The Death of Fine Art
a short story by Benjamin Caro
The itching was the worst part of it. This awful irritation had started almost innocently, a neat little tickling up and down his body. It floated over him like the hands of a masseuse, outlining each of his bones, precisely caressing each muscle and each bulge as if softly communicating, "This is your spine, this is the inside of your thigh, note the crevice between your collarbone and your shoulder.
It had scraped up and down the folds of his face, around the hunch of his back, wrapped around his waist and down around the soles of his feet. There was so much tingling that he couldn't concentrate on his day-to-day activities. The first time he noticed it he was enwrapped in deep thought, and for awhile that would be the only time it would appear. Sitting against the wall in the foyer, staring at the sunlight splashed onto the wooden floor, some of it bouncing off his own body, he would stop. His mind would just stop. As soon as he turned a new corner in his mind, found a valley, a new villa, the itching would embed its fingers like metal hooks through the skin in his back and pull him miles, flinging then dragging him whiplashed through all the thoughts he traveled through up until that moment, each site and each sound, only in reverse, until he landed back to where he started, dark, cool, a cavern blustering with destitute air. Then, he could do nothing except sit and let his white back press against the wall, his mind and his imagination tranquilized. He could think of nothing.
As a boy, before his sickness, which led to the itching, started, he showed an innate, unquenchable possibility. His skin, and especially his eager face, was pale, almost a bright white, void of any freckles, blemishes, fades of color- a place for impressions. The dreams, the commitments, the releases and scars of his life, his Mother knew would fall over his face in time like shadows cast from the leaves of a tree. She imagined that he could one day run faster than anyone had run before. She imagined that he could make music and cure diseases, discover new facts about life and form religious texts which could change the minds of millions. His possibility was everything to her. This is why her heart broke when she heard.
He doesn't remember telling her, exactly, but he remembers her knowing somehow. Remembers her looking extra concerned as he went through his daily routine, tickled by some force, too distracted by it to think. He did the same things he always had, of course, only now he was mysteriously and utterly consumed. His face was frozen, dead, a dearth of energy and potential energy. Anything he was bound to hear was destined to have no affect, to dissolve into dust in the hollow of his skull as it entered his ears, and vanish to any onlooker who looked for a reaction in his features. His arms fell blankly at his sides. He shifted like a ghost from room to room, the electrocuting pricks outlining his body like a wireframe diagram. Only his Mother noticed, of course, because only a mother could. She told him gravely, next to the windows.
She said, Son, you are getting sick. And he would not think to answer, for he could not think. The chills that string over your body like wires aren't there to support you. They are there to form a cage. And as she said that, he could feel the wires circumventing his limbs, his head, tightening on him, imprisoning him within himself. And he knew then he was to be put away into a small, cement-made cell with himself, doomed to share the same squalid breathing space with the other inmate for the rest of his short life.
His Father overheard the conversation.
Don't listen to Mother, he said. You want to be strong, don't you?
Oh how young he was then, he remembered- to think that it would stop with just the tickling. But then one day, he remembered, the sun was extraordinarily hot, as if it intensified three-fold as it burst through the windows. And he heat sizzled up from the wooden floor as if the floor was melting under the pressure, thereby emitting more heat. He could feel it, he remembered. Mysteriously he hadn't felt the tickling that day, but then suddenly a single wet, choking sear ran down his stomach. Then more exploded all over his body, puncturing mainly his chest, and he could feel the heat that boiled throughout the room rush into them. He stopped his movement, for he could not move- his muscles!- and he collapsed against the wall. Odorous chemicals seemed to pour out from the flesh-ripping scars which pounded him intermittently. He felt he was being stabbed. Only here, quite differently, his flesh wasn't being scored out, but as the blows formed in his skin was filling the wounds. Maybe it was the oozing that made him feel as if he was growing, becoming, even as he was rotting, decaying on the wood. The wounds bubbled and made him feel thicker than before, even stronger, and yet he still could not move one muscle from the ground. He was reminded of his Mother and his Father all at once.
