The Memoirs Of An Invisible Man by Patrick Sean Lee (reader novel txt) 📕

“So, Mr. Aries, you are an artist if I remember correctly. Performance?”

Perfect British diction.

I considered my answer very carefully.

“No, actually. I’m a fine artist. A painter. Jasper didn’t tell you?” So far so good.

“Ah yes, he did make mention of…how did he put it? ‘Imbecilic studies of the color black.’ I see you’re still investigating the color,” she said pointing at my shirt with a delightfully sculpted finger. I focused momentarily on her hand, her wrist, her arm…up, up until I landed on her dark almond eyes.

“I beg your pardon,” I finally managed, “What did you say?”

“Black. The color black. You paint it?”

I awakened.

“Oh no. Black isn’t a color, and you can’t ‘paint it’. It’s the absence of color. White is…I do use them both, you know.” I explained to Andrea the entire theory of color; my well-rehearsed line of bull, automatically. She listened with a look of bemusement on her face. For all I know I might have been telling her how the depth of her eyes, the enigmatic curve of her lips, the fall of her hair across her cheek had captured me. This portrait sitting not two feet away dispelled all previous notion of beauty in the downpour within my head.

Whatever it was I said, it seemed to fascinate her—she seemed delighted. She smiled and a spike of wonderful, devastating courage and hope began to pin me to the stars. We spoke further as the storm outside worsened. I recall very little else about our conversation except for one curious, last question she put to me a moment before she rose and left.

“Why don’t you envision the most lovely thing in the universe and do a series of paintings about it? Light! Capture the essence of it over and over in all its magnificent manifestations? How it has no substance; comes and goes like a ghost, yet without it we see nothing? Everything disappears.”

How simple!

Oh wait. There was a slight problem with doing that. How do you paint light without using an object it reflects off of, or penetrates through? This became a problem of Physics suddenly—a subject I failed miserably at in high school; forgot about entirely in college. For two weeks afterward I stood before the blank canvas, staring, thinking, not having a clue where to even begin, seeing only her face floating in and out across the white linen. Finally I despaired, threw the brushes and palette aside, stomped on a tube of Licorice black lying on the floor, and left the studio.

It was raining again. I walked to The Library Alehouse downtown, soaked to the skin, and got stinking drunk. At last call I ordered a double shot of Wild Turkey.

“We don’t serve hard liquor, Rex,” the bartender reminded me for the tenth time that night.

“Bring me one anyway. No, two. I’m a failure.”

“You’ve done pretty good on wine. Time to go, buddy. You want a cab?”

I think I stumbled out the door into the rain. I think I told him I was just fine. I must have made it home.

*

I loaded up on groceries the next day, and then locked myself inside the studio, determined to break my case of painter’s block, and paint something utterly marvelous in the manner Andrea had suggested. Downstairs in the gallery the phone rang itself off the hook. Every now and then someone banged on the door, but I paid no attention.

I situated a brand new four by six foot canvas on the easel, and then moved it closer to the window overlooking the street and the commercial buildings across the way. The north light streaming through the glass was soft; perfect, I thought, to work by, and so I began again.

Painting is thinking.

Any hack can stand at the beach at sunset or turn and study the crowds ambling up and down the boardwalk, and then slap colors onto a tiny canvas. It takes real genius to look at that white no-man’s land in the studio, though, and create a real world, be it in shades of black or…or what?

During those sessions, when I could think no more, I dropped the brushes onto the trolley next to the easel, went to the refrigerator and peered inside at the food I had no interest in eating. Made coffee. Let it sit and grabbed a beer instead. Turned the volume of the CD player up louder. Paced.

Why was milk white and beer amber? Should I leave and go buy more paint? Often enough I let my gaze fall onto the splatters and globs of paint on the floor, wondering if I could cut part of it up, frame it, and foist it off as something I’d created in a fit of Pollock-like passion. I examined my brushes, glanced every now and then at the blank canvas; picked up a number 24 Filbert and a house painter’s brush. I became Gene Krupa and Ginger Baker, slamming out a beat on the easel, with some British group’s song blaring in the background. I did anything except paint.

Back to the refrigerator.

It was three in the afternoon. I stood in front of the canvas again, bottle of half-empty beer in my right hand. It was then my muse struck in the most peculiar and enlightening way via a three or four second flash of light that came through the window. The iridescent slash landed on the canvas; a soft green glow. Before it disappeared, the edges of light appeared to move in waves, as though it was smoke, or a viridian fog. Then as suddenly as the light appeared, it was gone, but the canvas maintained a ghostly afterimage for several minutes until it, too, slid away.

Oddly, my first impulse was to grab my cell phone and call Andrea. As though she would be interested in a shaft of smoky light or any breakthrough I’d had in redefining the theory of color.

I tossed the bottle onto the floor behind me, blinked again and again as I stood there trying to make sense of what had happened. Not only did the flash of light brighten the canvas for those few short seconds, it also made the material disappear entirely at the conclusion of its visit! I reached forward and tentatively touched the spot, beyond which my eyes could see the wall standing behind it. My fingertips stopped at the material. The canvas was whole, but…it made no sense.

You’re drunk!

But I was not. I blinked again and again, that action being necessary for me whenever I needed to sober up my eyes. Yet, my eyes did not deceive me, as they say. I endeavored to discover exactly what had happened in the ensuing minutes as I moved left, right, forward and backward. The same result, no matter where I viewed the strange phenomenon from, or how often I touched the material of the canvas.

As I stood there scratching my head with one hand, the canvas with the other, my nose only inches from the material, another shaft of greenish light burst into the room through the window. This time very intense and more encompassing, and with it a strong odor akin to burning flesh. I felt an electric-like shock course the length of my body, head to toe, when it hit. Glancing down, emptying my nostrils of the foul odor, I saw the swirl of smoky light—the viridian snake of it—enveloping my feet, spilling onto the floorboards, floating away like a ghost before it dissipated. It seems the entire half of the studio that I inhabited had lit up this time, as though a battalion of photons had been dispatched into the room instead of a mere company.

So on the surface the mystery of what had occurred the first time was solved; the strange light entering through the window was the culprit, or the benefactor if you wish. Whichever the case, the cause and effect were the same. The remainder of the canvas, the floor surrounding it, the very window itself…my entire body disappeared. I found myself staring down into the gallery below through a jagged line of floorboards, joists, and dusty ceiling edges. My knees gave way at the impossibility of it, my head spun wildly, and then I passed out.

Hours—days?—later I awakened, sprawled out like Christ on the cross, lying there at Golgotha’s summit waiting for the spikes. My vision was blurry; every muscle in my body ached. A new round of music blared out of the speakers making my brain pound along with the frantic backbeat. I was confused. Awakening from a wonderful dream into the depression of reality. The reality was, though, I had disappeared, along with half my studio. And yet, I felt a certain excitement, given the disturbing fact that anyone and everyone I’d ever known would never see me again. That was oddly enough the first thought I experienced after I’d forced my eyes around the studio, bathed as it was in shadows. I must confess, the sensation of lying in thin air fifteen feet above the gallery was more than just disturbing. Should Andrea or Jasper somehow gain entry into the space beneath me, what would they see? A normal but deserted showroom? The fan dangling from the ceiling, spinning slowly? Or would they look up in shock to see the flat of my back suspended, as though I’d torn the place to pieces and then somehow hooked piano wires from the second floor rafters to my arms and legs? Performance art. I wondered, finally, if what had occurred hours or days ago was a permanent displacement of myself and my immediate surroundings, or more hopefully only a temporary exodus from the physical world?

I sat up at length; discovered that I was more than hungry. I was the emaciated soul who’d wandered out of the desert after forty days and forty nights of fasting—altogether against my will I must add. But I wasn’t hungry for beef or bread or cheese. I craved lemons. Bushels of them, and as I was to learn in the days ahead, they would become my personal crown of thorns.

The music was killing me, and so I managed to raise my ghostly self, stagger to the cabinet and shut it down. Better, I thought.

Food, again. Figure out later who, or I should say what I was. Why I was whatever it was I’d become. The refrigerator held plenty of beer, some wine, cheese and sundry items that held no interest for me. Bananas lay on the counter nearby. I turned up my nose at them and turned to leave. The local market would still be open, I hoped, and as I drew near the door leading out of the studio into the narrow hallway, I passed the coat tree with its nearly full-length mirror, a scarf dangling from a hook on one side, and an image of nothing in the dusty glass. There I stopped, re-positioned myself directly in front of it, and waved my hands. No one waved back. Christ have mercy. There was nothing of me!

Lemons.

That craving led to my first act of larceny. But honestly, how could I possibly load up a shopping basket with them, and then try to pay for the fruit? I had to steal them!

“Excuse me, Ma’am. I know you can’t see me, but I’ve brought my wallet, which you can see…” If you were the checker, how would you react?

So, I simply loaded as many as I could carry into my arms and sauntered as inconspicuously as possible back out the doors. It was 8:45, I noted from the clock hanging above the doorway. A young