Days stacked up into weeks, each day following a pattern of sleep, meds, meals, activities, appointments. Group therapy, shifts in the kitchen and time in the art room.
Geno spent about a third of his sessions talking, then Stef came up with some kind of exercise. Sometimes Geno could see the connection to what they’d been discussing, other assignments seemed totally random. Either way, he tried his best. Laughing a little too heartily at his pathetic attempts to be artistic, even as something in his gut blinked at Stef with hopeful eyes, wanting to please.
“You don’t suck as bad as you think,” Stef said.
“Don’t sweet talk me.”
“I’m not. You got a raw talent. Maybe you don’t have technique. You don’t understand perspective and you shade things ass-backward. But the way you see is special. When you get out of your own way, your subconscious and your imagination come up with some really cool stuff.”
Stef’s finger ran along the edge of Geno’s self-portrait. It was a close-up of his face. The features were all out of proportion and he’d stuck to a safe palette of neutral colors. He spent a lot of time on the eyes, consulting magazine photos and books he found on the art room shelves. In each dilated pupil was the reflection of a twin bed. In the left eye, a figure lay in the bed, hands cuffed to the iron headboard. In the right eye, the bed was empty, the cuffs dangling unused from a rail.
For the assignment of an abstract self-portrait, Geno did little more than lay down a black background, then dump a mess of brown, grey and yellow on the paper, swirling it together in clouds of gloom. Nervousness squeezed him as Stef looked it over.
“No adjectives,” Geno said, poking at the damp paper with the tips of scissors, gouging holes in it. “It’s just how I feel.”
Stef had an ocean wave tattooed on the side of his neck, a single bird flying above its crest. Now, as he nodded, the tendons in his throat flexed, making the bird come alive.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s pretty much how I imagine you’d feel.” His fingertip moved along a sharp delineation between the black background and the sickly clouds. “This right here is…”
“What?” Geno said.
“I don’t know. Something like a sandstorm moving across the desert at night. How it would obscure the stars.”
Stef took the paper over to the window. Geno thought he was setting it on the sill to dry. Instead, Stef leaned the paper against the panes, reaching long for a roll of scotch tape to fasten down the corners. He stood back, arms crossed and staring a moment, then looked over his shoulder at Geno.
“Look how the sunlight comes through the holes,” he said. “Like the stars are still there.”
Geno’s next assignment was harder. Another abstract self-expression, but Stef said it had to not only be before the rape, but before his mother died.
“Why then?” Geno asked.
“Because you’ve often said it was the last time in your life you remember being completely happy.”
I say too fucking much in here, Geno thought.
“Try to draw that happiness.” Stef said, setting down the blank paper. “Show who you were when you were fourteen. Or even before your mother got sick for the first time. When was that, eleven?”
Eleven, Jesus.
This was the hardest fucking thing to do. It took Geno a good twenty minutes to work through the frustration of not remembering, then the frustration of not being able to express what he did remember. Then of course, he wanted it to look good, which further frustrated him.
He was fidgeting with the star of David on his chain, cursing under his breath. When all at once the bit of gold took on weight in his fingers. It seemed bigger. Louder.
He remembered talking with Jav once, asking him how he came up with ideas for stories. Jav shrugged and called it The Thing. When a portal to some elusive and eternal source of creativity opened inside Jav’s head. His fingertips went all itchy, his eyes stared through particles of oxygen and he started mumbling under his breath.
“I have no idea where it comes from,” he said. “Maybe The Thing happens to all of us, but only some of us listen to it?”
Lips faintly moving as The Thing whispered in his ear, Geno picked up a pencil and drew a six-pointed star in the exact center of the paper. He drew a circle around it. Curved around the top, he lettered Natan ben Heironim. Beneath, he wrote Gallinero. He enclosed the lettering in a circle, then made music notes radiate out like petals. More rings. Thick, thin, patterned and plain.
“It’s a mandala,” Stef said.
The circles grew bigger, rippling out from the star of David. A ring of little hens, another of hunchbacked Quasimodos. Hearts. Houses. Kitchen knives. Radios. His own tattoo designs, symbols and signs. When he blanked out, he lettered his name round and round. Geronimo Gallinero Caan Geronimo Gallinero Caan Geronimo Gallinero Caan…
With a fine-tipped Sharpie, he inked over all the penciled marks, then took a week adding color. When he was done, a church’s stained glass window filled the paper, dazzling and dizzying.
“Now watch.” Stef took the sandstorm-desert self-portrait and laid it on top of the mandala, lining up the edges. Now holding Then hostage.
“Well, there you have it,” Geno said. “I can’t find the old me.”
“Sure you can,” Stef said.
“Can I?”
“Think about it. You’ve already started.”
“You mean therapy?”
“No. Think more literal than that.”
Geno stared at the sickly grey and dun clouds. Slowly he realized Stef meant the holes. He reached and started to widen a few of them. Tearing them open. Showing the color beneath.
“There you are,” Stef said.