CHAPTER ELEVEN
Everything around him seemed alive. He had made sure every aspect and second of his day was vibrant and bright and that especially included his apartment.
The apartment was on the third floor of a shabby building.
It faced east, which meant the morning light came in clean and direct for the first four hours of the day before the angle shifted and the room went to a softer, more diffuse light.
But even that muted tone of whitish yellow was beautiful and useful to him.
He had chosen the apartment partly for this, the way the light moved through it, and he had arranged his workspace accordingly His main worktable had been positioned to catch the direct morning light and the secondary surface along the far wall reserved for the hours when the light went ambient and soft.
And though the light was amazing in more ways than he could ever explain, his walls were also covered with an assortment of colors—a literal attack on the senses.
He had done this gradually, over the course of several months, beginning with the color charts he had made himself.
He had then expanded outward to include the botanical prints, the paint sample grids, the pages of handwritten notation, and the clippings from publications that had reproduced color accurately enough to be useful.
The coverage was dense but not chaotic. He was sure it looked like a crazy mess to the untrained eye, but it was perfectly organized as far as he was concerned.
It was organized by a logic that was visible once you understood the principle behind it, which most people would not.
This didn’t bother him because what he had been working on for quite some time was not for most people.
It had never been. Gabriel Kane was not the sort of man most people understood.
He was sitting at the main table in the morning light with his current ledger open in front of him.
The ledger was a hardbound book, the pages unlined.
He had been using it for the past eight months to document what he thought of as chromatic signatures, the specific color relationships that defined each subject—the hues they worked with most consistently, the registers they drew from most heavily, the way each person moved chromatic energy from the living world into the fixed and static world of human arrangement.
He turned to Desmond Hale's pages with a deadly sort of reverence.
He was just one of six. He had documented the color inventory of Hale's shop in careful detail, right down to the seasonal shifts and the way he’d grouped the flowers: dahlias in the deep burgundy to coral range, ranunculus in pale yellow and cream, roses in the saturated reds and warm pinks.
There were small swatches of paint he had mixed to approximate the colors, taped to the margins of the pages in rows.
Each one was labeled with the pigment name and the proportion, the way a precise chef might document a recipe.
He had spent considerable time in Hale's shop before any of this was decided, and they knew he had been a customer on at least two occasions.
He had stood in that dense, colorful space and watched the man work and understood with increasing clarity what was happening there.
All of those flowers. All of that color, pulled from the soil, from the stem, from the living chromatic field of the natural world.
And then they had been cut and separated from their source.
They had been arranged in configurations chosen for human aesthetic pleasure, placed in shops and homes and event venues where they sat in vases until they died, their color degrading by degrees and the vibrancy draining out of them day by day.
People actually paid for this…and that was equally disgusting.
They paid to have the color brought to them, contained and privatized.
They paid for the pleasure of looking at it in their own spaces until it was gone, and then they paid again, and the cycle continued.
And with each cycle a little more of the living chromatic field of the world was exhausted.
The flowers that had not been cut were correspondingly diminished.
The gardens and the meadows and the roadsides held a little less.
The people who walked through the world and looked at it with any degree of attention were receiving a little less than they should have been, though they didn’t know why, and they attributed their diminished experience of color to age or distraction rather than to the systematic extraction that was producing it.
This was not metaphor. He wanted to be clear with himself on that point, as he was always clear with himself on that point, because clarity was the foundation of the work. And he hoped those who eventually became clued what he was doing would also understand this.
It was mechanism. It was how the world functioned at the level most people were not equipped to observe.
His ability to observe it was not a delusion or a symptom or a sign of anything other than a sensitivity to color that exceeded the normal range.
He had been tested. He had the documentation.
His color discrimination scores placed him in the top fraction of a percent of the population.
Sometimes blues and yellows were so bright that it hurt his eyes, but he felt them warming his heart.
He had sketched, in the margins of Hale's section, a small diagram of what he imagined happening now.
He had drawn it the morning after, when he knew the work had been completed.
It was a simple thing, just lines radiating outward from a central point, but it represented what he believed was occurring: the chromatic energy that Desmond Hale had been channeling away from the world for years was returning.
Not in any mystical sense, nothing that required faith, simply in the practical sense that Hale was no longer performing the extraction, and the living world would recover proportionally.
The diagram was the color of the ink he had been using, blue-black, and the radiating lines were careful and even and he had been satisfied with it when he drew it.
He turned the page from Hale and looked to his note on Ostroff. God, she’d been such a talented painter. It had almost hurt him to set the process in motion—the process that had slowly taken her life over the course of ten days or so.
He turned the page, diving deeper into the ledger.
The next pages were different in character from Hale's and Ostroff’s, which had been largely about a commercial operation and the volume of material it processed.
The next subject worked at a different scale and in a different relationship to the chromatic world, not extracting color from living things directly but working with it in the soil, in the ground itself, coaxing it into particular configurations in private spaces, behind walls, where only a small number of people would ever see it.
The privatization was the offense. Color cultivated in a shared space, accessible to anyone who walked past it, returned something to the ambient field even as it organized it.
But color cultivated behind walls, maintained for the pleasure of a household and their guests, was another form of the travesty Hale had practiced. It was just slower and less visible.
He read again the pages he had written on her carefully, not because the information was new to him but because reading it carefully was part of the discipline.
You didn’t do this work carelessly. You didn’t allow yourself to become imprecise or hasty or dismissive of the details, because the details were where the accuracy lived.
He was not angry with any of them. He wanted to continue to be clear about that. He hoped that years from now, people would not view his work wrong.
More importantly he hoped his Master was proud of the way he was getting things done.
He set his hand flat on the open page and looked at the color charts on the wall above his workspace. The morning light was still direct and clean, coming through the east-facing windows and laying itself across the table and the ledger and his hand.
He turned to the next page and began to read.