The Muse of Lost Things
[ vm/ob PG ]
dedicated to my dearest Becca Ming precursor to Artist/Muse
Viggo writes.
He does other things as well while he’s in New Zealand; he paints and sketches and maintains detailed lists of all of the indigenous flora and fauna. He has his basement bathroom fitted with red lights and blacks out its windows with light-safe plastic and electrical tape. When Viggo has days off, he spends his free time there – writing and making and fashioning things. He loses track of what time it is, what day.
The kitchen of his apartment smells constantly of bitter turpentine and paint thinner and when Henry visits, he complains about always having to move his father’s canvases when he needs something from the fridge. Viggo gets used to washing his hands with painter’s soap and the backyard hose; he becomes accustomed to the cold water pooling around his bare feet as he does so. Spools of copper wire and half-spent jars of rubber cement start to accumulate on his coffee table.
In addition to all this, Viggo travels as well. He wanders and fly-fishes. He spends Tuesday mornings in the woods memorizing elaborately choreographed fight sequences. Spends Sunday evenings on the back porch with Bean, sharing expensive bottles of red wine. Together, they watch the horizon bleed out into the sunsetting sky and later on Viggo tries to recapture the moment in cadmium red and viridian green – metaphors and memories birthed out of plaster and varnish and thick layers of paint. Impasto. Chiaroscuro. Color theory and the law of thirds. Ansel Adams’ twelve-point gray scale.
While in New Zealand, Viggo tries to rectify himself with the life he left behind on the opposite side of the globe and, in attempting to do so, fills his time with all of these things and more.
But mostly, he writes.
…
Sitting in a well-aged pub in Wellington, Viggo notices the way Dom looks across the table at Elijah, notices the way the scuttling fingers of Dom’s right hand tug at his earlobe with a charming uncertainty whenever he laughs. Viggo runs his hands over the scarred, chipped wood of the table top – slightly sticky with nicotine smoke and a night’s worth of spilt beer. He listens to the pleasant babble of voices around him, the over-modulated bass of the jukebox. The ambient noise of revelry, it washes over him, threatening to overcome him with sensory overload.
Before they figure out tax and tip, Viggo’s pencil works deftly on the back of the unpaid check; the words spill fluently from the soft, blunt graphite. Timbre, rhythm, tone – these are the things that come effortlessly to him and within a few minutes, he has it – a few sentences of quiet, absorbed observation – written out in his webbed, spidery longhand.
Despite the small pang of satisfaction that he feels, Viggo knows that this tiny endeavor is useless. He knows there is no way for him to retain everything, for him to grasp at life so tightly with his aching fingers in a futile attempt hold on to too many things.
He knows all of these things – he recognizes them – but cannot help himself, because he is an artist. That is his calling. That is his excuse.
When the waitress comes, she collects the small scrap of scribbled-on paper and Viggo watches it go with certain sadness. Another untainted moment, captured and then lost. Like so many other beautiful, fleeting things in his life.
…
“Oi, Vig, stop moving, I keep messing up, man.”
Viggo doesn’t tell anyone, but he enjoys the way Orlando’s eyebrows pinch together when he feels hesitant, the way the tip of his shiny pink tongue pokes out of the corner of his mouth whenever he’s concentrating. The room is quiet around them, but there is a small whinnying sound coming from Orlando’s throat as he partially holds his breath in rising anticipation. There is the faint scritch of medium being applied to paper and the muted dull rub of it being taken away.
“Bugger,” Orlando suddenly mutters and his frustrated hand swallows up his latest drawing, crumpling it and tossing the aborted sketch into the corner. “I told you not to move.” He glowers at Viggo for a moment before he tries again, picking his way through a small box of broken grease crayons.
Instead of apologizing, Viggo asks: “Your nose is kind of crooked, do you know that?” He studies Orlando’s profile for a moment before squinting down at his own drawing. The rough skin on the ridge of his thumb is busy pushing charcoal across the page, blending black into white and shades of cool gray. His fingers scale the nape of Orlando’s neck with short, dark hatch marks and lightly veiling shadows.
“Sod off,” Orlando answers with the slightest bit of irritation stuck to his voice.
“No, no, don’t get me wrong.” Viggo starts to layer the contours of Orlando’s body with poetry, bits of verbal nonsense stolen from the forgotten pages of his notebooks and siphoned off the backs of misplaced napkins. “I like it about you.” Orlando’s lips disappear beneath the words ‘hairline fracture’ and ‘well-placed flaw’; his torso carries a textbook excerpt on the flight patterns of dragonflies. “I think it makes the rest of you seem more real.”
Orlando blinks at him from halfway across the room before continuing to doodle strange, disjointed variations of Viggo’s face. His fingertips are stained with soft, oily colors and when he runs his hand through his unkempt Mohawk, his fingers leaves vivid, broken streaks on the shaved sides of his head. “You would say that,” he then says, as if it’s understood, and lobs a messy handful of pastels towards Viggo. Orlando laughs with unrestrained satisfaction as his payload lands in Viggo’s lap and hair with a dancing, pittering sound. “Maybe you should go shag Monaghan if you like your noses a bit off,” he offers.
Viggo begins to pick the tiny colorful shards out of the folds of his clothes and then quietly disagrees.
…
The rain splinters upon the windows of Orlando’s bedroom with the sharp rattle of glass as Viggo kneels on the bed with a body stretched out beneath him like the feral New Zealand landscape. Orlando’s breath is answering the rolling wind with strange, arrhythmic syncopations and Viggo’s hands move carefully – subtly – to pull his subject in and out of focus.
After a while, he grumbles, “I told you not to move,” and his tone is a perfect caricature of Orlando’s earlier complaint. His mockery is laced with a genuine fondness, buried beneath the sharp angles of his affected accent. Orlando smiles.
Without warning, Orlando suddenly begins to wriggle out of his jumper with an innocuous giggle. He shucks the heavy knit wool for the room’s cool air and exposes the warm expanses of his rich, immaculate skin. “Is this better?” he asks softly and bows his body upward, his hands ghosting across the front of Viggo’s shirt. A faint hushing noise whispers between them as his callused fingertips move against the pressed, starched cotton. Viggo pauses behind his camera – frozen by the gesture and caught by the complicated, moss-tawny depths of Orlando’s gaze. Something in his chest clenches.
Whatever it is, it compresses and collapses, trapped beneath Viggo’s breastplate and tempered by his quiet demeanor, and as it goes, it takes the air from Viggo’s lungs with it. A faint “oh” falls from his lips, which Orlando catches beneath him with the faint corners of his smile. “Here,” Orlando then says, “let me help.”
With one hand, he pulls the camera away from Viggo, while the other climbs down the buttons of Viggo’s shirt like a stepladder. The small rounds of pearly plastic seem to unfasten of their own accord; they buckle out of place with cheerful satisfaction. Behind the dense weight of black metal and ground glass, Orlando searches out Viggo’s stubble-worn cheeks and careful mouth. Crows feet gather at the corners of his meticulous eyes and laugh lines mark the passage of Viggo’s face like well-traveled paths leading away from a better past. The erosion of lost joy, etched deeply into the rough stone of his countenance.
Orlando runs his hands over these careful lines – these scars of happiness – and tries to soothe them away with insistent fingers.
“Please let me help,” Orlando says again, and his voice breaks mid-sentence with the weight of his earnestness as he leans forward to kiss Viggo with open, unflinching eyes. His hands slide inside Viggo’s shirt; coaxing a response, they travel over the familiar passages of Viggo’s body – the notches of his spine and the patterns of his ribs. Orlando touches the same way Viggo writes – with starts and stops and run on sentences – all in keeping with some distinct, internal rhythm. The versed patterns of the heart.
“No,” Viggo murmurs, his voice lacking any concrete conviction, and pulls away slightly. His hair falls into Orlando’s eyes and, suddenly – quite painfully – Viggo realizes that this moment with Orlando is just like any other in New Zealand. Borrowed and fleeting. Not meant to last. “No,” he says again, “Orlando, you don’t understand.”
“I know I don’t,” Orlando replies and kisses him again.
…
It’s twenty five minutes after sunrise and Viggo is out back, burning everything he’s ever made from Orlando in a dingy oil barrel. He is watching intently as his pictures and drawings and bits of writing dissolve into quick-tongued licks of orange flame – crumbling into coal and tar in the barrel’s rusty belly. The paint cracks and blisters on his withering canvases; the light-sensitive silver emulsions of his photographs pucker and peel.
Orlando eventually finds him there, standing knee-deep in the scraggly, untamed grass of the backyard. The sun has burst upon the skyline, bruising the morning clouds with its rays, and Viggo shields his eyes from the fire’s dying sparks with the back of his hand. The flurrying embers alight on his arms and his cheeks and leave tiny soot streaks in their wake. Tiny pinpricks of pain.
“Hey, I couldn’t find you,” Orlando says, fanning the greenblack smoke away from his nose. His expression crumples with dissatisfaction at the smell – burnt and chemically, reminiscent of burning tires. “What’re you doing?”
“Just getting rid of some things before I find the opportunity to lose them,” Viggo says evenly and starts back towards the empty house before Orlando can ask what.
