“I WONDERED IF you’d show up after all,” Sela said as she led him up to her studio.
“Thanks for the offer.”
“It’s the other way around. I’m intrigued. I get the sense you have very vivid recall. Painting someone else’s dream instead of my own visions will be a challenge I welcome.”
She offered him a seat on a sofa near her work area. The lamps in the room sent out a warm glow.
“I can’t actually paint anything in this light, of course, but I can sketch it and make a light draft, and if you think it looks close, I can do a preliminary tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to interfere with your own work.”
Sela smiled. “If you were, I’d tell you. As it happens, right now I’ve finished a piece and need to do a few things to it and I’m letting that gestate for a few days. Timing’s good for me. I wouldn’t mind doing your portrait, either, comes to that.”
Nathan was startled. “Me?”
“Yes, I’m serious. I’d like to see if I can capture that look you have when you go inside yourself—it’s like you’re listening to something.”
“I usually am. One of these dream images, and it drives me crazy sometimes. I never know when they’ll show up.”
“I’m sorry, Nathaniel. I really am. I would wish health for you, to have that part of your brain whole again.”
“Thing is,” Nathan said with a sudden understanding, “without it I’d never have come to Canyon City, never started working with Harry, or met Sierra, or you.”
“Now isn’t that a good thing to know! An upside to everything, even a parasite in your brain.” Sela laughed in her musical way. “Thanks be to the gifts we are given.”
She pulled a large pad of art paper toward her. “So, give me a dream, my dear Nathan.”
“I was going to describe a forest someone took me to. It had a feeling in it, like something before time. I know that doesn’t make sense.”
“It does make sense. I know when I paint I start at a certain time, and I finish at a certain time. In-between, I’m in a different place. It isn’t like being suspended for a while, or forgetful. It’s something tangible. Wherever I am, it is more real to me than this world is. While I’m painting, there is only the moment. No time.”
The lamplight glinted off her hair. He wanted to reach out and touch it, but he didn’t want to change their dynamic. Not then. Not yet.
“After thinking about it, there’s another scene I want you to use, instead. It’s a plaza, bright sunlight, and it’s a place of learning. It doesn’t look old. The learning takes place at subatomic levels. People—children—are being shown by adults how to create worlds by manipulating particles and wavelengths of photons. The children work together in groups sitting around the plaza.”
“Good grief, Nathaniel! You want me to paint photons?” Sela looked up at him and laughed.
He described the journey that Soran had taken him on, the crystalline forms, the speed of it, the carboniferous forest.
“The child told me he was showing me a stage of this planet’s early life, that he had created it from seeing into my mind, by reading something there. What, my DNA? I don’t know. Then he was going to add that world to ones his group created. I didn’t stay to see how it all went together.” Nathan watched her face. “Sounds crazy, right?”
“Not at all. My word of choice is fascinating. They’re your dreams. No judgment here. So you want me to draw the plaza, not the forest he showed you?”
“Yes, but more than that.” Nathan continued and described the last time he had seen the plaza, the stones split apart and the children falling into the broken ground as the storm consumed them.
“What a terrible thing,” Sela said softly.
“I want you to draw both, before and after, in the same painting.”
“Split the images. I understand.”
Sela had begun drawing as he talked, making quick lines with her charcoal pencil across the paper. Now she tore that page out of her pad and on a new sheet drew a thick line down through the center and began sketching again. She worked fast. He saw the concentration. She had absorbed what he told her and had already forgotten he was there. He felt that like a solid thing.
“How is this—does it work for you?” She handed him the pad.
Nathan stared down at the drawing. On the left side he saw the plaza in Elaimat that Naliv had brought him to. A few of the details were altered, but in the end Sela had captured it, the light and freedom and joy of it. There was no color, just the lines she’d drawn, but he could feel the sunlight reflecting off the stones.
“This is it,” he whispered, not looking up at her. He tapped his finger on the left drawing. “This is it exactly.”
On the right was the same scene, but this time it was filled with the storm, the violence of it palpable in the few strokes she had made, and then the children screaming as they fell into the chasm that opened beneath them. The jagged edges of the earth filled the scene from the center down to the end. He touched the page and traced the lines with his fingers.
“Exactly as I saw it,” he said. “Just the same. Elaimat.” The serrations seemed to move as he touched them, and the colors fell across his vision like stars. His head felt, too, as if it had been split in half.
“Nathan!” Sela had come over to him and was shaking him. “Nathan!”
He wanted to explain, but it was too late. “No time,” he said to her, before losing consciousness.
YOU ARE READING
The Magic Hour
Mystery / Thriller"It was not exactly dark, but a kind of twilight or gloaming. There were neither windows nor candles, and he could not make out where the twilight came from, if not through the walls and roof." -Childe Rowland "T...
