Sunset Over San Gaetano (2006)
If Rome was the center of the world, Jasper Saavedra lived on the very outskirts of existence. The town of San Gaetano lay in the middle of the vast desert that encompassed most of the American Province. It was as small as it was remote, tied to the rest of the world by the southern road that led to the large cities of the eastern coast, and to the frontier towns at the foot of the Rockies to the west. San Gaetano was merely a stop along the way, forgotten. In the vast Roman Catholic Empire, San Gaetano was barely even an afterthought. It was an afterthought of an afterthought.
It was nowhere, as much a non-place as the space above the sky. To Jasper, it felt like an airless bubble, trapping him, suffocating him. He rubbed his chest, glancing toward the east-facing window, squinting as the sun began to rise. There was something about those rays reflecting on the white roofs of one-story houses and the glass windows of two- and three-story office buildings that made him shudder, as if reminding him of something he wasn’t meant to remember and couldn’t guess. He felt the bubble constrict around him, pushing the air out of his lungs.
He dropped the pencil he’d been holding in his left hand and stood up, facing the window. He had the nagging feeling that he should be somewhere else, that he should be doing something but had entirely forgotten what it was. After a sleepless night he wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
He’d never been good at remembering things. His past had become a jumble of fragments, as individual one from another as the sketches that adorned the walls of his drawing room. Above his desk were landscapes, black and white reflections of the flatness that surrounded him, horizons dotted with the occasional distant mountain. In one of them the sun was a black circle, radiating black rays on a barren landscape. With gaze unfocused, the drawing looked as if the sun were sucking the light out of the world, pulling all the energy back into itself.
Another sketch showed a beach, something that Jaz had only ever seen on television. The waves crashed upon the sand, foam spraying every which way. The few bits of color he’d added came from the water and the sun; this time the harmony was complete: the sun warmed the water and the water carried that warmth to the shore, moving the energy in an endless cycle.
Jaz wanted to see the ocean, even if he didn’t intend to cross it. The Old World was a foreboding place, a symbol of the power that held Jasper frozen in place, with no sanctuary but those four walls and that one window.
There were sketches of angels: angels in Heaven, angels among mortals, guardian angels, angels in battle. There were angels from Biblical passages and angels from fancy. They all had the same face, a severe oval with inhuman eyes, and long hair either blond or colorless, carried by the wind and given a life of its own. The same sexless body was hidden by all the white robes. They stood in organized choirs or floated alone above a vanquished enemy. They all glowed with the same pale light, blinding those around them.
Maria had once mentioned that their faces looked like Jaz’s own visage, but he’d denied the comparison. He only painted angels as he imagined them to be, not based on himself. That would be hubris. Maria was there, next to the angels, sketched in charcoal more often than not, her olive skin left colorless, her hair blacked in with severe strokes, her eyes rubbed in with his finger. There were portraits of her he barely remembered making, captured moments from years past, before they’d been married. Jaz no longer knew why he kept them, taped to the wall with all the others. She smiled in those, or showed a faint mischievous gleam in her eyes. The recent portraits, however, showed no emotion. In Jaz’s mind, they were two different entities. So much so that he no longer associated the older portraits with her name. They represented someone else, a dead girl from his past.
On the western wall, just as the sun shone the morning’s first ray on them, he could see the portraits he’d done of Skyler. The three-year-old boy seldom managed to sit still long enough to pose for his father, but that never stopped Jaz from finishing a likeness. One time he’d caught the little boy asleep, lovingly capturing the peace in the boy’s countenance, the dark blond hair falling over the face, the lips on the verge of a smile.
There were drawings he didn’t trust to the walls. The frenzied expressions of forbidden desires he tossed in the empty lard can by the desk and set on fire, sacrificing them to whatever Saint out there looked after those who suffered from his particular brand of sin. The manifestations of hidden fears he knew no one would understand.
Breathless, he sat back down and held his latest creation in both hands. It had begun as an angel–it was supposed to have been an angel. But the face had not taken the customary oval, instead defining a manly jaw and a small, upturned nose. The lips had a kind of rakish half-smile, and the eyes were dark, large and vaguely almond-shaped. The hair was short and messy, and almost as dark as Maria’s. It had taken Jaz all night.
When he looked at the finished product he felt his chest tighten again. The boy lay naked on the outlines of what could be a bed, in a pose that anyone with a shred of decency would call obscene. Jaz could only guess at the body; aside from his own, the closest he’d gotten to male nudity was the figure of Christ on the cross.
But Jaz had no trouble defining the outlines of his coworker’s body. He could imagine what lay under the white shirts Luc usually wore; they were usually a child’s size large, just big enough to fit Luc’s narrow frame, but not much bigger. The arms were thin, and while the muscles were not large they were strong and well-defined. He could see them coil and relax with each movement. The arm muscles would tug on the back muscles as well, and on the chest. Jaz could see all of that clear in his memory.
He sighed and forced himself to crumple up the page. Were it discovered, it would raise serious questions that could threaten his very life. He couldn’t let himself forget that, no matter how much he wanted to.
He tossed the ball of paper in the can and lit a match, putting it to the paper and waiting for the flame to catch. He watched the flames consume the drawing and tried to let the deadly lust be consumed along with it. He’d like nothing more than to be rid of it if he could. He’d give almost anything to be just one more happy member of the mindless horde.
Knowing he was eternally damned kept him from being the father and husband he wanted to be. Somehow it was all his fault, but he hadn’t figured out how. Or perhaps it wasn’t his fault at all, perhaps God had chosen him as a victim, to torment him like he had Job. Perhaps he should just stop obsessing and enjoy the ride. Might as well, being already damned.
He gripped the charcoal pencil in his left hand. He knew he was only supposed to use the right, just like everyone else, but he’d given up that fight. In the safety of his drawing room, he drew as he pleased. Gone were the school days of his childhood, the nuns with their ropes and hard rulers ready to smack the offending left hand if it dared to hold the pencil, or tie it to the back of the chair in an attempt to neutralize it. He put the tip of the pencil to a fresh page and let it flow, drawing line after line as the directions came to his mind, not knowing where he was going or what he would create.
The plant grew out of nothing, a short, fat stem holding up an enormous flower, two bulbous petals with claw-like cilia which closed over a mass of faces, hands reaching out like the damned reaching up from Hell. Faces with pain twisted around dead eyes, and above them the church’s bell tower, crumbling into misshapen bricks, the cross at its peak bent and broken under the force of the flytrap’s jaws.
Venus flytrap, he thought to himself as he studied the finished product. “It swallows you up. Nobody leaves,” he whispered.
He glanced at the window and the rest of San Gaetano, a trap in the middle of the desert, the heat beginning to rise in waves that Jaz could almost see as the sun continued its ascent. He was late.
legacy of olympus
Since I no longer own a television set (blasphemy, I know) I missed the November 24th premiere of 24: Redemption, the two-hour lead-in to the seventh season of Fox TV’s ‘24′. However, thanks to the folks at fox.com I was able to watch this over the weekend from the comfort of my own computer.