A work of fiction that invites readers to meander and bound restlessly amid works of art and through city streets, in search of the one…
by: Matthew Sam Prendergast
He couldn’t find her. The crowd confounded his search. Some moved in somber amble while others rushed about, compelled to some unnatural locomotion perhaps by consequence of being surrounded by so many people. Some jabbering in alien tongues, some taking photos of dead men, some speaking in reverent tones, some staring out into some well-tended landscape, some sitting on a bench staring at an inscrutable map composing in various colors this maddening labyrinth. His head was hot. His gait febrile. His mood also inscrutable. Why is this so? Why do I feel so panicked? I’ve been here before. Seen this before. The woman in the red hat, the pink and hazy view of the bridge, the famous water lilies, the pixelated people frozen in a park. He moved past innumerable stone Buddhas just to arrive at the top of the stairs in the very first place. His journey had just begun.
The morning had started as usual. He awoke. He stared out onto the Chicago skyline. Walked his dog on streets that had slumbered all night. Steam rising from grates as in some horror movie, an ambient aliveness. The others moved about. They looked straight down. One woman smiled, but just over his shoulder. Shower. Dress. Comfortable shoes, airy clothes. He was to meet some friends. Coffee. Stable discussion. Vague hostility present in every voice. A kind of insistence of being both subject and author.
He walked. To his right, ugly gardens and bronze death. How long ago did they live? To his left, titans in straight lines rendered in steel, glass. Marching towards some unknown goal. Monsters. Invariable people, all modern in design, manufacture, consistency, lifelessness. The folks and the structures. The statuary and the straight lines. The trees that could not be natives to the great city. Someone had to leave a bare space in the concrete. Someone had to petition some alderman or mayor or other such myth to plant them.
The little café with free coffee to members of the art museum was on the second floor, off near the Picassos. A grand atrium met him when he saw his friends standing near the entrance. Ordinary. Large, straight teeth out of proportion to his mouth. Another man. Old. Tall. Legs unnaturally so, making the thin torso too short. Another man. Thick glasses. Heavy. Tiny flowers on his shirt indistinguishable from globs of nothing when the viewer was more than three feet away. Free coffee. Silver platters. Fake silver probably. Cream, oat milk, honey. The three metal containers stood all crooked and absurd on a tray. A pool of white liquid. A stickiness caught in the light. People walked about all in black cleaning tables or preparing unnatural food. One had a shirt untucked. Vulgar.
They sat. Two teas and two coffees. He was desperate to lose weight and therefore he was hungry. He felt the pang. Human, all too human, he thought. The coffee made him all the more uncomfortable in his ill-textured skin. He became aware of an odor. He excused himself and walked into the bathroom. All white. But the tiles were a ghostly gray. Why? He stepped into the stall. He put his nose to his armpits. Felt around in his underwear and detected a moistness which bothered him. Vague. He brought his hand to his nose. Deep breath. Nothing but detergent. He took off his shoes. He could smell the moistness, but little odor. He brushed his arms across his nose. Nothing. But he still smelled. His feet hurt from the long walk there. He walked over to the mirror. He looked at himself. First his profile. Perfect, he thought, except for how much more obvious his thinning hair looked when seen from that vantage. He turned and held his face so close to the mirror that his nose nearly touched the glass. A blemish. Eyes just perceptively two different colors. One greener, one bluer. Pores. A faint stubble. I just shaved!
He charged out. He walked right past the table of his friends. One stood as he walked past and asked what one would expect he would ask. Cliché. Worn. Human. He stumbled just beyond the door. A long stairway. Then we return to the beginning. Buddhas, and then to the Impressionism wing. When he agreed to go for coffee, the teeth said he would probably not even go into the museum proper. But our subject said he would go in for a little while to find his favorite painting. He didn’t know what it was called. Had stumbled across it like any act of fate during a previous visit years earlier. And so he entered. A painting of Paris in the rain was on loan to another museum. They were the perfect couple. He knew they never fought and he stood long on that other visit admiring how perfect the man’s facial hair looked. Just then, as he stood gaping at the replacement, he couldn’t remember whether the man had any facial hair at all. Then he saw three at lunch, another favorite, and a woman with a young girl. The former wore a vibrant red hat. Years earlier, when he moved into his office, the former claimant to the space had a reproduction of the painting. The red was so dingy and worn, even more so behind the dusty glass, that when he saw her in real life he became dizzy and vaguely aroused. A movement.
Then the panic set in. When a young child began to roll on the ground and jabber in French he felt compelled to kick him in the ribs. A woman brushed his arm and he flinched so violently that the poor woman grabbed hold of him as he stumbled backward. He couldn’t understand what she said. He ran into another room. Eventually he realized he was in another century entirely. Religious scenes. Lily white Arabs. He became more and more faint, more and more frantic, more and more confused and suffocated by all the people gaping and gawking and jabbering.
He came to an employee. He described the painting. The employee seemed concerned, referenced his pale skin and that sweat. He thought again he must stink and ran off once the man gave him the room number of the girl. But the numbers, though near one another in that perfect science, seemed to confuse rather than clarify. He was again in another century. From the seventeenth he came to the eighteenth, and finally back to the only correct time. He turned right. He could sense her. He spun around with such violence that he stumbled again. But when he saw her he yelled “there you are!” and everyone in the room turned only long enough to see him with his head tilted just to the right. One woman saw a vacant look, vacant but for a just perceptible sense of pleasure and calm. He breathed more slowly. He could feel himself relax. Suddenly he smelled grass, perhaps mud, but just out of reach something sweeter. He didn’t understand how the artist got the sun to be so vibrant, practically neon. The subject looked off into the distance. She heard the song of the lark. She wore a headscarf and held a scythe. She wore clothes so anachronistic that he was suddenly in another world entirely. A world not so choked by people and noises and smells, a world where everyone spoke so softly, so melodiously that everyone was constantly calm. She looked like an actress, if there was an actress who looked so effortlessly beautiful that no one would know she was an actress. She was sad, perhaps. What word could he use to describe calm and sad tinged with slight exhaustion commingling perfectly with a reverent awe? There wasn’t a word for it; there was only this image. No one stayed in that room long enough to be able to roughly calculate how long he stared at her, but suddenly he heard a shriek. Some woman was laughing in another room. Blasphemy. Laughter, a uniquely human noise, could not compete with this majesty.
He smiled vaguely as he turned away. Everything in the room, from color to smell to sound to light was more restive to his senses. He moved slower. He breathed slower. His heart seemed to come to a delightfully somber thud. He smiled. A woman thought he may have been stoned. She rolled her eyes. He approached another employee who stood off in the corner. She was beautiful.
“Can you tell me where the Rembrandts are?” he asked after studying her just long enough for her to shift her posture and look away.
“Who?!” she asked, with some shade of annoyance. She was in her own trance, after all. Her shift was almost ending. Her feet hurt. She was so immersed in beauty day after day that she took it for granted. He felt the unmistakable, sharp feeling of disgust reenter the bloodstream. He looked at her long enough for her to reach for her walkie-talkie and he rushed out. Suddenly there they were, the throng, braying and smelling, and all wearing a mash of vulgar, puffed-up coats and other garments ill-befitting this sanctum. They spoke like a pack of hyenas or gaggle of geese; he couldn’t decide. All he knew was that he had to escape. But he became lost. With each corner he turned and saw Christ with a spear in his side, a selection of bronze statues that mirrored precisely this grotesque collection of human-like monsters with the strange, muted, gray pallor of the skin and even more ghastly garb. He looked up at the numbers which came no nearer to rational or well-ordered. He looked down one long hallway and couldn’t figure how the lines met at a point in any sort of sane way, and the whole hallway swayed a bit and the lines became fuzzy.
Finally he ran down the stairs and out a door, swimming upstream as everyone continued to enter, the long velvet roped line to his right. Most flashed their phones fitted with barcodes. He wondered what she would look like mediated by the modern on one of those screens that too many people used to take photos of art. Can they not just drink it in as he did? Outside, some men pounded away with drumsticks on upturned white buckets hoping for tips. The echo moved all around the buildings and added to the urgency to get away.
He walked south. At each intersection, cars honked, people walked, and the whole axis of noises had no music, no sense, no proportion, no beauty. The noises had no ability to uplift, to sanctify. He walked faster and faster until he turned down a main artery: Roosevelt Road. As he approached a subway stop he saw a clutch of the devout slinging bibles. He saw the rabble, the rubes, stepping out from the station and onto the sidewalk. He thought in some other age perhaps they could be noble. But who would erect their easel and paint this? When one man looked off into the distance, it was because of the sound of a siren. When one person stood long and appeared worry free, he suddenly unsheathed his cellphone. Another simply stared at hers with her coat an unnatural red. People kept moving past her but she was transfixed. He needed to get away. He saw two people drinking out of paper bags on the sidewalk and he nearly had to step over them, another Dunkin Donuts, another Walgreens with its unnatural fluorescent lights. Suddenly he saw a man hunched over collecting some food that had fallen on the sidewalk. He leaned over and our subject saw his boxers. All noise. All stench. All unnatural lights. Garish clothes only fit for a modern era so denuded of beauty. Just then a bus began to move down the avenue which had an ad for perfume on its side. He saw it coming. He was ready to leap. Just as his legs bent and he was ready to burst forth someone pulled him from the curb. They fell backwards into each other. They both stood. He turned around. She had no headscarf, no scythe. But she was a masterpiece. He had found her.
Matthew Sam Prendergast, graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a Continuing Lecturer of English Composition at Purdue University Northwest where he maintains a steady output of critical thinkers who learn to question the status quo and avoid the “naked this” and other promiscuous pronoun usage. His debut novel, Affinity, is slated for a 2025 publication. He lives in Chicago with his dog and his cat.
