Midwinter - A Portrait of the Artist

A Portrait of the Artist

Charles Midwinter

Asimov's Science Fiction

February, 2007

Charles Midwinter teaches high school science and lives with his wife and two children in Minneapolis. When he isn't teaching, he enjoys racing around the lakes on his bike, reading and writing fiction, or playing Go, the ancient Chinese game of strategy. Strategy and a possi-ble interest in screwball comedy seem to be in evidence in "A Portrait of the Artist"the author's first professional publication.

Chris is sitting in his chair, looking at the canvas propped up in the cen-ter of his apartment. He spent the whole day stretching canvas, but he has no idea what he wants to paint. His arms are crossed against his chest. His face is slack, tired, uninterested, but he makes himself stare. On the walls hang the many pieces from his pixelism period. Imagine pointillism, but on an absurd scale, and that's pixelism. In pointillism, it's okay to vary the spacing of your dots, and various effects are achieved by doing so. In pixelism, this is strictly prohibited. The dots have to be in a near perfect matrix, mimicking historical computer monitors. Eight hun-dred by six hundred is most common, although a few mavericks have un-dertaken higher resolutions with success.

On the wall is a pixelism self-portrait. Chris painted it two years ago, and it has already begun to look like someone else. The lines in his face are deeper than they were then, and he has lost weight. In the portrait he has good color. There is fullness in his cheeks and lips. Now his cheekbones nearly jut out, and he's becoming pale. His blond ponytail has begun to thin.

He stops staring at the canvas and rubs his eyes with his palms to scour the pain from them. He stretches, arching his back and tilting the chair onto two legs. He can see the rafters exposed in the ceiling. There are things living there. He knows every nest and web. There's the brown recluse he's too afraid to touch. There's the spot where the mice come in, bolt across like circus performers, and disappear back into the wall.

Sometimes, there are bigger things up there, too. There's a corner where something strange will scurry around once in a while. It's a little like a squirrel, only smarter. He's heard stories about these strange new animals before, but a week ago he saw one, and has been eagerly await-ing its return ever since. His doorbell rings. It's the kind that was invented a hundred years ago, an actual ringer in an actual bell. Every time it rings it is testament to a long line of shitty landlords. He tries to ignore it sometimes, is trying now, but that first design was a good one. It's loud and grating, hard to tune out. So he rocks the chair forward onto all four legs, and goes to answer the door. He leaves the apartment, and walks down a yellowish hallway. The last apartment on the left smells like pot. At the end of the hall is a stairwell of concrete that also smells like pot. He trots down the steps with echoing clack sounds. He walks down a final sick-green hallway and he can see someone through the glass front doors. On the front step is a girl in black. Flashes of light wink in and out of existence on her pale skin as she turns, her many piercings catching the light. She has tattoos all over. Some of them are interesting up close, but from a distance they make her look dirty. Not that she isn't dirty. Chris sometimes wonders if she ever washes her black hair. The matted dreads always look the same, down to the rusty clips that hold them in place.

He walks through the first door to the mailbox area, and lets her in.

"Hey, Chris," she says.

"Hey," he says.

She walks past him, down the hallway and into the stairwell. He starts after her, but by the time he reaches the stairwell, the door has already closed. So he opens it again, and when he gets into the stairwell, he can hear the door to the other hallway swing shut. He shakes his head. Not for the first time, he wonders how she can be so damn quick without hurrying.

By the time he gets to his apartment, she's sitting in front of the door. He walks up to open it, but she doesn't get out of the way. He waits for a moment, but she just sits there.

"Wanna go inside?" he asks.

She's spaced out, thinking about something.

"Lanna, let me open the door."

She sits there, stone-still, staring right through his legs. He nudges her shoulder with his knee, and she finally scoots out of the way. Apparently she wants to finish her thought, though, because she doesn't follow as he enters.

His feet hit the hardwood floor, and it lets out a creak. Chris hears something rustling in the corner. It looks like a squirrel, only larger, and it is scaling his brick wall. It isn't climbing the wall like a normal squirrel. It is too cautious about picking its footholds. Not that this compromises its speed. It has nearly reached the ceiling.

Chris looks at it carefully, trying to commit as many details as possible to memory. The last time he saw it, or one that looked a lot like it, it had unscrewed the lid from his peanut butter. As the creature reaches the top of the wall, it leaps onto a rafter and perches there for a moment. For the first time, Chris is able to get a look at its hands. They look like squirrel paws. Their tops are furry. Their palms look toughgood for tree-grabbing. The digits end in pointy claws. But there is one strange thing about them. From the inner side of each paw, a curved, white claw protrudes, exactly where thumbs would goif squirrels had thumbs. Chris has already stopped thinking of the creature as a squirrel. The creature flexes its paws, its bony thumb-claws clacking against its finger-claws. It runs across the rafter and into a hole in the ceiling, leav-ing a wisp of the brown recluse's web fluttering in its wake. Lanna walks in.

"You missed it again," says Chris.

"What?" she asks.

"That thing. It was here again."

"What are you talking about?"

"That big squirrel thing. It ran up the wall, and I think it has thumbs."

"Oh, the peanut butter thief."

"Yeah, it has thumbs. Very strange, I think. Well, maybe not thumbs, exactly, but bony things that it can use like thumbs."

"I don't know why I keep missing it," she said, shaking her head. "You should get a picture." Chris gets the idea that she doesn't believe him.

"Yeah, I should," he says, and takes a seat in his chair. Lanna goes and sits down on his mattress in the corner. Her black leather bag is studded with pointy metal. Out of it, she pulls her computer and all the strange peripherals she connects it to. There are the goggles and the gloves. The olfactory tube and the earbuds. Strangest of all, though, is the chest strip. She sticks it to her cleavage. When there's some particularly important information coming in, it will tickle or burn her, depending on priority.

"I can't wait for the day when they can give me all my intel directly through my skull," she says. "I'm getting tired of lugging all this shit around."

Chris stares at his canvas while she gets her gear on.

"They almost followed me here," she said.

"Who?"

"The spooks," she says.

"Oh. They still after you?"

She can tell he doesn't believe her. "Yes," she says. "They are."

"Well," he says. "You're safe here."

"That's sweet, Chris," she says. When she smiles, the metal pieces in her cheeks all point outward, like the spikes on a blowfish.

There is silence as she gets the rest of her gear on. When she is finished suiting up, she begins waving her hands around in the air. No doubt she is as attuned to her other world as she is deaf and mute to this one. Chris rises from his chair and goes to get his paints. In a few minutes, he is in a smock. Soon colors are moving across the stretched white.

In a few hours, Lanna comes to. She's finally starting to feel tired. When she peels her gear off, she is numb in a few places. She'd rub them, but she'd probably scrape her hands on all the metal. Chris is sitting in his chair again, looking at the canvas, and Lanna feels a bit sorry for him. It looks like he hasn't moved since she put herself under three hours ago. She goes over to talk to him, but, as she gets closer, she no-tices that there's color on the canvas. He has actually painted something.