The Unfinished World (8 page)

The artist looks at her, aghast but defiant. The artist knows his way around this kind of truth.

When the time traveler returns to her own time, she heads
straight to the third gallery on the third floor of the museum. The painting still hangs—a vast, moon-filled abstract, shapes building to a woman, curves like rolling blue hills, lit from within and without. The room is crowded with people who have seen it only on holo screens, breathless in its physical presence. The dates under the artist's name, bookended by the long-ago
b
. and
d
. The painting is now titled
In Spite Of
.

Two:
The time traveler counts three, and throws the dummy onto the highway as the bottle-green Ford comes barreling over the bridge. After the smash-up, she calls the young artist collect from a Modesto diner. There's been a terrible accident, she says. Long recovery ahead, come home for good, she says. When she gets back to her present and sees the painting, she isn't exactly surprised. The artist never had much filial feeling.

Three:
The time traveler sits at dinner with the artist's muse and the man she has hired to seduce the artist's muse. The muse is pretty, her eyes a soft gray and her hair a bright gold. She is tall and strong, with large breasts and hips, and the man has been happy to do his job. The time traveler buys bottle after bottle of wine for the table, until the man puts his hand on the muse's thigh and her face softens into a sweet smile. The time traveler is no voyeur, but she stands for a long time under the muse's open window, listening to the low moans float onto the warm summer air.

She returns to her own time and the painting still hangs. Now it is titled
Forgiveness
.

Four:
The time traveler steals the artist's rent from his dresser drawer. His landlord, she knows, is an unyielding sort. Now the
painting is smaller, much smaller, but it is still the single occupant of the room and it still sucks the air from the room and it still lights the room from within and without. Fuck, says the time traveler, and the tourists standing nearest her shift uneasily in polite Midwestern disapproval.

Five:
The time traveler posts an acceptance letter from a California dental college, complete with a nine-hundred-dollar bonus if the artist enrolls in the next two weeks. The painting is bigger again, and the bio on the wall mentions, as a humorous bit of trivia, that the artist briefly considered dental school. Can you imagine, it says. The artist as a dentist! The time traveler resents the exclamation point, as do all the dentists who pass through the museum.

Six:
The time traveler sets explosive charges under the apartment, and blows them when no one is home. Upon return, the painting is still there, and now a tour guide is lecturing on the painter's subsequent madness. The artist, he says with an air of enlightened detachment, claimed to have created a series of paintings using his own waste—which his wife unfortunately destroyed. The tourists make faces.

Seven:
The time traveler sets fire to the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.

Eight:
The time traveler pours acid on the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.

Nine:
The time traveler paints over the unfinished painting. The painting is still there.

Ten:
The time traveler steals the unfinished painting and buries it in the past of the past. The painting is still there.

Eleven:
The time traveler curses, cuts, spits on, slashes, saws in half, kicks, pours water over, blowtorches, burns to bits, eats the ashes of, smashes the easel around, throws out the paints for, and washes her hands of the unfinished painting. In triumph, she returns to the museum.

The painting is still there. It hangs, suspended, “like an artfully falling ocean,” says a pretentious young gentleman in a straw boater and suspenders. The time traveler thinks of artfully falling anvils instead.

Twelve:
The time traveler steals the unfinished painting and takes it back to the future, where it disappears like smoke upon arrival. And the painting is still there, is still there, is still there,
is still there
—is still hanging in the gallery and now it is titled
Perseverance
. The time traveler feels the unfairness of this keenly. She has persevered. She
has not succeeded. She has not made him see his own sad end, there in that bedroom with his failures and his guns and his useless, incomprehensible war with the painting. All that genius given, all that misery marked for both of them.

Thirteen:
The time traveler finds the muse at her lunch. She watches the muse eat her sandwich with gusto: tomato and cheese on thick slabs of crusty bread. She watches the muse gulp down wine, watches her strong white teeth and her smooth white throat. The time traveler sighs. She was more in love with life than with him—she'd never have believed how black and long the days could stretch over her, mean and empty, like shadows in the winter. She takes out
the pill, drops it into the muse's wineglass. She leaves before the gray eyes can close. She still needs them to see, just for a moment until the timeline catches up.

The time traveler materializes in the gallery, where the painting no longer hangs. Now there is another painting, lilies on a pond, and Google finds only a retired dentist in Modesto, California. The time traveler smiles then, a soft, sweet smile, and no, her limbs don't start to fade away, nor does that smile hang on the air, nor does she slowly dissolve, like pixels on a screen or shadows over a wall. She simply smiles, and then isn't.

Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World

L
ancelot has been summoned out of sleep to find a secret kingdom. Dreams of daffodil hair and golden summer smoke all drifted away when the earth opened above and the men shoveled him out. You have been to the Perilous Chapel, they said. You can help us find what we seek.

He does not think he has been of much help so far. The expedition is traveling in terrain he is unused to, unfamiliar with, and in his weakened state he can barely hold a sword. The men, strange in their colorful threads and accented voices, are looking for another kind of relic: the lost kingdom of Prester John. The Prester descended from the Magi themselves, it was said; he was the ruler of a fruitful land, full of new plants and animals, of new kinds of people. Nestorians and their descendants, heavy with the riches of their flight from other worlds.

These warriors with whom he travels now are not knights, but they claim a quest just the same. They are seeking this fabled hidden kingdom and all the treasures inside: the Gates of Alexander, the Fountain of Youth itself, and especially, most especially, a wondrous
mirror, in which every part of a ruler's land can be seen at a word. It is this mirror their master has sent them for. He is a foreign prince, Lancelot has been made to understand, and he desires the mirror to help him wipe out his enemies. Such men have always sought such artifacts.

They have been traveling in a dark jungle for days. Lancelot does not know jungles; he has never known such uncomfortable and wet heat. The damp reminds him of the damp he and Gwin made when their bodies came together. He misses her bright, brassy smell. He does not like this place. It has too many eyes. The men chatter to themselves and Lancelot cannot understand them and he is shorter than everybody here. And he is bored. There are no devilish knights to joust with, no castles to besiege and break. Only this vague heat and a cascade of invisible threats, surrounding them in the jungle like nightmares waiting to pounce. He is afraid of these nightmares. Defenseless against things he has never seen, he sleeps with his head to the tent, avoiding attack from behind.

The men are taking turns cutting through vines, hacking and slashing and cursing the foliage in this miserable heat and humidity. Mosquitos swarm the party, and the mules stop, well, mulishly in protest, half-hidden behind a lacy veil of pests. One of the beasts has just attempted to shed its pack again, standing firm and four times heavier in the middle of a small copse of trees, when Lancelot feels eyes on the back of his head. The men laugh, thinking he has gone stupid from too much time under the soil. Those are insects, they say, slapping at the backs of their necks and palming the blood smears as if to pantomime. Lancelot rolls his eyes. Even outside of space and time there seems to be a language barrier when it comes to metaphor.

Something is
watching
, he says. Following. I can feel it.

The men are still laughing, but not as hard now, and their eyes narrow as they survey their surroundings. These are not careless men. They have not earned the favor of their prince by being foolish. They fan out to the edges of the path. They wait, laughter fading down into a buzz saw of jungle silence, which is not a silence at all so much as a warning.

Lancelot is not the first to see it, but he is the first to believe it. A pale man, body and hair the color of paper, almost nude but for a leather loincloth and holding a sharp wooden spear. He appears in an instant as though he'd fallen from the sky.

He blinks, slowly. Just the once. Stands extraordinarily still.

We are looking for the kingdom of Prester John, says Lancelot. His heart swims into his throat for his own lost kingdom, but he swallows it down and watches the man's spear carefully, ready to duck or dodge if necessary. The spear lowers, inch by inch, spear hand relaxing. The man's face makes a bitter smile. And bitter, notes Lancelot, translates through all the many languages and races of the world. Bitter has a note that's hard to miss.

We seek the same, says the man, and he gestures. Some thirty-odd men like him, all paper-colored and silent, emerge from the surrounding trees and stand with spears at the ready. The prince's men, normally taciturn and unshakable, shout in surprise. Lancelot cannot understand how the pale men managed to hide themselves among all this dark and greenery. He thinks it is a trick he would very much like to learn.

Would you like to join us? asks Lancelot. We can seek for this kingdom together, and split the treasure among ourselves. The prince's men mutter darkly; Lancelot is offering what he has not been authorized to give. The prince's men begin to wonder if digging up a hero was in fact a mistake. Some of the prince's men had
argued for making a golem instead, and it is looking like perhaps they were right after all. But it doesn't matter in the end, because the pale men want nothing to do with the prince's men and their search. At Lancelot's words, they break into a single hiss, like a long white snake, and then fade into fog, into mist, into nothing. Lancelot and the prince's men stand their ground, uneasy for a time. Eventually, as the sun begins to loosen its grip on the blue overhead, they seek for a place to camp. To rest for the night and to water the mules.

They've only made it a short way forward when there comes a wailing like a heart run through.

Everyone turns and stares, watches helpless as the swampy sand opens and eats one of the men and his mule. One by one, small mouths of jungle-earth emerge and drown the prince's men where they stand. The ground rumbles and churns, men and mules shriek and run about, and in the sand's grumbling Lancelot hears the warning: We are the seekers. We will seek those who quest for what is hidden, and we will swallow you whole. We will keep the kingdom safe.

Lancelot does not want to be swallowed here, so far from where his king and queen lay. He smells green in the air, and in wild panic to live seizes a nearby vine and pulls himself up. He is face to face with a tiny monkey, old-man-faced and screeching. Lancelot has never seen a monkey before, but somehow he recognizes a relative. He is encouraged. He suddenly feels he has been
made
to swing from treetops, in the way that heroes do. As the men below dance about, avoiding the sand's hunger, Lancelot flies to another tree, and then another, until finally he spots solid ground below. The remaining men gape as he calls to them, but only for a moment. These may be foreigners but they are not fools. If gravity has suspended her pull for a moment, they will happily follow suit. After the ground has
given up the chase, Lancelot waits at a respectful distance while the others mourn their dead and distribute their belongings.

Later that night, they come to the edge of what looks like a village. There is a clearing, and a clump of small huts; a group of tall men in hooded robes confer in hushed tones by torchlight. Their eyes glow like embers, but their faces remain in darkness. As if in a dream, Lancelot opens the door to the nearest hut, drawing his sword. But his weapons would be useless here; he knows this. Another tall man, taller even than the others, stoops by a fireplace, half-hidden and half-flamed by the meager fire in the hearth. He is tossing papers and books to the floor, he is muttering to himself. He is too absorbed in his search to notice Lancelot at first. But then he hears the scuffle of footsteps, turns, looks with no surprise on the knight and the band of men behind him. Where his face should be is a pool of ink, spreading in the soft firelight.

Is this Prester John's kingdom? asks Lancelot.

The man laughs, hateful, bitter. We are also searchers, he says. We have only just arrived ourselves. And we will depart as you will: empty-handed, empty-hearted.

But who are you, Lancelot says. No real question. The answer does not matter. They are seekers, that is all. He suddenly understands that there is no kingdom. There are only the seekers and the lost places they drive toward, always just out of reach.

And with that, he breathes a last breath of stone and copper, of green and damp, of soil and skin. Then he tumbles to bones and is still, sleeping once more, and now the men must find their own way home.

And the World Was Crowded with Things That Meant Love

T
hey met only once, at a piano recital in her hometown. Both of them were there for other people's children. He caught her yawning while a blonde in pigtails murdered
The Blue Danube
, and they exchanged grins. After drinks and dinner they were delighted to find they shared a hobby: both were sculptors of sorts, though she worked in clay and he worked in wood. Both had jobs that sent them round the world, and it was a way to kill the long, late hours that haunt the solitary traveler.