Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“Clay and I dabble in the fine art of painting,” said Evan. “I prefer portraiture, whereas Clay is more of an abstract expressionist, with maybe some Bay Area figurative thrown in. But should we categorize art or just make and enjoy it? Here’s one of mine.”

The painting was maybe two by two feet. An oil. From the canvas Evan’s face looked back at me. The eyes, nose, and mouth were clear, detailed, and realistic, right down to the glimmering trapezoids of light caught on the lenses of Evan’s glasses.

“Nice,” I said. “Very you.”

“Thank you. It’s hard to be objective about oneself. But it helps the art to detach and examine, just as Dr. Hulet says detachment and examination help a person understand himself. Isn’t she one of the most attractive women you’ve ever seen?”

“She’s easy on the eyes.”

Evan fixed me with a look. “More like a direct assault on mine. But a most welcome one.”

The potter looked over, hands still working the vessel. “You’re nothing to her but a case number. A nutcase number.”

“Julie, you charmer you! This is the famous private investigator, Mr. Roland Ford. Star of film and TV.”

She ran her eyes up and down me just once, then turned back to her work. “I only watch PBS.”

“Let’s see Clay’s work,” I said.

“Over here.”

Our watcher from the forest looked in from the doorway, caught my eye briefly, then backed off. Evan put a hand on my shoulder as if we were old friends, guided me to the far side of the huge glass wall. We picked our way through the easels and paint-splattered worktables and stools. Through the floor-to-ceiling window loomed the mountainside, sharp with pines.

Clay’s painting was on an easel near the window. It was small. It looked complete but unclear. Against a black-orange background — a burning black curtain, a cave wall lit by a bonfire? — a figure stood above another figure lying on the ground. They had elongated, almost pointed heads. Human or simian, I couldn’t tell. No faces. Both were dark, twisted, and anguished, as if writhing in a fire. But somehow resigned, too. A performance or a ritual? I stared at it for a long time.

“What’s going on in the painting?” I asked.

“Clay’s mind.”

“Are those people?”

“Clay will have to tell you. I can’t. I just know that when we paint, Clay is very involved. He never paints from a model. Or uses a picture. It all comes from memory.”

Evan led me to the back of the room, where dozens of canvases leaned against the wall. Clay’s were not hard to find, two rows of four, all small in size. I knelt and flipped through them. The dark, longheaded figures repeated painting to painting. The backgrounds differed, though: some had similar red-black interiors, others brightly illuminated by what looked like cold white sunlight, and still others were dense, constricting fields of green that might have been forest or woods. But all of them featured the same two skinny, possibly charred but living figures.

“A fucked-up mind imagined that,” said Evan. “Pardon my language. Where I grew up they’d bullwhip you for using a word like that.”

“Alabama, right?” I asked absently.

“Shelby County. Hill country.”

I finished studying the last painting in the second row, tilted the canvases back against the wall. Then I went to the first row and looked at every painting one more time. I didn’t know why I couldn’t take my eyes off them, only that I couldn’t. Painful stuff. Pain itself. They had the simple brute allure of a highway wreck. Another way into the mind of this strange creature I’d been hired to bring back to the world. I stood and looked around. Back to this, I thought. His world.

“Do you think he’s capable of violence, Evan?”

He studied me, blue eyes narrowed, wheels turning inside. “His violence is not upon others. He smashed one of his paintings not long ago. Kicked a hole in a door.”

“Do women set him off?”

“No, Mr. Ford. He’s a gentleman or he wouldn’t be my friend. Anyway, that’s our art studio. Like to see that hummingbird drone in my room?”

Evan’s room was similar to Clay’s but looked considerably more lived-in. There were curtains over the big window with the nice forest view, several posters of Civil War — themed movies — Cold Mountain, Glory, Gettysburg, Sherman’s March — taped somewhat randomly to the walls. I guessed that poster glass or even plastic was prohibited. I let my eyes wander the living area while I listened to Evan rooting around in the bedroom. He had a desk, a laptop computer, and a printer, as had Clay. Also on the desktop was a loose stack of white printer paper and dozens of crayons of various colors and use. I nudged the laptop but it was fixed to the desk as firmly as Clay’s had been. And like Clay’s room door, and undoubtedly all the others, this door was lockless.

Evan came from the bedroom with a grin on his face and a small hummingbird-like thing riding on his palm.

We do have a drone-flying club here at Arcadia,” said Dr. Hulet. “One of Dr. Spencer’s interests. That’s what you saw.” I was back in her sixth-floor office. I’d told her about the strange little drone and Remsen in the tree.

“The pilots are supervised, of course. The drones have to be small and harmless. No cameras. The partners fly them around and end up crashing most of them. Evan of course knows all this but prefers a grand surveillance conspiracy.”

A drone-flying club at Arcadia. It didn’t sound as reasonable as an art studio. Or a nice swimming pool, or a play-money casino and a walk-in aviary where patients — partners — tended to small, frightened birds. And certainly our security escort wasn’t concerned when I climbed the fence to better see the bogus hummingbird.

Paige Hulet was wearing what I figured to be her standard work uniform: black pantsuit and shoes again, white blouse. This blouse had small black accents on the collar and buttonholes. Her hair was up in a tight bundle identical to the one she’d worn before. Her makeup was light or she wasn’t wearing any, and I thought of her treadmill voice early that morning.

“Where’s your power pencil?” I asked.

“I don’t think it would work on you. I use it on Alec because it helps keep him on task. Something to do with his Marine training?”

“Carrying out orders is what we do.”

“You don’t seem like a Marine.”

“I’m pretty ex, to tell the truth.”

She sat back in her black padded chair and looked at me for what felt like the first time since giving me Clay’s medical diagnosis the day before. I watched her gaze drift to the scar on my forehead, then lower. “As far as Evan’s claim about Clay being in Romania, that goes against all of the DoD information I was given. Of course, Evan Southern is delusional. He’s from Pasadena, California, not from the Alabama hill country. His name was Edward Frizell until he changed it. His accent and manners, the whole Civil War fixation — it’s imaginary. He probably didn’t have time to tell you about his great-great-great-grandfather who died at Antietam Creek.”

“No.”

“Evan has other identities, too.”

“This is a confusing and maddening place.”

“I love your choice of words. One of the longest discussions in mental health treatment is whether our help does more harm than good. Whether we’re just making them worse in places like this. I wrestle with that. I really do.”

“Clay Hickman told a lady friend of his that he received electroshock therapy here.”

She gave me a long, frowning look. “A lady friend? Someone outside Arcadia, then? So you’ve actually seen him?”