Sparks Amber - The Unfinished World - and Other Stories-50-53

Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting
One: The time traveler leaves her craft in a copse of trees

near the center of the park. She walks quickly—as quickly as
she can these days, with her aging knees and hips. She
buys a flimsy little card and takes the subway downtown till
she reaches the poorest part of the city. She finds the artist
at home amidst the squalor, paints scattered, no hot water,
barely room for a dirty mattress. Downstairs a baby cries.
He is so young, the artist, a white smooth face in the dark of
his walk-up. She supposes this will be easy—from the
empty, hungry tilt of his face, to the stooped posture from
painting under this sloped attic roof. She tells him her name,
the name of a very famous sculptor: a lie. She tells him she
has heard rumors, but finds he has no talent, that his
paintings are no good: a lie, also. She tells him he should
move back home to Modesto, become a dentist. There is
money and there is security in dentistry. There is emotional
stability and happiness.
The artist looks at her, aghast but defiant. The artist
knows his way around this kind of truth.
When the time traveler returns to her own time, she
heads straight to the third gallery on the third floor of the
museum. The painting still hangs—a vast, moon-filled
abstract, shapes building to a woman, curves like rolling
blue hills, lit from within and without. The room is crowded
with people who have seen it only on holo screens,
breathless in its physical presence. The dates under the
artist’s name, bookended by the long-ago b. and d. The
painting is now titled In Spite Of.
Two: The time traveler counts three, and throws the

dummy onto the highway as the bottle-green Ford comes
barreling over the bridge. After the smash-up, she calls the
young artist collect from a Modesto diner. There’s been a
terrible accident, she says. Long recovery ahead, come
home for good, she says. When she gets back to her present
and sees the painting, she isn’t exactly surprised. The artist
never had much filial feeling.
Three: The time traveler sits at dinner with the artist’s

muse and the man she has hired to seduce the artist’s
muse. The muse is pretty, her eyes a soft gray and her hair
a bright gold. She is tall and strong, with large breasts and
hips, and the man has been happy to do his job. The time
traveler buys bottle after bottle of wine for the table, until
the man puts his hand on the muse’s thigh and her face
softens into a sweet smile. The time traveler is no voyeur,
but she stands for a long time under the muse’s open
window, listening to the low moans float onto the warm
summer air.
She returns to her own time and the painting still hangs.
Now it is titled Forgiveness.
Four: The time traveler steals the artist’s rent from his
dresser drawer. His landlord, she knows, is an unyielding
sort. Now the painting is smaller, much smaller, but it is still
the single occupant of the room and it still sucks the air
from the room and it still lights the room from within and
without. Fuck, says the time traveler, and the tourists
standing nearest her shift uneasily in polite Midwestern
disapproval.
Five: The time traveler posts an acceptance letter from a
California dental college, complete with a nine-hundred-
dollar bonus if the artist enrolls in the next two weeks. The
painting is bigger again, and the bio on the wall mentions,
as a humorous bit of trivia, that the artist briefly considered
dental school. Can you imagine, it says. The artist as a
dentist! The time traveler resents the exclamation point, as
do all the dentists who pass through the museum.
Six: The time traveler sets explosive charges under the

apartment, and blows them when no one is home. Upon
return, the painting is still there, and now a tour guide is
lecturing on the painter’s subsequent madness. The artist,
he says with an air of enlightened detachment, claimed to
have created a series of paintings using his own waste—
which his wife unfortunately destroyed. The tourists make
faces.
Seven: The time traveler sets fire to the unfinished

painting. The painting is still there.
Eight: The time traveler pours acid on the unfinished

Nine: The time traveler paints over the unfinished

Ten: The time traveler steals the unfinished painting and

buries it in the past of the past. The painting is still there.
Eleven: The time traveler curses, cuts, spits on, slashes,

saws in half, kicks, pours water over, blowtorches, burns to
bits, eats the ashes of, smashes the easel around, throws
out the paints for, and washes her hands of the unfinished
painting. In triumph, she returns to the museum.
The painting is still there. It hangs, suspended, “like an
artfully falling ocean,” says a pretentious young gentleman
in a straw boater and suspenders. The time traveler thinks
of artfully falling anvils instead.
Twelve: The time traveler steals the unfinished painting

and takes it back to the future, where it disappears like
smoke upon arrival. And the painting is still there, is still
there, is still there, is still there—is still hanging in the
gallery and now it is titled Perseverance. The time traveler
feels the unfairness of this keenly. She has persevered. She
has not succeeded. She has not made him see his own sad
end, there in that bedroom with his failures and his guns
and his useless, incomprehensible war with the painting. All
that genius given, all that misery marked for both of them.
Thirteen: The time traveler finds the muse at her lunch.

She watches the muse eat her sandwich with gusto: tomato
and cheese on thick slabs of crusty bread. She watches the
muse gulp down wine, watches her strong white teeth and
her smooth white throat. The time traveler sighs. She was
more in love with life than with him—she’d never have
believed how black and long the days could stretch over
her, mean and empty, like shadows in the winter. She takes
out the pill, drops it into the muse’s wineglass. She leaves
before the gray eyes can close. She still needs them to see,
just for a moment until the timeline catches up.
The time traveler materializes in the gallery, where the
painting no longer hangs. Now there is another painting,
lilies on a pond, and Google finds only a retired dentist in
Modesto, California. The time traveler smiles then, a soft,
sweet smile, and no, her limbs don’t start to fade away, nor
does that smile hang on the air, nor does she slowly
dissolve, like pixels on a screen or shadows over a wall. She
simply smiles, and then isn’t.

Sparks Amber - The Unfinished World - and Other Stories-50-53

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sparks Amber - The Unfinished World - and Other Stories-50-53

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting

One: The time traveler leaves her craft in a copse of trees

Two: The time traveler counts three, and throws the

Three: The time traveler sits at dinner with the artist’s

Six: The time traveler sets explosive charges under the

Seven: The time traveler sets ﬁre to the unﬁnished

Eight: The time traveler pours acid on the unﬁnished

Nine: The time traveler paints over the unﬁnished

Ten: The time traveler steals the unﬁnished painting and

Eleven: The time traveler curses, cuts, spits on, slashes,

Twelve: The time traveler steals the unﬁnished painting

Thirteen: The time traveler ﬁnds the muse at her lunch.

You might also like