14 FAILURE TO CONJURE
14
F AILURE TO C ONJURE
Saz threw up the morning of Survey. Amrita sat on the edge of the bathtub and held her hair back as Saz clutched the toilet with a white-knuckled grip.
“I’m so fucked,” Saz wailed into the bowl. “I’m so, so fucked.”
“Saz, everything is going to be fine,” I said from the doorway. I watched them in the mirror, Amrita’s hands twined in Saz’s black hair, Saz’s shoulders heaving again. My stomach churned. I had to close my eyes.
“I told you that Moody said she didn’t think I was ready,” Saz wept. “It’s that farmer’s fault, he screwed everything up by finding the Boar King. The book said never to move the effigy unless you were prepared for the spell to unravel. Now Moody thinks everything I make isn’t good enough, and I’m supposed to show up with a smile on my face? Not happening.”
Amrita shifted her grasp on Saz’s hair. “I thought you said you found the ritual on Reddit?”
“Whatever, that’s what I meant,” Saz answered as she pressed her forehead to the porcelain.
“Moody just said that she could tell you didn’t feel confident about the pieces you’re showing,” I tried. “And I mean, she was kind of right. Your face is in the toilet.”
“Jo, if I could stand right now, I’d throttle you,” Saz said weakly.
“No throttling, we’re going to be late.”
That was Caroline’s voice from behind me. I turned to find her inches away from me, her cool eyes fixed on Saz.
There was something so eerie about Caroline over the past week, a chilling distance to the way she moved throughout the house. It was like a switch had flipped since she returned from break. She was on edge, increasingly erratic. The behavior sparked a new fear in me; it felt like further evidence that our ritual had changed something. The Caroline who awakened me before dawn in my bed did not feel like my friend.
“Moody ragged on the rest of us all week too,” Amrita said softly to Saz, giving Caroline a look out of the corner of her eye that said, please, not now. “Everyone is stressed over Survey. It’s not the ‘failing ritual’ or a symptom of your work. You’re a good painter, and the fact that you got to this point is enough to prove that.” She paused, waiting for Saz’s acknowledgment. “Okay?”
“Okay,” Saz whimpered.
Amrita smoothed Saz’s hair back and tied it with an elastic. “Alright, come on. Let’s get you cleaned up and feed you a piece of bread. No coffee until you have something in your stomach.”
I stepped back to give them room and found that Caroline was already gone, the doorway empty and the house quiet.
Survey was held in the gallery on the ground floor of Grainer, where the walls were freshly painted and lights made bright circles against the plaster. It was the same space where everyone who didn’t end up Soloing would show our collective group work. Tall windows welcomed in morning light. The hall that led from Grainer’s entrance to the gallery door was lined with stacks of paintings, with Phoebe at the front preparing to go first, then Veda and Cameron behind her with two spots left in front of them for Caroline and Amrita. We filed in accordingly to prop up our work against the wall. Inside the gallery, the floor was coated with layer after layer of gray paint to make the space neutral enough to complement any work that was hung. Rows of wooden folding chairs filled the room, enough for our critiquing panel as well as students from different majors who wanted to tune in for the show. The first row was seated: Moody predictably at the center with St. Roche to her right, and our surprise guests on either side of them. I didn’t recognize a few of the faces—they were likely local artists or critics with some debt to Rotham, or alumni that wanted to see the work our class was making. Interspersed throughout those strangers were some familiar professors: Lizbeth Enriquez, Jessica Fujioka, Pat Williams, and an empty chair with a photo of Kolesnik on it. Another memorial to a poltergeist.
“We have to look at him the whole time?” Amrita muttered beside me as we hunted for seats.
“It’s sabotage,” Saz whispered, still looking green. “They want to watch me spiral.”
Caroline sighed. “Not everything is about you, Saz.”
Caroline sat at the end of our row—she was first out of our group to go, alphabetically right after Phoebe, so she wanted to be able to slip out easily. Saz flipped Caroline off as Phoebe pinned up her collages. My leg bounced ceaselessly. Saz’s anxiety had rubbed off on me, clung like taffy to my teeth. It had been another sleepless week of struggling to fine-tune what work we were going to present. At this point, I was pretty sure my body was 85 percent caffeine. My sweat would perspire the color of weak coffee.
Moody stood at the head of the room. Phoebe teetered behind her atop a ladder, hammering pins through her painting into the wall. Moody had to raise her voice to be heard over the hammer.
“I’m sure many of you are familiar with the process of Survey. But we’ll run through it again for our distinguished guests.” She gave said guests a gratifying smile. Her hair was swept out of her face—the one earring glittered under the gallery lights.
“There are eleven of you showing your work this year. Each of you will have ten minutes to set up and take down your work, and thirty minutes of actual critique. We’ll open the last few minutes up for any students who might like to comment on their peers’ work. I encourage you all to take notes, ask questions, and absorb the feedback our guests provide. On Monday morning we will post our list of the five students who have a chance to advance to Solo. Out of those five students, we will evaluate the growth you apply to your work throughout the spring semester and select from your ranks our Solo candidate.”
She clasped her hands in front of her and smiled. “Good luck to you all.”
Phoebe descended the ladder. “Ready to go, Captain.”
“The floor is yours, Ms. Arnett,” Moody said as she returned to her seat in the front row.
It was a bit of a curse to show your work first. Phoebe likely resented her last name for designating her placement. We’d all been coming to public Surveys for the painting students ever since our freshman year—they were tense back-and-forths, exemplary presentations, scourings of vulnerability. We knew what to expect.
Phoebe cleared her throat once, twice, and said, “Hey, guys!”
“I’m already tired,” Amrita whispered, fingertip pressed to her temple.
Phoebe’s collages were not my favorite, but objectively intriguing. We took them in for a few silent moments—layered pieces of fabric and canvas in electric shades of pink clashing with yellow floral and blue denim. A shadow passed by the windows in front of the gallery and blotted darkness across the paintings. Beneath it I could just make out Phoebe’s details. Small stitches of red and black, like ants on a picnic blanket. Real shoelaces woven through cuts she had made with a blade. Paint scrubbed here and there, as if she had needed to reach a requirement: a suggested horse, seashells outlined with white, the faint trace of a woman’s profile.
“Your attention to detail is lovely, but it’s difficult to discern where you intended the eye to follow,” one of the guest speakers began. Phoebe’s face rose and fell. “There’s just so much happening at once. If you hoped to overwhelm the viewer, you’ve succeeded.”
That fed the rest of them. The critiques began to flow. Phoebe was a stoic force with a smile still clinging to her face, and I had to hand it to her. Somehow she remained professional throughout their dissection.
“I need a smoke,” Finch muttered, slipping out of her seat before I could catch her sleeve and stop her.
“We just sat down,” I whispered, loud enough to have a few heads swiveling in our direction. But they quickly lost interest in us and followed Finch out of the room with their eyes until their heads were all the way back on Phoebe, whose expression had soured.
Thirty minutes felt like thirty seconds. I’d bitten my bottom lip bloody by the time Moody announced that Caroline would be next. Finch reclaimed her seat, smelling of smoke.
Veda and Mars helped Phoebe deinstall her pieces, and Mars kept a comforting hand on her shoulder. They were too far away for us to hear what they were saying, but I figured it was something encouraging to bandage the way the panel had just torn her work apart.
Moody gestured toward our row, and I followed Caroline into the hall to help her hang everything. The canvases were massive. We had to carry them one at a time with each frame held in our wingspan. “Careful with that one,” Caroline said as I lifted one of the newer paintings. “It’s still wet.”
I obeyed, holding the canvas as far from my body as possible. Caroline took her place at the front of the room. There were five paintings in total—she had more, much more—but space only allowed for so many pieces, and these ones dwarfed everyone in the room. Caroline paused before the painting in the center as I hauled the ladder over and started drilling into the studs to hang the rest. The room was alight with low chatter. The closer I got to the overhead lights, the hotter they were against my hair.
“What the fuck?” she muttered, a hand grazing across her painting. She stopped at a gap in the canvas—a hole with the edges eaten away. Caroline spun and faced the rows of chairs. Everyone hushed, watching her, waiting. From above I could see her lip curling back, strands of hair sticking to her temples.
“Caroline?” I whispered. “You alright?”
She didn’t answer me. Her eyes focused on a face in the crowd—Finch stared back with an eyebrow cocked in confusion.
“I’ll kill her,” Caroline whispered.
“Ms. Aster?” Moody prompted. “Your critique begins in two minutes.”
Caroline pivoted back to the paintings without another word. There was seething rage in her face, the kind of anger I hadn’t seen since the time her dad called junior year and threatened to pull her out of Rotham entirely if he didn’t see her on the dean’s list. I climbed back down the ladder and rushed to get it out of her way. Caroline thrust the last painting onto the screws and took her seat, all the fury schooled, the smile on her face a picture of excellence.
“Our guests will take time to consider your work,” Moody said, “and then we will open the floor to you to hear your thesis.”
Caroline nodded, but the flat heat in her eyes concealed something terrifying. I thumped into my seat in the back row again beside Finch, then stabilized myself with a prodding finger on her thigh. “What happened?” I whispered in a rush. “What did you do?”
Finch reared back. “What did I do? What are you talking about?”
Two of the guest critics stood to give Caroline’s work a closer look. The paintings were expansive, primarily consumed by dark hues and texture. Deep cobalts, burnt maroons, lush emeralds. There was that swan painting from her first critique and an image of a woman clutching the belly of a tree, bark crawling over her skin where her thigh pressed against it. Another painting where the sky glowed a dirty, apocalyptic orange and birds were carved out of the paint rather than etched on top of it. Caroline’s careful hand had marked out lavish details among broad strokes. Each one felt like the kind of landscape you’d find in a nightmare, some disquieting purgatory. They were all-consuming, precarious, devastating. The one in the middle was spotlighted by one of the bulbs overhead—it shone on the hole where something had eaten away at the canvas’s fabric, the size of a child’s fist.
“The scope of the work is fantastic,” an elderly woman in the front row said. She had her hands clasped in a knot, fingers gnarled with age. “They’re quite dystopic, are they not?”
“Absolutely,” agreed Moody, “that’s just the word I would have used.”
“Like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Have you ever seen the Paris catacombs in person?” That was a pale bald man with frameless glasses in a tailored suit.
“Of course,” Caroline said easily. Sometimes I forgot who she was—that when she said of course, she meant it, because it was true.
“You’re a fan of Anselm Kiefer, I presume. Your work appears like his more colorful sister.” The jovial voice belonged to a younger man, the long-haired, tortoiseshell-glasses type. Caroline nodded and laughed politely. He pointed to the hole in Caroline’s central painting. “Can you tell me a little more about this?”
Caroline’s smile calcified. “I prefer to let the physical details speak for themselves.”
Moody waved a hand. “That’s alright, you can go ahead and give us a little background about the work.”
Caroline looked like she wanted to choke Moody silent. “That wasn’t intentional,” she said finally.
I nudged Finch. “I saw it up there, it looks like a burn. She’s pissed.”
Finch cut her eyes at me. “Okay? What’re you trying to say, Jo? You think it’s my fault that she screwed her work up?”
“Can you two please be quiet?” Amrita whispered.
I slouched in my seat, scolded. The way Caroline fixed her gaze on Finch as she said I’ll kill her had me convinced that she believed Finch was to blame. I anticipated fallout—the arrival of that shadowed self Caroline kept tucking out of view. But Finch just scoffed and turned back to face the display.
The young man stood before Caroline. “If it’s damage, it’s nicely done. I’d like to see what one of these would look like with a larger section burned out of them, maybe even sutured back together afterward. Not that I don’t enjoy what you’ve added already, but I think you might as well embrace how destructive they are.”
Destructive. I saw the word take root in Caroline. Her smile wavered, just a fraction.
Tortoiseshell man nodded. “There’s a sense of loneliness in these huge expanses with such small figures, little vegetation, wounded animals. It’s a scary place to be. I assume that’s what you want us to feel—ultimate fear?”
Caroline hesitated. The gallery lights made spidery shadows out of her eye sockets. Her spine was rigid, her mouth cruel, eyes glassy.
“I think of them as the moments in between,” she said. “It’s a place to cross in search of somewhere better. You know that feeling when you’re on a road trip driving somewhere remote and the land you’re passing through feels like a simulacrum of the world? Something your mind fills in to make sense of all that space you’re leaving behind? It’s never felt real to me. I’m trying to capture that feeling—a test of mettle, to see if you can find your way out of that ersatz space.”
“Nobody knows what the hell ersatz means,” Saz mumbled, but the professors in the front row were nodding sagely and looking at Caroline with revered awe.
“Any comments from the crowd?” Moody asked. When no one responded, she checked her watch and announced, “Well, that’s time anyway. Amrita Balakrishnan, you’re up next.”