Entropy (33 page)

The hijacker closed the phone and set it on the seat next to him. No one else was moving. Although we appeared to be united by our circumstances of this ordeal, we were each sitting alone and isolated in our different seats, with our own disparate thoughts, waiting for something to happen, or perhaps for someone to be killed.

The hijacker rubbed his shoulder where his arm was missing. I wondered what had happened to him and why he had taken us hostage. Could it have been for something noble or was he merely a criminal, preying on the prosperity and emotional philanthropy of others, bound to torture with impunity and malice? I imagined how you would have painted it, seen what you would have wanted to see in his movements, cautious to represent his unblemished guile while respecting flaws without ridicule or scorn. I wished you had given me the same respect.

In one image he may have been an aged soldier, running through the chaos and tenacity of battle to save several men in his company. However I was sure that selflessness was a color that you couldn't ever recognize. Being naïve, I hoped his condition had been the result of a romantic tragedy, his body forever changed as a result of some gallant or noble act.

After our daughter's murder, you never really talked to me except through what you could say in your work, whose culmination was now lying bloodied and slightly out of my reach like our child. But she was never helpless, even as an infant. Even when lying in the security of my forearms, she wanted to be on her own. Her tiny muscles often struggled to get away from my protection, willing her to break free and to be independent, even when independence was a concept she couldn't even begin to understand.

Looking out the window, I thought I could see her running up the street along the side of the bus. Her hands moving in front of her face, a button falling loose from her dress. I would have to sew it back on. As she came nearer, I stood up from my seat and closed my eyes. When I did, the hijacker told me to sit down. But my daughter is here, don't you see her? Can't you see her curly hair bouncing upon her shoulders? I stepped back into the space of my current canvas and pressed my hands against the window.

Abruptly, I realized that there was no one running along the side of the bus, the streets were vacant of people and possibilities.

I felt like I was a muse again, regardless of the circumstances; brush or gun, I was sitting there, exhausted and thirsty, moving my body left then right.
No, raise your head just a little and tilt it back. Put your hand up, like that. Please cup your breast with your hands. No, just use your fingertips.

That's all people could ever see.

It made me hate myself.

I was delicate, fragile, flawed and torn. I wanted to wail as loudly as I could. I wanted to live in a place of no structure, no color, an achromatic landscape where the beauty in everything would suffocate and collapse.

The catalogue was now farther away from me. I must have sat back down in a different seat. It caused me pain, but I desperately needed to hold it, to search through the pages of your work and perhaps find my peace in one of them. The hijacker had been studying me since I stood up. He made me feel uneasy. With apparent interest, he came closer and kneeled down a few rows in front of me. He picked up the catalogue and sorted through some of the pages, balancing it against his chest. He didn't even seem to notice all the blood on the back corner. At one point, he paused and looked up searchingly at me. I couldn't help but wonder where he stopped. Surprisingly, he closed the cover and handed it to me.

All that he said to me was
sorry
.

The hijacker sat back down in his seat and placed an earpiece connected to some kind of recorder back in his ear. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The cassettes were larger. When he placed the gun across his right thigh, he closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. He didn't remain that way for long, just a couple of minutes. Slowly, he raised his head and moved his hand up to his face. It looked as if there were tears in his eyes, but I wasn't sure. I wondered if he too shared the type of loss that I was experiencing …

I wiped off some of the blood from the catalogue on my jacket. Some of the pages were sticking together because of the drying blood. I pulled them apart. I looked out the window beside me and watched an ambulance turn down a side street. Still, no one stood within several hundred feet of the bus. I again grew weary of all the continuous, flashing lights. It was now dark and everything looked like it was trapped under water.

I now studied the catalogue intently angling the pages towards the spotlights, waiting pensively to be released from the suffocating confines of my grief and turmoil. I wanted to be killed.

Page 30
.

You always said to me that you hated most parts of winter except for the tranquility; the muted voice of the grass and the dirt, muffled under a light coating of cold and ice. Here you painted a school, the grounds virginal and devoid of any children or life. It wasn't our daughter's school though.

I always wondered if
her
children played there, in that field obscured in the arcane background that you had washed on with such personal and private gentility; as if you had been there, and held them against your chest? What did you tell them? What promises did you make to them? Had you already crossed that uncovered passage into their playground, trapped in the vertiginous echoes of their unblemished innocence, disappearing into the patterns of uncertainty that disestablished direction from what should have been our one principal obsession?

I thought of all those times at Jenni's school parent nights, where I would turn up alone to talk with her teachers about her dreams, and what she wanted to do when she was older. However, I never knew what her adult aspirations were, nor will I ever have the chance to find out. Suddenly, I began to quietly sob, stricken by guilt that I did not know what our daughter had wanted to do with her life. It was something that a mother should have known.

Had I taken enough time away from being with you to really understand her, and to listen to the things she had to say? Was I so greedy with my own hunger to be touched and to be consumed by you that I had pushed her aside? I tried to suppress my self-loathing by turning towards the window again and placing my fist over my mouth.

I glanced back down at the catalogue. I wanted to prove to you how much your paintings were a lie, where your recreations were flawed and unfair.

Page 32
.

Sweat was dripping from my forearms onto the pages. I wiped my palm across the page. However nothing was as close nor as stifling as hiding underneath that porch, not even waiting here, waiting for the disrupting and indistinct colors of death to enshroud me.

When it had happened it was actually a beautiful day out. However you had painted a raging storm of clouds and rain instead, a reckless and blind array of charcoals and lead, which dripped down the slope of the roof and poured into the rusted gutters. There was no place to absorb the flood of water, so it formed reflective pools of pale silver. But that wasn't how it happened at all.

I remembered the sky being bolder, ablaze with alternating lines of umber and scarlet. The heat was oppressive, bullying its way through the day and well into sunset. I must have slept for hours underneath that porch after pulling tomatoes from their stems and delicately examining their ruddy flesh for imperfections. They were ripe, exquisite pieces, and I pressed my lips and tongue through their skin, the small seeds invading the spaces between my teeth. Yet you had crafted them as pale, inexperienced children, incapable of existing without the guidance of their elders. Was that how you saw me? Was I a blind, infantile woman, who could not speak, and was incapable of forming the words to express the images that haunted me?

I was much more than you ever understood, or could ever paint in the common colors of your misguided spectrum.

I awoke in my hiding spot after hearing enraged voices coming from the house.

“I want you to leave.”

“That's not happening.”

“I don't love you anymore.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Please leave.”

It wasn't long before someone stepped out onto the porch. I pressed myself deeper into my private darkness and held my breath. You tried to mimic the tension that I felt in the obstructed background and barn, to hide what I witnessed behind a blurred glare and the absence of detail. The imprints you left in the soil were too small to be his. In your colors you left no evidence than anyone else had been there, as if I had covered up a crime, as if I could silence the perspective and voice of nature, and suffocate its cruel intelligence and vision. It had to be her; my sister. Would you have crafted her as she was, or how you thought I saw her? Again, your painting told people that I had been alone.

It wasn't fair to her, the woman who should have helped me become someone else, assured and resolute. You should have helped her become, through your brush, a figure of elegance and fortitude. Instead, you chose apathy and promiscuity. You never painted her stepping off the front porch, her jeans ripped behind her left knee. Weighed down by anger and uncertainty she struggled to regain her balance. Sweat dripped from my lips as I recessed deeper near the house.

“You said that we were going to leave here together, and that you loved me.”

“I can't leave.”

“What is it? Your father?”

“I don't owe you anything anymore.”

“The hell you don't.”

“Fuck you!”

You didn't show her turning and running into the vacant barn, obscured again from my vision. Timidity moved with the streams of perspiration across my arms and legs. No one saw her hide behind some kerosene barrels. I could see him going after her.

“You can't leave me.”

“Stop!”

You never painted him as I saw him, running into the barn behind her, slamming the old pine door. When I heard her scream, I closed my eyes, waiting for him to leave.

We were alone, and I wasn't sure what to do.

I started to slide my awkward body out from underneath the porch. I was wearing one of her sundresses, and I liked the way that it clung to my body, even though it was a size too big. I was dragging so much dirt out with me that I would have to wash it before putting back in her drawer. I had almost extracted my slight frame from under the house when I felt something grab at my ankle. A steel nail had gouged the patch of skin that covered my ankle bone.

It hurt so much that I had to bite down on my lip and tongue to keep myself from crying. The blood trickling down across my toes felt oddly ticklish. I rested my head on the hot ground and sobbed. You could never have made what happened beautiful, no matter what colors you applied to your canvas.

The only nobility you displayed in the lines and colors of that painting was your vagueness, and the absence of specification and circumstance of what happened next. Although you knew what had happened to her inside of that barn, you chose to leave it off the edges of the canvas. I had confided in you what I felt, the feelings that I encountered while hiding underneath that porch. We had been drinking at home, our daughter was with your mother. I allowed the mixture of wine, guilt and regret to assimilate in my bloodstream. When I pulled up my jeans to scratch my ankle, you asked me how my delicate ankle could end up with such a nasty scar. If you would have asked me that any other day I would never have answered. I had never told anyone else. But at the time I still thought of you as my husband and lover, not my foil.

Putting as much pressure on the wound as I could, I slithered out from underneath the porch. There were no sounds coming from anywhere, not the shifting of the structure of the old house, nor even the faint buzzing of equipment from the neighbor's field. It was dreadful, listening to such vacancy and emptiness.

I stepped carefully towards the barn, shifting my body to try and see through the small spaces between the wooden walls and doors. All I could see was the light coming in from the other side. There were no voices. You should have painted me perhaps a little farther away from the barn than I was when the door slowly opened and my sister staggered out.

Her body moved as if all of her bones had been replaced with those from another, a sad sampling of disjointed and discarded femurs and shins. Less than fifteen feet from the entrance she fell to the ground. When she raised her head her lips were smeared with blood and dirt. I covered my mouth and wailed. She lifted her eyes, watched me start towards her. I looked down upon her.

Her jeans were missing and I could see her bare legs. One of her legs was bent abnormally at the knee and a long trail of blood decorated the other. I fell to her side. Thankfully you did not create her in color, collapsed in my arms, with her underwear pulled down her knees. I remembered running my hands through her hair, the smell of kerosene being absorbed into the ends of my fingertips.

God I missed her. But it also formed my view of what I thought love was: intense, passionate but nevertheless imbalanced and full of oppression and hate. And you reinforced these misguided views as you intertwined your passion with infinite abomination.

***

The hijacker had been talking to someone on his phone. I wasn't sure how long I had been distracted by my thoughts. I noticed that an ambulance had taken up a position some 300 feet behind the bus. Things appeared bleak. I would have expected the hijacker to have surrendered by now or for the police to have stormed the bus. There was nowhere to go and he hadn't even made any demands.

The remains of the catalogue sat on my lap, ruined. The only page that wasn't steeped in blood and grime was one of the last pages.

Page 39
.

The inclusion of this canvas frightened me. I hated the way you made my body look so blemished, and disguised my emotions in pockets of blacks and grays. It was all just another lie; another fabrication. Did you tell anyone what
really
happened, or was I made out to be the one who betrayed you, your sensibilities and our vows? I was surprised that you wanted to recreate that failed moment of emotional restraint; the only time that you had hit me in our marriage. We had fought so many times during our relationship. However, you took great effort to create a façade so that none of our friends ever knew. You hid the bruises well in that painting.