Stuart Kaminsky - Melting Clock

“Bedroom, downstairs. Two beds. Dali’s bedroom is upstairs.”

Jeremy led me into a small but comfortable living room with thick, soft furniture. There were three paintings on the wall with their backs turned to us.

“Picasso’s,” Jeremy explained, putting the clock on a small table near the window. “Do you expect us to be here long?”

“Can’t say,” I said, sitting in one of the chairs and sinking in. “Three people are dead because of the missing painting and three clocks. Dali thinks the killer’s dead. I think he’s got Dali’s painting and may not be too happy with Salvador.”

“Do you have any …?”

“I think his name is Gregory Novak, but beats the hell out of me where to find him.”

“I will call Alice and tell her that I may be delayed.”

“I’m sorry, Jeremy.” I walked to the wall and pulled the first Picasso out so I could take a look at it.

“Alice is an admirer of Dali’s work. She’ll understand.”

The Picasso painting, what I could see of it, since I didn’t want to take it down from the wall, was a blue and yellow eye on a sea of something that looked like little question marks without the dots under them.

“Jeremy, what the hell does this stuff mean?”

“It means nothing,” said Dali, coming into the room. “Nothing and everything. Picasso is a fraud. Dali’s work escapes, goes beyond meaning into the eternal and mysterious unconscious. My Gala tells me you are a poet. Is what I have said not true of all art?”

Dali had changed quickly and shaved. He wore a tiger-skin robe from beneath which peeked the collar and the pants legs of pink silk pajamas. In his right hand was a glass with a stem about a foot long. The liquid in the glass was orange.

I let the Picasso drop back against the wall. Jeremy mused aloud: “Each artist, with rare exceptions, is his own Cassandra, doomed to tell himself the truth and doomed never to understand it. Surrealists say that their work has no meaning. The truth is that they are incapable of seeing what it means, and certainly they are incapable of saying what it means.”

Dali had been sipping his orange drink when Jeremy began, but stopped almost immediately and then looked at Jeremy without expression.

“And who shall tell us what it means?” he asked softly.

“There are many who will tell you, but each has his own key-the Freudian, the Jungian, the Catholic, the Jew, the Marxist. Each has a key to the enigma we create and each is right yet each is only partly right because we ourselves are the only ones who can comprehend the meaning of our work, without words, if we will just look at it.”

“And why do we not look at it?” asked Dali.

“Because we are afraid of what we will see,” answered Jeremy. “Sometimes I think artists create so that others may see and the artist need not look.”

“You are a romantic,” exclaimed Dali, holding his glass up to toast Jeremy.

I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, so I said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about and I need some sleep.”

“Tomorrow we shall be busy,” Dali announced. He placed his now-empty glass on a wooden table with a little round platform. The glass just barely fit. “Tomorrow is the celebration of the setting sun, and we shall all be in pagan costume to welcome the first devil’s night of the new year.”

With that, Dali raised his eyebrows and opened his eyes wide. His mustaches twitching, he turned and disappeared into the hallway.

“Where’s the kitchen?” I asked.

“I’ll show you,” said Jeremy.

There wasn’t much in the refrigerator that appealed to us after we finished the chilled shrimp and each had a large helping of orange juice in mugs shaped like babies’ heads. Jeremy led me to the bedroom after we made the rounds and were sure the house was secure. Locked doors and windows wouldn’t keep a killer out, but they would probably make it a little noisy to break in. We agreed to sleep in shifts, three hours each. Jeremy said he had some reading and wanted to stay up first, pointing out that I looked too tired to take the first shift. He was right.

There were two beds in the guest room. I washed my face, brushed my teeth with my finger and some Dr. Lyon’s tooth powder Jeremy let me use, took all the stuff out of my pockets and put it on the low dark dresser against the wall, and then took off my clothes and hung them in the closet. Jeremy, fully clothed, sat on one of the beds reading.

“What’re you reading?”

“Theodore Spencer,” said Jeremy, “Listen:

The pulse that stirs the mind,

The mind that urges bone,

Move to the same wind

That blows over stone.”

“Sounds nice,” I said, scratching my thigh through my underwear.

“I’ll read it to Alice tomorrow,” he said. “It’s part of a longer work. If you like, I’ll go in the other room to read.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll be asleep in a minute. My problem’s not getting to sleep, it’s staying there.”

And I was right. All I had to do was close my eyes and try to make sense out of what had happened in the last three days. I thought about Gregory Novak. I might even have said the name, but that was about all I did think or say before I fell asleep.

I dreamed of Gala in the kitchen singing “The World Is Mine Tonight” and making flapjacks on the griddle. She was wearing a frilly apron and doing her best to look like Betty Crocker. I was waiting for the flapjacks when Dali came in wearing overalls, a plaid shirt, and a straw hat.

“They’re almost ready to harvest,” he said, sitting at the table and grinning at me. He pointed to the window.

I got up and looked over the shoulder of the busy, singing Gala. The sun was white bright but I could see the shore-along the beach, in the sand, clocks were in bloom, black clocks just like the one in the other room. Music was coming from inside the house, dark music.

“Blood makes them grow,” Dali said behind me.

And now I could see that the sand around each clock was red.

I woke up. Jeremy was sitting in the same position, still reading, but he was at the end of the book.

“Time is it?” I asked blearily.

“Four-thirty,” he said. “I’ve checked the doors twice. I wasn’t sleepy.”

“I’m up now.” I sat up. “Get some sleep.”

I was awake but I could still hear the dark music.

“What is that?”

“Bach,” said Jeremy. “A fugue for organ. I think Dali uses it for background music while he paints.”

“Why not?” I got out of bed and almost crashed into the wall when my leg refused to hold my weight. I managed to steady myself by grabbing hold of the headboard.

“Would you like the book?” asked Jeremy.

“No, thanks,” I said, making it to the closet. “I’m going to see if I can find some coffee.”

Jeremy took off his shoes, removed his clothes, and put on a pair of clean pajamas that had been folded neatly in the small suitcase he had brought.

“Wake me no later than nine,” he instructed, lying back and closing his eyes.

“We’ll see how it goes,” I said, slipping on my shoes. “You can turn off the light.”

And he did.

I made my way into the kitchen. It was empty but I could still hear the organ. In fact, it made the floor reverberate under my feet. I didn’t find coffee or cereal. There was a loaf of bread. I went into an enclosed deck on the sea-side of the house, opened the window so I could hear the surf, and sat in a straightbacked chair with the bread and glass of water. The sun rose somewhere over the Rockies and hit the shore. The view was great. We were on a ridge about fifty yards from the beach. The weeds were below the ridge and a sandy path led down just outside the window. Gulls swooped and sat on something near the shore that looked like a big chair.