Shaking, he didn’t know why, he reached out and turned up the first card. A rush of that alienating cold went through him again, but differently. It was as if, for a change, he was doing the looking, rather than the Other that was looking through him. In the glass of the card, images rushed and tumbled as he held it in his hand, staring at the face side. Light bloomed and faded and bloomed again in the card, cold even when it was warm. Yellow light, sunlight that was still somehow wintry, and a man sitting alone on a curb of an empty street lined with empty storefronts; a dusty street, the man’s feet in the dust, his head bowed, his gaze lying flaccid in the middle distance.
“Yes,” the dark lady said, looking at the card with some resignation as he put it down and the image fixed itself. “That’d be about right. Turn the next one up. Put it on top of that one.”
He was shivering harder now at this other creature’s awful, lonely fixity. He was finished in every sense of the word, caught in the yellow light forever, all hope gone. Desperate to be different from that in any possible way, he plucked the next card from the top of the cut deck, turned it.
In the glass, chilly light and image roiled and tumbled again, settled toward darkness, shivering with one blade of light standing up in it: a naked woman, her face quiet but not entirely empty, looking out into a stream of light from a window to one side, her shadow long and black behind her. Any moment now she might move, leave the room—
“The basis of the problem,” the dark lady said. “Now what crosses it. Go on.”
Shivering harder, he turned over the next card, held it up. It was the image of the diner, seen from outside—the place where it was impossible to get to. The hunched man’s back was to the glass of the window, and this was in some terrible way even worse than being faced by him. That turned back refused the possibility of anything ever being any other way; it was final rejection, ruthlessly enforced. Past the hunched man he sat, and the red-headed woman, neither of them meeting the other’s eyes, or anyone else’s. Positioned between them and any possible outside, the Hunched Man blocked the way.
He let out a long breath and reached for the next card—then stopped, looked at the dark lady. “What difference can this make?” he said. “Who are you?”
Her gaze was on the cards at the moment. “Every difference,” she said. “You asked for help. It’s the first time you’ve been able to manage it. You’ve been further under than you thought….so don’t waste the chance. Turn the cards, lay them down where you’re told. There’s always a message, if you take your time and trust yourself to read it.”
It seemed too much to dare, to believe that she knew the way. He was terrified by the thought of how it would be for him if he trusted her and then discovered she was wrong. One more betrayal, one more anguish, worse because he had chosen it freely…
“Where does it go?” he said.
“On top. The best result to be achieved if things go well,” she said.
He gulped, and turned the next card up. Light seethed and boiled in it again, then settled through blue dusk smoke-curls to a scorching sunset, reds and yellows fading up to blues and near-unreal greens, silhouetting a railside switching tower, black against the smoke-streaked, splendid light; no humans to be seen anywhere. Loneliness seethed in that fading light, but also a strange relief.
“There’s no one there,” he breathed. “As if even It’s not there…”
The dark lady looked down at the image. “It’s a possible reading,” she said, tilting her head a little from side to side as she considered. “The problem is, he’s so reticent…such a minimalist. A more specific painter would leave you much less room for analysis…”
He let out a breath and pulled the next card off the top of the deck. “Here,” she said. “The foundation of the problem…”
This card’s image swirled for a long time, resisting defining itself. Finally it settled to a cool light from above, a porch light, white clapboards, a blue door; against the porch railing, a tall man, a woman in a short red two-piece sunsuit, her long legs very bare, the color of her fair hair indistinct in the shadowy light from above. He looked at her. She looked at the pale porch floor, and no eyes met.
“Yes,” the dark lady said, nodding and looking slightly rueful. “They couldn’t do without each other, but it never ran smoothly for them…”
He looked at her doubtfully. It had never occurred to him that the cruel It-thing out in the darkness might ever have known longing for anyone, much less love. He reached out to the deck, turned over the next card. “Where?” he said.
“To the left of the center one. The past…”
The image under the glass of the card in his hand swirled and burned, actually stinging his hand: he could feel the frustration, the rage, as the image settled. An office, pitiless electric light, a man hunched over a desk doing work that he hated—a woman watching him, incurious, unsympathetic. “Work,” he said slowly, “but no joy…”
The dark lady nodded. “No. That came later, if at all. Next one, now, on the other side. Future things…”
He picked up the next card, trembling. It whirled nearly instantly into a series of ruddy brick shopfronts, a painted barber pole, a line of dark, empty windows, like the eye-sockets of skulls; no human face, not even in shadow. Everything was locked down, tight, finalized, the street streaked with long unmoving shadows, a sunset caught in mid-decline and frozen there, time rendered ineffective and emasculate. Victory for the painter, and the destruction of the hopes for freedom of every painted thing.
His eyes stung where tears should have been, and couldn’t be. “This is no use,” he said through a throat tight with pain, staring down at the cross of cards. “It’s all hopeless. Why are you showing me this?!”
She scowled at him. “There’s always a way out,” she said. “There’s always a loophole for you to see. One of my sisters says the universe isn’t anything but loopholes. We just fool ourselves into seeing solid stuff instead of emptiness: locked doors instead of doorways. What’s not there takes more work to see. And we’re lazy…”
“Then what’s the way out?” he said.
“Not my job to tell you that,” she said. “Just to tell you that the doors aren’t locked. What you have to do, that’s for you to find out. Turn the next card—or go back and sit by her and listen to the furniture shopping list one more time.”
The steel in the voice was harsh; it surprised him, for her eyes were still soft, softer than anything else here. The reproof gave him pause. “But you said it was the future…”
“For him, anyway,” she said. “But then this isn’t your reading. It’s his.”
He was infuriated. “You mean this isn’t about me?”
“Everything’s about you, you idiot,” she said, sounding impatient. “Don’t waste my time here. I’m going far enough out on this limb, crossing genres for your sake. The Great Beyond forbid my sister should ever catch me with a brush in my hand.” Her look went briefly cockeyed.
“How many sisters have you got?” he said, slightly annoyed by the sudden irrelevancy.
“Eight,” he said. “Or sometimes nine or ten, depending on which poet you believe. It hardly matters; my father likes big families. Now shut up and turn the next card. The best resolution for you. Start a new line to the right: put it at the bottom…”
He reached out to the card and had to pause as he touched it. He could swear he was beginning to hear voices. There were not the chilly voices of this place, resonating off hard wood and gloss paint and polished metal. They had depth, and roots in some other place, another time where things were rough and unfinished, and the universe contained more ingredients than it strictly needed to for the composition at hand. There was a terrible tang of hope to the sound of those voices, a reminder of what life had been like once upon a time before the artist’s eye and brush had started making a prisoner of him. He turned the card, and as he did so and the light and color roiled under the surface of the glass, the voices shouted bri
efly into his heart, Save him, save him now, save all of us!
Save him? he thought, as the image steadied. A railway car, the chair car, in which a soft green light illuminated everything—the windows blind, bland, unrevealing panes of light, and people in seats facing every direction, going away all in company, though still going away alone…
“Escape,” he breathed.
The dark lady’s mouth quirked. “Say the word softly,” she said. “It’s a dangerous one for use by an artist, or for art…. Next card: the best it gets for others. Hurry. It’s dangerous to be this close to the surface; where you can hear his other voices, he can more clearly hear you…”
He stifled the urge to throw a look over his shoulder at the Hunched Man. If he moved— Hurriedly he picked up the next card.
The voices were louder still in his ear, a crowd-cry, a dim ballpark roar of desperation and hope. Save him! Smoke-shot light boiled in the brittle warm bit of glass, steadied down to the image. A green house, a lone man mowing his lawn: alone, yes, but not strictly lonely—the curtains of the house’s windows stirred in that light, eyes perhaps closed but not empty. Stillness, peace, a settled quiet if not a permanent one; sunny weather if only for a while—
“That’s as good as it gets for him?” he said, tempted to be scornful. Yet what had he ever had, even back in the real life where he walked the world, that had been as good? Could it have been that the bleakness in his own eye had been what had attracted the painter’s attention—
He pushed that thought violently away, reached out hastily for the next card. It fought him, wouldn’t come up from the deck. “His secret hopes,” the dark lady said, giving him that under-the-brow look again.
An empty street, noontime: no shadows to be seen: gabled houses, a milk-blue sky, everything preternaturally still; everything baking and warm, trees, houses, the dust of the street. No people…but again, that terrible peace.
Forgive me, the voice said. Forgive me. I’ve been getting it wrong all the time. I didn’t know any better how to show what I wanted; I did the best I could; I didn’t realize what was happening. But I can’t go against my nature, I have to be how I am. It’s how I was made. I am a made thing too—
He looked at the dark lady, filled with terrible surmise. She would not meet his eyes, for the moment; just traced the grain of the wood in the tabletop. “Last one,” she said very softly. “The likeliest final outcome…”
He reached out to that last card. The voice of all the artist’s other creation roared in his ear, a tortured unison. The card burned his hand with cold, so that he almost dropped it into its place at the top of the line of cards, and the voices all fell silent, breaths held, waiting.
A rooming-house bed, a half-clad woman leaning on it, sitting on the floor, legs tucked under, slumped. Sleeping? Dead?
Release from imprisonment, from punishment; release, if only something happens, the impossible thing, longed-for. All the glass around the diner stared at his back as if it had eyes, the transparency suddenly a terror; and the Hunched Man stared hardest, though he never moved a muscle, never looked up.
And now, staring down at the card, he saw the answer. It washed up over him sudden and infuriating as one of those rushes of water up the beach that comes up a lot further than you were anticipating, catches you unawares, and fills your pants cuffs full of sand.
“Forgive him? Forgive God?” he said to her, furious, under his breath.. “Since when is that my job? After what he’s done to me?!”
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Well?”
He stared at her.
“It’s all in your hands now,” she said. “This is the moment. Are you going to keep me sitting here waiting until he wakes up and works out what’s happening? I can always leave. Have you tried that trick lately?”
He took her point. The glass was as impenetrable as any steel plate: the doors only opened inward. “You can get out, though,” he said, at a guess.
“I can. I’m not subject to the rules you’re stuck with. Make your choice!”
He stared at her again. The cards were silent now. In the silence he could only hear a voice saying in ineluctable sorrow, “I may not be strictly human. All I want to paint is light on walls…”
“You really don’t understand, do you?” he said, wanting to shout it and not daring, for fear the Hunched Man should turn around. “He put me in hell!”
The dark lady looked oddly unmoved. “Damnation is a contract,” she said. “It takes two. One to say ‘To hell with you!’, and another to say ‘Okay.’”
He drew a long breath to answer her back in fury…then stopped. And which one am I? he thought suddenly, frightened.
Once again, she would not look at him, just sat there making little swirly designs with one forefinger in a wet spot on the tabletop.
He sat there, shaking harder than ever. The air of the place had begun to sing with danger: not the danger of the Other, the Artist, but of something else that might happen. There was a way to find out, a way to decide. All the cards lost their imagery and went smokeshot, uncertainty trapped in glass, waiting. Waiting for him.
But I hate It. Him. He destroyed me. Why let him off the hook? If I have to suffer, why shouldn’t he? The hell with Him.
Nooooo! cried all the other voices out of the paint, about to be damned with the It-thing. And the mild, unhappy voice, astonishingly helpless, was ready to say softly: Okay—
At that, he had to stop and think, finally frightened by the thought of what he might be about to do. Condemn this beyond-the-paint, tinhorn God to the hell he was himself inhabiting right now, and who knew what might happen?
And besides, said something angry and completely unexpected inside him, it’s not right. What if he didn’t mean it? What if he couldn’t help it?
He looked at the dark lady. She would not raise her eyes: she was still lost in concentration on the wet spots on the tabletop.
To do right. No matter what. If it’s all the humanity I’ve got left --
He was afraid, unsure. Desperate for a hint, he turned to look at the glass of the window. Slowly the other reflective surfaces in the place were all going milky; only the ones nearest to him still lay dark with the night leaning against them on their far side. In the dark window nearest, as he turned to it, he saw the reflection turn toward him…and was terrified to see the face in the window, not as his own, but as but another’s.
Blinded, horrified, he found himself looking out of the Hunched Man’s eyes at the world he had made. And to his own horror, he could have wept. The world in which It lived was bleak beyond anything he had experienced in here himself. To the Other, this was an improvement. In his own world, there was no love to be perceived, not even the illusion of it. There was light, but all of it was that cold brittle light, bright but loveless, a light that only exposed and did not illumine. The Other was just repeating what it saw, trying to tell the other human beings around it of the awful emptiness that seemed to underlie everything, to one whose heart was welded shut. Yet what it painted here at least had meaning: the outer worldview had a certain cold beauty, even if meaning was missing. He was doing the best he could, even in the face of that terrible, underlying emptiness…
But, Everything is loopholes, she’d said. We see walls instead of the emptiness they shut in. We see barriers instead of freedom.
What if I could let him see the freedom? The other side of the emptiness?....
He was shaking with uncertainty, and anger…and now fear, too. Even if it is right—why do I have to be the one who saves us all?
Unless it just has to be that way sometimes, because it’s right. Because I’m part of what scares him. Maybe for him, I’m the It in the darkness—the thing that comes real, that comes alive without permission…and frightens God Himself inside His own creation…
He stood there on that brink, terrified.
What if it doesn’t work?
And what if it does? said another voice that he finally re
cognized. Now he knew it was his own soul answering him, a sound he hadn’t heard in too long.
The Other’s eyes were still looking at him out of his own reflection; as frightened, as uncertain as he. And the look decided him. He glanced at the dark lady. He could see her watch his trembling: and he threw it all away.
All right, he thought. I forgive you—for you knew not what you did—
He pushed himself up and away from the table, and prepared to do what he’d tried only once before, and had failed. This time, though, he didn’t refuse the gaze that had fixed on his before, from the glass; this time he locked onto the desperate poison-ice of the Other’s trapped gaze, though it burned down his bones. And though and though the Other tried to tear his gaze away, he wouldn’t allow it, grappling the Other with his own gaze, wrestling as with a cold and resistant angel—
He walked toward the glass, didn’t stop: just kept walking. He didn’t dare close his eyes. Not even at the last moment, when more than anything else, he wanted to flinched—
He hit the glass. It shattered.
The Other’s gaze and his joined in that shattering, ran together, became the same thing. It was as if the whole world was one great crash of glass, the glass over a million art prints in the future breaking under the weight of a reality weightier than theirs, the glass of endless empty-eyed windows in the past and present of the artist’s mind breaking too; and behind the noise, heaven singing hosannas in shattered fragments, ringing in shining shards and splinters on the ballroom floor of the sky, as art becomes reality and breaks it, freeing the artist, even if only for a while—
How long it took for the din and chime of falling glass to cease at last, he had no idea. But as it tapered away, like brittle bells crashing to nothing on the sidewalks of the world, he came to himself again, looking out the diner window, which now was nothing but razory unreflective fragments sticking out of the window frame. The street was still dark; but over the rooftops across the way, the faintest intimation of dawn was beginning to gather.