After a long career and a short illness, the marginist painter Bertram donated his body to science, though his skull remained active in the arts. It watched empty-eyed from the sideboard as Jerome slashed lines in charcoal across a sketch pad. His work hung in hotel lobbies all over the city, and his primary technique was to make it look as if the artist had just left for lunch and would be back in a moment to collect his work. Wouldn’t he be surprised to find it framed and hung on a wall? the entire enterprise seemed to say. Jerome wouldn’t, and didn’t care.
He zig-zagged one line across another and used his free hand to smear them together. This one was going to be two leaves in a bowl, he decided. He glanced over his shoulder at the skull, raising his eyebrows as if seeking its opinion.
The atmosphere in the room tilted slightly. It was a non-committal sort of tilt. Jerome wasn’t much put out. He suspected that Bertram was still adjusting to his new role in the local scene. With a tiny shrug, he turned back to the sketch.
His front window faced the street and his side window faced someone else’s. An apartment higher up would have provided a view of the setting sun, but Jerome preferred the indirect light dripping down into the alley, basting everything in gold. He scraped the charcoal over the paper again, then stood back to admire the result. Yes, the bowl was definitely taking shape, though the leaves were a puzzle; should they be broad enough to partially cover the bowl? Tiny tea leaves lying in a puddle? The remains of a salad? He discarded this last notion as frivolous; he was not a painter of meals.
A knock on the door interrupted him. Sighing, he put down the charcoal and went to answer it.
“Hey,” said Elane, carefully framing herself in the doorway. It was not quite a pose. “I’m raising an army to overthrow the Factor Joliet. We attack at dawn.”
“I’m in.” His irritation at the interruption was already fading. Elane was at her finest when she was up to no good. “Let me change into my uniform.”
She followed him inside, closing the door behind her. “I’ll see you get a commission.” The army in question would be whatever friends they could scrape together, and since the Factor Joliet had been defeated over two hundred years ago, the local bars would have to suffice. He led her into the main room where half of his things were, and left her to go into the room where he kept the other half. It took him a few minutes to wriggle out of his painting clothes and into his drinking clothes.
When he returned to the main room, he thought at first she was studying his sketch. “Not finished.”
“Mm. I know that skull,” she said, nodding at the sideboard. “It’s Bertram.”
“It is.” Jerome was impressed. “I bought it from Carratt.”
“Figures. That’s who I sold it to.” She finally turned to look at him, frowning. “Didn’t he tell you?”
“About what?”
“I had to get rid of it,” she said, “because of bad vibes.”
“Bad vibes?” Jerome shrugged, somewhat amused. “I wasn’t really getting that.”
“Oh, you will. It’s a real stinker for vibes.”
That night Jerome had a dream that he was certain was a dream because he had to obtain a permit to install a new toilet. As he waited in line at the city office he wondered how long he had been in it. He had no memory of it and felt like an actor who has just picked up a script for the first time. Scene opens in a government office. Dreary architecture hangs over long lines of joyless citizens. Every now and then a number is called, and everyone checks their tickets. No one moves. A permit for a new toilet was the last thing he would have expected to obtain.
As he looked around, he noticed a fluttering motion to one side. Psst, someone said. He glanced in the direction of the sound and saw a thin man in an ill-fitting suit gesturing at him from a doorway.
Jerome pointed to himself. Me? The thin man eagerly nodded.
Was whatever it was worth losing his place in line? Jerome had no idea, but it was a dream, so the consequences were probably limited. He stepped out of line and headed for the doorway. The thin man was bobbing up and down in excitement. The shitty cut of his suit made the fabric bunch and release like an accordian. “Mr. Kahn?” he said, as Jerome reached him.
“That’s right.”
“This way,” said the man, and rushed back through the doorway and down a dimly-lit hall. Jerome followed in puzzlement, particularly when the man started pointing at the walls on either side of them. The walls were blank. All the spaces the man were pointing at were blank. Jerome stopped to peer at one of them. It was blank up close, too.
The man led him into an office, waited by the door until he entered, then shut the door behind him. “Now we can talk,” he said, waving Jerome to an uncomfortable-looking chair behind a beaten and ugly desk. “I presume you understand why you are here?”
“To pick up a permit for a new toilet.”
“Exactly.” There was another chair on the other side of the desk, but the thin man did not take it. “An enviable position to be in.”
“I don’t follow.”
“A man going places. On his way to the top,” said the thin man, smiling, nodding, looking as if he fully expected Jerome to catch his meaning. “That is a man who needs a new toilet.”
“I…suppose.” Jerome couldn’t fathom what the angle was here. “If it was a very nice toilet.”
“It will be a very nice toilet.” The thin man pointed to a spot on the wall to his right, just about the right height to hang a picture. The spot was bare. “The best, Mr. Kahn.”
“I’m happy to hear it.”
“Excellent. Excuse me.” The thin man left the office without looking back. Jerome listened to the taps of his shoes down the hall. They seemed to go on far beyond the imaginable confines of a hall in a city office. When they finally faded away, there was no sound beyond the blood in his ears.
He got up from the chair and glanced out of the office, up and down the hall. Seeing no one, he left the office and retraced his steps back to the lobby.
The lobby was empty. The lines were gone. The light had not shifted. There was no sense that any time had passed at all.
Jerome crossed the lobby floor, feeling exposed. He would have left the building but noticed that a face was peering at him from the window of the nearest clerk. Maybe he would get the permit after all. He hurried toward the window and stopped in front of it, then blinked in surprise.
The skull was sitting on the desk, facing him through the window. He stood still, watching it. After a few moments, he eased out of its line of sight and went to the adjacent window.
The skull was sitting on the desk, facing him through the window. He blinked and went to the next window.
The skull was sitting on the desk, facing him through the window.
“I’ll come back,” he said, and awoke with a confused grunt.
A few days later he went to see Carratt at the junk store, but Carratt saw him first. “No returns! No returns!” said the shopkeeper, disappearing into the back of the store. Jerome sighed as he dodged around overstuffed shelves and stepped over the items that had already fallen to the floor. When he reached the counter he noticed that the stockroom door was open a crack, and the thin line of light was trembling slightly.
“I don’t want to return anything,” he said.
The line widened a little. “No?”
“No. The skull’s really working out. It’s like Betram’s right there beside me.”
The line widened a little more. “I heard that he suffered from terrible wind.”
“It’s certainly less of a problem now.” Jerome glanced around the store. “I think he’s feeling a little under the weather, to be honest. I thought I’d get something to cheer him up.”
Carratt flung the door open and dashed around the counter. He was short and rotund and should not have been capable of such grace. His ratty jacket flapped around him as he yanked things down off the shelves, examined them, and tossed them back. “Not that. No. No. What? Oh. No. Hm. No.”
“He already has a hat,” said Jerome, but the little man was already lost in the aisles. Rather then try to follow the trail of thuds and scuffles, he settled for flipping through albums in the bargain box. A staple of every junk store, this is where the customer will find the records that everyone had at one time and no one will ever want again. A first pressing of Landell Sumerton’s Go Up Tonight might be passed off as a rarity, but no one’s going to be fooled by Sweet Sweat, no matter how tattered the edges are.
As he let the cardboard sleeves fall one by one he became aware of someone watching him. Carratt was nowhere in sight and the sounds of his search were far away, and there was no other customer in the store. As Jerome returned his attention to the bin the next album in line hit the last one with a dry slap.
The Rink was an avant-garde bar based around a roller rink and Jerome hated it for that alone. He’d already spilled two drinks and was about to lose a third as he morosely rolled across the floor with Elane at his side. She seemed to be having the time of her life. “I want to be buried here,” she said, laughing.
“It can be arranged.” Jerome flinched as a man speeding past nearly jogged his elbow. “Why don’t we all go in the same direction, at least?”
“Because we don’t. That’s who we are, baby.” She grabbed his other arm to steady herself. Number three became a dark stain on the floor. “Oh, sorry. Let me get that.”
“Why don’t we grab a table?” Jerome swerved and dropped the empty glass onto a beverage tray.
“No tables. Fucks up the ambiance.” A group of engineers in bow ties rolled past, barking to each other in tensors and coefficients. “Did you get rid of your roomate yet?”
“Bertram? No.”
She shook her head and almost lost her balance again. “He’s a malign influence.”
“I think,” said Jerome with care, “that we might have different impressions of him.”
“Huh. You buy any albums larely?”
He twitched. “Um, yeah?”
“Steptune?”
“No, of course not.” Jerome laughed without conviction. “I mean, Knutsen’s hardly steptune.”
“Yeeeccch,” said Elane, drawing out the disgust. “If music could fill a diaper. He’s even worse now that he’s dead. Nothing left to lose.”
“Knutsen? Or Bertram?”
“Listen,” she said, yanking his arm toward the bar, “shit music just makes it worse. You’re going to get too comfortable having him around. I know he was a name but now he’s nothing but a name.”
Jerome was wobbling as he tried to follow her lead. His feet weren’t quite going where he wanted them to. “Maybe Carratt will let me return it.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” They hit the bar with a smack. She turned to stare into his eyes. “Maybe you donate it back to science. Maybe it finds its way to a landfill. Maybe it just goes, however it goes.”
“Orders?” said the bartender, turning to face them.
Before Jerome could speak, one of the engineers glided past. “Try something with a higher specific gravity,” she squawked, before vanishing back into the crowd.
This time, the scene was scored to Knutsen’s gab gone goo and all the lighting was moody, as if a dream was trying to replicate the experience of a dream. Jerome carried the skull against his hip as he scurried down an alley. Though he recognized the alley, there was nothing specific about it that he could point to. It was simply a composite of every alley he had ever seen, a dream alley.
He reached the end of the alley and started to step out, then ducked back at the sound of voices. A crowd of revelers went past in roller skates, calling to each over the grinding of their wheels on the concrete. He waited in the shadows until they were well out of the way.
Carratt’s store was here, though the grocer and haberdasher normally on either side of it were not. A couple of generic, blank-looking storefronts filled in the spaces instead. He peered into the black window of the nearest one and saw nothing at first, then murky shadows began to emerge, as if his dream had just noticed the omission. He hurried on.
The windows of the junk store were just as they should have been, looking in on a row of shelves with the merchant’s most enticing merchandise. A gleaming brass pot caught his eye, shining in the gaze of a streetlight, then he noticed the empty spot beside it. Carratt wouldn’t have allowed it, not for a moment, certainly not overnight. Spaces in the world were meant to be filled.
Jerome meant to fill it. With a fluid toss he heaved the skull into the window. Glass shattered as the skull arced through the air and landed beside the brass pot. Jerome started to run. The skull spun to face him.
The music should have hit a crescendo at this moment, but it didn’t. Knutsen couldn’t have scored a dream if he had a lantern and a head start. The filled diaper of music, indeed.
When Jerome awakened this time, the skull was not in its usual place on the sideboard. It was on a shelf on the other side of the room, looking smug.
On his way to the bakery the next morning he noticed a commotion outside of Carratt’s store. Cars, cops, chaos. Jerome didn’t want to get involved but his curiosity did. He moved in furtive steps and indirection, trying not to look as if he was drawn to the scene.
As he approached the ring of onlookers, a short rotund man wedged his way out of it. “Jerome!” he said. “Jerome, tell these good people I am not a lunatic.”
All of the good people turned to face him. He had their full attention.
“Ah,” he said, smiling, trying to be vague about his opinions.
Carratt frantically tried to prompt him. “Tell them I didn’t break my own window, Jerome. Why would I do that?”
The crowd was parting a little in the shopkeeper’s wake, and Jerome could see the glass all over the sidewalk and the empty space on the shelf beside the brass pot. It shone in the sunlight. Even in his surprise he could see that there wasn’t any glass on the floor, indicating that something had crashed out through the window rather than in.
“Well,” he said, trying to split the difference, “you must have had your reasons.”
This didn’t seem to be an answer that anyone was looking for. Carratt let out a howl of anguish and attemped to kneel at the feet of the nearest policeman. Jerome edged away from the scene in search of breakfast. There was a crowd at the bakery as well, but it was the usual crowd.
“Get rid of that stupid skull,” said Elane, as they passed each other on the sidewalk.
“No,” said Jerome, and kept going.
Two days later he was sketching a fish in his main room, though he hadn’t decided whether it ought to be leaping out of a river or lying on a plate of rice. He had just about worked out how to position it so that it would work either way. The skull was watching from the sideboard, radiating approval. Knutsen was thumping on the record player. habba dong, habba dong, went the song. There was something in the air.
He finished up the lines of the tail and brought the charcoal away from the paper, willing himself to see the finished product, whatever it might be. The river or the rice? His finger traced the line of the plate in midair, then stopped.
Are you now a painter of meals? He frowned at the thought. It would have to be the river, then. But he was concerned at how easily he had forgotten his artistic convictions.
To clear his head, he decided to check the mail. The charcoal went back into its box. He made sure that he was wearing pants and went out to the hallway. As he passed the doors of his neighbors he noted that the walls were bare. He had lived here for some years now and had never noticed this, or had never found it worth noticing.
His letter box in the lobby contained nothing but a small envelope. Elena Ebba, Glost Way 41B. He squinted at the address as if he could resolve the intent along with the careful lettering. Shrugging, he flipped the letter box shut and carried the envelope back to his room.
A blob of candle wax bearing Elena’s imprint held the flap shut. He broke it and shook the contents out: a note and a sock. He picked up the note.
This will protect you from its influence. -E
Puzzled, he examined the sock. It was stripy and pastel, not the sort of thing Elena would have put on her own feet. He detected a faint cachet of perfume and musk. It had been worn for an evening out, perhaps.
There was nothing else in the envelope or on the note, nothing in the sock. Shrugging, he dropped the envelope and its contents onto the sideboard and returned to his work.
The fish looked wrong. He frowned and picked up the charcoal, intending to fix the errant line, but either he couldn’t find it or the entire thing was wrong. The fish was neither food nor sport, neither appetizing nor dynamic. It might as well have been rotting in an alley. The energy in the room had turned sour. There was something in the air, all right.
He glanced over at the sock lying on the sideboard.
“She’s such a goddamn killjoy,” he said, and sent it spinning out of the open window.
The junior underchief at the city office was very clear about the expections of the government with regard to the arts. “They have to be sedate, Mr. Kahn,” she said, as she walked beside him. Most of the building was under renovation and the artwork had been removed from its walls. Jerome could see the faint outlines where the frames had hung, protecting the plaster underneath from light and time. Here, he thought, pointing to the empty spaces in his mind. And here.
“I can make them very sedate, Ms. Tolley.” He had received notice that he was under consideration for a commission that he had applied for some months ago and forgotten about. The fee would be substantial. He was on his best behavior. “As sedate as you like.”
“We don’t want people to get the wrong ideas about what we do here.” The underchief was clearly not yet satisfied. She was a tall storky lady with thick glasses and an air of complete seriousness.
“I’m sure,” said Jerome, “that my art won’t put any ideas into anyone’s head.”
“Well, the samples you’ve brought me are very respectable but I’m concerned about the old switch, you see?” She stopped. They were in a long corridor dotted with office doors and empty spaces for art. One of the doors opened and a man looked out, caught sight of Ms. Tolley and eased back into the office, closing the door with gravity.
“The old switch?”
“The old switch-em-up? The old switch-up-er-oo?” She seemed to be accusing him of something.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what that is.”
She pressed her lips together, then sagged, swaying a little. “We commissioned a sculpture from a local artist some years ago. He vanished after we sent him the first installment of his fee. I received a package from him months later, posted from the island of Payapau. It was full of sticks.”
“Sticks?”
“He didn’t explain why,” said Ms. Tolley, “and we didn’t want to allocate any more of the budget to finding out.” She started down the corridor, and Jerome followed. Behind them, the door creaked open again.
She led him down a flight of stairs to her office. There was an exhibit just beside her desk, the sole piece of art anywhere in the building. It was a bundle of sticks under glass. Jerome examined it gravely, and Ms. Tolley pretended not to notice.
“Pardon me for asking,” she said as she waved him to a chair, “but do you find it hard to paint with that handicap?”
“What?” said Jerome, caught off guard. The skull had insisted on coming along. “Oh, the lump? It’s a little aggravating, certainly.”
“I should say so. I thought you had a second head under your coat.” Ms. Tolley took a ledger from her desk and opened it. “That would aggravate anyone, I suspect.”
“I don’t have a plan,” said Bertram. He picked up his coffee and took a short sip.
It was a dream, that much was obvious, but it was the sort of dream that doesn’t flicker or fade, an experience driven not by sleepy neurons firing at random intervals but by some outside force. They were sitting in the Cafe Marron of an age past, a place that Jerome knew was now a sandwich bar, but here were dead painters and forgotten sculptors. Bertram was sitting across from him at a table near the front. The skull, his skull, was in his head.
He seemed untroubled by this. “I don’t have a plan,” he said again. “My work hangs in a hundred anonymous hallways, unnoticed, unappreciated. No one ever stops to admire any of it. No one has ever looked at one of my works and seen anything but the lines.
“This,” he said to Jerome, “is the essense of marginism. This, I pass on to you.”
He vanished, and the skull remained. It glided onto the edge of the table and rested there, watching Jerome with hollow patience. He stared back, waiting for the dream to end. It took a long time, and at the end of it, he was still waiting.
The waiter dropped a bill onto the table and stalked off. Jerome picked it up and stared at it. Even taking the devaluation of currency into account he could tell that Bertram had stiffed him.
As he left the restaurant, he blinked. Was the dream over? He glanced behind him at the sandwich bar. It was a sandwich bar, that much was apparent, but had he been sleeping in it? Why was he not waking up in his bed?
Confused, he wandered onto the sidewalk, and collided with another man. “Shit!” he said, trying to extricate himself. “Sorry.”
Instead of mumbling words of absolution, the man snatched Jerome’s sleeve and held it fast. Rage contorted his face, painting it in alternating bands of red and white. He snarled at Jerome in a voice that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a bar fight.
“You think you’re better than me?”
Still confused, but waking up to mortal danger, Jerome tried to respond. “What?”
“You think you’re better than me?”
Jerome tried to puzzle his way out of a beating. “Well,” he said at last, “I don’t know you, do I?” He yanked himself free of the other man’s grip and hurried away. The man’s voice followed him. It seemed to grow louder and angrier. “You think you’re better than me? You think you’re better than me? You think you’re better than me?” And on and on, through the vagaries of the dream, and back to those of the waking world.