Gone Lawn 3 : Sean Thomas

Anthony couldn't remember how long he'd been staring at the apple. Hours, tens of hours, maybe even days of slouching on the wooden stool in his room with an empty canvas next to him and the apple a deep red oval on the table. It leaned slightly to the left with its thin stem curving in the opposite direction and its porous skin glistening in the side-lighting of a desk lamp. The back of Anthony's neck was cramping just below his hairline. The tips of his paintbrushes were stiff and dry in the glass jar at his feet and his eyes felt like a multi-day speed binge, so strained and bloodshot that he might never sleep again.

He could've sworn it was nighttime when he finally left his room and stepped onto his front porch and squinted in the morning sun. In front of him the street was jammed with cars, each one moving a few feet and then jerking to a stop all the way down Palm Avenue and northward into downtown. He rubbed his hand on the back of his neck and gazed up the sidewalk. The 700 block looked the same to him, not similar, but exactly the same. On the corner in front of the 7-Eleven the old surf bums, with their wrinkled bronze skin and thick mustaches, were huddled in a circle and drinking coffee and probably talking about their youthful days of listening to Dick Dale records and surfing monster waves. They gesticulated wildly and sipped their coffees, each one of their movements unfolding a familiar picture in his head, like he'd seen it all before, like he knew the image of each arm-wave and coffee-slurp before it happened.

He sat down on his front steps and closed his eyes and sank his head into his chest, focusing on the darkness. Silence crept into his ears and the rhythm of his inhales and exhales rocked him back and forth, sending tingles of exhaustion down his arms and out to his fingertips, through his legs to the bottom of his feet and then back up his spine and into his slackened face, his entire body tumbling down a black hole of nothingness, until the sudden sharp voice of a child jolted him awake.

"Why don't you sleep in your house, Anthony?"

He was slow to open his eyes because he knew the voice, and he didn't want to answer.

"Hello, Random." He squinted in the sunlight. Random stood at the bottom of his steps with her arms crossed and her wide blue eyes searching his face. She was no more than eleven or twelve but she had a way of staring at Anthony that made him feel like he was in the presence of his mother.

"Have you thought about your place in the universe?" She stepped onto the porch.

"You know, your place in the universe. Wandering out here all alone, through nothing but chaos, without a god."

Anthony stared at her. "No, Random, I'm too busy worrying about paying my rent."

"That's not good." Random sat down on the steps beside him and placed her tiny white hand on his shoulder. "You shouldn't worry about that so much. You're only sublimating, diverting your attention away from your own death. You're an artist, you should be expressing the hopelessness of your existence."

"I paint still lifes," he said. "And there's no hopelessness in fruit."

Random scrunched her nose and rested her chin in the palm of her hand. "You know, dad and I went over to your art show in the Gas Lamp last month. I saw all of your still lifes."

"Yeah, I saw them. And they won't save you from the pointlessness of living."

It seemed like Random was on his front porch every morning, waiting to spout some precocious philosophical garbage at him. Her father, Philip Rhinehimmer, had been one of his art professors in college. He was mildly famous for his abstract expressionist-type paintings, but a stubborn and overbearing teacher in class, a real curmudgeon, always shaking his head and raising his eyebrows and twirling his wedding band around his pudgy finger. On more than one occasion he'd told Anthony that if he only planned on painting concretely real still lifes, he should give up art, that he'd make a better horse whisperer, or something like that.

Random stood up and leaned against the banister. "So where's your hippie brother, Mikey?"

"Dad says he's even weirder than you are, Anthony. You shouldn't let him in your house."

"That's great, Random. Why don't you go home now and leave me to my porch in peace."

She let out a small chuckle, as if what he'd said was absurd. "I'll leave, but you'll never have peace. You're drifting along in an endless sea of senseless anguish. Peace. Hah! That's funny."

She skipped her way down the stairs and then sauntered north on Palm Ave. Anthony watched her tiny body shrink into the bright sunlight, shaking his head, and feeling as if their entire conversation had already happened. An exact repeat of yesterday, or maybe last week. He stood up for a moment and rubbed his chin. It was more than the feeling that their conversation had already happened; it was the sickening feeling that it was going to happen again, and again—not just Random either, but the old surf bums at the 7-Eleven and the line of cars crawling down Palm Ave. too. He felt like this entire morning had happened endless times in the past, and now stretched out before him into infinity.

The whole idea was ridiculous. It was the apple that was driving him crazy and now the world was slanted, time was slanted. He was going mad with insomnia and he just needed to sleep, right now. He jumped to his feet and visions of thoughtless repose spun in his head as he walked into his apartment. The calm tingle of sleep buzzed in his ears when he pushed open the bedroom door and stared at the twisted sheets on his bed. He could feel the soft pillow on his cheek and the fuzzy silence of darkness. But he didn't fall onto the mattress; he just tilted his head and stared at the empty white canvas beside him and slowly the thoughts of sleep faded. He stepped over to his stool, looked at the red apple gleaming in the light and sat down, sinking into the blankness of the canvas.

Why hadn't he been able to paint the apple? The light bent around its skin in perfect semi-circles, begging to be reproduced, but he couldn't grab his brush and add a single dab of color. And it was so simple. Countless still lifes hung on the walls of his house: gourds, glasses of water, blue and green spheres, piles of fruit, candles and lamps, every imaginable study of matter and chiaroscuro. What was different about the apple? It was only a sphere. A sphere that he'd sketched and painted a million times in his life, yet this time he couldn't reproduce what he saw in front of him. He reached for his brush, determined to add a single spot of red base color at least, but his arm froze in mid-air. It wouldn't be right. No matter what he painted, which forms and blended hues he combined, it would never add up to a truly objective mirror-image of the apple.

Mr. Rhinehimmer was probably laughing right now, wheezing uncontrollably at the hilarity of Anthony's situation, spinning his wedding band around his finger and raising his eyebrows between gasps of air. "You can't just go around and paint things exactly as they are," he would say. "That's not art. You have to put some of yourself onto the canvas." Anthony cringed. He didn't want to put any of himself onto the canvas. Human emotion was illusory and erratic, and there was nothing more angelic than the real, the static, than the inhuman frozen in time. He stared at the apple, at the side-lighting spilling from the desk lamp and curling depth and volume over the fruit, and then at the canvas peering back at him like a mocking white void, and he felt like screaming.

In the other room he heard the front door swing open and then thumping footsteps on the floorboards. He knew it had to be Mikey who always barged into his apartment after a morning of panhandling in the Gas Lamp Quarter, usually to raid his frig and pound on his drum and smoke pot. Anthony sighed to himself and then slid off his stool and walked out of his room, expecting to see Mikey sitting on the couch and packing a bowl, but Mikey wasn't there. Instead, a strange man with curly black hair and olive skin paced back and forth across the living room. He had a toga fashioned out of an American flag draped over his body and a jug of wine in his hand. He walked around with his chin raised and examined the paintings hanging on the wall.

"Can I help you?" Anthony asked.

The man spun around, looked Anthony up and down, and then nodded his head. "You must be Anthony. Mikey told me it was okay if we waited for him here."

"Yeah, there's a bunch of us meeting up before we head to the rainbow gathering."

The last thing Anthony wanted was a bunch of Mikey's crazy friends wandering through his house before they left for some festival of debauchery in the woods. "Great," he said.

The stranger gulped his jug of wine and stepped forward and offered his hand. "Name's Dah."

"What?" Anthony shook his hand and noticed its clamminess.

"Dah, that's my name."

"Yeah, Dah. It's an acronym. You wanna know what it stands for?"

He sipped his wine again and raised his arms in the air like he was stretching for the ceiling. "I'm Dionysus, the American Hero." He nodded again.

"That's great. How many people are coming here?"

Anthony knew that was a lie. "I'll be in my room working, so just please try to keep it quiet." He turned and walked back down the hallway. "And don't break anything," he said as he stepped into his room.

He walked back to his canvas and sat on his stool, but as soon as his butt hit the wooden seat his bedroom door swung open and Dah tramped in.

"I like your art, man." He slurped more wine, leaving red stains on the corner of his lips. "It speaks to man's lonely place in the universe."

"You know, living in the world without a god, without a dogma to follow. It really comes through."

"Yeah, I know. But the human emotion really shines through. It's like you're taking all the chaos of existence and throwing it into a painting, especially the blue sphere." Dah sat on the corner of the bed and swigged his wine, spilling a few drops on the sheets.

"The blue sphere speaks to the chaos of existence?"

"But it's a blue sphere."

"Yeah, on the outside, but if you really look at it, I mean look at it hard, at the streaks of light and shading. It screams pain."

"No, it doesn't. It screams blue sphere."

"Yeah. Yeah." Dah stood up, nodding his head and pointing his finger at Anthony. "I see what you're getting at. It's brilliant man. Fucking brilliant. I didn't see it until you put it that way. And with such beautiful words. Fucking poetic, man."

Anthony squinted at him. "Jesus, you're weird."

"Fucking brilliant."

"I have no idea what the hell you're talking about."

"I'm talking about the blue sphere. It's like a sheepdog with fucking bagpipes, man. A sheepdog," Dah muttered under his breath as if he was contemplating some profound meaning. "With fucking bagpipes."

Dah walked over to the white canvas. He scrutinized the emptiness and then stepped back and raised his thumb in the air as if he was judging its perspective. "Fucking brilliant," he said.

Anthony shook his head. "You're out of your mind."

"All the emptiness, man. It's fucking brilliant."

"Will you stop saying that?"

"You know, man, all it needs is a little wine, and then it'll be complete." He reached over to pour some of his wine on the canvas but Anthony sprang to his feet and pushed him out of the way before he could dump the alcohol. "Whoa! Okay. Okay. Out of my room. There's no pouring wine on my canvases."

"I was just trying to help, man."

"Thanks, but I'm only painting an apple, I don't need any help."

"But I'm Dionysus." He raised his hands to the ceiling again. "The American Hero."

"I know. You're Dionysus, and you can stay here and wait for Mikey and the rest of your buddies. But you have to stay out there. And don't break anything. And don't pour any wine on my paintings. And I don't want anybody coming in my room, not even Mikey. Okay?"

Anthony nudged him into the hallway and shut his door. Then he stepped back over to his stool and stared at the white canvas. He could hear more stomping feet in the living room and then the low murmur of voices, but he ignored them and sat down with his back hunched and his eyes fixed solidly on the apple. Slowly, his head drifted into thoughtless sleep, into a clear open void behind his forehead, dreamless, until he suddenly saw the apple floating in a background of white, blurry at first, but then deeper and redder and more focused. He saw the soft curves below the stem and each splash of light dribbling across its face and the tiny bumps and crevices on its skin and the shape, an imperfect oval, but at the same time a perfect figure, there in his head. He could hear Mikey and his friends talking in the living room and soon after the beating of drums, first low and booming and then raspy and high, louder and louder, filling out with more percussion until it sounded like there was a drum circle charging between the walls. The apple shimmered in his head and he could feel his arm rising, extending towards the glass jar of brushes, and his fingers grasping a single rod not like a brush, but like a knife, pointing it towards the empty canvas and attacking. Reds and yellows and whites. The colors flowed. The drums pounded and he moved his brush with the rhythm, heavy and light strokes, his vision a mess of reds and the apple no longer in his head, now forming its precise shape on the canvas with the drums vibrating a rainbow of colors, his vision blurring, and then silent darkness sinking over him.

When Anthony awoke he was still hunched in his stool and his neck felt like solid concrete. He looked at the canvas in front of him, the apple he vaguely remembered painting, but there was nothing there, no apple, no red, no soft curves below the stem or tiny bumps and crevices on the skin. Everything was black. The entire canvas covered in a solid ebony. No still life, no picture, just nothing, the same as when he started, except instead of no color, he'd painted every color.

He stood up and shook his head and looked at the canvas again. What had happened? He opened the door and stumbled out to the living room. All the people were gone. He ran his hands through his hair and it was matted and greasy. He touched his cheeks with his fingertips and felt a thin beard. How much time had passed? Hours? Days? He turned to the window and saw the light of morning creeping along the street. Had he been painting all day and night just for a black canvas? He looked around the room and suddenly noticed that the walls were empty. Bare. All his paintings were missing. Every one. Mikey and his goddamn friends had stolen them.

Just then the front door creaked open, and Anthony turned and watched Dah step inside the living room.

"Where the fuck are my paintings, asshole?"

"What?" Dah slugged down a gulp of wine. "Oh, yeah, the priest took them, man."

"Well, what the hell are you doing here, and what do you mean the priest took them? What priest?"

"The priest that was here last night. He's always stealing art. It's what he does."

"It's what he does? What does that mean?"

"It doesn't matter, what matters is your apple painting. How did it come along?"

Dah brushed by Anthony and marched down the hallway and into his bedroom. Anthony stood motionless for a moment, unsure if everything around him was really happening, and then walked into his room and leaned against the doorway as Dah examined the black canvas, bending forward until his nose nearly touched the face of darkness. He sipped his wine and turned to Anthony.

"This is shit," he said. "Absolute shit." He set the jug of wine at his feet and ripped the canvas off the stand. He raised it above his head and smirked a toothy grin. Then he smashed the painting onto the stool. Anthony didn't move. He didn't care anymore. He just watched his canvas break into pieces, and then Dah scatter the shards on the floor and pour a few glugs of wine on them.

"Fucking brilliant," he said as he walked by Anthony and out of the room, back down the hallway and through the open front door with his American flag toga swinging.

Anthony looked around his room and noticed that those walls were bare too. All of his paintings were gone. He stood for a while, staring at the empty whiteness, and then turned around and walked outside onto his front porch.

In front of him the street was jammed with cars, each one moving a few feet and then jerking to a stop all the way down Palm Avenue and northward into downtown. He rubbed his hand on the back of his neck and gazed up the sidewalk. The 700 block looked the same to him, not similar, but exactly the same. On the corner in front of the 7-Eleven the old surf bums, with their wrinkled bronze skin and thick mustaches, were huddled in a circle and drinking coffee and probably talking about their youthful days of listening to Dick Dale records and surfing monster waves. They gesticulated wildly and sipped their coffees, each one of their movements unfolding a familiar picture in his head, like he'd seen it all before, like he knew the image of each arm-wave and coffee-slurp before it happened.

"Why don't you sleep in your house, Anthony?"

Random stood at the bottom of the steps and Anthony stared into her wide blue eyes. He remembered how this had all happened before, but now something was different. Random wasn't talking. She just stood there, staring at him.

Her eyes brightened, rising in frequency, glowing, shimmering, reflecting hard white beams onto her cheeks and arms and legs, a globe of swirling light encircling her body, blinding Anthony and shooting streams across the street. He jumped to his feet, but he was surrounded in a cloud of light, in the middle of a star, unable to see anything, no Random, no porch, no street, just walls of brightness. He stepped forward and his feet glided as if he was walking on air, flying through white light, when he spotted a figure standing in the near distance, a man who looked exactly like him, the same unshaven chin and greasy hair, the same dirty jeans and white T-shirt. He tried to move closer to the figure but his feet were stuck, mired in light. He tried to reach out but his arms were heavy and stiff. So he stood there and watched, paralyzed, as the figure of himself shrank backwards, smaller and smaller, until he finally disappeared in the endless strokes of light.