Radiant Days (2 page)

“Don’t need you pissing away my money,” he yelled.

“You don’t need help with that,” my mother retorted, and ducked before he could slap her.

She stayed home with me and my two younger brothers, twins named Roy and Davis. My older brother, Robbie, had joined the army right out of high school, got stationed in Fort Bragg, and never looked back. This was before my mother took off. We never knew where she went, if she was still alive or dead. I found
some of her leftover makeup, Maybelline lipsticks and blue Yardley eye shadow, and hoarded it along with the broken crayons I hid in an old coffee can under the bed in the room I shared with the twins. The room always smelled like pee, but I didn’t mind so much since it hid the smell of the tempera paints I stole from school. At night when Roy and Davis were asleep, I’d crawl under their bed with a flashlight and draw on sheets of paper while lying on the floor. I’d invented a comic strip called
Danger Dog
, filling the backs of my school notebooks with pencil drawings of Danger Dog and his sidekicks, Bad Kitty and Meezum. On Sundays, while my father was at his second job, as a janitor at the hospital, I’d paint the color edition of
Danger Dog
, then let the twins read it at night. I saved brown paper bags, and sometimes my father would bring home cardboard cartons that I’d cut apart and draw on. Once he brought a huge refrigerator box. The twins and I dragged it into the overgrown backyard and I painted a city on it—skyscrapers on one panel, trees on another, a grocery on the third. Sidewalks and trains. The only real city I’d ever visited was Waynesboro, but I’d seen movies, and Metropolis on
Superman
. We played in the box until rain and hard use reduced it to a brown slurry indistinguishable from the mud around it.

At school I didn’t play much with other kids. All I wanted to do was draw. I was scrawny and, until I had an eye operation, cross-eyed. My father took me to the same barber shop where he and the twins got their hair cut; people used to think I was a boy. Kids picked on me but I fought back, until my tormentors were distracted by the arrival of a new kid, a soft-spoken black boy
named Alan. I came to his defense once and got a bloody nose and detention. When my father found out, he slapped me and my nose bled again.

“You’re like your mama with the niggers,” he said.

Things got better in fifth grade.

“That’s a really good horse, Merle.” A smart, popular girl named Donna stared at a drawing I’d made on a blank page in my social studies workbook. “It looks real.”

That became the pattern for the rest of my school career. People thought I was weird, but when they saw my sketchbooks they shut up. I was an okay student, not great but good enough. I was really good at lying, making excuses for not bringing in juice, or presents for Secret Santa; not because I forgot but because my father wouldn’t give me money. “They get my goddamn taxes, that’s enough.”

I hated high school, except for art class, and even that was a fight. In freshman year our teacher, Mrs. Caldwell, showed us slides meant to encapsulate the history of art, from cave paintings to Norman Rockwell. I loved the cave paintings best: animals from a dream of steppes and ancient forests, loping across the rough walls of places so dark and hidden it made me dizzy to think of them.

“How did they do that?”

Mrs. Caldwell shook her head impatiently. “Hands, please.”

My hand shot up. She was already on to the Sistine Chapel. “Those cave paintings—how did they do that? What did they make the paint out of? And how could they even see in the dark?”

“No one knows,” Mrs. Caldwell snapped. “They were very crude attempts; it was thousands of years before people learned how to draw properly.”

Van Gogh and Picasso passed in a flicker of blue and yellow, fractured faces and a whirling nightscape I recognized.

“That’s from that song,” I said to the girl beside me. “You know, ‘Starry, starry night.’”

“Shhh,” she whispered as Mrs. Caldwell glared at us.

A door opened for me that afternoon. For the first time I realized that paintings weren’t just things in books or on posters—they had a life of their own. They mattered to other people. Real people, not like Mrs. Caldwell, but people like the man who sang that song; people who were famous.

I began experimenting with what I drew. Mrs. Caldwell hated that, though in spring of my junior year the new English teacher, Ms. Aronson, used to come into the art room sometimes, and she liked my stuff.

“You’re a real original, Merle.” She was staring at a self-portrait I’d done, me as Van Gogh, with a pack of Marlboros where my ear should have been.

“Thanks,” I said.

She turned to me. “Are you applying to colleges next year?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“When the time comes, I’ll help you with the paperwork. Okay?”

I nodded, and she left.

That was the spring the seventeen-year locusts hatched. There
were cicadas everywhere, literally millions of them in trees and bushes. The noise they made was deafening, a shrill siren you couldn’t escape unless you were inside a fast-moving car with the windows rolled up. The split skins they left when they crawled out of the ground covered everything, crackling underfoot like dead leaves.

I thought the husks were incredible, amber and topaz like bits of broken jewelry. The living cicadas were even more beautiful, with huge golden eyes and iridescent green bodies and long translucent wings, pale gold and veined with black. Their wings were like tiny stained glass windows, and when the cicadas began to die, I gathered hundreds of them for my junior art project.

I found a broken pane of glass and trimmed the jagged edge with a razor blade, and made a frame of splints of wood and masking tape. I carefully removed the cicadas’ wings, then glued them onto the glass in a spiral, layering it with their emerald carapaces to create a rosace window, green and gold and onyx.

“Is that some kind of joke?” Mrs. Caldwell said when I gave it to her. She was hanging everyone’s paintings in the hall. “You know this is half of your final grade.”

Before I could reply, Ms. Aronson came up behind me. “A mandala.” She shook her head. “An insect mandala. That’s a showstopper, Merle. Let’s put it where it can catch the light.”

She slid the glass from Mrs. Caldwell’s hands and walked to the end of the corridor, positioning it so that morning sun spilled through the image like a radiant eye. All that day students wandered through the hall to look at the juniors’ paintings. When
they came to my insect mandala, they stopped dead.

“Wow! Stained glass.”

“It’s like a kaleidoscope.”

“It’s so cool!”

Then they’d fall quiet, until someone would finally pipe up.

“Is that a—are those
bugs
?”

When it was time to take everything down, I gave the insect mandala to Ms. Aronson.

“Don’t you want to keep this for your portfolio?” she asked.

I shook my head. “It’ll only get broken at my house.”

“Well, thank you, Merle.” She set it gingerly on her desk and stared at it. “This will be my pension when you become famous.”

When I got my report card three weeks later, Mrs. Caldwell gave me a C, with a note beside it:

The F on your final art project brought your semester grade down. Next time follow instructions
.

Charleville, France

AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1870

AT THE END
of August he ran away to Paris. He’d saved or stolen only enough to pay for a train ticket to Saint-Quentin, seventy-three miles away, but his friend Luc still owed him money for doing his Latin homework.

“Here.” Luc dug into his pocket and produced a few grimy coins. He picked lint from one and handed them over.

Arthur scowled. “That’s not going to get me to Paris.”

“Sorry. It’s all I’ve got. What about Ernest?”

“He’s broke.”

“I’m broke, too!”

“Yes, but I don’t like you as much.” Arthur pocketed the coins. “Thanks. I’ll bring you back a souvenir. Some hashish.”

“Bring me a Parisian girl. All the ones here are ugly.”

Arthur nodded and left, swearing under his breath. He should have planned better—the school in Charleville had closed because of the war, which meant he wouldn’t be able to shake down anyone else till it opened again.

But he wasn’t going to wait around for the war to end. He hated Charleville, that suburban shithole, and spent as much time as he could walking, trying to convince himself that he’d left it behind, that he was on his way to Paris. He was always walking: from his house to school; from school to town, where he’d steal archaic volumes from the local bookshop, books on necromancy and obscure religious cults; from downtown Charleville to the surrounding woods and fields, where he’d plan his escape and write poems in his head. He chanted words beneath his breath as he strode beneath the beech trees, the thump of his heavy boots keeping time, like the ticking of the old captain’s clock on the kitchen mantel at home.

It was a form of incantation, a means of welding the world inside his head to the one that surrounded him, words the fiery chain that bound it all together. Sometimes he’d forget where he was, so entranced by the rush of images that the countryside
became a blue-green blur, until he stumbled on a rock or tree root. If he’d managed to steal a bottle of brandy, he’d stumble more often, and swear, furiously, all the vile words he’d like to throw at his mother.

Bitch! Shit! Goddamned sow!

His father had decamped years before, leaving her with four small children and the grimly expectant face of someone first in line to watch a public burning. Steel-eyed, knife-tongued, parsimonious, she was ruthless in her dealings with tradesmen and the farmhands who worked the family’s fields outside Charleville, sometimes withholding payment for a year or more. Teachers at the local school were known to bolt classroom doors when they saw her coming, and itinerants had learned to avoid the Rimbaud courtyard unless they wanted a bucket of boiling water thrown at them. Frédéric, Arthur’s older brother, had recently joined the army to escape her nightly harangues.

Arthur called her the Mouth of Darkness (not within earshot). If Napoléon III had conscripted her, France would not have fallen to the Prussian army. Even Charleville’s chief of police lived in terror of Madame Rimbaud.

“Your mother was born too late,” he once confessed, when Arthur was (again) brought before him for pinching newspapers from the local stationer. “They could have used her during the storming of the Bastille. A formidable woman. I hesitate to take up her time over such a minor matter.” He shuddered, and released Arthur without notifying Madame.

So Arthur walked. He was researching magic—not legerdemain
or conjuror’s tricks but necromancy and alchemy, sorceries that could be mastered through knowledge and practice and technique, and ancient Egyptian magic. The eye of Horus was said to aid one through cycles of rebirth, and there were holy men in India who could travel through time and space by means of
perambulation
, an intensely focused kind of walking. Hashish was supposed to augment this effect. Arthur had already decided he would find some when he got to Paris.

He bought the cheapest ticket he could, for Saint-Quentin; after S-Q he hid under his seat, holding his breath when an immense man reeking of cow manure settled into the cushions Arthur had just vacated. Within a few minutes the train started up again, and the man was snoring. Arthur yawned and scrawled notes for a poem on a scrap of paper, trying to keep a safe distance from the man’s filthy boots. After an hour he too dozed off. When they reached the Paris station, a conductor stepped on his hand.

“Ow—what the hell!” Arthur scrambled into the train’s narrow aisle, where the conductor grabbed him by the hair and dragged him outside.

“Another shirker,” the conductor yelled at the stationmaster.

“I’m not a shirker! I’m a journalist!”

The stationmaster snorted. “And I’m Emperor Napoléon. Let’s go.”

Arthur was hauled off to the police station.

“How old are you?”

Arthur glared at the chief of police. “Seventeen.” A lie: he wouldn’t be sixteen till mid-October.

“Seventeen?”

The man gazed at him dubiously. There was an ormolu mirror behind his desk, and in its clouded glass Arthur could see what the police chief saw: a round-faced boy who looked even younger than fifteen, with tousled straw-blond hair and a smudge of dirt on one cheek. Yet Arthur could also see the man’s hesitation.

Because the boy’s mouth was obdurate, even grim, and the eyes that stared unflinchingly at the policeman were the wintry gray-blue of frozen slate. It was an unsettling gaze, with the chilling self-containment of an anarchist moments before he hurls a bomb. The chief of police looked away.