Light and dark

All you can feel is pain and what wakes you is a breath of wind. Breathing on my cheek, like she used to. A brief memory of her, then every nerve-end explodes into life and slams messages at my brain to say this hurts like hell, and blood is everywhere and burbling out of me, and pain is a hurricane soaking into every fibre and the car’s motor screams as if some idiot has his foot planted on the gas and some small intelligence tells me it’s my foot and I reach down and pull my cramping leg back and scream with the pain of the bone sticking through my arm but at least the motor has died now and there’s just dust and steam and flickering headlights, the smell of gas.

I unclip the seatbelt, left arm, left arm, push the door open, left arm, and urge myself out, urge the gas not to light up. The headlights flicker off. The dust settles, the sound of the steam subsides and suddenly the night is upon me and around me and absorbing me into it and then there’s nothing. I blackout, collapse onto my right arm and the shattering pain immediately wakes me. I scrabble away from the wreck on hand and knees, through sagebrush, dust and the smell of gas, sit at the side of the road.

Dirt road, dark night, miles from anywhere, no help, no guidance. Just me, me and this deep pit of pain. Blood in my face. Left arm, I haul out a crumpled handkerchief, wipe my eyes. Starlight, sweet starlight. One foot mashed up, can’t walk. One arm shredded. I know enough to know that I can’t leave the bone sticking out given that no-one else will drive this road in the next few days and save me. Left arm, takes hold of my right hand, pulls the hand, scream because that’s what you do when that happens, but at least the bone is up against its other half. She used to ridicule the jacket because of its pretentious slits and buttons at the wrist but now I have the last laugh as I button the sleeve end to a centre buttonhole to support the right arm. Clever me. Hold the handkerchief to my bloody forehead, wipe the dribbling blood. Pull the scarf off my neck, tie it, badly, awkwardly, to my head to staunch the blood. One-handed knotting is hard. Especially by starlight.

What the hell? I was just driving along. Not too fast, then she seemed to just rise up in front of the car. I swerved to avoid slamming into her and the world dropped away from under me. Think I had the seat-belt on too loose. Would have installed those inertia-reel ones but I don’t have the cash.

Sitting on the side of the road now I can see that she’s not there. Come to that, I’ve never seen anyone on this road and she left months ago. Wish I had some pain-killers. Pity I didn’t give my brother that ride he asked for. He always has some fentanyl on him. Talk about pain relief. Tylenol it ain’t. Even generic acetaminophen would be welcome right now. But that old man who brought me up always said ‘you gotta make it happen yourself cos no other damn fool is gonna do it for you’. I drag myself along to a small tree and through the pain I break a big stick and make a rudimentary crutch. Then I lie down, ease myself onto the dirt, let the pain fade. ‘From dirt you came and to dirt you will go.’ The old fool was full of words like that.

I manage to stand on my one good leg and start down the road. Crutch, foot, crutch foot. No woman in sight. What made me see her? I hadn’t been dipping into my damn brother’s candy bag. One tequila slammer an hour ago, before I left the bar. They know where I live but no-one will miss me for days. They know I shut the cabin door and paint and no-one sees me for weeks at a time. Even someone driving this road probably wouldn’t see the car down in the scrub like that. Damn sagebrush shouldn’t grow that big. I stink of sage. Better than stinking of gas anyways.

That vision worries me. A man shouldn’t see a woman that isn’t there. Should just see a road, arrive home, drink some more, sleep some, then stare at that new canvas until something appears on it that I can paint. It’s what I do. Stone carvers remove the stone hiding the sculpture. I remove the white canvas hiding the painting.

Crutch, foot, crutch, foot. God it hurts. It all hurts. Miles to go before I sleep. Thank you Robert Frost. Take this pain away and I might even remember more of the poem. Take this pain away. It’s what painting is for. Painting, the word, carried the word pain. It’s a short distance from pain to paint. Are all painters just trying to put their pain somewhere else? Exorcise the demons. Exercise the demons. Excise the demons?

Thank god it was my left foot that broke or I’d have had to lie there unable to move. My armpit will be a mess in the morning, taking my weight on this very poor crutch. There’s a big rock at the side of the road. I sit a while. Try to relax so the pain eases.

The moon hesitates at the horizon. Grey light whispers across the valley. Navajo memories shift in the breeze. Piñon pines lean into the road.

The night betrays us, wraps its cruel arms around us and laughs when we shrink back, even if we grab a torch, switch it on and toss light into the cold air. The night knows that the light will always go. The batteries will always fail and the sun will go down and leave us to the night’s mercies until dawn.

My paintings were always dark. The canvas a bright morning light that needed to be quelled, shapes resisted, enclosed, shadows created, lines drawn, limits defined, structure imposed.

She was the light. When she moved into my life I painted more with colour, saw the blues in the trees, the oranges in the sand, the blue-greys in the juniper. Forms eased and flowed. The creek in the valley rippled with life and light in its hesitant meandering.

But she tired of all I had to offer and went away, took her flaming hair, her warm arms, the lovely litter of her laughter. Just left.

I returned to the monochrome, searching for the light, the life, the multi-hued palette but finding just shades of shadow, lines of charcoal. Months had passed since then in gradations of Caravaggio black.

Days passed like lower register organ keys pressed heavily in badly-lit cathedrals. Processions of monks in dingy habits praying without ever seeing the benefit of their prayers, Nuns in morganatic marriages to Christ having given all and got nothing in return, desperate for sleep between compline and matins. Staring at the dormitory vaulting moonlight shadows.

Staring at the canvas. Seeing just her face, feeling nothing. Each night passing more slowly than the one before. Days staring at the box of charcoal, wondering if that was the art, before my fingers reached for the sticks. Turning the empty canvas away so as not to see the emptiness, not to face my inability to fill it, to make form of the feelings.

Maybe the desert bar would distract me. So I drove out there and downed a few while the country singer droned. Sank the last tequila and left, unrequited. Then she arose from the road and beckoned to me, a grey, dirt-filled spectre. At least I didn’t hit her. Not sure how I would have handled that. Driving through the vision.

Was it a vision or a thing of substance? Was it just in my head or was it real? Is a painting just an image transferred to a surface? Or is it the signals received on the viewer’s retina, interpreted by their mind? Is a painting different for every viewer? Did the vision appear to anyone else?

A hummingbird flits by. A sudden shadow. Shimmering colours hidden by the night. A breeze on my cheek from its fragile, urgent wings.

I notice a light in the distance. Under the old cottonwood. Where my cabin was. Did I put a light there? It flickers, like a candle. But I don’t have any candles. Marsh-light? But there’s no marsh. St Elmo’s fire? No storm here, no masted schooner. A black block of cabin in the moon-grey night. An old tree suffering eternal seasons of hot and cold, eternal days of light, dark. A candle in the window. That I didn’t put there.

I shut my eyes, lean on the crutch. More visions? When I open my eyes the light has gone. The block of black, under the charcoal lines of branches losing leaves, near the dark creek carrying ripples of moon.

Foot, crutch, foot, crutch. I shift the crutch and accidentally bang my broken arm. My scream echoes across places I know but can’t see. The sound wraps back to me like harpies swinging through the night, reaching for my ragged soul.

I stumble on, letting the pain own me like the darkness. Pain becomes walls of black in the dark, clawing up from the dust that smells of potsherds, burning corn, death on a small horse, stone arrowheads, broken beads.

I am become a fragment of time, tossed on waves of pain and slaughter sweeping from the plains. Cadavers eaten by starving coyotes.

They danced to their gods by fires in the night. Their gods departed. They etched glyphs in stones. Their gods deserted them.

I have to stop thinking and focus on getting to my bed.

The last rutted lane. I almost fall, hopping and crying. Crying out, crying tears. I slump against the door frame. Left arm. Turn the handle.

There’s a candle in the window.

Are you all right? she says. A voice in the dark.

I had an accident, I stutter.

You look awful, she says.

You aren’t real, I reply.

I stare into the empty cabin. The thick black lines of the drawing on the easel, of the woman and the crashing car.