The Brightest Star in a Constellati... - Chapter 30: Chapter 30

☽ Peter ☽
"How about this one?" Evan slides a drawing out from underneath his stack of papers and asks.
The layers of sketches and school homework covered in doodles form a dent on his bed when he moves it. The landscape at the forefront of the pile appears to be painted; dusty clouds hang above a rippling lake. The ice is cracked at the side of the scene, and draped around it are fishing supplies. A pair of boots lined with fur is perched at the edge, one of which is leaning into the clear water. "It's nice," I say.
Evan cycles between the icy landscape and the previous one he showed me; a half-shaded rendition of a view through a windowsill. Above the creased curtains, the outline of an exit sign. I've come to understand that his art has a slightly surreal touch to it—there's an object that has no place there—a shadow that lingers in the corner. Even the drawing of his room, which he showed to me first, is missing the bed. In its place are the two siblings—Evan and Elaine—huddled like they're on a camping trip, conducting the light to form the shape of a butterfly on the wall.
Some of it—a majority, I should be clear—feels a bit like intruding on a conversation I shouldn't have overheard. And as much as my throat burns to ask him what it means, it wouldn't be my place.
"Peter"—Evan turns to me—"eventually, you know, you're going to run out of adjectives to use." He buries his hand in the mess of curls he's pushed away from his face, and which has gotten progressively more tangled the longer he sits on his bed. My weight shifts between feet as I set my hand against his dresser. "I know they're not Maud Lewis paintings or anything, but we need to figure out what the best ones are. Okay, forget that. The least terrible ones."
My hand strays to locate the first drawing, and I pick it back up. "It's—"
"Please don't say 'nice' or, god forbid, 'great,'" he interrupts. "Seriously. I'll kill you."
My finger traces the edges of the drawing. "I think..." I just want to make my appreciation of what he's shown me known, but I don't know where to begin. "I think it's a metaphor."
"Okay." He sounds too uncertain. "That's... I can work with that. What do you mean?"
"Well, for starters, there's no bed."
He glances at the paper in my hands. In a small tone, he says, "I couldn't draw it right."
"So, it's not a metaphor."
Placing an anchoring hand to his temple, he sighs. "A metaphor for what?"
"You're asking me?" Now I'm questioning it myself. At another glance, maybe he's right, and it doesn't mean anything. It's the equivalent of trying to peek at the answer before I attempt the question itself. When I get to the end, and my conclusion is correct, I wonder if it would've turned out the same way if I hadn't looked. I don't know if I'm heading in the right direction because I've told myself it's correct that Evan's paintings have a deeper meaning, or if they actually do. And Evan nods, prompting me to tell him. "I don't know, Éric. If I had to guess, it's a bit lonely, isn't it?"
Evan rips the paper from my hands, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. For a moment, I think he's about to crumple it up, but instead, he shoves it under the landscape painting and out of his sight. "This is bullshit. I need a drink. Do you want some water?"
He stands in time to see me mutter that it's all right and departs to the kitchen. As he passes the partition that separates the sections of his apartment, the door creaks open. It stays put in that position where I can read the handwriting on the whiteboard, likely Elaine's reminder that she's left for the day penned on top of faded black marks. I stand to write my own message next to it before shuffling back to my previous position.
There is a rectangular resin structure standing by itself on the lacquered wood surface of Evan's dresser. It reminds me of another drawing—and when I rifle through various photorealistic renditions of Evan's family members and sheets scribbled over; I remove the correct one. Unlike the resin on his desk, containing a sample of pine needles, the uniquely Evan McKenna drawing has a telephone encased inside.
The sound of a refrigerator door shutting is followed by Evan's swift footfalls. He passes me my glass and dives onto the bedsheets. "I'm organizing this into groups. We'll narrow it down to anything that a bunch of stuffy college bureaucrats would think is real art, and... everything else."
He kick-starts the process and within a few moments, he's narrowed his options down to a handful of drawings. My drink is empty once Evan is finished, and while he isn't looking, I add the picture of his room into the portfolio. The rest is wildly impressive and impersonal—and if I channel my inner critic, (which is not difficult in the least) I figure the goal of art is to understand the artist. And not that I couldn't analyze the rest, but that seeing a mountain of similar pieces is letting me into a side of Evan that I'm not sure he's ready to share.
"I have to put these back," Evan says, crossing the hallway to Elaine's bedroom. He hides the drawings back in the place where he got them from, and I hold my tongue from asking, (again). When I arrived at his apartment, he explained it away with a wave of his hand and a look that tried to convince me it was nothing.
"You still aren't allowed to drive?" I say, in lieu of getting entangled in the complicated mess of his life.
From across the room, he calls, "Yeah, but I can mail this later. Once I stop being in trouble."
"I can drive you," I suggest lightly, shrugging. For the past few days, Evan is picking up extra shifts at work, ducking out directly after our lunchtime meetings to discuss the Astronomy Club's schedule. I'm half-expecting him to faint from exhaustion in the near future—he's an unpredictable satellite re-entering the atmosphere, and he's bound to crash—but I don't know where he'll land when he does. "No time to second-guess it. It's what I would do."
He nods. "Nobody has time for that." And he heads to my car, portfolio in tow. He clips into my passenger seat and we coast along to the nearest mailbox.
Evan folds his application into an envelope and adorns it with extra postage. The return address is listed as the hotel, where I told him I would be able to pick up his mail so that it doesn't get him into further trouble. The tiny drawing on both of the stamps is the same—the outline of a plane pointed at the edge of the letter, taking flight and begging to leave it behind. He steps out of my car and hesitates before pushing the letter inside. It dives into the depths of the sunset red mailbox before it slams shut.
"Do you ever think about leaving town?" Evan says once he's returned to Europa's passenger side. "I mean, hypothetically, if you didn't have the hotel to consider."
"But I have the hotel," I remind him.
He shakes his head at me and faces the windshield. A torrent of wind shakes the car as I glide it down the street. "That's why it's a hypothetical question, you idiot."
I flounder to explain that I've considered it; of course, I've thought about it. But when I try to summon the words—where I would be without the family business—I come up empty. And I realize I do not have an answer.
☆ ☽ ☆
My mother drives me to my appointment with Suzanna on Wednesday afternoon. Her pager flashes in my peripheral vision as I finish typing a new post for my blog. I hit the send key with my thumb, and the loading bar spins in roundabouts as it sends.
Facts I Learned at Midnight #2189:
Chronostasis is a temporal illusion in which the introduction of a new task can 'freeze' time. It temporarily occurs after a 'saccade' (rapid eye movement) in which the consciousness is interrupted, for example, leading to the perception of a stopped clock. The memory is false and thus causes a perception of time that is stretched slightly backward.
My brain is buzzing with activity today—the nerves are on high alert. I grip my seat, keeping my eyes firmly on the dashboard. The car tilts around the turn into the hospital and my stomach sinks with dread.
Parking in a space close to the entrance, my mother gets ready for work. She tosses her lab coat on, sweeps her hair away from her face, and heads off to the door. "Mwen renmen ou!" she shouts behind her. I love you, in Haitian Creole, which lately she's been slowly learning, (only to decipher dad's hotel notes, so she claims).
I slam the car door soon afterward and tackle the hospital lobby. Sticking my headphones on proves to help a bit, drowning out the cacophony of my thoughts.
Suzanna enters the waiting room after I check the clock behind the receptionist's desk for the seventh time. And either my chronostasis is pushing time backwards to the hundredth degree, or the clock is broken, as it doesn't budge from its position.
"How've you been?" Suzanna asks, clipboard in hand.
I just shrug. She leads me into her office, taking out a board game that I recognize. The box is faded to a soft green and blue. She sets up the coloured sticks underneath a layer of marbles. It's a game that we've played before when I get into this state, and the rules are rather simple. I can ask her a question if she loses—and the same for the inverse.
She pulls out a stick. The marbles shuffle around but stay in place. We take turns doing this in silence until I remove a stick that causes the marbles to spill out onto the plastic tube below it.
"Okay, question..." She sets her pen onto her pad of paper. "How is the new medicine?"
"It seems like it's working, a little." I change position on Suzanna's couch, but I can't find a comfortable place to set my legs. I move my arms to my side, then bring them back around my chest. I toss the plastic game piece back onto the table and begin to set it back from the beginning.
She watches me. The second game lasts three rounds, meaning it's my turn to get an answer. I think carefully about it before I say: "Why can't I stand the thought that taking care of the hotel is my only skill?"
Suzanna pauses. "What makes you think it's your only skill?"
"That's a question," I say, even though it doesn't matter. In post, I add, "I can do it. I was taught how to do it. It's the job I've had since I could hold a pencil. Having other skills doesn't matter—not when the hotel takes precedence. I don't see how any irrelevant skills would matter."
Tapping her pen against the table, Suzanna replies, "Look, if you were... if you wanted to accept the hotel and take care of it, that would be a dream for everyone. I think you're letting your parents off easy, because—as lovely as you make them sound—being protected is like having no exposure at all. I know why they did it—why a lot of parents do. Life is not protected by bubble wrap, but your parents put some there, anyway. This so-called dream would be if you never knew otherwise, if you just lived in Northwood for the rest of time, with only the skills deemed important. Is this coming up now that you're thinking about graduation?"
"I suppose," I admit. That's what Evan is counting down until, isn't it? The exact minute and second that he gets to save himself from drowning. "Hypothetically, if I didn't have the hotel, I wouldn't even be me. How can an inanimate object change the course of my entire life?"
"Well—if we considered all of that, we'd be here all day!" She lowers her head to catch my eyes. "Sometimes, one choice is the crux of the future. And when you have to make that choice—it leads to a bunch of bad thoughts, right? Mostly since you don't know what deciding can change. Don't be a psychic, and further to that, let's frame this in a different light. We're trying not to think about what could happen, but rather what you want to happen. The outcome isn't about pleasing anyone's expectations. It's about the choice that doesn't leave you unhappy. No self-destruction for the greater good, despite what the vigilante movies say."
I huff and crane my neck into the crook of the sofa. "Bubble wrap?"
"Yes. It wasn't intentional, but sometimes being kept away from any perceived danger can lead to this feeling. It's almost the opposite of flooding, isn't it? On one end of the spectrum, you can toss someone into a pool to teach them swimming. On the other, you can shield them from water until they encounter it for the first time, and have no clue what to do. Neither is correct, and there's always middle ground... which is what I'm here for. We can work on these unnecessary skills, can't we?"
I guess.
"Are you feeling up for it?" Suzanna asks. "We don't have to push you if you're not having the best day mentally. It can be tough for no real reason, which is perfectly normal. Maybe another round of marbles?"
I nod soundlessly. And Suzanna sets up the game for a third-round; I focus on the assortment of rainbow-coloured sticks as my vision blurs and becomes unfocused. The table in front of me looks the same way as it does when I'm not wearing my glasses. The edges turn softer, and the noise reduces to a distant whine like a Doppler effect.
I stare out the window, and I try to force time to unfreeze.