Chapter 18 The Heart of the Gorgon
THE HEART OF THE GORGON
After leaving Brennan, I start a dozen texts to Arla and erase them all, too chickenshit to tell her what I know.
Instead, I end up calling the gallery where I bought the painting and ask for information on the artist, telling the woman over the phone (who sounds different than the previous one) I’m interested in a commission after all, but want to speak with the painter directly.
She gives me a name and number which I use to look up a studio address somewhere on the bay.
I decide to extend my lunch break and drive over.
I pull up in front a mid-century ranch with a low-slung roof, a corner of windows, and a turquoise front door. Getting out, I grab the painting from under the jacket I threw over it a couple of nights ago and haul it with me, rapping on the wooden door. When I don’t get a response, I knock harder.
It takes a minute, but when the door opens, I see the same woman who sold me the painting the day I was in the gallery.
The same tiny frame and nest of white fluff, the same skinny arms dabbled in paint.
The same moon-shaped face and unnerving eyes passing over me.
I can hear Tori Amos playing quietly in the background. “Yes?”
“It’s you. You’re the artist, A. Nilsen?”
“I am Anneli,” she says, squinting at me. “It’s my gallery. Why?”
I hold the painting up for her to see. “You painted this?”
Her face softens like she’s seeing an old friend, and her hand reaches out to trace over the brushstrokes. “Of course I did. So good to meet her again. How are you getting along?”
“Can I come in?” I ask, lowering it.
“That good, huh?” Her eyes narrow, but she opens the door wide. “As long as you bring her with you.”
Together, the painting and I step over the threshold.
Inside, Anneli’s place is sparse but neatly furnished with mid-century modern knockoffs and secondhand finds, colorful and functional. She leads me toward her square little kitchen where she makes us each a cup of Earl Grey, pouring mine into an Oslo souvenir mug.
“I had no idea you were the artist,” I tell her as I take my mug.
“Why? Because I’m visually impaired?” She stares at me, aware of where my eyes are if nothing else.
“No, I mean … You didn’t say. I just thought—”
She waves a hand to stop me. “It’s a common misconception, that the blind walk around in the dark.
Only a very small percentage of the visually impaired experience total blindness.
I can see most color and light, a general impression of form.
It gives me a sense of things. The details I have to discover another way or conjure with my imagination.
But I wasn’t always like this, you know.
Once, I had perfect vision. The things I remember, they inform my work a lot. ”
“Oh.” I cup the mug, mulling over an appropriate way to respond.
“You want to know what happened,” she says, sipping her tea. “How I became legally blind?”
“Uhh—”
She smiles, pleased with herself. “It’s okay.
Most people want to know but are afraid to ask.
I wish I could tell you, but it’s as much a mystery to me as it is to my doctors.
Conversion disorder they call it now, but they used to refer to it as hysterical blindness.
It’s trauma induced, but not from physical trauma. My trauma was psychological.”
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her, unsure how to react.
“Don’t be,” she says. “I’m not. Happened a long time ago.
They kept thinking my vision would come back.
I tried a number of therapies—group, occupational, cognitive behavioral, hypnosis—but …
well, at this age, no one’s counting on it.
I can’t imagine life any other way now. It’s made me the person, the artist, I am today.
And I wouldn’t change that for the world. ”
“You must be an inspiration to so many,” I tell her.
She laughs. “Mostly I just make people uncomfortable,” she says. “But that’s probably a lot more to do with my manner than my sight. Fortunately, it’s never stopped anyone from buying my work. So, you’re here for another painting?”
“Not exactly,” I respond. “I wanted to know more about this piece.”
She seems intrigued. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever turned up at my door before to ask about a painting they already bought. But Thalassa is special.”
“Why did you paint it?” I ask her.
She cocks her head to the side and stares at me. “Why? Why does an artist do anything, Miss…”
“Cole,” I tell her before I can think better of it. It’s the second time I’ve given a piece of my real name recently, as though I am flirting with a homecoming. But it won’t matter here.
“Miss Cole, an artist is either inspired or driven or mad. There can be no other reason.” She sets her mug down and takes a seat at her dining table, pulling out a pack of papers from her pocket and a bag of marijuana from a nearby ceramic vase.
She begins casually rolling a joint in front of me, her fingers deftly working the materials.
“And which are you?” I ask as I sit down across from her. “Inspired or driven or mad?”
She grins. “All three.” Then she licks the paper and seals the joint, produces a lighter from God knows where and takes a hit.
I won’t argue with her own assessment of herself. “But can you tell me why her?”
She coughs out a plume of smoke. “Who? Thalassa?”
I flinch at the name. “Yes. That.”
“Why not?” She eyes me curiously.
“Because she flooded my condo,” I say flatly.
At that, Anneli starts laughing and it takes a long time for her to stop.
“You believe me?” I ask after she gives one last chuckle.
“Of course,” she says, offering me the joint. I shake my head. “People have a bad habit of bringing things into their home without thinking, Miss Cole. But there is energy attached to everything. Especially to art. Especially to idols.”
I peer at her. Is she saying it’s my fault? “I don’t understand.”
“It’s like this,” she tells me. “Someone gets a big white dog at the pound, and they name him Loki. Then they come home a week later and whine because he’s eaten the couch.”
“Again, I don’t follow.”
“Chaos, Miss Cole. I’m talking about chaos. It’s everywhere. A force larger and far more powerful than us, but we want to pretend we’re in control.” She drags on her joint, inhaling deep.
“Is that why you painted her? Because … chaos?”
“In part,” she says. “I like sacred feminine energy because it scares people. Goddesses are”—she waves a hand in the air—“challenging to us. We need them, but we don’t want to admit it.”
I shake my head. “Why is that?”
She shrugs. “No one can love you like your mother,” she says now. “And no one can hurt you like her either.”
The words slam into me with all the force of Solidago’s winds. For a second, I can’t draw breath. “You talked about primordial goddesses the day I bought this,” I remind her.
She nods. “They are the beginning and end of everything, Miss Cole, the very stuff creation is made of. They shape the world.” She rolls the joint thoughtfully between her fingers. “This, too, is chaos.
“Did you know that in the tropics, elephants shape the forest? Not by planting trees, obviously, but by destroying them. They can create gaps in the canopy where seedlings flourish, they make pathways other species rely on and churn the earth for new seeds to germinate. Many plants depend on their digestive tracts for distribution.” She watches me through the smoke.
“I thought we were talking about goddesses, not elephants.”
Anneli shrugs. “To the ant, surely the elephant is a god, a creator and destroyer of worlds.”
I push my hair behind my ears, understanding dawning. “You think they’re real.”
She eyes me strangely. “I know they are.” She takes a drag, lets it out slowly, and sets her joint down.
“You know, I used to be a professor before the art took over, of mythology and religion.” She gets up and saunters to a bookshelf, plucks a volume off, and brings it over to me.
The title reads, The Divine Autochthon: Goddesses of the Emergence.
Beneath it, Dr. Anneli T. Nilsen. “So, I know what I’m talking about. ”
I admit, I didn’t expect that. I remember the books at her gallery. Hers was the author’s name on the spines, the writer of them all. I set the book on the table. “Doctor? That’s impressive.”
“I was older than you are now, but still a young woman when I traveled to Svalbard for my work. It’s an archipelago belonging to my home country of Norway, and Longyearbyen is a settlement on the largest island there.
I was there for the sun festival in March, when the sun first becomes visible after four months of polar night.
To observe a place where humanity still echoed early rites of heliolatry, or sun worship, in modern times.
I’d hired a guide to take me to a glacier plateau where I could experience the sunrise like I never would again.
It was to be my last sunrise in more ways than one. ”
I notice my fingers gripping the Oslo mug and slowly release them. “What happened?”
“An arctic fox,” she answers. “I followed it to snap a picture. Foolish in a place where you’re not allowed to venture without a rifle-trained guide due to the polar bear population.
It was still dark, and I got away from my guide, turned around in the uniformity of the landscape.
I was suddenly and truly alone.” She looks at me, dread memory hanging in her eyes.
“What came racing over the distant peak when the sun broke wasn’t just the day. ”
“Was it a bear?” I ask, horrified. I imagine coming face-to-face with a polar bear might be enough to damage anybody, even if you lived to tell the tale.
“I wish that’s all it had been.”
Her words make my breath go still in my chest.