by Douglas Kolacki
Paris, 1966
Outside the restaurant’s back door, where I had to hold my nose to go in or out, I spotted a rat. It was sniffing around our four grimy trash cans, nose twitching until I ran up and kicked at it. It ran out of sight.
Just before it disappeared around the end of the building, I saw–or thought I saw–the thing’s scrambling legs stretch. Lengthen into thin, footless threads that somehow lifted that furry body as high as my knees in the instant before it banked around the corner.
I stared–shook my head–raised my wristwatch to my face. 5:52pm.
Was it happening already? And outside the building, even?
Everyone called tonight’s celestial event the convergence, but no one knew exactly what time it started. I made a quick study of the trash cans that guarded Restaurant DuChamp’s back door with just their stench, as well as the screen door and the grease-spattered pavement, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
Reaching for the door handle, I heard a shrill voice from inside. “Es-tu fou, mec?”
My French was passable enough to understand it: Are you mad?
That was Monsieur Blance, our Maitre-d. A calmer voice answered him: “You are still bothered. Must we talk this through again?”–Monsieur DuChamp, the owner.
“But last year–have you forgotten? We were nearly wrecked. And that was only Picasso–“
“You exaggerate, my friend. He favored us with the mermaid, nothing more.”
“Yes, that. When it appeared, three women fainted dead away, have you forgotten that too? And that was, as you say, only the mermaid. But tonight…”
He paused, and I pictured him catching his breath; he got winded easily and normally talked little, except to patrons.
“We are speaking,” he continued in a low voice, “of a man who arrived at the Sorbonne in a Rolls-Royce filled up with cauliflower to give a lecture he called ‘Phenomenological Aspects of the Critical Paranoiac Method.’ In New York, he appeared in a bookshop window lying in a hospital bed, wearing a gold leather dressing gown, his pulse monitored on an electrocardiograph for public view. It caused traffic to back up. And he attended an exhibition in London wearing a scuba suit and helmet–“
“Yes, I know. He almost suffocated. But the convergence is so unpredictable, yes? Perhaps nothing–well, nothing much–will happen at all. And a visit from Senor Dali will be good for business.”
“HOW–“
Blance shouted so loudly, I jumped.
“–CAN YOU BE SO CALM ABOUT THIS?”
“You must calm yourself, Monsieur Blance. Senor Dali appears to have no such worries.” My spirits kicked up a notch. It looked like I had won my bet with Georges, my dishwashing teammate. Dali was showing up. And he was showing up tonight.
I pushed through the spring-loaded door into the kitchen and let the door clap shut behind me.
DuChamp and Blance had faced off by my industrial washer machine, the one big enough for a man to crawl into and bathe in if he doesn’t mind getting scalded, turning toward me as one. The bang of the door cut off their spat, at least for the moment.
“Ah, Monsieur Jean.” DuChamp always called me that, pronouncing it zjon, although my name is Jon and it’s my middle name. Back in Zanesville, Ohio, they called me Harold, but I’d never cared for that. “Perhaps you can settle this matter. Knowing what this night is, and who visits us–it has not kept you away, like Georges and our best chef, yes? They stay away, but–“he spread out his arms as if presenting me to the scowling Blance–“you are here. And made the tram ride all the way from Montmartre. Do you believe tonight will be dangerous?”
“No.”
“There! You see?” DuChamp’s voice rose in pitch, almost shrill as Blance’s a minute ago, as it did whenever he got excited. He rarely got excited, though, and never this excited.
Blance, square-jawed with hair dyed black, often got worked up. We kitchen staff gave him a wide berth. He glared at me, face reddening like a boiler about to blow. I braced myself…but then something else happened.
I saw nothing but the kettles, the racks holding the pots, pans, and dishes and fine cutlery, the white plaster walls. I heard nothing at all. But the very molecules in the atmosphere, the air moving in and out of my lungs, had somehow altered. My body occupied my shirt and pants, but I did not feel them the same as before. My shoes, even my socks seemed to have expanded just enough to break contact with my skin and the little hairs on my skin.
DuChamp was patting himself all over. He sensed it too, as did Blance, who held still and sweated, face turning from red to white.
The three of us looked at each other. He’s here.
I spoke first. “Did this happen last year?”
DuChamp shook his head. Blance said, “Nothing here in the kitchen. Only in the dining
room, that was all.”
Three months ago when I started, I learned DuChamp’s is the only restaurant insured by Lloyd’s of London against damage or destruction by “unnatural means.” (In the years since, they’ve also insured the Loch Ness Monster against capture.)
DuChamp gave a little start. “Monsieur Blance?”
Blance was heading for the door. “I am sorry, I have a wife and three children. I cannot risk this madness-“
He went on talking, but the screen door banged behind him and we did not hear the rest.
Now DuChamp assumed the stern look of a general handed responsibility for a battle that could win or lose the war.
“Monsieur Jean. We will have to make do with a skeleton crew tonight, yes? But we shall triumph.” He headed for the swinging doors with the wide portholes that led out to the dining room. I watched him sweep through, and the doors noiselessly close.
***
Three months back.
I sleepwalked off the ship and fell onto a train and stumbled into Paris, wide-eyed at this whole new continent when I’d never even been outside Ohio in my twenty-three years. No relatives here, no friends and no idea where I would stay or how I would get by, knowing only my high school French with enough dollars in my pocket for a little while, once I found somewhere to change them into francs, but by no means rich.
Ambling across a Seine River bridge, finding myself on the Rue de l’Ancienne Comedie, I saw a plate-glass window with yellow letters proclaiming RESTAURANT DUCHAMP and thought it would be a good idea to get something to eat while I pondered my next move.
Monsieur Blance stood guard in the doorway. When he saw me, his face twisted like he had swallowed a lemon. A couple came out and brushed past me, confirming what I had guessed: the patrons here dressed as for the Oscars, and I was rumpled, unshaven and, for all Blance knew, about to beg for scraps.
A flicker of light from the darkness beyond caught my eye. I stood on tiptoes. “What’s that?” I asked, forgetting I needed to speak French now.
He thrust his chin out: “Jeune homme, êtes-vous au bon endroit?“
Eh? What did he mean, was I in the right place? I was about to tell him something else in English when another man faded out of the dark beyond and stood beside him: Monsieur DuChamp in his blue suit. Gray hair combed neatly back, aquiline nose, green eyes, a look like hey, nothing’s that big a deal, just go with it. He raised a white handkerchief, wiped his brow with it, and stuffed it into his pants pocket.
The sight of him put me at ease, and I addressed him instead. “C’est–Monsieur, c’est quoi
cette lumière?“
He seemed pleased I had asked. “What is that light, you ask?” (He said this in English; my accent, of course, had given me away.) “Allow me to show you.”
Blance stood aside, watching me as if I was an alley cat sneaking into his establishment. I followed DuChamp in.
You’ve likely guessed it by now. This was my first sight of the film showing the Mermaid
of DuChamp’s, or Picasso’s Mermaid.
We stopped in the dusk where the dining room began. I saw now why it was so dark: the film, the projector up on a second-floor balcony rattled softly beneath all the conversations at the candlelit tables, beaming a rectangle of light on a blank wall between three large, framed photographs of a city street. DuChamp let me have a long look.
“Is this a Lumière brothers film?” I asked in French, or tried at least; I was far from fluent. DuChamp asked me to repeat the question, then said: “You have heard of the convergence?”
Yes. The one day the year when natural laws suspended and the surreal threatened to turn real. But not everywhere.
“This very spot where we stand, it is one of only three areas where it, shall we say,
manifests. Why, no one knows. And not for the whole day–no one would survive it, yes? Only in the evening, when darkness falls. And there,” he motioned to the film with undisguised pride, “is
the proof.”
No way. But the mermaid…she was about the size of a man’s lower leg, taking up two-thirds of the aquarium. No room to swim around, she only hovered, slender arms and small, white breasts, light hair swirling, her tail fins sharp and wide apart like a marlin’s. Her face was that of any little girl, her hair swirling and hiding it much of the time, but she had a way of peering through her hair and giving you a glimpse of her eyes. The eyes were inquisitive and bright. She did not morph into a fish at the waist, but rather kept her legs and knees, the legs terminating–I could never quite tell where–in the slowly fluttering marlin’s tail.
That same aquarium was still here, occupying the wall by the cashier’s desk, but only blue and orange tropical fish swam there now under lights. “What happened–you say Picasso brought her?”
“Yes, for last year’s convergence.” It was a good thing he knew English, because I had forgotten all about my French. “Or, if you care to believe it, he created her.”
“How?”
“Doing what he is famous for. He drew her for us.”
Drew her?–No. No. Yet there she was, real as life, or as real as one could be on film. This
was no puppet or animation. I had never missed a radiation-spawned monster movie at the
Zanesville drive-in, and this film had none of that stop-motion jerkiness. Her drifting hair, her
tail, were all smooth and seamless.
“Drew her on the back of a wall calendar page,” DuChamp said. “We were careless. We
should have known someone would try to steal the drawing.”
“The drawing,” I parroted tonelessly.
“Now we know it–only now–if the source, the picture, departs too far away, the creation
ceases to exist. It is fortunate I captured it on film first.”
I said nothing, so he continued. “The convergence seems responsive to imagination. If someone is exceptional, who knows what could happen. Picasso’s presence made all three of those street photographs–you see them?–come alive, and assume depth. One patron was brave and tried reaching into one. He succeeded, yes? His arm went into it. I saw it myself. He said afterward the temperature made a sharp drop and he could…touch…the pavement on the street within it. He felt the wet concrete. It was like it had changed from a mere photograph to the actual street, filtered through Senor Picasso’s mind or whatever the convergence was reading from him.”
I was trying to process all this when he asked me for my story. I summed it up as, “I’m from a small town and wanted to see the world and I’d always heard about Paris.” Spoken like that, no commas.
He nodded. “I see. This establishment, it has operated since 1929. It had bad luck to open a week before the Depression. But they ‘toughed it out’ as you might say, and then the Germans came. Many of them came here–oh yes, this very room,” he intoned with something smoldering in his eyes, “my younger sister–did you know the painter Salvador Dali, he got his start in this city? He has a younger sister also, and a brother who died.”
I tilted my head. Where did that come from? He went on: “My sister, Lola, she was so sensitive and had nightmares about the Germans–so terrified of them–and one day decided she could not live this way any longer. Had she waited another year…”
I flinched back. Why tell me that? I started to wish he had let Blance send me away. “But what–I mean–does the government know about all this?”
“But of course. First men brought instruments for study, but were disappointed. No miracles happened for them. Then we thought it best to close on convergence night. The public demanded we reopen.” He chuckled. “So you are the newest arrival to Paris? Very well. Have a seat at this table, and the waiter will bring you a beef bouillon with pommes frites and a glass of water. Your dinner costs nothing if you will help in the kitchen afterwards.”
Watching that impossible creature on film with thoughts of the convergence and lost sisters in my head, I considered it.
After a few moments, I nodded.
***
Now we had an important guest to greet, or rather DuChamp did. I followed him out to the dining room, trying to mentally snap everything back into place–“everything” meaning, I suppose, the molecules making up my body. Like a jigsaw puzzle with all the millions of microscopic pieces combining into the human creature, fitting together, but not securely like they should. My eyes, my mouth where hopefully no teeth would come loose, my bones, arms and legs, no longer bonded so securely. I jammed my hands into my pockets, though I did not know what good that would do. DuChamp walked in sort of a jumpy way, and hugged himself before pushing through the doors. I kept wanting to wrap myself in tape or something so my body parts wouldn’t drift clear apart…and I really felt they must might.
That’s when I got scared. The hell with this. Let them get someone else to wash the dishes, or leave them for tomorrow. Go! Now!
I did not go. Georges had already called out, and there was no one else to get them done.
So I shook off the feeling and hurried after my boss.
***
There he was, framed in the brass entranceway: the famous artist whose full name was
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dali i Domènech.
He stood just over five and a half feet tall, snappy in a brown chalk striped suit over a
white ruffled shirt with lace spilling halfway down his chest. His dark hair was combed back
over his head, his silver-tipped cane in his hand, but fortunately no bug-wide eyes like I had seen
in photographs of him. Most of all, of course, he wore his trademark mustache, sweeping up like
long, thin horns and waxed in place.
Hovering alongside him was his spouse/muse Gala, also dark-haired and prim as royalty.
She had shown up in a number of his paintings, and I was sure if I counted them all, the number
would be quite a few.
DuChamp reached the artist in two bounds, pumping his hand and greeting him in
Spanish, despite Dali knowing this city’s language. I caught the word Senor about three times.
Dali, however, was glancing around, sizing up the place. The disconnection we had
sensed in the kitchen was growing visible here in the dining room. The hems of the white
tablecloths were stirring as if in a breeze, and the flames on the candles–not the candles
themselves, but the flames were lifting off their wicks and hovering an inch or two above, still
burning, still flickering like nothing was going on.
I gaped. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them. The weirdness remained.
Whirling around, my eyes sought our guest, as if for reassurance. DuChamp was showing him to a table with four chairs around it. Dali looked like–hold on. His face was glistening–sweat? Hot outside for November? No, his expression–his eyes–he didn’t like what he was seeing either.
And then I did something I will never understand.
“Senora.” I ran up and pulled back the opposite chair, Gala’s chair, with a loud scratching sound that may have been the carpet ripping underneath.
The two sat down, and I backed away while avoiding eye contact with my boss, secretly flipping out inside at the table’s candle flame right in front of me, hovering like St. Elmo’s Fire above its black, bare wick. That can’t be real, it can’t be…
“We shall order,” Dali said.
I froze. He said this right to me, in French filtered through his guttural Catalonian voice. My boss stood beside him, and even though I avoided DuChamp’s eyes, I could feel them upon me and it did not feel too good.
He spoke next. “Garcon, would you kindly take our guest’s order?” His voice sounded exactly as I would have expected. Except he was watching me, and Dali was watching me over that antenna-mustache, and I had no pen or paper. How was I going to…
A snowy-haired man in a tuxedo at one of the other tables, who appeared a century old but whose speech and actions belied it, held something up. “By Jove!”–an Englishman. “My pocket watch is melting!” And he laughed, a loud, strong boom like a man in his twenties. This brought a murmur that rippled around the dining room, and a few hands clapped. Dali got up and took a bow.
Thinking back on it now, it was rather like when the Titanic first brushed against the iceberg, scattering pieces of ice across the deck. Some of the passengers picked up pieces and put them in their drinks, no big deal. Only afterwards did the gravity of the situation set in.
Dali returned himself to his seat and his attention to me. “Fried eggs.”
Fried eggs. All right. Except, of course, no way to write–
Something pressed into my right hand. There at my elbow stood Martin, our youngest waiter at seventeen. He went by a Western name but had emigrated to Paris straight from China, fleeing Chairman Mao’s overhaul of that nation. He gave me a quick nod and retreated soundlessly with the grace unique to waiters.
“Right!” I raised my newfound items like a shield, notepad in my left hand, pencil in my
right. “Coming–” I scribbled–“right up.” And retreated gratefully to the kitchen.
Once back in my hot, steamy domain where pots clanged and the dishwasher machine
waited, I stopped, my face flushing hot. Fried eggs. Two words–what was so hard to remember
about that?
Dishes were stacking up–the busboys had all shown their solidarity by coming in tonight, and the dirty plates, glasses and silverware were piling up in a hurry. Without strapping on my apron I grabbed a dinner plate, sprayed and loaded it on the tray, then another, when Martin reappeared.
“I brought the eggs. Lobster is next.” He hurried off.
My boss had preceded me to the kitchen, cooking fine dinners in place of our best chef. About half our guests stayed away as well, but the die-hards and adventure seekers who insisted we open on this night, signed a waiver:
Management shall not be held liable for any loss of property,
limb or life that may come about
by any unanticipated unnatural means…
DuChamp held out a platter with the crimson beast on it. Wisps of steam curled up. “All ready.” His eyes said, You wanted to serve him, so go to it.
I hefted the platter, thinking our guest might appreciate it had we been able to place the lobster on a telephone instead, where the receiver normally goes. I carried the steaming crustacean like a royal page bearing the Crown Jewels on a velvet pillow, through the swinging doors to the dining room–
And almost dropped it.
The dining room barely resembled the one where I vacuumed the carpet and took the chairs down off the tables every day. In the few minutes I was away it had stretched out to twice its normal length, and noticeably out past its width. It should have pushed out into the street, into the hotel beside us as well as the pub on our other side, but there was no sign of buildings colliding, only the vast dining room as if it had been built this way and had always stood so. It had dragged some of the tables with it, including those with diners, spread out now some ten, fifteen feet apart.
The customers were getting the idea now. Some had departed, leaving half-eaten food on their plates. Three had been gracious to leave franc notes on their tables. The ancient Englishman and his wispy black-haired female companion stubbornly remained, munching greens as if they were on a mission.
And in the center of it all sat Dali, visibly anxious. Even his mustache was a tad crooked. Perhaps it had carried over into his table manners, bread crumbs all over the tablecloth and egg yolk on his chin, gulping from his water glass–I would have to refill that.
I hurried over with the platter that, to me, weighed as much as if it was holding a fully-grown pig, setting it down on the table as delicately as I could. “Here you are.” Trying my best to sound like everything was under control.
I thought then to escape back to the kitchen and tackle the biggest stack of dirty dishes I had ever seen–but Dali raised his walking stick. “This is my lucky walking stick, Victor Hugo’s third leg.”
Why he told me this, I did not know. But not wanting to be rude, I nodded with a nervous grin nearly cracking my face in two. “Is that so,” I finally said.
He attacked the lobster. “You must only tell me things that are interesting,” he informed me. Was his voice always this loud? “I am in a state of permanent intellectual erection. I crave cerebral copulation. I love people with great brains even more than I love people with great bank accounts.”
Eh? Well…I blurted something or other about art–
“Art is the future,” he said. “The purpose of art is to make people see the familiar through new eyes: to change, modify, to awaken. Art is political. Once it is understood, it loses its power and becomes aesthetic, decorative, pedagogic. Artists must travel over the stepping stones left by the Impressionists, Cubists, Dada, Surrealism and Dali, the revolutionary movements that take inspiration from communism, anarchy, Buddhism and nihilism–four steps to the void.”
“Communism?”
“What is the difference between capitalism and communism?” he demanded. “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the reverse. It is a Russian joke. Galuski, my wife, is a Russian noblewoman, a relative of the Tsar.” And he emptied his water glass. I really needed to refill that, I thought, and when he put it down, I carefully plucked it from the table.
“My greatest achievement–” His words halted me just as I was about to bolt. “When I first arrived in New York, Bonwit Teller’s store on Fifth Avenue asked me to design something for two of their windows, whatever came into my head. I called one window ‘Day’ and the other ‘Night.’ I used very old, dusty wax mannequins. In the Day window a mannequin was stepping into a bathtub lined with fur and full of water. There were also mirrors and many flowers growing from the floor. In the Night window, a mannequin rested on a bed made of a buffalo–the canopy was the buffalo’s head, and the feet of the bed were buffalo feet. The model’s head rested on a pillow of live coals. And there are many jewels, symbols of desire and dreams.”
He looked all around as he spoke, as if telling this not only to me, but to the whole place, the silver arc of water flying across the room with black cats–cats?
“The next day I went to see the window, and they changed everything without telling me. The mannequins, the buffalo bed were gone. I demanded they remove my name from the windows and change everything, but they refused. So I went to the window, thinking to empty the tub with the water and thus force them to change the display. A great crowd gathered outside the window on Fifth Avenue to watch this extraordinary apparition of Dali lifting the bathtub. But the bathtub slipped from my hands and crashed through the window, breaking it into many little pieces and flooding the sidewalk with water. I was arrested by a detective and taken to jail. But the judge acquitted me, and this caused a great sensation in the newspapers.”
“Excuse me.” I made my getaway before he could start another story.
And then, seeking my kitchen refuge with the water glass, I noticed my boss running. The convergence had to be going full-tilt now, and our dining room had not stopped with stretching out into a Catalan landscape. The hallway leading to the lavatories curved into blackness where it had led only a short way before, the only light emanating from a burning giraffe. The chandeliers overhead were dissembling like the kitchen, the bulbs and wires detaching themselves as I watched, hovering in perfect symmetry, slowly revolving, all the exact same distance from one another, with nothing whatsoever holding them up. Great–those disembodied candle flames had been bad enough.
But DuChamp, he was sprinting around the dining room, stopping for a moment at each of the three oversized photographs of the 1940s Paris street. Studying them, putting his hands out. The remaining guests watched him from their tables. Three-dimensional, they were no longer photographs, but windows onto streets wet with rain or shining under streetlights, and in one–two–all three of them, the street was pushing through, sliding out of their framed confines into a dining room that felt less safe by the moment. One lamppost slid into the room as I watched, aghast, as Dali kept up his monologue somewhere behind me. And as the scene moved it changed proportions, shifting from a 16 X 24 photograph to real-world stature, as seamlessly as every other miracle that was happening.
And the mermaid film that was still running, the projector still calmly rattling on the second floor balcony?–That had not changed; in the midst of all this dissembling chaos, the room warping itself out of shape and surrealism overriding every natural law–strangely–it alone stood fast in reality, running on, projecting its electric light through sixteen-millimeter film onto a flat white wall, refusing to bend or budge as this apocalypse of the unreal erupted all around it.
DuChamp caught my attention again. Easy to do when he was running from one photograph, touching and pawing all over it, then jumping to the next.
“Boss?” I took off across the expanse, between the tables that must now have been were now a good twenty feet apart, toward DuChamp who was receding away along with the opposite wall, his leg up, trying to climb through one of the restaurant’s three new windows into–if it was really so–Paris of another time.
But I reached him first, so fast I barely had time to skid to a halt before tumbling end over
end into that black and white looking-glass land myself.
DuChamp seized my shoulder. His hair was out of place, his eyes wild, and I swear that with a similar mustache, he’d have borne a keen resemblance to our surrealist guest.
“Monsieur Jean. It is happening.”
And then I recalled his story, his lost younger sister.
“That street–” he shook a finger toward it–“we lived there. She is there.” He clambered, grabbed for any handhold, foothold, a lamppost, even a potted plant on a windowsill that he knocked off by accident. It fell and smashed on the carpet. “I knew it would happen. Dali, he too lost a sibling–“
“His sister?”
“No, his brother, the first Salvador. Lola?” He called out at the street.
Now I was getting confused. I lent a hand, tried to at least, but my best attempts to climb into that impossibility were like trying to ascend a slow but steady waterfall of tumbling, floating objects, the street suspending into an arrangement of non-touching symmetry. Years later I would see Dali’s follow-up to his most iconic painting, the Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. The one leaning more toward Cubism? Yes. It was like that.
The street remained, but everything on it eluded our grasp, like quicksilver. The more we struggled, reached, grasped, kicked and climbed, sweating and puffing for breath, we could not cross into that time in the 1940s when the Germans ruled and all signs pointed to France being done.
DuChamp ran to another cascading window. I ran after him, we gave it another attempt, but no luck.
“Lola, Lola.” He shook now, the light from the projector radiating over our heads, the larger-than-life capture of the mermaid peacefully floating in her tank with her tail fin fluttering. I added my own voice, shouting the girl’s name–if we could not get to her, maybe she would hear and come to us–until I was hoarse.
***
The psychedelic waters receded. The laws of nature reasserted themselves, reality easing back into place. DuChamp, as disheveled and rumpled now as I had been on that first day, collar open, tie loosened, slouched in a chair I had pulled out from one of the empty tables. I had lost all track of time, but guessed that we were “over the hump” with the convergence, it was ebbing, and the waiver every patron had to sign on this night no longer applied.
Out of nowhere breezed Martin. Breezing seemed the only way he ever walked, cheerful of countenance, even now as he steered around the overturned chairs, tables with the tablecloths half hanging off, plates and cutlery and food scattered about, chairs and knives, forks and flower vases drooped over and half-melted, the flotsam and jetsam of our establishment’s annual eruption of the impossible, carrying a guest check with a black ballpoint pen on a small tray. He stopped when he saw our boss.
DuChamp was weeping. He did his best to hide it, keeping quiet, head high; but a telltale trickle showed on one cheek.
“Gentlemen.”
In the middle of the tables all more or less back in their proper arrangement, in the dining room shrinking to its rightful dimensions, stood Dali. Gala kept her seat, but other than that, the place had completely emptied. It must have been past closing time. The man whose bizarre mind had somehow greased the skids for this convergence-hurricane to come crashing into our establishment–I had actually forgotten about him.
Before the artist could say anything else, DuChamp placed a hand to his face and allowed a soft sob to escape. “All things should have been possible on this night…why could we not reach her?”
Dali, walking stick in hand, sauntered over to us. I watched him. DuChamp, raising his wet face, watched him. This man’s very presence demanded and got attention. He wore a sour expression.
“What is done, monsieur, is done. Perhaps the crucified Christ could have undone it? But regrettably he is not here.” His mustache twitched. “The check, S’il vous plait. This night is too crazy!”
DuChamp and I both did a double take. This man had said that?
My boss lurched at Dali and reached for his arm. The look he got from the artist arrested him cold.
“Apologies, Senor.” DuChamp recovered himself, sniffled, pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his nose. “Perhaps, as you say, all things are possible on this night (actually he himself had said that). And, uh…last year…”
His head turned now in another direction, across the dining room where the projector still
purred, splashing its black and white magic on the wall at the rate of twenty-four frames per
second.
Slowly it dawned on me.
Are you mad, man? That’s what sprang to my mind, but I bit back on it. Instead I waited
for our guest’s response. Martin hung back, and DuChamp was holding his breath.
Dali leaned on his cane with both hands, eyes locked on DuChamp’s. “You want this, truly?”
“Yes, yes!”
“I may attempt to grant your wish, but possibly nothing will happen. You may be better for it, for it may prove the worse. Her face you may know, but inside she will be different. She may have no memories, and may not answer to the name you give her.”
“Try it, I beg you! Senor–” DuChamp sucked in a breath, was waving his white hanky like a flag, though that made him look like he was surrendering. “You can still commandeer tonight, all that has happened, you can best it! Show it no matter what it does, it is not, can never be, the equal of Dali!”
The Spaniard’s eyes flared. “Every day for me is a convergence! This night is as nothing to a day in the life of Dali.” His eyes, however, did not back up his words.
Martin still held the tray with the check and pen. Without a word the artist accepted the tray, placed it on a table, got out his checkbook and sat down. “Do you have her picture? Preferably several of them.”
The next to last miracle of that night was how fast DuChamp vanished and reappeared with one, two, three framed photographs of the jeune femme, placing two on the table, holding one. In two of them she faced the camera, though her eyes were off to the side in one, and the third showed her in profile. She had dark shoulder-length hair parted to the left, and a nice smile, I thought.
Once more Dali asked, “You are certain?”
DuChamp was about to seize the man by his fluffy collar, we could all see it, so the artist said nothing more. Turning over the check he had just written, he drew on the back. DuChamp, Martin, and myself leaned in to see. Gala leaned over to see. A young woman took shape, like in his early painting Young Woman at a Window, except this one faced not away from the viewer looking out on Port Lligat in southeastern Spain, but toward us.
The photograph DuChamp held trembled in his hands. Little breaths hissed from his mouth. Myself, I had my fingers crossed. Dali glanced at one or more of the photos, drew, glanced and drew, executing rapid, expert pen strokes.
All these years later, I still try to pin down the memory. At what point did the sketch transform into a five foot three, honest-to-goodness flesh and bone woman and my boss cried out and dropped his picture? Fortunately it hit the table, not the floor, and did not break, although it disrupted the artist putting the finishing touches on the only work out of the more than the 1,500 in his lifetime that could truly be called miraculous. But there she was, teetering next to her shocked brother, fully formed in her blue striped dress, like Athena busting full-grown out of Zeus’s brow.
Dali made a final pen stroke on the sketch’s ankle. “And voila.” He surrendered pen and check to Martin. “I have signed it. I shall call her, Young Woman Birthed Among the Wreckage of the Waning Convergence.”
It meant, of course, that Dali’s fried eggs and lobster dinner was on the house. Remember
the mermaid? If DuChamp ever cashed that check…
Martin and I scrambled after Dali and Gala, following their unhurried steps to the kitchen, leaving the dining room to the reunion–but in reality, the first meeting of brother and new sister, the second Lola.
Unless…? I asked the artist about this.
Dali shook his head. “No, no. Perhaps with a good artist, but Dali is bad artist. I am too intelligent to be a good artist; for that you must be a little stupid. That is not the lost sister, as I am not the first Salvador of my family but the second. You must say to DuChamp,” he pointed with his walking stick, “he must not tell the new sister about the lost one, every day, every moment. Talking of the sister he lost, not the one he has. It may become an obsession with the new Lola, to get everyone’s attention, to prove she is alive, for that was the experience of Dali.
“Also inform Monsieur DuChamp, if the new sister should get in a bad temper, add green streaks to the hair on the sketch, and she will be calm. When she is sad, color the drawing’s fingernails violet, and she will be happy. And now we take our leave and will never again come to this establishment.”
Martin and I opened our mouths. The back screen door where I had come in earlier, opened and clapped shut. The artist and his muse were gone.
***
I believe I understand now why Dali left the way he did. His brother, the first Salvador, died before Dali’s birth. The parents spoke of the lost son, always the lost one, and the second Salvador felt as nothing more than a replacement, insignificant. That spawned an urge, a lifetime drive to establish his own identity of the bizarre, to be someone who was nobody’s replacement and whom no one could ignore. Or–once they saw him or his painted creations–ever forget. Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening. The Persistence of Memory. The Temptation of St. Anthony. Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War).
But on that night, our restaurant and the convergence conspired to challenge him, even surpass him in outrageousness. His own imagination spawned it, but as a consequence he no longer stood out as the only spectacle. He was, once again, only the other Salvador, an afterthought. And that, he could never stand.
The second Lola–for of course DuChamp named her that–lives with her brother in his
apartment. The check with the sketch is securely locked in a metal box DuChamp keeps in his
wall safe.
Trying to convince himself she was the original, he could not deny reality for long. Like every human being, she is her own unique person, and DuChamp has gotten to reminiscing of the old sister in front of the new one. I’ve overheard him asking her, why doesn’t she laugh like Lola, sing songs like Lola? I cautioned him against it. Still he keeps it up.
And sure enough, she is changing. Her male midwife’s signature shows on her right ankle like a tattoo; it was not there at first. Once she walked into the restaurant balancing a loaf of bread on her head. She keeps eggs all around her room. Her favorite animal is the rhinoceros, and she has talked to me quite a bit about the significance of their horns.
She draws, too. Baffling, surrealistic pictures? Of course. Like all such creations, I marvel at them but at the same time wonder, what does this all mean? Strange, random images, like John Lennon throwing random phrases together for “I Am the Walrus.” But then I remember not to mind rules and limitations so much and just let art be art. Which, I suppose, is the whole point.
As for adding green streaks to Lola’s hair or violet to her fingernails, Martin and I agreed never to mention it. Too controlling; she gets enough difficulty from her brother as it is. And if there is no reining in the artist, then the same should go for the creation.
Douglas Kolacki began writing while stationed with the Navy in Naples, Italy. Since then he has placed fiction in such publications as Weird Tales, Liquid Imagination Online and The Fifth Dimension. He currently haunts Providence, Rhode Island.