Upon entering the bathroom of the bank, the third man yanked off his rubber Trump mask. Now that Jules finally could see his face, he realized that the man was, in fact, just a boy, seventeen, eighteen at most. Fear filled his watery eyes, obvious even in the reflection of the mirror across from the stall. He laid his weapon on top of the mask by the side of the sink and removed his leather jacket. His pale arms trembled as if unable to tolerate the tattoos of skulls and flames that had been applied to strengthen them. He ran the water, cupped his hands, and rested his face in the swirl.
Julio Salablanca, delicate-boned, as slight as a sparrow, wondered if here was an opportunity. His eyes flickered from the pistol to the boy’s face hidden in his hands, and back to the pistol, and back to his hands, rapidly, for he knew he had seconds to decide, from the pistol to his hands, darting and flickering, each flicker exaggerating the distance between them. The sensation seemed to him entirely natural, his perception of vastness between minute details, for that morning had begun for him as many other mornings had, peering from behind special glasses that magnified every brushstroke in the museum’s restoration of damaged paintings.
Could he do it? Did he dare? Certainly he was not the kind of man to take action for himself, was he? Was he?
Invocación: Little Julie, prim in his smock, blows his horn and glances warily over his shoulder at the towering figures wreathed in smoke he has conjured from the walls of his bedroom. One is a prince with a goblet of wine. And one is a grizzled hunter with a long lit taper. And one is a boy with windswept blond bangs and tightlipped curiosity. If we look more closely, we see on the back wall the door of the closet into which he retreats. The besmocked child in the foreground grips a brass ball and horn; for the boy in the closet, these are a flashlight and book for his dreams. The book contains artwork of Remedios Varo. Night after night he consumes the pages by heart. He sees them in sleep and lives them by day, for they tell him stories in patterns and images he swears to be realities, some he has already known, but many more that shall become true. Though hidden in the background, as if an afterthought, the locked closet door seems to pulse with intense anger, especially when his father bellows throughout the house, “¡Maldita sea! ¿Dónde está ese chico?”
Dolor reumático: He stands with his back to us, his wrists shackled to the marble column against which he leans. A knife protrudes from between his shoulder blades. Clouds hang in the red sky above the chess board floor. On the horizon his sister Tara projects the rhymes he reads in life. Tara shines with the smooth complexion and saintly curvature of their Anglo mother. Tara is featured in the costume she wore when she danced the Nutcracker while he smoldered offstage in shadows of envy. Her graduation tassel, teasing in midair, draws our attention to the valedictorian stole upon her shoulders. His father, built like a tractor and clutching red hands, gazes in adoration from behind another column. His swarthy face beams, oblivious now to all but her. His father, who has tried to offer him everything men should desire but has given up. His father, who has said to him once too often, “Tara y yo vamos por helado. Tú puedes venir, también.” It’s the little things like that.
Niño y mariposa: We are arrested at first by the boy’s glare leveled directly at us. Perhaps it is belligerence, perhaps insouciance. Shoulders never broad to begin with droop with the weight of arms that slump into his pockets. In his drab olive outfit he shuffles through the barren street below empty windows that nobody bothers to come to. Shredded papers litter his way. The middle of his shirt is unbuttoned, so perhaps it once contained love poems that have spilled from his injured heart. Stretched menacingly just above his head is a monstrous butterfly, a horrible creature with wings of brown fur spanning a yard, its impish human head with heavy black brows and thinning gray hair. The illuminated surface of the narrow street that bends back around the corner leads to Rocksboro High, where most of his classmates do not quite know who he is, and those who do dutifully disregard him because there is something just not quite right. But he has gotten used to it by now, hiding himself in the cracks of their perception. He has made the butterfly his pet.
Ciencia inútil, o el alquimista: The ashen figure seated on the stool is wrapped in a mantle of the checkerboard floor. Incipient tears glaze his green eyes because he has realized the futility of persistence. From his hand we can trace the cause of his suffering: he cranks a spinning wheel of a device that through an elaborate mechanism of belts and gears attempts to capture the mysteries of life. Funnels may collect raindrops to be purified and bottled, but that is no magic. In art school he learns technique but is otherwise stultified. He has various visions but not he tells himself the vision. He can gaze at a white canvas and see what it could say but not what he would permit it to say. He comes to know intimately every painter except himself. His days become a palimpsest for the greatness of others.
Simpatía: The cat joyously dives into his attention, skidding across the tablecloth and knocking over the glass of water. He and the cat both gleam bright orange. He has such affinity for her that his legs have become tails. Scratching her back, he produces kinships of static electricity, whose sparks bullet out from the hair on his head, through the walls and ceiling of his monastic cell, but not before etching with spectral embers wheels and gears of sympathy that satisfy a drive in his little world. He has gotten a cat because it had been foretold. He has named her Remedios.
Robo de sustancia: Ominous clouds have set in above the scrubland plain. Five figures on the left warm themselves about a fire, but where are their heads above the cloaks’ collars? Where are the hands at the ends of the sleeves stretched forward? The Siamese on the rock stares alarmed at the absence of corporeal form and wonders where they have gone. It is also frighted by the creature looming beyond, its one collective head upon five conjoined bodies. What kind of theft has this been that it must dance in mockery of its victims, who are left to freeze devoid of identity? But he allows himself to disappear, so easy to do because he never has had any substance to start with—who ever acknowledged his presence?—and spends hours on end self-wrapped and self-rapt in a trunk in the middle of his apartment’s living room floor. Remedios watches him alertly as he goes through the ritual of leaving his eyes outside. Inside he escapes his ugly little body and finds identity in the gallery he sees with his eyes within.
Revelación (El relojero): It is 12:15 in the morning (if we are not otherwise in the timeless). Cogs roll off the tabletop and onto the floor and wheel away into the corners as the circular apparition sailing in through the window mesmerizes the emaciated watchmaker. Doubtfully tangible, it glides as a large crystal serving dish parting the air, detonating it with carbonated puffs. Grandfather clocks’ tips support the sagging roof as if existence were about to collapse upon him like an ill-prepared tent. A gust of inspiration blows aside the curtains suspended beneath the clock faces. Yes, we do see the pendulum and counterweights we expect, but time has fractured. The oscillation of the pendulum means nothing, for beyond it, in the secret chamber of every one of the clocks, is a different life that he enacts—an astronomer, a duchess, a poet, a swordsman, a courtesan, a jester, a builder. They are all there if he dares to embody them. But the canvas remains white in cowardly resignation. And we almost overlook in the lower right the cat who beseeches us to uncover her forgotten supper.
Encuentro: Seated at a small table, the figure lifts the lid of the casket from which peers another within. The figure is draped in a mantle of water that cascades from the coffer. At first it is a rivulet, spilling and splashing, but soon is woven into something that sustains. The eyes of the other gazing through the crack seem satisfied that the voyage is complete but slightly apprehensive about where they have arrived, whom they have arrived as. He is the other; his other self, one of many, the figure. On the shelf in the background are other caskets. As the waterclad figure, he gazes aside, beyond the frame, almost wistfully, and ponders metaphysics. If the source of his new being flows from the casket before him, what is his connection to the others in the caskets on the shelf? As the other, back in his apartment, Remedios curled in his lap on the sofa, he wonders the exact same thing as he scans the walls covered with Varo reproductions he has created for his sanctuary and shrine. What—or who—lies on the frontiers of his destinations, and how have they created him?
Caza nocturna: And there are those on the other side that would counsel him out of his foolish notions. Take for instance the subject before us, the owl warrior dancing defiantly from flight onto the dark street, vigilant protector of the less anthropomorphic owls of the city. He is their guardian. They call him the night fighter. The large frames of his charcoal-rimmed glasses have become the fine white feathers of the owl’s facial disk. Not only does he see all—he is not afraid to act. He speaks for all those explorers and weavers, star catchers and troubadours, all those celestially inspired and granted freedom by their wheels. He has the wisdom of Athena. He should be heeded.
His eyes flickered from the pistol lying on the Trump mask to the boy’s hands cupped full of water, from the pistol to the hands. Mere seconds left to decide. What would it be like? It should be executed with surgical precision, delicate but incisive, like gossamer threads that run from the stars, filaments at once diaphanous and adamantine.
Internado ambulante: It is a juggernaut, a beast with the stripes of a tiger that radiate from its body like branches and antlers. The human face on its bowed bullish head seethes with implacable determination. Iron wheels support its massive frame. The folds of its tiger’s hide are the folds of the fabric suspended from the helmet of the ghostly warrior emerging from the back of the beast. The hide’s folds part to reveal those same casketed cowards he knows himself to be. But who is that with the book, sternly lecturing them, reprimanding them with an accusatorial finger? It looks like him. No, it really does. It looks exactly like him. How had he not noticed this likeness before? It is a supreme vision. It changes his life.
His eyes ceased wavering and focused intently on the pistol. He loosened his tie and pulled it from under the collar of his dress shirt so he could easily slip it over his head. He then eased himself beyond the stall door and bounded quietly to seize the pistol. It was much heavier than he imagined it would be. He had to use both his hands to hold it up. The clicks of his shoes’ soles upon the tiled floor were covered by the sound of the rushing water, but the boy must have sensed his movement. He brought his face out of the swirling water just as Jules was aiming at his midsection.
He stepped back from the sink in utter surprise. “Where’d you come from?”
Jules slipped off his tie and threw it at him. “Undo it and loop one end to one of your wrists.”
“What?”
“Undo the tie. Then loop one end around one of your wrists. Pull it tightly. Then lie on your stomach with your hands behind you.”
The boy silently complied. Kneeling on the small of his back and balancing the pistol between the boy’s shoulder blades, Jules wound the tie around his hands and knotted it securely. He grabbed the weapon and stepped back.
“Okay. Now get up.”
It was all happening too fast. Because he had always kept himself at a discreet distance, life easily ambled by. Now he had only the time it took for the boy to get to his feet again to begin a thought that ran something like Engagement destroys the luxury of parallax.
The boy stared at him with what appeared to be a pout.
“Look, I think we both want the same thing,” Jules whispered. “We both want to get out of here. Stay in front of me. I have the gun right at your back.”
“You think they’ll let us walk right out the front door?”
He had not considered the boy’s two accomplices. Yes, what if they don’t? Stupid, stupid of him! But he was already committed and had no time to stare down the problem for a solution. He had only the time to act.
“Turn around and keep walking. We will not stop.”
As they left the bathroom, he did not dare glimpse at himself in the mirror. He would see no tiger, no night fighter. That would ruin it.
Steadily they walked into the lobby, both his hands on the pistol, the muzzle nesting upwards into the base of the boy’s skull. Jules planned to swing wide of the boy’s two associates, but when they were about forty feet away, the boy spoke up. “Dalton.” He did not yell; he merely spoke the name.
The one called Dalton glanced over his shoulder, suddenly wheeled around and raised his weapon. “What the fuck? R. J., you stupid son of a bitch!” The other man leveled his pistol at them as well.
“I’m sorry, Dalton. He was hiding in the bathroom. I didn’t see him.” R. J. sounded genuinely contrite, his voice childlike and reedy.
“Keep moving,” Jules told him, pushing into him to guide him to the front door. “Don’t stop.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Dalton bellowed again at R. J.
Jules tried not to look at him too closely. He seemed as broad as a baited bear on his hind legs, determined to kill captors.
“Look, he just wants to get out. Let us go and he won’t hurt anyone.”
They were slowly circling Dalton and half the way across the lobby. Ten feet behind Dalton was the other man. The bank employees and customers, on the ground, their backs to the tellers’ windows, gaped with uncertainty.
“Bullshit. He’s not going to do anything.”
He abruptly fired into the air just above their heads. Several of the women screamed. Jules froze.
“You see? A real man would’ve ignored that and kept moving. Didn’t I teach you anything about how to read people?”
“Dalton, just let us go.”
His face hardened in his rage. “You chickenshit! When I need you most, you give up on me!”
Jules felt R. J.’s chest heaving. He was beginning to cry. Curiously, it worked on him like empathy. Jules felt himself start to shudder.
Then Dalton laughed and turned behind him to the other man.
“What do you think? Let him go? Sure, let him go! He’s no use to us anymore!”
He turned back to them with practiced leisure and, his sardonic grin still full of contempt, casually shot R. J. in the chest.
The impact knocked them both backwards, and just before his body landed on the floor and R. J.’s body landed on top of his, Jules felt the fleeting sensation—he did not know if in fact it was correct—that the bullet had passed through and penetrated his chest as well. As he hit the tiled floor and seemed to bounce once or twice, he realized he was still gripping the automatic. He watched Dalton stalk forward.
Bereft of thought, he shut his eyes and squeezed the trigger until he could no more, firing blindly.
