Conversations

“Harley and I are old friends,” she explained, smiling serenely.  “We would often go to church together, back when that sort of thing was still allowed.  Churches were allowed here for some time even after they were officially pronounced ‘illegal.’  The powers that be had a tendency to overlook certain things in a wink-wink nudge-nudge kind of way, if you catch my meaning.”  She grinned and shot him a sidelong glance.

“Yes, I think—” Jon began.  

“Right.  And the sheriff was even part of the church, so who was he to prosecute churchgoers!  But no, he would never do that anyway, not Hank.”  She glanced down, and a shadow crossed her face.  “What a kind man.  Yes, he was one of the good ones.”

“Was?”

“Yes.  Yes, was.”  She brightened, as though by force of will, and cleared her throat as she walked slowly, with him in tow, through the clearing and along a wide trail, which he now saw led to a large colonial-style home.  It looked distinctly out of place—like something he would expect to find in some wealthy enclave of Connecticut, not in the middle of the woods, here, in a far-flung suburb of the bustling metropolis of Clearfish.

She continued:  “And Harley and me, we got along well.  Because, I think, we saw eye to eye on certain matters.  Certain economic happenings, if you will, which were going on at the time and to which the two of us paid keen attention.  When the collapse and the various wars finally came on, we weren’t particularly caught off guard, see, because we had seen them coming.  Not to the extent of the devastation, mind you, but we foresaw disaster.”  She fixed her expression in a look of both sadness and disgust.  Jon had been watching her and had been afforded a view of the top of her head.  Now, he looked ahead and remained silent as they made slow progress toward the house.  He watched her peripherally, but there was not much to see.  

She cleared her throat after a while and continued.  “He never really liked church, did Harley.  I never understand why he insisted on going, really, but he had a reputation as one of the most ardent churchgoers in our little town (though I suspect his ardency ended upon entering church, and I never saw much of the Christian spirit in him).  But the congregation loved him.  Everyone did.”  She stopped and eyed a patch of weeds which had cropped up along the rows of fruit trees.  She sighed before walking on, tugging at his arm twice with unnecessary force to signal their departure.  

“Harley and I had a habit of getting brunch after church and catching up.  At the time, my husband was very busy.  He was always constructing something around the house or around the property—fences, garden boxes, you name it.  We were a team, him and I.  I loved this property—I still do, in a way, but it isn’t the same for me without him here—we made it special.  We brought out its best qualities.  It was something we could do together.”  Her eyes had a faraway look.  

 

What a queer woman, thought Jon.  

“So, but anyway, one day Harley and I were talking, as we often did, about politics, God, hedonism, whatever politician or foreign actor was in the news, or whatever bastard happened to be committing whatever horrific deed which happened to be in vogue among people who commit horrific deeds.”  She looked up at him with a look of maternal kindness.  “It was a dark time, then, dear, and we were only speaking of what we were seeing—for what else was there really to say?”
Jon nodded, as if signaling his understanding.  She turned away from him, satisfied that he would feign appreciate, if not actually grasp, her meaning.  

“Right, and anyway, on this particular occasion, Harley had brought up religion, which was a subject he had a habit of broaching.  He was always spouting off, see, beginning his thoughts with, ‘now, I think of it this way,’ or ‘okay, now what if we frame it like this.’  It was maddening.”  Jon smiled, imagining Harley talking in this way.  It seemed fitting.  Prefatory sentences were certainly the man’s conversational practice. 

“And on this occasion, as I was saying, he was explaining why religion was bad—his reasons actually being quite similar to the reasons now espoused by the Leadership, though I don’t know if any card-carrying member of the Party could match Harley’s conviction when he spoke on the subject.  And boy, was he a good orator in this those days!  I’d pity the poor pastor who tried to voice an argument contrary to Harley’s line of thinking when he really got going.”  She exhaled sharply through her nose.  “If he wasn’t faultlessly logical, he had this way about him, of constituting a counterargument like it was a veneer on something real: a veneer only.  And he would chip away at it and reveal it as unendurably, risibly superficial.  Then he would state his facts, and like bricks—substantial things upon which his opinions were based—his opinions would stack on top of one another; they would rise, intangible monuments to the unimpeachability of his convictions; implacable monuments paying homage to his own intellect.”  She stopped walking and took a shaky breath, tugging Jon along with her.

“I can’t remind his exact wording, but I recall that he was saying something to the effect of religion only being valuable as a palliative, which we discussed quite often.”  She paused and looked off toward her house.  “Yes, that was it:  A palliative—as something to take to feel better about the way things are and to feel better about one’s relationship with the world. He wound it into his broader notion of religion as something created by man and inherently flawed.  He thought that men were small; that men were weak; that men cowered in the sight of God but also welcomed him because he represented something to which we will never measure up.  That was the important thing for him, yes.  When we compare ourselves with our own image of God, we fail.  But in the simple act of comparison, we elevate ourselves to a position not with, but near to God.  Do you see this?”

Jon did, and he found he was seriously impressed with this woman for her eloquence in her reformulation (and probably augmentation) of Harley’s views.  Not for the first time in his travels had he misjudged someone.  Note to self, he thought, choosing to live in the woods did not automatically make one a simpleton.

Almost as confirmation of his thoughts, she went on.  “And those are my thoughts on religion, too.  And they’re not even critical, really, but they’re not blindly supportive of religion, as many of our fellow churchgoers’ ideas were.  And I’d heard this general theme (his treatment of religion, I mean) from him, before.  But then he went on, talking himself into a fit of pique:  He said that he had been wrong—that religion was more than a palliative.  That it was a lie and a big one; an important one to tell in order to keep living, but a lie, nonetheless.  At one point, he banged his hand on the table to make a point,” and Jane slapped her own thigh, the sound a neat thwack, “and people at other tables began to take notice.  He was making me uncomfortable so I asked him to please lower his voice, and he did, but I could still sense the tension in his voice.”

Somewhere to the left and nearby, a songbird broke into song.  From the right, and further away, a rejoinder—lighter, sweeter, an expansion on the theme—could be heard.  “So, I asked him.  I said, ‘alright, Harley, what’s gotten into you? What’s going on?’”

“And he answered me.”  She paused and looked up at him, raising an eyebrow in a look which did not register to Jon as conveying any one specific emotion.  “He gave me some bad news.  Harley was the first person I respected to tell me the world was ending.”'

“And he was right, of course, but the way he told me, it still gives me goosebumps—and it didn’t make it any better that he, this man whom I greatly respected, was the one who told me.  He informed me of it, straight-faced; no emotion at all.  He delivered to me the worst news a member of the human race can hear—that her species is at the brink of extinction—the way he would have brought me the news that the sky is blue or the news that he had purchased new trousers or that he was painting his bedroom.”

What the fuck were ‘trousers,’ thought Jon.

Jane pressed on.  “And there was more, much more.  He told me that every country would descend into chaos and that the United States, for its part, could go one of two ways:  it could descend into chaos, too, or control would be wrested from the masses by the few—by a group of technocrats which had secretly accrued a great many of the world’s most important and highest-valued companies.  Of course, Jon, Harley never presented an option which depicted the way that many people see the world, today.”  She looked at him quizzically, her head slightly off-kilter.  

She shook her head.  “No, Harley never did say, ‘the world will go on spinning and people will start settling for less and start putting up with it.’  But is that not how people today interact with, and live within, the world?  Don’t people think ‘life is to be survived,’ when they should be saying to themselves, ‘life is to be lived’?  Don’t people perceive life as a quest for self-preservation when it is instead an impossible but nonetheless singularly important endeavor to be, and imprint yourself on the world in the way in which you must?  Because I think that’s exactly how people think, and Harley did too. And us thinking similarly in that respect led him to include me in a secret I understand he also let slip to you.”  She turned to him, stopping again.  “Did he tell you that you were his first?  His first recruit, that is.”  

He had.  Was it a lie?  Jon was hurt in spite of himself.

Jane could read the expression on his face and laughed.  “Yeah, he’ll do that,” she said, ruefully.  “I never knew why, but he does have a tendency to do that.”  She stroked her chin and began to walk slowly along the path again, which was now no more than twenty steps from the base of the house.  “He’s recruited probably a tenth of the people in Prometheus, for Christ’s sake.  And I think he just says that to mess with people.  Maybe he’s gone a bit crazy, as have we all.  Who can say?”  She laughed again, detached herself from Jon’s arm, and bounded up a pair of stairs leading up to the colonial style home he had looked at from afar.  Now, he would get to see the inside.  “Come in, and welcome to ‘casa de Jane.’”
 

The first thing he noticed upon entering, aside from the sheer size of the entryway, were the walls—more specifically, the paint on the walls.  On three sides of the large antechamber that greeted any visitor to the house, the walls were a rich shade of lavender, but the wall to the right was a mural of enormous proportion and awesome detail.  It depicted large, supernaturally muscular people, ripped as if from myth to be painted on the wall in this Edwardian style scene.  Jon was impressed.  

“It’s amazing,” he whispered.

“Thank you, Jane replied.  “I made it.”

“You—you did this?”  An artist.  He had never met one, but he had a very distinct impression of one, which at first seemed very different from the person he believed Jane to be.  But the more that he thought about it, the more he realized that she was rather brusque and headstrong, as he knew artists were, though he did not from know where he had picked up that idea about them—it was something he simply knew to be true.  She also had a strange way of thinking about things, as artists did, though not a dangerous perception of the world, per se, as to which perception all artists were necessarily predisposed.  He decided that he ought to be careful about what he said to her.  

“Yes, dear.  I realize now that I’ve been speaking to you so much of the past that I’ve neglected to tell you how I spend most of my time now.  Sure, I tend to the yard and the house and the road you came in on.  But beyond that, I have a grander purpose.”

“And that purpose is to make art.  Beautiful art, if I do say so myself.”  At that, she stepped away from the wall, hands on hips, assessing her own work with an eye both critical and shamelessly appreciative of her own talents.

“Before the collapse, I was actually a rather well-regarded artist—back when one could have such a passion and have it be the same thing as one’s job—and I made a living hosting shows, both in this home,” she gestured around her, and particularly at the wall which she had not taken her eyes off of for even a second during their conversation, “by special appointment, or in a gallery in Boston.  I met my husband there, actually, when we were both in our teens.”  

She smiled:  “We eloped together, which made quite a splash at the time, to tell you the truth.  I met him when he was in high school, and I had just entered college.  He had snuck into a college party and was trying to fit in, but I knew what he was and went right over to him, all set to boot him from the party.  But then he turned to me and told me that I was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.  Cheesy?  Yes, but, no one had ever talked to me like that before, mind you, and I certainly didn’t expect such words to come from this high-school, snot-nosed pubescent thing that I had him pegged for.”  She was silent for a time.

Jon regarded her, waiting for more.  “Then?”

She cleared her throat and walked toward a doorway carved into the wall (that wall that housed the mural).  “Then—well, then I decided that he could stay at the party after all.  We spent the night talking.  And after two years of dating, we left our lives behind and moved to Chicago, before we made our way here not that long after—around the time that it had no longer became safe to live in cities.  Dark times, those were,” she added, editorializing the past in the way Jon’s mother did at times.  Jon grinned in recognition of the parallels between the two, as Jane opened her mouth to continue.  “So, we moved out here, thinking it would be safer, but my husband—Josh was his name—still kept in touch with our network of East Coast friends, many of whom were involved in some capacity in the art world.  He was my agent, though I never officially thought of him that way.  It was more of a position that he had taken upon himself but which he performed perfectly.  And for fifteen years of marriage, he supported me as both husband and partner, until one day,” she snapped her fingers, “‘poof,’ he was gone.”

Jon knitted his brow.  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I was, too.”  She waited a moment, then corrected herself, “I am sorry, still.”  

She looked away from him and walked over to a bookshelf which was tucked in the far side of the room.  Following her with his eyes, Jon noticed that each book was almost identical in size and dimension.  The only difference was in the color—the tomes looked dense, and their identical spines boasted largely muted, faded primary hues.  “He had left me a note one night, saying that he had to leave.  Saying that he had to get away and could not name his reasons for leaving but that his mind was made up.”  Her voice was shaky for the first time in their conversation.   

“And when I got home and didn’t find him there, attending to some or another task around the house, which is how I typically found him, I just about broke down.  And I stayed broken, really, for some time.”  She sighed.  “It was not a good time in my life.”

Then, her eyes darkened and the lines around her face hardened into an expression that evinced at once scrupulous self-control and seething rage.  “His note:” she paused, collecting herself, “his note was rubbish, and I don’t think he ever left me—or rather, he never left me of his own volition or choosing, nor, I am quite sure, would he have.”  She gathered herself and pursed her lips before continuing.  “What I think happened is that he was taken.  And while you might think that my opinion is the opinion of a woman whose husband left her and that I can’t possibly be objective about the situation, I’d like for you to hear me out.”

She walked from him toward a cubby which was covered with two panes of glass, allowing an observer a free line of sight into the drawers within.  One drawer was filled with glass figurines and little tchotchkes, but the more elevated cabinet held an ornate jewelry box and contained a small, satin bag—gray in parts from excessive wear but a delicate brown throughout.  She reached for the box and undid a clasp, which appeared to be made of burnished bronze, and retrieved from the box a folded piece of paper, which was stained at intervals and appeared to be quite old.  She turned to face him.  

“I have come to believe that there was no way that Josh, my loving husband through the best years of our lives, would ever leave me or his land by choice.  The amount of time he spent trimming hedges and transforming his property into whatever final product he envisioned in his mind—well, he was not a wasteful man, and he would have wasted years of his life tending to such matters if he was preparing to leave all the while, as he intimated in his letter.  Now, our marriage was not perfect by any means, and at one point in our relationship, my husband accused Harley of sleeping with me—which never happened and was an absurd accusation for him to make, but he accused Harley of this because he loved me.”

 

She smiled sadly.  “His actions were borne of jealousy, not of some latent unhappiness with our relationship.”
 

She unfolded the piece of paper she had retrieved from the cubby and held it out in front of her, at some distance from her face, in a manner which seemed in keeping with her age and which suggested to Jon that her eyesight was far from perfect.  She was silent for a period of several seconds, as if reading words she had read countless times, and her lips moved wordlessly as she read.  

Then, she peered up at him from over the top of the piece of parchment.  “This is a poem he wrote.  It is not about me, but it is a poem, and if you had known Josh, then you would have some idea of what it would take to get him to write poetry.”  She laughed disconsolately.  “I won’t read it, but I’ll summarize its key parts.”  

Jon waited.  Jane stood stiffly, then pulled out a chair and began.

“For years, I had told him that he should write, or paint, or journal, or play music—anything, really, that was an outlet for his emotions, the expression of which (his emotions, I mean) was sometimes challenging for him.  He had resisted me at every turn—and I gave up after a while, chalking up his reticence to the fact that he was getting to be an old man and had shown no interest in engaging in activities which were not his idea in the first place.”  She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, Jon could see that they were brimming with tears.  She cleared her throat.

“When he first ‘left’ me,” she spit out finally, “I was angry.  I tried painting to soothe myself, and I tried exercise, and I tried screaming: endlessly, loudly, noiselessly.  Did you know there is a way to scream plaintively?  And a scream to convey impotence; and to project love; and to rebel against a lie?  I screamed in all of the aforementioned types, but it was not enough.”

“Yes, it was rather cathartic, I’ll admit, but at the end of the day, I would lie in bed, eaten up inside by what continued to elude me about his leaving.”

“It was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, to say the least.”  She crumpled up the poem which she had been holding gingerly between thumb and forefinger and pocketed it finally.

“So, after about a year of this, I started cleaning up his things.  It was evident to me then that he would not be returning—and would have no need for them—and their presence in the home wasn’t doing me any favors.”  She nodded to herself.  “When I walked through the hallways of this house,” she said as she looked around the room, “and saw that it was filled with reminders of our shared life together, I began to feel deeply uncomfortable here—in my own home; in my own skin—so I began to tidy up.”

“And so I did that—room by room, day by day—until the house seemed warmer, and all that was left inside were my personal effects, some furniture, and more space than I wanted to fill with objects I lacked.”

“But I left this chest, which used to be his.”  She pointed at the cubby from which she had retrieved the piece of paper, which she continued to brandish as she spoke, “Yes, I left it unopened until I could bear it no longer.  Inside was some money; assorted pictures of him as a child; several pictures of me; some notes from family members; and a single piece of parchment paper with his scrawl on it.  It was almost illegible to me, but I realized with amazement that it was poetry, prefaced with a paragraph effectively griping that I, his wife, was making him write this, but that ‘who knows, maybe I’ll get something out of it.’” She laughed then.  “Yes, that’s what I wrote: ‘who knows, maybe I’ll get something out of it.’ Jon was spellbound, and grateful that this woman felt so free to open up to him, a stranger, about what was quite clearly for her (and would be for anyone) an emotionally fraught subject.  “Well—what was it about?”

She was quiet, and her mouth twitched slightly until she opened it again to speak.  “His fruit trees.  It—the poem, I mean—was about his fucking fruit trees.”  She took a breath, and her face looked more relaxed upon the exhale.  

“The subject wasn’t the most inspired, as far as poetic themes go, but it was beautiful.  It was about how work can make beautiful things.  Fruit too divine for this world and perfect in a way that no creation of man ever could be.  It ended with the phrase, ‘But I did that.’  And what I took his poem to be was an ode to his own work and the time and effort he had taken to plant these trees and the satisfaction he felt in harvesting the fruits of his labors.  It was something I had always suspected about him (that he was defined by work; impelled inexorably to work, and that the result made it worth it for him), but not something I had ever heard him express, in any form, much less in the stanzas of a poem.”  

She chuckled humorlessly and then smiled.  “That’s when I knew his note, saying that he had left me, was a lie.  It simply had to be:  There was no evidence in favor of any other conclusion.”  She unfolded the paper again and began to read it silently again, but Jon spoke and interrupted her.

“But—but, who took him?”  

She regarded him impassively.  “I have my theories, yes.”  

Jon waited for more, but she was not forthcoming.  “Well, who, then,” he prompted.

She tortured her face into an expression that was at once pain and an intense expression of beatitudinous calm.  “I think that it was the Leadership, or the Party, or some agent of theirs collectively, or of either one.  The short answer is that no, I don’t know exactly who or what was responsible, but I think that’s only due to the fact that the inner workings of the government are fucking impossible to interpret.  So, I suppose I would say that I know the responsible party to the extent that anyone can know (to the extent that it would be knowable for me) what goes on within the Leadership or within the Party.”  

“What I know—” she began, placing the palms of her hands on the tops of her thighs, still sitting in a chair at the table, her chest almost leaning on its lip.  “What I know is that I can point my finger at some nebulous being and say:  ‘They are.’  ‘They are the guilty party.’  And that’s enough for me, because I know that there is a government out there responsible for, or otherwise to some extent aware of, the forcible kidnapping of my husband.  And so I don’t look for culpability at a micro level, because I know that even if I were to investigate and find an agency, or group of people, or even a single person responsible, it would never be enough for me.  I think you can understand why, if you have even a basic knowledge of how the Party is organized and how orders are disseminated and executed, as I hope you do.”  She paused and looked up at him, brow furrowed.  “Do you?”

 

Jon nodded his assent and began to say the word ‘yes,’ but was cut short by Jane, who had seen him nod and had continued.  

“Right.  Right, now, if person x says to person y, ‘do this,’ upon whose authority do you think person x makes that command?”  She stopped, giving Jon time to contemplate the people she was envisioning and their hypothetical relationship and dialogue.

Seeing that he was following her, she pressed on.  “Sure, person x may be a high-ranking individual within the Party, but you can be sure that there are many, many people at a similar or higher level than he is.  So, when person x makes this demand of person y, he is taking responsibility for his request, but he is also speaking on behalf of an enormous entity with millions of members, and he is making his demand with that in mind (and person y hears this request and acts upon with this in mind, too).”  She took a breath and looked at Jon, making sure he was paying attention.  He was.

“Beyond that, the Party signifies the common good, and whatever demand is made is in line with the common good simply because the demand is made by a Party representative.  So, when person y executes on the request of person x, person y is following the orders of person x, who in turn is beholden to the whims of a fabricated common good.  And if this makes you ask, ‘fabricated by whom,’ then I applaud your curiosity, but I can’t possibly know—which is, I think, the point.  There’s no one thing at which to be angry or any singular object to which I can direct my grievances—and I have my fair share of those.”  She took a shaky breath and shook her head slightly.  

“No—I am left, instead, with the Party: a decentralized collection of people incentivized to be members thereof by every factor except furthering whatever ideology which the Party claims to favor on its merits.”  

Jon sat down in the chair opposite hers.  His chair was canary yellow while hers was a vibrant burgundy.  He noticed that every single chair at the table, of which there were four, was a different whimsical pastel hue.  His was plastic and hers was wood; he felt silly sitting as he was.  

Nevertheless, he returned his attention to what Jane had just said.  “Jane—and please don’t be offended by this—I’m asking only for my own curiosity, you see:  do you ever think that what you’re stating here seems a little,” he hesitated, “I don’t know, a bit crazy?”  

She looked at him seriously, scrutinizing him, then the lines around her eyes gave way, and she thrust her head back, laughing hoarsely.  And she did this for what Jon perceived to be an excessively long time.  “No, Jon, I don’t.  Listen to what I’m telling you and try to understand:  I have a very fair assessment of my own sanity, and I want you, too, to believe that I’m sane, though ultimately, I’m not concerned with where you end up in that regard.”

She leaned forward again, clasping her hands in front of her.  “I am a painter, Jon.  Do you think I ever wonder to myself ‘why am I making these paintings?  Why do I think there would be value for something you can’t eat, or drink, or with which you can’t even wipe your ass?’  No, I don’t ask myself questions of the sort because I have knowledge of such a thing as an art market, and I have some conception of the sum of money that a particular piece of artwork commands, despite the fact that I know there is very little intrinsic value in such a thing.”

“And I can apply this to you.  (And maybe this will help, for don’t we all understand things when they’re framed from the perspective of our own little world?)  Do you, a regulator, think to yourself, ‘why would I care to judge what a man has done in the context of a list of rules I view to be immutable and just?’  No, because you understand that this ‘set of rules’—which is to say ‘laws’—serve as the accepted societal code of conduct by which everyone in an organized society must (or ‘ought’ to) abide.  Do you think some mathematician out there, studying some esoteric field of mathematics, ever stops his work to think ‘what are these marks on my page; what are these numbers on my tablet; why am I spending time perfecting a craft so removed from the physical world that I can’t possibly see its effects in my life?’  No.  Because he has lived in a world which has been shaped by numbers in ways that those unfamiliar with that relationship could not possibly grasp.”  She regarded him imperiously.

“Now, consider this.”  She paused, and slowly studied the room, chewing on the fingernail of her index finger as she did.  
“Yes—yes, consider this.  I’ll call you (for the purposes of my explanation, only) a hollow man.”

“‘You, Jon, are a hollow man.’”  She stood up to make her pronouncement, and tapped him on each shoulder, as though physically imbuing her nonsensical sentence with meaning by touching him.  “That means that you are a man in all functional senses of the word: you can read, understand, and speak language, but crucially, you have never lived in the world and your understanding of concepts is an intellectual—as opposed to a practical—one only.  Are you with me?”

Jon smiled at her, feeling as though he was both indulging her in whatever end she was pursuing with this hypothetical and indulging himself in listening to her ideas.  “Yep, I’m a hollow man.  I’m with ya.”  He closed his eyes, furrowing his brow in mock concentration, pantomiming turning himself into a hollow man—whatever that would look like, he thought.
“Perfect.”  She sat back down and continued, with a singularly effervescent sparkle of intelligence in her eyes which he was beginning to appreciate the more she spoke.  “Now I’m inviting you into my home as a hollow man and explaining concepts which you fail to grasp.  Interpret my words as (the hollow man) would.”

“Okay:  Look above you.  This is a ceiling fan, which I can make move by flipping this switch,” she leaned back in her chair to flip a white switch on the wall behind her, “and running an electrical current through it.  As a hollow man, you have a perfect understanding of the operation of ceiling fans, and you can appreciate how a motor turns the blades.”  He nodded, regarding the ceiling fan as he imagined a hollow man might.

“But what you do not have is an answer to the question, ‘why not open a window?’  Or, in the alternative, ‘why not get central air?’  The answers to those questions elude you because there are some things you have not read about.  You have the feeling of having perfect mastery of your environment—because you have a wealth of knowledge about it—but you are hollow in a way you cannot understand.  You consider yourself all-knowing, but you have fatally imperfect information about your own life and cannot answer basic questions about the world you live in.  And they’re questions you would not know to ask, because they seem to you self-evident, but you’re missing something you would never think to look for.”  She looked at him and he returned her gaze, processing her words.

“Do you understand me, Jon?”  

“I think so…”  His head ached.  “But I don’t know, I’m still a bit foggy about it all, to be honest.”  His stomach growled audibly, and Jane jumped up, looking almost alarmed.  

“Oh!  I’m sorry, Jon.  You were promised food when you came here—and here I am, making a liar out of myself!”  She hurried through a set of hinged doors leading into yet another room—one that Jon had not yet entered.  He remained seated for a moment.  Then, when it became clear to him that she would not be returning, he stood up and followed her through the set of doors into a brightly-lit kitchen—the countertops, walls, and tiling of which were all pristinely white.  It seemed to him to be composed almost entirely of a sort of decadent-looking marble.  

Jane was preoccupied with a glass pan atop one of the countertops.  In the pan, aluminum foil was wrapped around an unknown dish which vented steam through its covering.  The base of the pan was clear and there was an unknown liquid sloshing around in it as she fussed with a black, plastic-looking stick, which she was inserting through the foil into the dish.  She eyed the device and nodded her approval of whatever measurement it had made.  

As he walked in, she looked up, and brushed her wet hands on her pants.  “Dinner should just about be ready.  I hope you’re hungry!”  

He was, and he smiled his thanks.  

“Mm,” she answered, by way of acknowledgment, before adding, “the washroom is through there.”  She pointed to yet another doorway, which opened into a dark room which brightened automatically upon his entry.  The floors were covered with overlapping carpets—some animal pelts; some small carpets the size of bathmats; some large rugs which were decorated with ornate designs or fanciful geometric patterns.  He looked up and saw that a rather impressive-looking fireplace served as the room’s focal point, and one chair faced it directly.  The walls were cluttered with books and pieces of paper which hung out of shelves at odd angles and gave the place the look and feel of a study belonging to a great intellectual.

“Let me help you with that.”  Jon turned, startled, to find that Jane had followed him into the room.  She brushed by him and ran her hands along the spine of a particularly worn-looking book.  She fumbled for something at its base, and the entire bookcase began rumbling, before it retreated into the wall.  

Jon jumped back in alarm as Jane watched him, chuckling to herself.  

“Josh built this,” she made a sweeping gesture with her arm to made clear that by ‘this,’ she was referring to the sliding bookcase, “when we first bought the property.  We were going to make it a safe room, but there didn’t seem to be any pressing security concerns at the time, so we repurposed it to function as a washroom.”  Sure enough, Jon could see past the bookshelf into a room composed of the same white material as the kitchen.  As Jon stepped forward to take a closer look, Jane retreated into the kitchen.  

Enchanted by what he had just witnessed, Jon continued to inspect the mechanism which opened the bookcase.  It appeared to work via a sliding track system, and the whole bookcase was set on minuscule rollers.  The sliding feature would presumably activate by depressing some kind of hidden button embedded within the base of the book.  He read the spine of the text:  “The Behavioral Bible, 2054.”  Huh, thought Jon.  It was a Party bible from a decade ago, which struck Jon as strange, because he could not see Jane as a Party member.  Certainly not in light of the theory she had with respect to the party’s role in her husband’s disappearance.  The bible seemed worn, though the pages seemed to be in perfect condition, its sections filled with prescriptions for party members’ behavior and the yearly ideology of the party.  Maybe a Party bible serving as the opening to this secret room was a slight against the Party?  He reasoned that it was possible, given the high esteem in which Jane seemed to hold metaphors.  

He walked into the bright white room.  It was warm, due perhaps to its being insulated by several feet of bookshelf on one side and whatever lay between the washroom and the outdoors on the other.  Jon noticed that the window above the sink was fogged up with condensation, although he had only just entered the room.  He bent at the sink and rinsed his hands in the warm water, which came out of the tap automatically when he placed his hands near the basin of the sink.  He splashed some water on his face and looked at himself in the mirror, wiping away the fog from this mirror to better inspect himself.  

His jawbones looked more defined than he remembered them looking and his eyes looked sunken into his face.  He pinched and un-pinched his cheeks, enjoying that the white marks from his having pinched himself could visibly fade in real time.  He grinned; he thought he looked like an old-fashioned ascetic monk in the middle of his fast—his face gaunt from malnourishment for the honor of some righteous cause.  

Asceticism:  what was asceticism, really, he wondered, as he studied the mist on the mirror and the angular, jagged makeup of the bones in his face.  It was as if the elasticity in his skin had been stolen from him, and all that remained was a skeletal shell of what his face had been, its volume having been insidiously removed from his cheeks (and with it, maybe something more).  

He dried his hands, exited the washroom, and walked out from the bookshelf and into the room with the many rugs for a second time.  It was a peculiar feeling to exit from a bookshelf, he thought with a smirk.  But what are you going to do: Jane was an artist!  He could not attribute to a certain event his disdain for artists, nor was ‘disdain’ the exact right word for the way he felt.  It was more that he treated artists as a category of people which were diametrically opposed to him in all respects; the opposite from him in an imagined spectrum of thinking about things properly.  Jon did not know why one would seek out being an artist, nor did he understand how one gained ability at artwork; those people who had sought out a life in art—and who possessed some innate faculty for it—were different than he, and he knew it.  
In fact, the more he attempted to trace the source of his sentiment with respect to artists to a specific period in his life, the more he realized that he always, in one or another, felt this way.  In kindergarten, the teachers would examine the students with a test of drawing ability.  Students as young as five were given a black-and-white photograph of a military-style airplane, with dual-cylinder blasters affixed to each wing.  Children were given a range of colors and a range of shades to use in their artistic rendering, the goal of which exercise was to approximate the airplane as closely as one was able (or as closely as could be reasonably expected from a kindergarten-age child).  

Jon reflected that there was a trick to it:  Since the photo was in black-and-white, the use of color would have been impractical and therefore indicative of some sort of deviant, artistic thinking.  Perhaps a child could be forgiven for behaving irrationally, but it would be necessary to recondition the student in some way.  Jon remembered with satisfaction the wan smile Mrs. Gardner had given him when he had submitted his drawing.  He had distorted the proportions of one of the wings, but it was otherwise recognizable as an airplane—and, what’s more, it was rendered in black-and-white and more or less to the scale of the photo.  

He remembered that Mrs. Gardner had showed the picture he had drawn to a man who come for the day but whom Jon did not know.  The man looked at the drawing, looked back at Jon, and looked at the drawing for a second time.  Then, reaching into his bag, he produced a tablet—which now seemed to Jon, upon remembrance, to be comically large in comparison to today’s standards—and had jotted down some notes.  He had then folded his arms, the tablet hanging lazily from the tips of his fingers and had given Jon a tight-lipped expression which was almost a smile.  Then he had left the room and Jon never saw him again.  

But a girl in his class had fared worse.  She had used blue to draw the sky, which was not by itself alarming, since this made sense given the color of the sky on most days was blue, but then she had also used it to draw a stripe—or some other such feature (Jon was a little hazy on the details)—on the wing of the plane.  This was pure imagination by the girl, since there were no clues hinting at the color of the wings.  This did not please Mrs. Gardner in the slightest, who left the room and, a moment later, beckoned for the girl to follow her.  He had not seen the girl after that, either.  
Geez, I hope they helped her, Jon thought.  With an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach, he had the sense that ‘help’ was not quite the right descriptor.  

Jon could hear rattling in the kitchen and the distinct hissing of the sausages, which were apparently being re-heated. As he entered the kitchen, he was greeted with a notably less white kitchen than before.  On the walls, a spray of tan juice could be seen, and Jane was on her knees on the tiles picking up roast vegetables which Jon reckoned must have sloshed out of the pan.  He bent down to assist Jane, who half-heartedly made a motion as if to shoo him away before accepting his assistance.  

“How’d you like the room?’” Jane asked him with a flash of humor in her eyes.

He laughed.  “It was unique, I’ll say that for it,” replied Jon.  In truth, he had always marveled at the hidden rooms or secret compartments that had been depicted in some of the movies he had grown up watching.  He also had a number of questions for her, but he elected to remain quiet in case bringing up Josh’s former projects proved to be a sore subject for Jane.  This seemed very possible in light of what he had heard from her about his kidnapping.  At the same time, Jane struck him as an obstinate, headstrong woman, and he wagered that she could more than withstand the mention of her husband’s name and reference to his work.  

He decided ultimately that there was little to be gained from bringing up the specter of her dead husband.  “What do you paint nowadays,” he asked her, keeping his voice casual.

“Oh, whatever I want, really.  Whatever’s speaking to me most and whatever offers me a conduit to express what I feel that I need to express.”  She stopped picking up vegetables and exhaled, as if reflecting on her passion, before picking at an errant piece of onion and returning to her task.  

“It was a cliché in the art world, you know,” she glanced at Jon conspiratorially, “that ‘art is expression,’ I mean.  But I really feel as though that’s so.  And when you don’t have the capacity to say with words what you want to say, then art is an outlet.”  Jon thought on this and asked her a question to which he already knew she would have a fully formed answer (as she did in all things).  

“But when do you have something to say but lack the words to say it?”  

Jane stopped picking at the mess of vegetables scattered on the kitchen floor and stared at her hands, which were clutching some cut zucchini and a head of broccoli.  “When I have the most important things to express, I often find that I can’t say in words what I want to express more viscerally.  That is the role of art in my life.”  

It’s still unclear to me what she means by that, Jon thought.  Am I being dense or am I missing something that, if grasped, could be potentially important?  He decided that there was no shame in misunderstanding a discussion of art, since he was a more practical-minded person.  He should therefore have no ego about whether or not he knew what Jane was talking about when she waxed poetic vis-a-vis the virtues of art.  

“But maybe an example?”  He stood and tossed the scraps of vegetable matter he had collected into the sink.  “Like when—when you think of your husband?”

She was silent.  Then, “sometimes, yes.”  Her calmness encouraged him to continue in this line of questioning.  

“Can I see something you made when you were thinking of him?”  

She thought about it.  Then, she stood and deposited the vegetables that she had collected in a trash can which Jon had missed earlier and walked out of the room.  From the next room:  “Alright.  Come on, then, we can go to my studio.”  A studio—Jon knew of such places but had no concept of what a studio looked like as a practical matter or what artwork or art-related materials it might contain.  Excitedly, he trotted to catch her and followed as she slowly moved through the sprawling first floor of the house.  

She passed through two rooms which were new to Jon—the first room was plain, with tan walls, quartzite tiling, and a long tube running along the top of one of the walls, which Jon assumed could contain a folded-up projector or a screen of some sort; the second room was lit with two lamps at opposing ends and featured a marble island which housed a large glass chamber.  The chamber was set deep within the island, so that its contents were visible only by looking through the glass at its top.  As Jon peered in, he smelled mildew and humidity and he realized that he was looking at a rather sizeable terrarium.  It was lush and clearly well maintained, and Jon was delighted to see that several small green frogs perched on a thin twig which was arranged at an angle on a bed of moss.  It was as though a section of the forest had been removed and transplanted into this case.  And the effect, thought Jon, was marvelous.

Jon glanced up from the case in time to see Jane retreating from view, and Jon took several quick strides to chase her out of the door by which she was leaving.  As he passed through, a bright burst of light from the setting sun caught him by surprise, and he recoiled involuntarily.  Jane was up ahead—moving slowly but with purpose—to a structure about a hundred yards from the house.  Squinting and putting his arm between his face and the sun to protect his eyes, he followed her, the mown grass giving way slightly as he stepped through the spongy-feeling lawn.  

As his eyes adjusted, he saw with some disappointment that they were heading for what was little more than a shack, made accessible by a door fashioned out of crisscrossing wooden boards.  As he approached it, he could see that each board was etched with a line or two of writing, though the text was impossible to make out on account of the rough grain of the wood.  

Jane opened the door to a room which was pitch dark, but the light from the outdoors lit the first three feet of the entryway.  

Jon’s initial impression was that the floor was filthy.  It was strewn with an assortment of paintbrushes and plastic packaging in addition to a thin layer of dirt and dust (likely, he thought, accumulated due to the terribly constructed door).  It fit its frame reasonably enough, but it sagged at the bottom corners, and the cracks formed by the warped wood allowed the outside in.  

Jane fumbled with a cord which seemed to be attached to the ceiling, though Jon could not be sure of that, since it was still very dark inside and his eyes had only just adjusted to the bright of the outdoors.  With a click, Jane pulled down on the cord and the room lit up.  

On a light-colored and pock-marked framing table, Jon could see three different canvases.  One, of a woman’s profile, was very large and lay flat on the table.  The other two were more abstract and were mounted on an easel, separated by a vertical metal protuberance.  Both seemed unfinished to Jon, although he supposed that a piece of artwork appearing to be unfinished could be a desirable attribute in the black is white, up is down dislogic of the art world.  As he stared at the paintings, he saw there was a common theme in the style of their brushstrokes:  The strokes were heavy, and sections of greater or lesser amounts of paint were incorporated throughout the pieces in a very pleasing way.

To the extent that Jane had attempted to achieve realism in her portrayal of the profile of the woman, she had failed—but Jon felt drawn to the art, still.  The pupils of the eyes were too large and the eyes themselves were set too close together; the nose was too small; and the mouth curled up at the corners.  

The effect, as a whole, was almost sinister.  The woman looked to Jon to be both plotting something evil and falling victim to some either evil which had befallen her and to which she was helpless.  Feelings need not be explicitly articulated to be explained, thought Jon.  Is this what Jane sees when she looks at her painting?  Had she imbued her artwork with whatever pain she was feeling?  It would do no good to ask her, since he lacked the vocabulary to describe what he was seeing in the lines of the woman’s face and would have felt uncomfortable expressing such emotions in words to Jane, nonetheless.

“Well, this is it,” said Jane, proudly, and Jon glanced up at her sharply, as he had forgotten momentarily that he was not alone in the room.  “I’ve got my easels here, my paints, various sketchbooks,” she gestured to a cardboard box which was half-opened, revealing several sheafs of paper and loosely bound notebooks, “and, of course, my wall of inspiration.”  He followed her eyes to a wall of hanging photographs, the lighting in all of which was unique.  There were contre-jour photos—a phrase he remembered from his mother’s recollection of her days of grade school French—of trees and water, backlit by sunlight.  There was a picture of Jane, which she had taken from a low and rather unflattering angle, and which had only a small area of focus in the middle of the image.  Jon wondered if the lensing effect had been purposeful and he imagined that it must have been, since Jane was, after all, an artist by trade—and he had no reason to believe that she was anything short of highly competent.