The Peacock Boy
He approached the turnstile, and the man in the booth assumed a look of remoteness. It was in its way more cutting than a look of disdain, but it was a look with which he was familiar. He paid the admission price, handing the man a damp and crumpled dollar bill and four quarters slick and warm from his sweating palms. Fumbled awkwardly at the bar, nerveless hands slipping off the metal with a helpless flutter; giving up, he shambled through, pushing the bar with his thighs.
He couldn't help it, couldn't help the state he was in. Trickles of sweat crept like little insects along his hairline, making his skin crawl all over. His stomach was a void, a vacuum, hollowed into nothingness by hunger. It affected his equilibrium. His body felt discombobulated, floating above his legs, which carried him down the wide halls effortlessly. He could have eaten with the two dollars--the supermarket sold stale bread, three loaves for a dollar--but this way was better. He came as soon as he had the money, purged and honed fine. Not like the people around him; THEY moved ponderously, sluggish with too much food, too little thought, with the very density of their souls. THEY goggled fish-eyed at him, lacking even the finesse of the turnstile operator. He permitted himself a disdainful smile.
None of them were here for the reason he came. THEY came because it was the thing to do, THEY came to pit their pathetic opinions against those of the equally ignorant critics. He came for one thing. He came to see the boy.
What did any of THEM have to say about him? He was exquisitely crafted, he was sublimely pretty... idiots! THEY called him a delightful Ganymede and placed him in a class with Donatello's David. THEY said that the jewels in his eyes were worth more than the boy himself, degrading him more than ever they had Donatello's simpering dandy.
What did THEY know? Their minds were molded by the facile opinions of society, molded to appreciate the noble, the mighty, the heroic, the tortured and the sainted. Gods, heroes, prophets and saviors embodied greatness, but the boy was only a pretty catamite.
He had reached the niche in which the statue stood. No one else was there. His eyes alone feasted on the boy.
The boy wasn't pretty. He was beautiful. Unlike the weighty contrapposto poses of most ancient statues, he stood with delicate poise, with grace seeming more ephemeral than that of the fleetest of gazelles or the most ethereal of winged angels. He shimmered like a dragonfly. There was a graveness about him too; his perfect lips suggested a smile at once solemn and secret, and the gaze of his eyes promised deep truths.
How the statue had survived in such immaculate perfection was a mystery. There were no chips, no cracks, not a flaw to be found on the gleaming marble flesh. The original colours tinting the marble remained, mellowed by the centuries from bright paint to soft, glowing hues, the graceful drape of the tunic a muted bluegreen, as were the peacock feathers in the shining fall of bronze hair, straight and fine as silk. The eyes were inlaid jewels, two dark opals perfectly matched, glowing with shifting hues of bluegreen in their depths.
THEY said it was because he had been sealed within an airless tomb, untouched by plunderers and time. THEY said that the paint was of an unknown mixture, the artist's secret skill. THEY said that it wasn't authentic, that the boy had been retouched. He neither believed nor disbelieved any of THEM. It was simple beyond mystery or miracle; the boy endured because he must always endure, gazing out at the world from his self-contained perfection. He was Beauty, and like the sun and the moon and the stars, he would exist forever.
He turned away. The aching emptiness and sick giddiness had become sharp, light-filled clarity. He was as keen as a razor, filled with brilliance instead of hunger. People did not stare at him now as he flashed along, but moved out of his way like raindrops scattered by lightning.
He returned to his flat, and threw himself feverishly into his painting. All through the day he worked, until he could no longer distinguish colour in the dusk; then, for he had no money to pay his electric bill, he tied a flashlight to the rickety, broken ladder he had begged of some workmen and worked on. The canvas was enormous, and he had been working on it for a long time, so long he hardly remembered beginning. It portrayed a fountain exploding with colour and life, shapes fantastic and beautiful forming in the glittering sheets and cascades of water. He could have done many other things, made many smaller paintings, in the time since he had begun the fountain, the masterpiece, but no; it must be this. It was his tribute to the aesthetic principle by which he lived; and of course to the boy.
It wasn't easy to serve Beauty if you weren't born beautiful. You had to find another way. If you didn't have the means and the grace to encompass it in your life, you had to create it. He envied the sculptor who could translate marble into flesh and the author who could forge glimpses of transcendent beauty from the abstraction of words, but his medium was colour and figure, light, shadow and form; it flowed from the brilliant images in his mind down his arms and from his hands, leaping into life on the virgin canvas. Beauty transformed his hands into magician's instruments, let him fuse the glory of imagination and colour into an avatar of itself.
His brush swirled futilely at the flat, damp patch of ultramarine. Anxious and aggravated, he tried to force even a dollop of paint from the tube, but it was hopelessly empty, as he'd known it would be. He slit the tube open with an old razor and scraped the thin film of paint from the inner walls. When that ran out he checked his cobalt and cerulean, and found them nearly gone as well. Despair undermined his inspiration, frustration stinging his strained eyes. The batteries in the flashlight were going too. He needed money for paint. And food... how long could he go without it? The paint was more important. He shouldn't need food, which was just so much dross, but it was no good if he lacked the strength to paint. He needed money for both, there was nothing else for it.
He knew of a way, if it had to be done. Tomorrow he would go and see a friend, a man he knew, and do a job he had asked. The thought made him feel dirty and spoiled already. He curled himself into a fetal ball, and fell asleep hugging his knees to his chest.
It was nothing, really. An anonymous someone thrust the package at him from behind the screen door, then he took the buses on the route the man had told him. It was just an errand and had nothing to do with him. In the park the policemen stared at him out of stupid curiosity, but they didn't molest him. He walked peaceably by them with the package under his threadbare jacket, met the other man, the pick-up man, and walked back with the bulging envelope in his pocket. It never occurred to him to keep the money; the man, his friend, gave him fifty dollars for doing it.
Fifty dollars almost compensated for the feeling of defilement. He bought supplies, he dined, he returned to his flat resplendent as a king. The canvas and the paint sang under his brush, his strokes soared. His hands moved as quick as light, but they were precise to the minutest detail; he could not err. He had been afraid it would leave him after what he'd done, trafficking in the profane world, but the earlier force sustained him.
He drew strength now from his own work. His mind was a mirror; it mirrored beauty and flung it back and his hands captured the reflections of beauty on the canvas, binding them there forever with his paints.
Then, oh then, days later--how many he did not count--it lived within the canvas, finished, and not within his mind. Finished, the canvas held the shifting, glowing colours and the figures that swirled and undulated within the shimmering fountain, and his mind was as pure and blank as an empty canvas. Transubstantiation of the spirit; he was changed. The world would change. Now he had a piece to show the galleries. Now he would transcend the squalor of his life. Now the shining gates of Heaven would swing open and he would be bathed in glorious light, for he had created Beauty. Yes.
This time, for the first time, he came not trembling and sweating like a junkie in the throes of withdrawal, but sure and joyous as a newly ordained priest before the altar. If the people stared now, it was at the radiance in his face.
He saw the ropes cordonning off the boy's niche from down the hall, and stopped. Why ropes? Had the idiots finally realized his worth and decided to protect him from gawkers?
No, not ropes--police banners, DO NOT CROSS. His ears began to ring faintly, and the sound increased in volume as he walked toward the boy. It grew louder, as if somewhere a great bell had been struck beyond bearing and must shatter under the reverberations of its own tolling. It grew louder still, until he could hear in the ungodly ringing the sound of the very foundation of his world being torn asunder.
THEY had gouged out the boy's eyes. He still stood, graceful, smiling, gleaming, but where his beautiful eyes had glowed there were only blind craters. The critics had said it, that his opal eyes were worth more than the boy himself. Someone had listened to the critics.
His vision darkened, and he would have welcomed it if it had obscured the sight before him. He cried out loud in his anguish, and heard no sound but the sound of his shattering soul. Climbing over the ropes, he beat on the boy's oblivious chest with both fists and saw through a wash of bitter tears the statue wobble on its plinth. He gave the violated statue a powerful shove and the boy toppled from his pedestal, crashing to the tiled floor, one slim marble arm cracking at the impact.
The shrill alarm of spectators penetrated the knell of doom ringing in his ears, and he turned to flee. Forgetting the ropes, he stumbled and fell awkwardly over them, legs tangled. His numb fingers scrabbled frantically at the ropes as he strained to escape the desecration behind him, flesh shrinking with revulsion at the memory of the touch of the cool marble. Freeing himself, he ran blindly in the direction of the exit, struggling out of the grip of museum guards who sought to restrain him and blundering desperately through the crowd of onlookers who stared at him in fear and distaste, not knowing that he was no danger to them, not knowing that he was no more mad than any man betrayed by that which he had held to be his god.
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Updated Thursday, 04-Mar-2004 14:58:29 PST