VI.

Ah, Jessi. It looked like she had really connected with Walter, as he explained his vocation with unprecedented candidness. He was coming out of his shell; he was speaking his mind honestly to them, and Harlow didn’t get it, but Jessi did. She must have been wallowing in her element.

For the first time that night, she didn’t hear him speaking to her. And for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t thinking about herself, either.

When the strange bird-man and -woman called out to Thad and pulled him away from the table, Jessi looked up suddenly. Her anxiety over Thad’s questionable authority and his claims about the separation of emotion and life, or emotion and art, evaporated when she saw the newcomers. She’d met them before; they came to these events frequently and deferred absurdly to Thad. The man was a painter she had once worked with. The woman’s name was Laura.

What a startling—miniscule!—coincidence, that brought her out of that onerous confusion. All at once one burden was lifted, and another made haste to take its place; Errol’s dream returned to her with vivid force, effectively dissolving everything she had been mulling over before, a suffocating, unforgiving black storm cloud.

For if you remember, it was only that morning that she had been up before dawn to answer his cry for help; it had been the first time she had witnessed him behave any differently than a kindly old piglet; she had never before seen him any less than delighted, enraptured by his own dreams and by her interpretation of them. In fact, he was a person, as she now noticed for the first time since she had started working for him over three years ago, who was enchanted by life in general, and his enchantment was beautiful and contagious. She wanted desperately not to lose that.
Plunged into her memories of that morning, which had flattened themselves into the folds of her brain but now, triggered by the name Laura, came out from their hiding and commanded her full attention like guerilla shadows, she was only half-listening to the discussion around her. She registered that Harlow again began to monopolize Walter’s conversation, beguiling him with her scheming fascination with his life, and only hazily noticed that he was looking at her, Jessi, when he spoke.

It was haunting. Errol Spice, as old as the Victorian house he lived in, as dusty as the attic that served as his home and her studio, who could see the world in fantastical color by closing his eyes—Errol Spice was no longer himself. He was terrified; he was depressed; when she left him at eleven o’clock this morning, promising to come back after getting some breakfast, he had only barely calmed down. What bothered her too was his anomalous reaction to a genuinely disturbing fear: he merely shook in little vibrations, shrank back into his pillows, and asked that she stay there, and asked that she paint.

How was she supposed to paint a fictional schizophrenia? Was it even schizophrenia that he dreamed about? She had no background in mental health and only knew the word to be associated with split personalities, or something, and she wasn’t even sure about that. She had never given it a second thought. But now Errol had described something so sad and so scary that even she had begun to feel fear, just by experiencing it secondhand. She had returned to him later that day, and he had scarcely improved. She’d considered taking him to the hospital.

His reaction—so timid, so humble—what was she supposed to make of it? He couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t get out of bed. He didn’t want to leave, although his very surroundings seemed to preserve the terror. He didn’t want to talk about anything else. His first and maniacal desire, the only way he could think to allay the fear, was to have Jessi immortalize it on canvas.

Reflecting on his odd reaction made her question why he had wanted her to paint anything for him at all. What kind of strange desire was it that compelled him to search out a willing young artist, a painter who did not mind his erratic demands and schedule and pay, who could visualize his vivid dreams and apparently do them justice, somehow to his satisfaction? She had long since stopped trying to evaluate his motives. For a long time now she had only ever listened to his requests with a benign condescension and accommodated, content to not have to look for a day job and to have plenty of time and sometimes the money to paint her own visions and meet friends for drinks. But this morning it nagged her. Why does he think that my painting can alleviate his fear?

She surfaced to hear Walter say, “I’d always been writing,” and she knew he was speaking to her as well as to Harlow, expecting a proper response. She forced herself back to Baci and fabricated a reply, knowing that the path down which her thoughts were taking her would soon ensnare her, as in a dark wood, if she let it; she needed to cling to Baci as she would to a search party.

“What did you go to school for?” she asked, hoping it was a relevant question.

“History,” he said, and involuntarily she started to slip back into the woods, the darkness of a dense wilderness encroaching around the edges; again she was surrounded by Errol’s attic and Errol’s dream.

She heard him say “I wanted to know everything,” and she was reminded of something Errol had said once, was it really three years ago? that she had begun to come see him regularly; before she got used to his eccentricity, there was a brief time when she tried in vain to understand it. “Toledo?” she’d said, picturing Madrid. “I think I know what it looks like. Do you want me to base it on a certain photo? Do you have any pictures from your time there?”

“Oh, no,” said Errol, the drawn-out o sounds making his voice sound even thinner, like a drinking straw. “That’s not what it looks like at all. Last night it looked very green, but blue. Is that teal, dear?”

“I—what? I don’t know what you mean,” she said crossly, frustrated at an old man’s senility. “I can’t paint it unless I know what it looks like, and I want to stay true to your dream, so I need you to tell me.”

“You will,” he said serenely, and she almost decided then to just paint whatever the hell she wanted.

But she was still curious. “Why do you have such a specific request in mind, but you won’t give me the specifics? Do you think I can just intuit them?”

“I want it to mirror what I already know, which is what I dreamt,” he answered, “but I also want to know more, which hasn’t happened yet. I want to know everything. And that includes what you see, too.”

Utterly exasperated, Jessi fumbled around in her own head, looking for a response.

“Why?”

For a moment, she thought Errol was speechless, or asleep. Then he said, “I don’t know. Surely nothing else seems necessary. What else is there?”

“It became necessary?” Harlow asked. Jessi jumped.

“But how will my guessing at what your dreams look like, and painting them for you, help you to know everything?” she’d demanded.

Errol Spice took several deep breaths before answering. “Because what you know is part of everything. If I don’t try to see from your viewpoint, I am limiting my possibility of learning. I need your piece. Together we can begin to put the pieces together. I…I wish we had everybody’s piece. But it’s just you and me, here, and I am asking—entreating you, dear—for yours.”

“Why mine?”

With the utmost delicateness he said to her, “If you’d rather not do it, then I would hate to force you. You are quite young, I notice. I think perhaps that you’re too young to understand. Which is, of course, why I value your piece so much. It is fresh and utterly unique.”

Naturally this inflamed Jessi and she said indignantly, “Well, I’m sorry if I think differently than you do. It’s just that I don’t see how you’re making any sense.”

“Please,” he said gently, patiently. “I can’t explain it. I want…the difference between our thoughts. I want to see the gap between our thoughts so that I can start to fill it in, to start to see everything. I didn’t choose to want this. I want it, though. I want to see during the day what I see at night. Through someone else’s eyes. Someone with an eye for color and has taste and elegance. My dear, you bring such elegance. Please.”

“You didn’t choose what you wanted,” she told Walter.

He licked his lips. “I suppose I didn’t,” he answered, vaguely confused. Before she could qualify her contention she was back in Errol’s attic, and he was lying comfortably under his purple paisley quilt, surrounded by fluffy pillows, his ancient fingers poking out over the edge of the covers by his chin, pointing at his toes, like a little boy having a bedtime story read to him. He seemed distinctly unaware that next to him, the picture of tranquility, Jessi was so upset she was actually shaking.

She began to speak but then was quieted by a silent urge inside of her; it seemed any movement or noise would scare him out of his peace, which would harm or maybe even kill him, she imagined, and no matter how maddening his esoteric explanations and nonsensical requests were, she was very, disproportionately fond of him. In his presence she felt a warmth she had not felt in years. Safe—she felt safe near him, and even in her insufferable state of anxiety which he had caused, she wanted nothing that might endanger that security.

She let out a long breath, committing to ignore his comments and do her job, feelings aside.

“All right,” she said, fighting to speak evenly, “please tell me what you want, and I’ll do my very best.”

She realized he’d been humming to himself, looking up at the sloped ceiling as if a movie were playing on it, just for him. Now he stopped, and his eyes darted over to her without disturbing his head’s nesting place in the pillows.

“Ah, yes. I’m so very glad, Jessi, to hear you say that. It is a great relief to me.”

“We were in Toledo,” she reminded him.

“You are too good to me. Yes, Toledo. It was a brilliant sort of emerald blue. What an interesting color! I don’t know that it’s found in nature, you know.”

“Hm. But you saw it in your dream?”

“Mm…‘saw’ is such a strong word, don’t you think? I would hesitate.”

She made a note and renewed her recent commitment to objectivity. “Okay. What else?”

When he had described the scene, a bewitching medieval scene of learning to waltz from a baron, or something, Jessi looked back at the notes she had taken. She had a page full of floating words and arrows and cross-outs and some diagrams which meant nothing to her, a list of adjectives attempting to describe a color he may or may not have seen, and some quotes she’d recorded verbatim, with the intention of deciphering them later. “I think I have it,” she told him, “but may I ask you to repeat your instructions? Just so we’re clear?”

“My instructions,” he said, and he sounded at once like a very young child and a very old man, like a teacher and a learner at once. He was both, he was all.

She waited.

“Please paint me my dreams,” he said, and with that, was no longer interested in talking.

Harlow was hopelessly confused.

“How is that like instructions?” she asked, her voice wavering on the edge of defeat.

“I think,” said Jessi, “if I know what you’re talking about, that you have it inside of you. The desire to do what you need to do. Almost that, you don’t want…what you don’t need. It is your job to figure out how to make it happen.”

“Yes,” agreed Walter, “yes, that’s it. Self-reflection can tell you quite a bit about yourself.”

She remembered how young she was when she first met Errol, when she attempted her first painting for him, when she brought it to him sheepishly, expecting to be rebuffed, unpaid, fired immediately. He loved it.

Part of what she loved in him was his complete disregard for the concept of right versus wrong. Because he was obsessed with the idea of Everything, he could not deny one or the other, so anything she said was valid. Everything she said, it seemed, when she was suggesting something new, a new idea or interpretation, he welcomed joyfully. He celebrated. He only rejected her comments when she said something literal or constraining or regressive.

She had never been around anyone who accepted her candid ideas as openly as she did, without judgment, with a willingness to consider them, with a desire to understand them. His dreams were just as much hers as his, because he allowed her to be a part of them. He asked her to paint something she couldn’t see, and when she finally let herself, it was the freest she had ever felt.

The schizophrenia dream scared her. There were no colors. There were no sounds. There were humanoid characters, lacking any warmth or human features; they were shadows of people, shells, they were more like death than life. There were foggy, blurry landscapes that did not entice, only depressed. There were no possibilities.

Painting a dancing scene with a flamboyant duke who had a nose as thin as air and a feathery boa the color of twirling—what did that even mean? She had painted it nonetheless, because Errol had said it matter-of-factly; he had made her believe it made sense; he had made her almost see it, and that was enough to get started. He trusted her the way a child trusts his mother, to do what is right, and the way a mother trusts her child, to imagine. He entrusted his dreams to her, and the only way she could do wrong was if she refused. Painting these synesthetic reveries, these excursions into life, these adventures that ignored parts of speech and grew entirely from free association and wordplay and an all-inclusive belief in the imagination—painting these was freedom. She could get lost in the colors and forget what words meant, or she could learn what a word meant based solely on its sound. The dreams became hers, and they shared with her the absurd joy, the disregard of “true” and “false,” the embrace of the world, the promise of endless possibility, of which they were made.

“I’d feel that I’d lost contact with myself,” she heard, “I don’t know what I would do.”

“Maybe you’d feel free,” she said before thinking, and she watched the swimming colors dissolve, and in their place, a swirling, unfocused sea of red and black and skin-white.

In the middle of an interminable conversation that was decidedly not about colors and words she found herself, struggling to pretend nothing was wrong, and Walter said flatly, “Ah, maybe. Does your motivation limit you?”

“No,” she said too quickly, almost forgetting that she was not within a dream-painting. “No, I mean. Not my motivation, no. But it might be freeing to live without constraints—” (she wished they had any idea) “—because if you’re not held to them…” (realizing that she was not making sense, she struggled to redirect her sentence) “You wouldn’t feel like you’d failed if you didn’t follow them.” There. She’d escaped her own trap, by barely making a point.

What would it be like to paint the schizophrenia dream? Could she enter it the way she had learned to enter the others? Would she find herself lost, or trapped, or both, amidst a backdrop of gray skies and claustrophobic horizons? Would she lose herself in the joylessness of confusion and a changing reality, of insincerity, of emptiness? It was the opposite of their usual dreams. Before, she and Errol had used sensory perception as law, so all that mattered were the senses and the delight they brought, their blissful exploration of the impossible, their effortless negation of the intellect, and in an impossible paradox, that intellect was challenged, validated, uplifted; now, in this dream, chaos reigned, lack of sensory stimuli abounded. The senses were utterly devastated and the intellect could not stand up straight without being pushed back down by contradictions and despair. There was no joy to be found in the senses’ play because the self was not intact. In order to paint it, she would have to undertake the same process she did to paint his happier dreams: She would have to enter into it as fully as she could, so that she could understand it, and interpret it, and visualize it. She would attempt to give it order, make it make sense, so that she could give it shape and put it on canvas, so that he in turn could look at it and understand his own dream, and now she understood why he wanted her to paint.

If Errol went there in his dream, she would have to follow him there.