The moment Tara is distracted by Thorne and Jesse, Driscoll slips away, leaving his sandwich unfinished. I know exactly where to find him: in his studio, slumped on a stool in front of an easel. The floors and walls are filled with paintings, drawings, collages, photos, sketches…every medium and technology that can be imagined. He’s a wilted rose in a garden where every bloom is another beautiful man.
When he closes his eyes, I enter. That’s how dreams happen.
« Don’t look at those, » he says. « Most of them are going to be burned. »
I look anyway. « Sometimes the art you reject is your best work. »
« It isn’t a matter of what looks nice, » says Driscoll. « It’s a matter of what is. I need to capture not only the appearance, but the essence of the man before he emanates. Sometimes it’s easy. I’ve got three good paintings of Julian. It was difficult to choose the one to put on his trading card. Gwion is a different story. There’s something elusive about him. I must’ve painted a dozen before I got something I was willing to use. Don’t tell him this, but I still think it’s wrong. »
Driscoll’s dreams are full of blood, his own blood, and pollen, his own pollen. He mixes them together, the binding medium for his colors. It’s not something that he wants me to know.
There’s a piece of a corrugated cardboard box on the table. It bears a hasty sketch in felt-tipped marker. It’s Theo.
« I’m keeping that one. It’s not the one I put on his card, but it’s still good. Theo is easy – he has a very open face. »
« It amazes me that Davy can work from this, » I murmur.
« Thank you, » he says, frostily.
« You know what I mean. »
« That they aren’t the least bit accurate the way that it would be if I were using a design program to make a three-dimensional model? Davy can do that sort of thing in his head. He needs to see what they are like before he can craft what they look like. »
Driscoll’s vision is sharp, too sharp, like shards of glass. It cuts him. That’s where the blood comes from. The pollen is another story. Desire that is never released. If a flower could practice karezza, it would be Driscoll.
Today, the blood is pooling, a hemorrhage. « I’d rather work on my new series, » he says. « Self-portraits Not of Me II: Baby Pictures. I’m going to paint each spark. Not a realistic conception – they just look like swirling blobs of color. But if you close your eyes… »
« They’re made of many colors which blur into a dominant hue. Patterns. Shapes. »
« You can see that? »
« It determines the form of their dreams. »
« Then look at these. » He hands me a portfolio.
The first image is a swatch of tooled leather, the design a stylized five-petalled rose which seemed to expand out into ripples of water. « It’s Sloane, » I recognize immediately. He’d also done Prem – a rich droplet of red which seems like a crystal, a flower, and a richly woven tapestry all at once – and Alexander – whirling charcoal thunderbolts of cyan and black. Alexander feels exactly like that, quickly sketched, quickly eradicated, changed or restored in an instant. The dominant impression is of violent energy.
The last is a thick, violent swirl of paint, apricot blending into magenta, a bit of purple near the edges. It’s Driscoll, a true self-portrait, a nude. I glance at him quickly; he looks embarrassed.
But this self-revelation isn’t why Driscoll is bleeding. He’s dreaming about something else. No, it’s a dream he’s afraid to dream. Why? It isn’t a nightmare. It’s a beautiful dream that he’s pushing away from himself.
« Of course, I can’t invest much time in those now, » he says. « I have four more emanations to do. Four more. Davy is working me to the bone. »
« Only four more, » I murmur.
« Why don’t you just leave me alone? » he snaps.
It hurts. I’m bleeding now. But I can’t leave him. I’m the only one who sees his pain, probably because he painted it into my eyes on the day that he imagined me.
I wrap my arms around him from behind. He’ll feel better if I can’t see his face, even though I can feel his expression carved into mine. « There’s only four more left, » I repeat.
« I have to get them right, » he says, his voice halting. Then he pulls away nervously, reaching for his cigarette holder. « I’m not happy about Thorne, » he says, fumbling for a light. « His beauty is cliché. But there’s only so much you can do with a pink unicorn. »
He passes me the cigarette. There’s a bit of highweed, for the buzz, but it’s mostly Salvia divinorum doped with lith-covexx. Diviner’s sage is notoriously insoluble in water, so the lith-covexx binds to it, making it easy to metabolize.
I find it a bit unpleasant. All the dreams come up sharp at the edges, pointing in a single direction. I prefer to wander. « This could use more highweed, » I tell him.
« This is for business, not pleasure. If you just want to chill, go bother Chase. »
« Chase wouldn’t be bothered in the least. Chase isn’t bothered by anything. »
« That’s because he’s always buffered halfway to the Andromeda Galaxy. »
The opposite of Driscoll, who never spares himself anything. « Davy is thinking exactly the same thing, » I realize.
« Davy is thinking that Chase is buffered? » says Driscoll, knowing exactly what I mean.
« Davy wants them to be perfect. »
« Then Davy is stupider than I thought he was. Not only is perfect impossible, it’s tacky. That was exactly the problem with Thorne. Obviously, these emanations need flaws, but they have to be the right kind of flaws. There’s a big difference between the “Wracked with guilt because he couldn’t save his seditionary parents from being shot” mysteriously dark past, and the “Arrested for peeping into little girls’ bathrooms” mysteriously dark past. Not that sparks have any past, but you know what I mean. Tara will go for a wide range of idiosyncrasies, from pain-pig submissive to turned on by Sudoku to gets off on hand puppets to whining bitch artist. If Davy really cared, he’d custom-design the digestive tract, for once. It’s important to have a strong stomach. »
« Davy said he’ll never do bowels. But for the final ones, he’s making the hearts by hand. » This gets Driscoll’s attention. « Davy got a Gold Card for admitting he was worried. »
« Who the hell wants a Gold Card? » For a moment, I think it’s just Driscoll’s typical denial of something which bothers him. But there’s a shape forming behind him, a ghost of an outline. No, it’s a shadow. No, it’s my shadow. My shadow which falls across Driscoll.
He never wanted my love. He never wanted anyone to love him. This is very different from the kind of person who doesn’t want to, or can’t, love. It’s because Driscoll loves so deeply that he pushes everyone away. « You can’t avoid it forever, » I tell him.
« Wait until you see the ones I’m going to make, » he replies.
« Even if you’re the last one into the Gold Club, it will happen. We were all made to have the potential for Tara to fall in love with us. »
« No matter how much you love somebody, there’s always a part of them that you don’t love. From I and I’s perspective, it would be much better to concentrate that element in one of us than to spread it around. »
« I don’t understand. » His statement is a fallacy. There is no part of Tara that I and I does not love. There is no part of Tara that I don’t love.
« Tara is human, » he hisses. « She has a human heart. » Driscoll turns impatiently back to his canvas. « Forget it. You never understood the plot of Othello, no matter how many times I explained it to you. »
This isn’t going anywhere. He’s too sunk in despair – reason won’t help, sympathy won’t help. I need something archetypal, something absurd.
I pull down my trousers.
Driscoll stares at me coldly. « I would never have thought you to be so obvious. »
« It worked for Baubo. It worked for Ame-no-Uzume. »
Driscoll slaps his forehead. « Those were female deities. Look, when a woman exposes herself, everyone is happy. It’s an epiphany. When a man flashes his dick, he’s socially ostracized. »
I don’t understand gender.
Driscoll sighs exaggeratedly, a histrionic sigh, a sign. He’s put his mask on again, the mask of comedy and tragedy.
« In any case, you’ve mistaken me for somebody important, someone to be missed. Now if you would excuse me, I think I have an idea for Zadornin. »