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MIXED MEDIA

  Published by Odd Sky Books

  First Edition: July 2014

  Copyright © 2014 Erzsebet Aniko Carmean

  Cover Art by Aniko Carmean, using DIY Book Covers

  Editing by Jacinda Little

  License

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  MIXED MEDIA

  A Surreal Short Story

  Aniko Carmean

  For MGC

  Table of Contents

  Mixed Media

  Want to Know What Happens Next?

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  About Aniko

  Mixed Media

  My name is Mario Santa Maria. On Tuesday, all of the paintings at Vos Museum were black. The works in the visiting gallery had names like Surreal Forest, Submissive Ocean, and Cloud Ninety-Nine (As Seen from Easy Street). Their placards extolled the sensuous representation of Nature. The nihilism was gutsy, and I wondered why there hadn’t been a bigger media splash.

  The Contemporary Art exhibit was in the next room; it was well-lit, and the floor creaked with familiar goodwill. Color exploded from the canvases, brighter than a Technicolor dream. O’Keefe’s southwest yellow-orange-red swelled near Rothko’s angular green-blue-brown. It was all as I remembered it, as colorful and mind-expanding as I remembered — and then it wasn’t. The encroaching black slid over the Contemporary masterpieces. The yellow-hued Ashley to my left went blank. There was no yellow on the canvas. No yellow, no red, no green-blue-brown, not even a pastel. Just black.

  “Sir, are you all right?” a security guard asked.

  “This isn’t art.”

  “Guess you’re a traditionalist. Not saying I understand pieces like that one, though.” The canvas he indicated flared with color and shape. When the guard shifted his gaze back to me, the painting went black.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “It changed, was colorful.”

  “You don’t look good.”

  “Maybe I’m sick.”

  “I can call an ambulance,” he offered.

  “No! I just need to some sleep. I’ll go home.”

  “But you’re shaking.”

  “It’s nothing, nothing.”

  I hurried away from the solicitous guard. Near the front door, the souvenir shop’s neon sign caught my eye like salvation. Shelves of colorful baubles drew me inside. A bin of stuffed bears wore bright t-shirts emblazoned with the Vos logo; I picked one in turquoise for Darla. A cup held water-filled pens with museum cut-outs floating from writing tip to button-nub. Vibrant hues draped the bears, pens, stickers, coloring books, cheap bags, and gaudy hoodies. My shoulders relaxed with each breath.

  “Oh, hello! I didn’t know anyone was here.” A woman wearing glasses and a volunteer vest emerged from the stock room. “Are you ready to check out?”

  “Yes. Wait, no. Are there any posters for sale?”

  “Of course! Follow me.”

  The poster display was an oversized book, opened to a page in the middle. Good, clear font labeled a black rectangle. My fingers left smears on the protective plastic where I touched the missing image.

  “Don’t see what you’re looking for?” the volunteer asked.

  “Funny,” I said. “Really funny. What’s going on here, a psych experiment?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “None of this bothers you?”

  “I may not like every piece we have here but, no, none of it bothers me,” she said.

  “You’re serious.” I set the stuffed bear next the register.

  “Every object in Vos goes through rigorous qualifying review.” She rang up the bear. “It’s better than the mess in some boutiques where just anyone can decide they’re an artist.”

  “I’ve shown pieces in a couple of those smaller galleries.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll make it into the establishment.”

  “I don’t care about the establishment!” I slapped the counter harder than I intended. The volunteer cringed.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” she said.

  “Yes, you did. They always do. You and my girlfriend should get together and talk about how art should be run as a business, how I should establish myself.”

  She put the bear in a bag. “Will that be all?”

  “No. I’d like some postcards. Of paintings.”

  “Over there.” She pointed at a carousel near the register. “I’m afraid you’ll have to hurry. I’m about to go on break.”

  “Of course you are.” I pulled the corners of my mouth back, but it didn’t feel like a smile.

  She crossed her arms, looking over her glasses at me the whole time I inspected the spinning carousel of postcards. I turned it, slowly at first, before finally giving it a spin so strong it wobbled. “Why are they all blank?”

  “It’s a postcard,” she replied.

  “I’m not talking about the back!” I grabbed a card at random, crumpling it as I thrust it towards her. “What is this?”

  “Yours, now that it’s ruined. And please mind your tone, or I will call security.”

  I smoothed the card on the counter with jerky movements. “It’s like my dreams. It’s all like my dreams.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I used to dream, and now I don’t. I thought it was the job, so I quit. It wasn’t the job, and now it’s happening here.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “All of the paintings are blank!”

  “Not every piece of art is going to speak to your soul.” She tugged the card away from me to scan the barcode. “You understand you have to pay for this.”

  “Wait!” I grabbed her wrist, and she gasped. “Look at it and tell me what you see.”

  Her eyes flicked at the postcard. An agony of russet swam to the dark surface, followed by swirling ocher. It was a man, face between his hands, mouth agape. She yanked free, wiped her arm on her shirt. The image on the postcard disappeared.

  “Edvard Munch, The Scream,” I said. “Too perfect not to be a setup. I’ve figured you out, now what? Where are the camera men? Or is it the guys with the white coats?”

  “I’d like you to leave.”

  “I haven’t paid.” I snatched a second, random postcard from the display. Leaning across the counter, I shoved the card at her. She cringed backwards, her attention shifting from my expression to the card, as if it was a weapon and I was a mugger. “Look at it.”

  “Escher,” she whispered. “The information is on the back.”

  “Don’t look at me, look at the picture.”

  She swallowed hard, and blinking very rapidly, looked at the picture. Sure enough, The Hands appeared on the postcard. The volunteer whimpered, and something in me broke. I set the card down gently, carefully. “Do you take credit?”

  ###

  The bag of purchases thumped against my leg as I hurried to the exit. Two security guards, including the man I had spoken to earlier, entered the lobby behind me. The volunteer pointed and cried out, “He’s why I triggered the alarm!”

  “You, stop!”

  I slung myself down the front steps. The air fought me, refusing to fill my lungs. I was a painter, not a runner. Shop windows reflected my flight, the bag dangling like a broken wing. Three breathless blocks; no sirens, no pursuit. A bus stop offered cover, and I took it. Hands on my t
highs, bent-double, gasping. The pavement was cracked, nearly shattered. Sanity filtered through those cracks, lost like spilled wine, my missing dreams, or the blanked paintings.

  “Mister, you okay?”

  A pair of women’s shoes appeared on the cracked pavement. They were heavy Doc Martins, the sort Darla would never wear. I drew myself upright and leaned against the cool Plexiglas of the bus stop.

  “You good now?” she asked.

  “Can I show you something?”

  “God, not another perv! I will spray your dick with Mace.”

  “That really won’t be necessary.”

  “You’ve been warned.”

  “I just want to show you a postcard.”

  She raised an eyebrow. Her buzz-cut hair was glorious, Manic Panic pink. Cars flowed past us, more colors, but none as bright as her hair. I plunged my arm into the bag and retrieved a card. “Please, look.”

  “I’ll probably regret this.” She turned only her eyes toward the postcard, paused, then swiveled her whole body towards it. “Groovy Escher!”

  The black rectangle morphed into the iconic drawing of two hands in a self-reflective circle. She looked up at me, and I could feel her staring, but I couldn’t stop looking at the post card. The image faded to black.

  “Did it look normal to you?” I asked.

  “Escher, Dali, they’re super-normal…like, above it.”

  “Okay, I can get that. But this particular postcard, your experience of it just now – did it seem like the drawing was appearing? Kind of, um, rising through darkness?”

  “Man, it’s just a normal postcard.” She swept a hand over her short, pink hair. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “No, but I like your hair.”

  ###

  The inside of the apartment was dim and protective, the blinds still closed from an earlier attempt to nap. I flopped on the couch and stared at the ceiling, but my feet and my hands kept up a constant twitching motion. The upstairs neighbor and her three kids were out, their silence a taunt. I was farther from sleep than any human, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever make it back.

  My journal was on the coffee table, its pages filled with the ghosts of dreams. I picked it up, the cover crumpling in my haste. I set the notebook in my lap. The tremors in my hands didn’t stop, but they lessened as I flipped open to a random entry. This dream was a disturbing one, even for me. Darla and I were in a car, we were driving down a long wooden bridge. No guard rails. The water on either side went on in unbroken blue waves all the way to the horizon. Darla was at the wheel, and I was looking at the water. Clouds rolled in. The sparkle left the waves. Darla began to cry and fumble with the door handle. Before I could stop her, she jumped out. I was alone in the car, far from the driver’s seat, too panicked to undo my seatbelt. The bridge wasn’t a bridge at all. It was a pier. The last thing I heard before I woke was the hard slap of water on the hood of the car. My eyes slid down the page, seeking the accompanying sketch. After a moment, I leaned forward, sucking in a relieved breath. My sketch was still there. The darkness hadn’t stolen it.

  “Why?” I yelled out loud. The silence had no answer.

  I flipped through the rest of the sketchbook. Glimpses of dreamscapes filled the pages: a forest of teal serving utensils, a handful of broken teeth, my baby sister exactly as she was two decades ago. The older sketches lacked the skill of my more recent ones, but even the worst of them confirmed that the darkness had a limit – there were things it would not touch. On a whim, I retrieved my favorite college art book. Just like the poster display at Vos, the text was intact, but the images were dark. A chapter on Surrealism sent theories sparking through me like electricity. When I read René Magritte’s description of his painting, Son of Man, the sparks coalesced and turned to lightening.

  ###

  It was dark when Darla got home. I was on the couch, all of my Strathmore dream journals scattered around me. The art book on Surrealism sat open on the coffee table, the Magritte passage both highlighted and underlined.

  “What are you doing?” Darla stood in the doorway to the bedroom. Her arms were crossed, one hip jutted in an angular fighter’s stance.

  “Something happened at the museum,” I said.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Now I am.”

  She moved around the room, gathering up my journals. “You were supposed to meet me tonight. There’s someone at the clubhouse I wanted you to talk to, and he came to this meeting because I said you’d be there.”

  “Shit,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “You always do.”

  “No, this was different. All the paintings were black!”

  “I don’t care if the paintings were gone.” She shoved the stack of journals onto the shelf. “I want you to get help. Levitan is a sleep expert, an MD, willing to help us.”

  “Please,” I said. “Sit down. Let me explain.”

  Darla returned another journal to the shelf, and paused outside our bedroom. No doubt, she saw the unmade bed surrounded by a litter of dirty clothing. Her shoulders lurched as heavy sobs burst forth from her tiny frame.

  “I meant to clean before you got home,” I said.

  “That’s not why I’m crying.”

  “It’s been tough for both of us since I lost my job.”

  “You didn’t lose it, Mario, you quit.”

  “And now you’re working two jobs to support us, and I know it’s been a strain…”

  “Did you look?” She faced me. “Did you even try to find a job today?”

  “There isn’t much call for a painter with a fine arts degree.”

  “Maybe not, but you managed to get work before.”

  “Let’s not have this fight.”

  Darla crossed the room to sit on the couch. We were both very stiff, posed like strangers on a park bench. “I want you to get help.”

  “I know.”

  “Lack of sleep is dangerous. You’re unreliable and erratic. I’m afraid for both of us.”

  I returned to the sketch I started before Darla arrived. It was the apple from Magritte’s painting, but my version was rotten, and leaked worms full of dreams. “Are you saying I make you want to use?”

  “I’m a recovering addict with a boyfriend who’s lost touch with reality, what do you think comes to mind when I’m stressed?”

  “I haven’t lost touch with reality.”

  “Then what is this?” Darla spread her arms, indicating the coffee table, the mess, me.

  “I’m sorry I’m such an inconvenience for you. I thought you understood why I had to quit that job. Retouching prints with cheap paint to give them ‘authentic texture’ was perverse. It killed my inspiration, and then stole my dreams.” I finished shading a wisdom tooth in the belly of a worm, and tossed the sketch book onto the coffee table.

  Darla’s lower lip quivered. Her nose whistled, a high-pitched reminder of the all the coke she’d done. “You need help,” she repeated.

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.” I passed her the Vos bag. “I got this for you.”

  She pulled out the bear and adjusted its tiny shirt. “Do you really think you can fix this with a stuffed animal?”

  “No. There are postcards in there, too.”

  Darla tucked the bear under her arm and fished in the bag. She shuffled the postcards. Escher and Munch appeared and disappeared in exquisite detail. When she set them on the table, the images morphed to black. “Should these mean something to me?”

  “Probably not, but they’re part of it.” Thought-lines furrowed her brow. Before she could speak, I asked her, “What do you see when you look at that book on the coffee table?”

  “A picture of a man with a floating green apple in front of his face.”

  “Do you know what I see?”

  She shrugged.

  “Nothing. I see a black rectangle where the picture should be. Magritte, the artist who painted this, explained it by saying ‘everything we see hides another thing, we alway
s want to see what is hidden by what we see.’”

  Darla clutched the bear to her chest. “What does it mean?”

  “I think it explains what’s happening to me.”

  “What, Mario, what’s happening to you?”

  “I’ve been chosen for something.”

  “Chosen?” she repeated.

  “You make it sound crazy.”

  Darla buried her face in the stuffed animal, shoulders shaking with the intensity of her cries. The upstairs neighbors returned home. Their laughter, noise from a foreign land, reverberated from the space above a fragile ceiling.

  “Will you do me a favor, Darla?”

  She wiped her tears with the back of her hand. Her congested nose no longer whistled. “What do you want?”

  “Come to the museum with me tomorrow.”

  “I have to work.”

  “It’s on your way, and there’s an exhibit I need you to see.”

  Darla forced her hair into a pony-tail. Without the soft curls at her face, she was a warrior. “I needed you at the meeting tonight.”

  “I’ll make it up to you by going to the AA picnic this weekend.”

  “Will you talk with Levitan?”

  “Yes. I’ll talk to anyone you want me to. But only if you stop in at the museum.”

  “I can’t stay for long.”

  I clasped her hands in mine, kissing them. “You won’t regret this. You’ll see.”

  ###

  On Wednesday, I got up before Darla. I fried nitrate-free bacon, toasted organic bread, and scrambled the eggs of cage-free hens. The coffee smelled like the brand we bought when we started dating, but it was fair trade and much more expensive.

  “This is a nice surprise,” she said, looking rested and healthy. I had the urge to tell her I’d beg to have my job back, if it would keep us together. Instead, I asked her how many slices of bacon she wanted.

  “Two, no three!” She raised her arms above her head in a slow, unconsciously sexy stretch. She finished; smiled at me. “This reminds me of our first morning together.”

  “I asked you what you dreamed.”

  “I remember.”

  “Me, too.” I set a filled plate before her. “You dreamed that there was a giant trout swimming in the water. It came near the surface, and it had amber eyes.”

  “Golden amber,” she continued. “Where the pupil should be, there was a baby. I could see tiny fingers and the umbilicus.” She sipped her coffee. “I wonder what it meant.”

  “Everything,” I said, and sat next to her. “It’s why I fell in love with you.”