I bought View to the West from a police auction for thirty dollars (okay, fine, it was the starting price and there were no other bids). It was (is) an oil painting, or so I assume, and the burnished bronze frame was included with it, and I figure the price was probably worth thirty bucks in the frame alone. The painting itself is pretty enough that I figured at the time it would make a nice little piece to hang over the couch of our apartment and add a little maturity to the look of the one-bedroom my boyfriend and I share.
When I brought it home, my boyfriend was furious, accusing me of wasting money again because I "knew" that every penny was precious. He was unemployed and I was barely keeping us afloat with my grocery clerk job. Thirty bucks was a lot of money, especially for something he labeled as a frivolity, but I never got to spend any money on myself.
"Thirty bucks is worth my mental health" is the general tune of what I said. He wanted to argue, but even if he wanted to break up right there he'd be homeless, no close living family to speak of. Besides, we were technically in love and he couldn't leave me without putting some major thought into it.
I wish I could tell you what the painting looked (looks!) like, but I don't remember by now. I only remember the frame, with its intricate little floral designs and details. It's heavy, like real bronze, and the painting itself is about three feet wide and two feet tall, plus a few inches for the frame. There's no signature on it, which pointed to something maybe mass-manufactured, but the texture on the canvas (I'm trashy and touched it, shut up) made me think that it might be hand-painted.
I hung it up over the couch as planned, without the help of my boyfriend who still stubbornly clung to the notion that it was a waste of money. He slept underneath it on the couch that night when I told him it was my money and I was allowed to spend it.
The morning after, as I was getting ready for work, my boyfriend seemed shaken. I asked him what was wrong, knowing he was about to pick another fight over the stupid painting I'd bought at the auction.
The painting, he said, was making him uneasy all night. There was something weird about it, and he said he wanted me to take it back to the auction to see if I could get my money back. Of course I didn't do that. It was a lame excuse anyway, and I had to work the next few days. The reason he was uneasy, I told him, was probably because it was a confiscated item from a police auction and he thought it was some kind of criminal paraphernalia. Which it wasn't. Isn't.
When I got home from work he was still at home like usual. But instead of lounging on the sofa watching Dr. Phil, he was sitting in the middle of the living room floor, looking up at View to the West like he was worshipping Christ Himself.
When I said his name, he didn't look up.
I had to shake his shoulder to get his attention, and when he finally looked up at me, his eyes were red and dry. He managed to blink a few times and I asked him what the hell he was doing.
He didn't know.
He thought he had seen a little black figure cross through the painting (it must have been some kind of a landscape, now that I'm writing it now) when he had been trying to go back to sleep on the couch after I left, and after that he couldn't stop staring at it. He claimed he hadn't realized so much time had passed while he was staring at it, and I wanted to accuse him of being dramatic, but those eyes were too hard to fake.
Fine, I said. If it was bothering him that much, we could cover it up and I'd try to take it back in a few days when I had time off again. He nodded, and his joints creaked when he got up to help me cover it up with a throw from our couch. How long had he been sitting there? That was the first real sign that something was wrong, but I ignored the unease that crept up the back of my neck.
He slept in bed with me that night, but when I woke up in the middle of the night for water, I was alone. I went out into the kitchen and saw my boyfriend in the living room again, wrapped now in the blanket we had put over the painting. His eyes were trained on it like it was the only thing anchoring him to this reality, and I even doubted that much. Despite the fearful feeling in my gut that something was very, very wrong with him, I approached. I even tried to put myself between him and the painting, but he stared right on through me.
I shook him again and he waved me off. I regret this, but I went back to bed shivering instead of calling for help. I didn't know what to do. Please don't judge me for that.
When I woke up to my alarm in the morning, my boyfriend was nowhere to be seen. The blanket he'd been wrapped in was in the middle of the laminate flooring of the living room, discarded. The door was locked, the bathroom empty, too, but he'd left his keys on the kitchen counter where they always sat.
And there was the painting, hung up on the wall where it had always been. I inspected it, hoping to see what my boyfriend had seen in it, trying to understand the obsession and praying it would tell me where he had gone. Fear soaked my bones. What if the painting had become too much for him to handle, what if I had awoken a psychotic break with the painting, what if he was on the street losing his mind and I was sitting at home, fretting over what he might be doing instead of going out to search for him?
And then I saw them: two little dark figures like the shadows of moths fluttering across the center of the painting. I pulled myself away from it, unsure of what I saw. Desperate to see it again, to prove that I wasn't seeing things, too, like my boyfriend had.
That was about thirty minutes ago. I texted my mom to let her know that my boyfriend is missing. If you know an unemployed Jonathan in Omaha, let me know if you know where he's at. We should talk and I'm worried about him.
In the meantime, I'm going to go look at the painting again to watch for the figures one more time. There must be something there.
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