Negative Space by Mike Robinson (classic literature list .txt) 📗

***

They drove for many silent miles and hours, winding southbound down Highway 1. For the first time since the demoralizing start of his freshman year at Rheta, Max felt no urge to draw. It didn’t bother him, though this indifference did.

“Listen, I think we all could use a little loosener,” Dwayne said. “Little time to thaw out.”

Karen frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Max, check the cooler. I think I got a bottle of Jack in there, if you’d be so kind as to fetch it. A stretch and a swig. How about it?”

“You’re driving, Dwayne,” Max said, hesitating at the cooler.

“Relax, Maximo,” he said. The nickname had resumed its brisk playfulness, but still felt forced. “I won’t take much. Plus I have a higher tolerance than the two of you put together and I’ll walk off any drops of the stuff before I hit the wheel again.”

“Sounds like a challenge,” said Karen. “You think it’s just my lungs that get all the abuse?”

Max opened the cooler. The infamous package of special cookies. Crackers. Chips. Sandwich with a Europe-shaped spot of mold on the bread. And the single vial of salt water Karen had snatched from the limousine.

“Where’s the bottle?” Max asked.

“On the bottom. Just lift the other stuff.”

“Got it.” He handed it up front to Karen.

They were again in the vicinity of Big Sur. Dwayne pulled over to the side of the road at a clearing spread before a wall of pines printed flat and black against the sky. The threesome piled out, huddled in a small loose circle. Above them, the white pupil of the moon stared over the treeline and rendered in funereal light their tired features.

Karen took a swig of the bottle and passed it to Max who hesitated, then shut his eyes and sipped. Second taste of alcohol in his entire life. Bitter. Acrid. Tingling. But perversely enjoyable. He relayed the bottle to Dwayne.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t with you guys,” said Dwayne. “At the museum, I mean.”

“It’s fine,” said Max. “I’m sorry I was there.”

“It’s just...every time I go to that town I go in with a different intention, but I always end up doing the same thing. I tell myself I’m going to see this, or do this, but I get pulled in the same direction and I don’t ever do anything else, like the place is afraid of me sniffing and scoping it out so it tosses a steak at me like I’m some guard dog. Some distraction tactic and I fall for it every fucking time.”

Max and Karen glanced at one another.

“What do you do?” Max asked.

“I lost someone, too,” Dwayne said. “My fiancée.”

“Oh,” Karen said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know this is going to sound nuts. But remember what I said before, when we came to town? That there was some kind of extra concentration of artistic energy there?”

Both nodded, slowly.

“There’s a little more to it. Or at least some people claim there’s more to it. Legend says the stain of the Agra tribe is still there. That they opened some kind of other realm, or did something, that bled otherworldly power into Twilight Falls. It’s a realm one can usually access only through a lifetime of spiritual practice, like meditation. The paint of the gods, as one writer put it. But going there is like a shortcut to enlightenment, to the god-stuff that supposedly translates thought into reality. Manifests dreams.

“Sounds like a cheesy Twilight Zone plot, I know. In fact, I think it was, sort of. But I can’t help it. I’ve tried to bring her back so many times and I’ve failed just as many times, but I keep going back. I keep thinking—this time I’ve gotten it down. Gotten what down? Why am I blinded with the possibility of this shit? I mean, I know why. But you’d think by now I’d get better at controlling the Santa Claus impulse. Left over from childhood, maybe.”

Karen wondered if Clifford Feldman knew of these stories, and an eerie thought came to her that of course he did, that that was precisely the aim of this deluded “renewal” agenda: that somehow a bunch of people, their minds wiped clear of the old world, would sit around and, under his twisted tutelage, equipped with this “power”, engender a new one, dream it pulsing into reality.

So they thought.

As if reading her thoughts, Dwayne said, “I’m sure Feldman’s into the whole Agra thing. Seems to attract a lot of artists. A lot of men, too. Want to know truly what I think? I think men are massively envious of women being able to make babies. We loan the ingredients, but they brew it up, put it out. It’s living art. Men desperately want to make living art, too. To make something that will last and endure, affirm their existence. It’s why I think there are more major male artists than women artists. It’s not just patriarchy. It’s terrible insecurity. Women are more ... of the continuum. Men scramble to find meaning, lusting and battling and creating for it. Shakespeare and Hitler are embers of the same firestorm.”

Max thought about his business card-sized prints of all his canvases. Safe and pocketed, signs and reminders of his work, his existence, his babies. Preserved. There in case. In case of—well...what?

For several seconds, the birds and the insects sang to the darkness. Then Karen said, “Feldman told me I was a destroyer.”

Dwayne studied her. Max’s head hung. Had that whole episode with Feldman in the woods even happened? Sometime, just prior to it, the harder touch of reality had fallen away; they had stumbled over a precipice into some recess of the weird, where sensations unintended, unreal, unfit for typical human veins had filled them, suspended them in a dream-stasis until they reached once more the other side of the regular world.

Karen rose, dusted off the rear of her jeans.

“I need to pee,” she said, then made her way into the shadows.

Max kept an eye on