Exhilarated and refreshed I took up my load more willingly and went on with my search for brothels.
I came to one in a small building two blocks away from the main quay, attained by a darkened door in an alley at the side. I went in, moneyless, throwing myself on the charity of the working women, seeking sanctuary for the night from the only church I knew. The cathedral of my dreams.
Because of its history, but more because of its marina, shops and sunbathing beaches, Muriseay Town was a tourist attraction for wealthy visitors from all over the Dream Archipelago. In my first months on the island I discovered I could make a lucrative income from painting harbour scenes and mountain landscapes, then displaying them on a section of wall next to one of the large cafés in Paramoundour Avenue, the street where all the fashion houses and smart nightclubs were situated.
In the off-seasons, or when I simply grew tired of painting for money, I would stay in my tenth-floor studio above the city centre and dedicate myself to my attempts to develop the work pioneered by Acizzone. Now that I was in the town where Acizzone had produced his finest paintings I was able at last to research his life and work in full, to understand the techniques he had employed.
Tactilism was by this time many years out of vogue, a fortunate state of affairs as it allowed me to experiment without interference, comment or critical interest. Ultrasound microcircuitry was no longer in use, except in the market for children’s novelties, so the pigments I needed were plentiful and inexpensive, although at first difficult to track down in the quantities I needed them.
I set to work, building up the layers of pigments on a series of gesso-primed boards. The technique was intricate and hazardous – I ruined many boards by a single slip of the palette knife, some of them close to the moment of completion. I had much to learn.
Accepting this I made regular visits to the closed-case section of the Muriseayan Town Museum, where several of Acizzone’s originals were stored in archive. The female curator was at first amused that I should take an interest in such an obscure, unfashionable and reputedly obscene artist, but she soon grew used to my repeated visits, the long silent sessions I spent inside the locked sanctums when I was alone, pressing my hands, my face, my limbs, my torso, to Acizzone’s garish pictures. I was submerged in a kind of frenzy of artistic absorption, almost literally soaking up Acizzone’s breathtaking imagery.
The ultrasonics produced by the tactile pigments operated directly on the hypothalamus, promoting sudden changes in serotonin concentrations and levels. The instantaneous result of this was to generate the images experienced by the viewer – the less obvious consequence was to cause depression and long-term loss of memory. When I left the museum after my first adult exposure to Acizzone’s work I was shattered by the experience. While the erotic images created by the paintings still haunted me, I was almost blind with pain, confusion and a sense of unspecified terror.
After my first visit, I returned unsteadily to my studio and slept for nearly two days. When I awoke I was chastened by what I had discovered about the paintings. Exposure to tactilist art had a traumatic effect on the viewer.
I felt a familiar sense of blankness behind me. Memory had failed. Somewhere in the recent past, when I was travelling through the islands, I had missed visiting some of them.
The litany was still there and I recited the names to myself. Amnesia is not specific: I knew the names but in some cases I had no memory of the islands. Had I been to Winho? To Demmer? Nelquay? No recollections of any of them, but they had been on my route.
For two or three weeks I returned to my tourist painting, partly to gain some cash but also for a respite. I needed to think about what I had learned. My memories of childhood had been all but eradicated by something. Now I had a firm idea that it was my immersion in Acizzone’s art.
I continued to work and gradually I found my vision.
The physical technique was fairly straightforward to master. The difficulty, I discovered, was the psychological process, transferring my own passions, cravings, compulsions to the artwork. When I had that, I could paint successfully. One by one my painted boards accumulated in my studio, leaning against the wall at the back of the long room.
Sometimes, I would stand at the window of my studio and stare down across the bustling, careless city below, my own shocking images concealed in the pigments behind me. I felt as if I were preparing an arsenal of potent imagic weapons. I had become an art terrorist, unseen and unsuspected by the world at large, my paintings no doubt destined to be misunderstood in their way as Acizzone’s masterpieces had been. The tactilist paintings were the definitive expression of my life.
While Acizzone, who in life was a libertine and roué, had portrayed scenes of great erotic power, my own images were derived from a different source: I had lived a life of emotional repression, repetition, aimless wandering. My work was necessarily a reaction against Acizzone.
I painted to stay sane, to preserve my memory. After that first exposure to Acizzone I knew that only by putting myself into my work could I recapture what I had lost. To view tactilist art led to forgetting, but to create it, I found now, led to remembering.
I drew inspiration from Acizzone. I lost part of myself. I painted and recovered.
My art was entirely therapeutic. Every painting clarified a fresh area of confusion or amnesia. Each dab of the palette knife, each touch of the brush, was another detail of my past defined and placed in context. The paintings absorbed my traumas.
When I drew back from them, all that could be seen were bland areas of uniform colour, much the same as Acizzone’s work. Stepping up close, working with the pigments, or pressing my flesh against the stippled layers of dried paint, I entered a psychological realm of great calm and reassurance.
What someone else would experience of my tactilist therapy I did not care to think. My work was imagic weaponry. The potential was concealed until the moment of detonation, like a landmine waiting for the press of a foot.
After the first year, when I was working to establish myself, I entered my most prolific phase. I became so productive that to make space for myself I arranged to move some of the more ambitious pieces to a vacant building I had come across near the waterfront. It was a former dancing club, long abandoned and empty, but physically intact.
Although there was an extensive basement, with a warren of corridors and small chambers, the main hall was an enormous open area, easily large enough to take any number of my paintings.
I kept a few of the smaller pieces in my studio, but the larger ones and those with the most potent and disturbing images of fracture and loss I stored in the town.
I stacked the biggest paintings in the main hall of the building, but some nervous dread of discovery made me conceal the smaller pieces in the basement. In that maze of corridors and rooms, ill-lit and haunted by the stale fragrances of past occupiers, I found a dozen different places to hide my pieces.
I was constantly rearranging my work. Sometimes I would spend a whole day and night, working without a break in the near darkness, obsessively shifting my artwork from one room to another.
I found that the warren of interconnecting corridors and rooms, cheaply built with thin partition walls and lit only at intervals with low-power electric bulbs, presented what seemed to be an almost endless combination of random paths and routes. I stood my paintings like sentinels, at odd and hidden positions in the maze, behind doorways, beyond corners in the passageways, irrationally blocking the darkest places.
I would then leave the building and normal life returned for a while. I would start new paintings, or, just as often, walk down to the streets with my easel and stool and begin to work up a supply of commercially attractive landscapes. I was always in need of cash.
So my life continued like that, month after month, under the broiling Muriseayan sun. I knew that I had at last found a kind of fulfilment. Even the tourist art was not all drudgery, because I learnt that working with representational paintin
gs required a discipline of line, subject and brushwork that only increased the intensity of the tactile art I went to afterwards and which no one saw. In the streets of Muriseay Town I built a small reputation as a journeyman landscape artist.
Five years went by. Life was as good to me as it ever had been.
Five years was not long enough to ensure that life could always be good. One night the black-caps came for me.
I was, as always, alone. My life was solitary, my mood introspective. I had no friends other than whores. I lived for my art, working through its mysterious agenda, post-Acizzone, unique, perhaps ultimately futile.
I was in my storage depot, obsessively rearranging my boards again, placing and replacing the sentinels in the corridors. Earlier that day I had hired a carter to bring down my five most recent works and since the man left I had been slowly moving them into place, touching them, holding them, arranging them.
The black-caps entered the building without my being aware of them. I was absorbed in a painting I had completed the week before. I was holding it so that my fingers were wrapped around the back of the board but my palms were pressing lightly against the paint at the edges.
The painting dealt obliquely with an incident that had occurred while I was in the army in the south. Night had fallen while I was on patrol alone and I had had difficulty getting back to our lines. For an hour I wandered in the dark and cold, slowly freezing. In the end someone had found me and led me back to our trenches, but until then I had been in terror of death.
Post-Acizzone, I depicted the extreme fright I experienced: total darkness, a bitter wind, a chill that struck through to the bone, ground so broken that you could not walk without stumbling, a constant threat from unseen enemies, loneliness, silence enforced by panic, distant explosions.
The painting was a comfort to me.
I surfaced from my comfort to find four black-caps standing back from me, watching me. They were carrying their batons in holsters. Terror struck me, as if with a physical blow.
I made a sound, an inarticulate throat noise, involuntary, like a trapped animal. I wanted to speak to them, shout at them, but all I was capable of was a bestial sound. I drew breath, tried again. This time the noise I made was halting, as if fear had added a stammer to the moan.
Hearing this, registering my fright, the black-caps drew their batons. They moved casually, in no hurry to start. I backed away, brushing against my painting, causing it to fall.
The men had no faces I could see: their capped helmets covered their heads, placed a smoked visor across their eyes, had a raised lip to protect their mouth and jaw.
Four clicks as the synaptic batons were armed – they were raised to the strike position.
‘You’ve been discharged, trooper!’ one of the men said and contemptuously threw a scrap of paper in my direction. It fluttered at once, fell close to his boots. ‘Discharge for a coward!’
I said … but I could only breathe in, shuddering, and say nothing.
There was another way out of the building that only I could know, through the under-floor warren. One of the men was between me and the short flight of steps that led down. I feinted, moving towards the scrap of paper, as if to pick it up. Then I spun around, dashed, collided with the man’s leg. He swung the baton viciously at me. I took an intense bolt of electricity that dropped me. I skidded across the floor.
My leg was paralysed. I scrambled to get up, rolled on my side, tried again.
Seeing I was immobilized, one of the black-caps moved across to the painting I had been absorbed in when they arrived. He leaned over it, prodded at its surface with the end of his baton.
I managed to raise myself on my good leg, half-crouching.
Where the end of his baton touched the tactilist pigment, a spout of fierce white flame suddenly appeared, with a sharp crackling sound. Smoke rose copiously as the flame died. The man made a sardonic laughing sound and did it again.
The others went over to see what he was doing. They too pressed the live ends of their batons against the board, producing spurts of bright flame and much more smoke. They guffawed.
One of them crouched, leaned forward to see what it was that was burning. He brushed his bare fingertips across an undamaged portion of the pigment.
My terror and trauma reached out to him through the paint. The ultrasonics bonded him to the board.
He became still, four of his fingers resting on the pigment. For a moment he stayed in position, looking almost reflective as he squatted there with his hand extended. Then he tipped slowly forward. He tried to balance himself with his other hand, but that too landed on the pigments. As he fell across the painting, his body started jerking in spasms. Both his hands were bonded to the board. His baton had rolled away. Smoke still poured from the smouldering scars.
His three companions moved across to find out what was wrong with him. They kept an eye on me as they did so. I was trying to lever myself upright, putting all my weight on the leg that still had feeling, letting the other dangle lightly against the floor. Sensation was returning quickly, but the pain was unspeakable.
I watched the three black-caps, dreading the menace they exuded. It could only be a matter of time before they did to me whatever it was they had come to do. They were grappling with the man who had fallen, trying to pull him away from the pigments. My breath was making a light screeching noise as I struggled for balance. I thought I had known fear before, but there was nothing in my remembered experience that equalled this.
I managed a step. They ignored me. They were still trying to lift the man away from my painting. The smoke swirled from the damage they had caused with their batons.
One of them shouted at me to help them.
‘What is this stuff? What’s holding him against that board?’
The man started screaming as the smouldering pigments reached his hands, but still he could not release himself. His pain, my agonies, contorted his body.
‘His dreams!’ I cried boldly. ‘He is captive of his own vile dreams!’
I made a second step, then a third. Each was easier than the one before, although the pain was terrible. I hobbled towards the shallow stairs by the stage, took the top one, then another, nearly overbalanced, took the third and fourth.
They saw me as I reached the door beneath the old stage. I scarcely dared to look back, but I saw them abandoning the man who had fallen across the pigments and hoist their batons to the strike position. With athletic strength they were moving quickly across the short distance towards me. I dived through the door, dragging my hurt leg.
Breath rasped in my throat. I made a sobbing sound. There was one door, a passage, a chamber and another door. I passed through all of them. Behind me the black-caps were shouting, ordering me to halt. Someone blundered against one of the thin partition walls. I heard the wood creaking as he thudded against it.
I hurried on. The curving passage where I stored some of my smaller paintings was next, then a series of three small cubicles, all with doors wide open. I had placed one of my paintings inside each of these cubicles, standing guard within.
I passed along the corridor, slamming closed the doors at each end. My leg was working almost normally again, but the pain continued. I was in another corridor with an alcove at the end, where I had stood a painting. I doubled back, pushed the door of one of the larger chambers and propped open the spring-loaded door with the edge of one of my boards. I passed through. Another corridor was beyond, wider than the others. Here were a dozen of my paintings, stacked against the wall. I hooked my good foot beneath them, causing them to clatter down at an angle and partly block the way. I passed them. The men were yelling at me again, threatening me, ordering me to stop.
I heard a crash behind me, and another. One of the men shouted a curse.
I went through into the next short corridor, where four more chambers opened out. Some of my most intense paintings were hidden in each of these. I pulled them so that they extended into the corrido
r at knee height. I balanced a tall one against them, so that any disturbance of it would make it fall.
There was another crash, followed by shouting. The voices now were only a short distance away from me, on the other side of the decrepit dividing wall. There was a heavy sound, as if someone had fallen. Then I heard swearing – a man screamed. One of his companions began shouting. The thin wall bulged towards me as he fell against it. I heard paintings fall around them, heard the crackle of sudden fire as synaptic batons made contact with the pigments.
I smelt smoke.
I was regaining my strength, although the naked fear of being caught by the black-caps still had a grip on me. I came into another corridor, one that was wider and better lit than the others and not enclosed by walls that reached to the ceiling. Smoke drifted here.
I halted at the end, trying to control my breath. The warren of corridors behind me was silent. I went out of the corridor into the large sub-floor area beyond. The silence followed and wisps of smoke swirled around me. I stood and listened, tense and frightened, paralysed by the terror of what would happen if even one of the men had managed to push past the paintings without touching any of them.
The silence remained. Sound, thought, movement, life, absorbed by the paintings of trauma and loss.
They had surrendered to my fears. Fire licked around them.
I could see none of the flames myself, but gradually the smoke was thickening. It heaped along the ceiling, a dark grey cloud, heavy with the vapours of scorched pigments.