The Illustrator

You have never heard of me. You have never been to my exhibition. 

But you have seen my Art. 

Too young to speak? Too old to walk? Too poor, too busy, or category-five blind? You have seen my work.

Of course, you have. Everyone has.

I am the Illustrator.

*****

Thirty years earlier.

“DO NOT ENTER,” says the sign in obnoxiously red letters. 

I push past the door.

“CONTAMINATED AREA. RESPIRATORY EQUIPMENT REQUIRED.”

I take a deep breath, hold it, and walk further into the bowels of the old dilapidated warehouse. It’s dark and stuffy inside, specks of dust floating in the rectangular shaft of light from the open door. Just an old creepy building, I tell myself as I clutch my worn satchel tighter with my good hand and move away from the comfortable proximity of the exit. You’ve been warned the venue is unconventional. You’ve been–

The inner pep-talk trails off as I freeze and take in the next sign. “DANGER: RADIATION RISK.”

God, how much do I want this job? If even one of these signs is real… But my feet are already moving forward, bringing me past another door and into a dimly lit corridor. My body knows the truth even if my mind doesn’t quite accept it. This is not a question of want. It’s a matter of need. 

I keep going. Ten seconds. Twenty. The corridor ahead of me twists in wild swings even as it angles down at a steep unrelenting incline. If this were a mountain, I would be hiking down the switchbacks. Nervous, I try to calculate how far underground I’ve descended, but it’s becoming somewhat hard to think past the growing urge to inhale. I know I’ll have to give in to the burning in my lungs eventually, but those bright red letters are still blazing in my mind’s eye. The further from the signs I am, the—

“Hello!” booms a voice an inch away from my ear and all rational thought flees my head. My lungs expand in a painful spasm – and I whirl to wheeze into the face of a man leaning against the wall a few steps behind me. 

What the…?!

My wheeze turns into a gasp as I stumble away, deeper into the passage. The man… the creature standing in front of me has a face that would fit into a cubist’s painting without any – any – alteration. Misaligned lines and shapes creating something vaguely humanoid. For a blissful second, I think the poor light is playing tricks on my eyes but a closer inspection disabuses me of such a hope. No. The thing in the corridor really is a collection of colorful geometric forms that have somehow slithered off a painting and come to life. Even his body is a series of stashed blue triangles. 

“You must be Mr. Ron Staroff? The painter?” it asks amiably, its booming voice managing to scare the daylight out of me for the second time in one minute.

“I… I’m armed!” I blurt and throw the flap of my satchel open in what I hope is a convincing search for a gun. There is nothing inside but a few sketchbooks and a book, but I hold the satchel out anyway. Worst case scenario, I can hurl it at my attacker.

“Master Ron, if you think that I will crumble like a Jenga tower if you land a hit, you are quite wrong,” the creature laughs and shakes its mismatched head, “But I apologize if I’ve frightened you. I keep trying to find a way of introducing myself tactfully, but nothing seems to work.”

“Maybe try not creeping up on people from behind?!”

“Ah, but I did try,” the creature frowns – a misalignment of flat rectangles that I think are its brows, “But coming up from the corridor below just sends everyone running all the way to their homes. Screaming. Very impolite.”

I still breathe hard and don’t let go of my improvised weapon despite the familiar pain that starts flooding my right wrist, but the words dull the edges of my panic, “You… let them go?”

“What else am I supposed to do?” a helpless shrug, “I suspect chasing them with a glass of water isn’t going to help.”

I let out a choked sound that might have been born as a snort, “Yeah, probably not.”

“I have them, though. If you want?” abashed hesitancy to the question, “I can also make a cup of tea. Or perhaps find a chocolate? I’ve heard humans like to eat when they are nervous.”

“Mmm, no, thanks. I’m good.”

“Hmm,” the creature shifts from one disproportionately long leg to another, “So… want to proceed to the interview then? I haven’t gotten to talking to any of the candidates before, so I am not sure if there’s some other protocol.”

I consider saying that I want to leave too, that I am going to run out of this warehouse and never look back, but as my agitation fades, so does the illusion that I have a choice. My right hand is positively throbbing by now. I need this job. I need the money. The surgery won’t pay for itself.

I let the satchel settle back on my shoulder. Shake out my aching hand, “Lead the way.”

My companion motions forward, towards a branching corridor I haven’t noticed before, “This way. The Illustrator is waiting for you.”

*****

It’s another fifteen minutes of walking in the shadowed underground maze before Steve – yeah, the impossibly alive three-dimensional cubist’s painting by my side is named Steve – leads me to a tall magnificent door that an artist in me immediately recognizes as a replica of the Ghiberti’s ‘Gates to Paradise’. A perfect replica. Looking every bit as old as the original.

“Is that…” I start and Steve smirks. 

“We call it ‘Gates to the Galleries’ here, but yes. The Illustrator has always been proud of this particular design.”

“Proud? It’s an incredibly accurate copy, but Lorenzo Ghiberti is the one who came up with the design like six centuries ago.”

Steve’s eyebrows misalign again and he sighs, “I’ll let the Illustrator explain this one.” He walks up the Gates of the Galleries and pushes both doors outward.

They swing open with an unexpectedly loud thud.

I drop the satchel.

Then, my jaw.

I am looking at my paintings. Dozens of them, all perfectly forged, are arranged in rows of easels in a hall that doesn’t seem to have any ceiling or walls. That latter part should have probably been alarming, but I’m so shocked to see my work staring back at me that nothing else registers.

My first thought is that whoever this Illustrator is, he has somehow broken into my tiny studio and stolen everything I’ve ever created. How dare he? I almost turn to jab an accusing finger at Steve before I notice something among the paintings. A small canvas that shows a blue porcelain cup of coffee held by a long-fingered feminine hand. My mother’s hand. 

I know it intimately, recognize it immediately, have seen it a thousand times in my imagination, remembered it wistfully and lovingly, but I’ve never – never — painted it. Not so much as a sketch. It’s one of those images we carry close to our hearts and don’t wish to debase them with something as mundane as grids and lines. 

Mind reeling, I tear my gaze away from my mother’s hand and scan other paintings. I’ve been wrong. There are more than dozens of them. There are thousands.

Places I’ve thought of, people and scenes I’ve imagined when reading, compositions I’ve considered and discarded. All things that have ever had color and texture and a spark of life in my mind are drawn here on a white sterile canvas.

I swallow. Turn to Steve.

“What is this?”

“You sure you don’t want that glass of water? You look pale, master Ron.”

“What. Is. This?!”

“This is—”

“My home,” says another voice, a whisper that seems to bounce off the non-existent walls, “And this is your room, Ron.”

I turn to find a short dark-skinned man in his seventies rolling his wheelchair in my direction, a smile on his face. His eyes dance as he watches me stumble back into Steve’s uneven chest. 

There are multiple reasons to back away. For one, the man and his wheelchair have appeared absolutely out of nowhere. For another, he has more facial hair than anyone I’ve ever met. Impeccably dressed in an Italian suit as he is, he looks more an ancient chimpanzee than a human.

Steve lays a comforting hand on my shoulder. I want to scream.

“This is one my favorite rooms,” says the newcomer, giving the space around us an appreciative look, “Your imagination has so much room and light, Ron, it’s a pleasure to work with.”

“You are—”

“The Illustrator, of course.”

“May I ask your name?”

The question seems to startle the old man. He thinks for a while, brow furrowed in deep concentration, and then says, “I don’t remember. Just call me the Illustrator.”

“You… don’t remember your name?”

“No. I don’t remember if I ever had a name.”

“Everyone has a name.”

“These modern days, yes. Things were simpler a little while back.”

I try to process the statement. As far as I know, people had names as early as there were…well, people. I am not sure I want to ask the next question, but it bursts out of me anyway. 

“How old are you, sir?”

“Sir? Hmmm. Maybe that can be my name, I quite like it. I am seventy-two,” I exhale in relief while the Illustrator thinks, counting something on his fingers, and then adds, “And five zeros.”

“What?”

“I always miscount the zeros. But yes, seventy-two and five zeros.”

“That’s more than seven million years!”

“Sounds worse than it feels,” the Illustrator says, beaming up at me, his furry face alight with a smile, “You’ll see.”

I’ll what?!

For a second, I imagine myself sitting in a similar wheelchair for millennia, trapped underground in a place that can’t be with creatures that can’t exist. The image is so terrifyingly bright in my mind, that I squeeze my eyes closed to find some comfort in the darkness behind my eyelids, but when I open them, it’s right there – on an easel just a few steps away.

I yelp, but the Illustrator only laughs. Rolls his wheelchairs closer to the painting, “It’s not that bad here.”

“How…” I motion from the painting to my head, “Does this place see inside my mind?”

“Of course, not. Your mind sees inside this place.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you have a book with you?”

I nod, refraining from asking how he knows that I always carry something to read with me. That’s hardly the most pressing of my concerns.

“Read an excerpt, please,” says the Illustrator and wheels himself to a blank canvas, a brush materializing in his hand. For the first time, I notice that his hands are fuzzy, almost blurred. Like they are appearing and disappearing a thousand times per second and I just can’t quite catch them in the act.

I return to the Gates and pick up my satchel. Take out the book, flip to a random page, and read the first line, “The glangoh before Zent had seven eyes set around the circumference of its head, each a different color of the rainbow,” I steal glances at the Illustrator as I read, the words of the fantasy story barely registering. With a baffling speed, the old man draws a vague shape with a few bright blotches, nothing like the glagnoh I’d imagined when reading the book before. Yet, there is something else that catches my eye and makes me pause my reading. 

The phrase I’ve just said aloud is now itched into a narrow plank above the easel, a detail I haven’t noticed before. Like… like instructions for the artist. Even as I watch, the line changes to ‘like instruction to the artist,’ and the Illustrator is already painting a different picture, one that has a vague impression of a human in front of the canvas. 

I stop reading or thinking in words entirely, trying to summon the detailed image of the glagnoh I’ve built over the previous days. It appears beneath the Illustrator’s hand a millisecond before I see it in my mind’s eye.

“You…” I choke out, “You Illustrate thoughts. Human thoughts!”

The old man makes the brush in his hand disappear and rolls back to me, “Yes. Some of the animals too. Apes, mostly.”

“How?!”

“Well, I hope. Despite everything,” he gestured at his wheelchair.

“But there are almost eight billion people in the world!”

“I know. My house had almost eight billion rooms.”

“Not everyone thinks in pictures.”

The illustrator nods, serious, and prompts me to walk through a door that hasn’t been there a second ago, “Yes, let me show you.”

We walk into a room so dark, I think that Steve has somehow sneaked up and slid a black velvet scarf over my eyes. 

“This is the room of a seven-year-old boy who has been born without eyes. He has no perception of color or visual understanding of shapes,” the darkness explains in Illustrator’s voice, “But I can give him paintings made of sound, touch, taste, and smell. It’s a harder art, much more delicate, but just as important. If you are good, you can add a little of those to your lit rooms too.”

I hear rather than see a door open and the Illustrator whispers, “Two steps forward, please.”

I obey. We are in a room, where everything is black and white, instructions inching their way on the wood of the easel. “Monochromacy,” the Illustrator notes, and opens another door. This room has no color blue. “Slight color-blindness.”

He keeps opening doors. I keep following. 

A room, where most paintings are drawn from above. A room, where everything is vague. A room, where each painting had a round black hole in the middle. Others, that seem both surreal and natural at the same time.

I can’t help but feel like I am intruding. Many of those images are… private.

But the Illustrator makes me look. Makes me understand what each room – I still can’t think person – requires. How to make the most of the available equipment and colors.

I listen, half-stunned, half-fascinated. I can already see that the Illustrator isn’t just doing a perfunctory job. No. For the same set of instructions, like a character description from a popular book, he will draw a thousand different portraits in a thousand different rooms. It’s awe-inspiring. Humbling. Touching.

By the time, we finally return to my room, I am all but in love with the old furry man. 

He chuckles at my expression and asks, “So? What do you think?”

I laugh and point at the closest easel, where the line in the wood reads, “Holy God! Holy God! Holy God!”

The Illustrator laughs with me, but then coughs, blurry hand flying up to cover his mouth, “Sorry, age has been catching up to me lately.”

“Why did you invite me?” I ask, still elated, “Do you need help with some of the rooms? Clean? I’ll do anything!”

“Become the Illustrator in my stead?”

 I freeze.

“But the job description said…”

“...help needed to Illustrate a story. Yes. A story of humanity. History.”

“But I am human! I can’t draw in eight billion rooms at once! I can’t even draw as quickly as you do!”

The Illustrator laughs, “My dear, I was barely a monkey out of the jungle when I got the job. You are one of the best painters I’ve ever known. Look at this room!” he opens his arms as if to hug the infinite space, “You see so much. Appreciate so much. You’ll do well.”

I stand there, eyes lowered to the floor. I want to say yes. A part of me remembers my life above, my friends, my small studio, but a larger part of me can’t seem to let go of this place. This knowledge.

They shouldn’t have renamed the doors. They are the ‘Gates to Paradise’. My Paradise.

Fortunately, I don’t really have to make a choice.

“I can’t,” I say quietly, “I’m sorry.”

“May I ask why not?”

“I need a joint replacement surgery. On my right wrist. The doctor says if I don’t do it in the next two weeks, I may never be able to hold a brush or a pen again.” I have hoped to get this job, make the money, do the surgery, but now…

The Illustrator shrugs, “I’ll paint you a healthy wrist.”

“I’m afraid even you can’t do that. Illustrating thoughts is one thing, painting physical objects into exist—”

Behind me, Steve coughs and the Illustrator lifts an eyebrow. 

“There is one room I didn’t show you,” he says, “Mine.”

I laugh, straining to imagine how much light and color that room will have, but the word yes still refuses to drop off my tongue. The images of my life flash, both literally and figurratively, before my eyes and I feel torn between two impossible choices.

“You like the above, don’t you?” The Illustrator asks.

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t we negotiate a starting date?”

“We can do that?”

“Of course. I’m old, young man, but I can wait a few more decades. How about starting in… thirty years?”

“Just like that? Come back here and start in thirty years?”

“Just like that. Except when you start, you’ll have to keep doing it for about seven million years. Doing it well. Until, like me, you don’t even look like a modern human anymore.”

I think for an entire minute, trying to find a reason why I should refuse. When none come, I hold out my good hand. 

The Illustrator takes it in his blurry one. Shakes. 

“See you in thirty years.”