THE INVISIBLE MUSEUM
Noah
131/2 years old
The Neighborhood Terror Threat Level drops as I pan with Dad’s binoculars from the forest and street on the front side of our house to the bluff and ocean in the back. I’m on the roof, the best surveillance spot, and Fry and Zephyr are paddling through the break on their surfboards. I can tell it’s them because of the sign flashing over their heads that reads: Itchy Blistering Brain-Boiled Sociopathic Onion-Eyed Asshats. Good. I have to be down the hill at CSA in an hour and now I can take the streets, for once, instead of tearing through the woods, trying to give Fry the slip. Zephyr, for some reason (Into Jude? The concrete dork?), leaves me alone now, but everywhere I go, there’s Fry, like some mad dog on meat. Throwing me over Devil’s Drop is his obsession this summer.
I mentally send a school of famished great white sharks their way, then find Jude on the beach and zoom in. She’s surrounded by the same bunch of girls she’s been hanging around with all spring and so far this summer instead of me. Pretty hornet-girls in bright bikinis with suntans that glimmer for miles. I know all about hornets: If one sends out a distress signal, it can trigger a whole nest attack. This can be deadly to people like me.
Mom says Jude acts the way she does now on account of hormones, but I know it’s on account of her hating me. She stopped going to museums with us ages ago, which is probably a good thing, because when she did, her shadow kept trying to strangle mine. I’d see it happening on the walls or on the floor. Sometimes lately, I catch her shadow creeping around my bed at night trying to pull the dreams out of my head. I have a good idea what she does instead of coming to the museum, though. Three times now, I’ve seen hickeys on her neck. Bug bites, she said. Sure. I heard while spying that she and Courtney Barrett have been riding bikes down to the boardwalk on weekends, where they see who can kiss more boys.
(PORTRAIT: Jude Braiding Boy After Boy into Her Hair)
Truth is: Jude doesn’t have to send her shadow after me. It’s not like she can’t take Mom down to the beach and show her one of her flying sand women before the tide wipes it out. It would change everything. Not that I want that.
Not one bit.
The other day, I was watching her make one from the bluff. She was at her place, three coves away. This time it was a big round woman, done bas relief, like always, except she was halfway turned into a bird—so incredible it made my head vibrate. I snapped a picture with Dad’s camera, but then something really horrible and maggoty came over me and as soon as Jude had walked off and was out of sight and earshot, I slid down the whole cliff, raced through the sand, and, roaring like a howler monkey—its roar is epic—knocked into the awesome bird-woman with my whole body, toppling and kicking it to nothing. I couldn’t even wait for the tide to take it out this time. I got sand everywhere, in my eyes and ears and down my throat. I kept finding it on me days after, in my bed, in my clothes, under my nails. But I had to do it. It was too good.
What if Mom had gone for a walk and seen it?
Because what if it’s Jude who has it? Why wouldn’t that be the case? She surfs waves as big as houses and jumps off anything. She has skin that fits and friends and Dad and The Sweetwine Gift and gills and fins in addition to lungs and feet.
She gives off light. I give off dark.
(PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT: Twins: The Flashlight and the Flashdark)
Oh, my body’s tightening into a wrung towel from thinking like this.
And all the color’s spiraling off everything.
(SELF-PORTRAIT: Gray Noah Eating Gray Apples on Gray Grass)
I pan back up the now colorless hill to the now colorless moving van parked in front of the now colorless house two doors down—
“Where the hell is Ralph? Where the hell is Ralph?” Prophet the parrot next door cries.
“Don’t know, buddy. Nobody seems to know,” I say under my breath, while I focus on the movers, the same two guys as yesterday—not colorless, oh man, so not colorless—horses, both of them, I already decided, one chestnut, one palomino. They’re hulking a black piano into the house. I zoom in until I can see the sweat on their flushed foreheads, dripping down their necks, leaving wet transparent patches on their white shirts, which stick to them like skin . . . These binoculars are so awesome. A tan swath of the chestnut guy’s smooth stomach slides out each time he raises his arms. He’s more ripped than David even. I sit down, rest my elbows on my bent knees, and watch and watch, the swimming, thirsty feeling taking me over. Now they’re lifting a couch up the front stairs—
But then I drop the binoculars because on the roof of the house I’m casing, there’s a boy pointing a telescope right at me. How long has he been there? I peek up at him through my hair. He’s wearing a weird hat, one of those old gangster movie ones, and there’s white surfer hair sticking out every which way under it. Great, another surftard. Even without the binoculars, I can see he’s grinning. Is he laughing at me? Already? Does he know I was watching the movers? Does he think . . . ? He must, he must. I clench up, dread rising in my throat. But maybe not. Maybe he’s just grinning in a hello-I’m-new kind of way? Maybe he thinks I was checking out the piano? And asshats usually don’t have telescopes, do they? And that hat?
I stand, watching as he takes something out of his pocket, winds his arm back, and then lobs whatever it is into the air over the house between us. Whoa. I stick out my palm and as I do, something slaps hard in the center of it. I think it’s burned a hole in my hand and broken my wrist, but I don’t flinch.
“Nice catch,” he yells.
Ha! It’s the first time anyone has said those words to me in my life. I wish Dad heard. I wish a reporter for the Lost Cove Gazette heard. I have an allergy to catching and throwing and kicking and dribbling of any kind. Noah is not a team player. Well, duh. Revolutionaries aren’t team players.
I examine the flat black rock in my hand. It’s about the size of a quarter and has cracks all over it. What am I supposed to do with it? I look back at him. He’s redirecting the telescope upward. I can’t tell what animal he is. Maybe a white Bengal tiger with that hair? And what’s he looking at? It’s never occurred to me that the stars are still up there shining even in the daytime when we can’t see them. He doesn’t turn my way again. I slip the rock into my pocket.
“Where the hell is Ralph?” I hear as I quickly climb down the ladder at the side of the house. Maybe he’s Ralph, I think. Finally. That would be it.
I whip across the street to take the woods down the hill to CSA after all, because I’m too embarrassed to pass the new kid. Plus, now that color has refastened itself to everything, it’s supernaturally amazing to be in the trees.
People think people are in charge, but they’re wrong; it’s the trees.
I start to run, start to turn into air, the blue careening off the sky, careening after me, as I sink into green, shades and shades of it, blending and spinning into yellow, freaking yellow, then head-on colliding into the punk-hair purple of lupine: everywhere. I vacuum it in, all of it, in, in—(SELF-PORTRAIT: Boy Detonates Grenade of Awesome)—getting happy now, the gulpy, out-of-breath kind that makes you feel you have a thousand lives crammed inside your measly one, and then before I know it, I’m at CSA.
When school got out two weeks ago, I started doing recon down here, peering in the studio windows when no one was around. I had to see the student artwork, had to find out if it was better than mine, had to know if I really had a shot. For the last six months, I’ve stayed after school almost every day oil painting with Mr. Grady. I think he wants me to get into CSA as much as Mom and I do.
The artwork must be stowed away, though, because in all my spying I didn’t see one painting. I did, however, stumble onto a life drawing class being taught in one of the studio buildings off the main campus—a building with one whole side of it tucked into thick old-growth trees. A freaking miracle. Because what could stop me from taking this class? Covertly, you know, from outside the open window?
So here I am. Both classes so far, there’s been a real live naked girl with missile boobs sitting on a platform. We do speed drawings of her every three minutes. Totally cool, even if I have to stand on tiptoe to see in and then bend down to draw, but so what. The most important part is that I can hear the teacher and I already learned this totally new way to hold the charcoal so it’s like drawing with a motor.
Today I’m the first to arrive, so I wait for class to start, my back against the warm building, the sun smothering me through a hole in the trees. I take the black stone out of my pocket. Why did the kid on the roof give me this? Why was he smiling at me like that? It didn’t seem mean, it really didn’t, it seemed—a sound breaks into my thoughts, a very human sound, branches cracking: footsteps.
I’m about to bolt back into the woods, when, in my periphery, I catch some kind of movement on the other side of the building, then hear the same crunching noises as the footsteps retreat. Where there was nothing, a brown bag’s lying on the ground. Weird. I wait a bit, then sneak to the other side of the building and peek around the corner: no one. I go back to the bag wishing I had X-ray eyes, then crouch down and with one hand, shake it open. There’s a bottle inside. I take it out: Sapphire gin, half full. Someone’s stash. I quickly stuff it back in the bag, place it on the ground, and return to my side of the building. Hello? I’m not getting busted with it and blacklisted from going to CSA.
Peering through the window, I see that everyone’s there now. The teacher, who has a white beard and holds his balloon belly when he talks, is by the door with a student. The rest of the class is setting up their pads on their stands. I was right too. They don’t even need to turn on the overhead lights at the school. All the students have glowing blood. All revolutionaries. A room of Bubbles. There’s not an asshat or surftard or hornet among them.
The curtain around the model’s dressing area opens and a tall guy in a blue robe walks out. A guy. He undoes the robe, hangs it on a hook, walks naked to the platform, jumps the step, almost falls, then makes some joke that causes everyone to laugh. I don’t hear it because of the heat storm roaring through my body. He’s so naked, way more naked than the girl model was. And unlike the girl, who sat and covered parts of herself with her bony arms, this guy’s standing on the platform, in a hand-on-hip pose, like a dare. God. I can’t breathe. Then someone says something I don’t catch, but it makes the model smile and when he does, it’s like all his features shift and scramble into the most disordered face I’ve ever seen. A face in a broken mirror. Whoa.
I wedge my pad against the wall, holding it in place with my right hand and knee. When my left hand finally stops shaking, I start to draw. I keep my eyes clamped on him, not looking at what I’m doing. I work on his body, feeling the lines and curves, muscle and bone, feeling every last bit of him travel through my eyes to my fingers. The teacher’s voice sounds like waves on the shore. I hear nothing . . . until the model speaks. I don’t know if it’s ten minutes or an hour later. “How about a break, then?” he says. I catch an English accent. He shakes his arm out, then his legs. I do the same, realizing how cramped I’ve been, how my right arm has gone dead, how I’ve been balancing on one leg, how my knee is aching and numb from being jammed into the wall. I watch him cross to the dressing room, wobbling a little, and that’s when it occurs to me the brown bag is his.
A minute later, he lazes across the classroom in his robe toward the door—he moves like glue. I wonder if he’s in college around here like the teacher said the girl model was. He looks younger than she did. I’m certain he’s coming for the bag even before I smell the cigarette smoke and hear the footsteps. I think about hightailing it into the woods, but I’m frozen.
He rounds the corner and immediately lowers to the ground, his back sliding down the building, not noticing me standing just yards away. His blue robe glitters in the sun like a king’s. He stubs the cigarette out in the dirt, then drops his head into his hands—wait, what? And then I see it. This is the real pose, head in hands with sadness leaping off of him all the way to me.
(PORTRAIT: Boy Blows into Dust)
He reaches for the bag, takes the bottle out and uncaps it, then starts chugging with his eyes closed. There’s no way you’re supposed to drink alcohol like this, like it’s orange juice. I know I shouldn’t be watching, know this is a no-trespassing zone. I don’t move a muscle, afraid he’ll sense me and realize he has a witness. Several seconds pass with him holding the bottle to his face like a compress, his eyes still closed, the sun streaming down on him like he’s being chosen. He takes another sip, then opens his eyes and turns his head my way.
My arms fly up to block his gaze as he scoots back, startled. “Jesus!” he says. “Where the hell did you come from?”
I can’t find any words anywhere.
He composes himself quickly. “You scared the life out of me, mate,” he says. Then he laughs and hiccups at the same time. He looks from me to my pad resting against the wall, the sketch of him facing out. He recaps the bottle.
“Cat got your tongue? Or wait—do you Americans even say that?”
I nod.
“Right, then. Good to know. Only been here a few months.” He gets up, using the wall as support. “So let’s have a look,” he says, walking unsteadily over to me. He fumbles a cigarette out of a pack that was in his robe pocket. The sadness seems to have evaporated right off him. I notice something remarkable.
“Your eyes are two different colors,” I blurt out. Like a Siberian husky’s!
“Brilliant. He speaks!” he says, smiling so that a riot breaks out in his face again. He lights the cigarette, inhales deeply, then makes the smoke come out his nose like a dragon. He points to his eyes, says, “Heterochromia iridium, would’ve had me burned at the stake with the witches, I’m afraid.” I want to say how supremely cool it is, but of course I don’t. All I can think about now is that I’ve seen him naked, I’ve seen him. I pray my cheeks aren’t as red as they are hot. He nods toward my pad. “Can I?”
I hesitate, worried to have him look at it. “Go on, then,” he says, motioning for me to get it. It’s like singing the way he talks. I pick up the pad and hand it to him, wanting to explain the octopus-like position I had to be in on account of not having a stand, how I didn’t hardly look down as I was drawing, how I suck. How my blood doesn’t glow at all. I swallow it all, say nothing. “Well done,” he says with enthusiasm. “Very well done, you.” He seems like he means it. “Couldn’t afford the summer class, then?” he asks.
“I’m not a student here.”
“You should be,” he says, which makes my hot cheeks even hotter. He puts his cigarette out on the building, causing a shower of red sparks. He’s definitely not from here. This is fire season. Everything’s waiting to go up.
“I’ll see if I can smuggle you out a stand on my next break.” He stashes the bag by a rock. Then he holds up his hand, points his index finger at me. “You don’t tell, I won’t tell,” he says, like we’re allies now. I nod, smiling. English people are so not asshats! I’m going to move there. William Blake was English. Frances freaking-the-most-awesome-painter Bacon too. I watch him walking away, which takes forever on account of his sloth pace, and want to say something more to him, but I don’t know what. Before he turns the corner, I think of something. “Are you an artist?”
“I’m a mess is what I am,” he says, holding on to the building for support. “A bloody mess. You’re the artist, mate.” Then he’s gone.
I pick up the pad and look at the drawing I did of him, his broad shoulders, his narrow waist, long legs, the trail of hair on his navel going down, down, down. “I’m a bloody mess,” I say out loud with his bubbling accent, feeling giddy. “I’m a bloody artist, mate. A bloody mess.” I say it a few more times, louder and with more and more gusto, then realize I’m talking with an English accent to a bunch of trees and go back to my spot.
A couple times in the following session, he looks right at me and winks because we’re conspirators now! And on the next break, he brings me a stand and a footstool so I can really see in. I set it up—it’s perfect—then lean against the wall next to him while he sips from the bottle and smokes. I feel way cool, like I’m wearing sunglasses even though I’m not. We’re buds, we’re mates, except he doesn’t say anything to me this time, nothing at all, and his eyes have turned cloudy and dim. And it’s like he’s melting into a puddle of himself.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“No,” he answers. “Not okay at all.” Then he throws the burning cigarette into a dry patch of grass before he gets up and stumbles away, not even turning around or saying good-bye. I stomp out the fire he’s started until it’s dead, feeling as gloomy as I felt giddy before.
With the new footstool, I can see all the way to everyone’s feet even, so I witness what happens next in perfect detail. The teacher meets the model at the door and motions for him to go out into the hall. When the English guy comes back in, his head’s down. He crosses the classroom to the dressing area, and when he emerges in clothes, he seems even more lost and out of it than he did on the last break. He never once looks up at the students or at me on his way out.
The teacher explains that he’d been under the influence and won’t be modeling at CSA anymore, that CSA has zero tolerance, blah blah blah. He tells us to finish our drawings from memory. I wait a bit to see if the English guy’s going to come back, at least for the bottle. When he doesn’t, I hide the stand and stool in some bushes for next week and head back into the woods toward home.