The Blood Artists

Dressed in a crushed velvet jersey and loose jeans, she came back into the bedroom and faced the painting. As a glimpse into her subconscious, this bizarre expression of angst was at the very least unsettling. She took the canvas down off her cheap metal easel and set it on the floor, facing the wall, then went to search for her keys.

Melanie lived in a tiny two-room apartment that was a well of voices. The broad windows of her apartment faced the broad windows of the next building of apartments, linked to her building on either side, three planes of windows and bleached bricks rising. Through her open, breezeless windows droned the jumbled voices, television clamor, and slamming doors of various other lives. She could make out only a sliver of sky as she looked up from her windows, though she had a terrific view of the accumulated trash tossed from the windows to the asphalt pen below. The Allston-Brighton neighborhood of Boston was a cat box for university students. Many a night she was awakened by the delicate sound of a person or persons relieving themselves off the roof.

It didn’t have to be this way. Melanie had been taking one of her fearsome canvases out to the trash one morning when a middle-aged man who struck her as a college professor stopped her at the curb. He saw the painting and expressed an interest in purchasing it, but Melanie gave it to him for free. The man insisted on taking her name and address, claiming that if the painting appealed to his “employer,” perhaps some future arrangement could be made. She said sure and gave him a fake address and went on her way. A few days later, a money order drawn on an Atlanta bank in the amount of five hundred dollars was slipped underneath her door, with a note requesting more paintings as they became available. Since that time, whenever she was low on funds and had another canvas lying around, she would contact this gentleman to arrange a sale. Neither he nor his employer ever identified themselves, but if some eccentric wanted to pay for her repulsive paintings — her imagination had conjured a dotty old geezer, like a backwoods Citizen Kane, squirreling her canvases away next to his fishing line collection and carton upon carton of artificial limbs — who was she to turn him down? Twice her secret patron had, in writing, offered to relocate her to Atlanta and install her in an artist’s loft there. But Melanie was not born yesterday. Besides, she had no real control over when she painted, or what her mind told her to draw.

The heat rising through the well obliterated most rain and snow, and the depth of the pit defeated direct sunlight, so that the weather, when she went outside, was always a surprise. She found her keys and ran down four flights of stairs, pizza crust in hand, to the glass front door webbed to obscurity with cracks left from a year-old shooting. It was a cold, early December morning.

She glanced up and down her narrow, curving street before starting to the corner, and saw no one suspicious. But the people who were following her rarely appeared so close to her own building.

Her bag slapped against her side as she ran along the Commonwealth Avenue median after a streetcar, catching it and boarding and moving between two empty seats, choosing instead to stand. No one had followed her inside. The train started and she stood holding the overhead bar, rocking along, pretending not to be scanning the faces of the other riders, and resisting the sleeplike pull of mass transit funk.

The B line trolley below Kenmore Square, the one on which she was traveling, ran between the area’s two largest universities. She was surrounded by students, all unfinished faces and soft hands, knapsacks slumped at their feet and modishly colored tablets tucked under their arms. The most fashionable kids wore hospital shirts or bruise-colored eye shadow, with plastic hospital bracelets dangling off their wrists. “I’ll” was in. “Unhealthy” was the rage. It was evidently a fashion statement about the diseased world they stood to inherit. Melanie had the look herself, in her build and the dark circles under her eyes, only she did not share the sentiment; she came by her disease-chic naturally. One healthy-looking man in the second car, older and well-dressed in a simple suit, stood out from the rest; his only concession was an inconspicuous pair of latex gloves, which, when riding on a public subway, was not a bad idea. The rest all looked like children to her twenty-four-year-old eyes, and she could feel her days of scamming student discounts coming to an end. Four years of being a dedicated dropout, of auditing her life, had earned her no credits, no degrees, no nothing. She was four years’ poorer and on the brink of expulsion from the university of her own making.

At the Brighton Avenue intersection the doors folded open and she stepped down with the others, passing in front of the blunt nose of the train to the rail tracks on the other side. The change in acoustics from the trolley to the outside street amplified the ringing that was constant in her head: a flat, mantric tone sapping 60 percent of the hearing in her right ear. At certain times, such as right now, the blare rose so intensely in her head that nothing short of stopping and pressing a hand to her ear would ease it. Others from the streetcar moved around and away from her as she waited. She felt the rumbling of the tracks, but did not make sense of it in time.