my head. I told her about that night’s dream.
“Come on,” she said, extending her hand. “Be sleepless with me.”
I went to her. I leaned my head on her shoulder, sipped from her mug when she offered, and shut my eyes against the fabric of her T-shirt. This was different from our voraciousness. With Amrita I could fade into the background. There was no pressure to feed on what they gave me, to be funny or clever or lovable or coy. The dreams were just dreams. Conjurations my heart invented to hurt me and banished by Amrita’s comfort. Anything impossible solved at once. Anything capable of killing simplified and slept.
But I had to go to bed at some point. I was terrified of possibility: how untethered and expansive it was, how there seemed to be no limit to our belief in the potential of magic. I was afraid that this was a precipice we could not walk back from.
The day before Halloween was a Wednesday. Normally Kolesnik sent out an email by Monday evening at the very latest detailing what he expected us to show up to class with, but my inbox remained empty. I tried to prepare myself anyway—the burgeoning anxiety that ruled most of my day-to-day tasks forced me to drum up something that he might find interesting. Only two out of the ten required pages of my thesis paper were written so far, and the five hundred or so words I had managed were limp and uninteresting. How could I put my thoughts on paper in a way that might make him understand? How could I describe the way I wanted to freeze us through the paint and immortalize us as we were? What could I say? The truth, maybe, even if it only made sense to me. That I was so greedy. I wanted nothing to change. I thought if it changed, any of it—if they went on to live lives that I couldn’t be a part of—I’d turn to dust. And if I could capture it in the paintings, the world might keep moving on around me, but at least I’d have proof that it had existed in the first place.
Finch was already standing outside Kolesnik’s classroom when we arrived. She had a hoodie on that I sometimes stole when I slept over, sleeves bunched up around her forearms. There were bags under her eyes.
“Canceled,” she called. She inclined her head toward the room’s shut door and the paper taped to it. “He left a note.”
“Are you serious?” Amrita sighed, stepping up to touch the scrawled writing on the note. “He couldn’t have sent an email last night so we could sleep in?”
“He wants us to suffer,” Saz mumbled through a bite of a granola bar. Crumbs littered the pink silk of her top.
“He’s probably just sick,” I tried. I brushed a few bits of the granola off Saz. She gave me a full-mouthed smile.
“Maybe he canceled for Grotesque prep,” Amrita suggested. “They still haven’t figured out what ... happened to the Boar King suit. I’m guessing they’re going to make a new one?”
Caroline grinned. There was a cruel gleam in her eyes. “All they have to do is take a walk through the corn in a field off I-80.”
“Shut the hell up,” Amrita whispered, prodding Caroline’s shoulder.
I had a vicious headache, likely a result of too many hours spent awake. At least a canceled class meant that I could go back to bed.
“Well, I’m not going to the studio yet if we don’t have to. I’m going home to get some sleep,” I said. “Wake me up if anything changes.”
“Slacker,” Caroline sang.
I flipped her off over my shoulder and started down the hall. Slatter Hall was a maze—everything the same dark hues of brown and green, from the high ceilings to the wood floors to the heavy doors. Most of the buildings across Rotham’s campus connected somewhere along the way, either adjoining aboveground or under the promenade, and Slatter met the atrium down one of the east wing halls. It was a longer walk back to the Manor that way, but a prettier one, and I was so rarely alone on campus without a schedule that I wanted a moment to breathe.
I turned into the east wing and hesitated under its arched entryway. The overhead lights were off, usually triggered by movement in the afternoon when classes started to pick up. The only illumination came from the crosshatched windows, sunlight shaking on the floor as the wind outside blew through the leaves.
At the end of the hall stood a shadowed figure—stooped and somehow still massive, humanoid but bent in discomfort. The head drooped and hands went up to clutch the face. The black hall obscured most of its definition and turned it into an indistinct mass, until it finally staggered forward.
I rocked backward at the same time it stepped into the light. It convulsed again, hacking with a strained gag, but now the diamonds of sun lit up the face.
“Professor Kolesnik?” I whispered. “Are you okay?”
It was Kolesnik; I was sure now. In his white button-down and his black slacks, he looked like a penitent mourner. His shoulders made the same shape as when he would viciously blow the blood out of his nose—taut, drawn up by his ears as if in mid-flinch. Then he arched and made the rearing shape of an animal rising to its hind legs. One hand slid down to his chest, pressing against his rib cage as he stumbled closer.
My pulse pounded so hard in my ears I thought it might be the echo of footsteps behind us, but when I turned, we were still alone. The doors lining the hall remained shut. Kolesnik took another step forward, his body giving a shuddering, titanic heave as he gasped down a breath.
I tried to inventory my sanity. My voice, my hands, my heart—all shaking. “Do you need me to get someone? Do you need help?”
The questions were a reflex. I didn’t know what the fuck to do. I just took a tentative step in his direction, like he might scare if I got too near.
He went down on one knee with a thud that rattled the hall. The floorboards wheezed as if all of Slatter was exhaling and cowering away from him. This close I could see blood coming out of his nose, collecting in the gray hairs of his beard. I thought about the stained tissues in the Boar King’s heart. Kolesnik’s gore sealed up inside of that chest forever and ever.
His eyes finally landed on me. But they were wild and dilated, his jaw working as he sank lower. A hoarse sound pushed out of his mouth. It was a broken moan, the whimper of a thing shot and intended for an end.
And then he began to scream.
He screamed and he screamed, fingers ripping into his chest, that dogged and awful howl carrying down the hall as I rushed forward and tried to yank him to his feet, my pleas for him to stand up and to stop screaming and it’ll be okay, you’re okay, it’s okay all bowled over by the sound of his agony.
“HELP,” he wailed, the sound only half a word, mostly the desperate caw a body releases when it can’t find the breath to sustain itself. “HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME.”
His eyes were bulging spheres of sclera with the iris all rolled away as he ripped at the collar around his neck, sweat beading at his temples. Blood running out of his nose made his lips a collage of color.
“What do I do? You need to tell me, I don’t know how to help you, fuck, I don’t know what’s happening.” The world blurred as tears rose to my eyes, and I tore helplessly at his blood-spattered tie, trying to clear his airway. “What the fuck do I do?”
The stone beneath my knees was so cold, his face a choked red. I watched something slacken in him—the onset of an absence of vitality.
“Jo, what the hell is going on?”
I didn’t hear them come up behind me until Finch was pulling at my arms. Kolesnik keeled forward and hit the floor hard, the blood from his nose smearing a line across the stone.
“Oh god,” Amrita whispered, her hand pressing over her mouth. The others gathered around her. Saz gasped a stream of horrified curses as Caroline rushed to Kolesnik to tip him onto his side and feel for a pulse.
“Someone call the dean, or fucking 911 or something!” Caroline snapped, but Amrita was already turning from us, her phone pressed to her ear.
Finch scrubbed at my arm with the hem of her hoodie, and that was when I saw the blood on my wrist from where Kolesnik had slumped against me. I drew in shallow breaths, my chest too tight, the hallway too hot, sun whiting out my sight.
“Hey hey hey,” Finch whispered, squeezing my wrist. “Look at me, you’re alright, everything’s going to be fine.”
I tried to look. My eyes kept snagging on her cheek and darting back to Kolesnik, panting against the ground, his eyes rolling back. The scream had died off. It was a rattling gargle of breath now. Caroline attempted to hold his head up, to keep it from lolling. She looked desperately to Amrita for help.
Finch turned my head back to her with a hand on my cheek. “What the hell happened, Jo?”
All I could think was— we killed him, we killed him, we killed him, I killed him.