Escape Velocity: The Anthology (41 page)

       “
Atoms, dear boy,” he would say. “Everything is composed of atoms – physically, but not geometrically indivisible. Between them lies empty space.”

       “
The void?”

       “
Don’t get me started on the void,” he growled. “Those idiots who play with words say that if you can conceive of the void, it’s a real thing and therefore isn’t a void at all. Nonsense! Atoms are indestructible and have always been and always will be in motion – unlike the brains of my detractors.”

      
Democritus was always ahead of his time. I tried to persuade him to take the risk and accompany me on my travels so that he could meet Einstein and join our chats when the great man tried to explain how space is relative and cannot be separated from time as part of a generally curved space-time manifold. My response was usually: “You must meet a Greek fellow I know. He’d give you a run for your money,” but Einstein was like Da Vinci; surprisingly careful for a genius, and unlikely to hop into a time machine unless he’d designed it himself.

But I’m rambling. I was going to tell you about Maggie. When her infidelities reached the point where I was ready to disembowel her, and needed a major distraction, I hopped back to paint the Sistine Chapel for some light relief. You look surprised. Oh, I didn’t do the entire thing myself, obviously. I worked alongside Perugino, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, and the others. I kept a low profile and let the top three take the glory. Between us, we did a fabulous job, well set off by the starry night on the ceiling. Vincent would’ve loved it. Popes, however, are tricky creatures, and don’t always appreciate what they’ve got. The rest of the story is well known, and the earlier efforts all but forgotten. Yes – Mick turned up to re-paint the ceiling and design a last judgement for the end wall.

      
He was so young. So beautiful. I was by now far too old for him to notice me, so I hopped again, and re-appeared as a young and well-muscled member of the scaffolding team.

      
The Angelic Mick hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place, but he was the darling of the pervert Popes, and had been given a commission he dared not refuse. He painted more like a demon than an angel; peopling his frescoes with all the glorious men and boys he’d ever desired. There was a scandal, naturally, and some twit came along later and painted out the genitalia.

      
Ah, Mick. Stinking Mick who smelled like a sewer rat due to his propensity for losing track of time and forgetting to wash, and who permanently crippled himself standing with his head bent back for however many years it took.

      
Did he paint my Maggie? Did he hell. Have you seen his attempts to paint women? They’re either thinly disguised boys, like the glorious Libyan sybil, or shapeless blobs with ill-defined bodies, like Eve when she’d been kicked out of the garden. Lack of familiarity, you see. Maggie never sought him out. She knew there would be no point.

      
Mick grew fond of me and begged for permission to paint me on the ceiling. I capitulated, after a particularly steamy session late one night, and agreed to be the prophet Jeremiah. Mick painted a restrained and loving portrait that brought out my intellectual qualities. Centuries later, another dear friend (Rodin) re-did me as The Thinker. The two depictions are all but identical.

      
Mick was a darling, but he had his problems, the worst of which was his propensity for wallowing in guilt. He was the worst of sinners in his own eyes – a fornicator. The problem stemmed from all those muscled bodies he’d spend hours drawing late into the night. His own body, in contrast, was shrivelling due to his manic work ethic and tendency to forget to eat. He even painted himself into the last judgement as a piece of flailed skin. I think it was meant as a joke, but I’ve never been sure. Mick wasn’t exactly a bundle of laughs. Lenny Da Vinci was potentially far more fun, but his towering intellect intimidated even me.

      
The flailed skin was revolting.

       “
Mick, why have you painted yourself as an empty scrotum?”

      
He scowled, and tried to look at me to reply, but his neck was stuck as usual, so all he managed was a strangled, “Get lost.”

       “
All right, have it your own way. Addio, mio Angelo.” I walked out of the chapel; suddenly loathe ever to step in there again. I was itching to travel, having been in Rome for years now, and I missed Maggie. My fury with her had fizzled away with time, and the beauty Doré had captured so perfectly in his ‘Charity’ portrait haunted me.

      
I travelled backwards and forwards in careful increments, stopping off at likely venues. I finally spotted her on the Grand Canal in Venice. Joe Canaletto wouldn’t have painted her – he never did the figures. It must have been one of the lads from the studio. Definitely her, though (and I bet she slept with the boy, whoever he was). Bright red bodice, short dark curly hair, teasing expression, flaunting her décolletage. Yes, that was my Maggie. She’d know I could see her, the little tease. The painting had to have been done in the 1730s, but Canaletto was always terrible at record keeping, so I couldn’t pin her down with any more accuracy.

      
In desperation, I jumped back to have another chat with Democritus.

       “
Look, this granularity. I need more details, so that I can focus in more accurately.”

       “
We’ve been through this before, dear boy. Imagine each grain of sand can be cut again and again –”

       “
Until you end up with an atom – or quarks, gluons etc. Indivisible. I know. That’s fine for matter, but what about time?”

       “
Why don’t you ask your wooden friend?”

       “
My what?”

       “
That Mr Plank you were talking about last time we chatted.” He giggled at the name.

       “
Max Planck? He’s great on measurements, and yes, I calibrate in Planck lengths these days to keep it simple – but that’s irrelevant. If time is granular, then what’s Maggie doing? She talks about tape loops. Continuums. Chickens and eggs. She thinks everything happens at once. All time is ‘now’ time.”

       “
Doesn’t sound likely to me. I’d be more inclined to think the moment ‘now’ doesn’t exist at all, but is a combination of the effects of the past and future on the conscious mind.”

       “
I agree, but she believes the tape upon which all events are written already exists, and we just read the bit we’re on.”

       “
That can’t be right. The void …” His brow creased.

       “
Go on?”

       “
The spaces between the atoms of time have no time in them, by definition. Therefore ‘now’ has no time, but is the product of the past and future interacting; it’s the place between what we’ve experienced, and what’s yet to come. Would you like some wine? Best way to experience the void, undoubtedly.”

      
Several glasses later, we’d invented a succession of ‘is’ pods, where nothing happens – creating time but not existing in it. Democritus wrote it all down, but his notes were lost in that catastrophic fire, years later. Probably a good thing. The world wasn’t ready for the sort of pseudo-logical positivism, where nothing could be and become at the same time, yet not at the same time, and by the same token nothing could become and be at all. That makes little sense in retrospect, but I was very drunk at the time.

      
I left Democritus and made an inspired hop into the soul of one Frans Snyders, a phlegmatic Flem of moderate talent. It worked. Maggie was highly amused by my new persona (perhaps she really was everywhere at the same time) and couldn’t resist turning up for her portrait.

      
I surrounded the little tart with fruit and vegetables; giant cabbages with stinking mouldy under-leaves, caterpillar-ridden cauliflowers, a basket of mushrooms, hideous gourds, pomegranates, onions, apples, lemons, grapes and strawberries. I placed a basket of apricots on her lap. She couldn’t move. I allowed her to wear red – my one concession to her wishes.

       “
Dammit, Frans, this painting’s horrible and I’m ugly. What have you done to me?”

       “
You’re not ugly at all, my little cabbage leaf. You’re simply in the Flemish style. I’m more interested in white radishes and beetroots than sultry beauties at this point in art.”

      
She will never again look as Doré once painted her, I swear it. “Frans, I can’t move. Take these apricots away. Paint them out. Would you like a plum?”

       “
Not even an entire basket of cherries. Too late, my love, too late.”

The year is 2010. By a curious synchronicity, we’ve all been collected together in the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle (except for Mick, of course). Our pictures hang in a happy juxtaposition. My darkly handsome self-portrait lies at one end of the gallery. The Rhine (or Borrowdale, if you prefer) is to my right. Straight ahead is Doré’s Scottish painting of a fleeing Maggie. On the adjacent wall hangs his depiction of my darling in all her heart-rending beauty – and I have my hand on her shoulder. She can’t slip away into circular time while I control her like this. 

      
Walk under the stone arch and into the next gallery, and you will see an enormous painting of a plain woman in red offering you a plum. She has a basket of apricots on her lap and is dwarfed by a mountain of cabbages. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see her younger self on the Grand Canal, about to fall out of the gondola and into the murky depths of the lagoon.

      
She’s safer behind her giant vegetables, with all her Flemish frumpiness. Mick would laugh: if he’d ever painted in this style, that’s exactly how he’d have depicted her – sexless and disappointed. I’m missing Mick. Might have to go back and give my poor angel a neck massage. He’d like that. So would I.

      
Goodbye Maggie. It was fun while it lasted. Enjoy the vegetables.

Of Honeysuckle and Sunsets

Brian Koscienski and Chris Pisano

Crickets. George hated crickets. The shrill tympanum strummed through his mind like a guitar strung with rusted razor wire. He could never understand why anyone would choose rural over urban. But this was only the second time he had heard crickets. The first time was when he and his partner, Leonard, arrested a jumper hiding in a similar environment. George throttled the handle of his gun, wishing the infernal insect noise came from one lone creature, so he could shoot it. He didn’t like firing his gun. The kickback always pinched a nerve in his hand, causing numbness for half a week.

      
George had his back to the farmhouse, but not touching it, as if he could be contaminated by the countryside farm and surrounding forest by a mere touch of the paint-peeled wood siding. He looked through the nearest window, and then through another at the far end of the living room to see that his target was just around the other side of the house, sitting on the porch. The smell of mildew offended his nose as he whispered, “Okay, Leonard, here we go.”

      
Arms straight, George ran around one corner of the house and along the side. His trot was jerky, a hastened tiptoe, careful not to give away his position or worse, step in some kind of animal waste. Not being fond of animals either, he had no idea what kinds could be found in this area, nor did he care to find out. Last corner coming up, George fought with himself to keep a clear mind.

       “
Freeze!” he yelled, jumping around the corner of the house, aiming his gun at his target: his partner, Leonard.

      
Jolting in his rocking chair, Leonard almost threw his glass of lemonade. “Good God, George! You made me spill my drink.”

        
With no banister to hinder him, George stepped onto the low porch as carefully as he would through a minefield. His muscles tensed with every creak and groan of the warped planks. “I don’t think that’s your biggest problem right now, Leonard.”

      
Leonard sucked his teeth then sighed. “Will you put that thing down? You pull the trigger and your hand will be numb for three days.”

       “
Leonard, I’m…”

       “
Do I look like I’m armed?” Leonard twisted to face George. The ice clinked against the glass and the lemonade sloshed as Leonard extended his arms, exaggerating his frustration.

      
George pulled his eyes away from Leonard to examine the scene: a creaky wooden porch holding a small, round table and two rocking chairs, one being used by Leonard. An empty glass stood next to a half full pitcher of lemonade on the table. George lowered his weapon and stepped closer to his friend. “Why’d you do this, Leonard?”

       “
Why? I quit the force, remember? This is my retirement.”

       “
You’re a cop…”

       “
And I’m…I
was
…a damn good one too. How many arrests did you and I make, George? How many times did we stop delusional kids from killing Hitler or saving Jesus? How many whack jobs did we bust for trying to tamper with the stock market? How many…”

       “
All right, all right. I get it.” George chuckled. “It ain’t like you to get all wound up. Now, you gonna offer me a seat?”

      
Leonard pointed at the empty rocking chair. George accepted. He placed his gun on his lap then poured himself a glass of lemonade. “You can’t do this, Leonard.”

       “
I did, George.”

       “
You can’t…”