True Heroes (63 page)
She smiled a satisfied shine of teeth before wrapping his arm in her embrace. Caleb looked towards the building, and felt less inside. ‘She is going to phase you completely out.’
‘I’m a lot louder than her.’
‘She spreads to me like a gentle mist.’
‘Like a slow acting poison.’
‘As opposed to you being a tumor?’
‘I secrete truth, more like a cyst.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘I’ve found an outside source.’
The grand entrance was both asymmetric and new-age; a wide doorway with a metal gate pulled into itself off to the side while various, angelic children were frozen in rock and time to the left and right. A short step led to a rotunda that was wide at the sides and sharpened at the ends. A large banner screamed “New” in fluorescent pastels above a display in the center that Alice and Caleb naturally travelled towards. “The Three-Dimensional Man: on loan from a museum in New York, comes from an artist that never signed his work.”
Caleb approached the work but kept his distance, walking around to see all faces of the project. The painting was split into three parts that connected triangularly; the first faced the doorway they entered and depicted a visaged man with no face or features. His skin had a bluish-green hue while the background shown a vibrant white ground—‘A beach of white sand,’—and an even cut along the horizon that opened to a peach bouquet across the shades of orange—‘Twilight across a plain sky.’ The man’s feet seemed small in comparison to his upper body, which shown outstretched arms and hands cupping a blue orb that lightly illuminated along its edges. He walked around to the opposite portrait. A small village watched as the orb, now substantially larger than before, fell upon the man from a nearby cliff. From the lofty view, a few peoples in tribal uniforms watched as the orb battled against the man before them, the horizon, and the heavens. Caleb noted the slighted man before the large globe crashing upon him, his shade only slightly darker. “When was this painted? Does it say?”
Caleb walked around to the side with Alice scanning the placard, “They say the paint testing suggests it was sometime around Nazi Germany. The New York people say some soldiers found it in a town outside of where Auschwitz was.”
The third painting stood before him on the right of the opposite two: the subtly outlined orb from the first now conquered the painting with the large man from before nowhere to be found. From behind, the painting projected the orb as big enough to nearly eclipse the earth, but largely unthreatening. There were no lines of movement, or ravenous dark intent; dark space wafted along the background with stray planets seeming too far off to be interested. ‘The man’s still holding it.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘That’s the point.’
“Do you like?”
Without turning to Alice, Caleb smiled. “It’s perfect.”
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- -
“Perhaps it would be best if I sat and watched for now. Have them go about their usual business, David.”
Caleb listened from across the room at their whispered conversation. Power retracted as his will induced, and yet it waited and lounged against the receding line until it was next to Alice’s body. She spoke to Angela and Christopher in a low voice with a smile on her face as Power surrounded her with its clear cloak. He smiled and let Power out a little further as Alice pulled her arms closer to her body and looked around, feeling the warmth created with its encircled form. Alice walked away from the couple with Power following suite; her look traveled to Caleb. It listened closely as she mumbled. “Is this you around me?”
He felt the vibration of her voice across his slightly distorted extension. Caleb allowed Power to gently whisper back to her. “Yes.”
“They’re going to see.”
“You think I care? It’s chilly in here.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“He wants you to be better than fine, remember?”
“You’re doing his bidding now?”
“We see eye-to-eye on an inconsistent basis, but it does happen.”
She walked quickly to her recliner next to him and snatched his hand while leaning next to his ear. “I think he’s starting to warm up to me.”
David finally joined the circle. “Welcome everyone. Benny, let’s go ahead and get your story going.”
Benny stood up with a regular outfit on and a long piece of paper in his hand. “This is called Chaotic Cake. The wedding cake in the middle of the room: a reminder of what has been, would be, might’ve happened, never dreamt. One moment within a moment, muddied with life times of moments. A tethered moment of memory, epicenter to a room of majestic chaos with fluffy frosting. Any of its many features tugging, reeling all people and eyes; forcing the chaos to stop, just a beat, in remembrance of moments passed.”
Caleb was amongst the first to applaud. Benny glared at him. ‘It appears as though he wants you to begin the critique.’
He cleared his throat. “To thine own images be true, noble Benny, and scribe only ever what is known. Allow my speech to trickle in a way most pleasant, and to reveal a most troubling of vises. Amongst the fielding of imagined caravans, thine mind creases more stupendously amongst the bestial, but not along the sculpted landscape. Perhaps the fairness of an entrenched nun would strike against your palate savory?”
Alice smiled sideways at him as he shared eye contact with Benny, who looked down and up repeatedly. ‘You may have flustered him.’
‘I didn’t mean to.’
“I think it was pretty good, but Caleb’s right. You always focus on everything at once Benny. Why not focus on one thing that you love?”
Benny looked hurt. “Words are the filling to all the world though.”
“All the world does not fit into a poem, much as a beating heart cannot always clock the world’s spin.”
“Perhaps there is a beat that pumps to the rotary grind of Earthling spin?”
“That’d be a question for him.” Alice nodded to Mr. Dyllo, who was scribbling along a small legal pad.
“Your feet hasten to jump before the walk. Bring about the winking eye before the setting sun.”
“I think he wants you to focus on something you love before going as broad as you usually do.”
Benny nodded his head and sat down with his eyes darting across the ground. Alice gave Caleb’s hand a squeeze before standing as David announced the small group time. Caleb looked around for a free partner, and Christopher’s movement revealed Lacey’s tiny frame with writhing hands at her waist. He pulled around a chair as she slowly approached and made sure it was a comfortable distance away. She finally sleuthed into the chair. ‘She’s so curled into herself.’
‘So was Alice, and now you’re twenty minutes and an alcoholic drink away from culminating a sloppy union.’
‘I’m positive I won’t be doing that. She’s just afraid.’
“Alice talks a lot about you.” ‘How can you hear that tiny of a voice?’ “It’s good stuff.”
“I’m glad you’ve heard of me a little then.”
He tried to refrain from looking at her face. “What do you think that man’s here for?”
“I don’t care, honestly.”
“You don’t?”
“No, but I do care why you’re here.”
She smiled a little. “I’m here like everyone else is.”
“Almost everyone else in the circle has a highlighted day. Benny does his thing every day, Andrew does his thing some days, but you, Joy, and Stewart barely ever talk, and I’ve only ever talked with Stew while I’ve been here out of you three.”
“Did you ask them why they’re here?”
“I will once I get the chance. I don’t think Andrew likes me too much, but that may be my imagination.”
“Joy likes you.”
“A lot, I know.”
She pursed her lips and thought. “Why do you want to know why I’m here?”
“Curiosity.”
“It’s not more than that?”
Caleb couldn’t help but read. “It means more than that for you to come here, doesn’t it?” She seemed to be on the edge of answering but didn’t. “Reciprocity, gotcha. When I first came here, there was a deeper reason,” he looked towards Alice’s back, “but I’m not sure now. Maybe there still is I just can’t see it.”
“You seem smart. I’m sure you’ll find it.” She rolled her head to the other side. “I need to be here. Outside, people can be happy or sad, and I panic when they’re sad. People are always happy here.”
“That’s your focus area?”
“I guess if I had one that would be it.” She looked towards Alice. “That’s why I had a crush on Alice.”
Caleb chuckled. “You’re lesbian? Or bisexual?”
She rolled her head back and glanced at his eyes momentarily. “What sexuality do we really have?”
His lips snapped back. ‘A girl that feeds off happiness having a crush on the never-ending-happiness-volcano.’
‘More than that. Look at her eyes when she observes Alice. There’s reminiscence in that gaze.’
“You two dated?”
She smiled again. “For a little, yeah. I think it was to make me feel better. Even so, I hold on to it.”
Caleb felt his heart tug. ‘Alice lied to her. Told her that she wanted to be with her and that they’d be okay forever.’
‘Sometimes it has to happen. People cannot survive on the truth alone.’
He shook his head. ‘We can try.’
“Don’t.”
Lacey rolled her eyes towards his bouncing legs. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it wasn’t real. She lied to you, no matter how good her intentions were. You can’t live in a lie.”
She looked up at him. “It’s a happy lie.”
“You’ll be just as happy in the truth, and you will get a smile from her so wide and so bright that it’ll melt your heart, I promise that.”
“Excuse me for a moment. Caleb, is it?”
Over his shoulder, Mr. Dyllo had descended with his distinct accent and smile invading their space. “Yes, Mr. Dyllo is it?”
They shook hands. “Fred, please. I wanted to ask you something, if I could, before I began my first session here.”
“Go for it.”
Caleb noticed Lacey’s face was straight down at the ground. “When you were speaking to your friend Benny, you seemed to take on a seventeeth-centurian accent with imitation vocabulary from the same period. It seemed odd to me, and David also noted it as an irregularity in your behavior. I was wondering why you changed to his language, so to speak.”
He turned in his chair. “Benny and I have been having communication problems, and I thought switching to his dialect would help bring me to his intellectual plane. If you’re an American in China, you learn Chinese, don’t talk, or find another way to communicate.”
“Perhaps, and yet this is often a technique used by group leaders or professionals in mine or David’s field. To see an adaptive technique in such a setting is akin to a caveman’s first fire.”
‘He’s really comparing us to cavemen?’
‘He’s taking your advice. You’re right: this truth is making me very happy.’
‘That’s not truth.’
Caleb smiled and nodded. “Hopefully, we can teach them how to use matches soon.”
“Indeed. Thank you.” Mr. Dyllo stood back up with a smile across his long face and walked back to David’s side.
The two whispered for a few seconds. “All right everyone, our guest is ready to stimulate our minds.” Everybody was settled again—‘Her hand is still so warm,’—and David moved outside the circle.
“Thank you again for allowing me the time to attempt to unlearn your dangerous habits.”
‘Nice start.’
“In a simple sentence, you are all sick. The entire human race shares this illness with you, and the medicine is in a deeper vein of thought than most people will ever be capable of plumbing. As I watch and diagnose this plague, I have spotted its symptoms: self-denial, misconception of value, debasing of human instinct, and clumsily rationed wisdom that can skip entire generations of peoples. This is the way the world is: base and devoid of a helmsman.
