all you have to do to make a map is walk around and draw what you see

Folding myself into what I wanted to be had gone wonderfully.

I had come to the bar seeking solace in a new woman, and as with everything else I did I had arrived too late. Far too late, even considering my usual standards. There was neither bartender nor bar available. I looked at my phone for the time. 3:12, long after last call. My spit came course and vitriolic. There was no way I was going to ever see her again, I thought. I walked back home. The sun came up before I went to bed.

* * * * * *

A slight and hazy buzz opened in my ears, and my eyes stayed shut. A hell of a tragic consequence, it screamed in multiphonic valency. I muttered a short prayer for the dismissal of this sound and pulled what was left of my jacket over my face. I tried to sleep for another two hours and failed miserably. The buzz kept growing insistent, so I decided to get out of my apartment as quickly as possible.

There was method to this. Putting water on my face was my absolution; staring into my pores in the mirror over the sink my penance. Coffee always left me wanting and jittery. Such is the body of Our Lord.

The walk to the studio was always my favourite part of the day. Certainly it was better than the work itself, which covered me inside and out with plaster dust and left my hands rough and a little withered.

There was never a way to pass the food stands in the Chinese district without talking to Xien. Most of the time he was waiting outside his store, watching his employees shuffle produce from basket to bin, watching it all happen. It was like he knew the streets were full of flesh but empty of skeletons – maybe he thought that conversations restored bodies whole.

“Mr. Handel, I want you to try my kiwis today. Sweetest of the year! This load will be here three days, until Wednesday. They bring back energy like sleeping. You want to try?” He handed me a slice from the fruit in his left hand while cursing the blade in his other. I was beginning to understand Mandarin, but would never be able to have anything but an uncivil conversation with anybody.

I ate the slice and thanked Xien.

“So how’s your ladyfriend? What was her name, Sarah?” Somehow without paying any attention to what he was doing, every kiwi and apple sitting in the bins in front of him became perfectly organized in under thirty seconds. I thought for a second that maybe I should hire him for the studio. A man with such a meticulous unconscious would be a good moulder or detailer. Too bad the studio wasn’t really making money from our current labours.

“She’s doing ok, Xien. We’re not together anymore.” I picked up two kiwis and an apple and motioned that I wanted to pay.

“So sorry to hear! Maybe it’s for the best. You look happier.” He didn’t smile at all when he said that. In truth I was happier.

“I don’t know about that. We had a good thing. Then I started working again.”

“Keep working hard, Mr. Handel. Good way to keep a mind together. My grandpa was in the war, eh? They worked him like dogs, and here I am!” Xien looked me straight in the eye while I handed him the coins for the fruit. I opened my backpack and put the kiwis next to some bananas that I had picked up two days before. They weren’t really edible anymore, but still brought a good weight to my bag. Health by osmosis, I guess.

“I’m going to get a new tattoo for my back.” I thought he was going to take off his shirt, but he patted his right shoulder blade instead. “A poem by Li Po, in characters. ‘We sit together, the mountain and I, until only the mountain remains.’ What do you think?”

“I think that joy and suffering are all that remains. But a mountain will do. That’s pretty, Xien. How big are you going to get it?” I begin to spin the small apple that I had purchased over my knuckles, failed after two attempts, and watched it bruise on the pavement.

“Oh, you want another one? It’s ok, I have lots to give!” Xien handed me another and I thanked him. “Keep dropping them and I’ll sell you more!” He laughed. I thanked him again and continued walking.

There was no way I would get much done at work today, I thought. It was a good thing I owned the place, although I was getting ready to fire myself for gross incompetence. Both Neil and Jodie were there to greet my arrival. They were working on the mantel for the wall of the fake castle that was our commission. It was almost finished – maybe another two or three days – and I knew that I had done little to help.

“Hey Jordan, where the fuck have you been all afternoon? It’s already after three!” Neil was painting rock details and had to remove the breather from his face to speak. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and saw that it was twelve minutes after three. Nothing clicked.

“Rough night, thanks for asking.” I grabbed my own mask and set to the other side of the wall, which was still rough, undetailed plaster. It looked like I had a good nine hours in front of me.

After three hours, I broke down to let the plaster dry. Neil joined me out back, and after a few minutes of useless small talk, he produced a spinner. We smoked in silence, then returned to work. An hour passed before anybody spoke.

“So how was your date with Becky last night? I don’t want the bullet points, but from the look of your tired face it was a good one.” Neil’s face was twisted smiley like any well-stoned bastard.

“I fucked it up. Don’t want to talk about it.”

“C’mon. I’m not going to let this go! It’s been what, three months since Sarah? Time for some movin’ and groovin’ buddy.”

“Look, she wasn’t there. I fucked up. Let’s forget about it.” I put my breather back on.

“What, you were handed the prettiest girl in Kensington and you didn’t even get there on time?”

I looked over at Jodie, who seemed oblivious to the fact that she was the only one working. I took the pretense of a breather from off my face. “Don’t worry about it. Sinking ships are better forgotten.”

“Whatever.”

We sat in silence for almost a minute before I got up to use the washroom.

* * * * * *

The walk home was brisk that night. August sometimes did that to you. There was a street parade of drunken students enjoying their last week of freedom. I didn’t mind the pyjamas they wore, but the noise of their joyful tantrums averted my gaze too much. I took a back alley to get away from it all.

One thing about alleys that I have always loved is their containment. Escape without an exit. Garbage kept you on path, but the buildings seemed to want to deny you passage, even when you could see the street ahead. Then there were the unexpectedly frequent and random encounters with people who, unlike when they are in the street, never seemed to want anything from you. I liked that purity. It was contagious, and like a disease there was no way to turn it off.

I wanted certain memories to come back to me, the ones that I had used periodically to restrain myself. I could afford them that night, being spent from the day. All of Sarah was present, every inch and every movement. I wanted to reach out to her, to force that immanence into my pores. I fell asleep with the gratification of the flesh rendered mortal.

* * * * * *

Waking from such dreams without a hangover was always tragic. It was comforting to be pained when you had spent the night in grace. A headache gave you something to accomplish, something to hope for, something to remember your time with. Once she had been gloriously Sarah, and now there was a glorious absence. What a glorious morning. All of my dirty mantras had remained intact. Waking up sober was the least healthy thing to do at that point, and I was resolved to never let it happen again.

The bed stand was covered in wasps. They had swarmed around the backpack which I had left there the night before. There must have been a few dozen, coagulating on the bag filled rotten. It was for moments like this that they worked to elevate a queen. I sat on the edge of my bed and counted. Some were inside the bag, some hovered peacefully. I felt like all my lovers were coming out of me simultaneously to walk on my grave.

I got up and went to work not forgetting my morning mass. This time, it was extended with the additional cleansing of a sacrament made holy by the applications of thirty insects.

* * * * * *

We finished the wall as well as the roof of the castle. Neon Lit Holes would get their masterpiece after all. I called the store to let them know the good news. They promised a cheque by Monday. I promised to pay Neil and Jodie on Tuesday, and they left for the weekend. I sat in the studio and thought about Sarah. She was gossamer in front of me for three hours, then I woke to find it was early into the next day. I wiped sweat from my face and got out of the windowless incandescence of the studio.

It was sunny, so I bought a watermelon from Xien’s stall. Xien wasn’t there, so I also bought some pears and bread from a stall across the street. I talked to another customer about why my clothes were covered in various substances before I decided to hit the bar.

The Bishop Ryan was one of those bars that made you want to look under the floorboards. I drank five pints in silence. Nobody except the waitress bothered me. She was pretty. At the end of the last pint, I realized what had happened. Over the four hours of my stay, I had come to observe about thirty people whose lives seemed unaffected by each other. As sudden as a decade that passes under your feet, I realized that I had begun to seek the same thing as they did. I was a complainer whose silence was liquor. But in a way I had beaten the system. This kind of loneliness had a habit of not turning on a person until it was far too late to do anything about it. Time was irrelevant when you wanted to age like wine in a dingy bar. Conversations, if they occurred, were always villainous, and you felt yourself entertained by the misery of it all. It was this vicarious joy that really oppressed me. It felt like a curtain obscuring your view of the sea. I knew that was what I had been after, this isolation from immensities that made one whole, and that thought offended me.

I paid my tab and left to go back to the studio.

* * * * * *

New project. What would keep me sane, otherwise?

I started a few ideas, and I was pretty sure that their failure was that I wasn’t restricting myself to paint. There were too many obstructions in other media. Paint fell under your control very quickly, and I felt pleased by my progress. I worked quickly through the weekend, taking breaks periodically at the Bishop to let the thing dry a bit while working feverishly on my alcoholism. I finally went to bed shortly before six Tuesday morning.

The rest of the day almost never happened. I woke shortly before eleven in the evening, confessed, and went into the studio. There was a short delay in my clarity as I fumbled the keys on the lock. I cursed my headache and finally got the door open. Neil’s shoes were on the floor. It hadn’t rained in three weeks, but I noticed that he had covered them in mud. Fuck, I thought. I had forgotten to get money for him and Jodie.

“So I rounded up the shit you left around.” Neil walked casually into the front hallway, where I was stumbling to get myself together. He was eating from a tub of ice cream, and seemed to be enjoying the fact that he didn’t plan on offering any of it.

“Neil, I’ll admit right now I can’t pay you guys until tomorrow. There was a burst of activity that kept me here, and I didn’t get to the bank.”

“It’s ok. I saw your piece. It’s cool. Your reds are fantastic.” He wiped something from his hands onto his apron.

“I can’t remember much except the face, which is blue. Ok, if you think that it works.”

“I don’t see anything figurative there. Changing schools a bit? That’s cool.”

“I dunno. Things are pretty clear to me right now, and I think portraits without people being depicted immediately there is what I want, you know. I’m sick of looking at people.” I took off my glasses and wiped my face. I had spent the weekend in a bar, and now I was expected to hold a conversation. “Listen, I’m going to work on a few more, like for a set or something. Can I just come over to your place tomorrow and pay you. Maybe we can go out with Jodie for a coffee or something.”

I pushed past him and went into the workspace.

“Whatever, I’ll get out of here in a minute.” Apparently I had stretched more canvas than I remembered, so that saved me a night’s work. Neil was coming in and out of the workspace. I saw him grab a few of his pieces and put them into a basket. He said goodnight, then left in his truck.

* * * * * *

It took me only a few days to finish two more pieces. It was cool that I finished them in the first week of the month, because that meant that I could still do some real work for the rest and not lose too much cash when the bills hit. I had a few backlogged to July, so we could finish those up and get paid again. The work was pedestrian, but it paid well enough that I didn’t really have to worry about anything from thanksgiving until the end of the year. Then Sarah called. She wished me happy holidays, and told me that she had breast cancer.

* * * * * *

We cried together for a few minutes, and then she told me which hospital was looking after her. I didn’t sleep at all that night, and finally they let me into the hospital in the morning. Sarah wasn’t sleeping either.

“You look well,” she said as she tried to sit up. Her breathing was forced. There was a cross around her neck. I wasn’t sure, but I think it belonged to her mother.

“So do you.” Already it was a sinking ship, and we both knew that we could always find the joys of firing canons at each other. I sat beside her bed.

“Thanks for coming over. You were an ass to me, but I wanted you to be here.” She smiled as much as she could. I tried to laugh, but couldn’t find the breath to do it properly.

“You were never any good at being anywhere, and here you are.”

“Well, I really did want it to work, Sarah.”

She laughed quietly for a second, then turned. “Nothing works anymore, Jordan.”

“Sarah...”

“No I mean it. Nothing. Everything’s malignant. My bones are weak, my lungs are dying. I don’t really eat anything.” I had nothing to say, so I just held her hand and looked out the window. Flames from the industrial part of town made the early morning sky radiant in red and blue.

“I love you”

“You know there’s no way I can talk about that now.”

“Jordan...” Her voice grew course, and she started coughing. “They told me that no matter what, I won’t be able to have kids anymore.”

I started to cry. I knew then that I would be with her always.

* * * * * *

Money extra than my bills never really appealed to me, so I took time off work and concentrated on my paintings. I quickly learned that it didn’t take that much longer to work on five paintings at once as it did fifteen, so I decided to take the whole workspace to myself and work as quickly as possible. Neil and Jodie came into the studio to work, but were usually unable to find space. We talked sometimes, but for the most part I could ignore them. Then they stopped coming altogether.

It was late December. Susan's funeral had passed, and the snows had come.

I finished almost three hundred paintings before the sudden disappearance of wasps from my apartment left me naked and confused.

* * * * * *

There was no other way to deal with the situation. I took all three hundred of my paintings and chaotically piled them in the middle of the workspace. They stacked almost all the way to the roof. Fifteen feet of canvas, oil, random objects, and wood was enough to demonstrate my intentions. The weight of it all tore into the canvas on the pieces near the bottom. One of the frames broke and pulled the torn canvas with it.

You really couldn’t see much except the randomness of it all, so I walked over to the front of the space and wrote Erasure in black marker over the inside of the doorway and Portraits over the outside.

I called Neil and told him to come over with a bunch of friends. “We’re having an opening,” I said.

Then I sat on the floor in silence outside of the workspace, and looked in. Sarah was sitting cross-legged and in thought on the pile of paintings, as beautiful and gossamer as always. It was exactly the way we met, smiling and ready for each other.