Dance of a Paintbrush

 Jay Beckerman is an eccentric yet boring man. He drinks peptic as a beverage, and from some point in his life, it became the only liquid he drank besides water. Boxes of green little bottles are piled up at the side of the room like an old accolade. Above the boxes, there is a picture of a woman sitting on a stair with gloomy eyes like the green glistening on the glass bottles, yet she is smiling. There is another picture of her on the back side of a tiny postcard on the table. Same smile, but she has red eyes this time. All of those pictures with smiles that are so serene and tragic looming like a sheer mist in the background make me shiver underneath my skin.

 Jay Beckerman's room is nothing but ordinary. The wallpaper is the color of dull ivory that is whether painted or faded. A small desk of a width that is slightly larger than Jay Beckerman's shoulder, a chair that looks like bone rotting in the sand, and a dark blue rug lying in the living room like an old dog towards the end of its life, they are all waiting for something to happen. The wind blew from the window made of a mild green sash shook the gray fluffs blooming on the rug and sat down on a chair like a soul.

 Jay Beckerman is sitting at the corner of the room with one hand on his folded knee. The other hand is flipping over the pages of a job posting. As his finger scrutinizes the letters vertically, his fidgety toes are frantically squeezing. He has a sparse beard that is between being neat and odd, and a pair of green snickers that matches the duality. Jay Beckerman was doing quite well after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

 A phone rang and in response, Jay Beckerman swore a little mumble in surprise as he pulls his gaunt body up and walked toward the phone. Meanwhile, the phone rings hysterically, turning every bit of silence into broken pieces.

 “Hello,” As Jay Beckerman answered his phone, I quickly picked up the headset to eavesdrop. Through a buzzing sound, I could hear Jay Beckerman's ghost-like voice.

 “Jay?” A woman's quivering voice responded.

 “Becky.” Jay Beckerman whispered with a sigh. He sat by the window and looked outside. His face blurred in the white sunshine.

 “Did you get my postcard? I sent it as soon as I heard about you. Are you okay?”

 “I'm okay. I kind of knew this coming.”

 “What do you mean you knew this? You had symptoms?”

 “No, but I drank peptic instead of bear. Maybe peptic was stronger than I thought.” Jay Beckerman leans toward the green bottles and flicks them with his finger. The green bottles hummed clinking sounds.

 “How long have you been drinking peptic?”

 “I don't know. About ten years?”

 “Ten years?” The girl repeats the word in remoteness by discovering something unexpected from a person she thought knew well.

 “Or more?” Jay Beckerman smirked at her alarm.

 “Why did you do such a thing?”

 “You know, it tastes good, smells good, and has cute little green bottles.”

 “But you knew that you are gonna get ill out of it.”

 “Well, I didn't much care if I got ill.” There was some moment of silence. Only the sound of Becky sniffing echoed.

 According to the long-distance call, Becky, the girl with the gloomy eyes on the postcard and a picture, is Jay Beckerman's sweetheart. But she is far away across the ocean to learn how to make a fine paintbrush according to the Victorian style. That was her job in England.

 After an hour, Jay Beckerman plays an old CD, but it was too soft to chase away the solemn ambiance. He cooks a chicken soup and finally breaks into a cry, throwing the spoon across the sink. It collides with a china kettle with a pink rose pattern, which is maybe the most luxurious thing he owns.

 “Oh, no, no... Sorry, Mom.” It must be a gift from his mom, I thought while Jay Beckerman collected the pieces.

Knock.

 “Pizza delivery!” I pull off the headset and climb down the hall carefully. When I open the door, there is, again, a short boy holding a pizza in a stupid red uniform. I don't get it. Is it some kind of metaphor for pepperoni, I ask him. But he simply tilts his head, holding out one hand for the pay.

 I am Wes Heimer, 81 years old man, an owner of this building which coincidently has wiretaps and spy cameras all over the place. I guess it was a former dwelling of a hitman or a prime suspect but no paper verifies the original owner. I discovered the panic room 3 years ago, and since then, I started a project.

 I observe people through cameras and wiretaps, but I am no freaky psycho or a pervert. I consider my building a sacred butterfly specimen. The people are my wings and I am just a looper wanting to fly.

 I eat pizza watching Jay Beckerman go to sleep. Before he lies down, he writes a letter to Becky. On a postcard with a picture of a cloud in a blue sky, there is a single line written with a rough black pen.

 “Please come home.”

 Red plastic cup dewed with black cola, brown box with crusts and arid scraps, pickle absorbing the blue light coming from the button on the wiretap machine. It falls into my eyes and becomes glistening stars in them. I stare into them in the reflection of myself in the mirror as I brush my teeth and as I climb into my bed. I fall into the darkness between the memory and forgetting as I closed my eyes. This is what I could get best from my life.

 Jay Beckerman is surely an interesting man. He is a man in the middle of those two borderlines. Humor and gravity. However, most of these days, he seems to use humor only to cover up the trace of death following his footsteps. He doesn't feel humor anymore, he only utilizes it.

 When Jay Beckerman was 13 years old, he met Becky. It was a summer day on the threshold of his mother's nail shop which was located at the verge of the cornfield. Young Jay used to hover around there with his bicycle, watching the immense waves of corn shake their heavy heads full of ripening beans. Those days felt endless like the endless stretching out cornfield. The monotonous line of the horizon, repetitive whispers of corn leaves brushing against each other, and the white sunshine roasting the road. He remembered the particular smell of the sun burning the soil. The drowsy smell of dust, the acerbic smell of the mashed green leaves. They would gently warm his cheeks with a sweep.

 'Looking back,' he wrote. 'it was all becoming a part of me, building a delicately fabricated road of life that led to now.' He bore a handful of soil and a handful of air always inside his heart. Sometimes when the two elements mingled upside down like the otolith rolling in his ear, the eternity confused him. He used to worry about how can anything be meaningful in these ceaseless moments. However, now since his life was demising, he started to find everything strikingly meaningful.

 One summer day on the threshold of his mother's nail shop, Becky first entered Jay Beckerman's life. Though almost 36 years passed since that day, he still remembers the moment when he spotted a pale blue dot appearing above the horizon. It got bigger and bigger as it emerged to him. The surrounding was silent and the wind was motionless as if before the storm. Reminiscing, he is amazed at how some moments are determined purely by coincidences. He starts to call them fate.

 A girl came riding a bike and stopped at the exact spot she wanted it to be. She jumped off the bike and walked into the nail shop. And while putting her one foot on the threshold, she asked a woman.

 “How much for doing the nail?” She was very polite, but at the same time, she was powerfully confident. She looked undefeated: the length of her walk, the key of her voice piercing sharp and clear.

 “I'm not even working here.” A woman with a frown of contempt answered her. By that time, Jay was sitting on the fenceless porch in front of the shop. Hearing this line, he wondered why the woman should be so rude toward a stranger who she barely knew. Why was she upset? About what? When he figured out that the woman was annoyed for being mistaken as a lowlife worker at a nail shop, rage out of disgust hit him like a spark. It all disgusted him; how the frowning woman could get a service from his mother while putting her poisoning contempt under her transparent persona. Every time his mother touched the woman's fingertips, he winced.

 “It costs 30 dollars.” Jay's mother answered, appearing from the corner of the room, whisking off her wet hands.

 “Well, that's too expensive for me. Thank you.” Young Becky walked out of the shop and found young Jay sitting on the porch.

 “Do you know that woman inside?” She asked.

 “The one wrinkling her forehead with a frown?”

 “Yeah, she's not your mother or something, is she?”

 “She's not my mother, she's just a customer. My mother is the one working there.”

 “Such a relief. I was thinking what a bitch that frowning woman is! Any kid under her charge must be painfully suffering.” Jay was surprised at Becky's exclamation. But suddenly it turned into exhilaration. As his inexplicable hate toward the woman was officially confirmed as something reasonable, he felt justifiable.

 “I know.” At Jay's comment, Becky smiled her sunny smile. It melted down the hate and disgust in his guts and turned them into nothing. Becky made everything seem okay. With her armor-like confidence and reassuring smile shining like the varnish on it, he was safe beside her.

 They became friends riding bikes along the cornfield together. She would tie a thread to a branch of a tree and walk toward the deep core of the cornfield. Holding her sweaty small hand and the thin white thread in another, he ventured through the unknown ambiguity. The time at the cornfield started to pass fast. It became terminated when Jay and Becky became 18, the time they fell in love.

 They went to college together and their lives were more intertwined. Jay Beckerman thought it was the end of the story. He thought that they will be together, just like that forever. But Becky left without a word after finishing college.

 It was June, right after college graduation in May. She left in a taxi with only a suitcase accompanied. No one knew why she left, not even Jay Beckerman. After 2 years of her disappearance, a postcard came. That was it. Only postcards and phone calls. But Jay Beckerman believed that they were still in love.

 'Why did you leave, Becky?' Jay Beckerman writes in his diary.

 A month passed from the day Jay Beckerman sent her a postcard. However, there hasn't been a response. Jay Beckerman died shortly after a few more weeks and was buried at the Cemetery beside his mother's grave. According to his wish, he was buried with the broken pieces of rose kettle given by his mother, postcards written by Becky, and peptic bottles he collected.

 I went to Jay Beckerman's funeral since it is my rule to attend the funerals of the ones who died living in my building. The service was taken on a beautiful sunny day as if death granted Jay Beckerman's last wish. I threw a handful of soil on his coffin and it sounded like a last knock saying that I had come. If Jay Beckerman is still lingering in this world, he must be very thankful to me. I left a message to Becky about his death and the schedule of his funeral. I also arranged the funeral with my own money and picked the headstone color as Amazon green. I thought it summed up his life pretty well, bringing the color of the cornfield and the color of the peptic bottle into one.

 Becky eventually came to Jay Beckerman's funeral. She was wearing a long black coat, a plain black dress, black flats, and black sunglasses. She was sniffing, but not crying. When she took off the sunglasses to take a close look at the headstone in the shade, I only saw tears soaking her eyes, not dropping from them. She looked reserved. Like simply accepting a refusal of a refund or cancellation of a booking, she stood there with a blank expression.

 “Are you Becky?” I ask her though I know her face.

 “Yes, I am. Who are you?”

 “I, I am a close friend of J, Jay.” Though I stammer a little since I barely talked to people for a while, it sounds like a person overwhelmed with sorrow.

 “It must have taken a lot to prepare this. Did Jay give you money?”

 “No, no. However, Jay asked me a favor.”

 “What favor?” She, again, takes off her sunglasses.

 “He told me to ask you why you left.” She halted every action for a moment. Shaking shoulder out of breathing stopped, the almost unperceivable tremble of the finger stopped, and swindling posture stopped; everything that was live and natural about her stopped.

 “But Jay is already dead, and I don't think it is necessary to verbalize it to a stranger.”

 “I am curious, Becky. And as a person who prepared the whole service instead of you, I think I deserve an explanation.”

 “So, you think I am responsible for him? I am not even married to him.” She scoffs and pulls out a cigarette from her black coat.

 “You are a very different person than I thought.”

 “Yes, I am. I am not to be defined or expected.”

 “But you loved him, right? At least you loved him.”

 “But loving and living are completely different things.” She mercilessly strokes a match and holds it while flaming with her fingertips. She smokes like a rebel into my face.

 “I had to leave him. I couldn't just live on like that and end up with nothing. The thing is that he always liked how everything was and I did not. Also, I was not a good person as he thought. I was not and I am not.” She watched how her smoke stroked Jay Beckerman's headstone and she stepped away, murmuring “Jay hated me smoking.” She looked confused in the smoke under the sunshine. Her eyes glisten somewhere between white smoke spreading like mist and the sharp sunshine cutting it like a blade. I handed the key to Jay Beckerman's residence in silence.

 After Becky was on her way to pack Jay Beckerman's stuff, I was on my way to Dr.Muhashin.

 “I need your brother to find out about Becky. I don't know her last name, but she is a girlfriend of Jay Beckerman and is working in England making a Victorian-style paintbrush.”

 “New specimen? By the way, he is not my related brother. You know that right? If you keep saying 'brother', someone might mistake me as his real brother and track me down or something.”

 “I'll call him Mr.Shadow then. He has this creepy aura.”

 “It's just because you don't know him that well. He is a good guy.” Dr.Muhashin laughed at my terrified expression.

 “How's your insomnia? You don't need meds anymore?”

 “I'm doing okay.” Dr.Muhashin has something that makes your guard down. He sees through people and never forgets what they told about themselves.

 As we parted down now dusk-falling ally, Dr.Muhashin told me.

 “Wes, never forget that you exist. Never lose the grasp of your past.” I nodded.

 As always, a man covered with hat, scarf, and gloves rings the doorbell after a week or so. He drops the report, I hand him money, and he left.

 According to the detective's information, Becky disappeared right after graduation to England. She worked at various places like convenience stores, burger shops, dentist's offices, etc. There was not much of a peculiarity. She had no other man in her life or big secret. Then, she got into a company making brushes according to the Victorian style and she stuck to that.

 I wondered what intrigued her to make the brush.

 “Loving and living are completely different things...” I murmured what she said to myself.

 The brush.

 The strands of hair concord to draw one line in unity. Those little pieces come together and dance on white canvas as if they are one. The elasticity is vibrant like the toes of the ballerina. Long thick arm of wooden handle stretches. It draws the line in the air, on the canvas, making a swishing sound. Spin, point, halt, draw.

 Life was becoming a brush on a white blank canvas. To draw a masterpiece, you have to dance till your toes burn off, till you sweat from the oppressing pain while biting your lips with rebellious endurance. Amid the burning pain, you realize yourself alive, as alive as the flaming matches kissing the tip of the cigarette. That must have been the dream of Becky.

 The night was becoming darker as the green headstone glinted under the blue moonlight, as the paintbrushes fell asleep on shelves in the paintbrush factory in England, and as Dr.Muhashin got up from his sofa to open the door for Mr.Shadow returning from his late work. I was four feet under the building, listening to the buzzing crackle coming from the empty room of Jay Beckerman's residence. Every strand of life that was either alive or dead was flowing into now darkening night.