Lacquer and Fire
Wilhelm was alone in his fire-lit
study, sitting in his chair of tooled leather among strewn papers and dancing
shadows. He sipped the last of his watery whiskey, which was helping with the
cough. The fire, hissing and popping, its flames protesting the marble mantel,
vied with the rain, which pelted the colonial windows behind him. He would have
walked into town if not the storm, so he told himself, but now it was best to
edit.
Seventy-one, arthritic, and battling
pneumonia, he must have known his pen would be useless at this hour. After the
coughing fit subsided, he scribbled out the few notes written and put down the
pen. He finished the scotch, placed the crystal on a stray sheet of scrawl, and
looked toward the fireplace. To its left hung an oil painting of docked
sailboats on sun-streaked water. To the right stood a tall bookshelf, its thin
boards bowed from their burden. Wilhelm went to it and scanned the printed
bindings, the fire warming his pale cheek and liver-spotted arm. On the middle
shelf and between bronze bookends stood his three novels.
He took down his first published
work, Into Hispaniola, written forty
years ago. Thaddeus, a seventeenth century pirate, yearned for an island native
during an expedition across Tortuga. He was bartering knives for tobacco when
he saw her in a brook, cleaning land crabs. She caught his gaze and they
stared, and in the days that followed desire for her consumed him. Under cover
of night he would steal the silver from his ship and meet her in Cayona. They
would cross the Canal de la Tortue to the mainland and with the bullion buy
their voyage to the Old World. But the Spanish invaded before Thaddeus put his
plan to action. He fell under a barrage of flintlocks, and lay dead on the
lapping shore, having never spoken to the woman.
Wilhelm lowered the book to catch
more firelight. On the left half of the cover was a man among ropes and square
sails, gazing to a calm Caribbean. On the right half: a young woman among slim
leaves of sugar cane, wielding a spear and staring passed its tip to the
distance. If I had a son he might look like Thaddeus, Wilhelm thought. The
cobalt eyes, the straight brown hair I used to have.
Then he took down Venusian Entreaty,
“a romance written for money,” he admitted after its publication. Young readers
bought the book, but it disappointed critics (“Wilhelm Dore’s foray into
eroticism is a meandering attempt to recycle literary trash” was particular
feedback that stuck with him). The cover illustration of Venusian Entreaty, a pop art rendering of the planet itself,
suggested nothing of the novel’s amorous and doomed affair. Wilhelm had been
embittered about this art, but now the planet was fitting--suffocating,
lifeless sentimentality.
Finally, he removed Copper, his longest and most technically
adventurous work, written to finance the New England home. In Copper, protagonist Bill Bexler, like
Wilhelm, was raised in rural Montana. Unlike his creator, Bill had a wife and
daughter, whom he abandoned for promising work at a Chilean copper mine. Bill
was imprisoned during a political coup, however, and became desperate to return
home. He broke out and fled to the Andean foothills, but a Chilean Recluse
bite, and subsequent renal failure, took him in the wilderness. Wilhelm flipped
through its pages, seeing the blue ink of his obsessive, post-published
revising.
Wilhelm
knew he wasn’t unlike his protagonists, those wandering figments of his
imagination. They all shared the loneliness, sure, but now Wilhelm too felt
victim to fate, destined for solitude. Even one of his aspiring-writer friends
would be welcome company now, perhaps to watch the storm with, perhaps to
advise that art must eventually be set free.
He gazed into the dimming fire, the
books burdensome in his atrophied, cradling arm. Such devotion they demanded,
but he was indifferent to them now. He thought about Emilie, the woman he
forsook for his writing. He imagined the children they never had. If only I had
stayed with her, he thought, she could be here now and I wouldn’t die
alone.
He knelt in the glow of the fire
and, one by one, threw the books in, embers spitting forth. Flames flickered
violet as the lacquered covers caught. He waited, his forehead beading with
sweat, his kneecaps raw, to ensure the books were wholly engulfed. From the
gray-bricked chimney plumes of smoke joined the night.
Later, he returned from the bedroom
and laid the quilt and pillow on the hardwood in front of a smaller, retreating
flame. He tossed a log in, closed the iron screen, and lay down in fetal
position with his bony back in the heat to soothe his lungs. He heard the moist
log gasp and steam. The hiss of encroaching death, he thought. And as the
thunderstorm’s full fury enveloped his hilltop estate, it drowned the sounds of
coughing into the night.
David Gershan works as a clinical psychologist in Chicago, IL. When not at his day job, David can be found indulging in his love of music, literature, and creative writing. David has been published in Flash Fiction Magazine and has written numerous articles for an award-winning mental health blog.
Tags:
Poetry