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Who is Van Gogh?

Topper Barnes

    I slept in on weekends. When I woke up somewhere in between ten and eleven a.m., there was always a steaming cup of sugared coffee waiting for me next to a plate of fried eggs, bacon and toast. I liked my eggs with a runny yolk. I liked to dip my toast in the goopy yellow yolk and soak it up before putting it down. After eating we sat for an hour while the food digested, Lena drinking Chinese tea, and I sipping on coffee as I read. Our silence was perfect and there was nothing odd about us not saying a single word to each other during breakfast. I stole glances at her, raising my head from the book for a moment, as she looked down to check her phone. She was beautiful and I loved her.
    We lived in the countryside then and it was mid-spring. The rains were beginning to clear up, and when the opportunity presented itself, we took long walks in the afternoon. We cut through the hamlet we lived in, a small patch of wooden cottages built a hundred years ago, and walked into the forest until we reached a spot where the trees opened up to a blooming meadow. I spread out a blanket for us to lay on as Lena unpacked the picnic basket containing sandwiches and sliced fruit. We nibbled on the goodies while looking up at the puffy white figures floating across the sky. When I became full, I would stretch out as far as I could, extending my limbs farther and farther, a warm sense of relaxation buzzing through me with each centimeter I gained. Then I would watch Lena gather wildflowers for bouquets (the house was decorated with flowers in every room but my office) and smoke cigarettes leisurely. As the sun began to fall behind the trees, we waited a bit longer, watching the sky turn crimson-purple, before packing up and going home. The hamlet was mostly deserted and we rarely ran into other people, only a stray dog or cat from time to time. We did not mind though, each other was more than enough company.
    It had been six months since we left the city and neither of us yearned for the fast-paced lifestyle we left behind. We spoke often about how great it was living in the country, how for the first time in our lives we were real humans, and how we would never trade our daily walks in the forest for a walk down the bustling avenue. There was work to be done on the house every few days, clogged faucets or loose door handles, little things that did not take a skilled worker to fix, and even though we no longer had a landlord to take care of these things I did not mind. I felt rather manly with a tool in my hand and would approach Lena after tightening a door hinge and proudly announce that the work was all done. However, we both silently agreed that if anything serious ever happened we would call a real professional.
    Once a month we called a delivery service that provided chopped wood. The first time I started a fire to warm a house I was shaking with excitement, unable to believe that this is how people really lived. It was so picturesque to me, and I could not get the image of old Shakespeare doing it too, lighting fires for the family and then resting by the hearth to brew up a new play. How could anyone be a writer in the city? There is only one real way to become a writer, and that is in the country. My time was approaching and I could feel a masterpiece bubbling in my bones.
    We came to live in the country for two reasons but only one was valid. Lena needed a quiet, calm space to work on her dissertation for her PHD. What her dissertation was on I had no idea, something to do with science, and whenever she spoke about it, I drifted away with great authors on my mind. The house was not a problem because her family had owned it for fifty years and they were happy to give it to us as long as we kept it in good condition. I would rather see the house alive, with flowers and water running through the pipes, her grandmother said. For me none of that was relevant. For me I had come there to write. My inspiration had dried up in the city and my job teaching English as a second language was beginning to become burdensome. I did not know how many more days I could spend explaining conditionals and articles before I put a knife to my throat. I was going to complete my first novel there and finally we would be skyrocketed out of our condition into a sphere neither of us could have dreamed of.
    We always had more than enough food and drink to feed a six-person family. French cheeses, Italian wines, Spanish meats, local vegetables, anything our hearts desired we had on the dinner table. I cannot remember one night that we went hungry for lack of food. Lena was the cook, this was established early in our relationship, and no matter how much work she had to get done she was always able to pull together a miraculous meal. We ate with smiles, full cups and the sounds of classical music. Our weekend dinners did not last as long as our breakfasts, and we quickly moved to the bed after eating and drinking. Sex was for weekends and we took turns pleasuring each other until everyone was satiated.
    Then I waited. My heart would begin to thump uncontrollably due to what I knew was coming. Playing with Lena’s hair I watched her eyelids inch their way shut and once closed I waited some more. Waited some more. When I was sure she was asleep I sprung up from the bed and tiptoed to the kitchen where I retrieved a bottle of wine. I needed the red if I was ever to write something worthwhile and there was no way someone could have talked me into thinking the white stuff would work. I shuffled into my office, a room littered with old books and unpublished scribbles, where I immediately poured myself a tall glass of wine. I sat for a while sipping on the wine and smoking cigarettes. I had been telling Lena that I was getting close to finishing my manuscript, that within the month it would be done, but every month presented a new problem in the text that had to be dealt with and sent the estimated time of finishing back. All of this was a lie. Whenever she asked me if she could take a look at the text, have me read it to her, or at least give her a quick synopsis I came up with an excuse to reflect her request. There was no manuscript, nothing clear at least, just a hundred pages of random words with no meaning placed on paper. In Lena’s head the manuscript was my magnum opus, the ticket I would ride to the publishers, and on top of that there were the shorts and poetry. This I gave her free reign to look over, and after a few glasses I would even recite it to her. She would praise me with lofty words such as talented and gifted before pleading to me that I had to try and get them published. If not the manuscript, then you must do something with these, she said. I told her ‘no’, it was not time yet, and anyway I preferred to become known after death, that is how all the greats did it. It was all very cliché, from our flawless life together to my elevated visions of grandeur, none of it was original, none of it was authentic.
    Lena had no idea how to read or listen to literature, and the simplest arrangement of beautiful words could make her think the piece was chalk full of merit. The truth is that my work was nothing more than that: a beautiful arrangement of meaningless words that carried no weight or soul. I told her I had to wait before sending anything in to the publishers, everything had to be edited and edited again before it was ready. I rattled off quotes about writing from authors she had never heard of and this gave me a sense of authority in her eyes. The reality was that I had sent all of my poetry and shorts to literary journals, twice in fact, and both times I was rejected with sweet notes telling me to keep on pushing forward, something would pan out eventually. If only they would have told me I was no good and I would have quit on the spot.
    The past months had been the worst. I spent most of my time in the office rereading the rejection letters, searching for the faintest sign of hope, and watching YouTube videos. By the time it was three a.m. I had no work done and had drank my way through half a bottle of wine. I told myself I needed the wine, that a writer could not get anything done without it, just look at Faulkner or Wilde. I told myself a lot of things that were not true.
    After a few hours of procrastinating I would start putting words down for about twenty minutes, but the act was purely done to pacify my self-doubt. There was no passion in the writing. It was mechanical, completely grammatical, a step by step following of the rules. That word goes here, that punctuation goes there, that character would logically do that, and that setting always looks like this. Creative writing is hardly the term that could have been used for what I did. A machine could have done a better job. I had been writing for five years and had nothing to show for it. Nothing complete. Only half-finished works. I often thought about giving it up when I was still relatively young but there was that minuscule nipping of hope in my heart. If I just kept on at it, kept reading the greats and practicing, something would turn out eventually.
    One night I had drank a bit more than I was used to drinking and smoked my head clear out of consciousness. Blue smoke circled about the room, twirling above my head and across my desk. I had five lines down for a new poem titled, “The Sounds of The Spruce”. It was utter shit. I had one talent and that was the ability to know whether or not something was worth anything. Unfortunately, I only ever used half of this talent on my stuff. I crumpled the paper up, not even considering trying to type it out, and tossed it at the wall where it bounced off of a print I had hanging above my desk. The paper ball ricocheted back and hit me in the face. I looked up at the print and smiled. It was a print of the self-portrait Van Gogh did of himself after hacking off his ear. Everyone knows the one, where he is all bandaged up, wearing a fur cap and reverberating with color. My sister had given me the print before I moved out of the states to go live with Lena. She said the painting would bring me the artist’s luck, a kind of muse she said, it was a sure-fire way to get inspiration. I had kept the print in a closet when we were in the city and only found it again when we moved to the country. I thought it would be a nice way to give my office a bit of flair, and maybe it would even bring me a few lines. It never did though and for six months I rarely ever even looked at the thing.
    A gust of wind shook the house and outside the trees were screaming. I poured some more wine. The painting was quite beautiful actually, I had never looked at it for more than a few minutes and the longer I stared at it the more tantalized I became by it. Everything moved, had life somehow, even the blank spots swayed with life. Who was Van Gogh? I had no idea about the man besides that he was a crazy painter who chopped his ear off. He was never famous in his lifetime and he made the ultimate sacrifice for the only thing reasonable in this mad world: art. His name, when I thought of it, did not represent a man but an ideal. I began to say his name over and over again, but not once did I think of a living, breathing human. He represented something far beyond who he was; he was art and suffering; he was insanity and creativity; he was the doorway to modernism; he was brilliant colors and swirling eddies of joy that laughed in the face of rejection; but he was not Van Gogh. Artists fight for immortality with their art, but when their names no longer represent themselves but something else, they can hardly be considered immortal. I flipped open my laptop and typed in the name Vincent van Gogh. I began reading everything I could about the man. Where he was from, what his family was like, about his wife if he had one, anything and everything I could think of I looked up. By the time I was done reading it was almost five a.m. and the whole bottle of wine along with half my pack of cigarettes was gone. I decided it was best to go to sleep before the sun began to rise, the day was Monday and weekdays I had plenty of work to handle. With weekdays being Lena’s study days, I had to take care of the house along with the lessons I had. As I got up and began to leave my office, I felt a sting of eyes on my back. I turned around and saw nothing. I headed for the door but once again I could feel someone’s eyes crawling all over me. I swung around in a hurry and could of sworn I saw the portrait of Van Gogh jerk back into position. I must have drunk too much.
    I slept in past my first lesson and awoke at noon to Lena yelling at me. My phone had been ringing all day, the house was a mess, the bathroom door handle was wobbling and Lena had work to turn into the professors by Friday. I leaped out of bed in a frenzy, dashed past Lena, and started attending to the work. I cleaned the house, cooked lunch and boiled water for tea. Once Lena was sedated with her tea set, I messaged apologies to my students and rescheduled their lessons. Then there was just the door handle. The damn thing took me a full hour to fix and even though it worked at the end of the battle I was not satisfied with my work. I knew I would have to battle it again the next day. I went through the rest of the day dead eyed and thoughtless. I ran through my lessons without any passion and by the time it was dinner I felt as if nothing had happened all day. Lena studied me from over her lamb chops, mashed potatoes and steamed vegetables, suspicious of my behavior, and I could feel she wanted me to say something. I stared down at my dinner and did not take a single bite, the wine however was a welcomed respite.
    “Is there something wrong with you?” She asked.
    “Do you know who Vincent van Gogh is?”
    “The painter? Yes, you have a painting of him. You’re acting very odd, I think you need to take a break, take a week off from everything. It would do you good.”
    “What do you know about him?” I picked up my fork and poked holes in the mound of mashed potatoes. Steam rose out of the mush and dissipated into the air. There was something wrong about all of it. The food, the wine, the woman. I felt as if I should not have had all of those things. As if they were meant for a different man.
    “Van Gogh?” She was getting frustrated. She always did when a conversation did not go her way.
    “Yes, I am not talking about anyone else. Van Gogh, what do you know about him?”
    The room stood quiet for a moment, the world outside was non-existent and we were floating in a room devoid of a foundation. The house lifted itself into an unknown realm that neither of us had experienced together. This place was alien and cold, there was no love there and the classical music was muted.
    “I don’t know anything, really, he was a French painter, I think. Cut his ear off.”
    “He was Dutch, actually. He did mangle his ear pretty bad though, the left one, after a fight with Gaugin. Did you know him and Gaugin were pals, and he had a brother who supported him. I always kind of thought of him as alone in the world. This solitary figure floating in the space of history.”
    “Who is Gaugin?”
    “Another painter with a mad fascination for naked islanders, that’s not the point. Are you listening? The point is that he had friends, a family, people who loved him. And none of it mattered in the end, all we remember is the art. That is what was important, and Van Gogh knew that.”
    “I thought you were a writer.”
    “I think I am.”
    She got up with this face she made when she wanted to tell me that I was not invited into bed until long after she was asleep. I had better get up earlier tomorrow and have breakfast ready before she wakes up, I thought.
    I gathered the dishes and washed them. The night was calm, the winds had vanished and the rains were gone. Soon it would be summer and the days would be long and hot. In the summers I did not teach and tried to devote my whole being to my real work, although the previous summer proved this ideal to be untrue. I spent the days lounging about and reading mostly, and when Lena was free, she had the whole of my attention. Work was never going to get done if I kept this up, there had to be a moment when I finally started writing, really writing, pushing out everything that came to me and coming back to it with a cutting vigor that cleaned it up and got it ready for reading. But no matter how much I wanted this the motivation to carry it out was just not there. Writer’s block happens to writers, and I did not write. I was more of a note taker.
    Grasped by the muses I grabbed a bottle of red, dashed to my office and flipped open my laptop. There was no need to handwrite. I wanted something concrete down, something that I could not crumple up and toss in the trash. I began typing, letting the words lead me without the thought of where they should go. The words always know how to arrange themselves, they inherently lead themselves to logical conclusions, they only need someone to put them down. I wrote for an hour straight which was more than I had written in the last month combined. I felt satiated and proud of my work. I lit a cigarette, poured a brimful glass of wine and went back over my words. “The rabbit cat runs faster than all foxes combined and there is no reason to dismiss the philosophical repercussions of this simple yet profound fact.” What the fuck had I written? There was nothing there but a discourse on a mythological animal that was not even interesting. No story. No characters. Just something called a rabbit cat and a whole lot of bullshit trying to explain the importance of its speed. I deleted the page and sat smoking for some time. My sister once told me that all great artists start somewhere, not one of them picked up their tool on the first day and played it perfectly. She was a wise woman but also my sister. She was blinded by familial love and the subconscious belief that just because we came out of the same dick, I had to be talented. I could see the truth though, and even if she was right it was not as if I had just picked up the pen. I was just as bad as when I first started.
    “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.” These words slapped me in the face, spoken as if another person was in the room with me. So close I could feel the breath tickling my skin. I was jolted out of place and tweaked my head around. No one. I was alone. It was three in the morning. There was a faint chance, the slightest, that I left the radio on in the kitchen and it was a commentator’s voice I heard. I turned back to my work and thought about trying to add a plot into the muddled words.
    “There is no love in what you do. You must find the love, then you can work.”
    There was no mistaking that time, there was definitely a person speaking. A cold fear rushed through my veins and I leaped up from my chair ready to fight. I had been in one fight my entire life and lost it. However, this did not mean I was not willing to get hit. I had been hit plenty of times.
    “It wasn’t the people who loved me, being loved is a lot different than loving. You must love your work more than anything, more than food, more than security, more than Lena.” I looked up at my painting of Van Gogh and saw his lips jerk back into place. He was mocking me with his greatness. All this time he had been watching my false starts, my shallow gutted attempts at writing, and he had been laughing. The son of a bitch, I thought, you were worth nothing in your lifetime. Now you are just a name, a name that does not even mean Van Gogh but some other abstract idea.
    “But people know my name, more than we can say about yours.”
    I sprinted to the bedroom and tore Lena out of bed. She was hazy eyed, mumbling curses at me, but limp and unable to fight me as I dragged her into my office. I pointed at the print. I explained to her that Van Gogh had been bullying me, preventing me from getting any work finished, but she did not look at the print. She stared at me bewildered and told me I should sleep in the living room.
    A week went by without anything happening. I worked, Lena studied, and not a single word was written. I began to become resentful at myself for the things I had. The house became a luxury that I did not deserve, a place I was intruding upon, and the once charming cottage became a burden on my heart. The good weather and walks in the forest became unbearable trudges, worse than treks to the gas chamber. I talked less and less, the use of communication became an unnecessary tool, and I spent the majority of my days staring at trees and the birds that filtered through them. I cancelled my lessons indefinitely and stopped eating. The only things I touched were coffee and a bit of bread. The gnawing hunger in my gut was my only solace.
    Lena went through stages as I began to decompose. At first, she was angry, throwing little quips my way that she hoped would spur me into action. Once at dinner when I knocked a glass over and blankly watched the liquids slowly pour out onto the table, she called me an idiot and stormed out of the room. I think it was rather rough for her character but I could not have known for sure. She seemed content with her studies and tea. Eventually she passed into a motherly stage of worry and constantly asked me if I was feeling okay. She became unsure of herself, awkward and self-conscious of her every move. She became the self she was when we first started dating. Every day she did herself up real nice with pretty clothes and pounds of makeup. She was attempting to court me again, whispering sweet compliments into my ears and flaunting her body. Sex was unappealing to me, even masturbation had lost its primal thrill, and when she saw that her high shorts were not working, she began attending on me like I was a sick child. She would mix hot coco, cook hearty soups, try to force medicine down my throat, attempted sticking thermometers up my rectum, tried tucking me in at night, played music she knew I loved and one time I believe she had the idea of trying to breast feed me but stopped herself before doing it. Her schemes to knock me out of despondency were endless for three days straight. Nothing worked. I sat around like an invalid, unable to read or think, my mind was void of all thought. Emotions had left my entire being. Lastly, she gave up, and walked around the house without taking any notice to me. Let him starve, she whispered, see if I care. From time to time she would spout out well-worn platitudes on the virtues of hard work, but mostly she kept to herself.
    Nothing mattered anymore and I did not know why. The world had lost its color, the once vibrant countryside had become a black and white film, and I had no urge to find what had been lost. During a wood delivery the lumberjack was talking as I oversaw his operation. He talked about his family, his son in particular, and how proud he was of the boy for getting into college. Even though this meant he was missing a helping hand, which meant he then had twice as much work to accomplish, he was happy to see the boy put the axe down. His jolly face was flushed with an overwhelming joy for life as he tossed log after log from the back of his truck onto our yard. I heard his words but could not put them together and register their meaning. It was like listening to a foreign language that I had never studied or even heard of. It was no different than listening to a dog bark. In his passionate ramblings he lost sight of me for a moment and tossed a log into my vicinity. I saw the log coming, watched it float through the air, its trajectory aimed at me, and quietly accepted the fifteen-pound hunk of wood. It smashed my foot and I heard the bones crunch. I fell to the ground silently and laid there until the lumberjack lifted me up like a child and carried me into the house. Lena started screaming, it was broken, it had to be broken, but I made no reaction to her banshee like voice. I propped myself up against the armrest of the couch and stared at the bruising, warped foot and counted the bones that were twisted. There were five.
    “We have to go to the hospital. Can you help us there?” Lena asked the lumberjack.
    “I can carry him to the car but that’s it. I’m sorry but I have another delivery scheduled today.”
    “Excuse me, sir, do you know who Vincent Van Gogh was?”
    “Who?” The lumberjack replied.
    “Van Gogh, the Dutch painter. Do you know him?”
    He stared at me for a few moments, a state of shock had penetrated his grizzly, wrinkled face and he scratched his blonde rugged beard. I bet Van Gogh would have had a ball painting him, the essence of the working peasant. He turned away from me, disturbed that the pain was not bothering me, and began to speak with Lena once more. They had planned it all out and were ready to lift me but when they attempted picking me up, I started thrashing about and clawed at them. It took a heavy blow from the lumberjack to tranquilize me. I told them that I would not allow myself to be taken against my will anywhere that I did not want to go. I had work to do and if he did not mind, I would appreciate it if the lumberjack left my property. A few pleas were made, attempts to persuade me into going to the hospital, but I retorted that no one knew my body better than I did and that I knew without a doubt that it was merely a sprain. A hospital could do nothing for me. Finally, the time for his next delivery came and he was forced to leave out of necessity, but as he left, he told us the time he would be finished and that if I changed my mind, he would happily come back to help bring me to the hospital. I thanked him for his kindness but assured him that he would not be needed again until next month. Lena and I were once again left alone.
    Lena fell into a hysterical state, her eyes pried open by invisible clamps, and began racing around the house to do anything she could for me. I denied all of her advances and when she tried to wrap gauze around my foot, I kicked her away. She brewed a stock pot of chicken soup and a kettle of green tea but when she brought it to me on a bed table, I tossed it onto the ground. Tears swelled in her eyes and she was unable to utter the words she wanted to get out. She stood there gesticulating her mouth in this grotesque way that made me want to get away from her. She gave up trying to get me to talk and ran to the bedroom where I could hear her dial her mother and start venting about my recent behavior.
    I sat in the same position for five hours, not once lifting my gaze from a single point on the wall where the floral wallpaper was torn. I wondered who had torn it and how long it had been that way. I had been living in that house for months and had never noticed the rip in the otherwise immaculate wallpaper. How many other things were there that I had never noticed, how many tears and blemishes were there that I had overlooked? I had been living in a perfect world for so long that I had forgotten about defects, about the things wrong in the world.
    The sun dove behind the spruce trees and the moon catapulted itself into the sky. Space became alive with dots of burning light, minuscule infernos danced in the black backdrop, and I felt beauty for the first time in a long time. I had been living in beauty for so long that I had forgotten how to feel it. It became normal, it had lost its once lustrous shine, and it became no different than a remote control or pair of shoes. I hopped up from the couch and hobbled to my office. There was something I needed to say, something that had to be put down. I wrote feverishly, falling helplessly into a delirious state of words and punctuation. I kept my head to the keyboard for four hours straight and by the time I was finished I was ready to faint from exhaustion. My fingers were arthritic, puffy and red, and my eyes were sandy from being peeled open for so long. I leaned back in my chair and allowed myself a cigarette. The taste of the cigarette had come back. I enjoyed feeling the smoke barrel its way down my throat, into my lungs, rest for a moment and shoot its way back out. I looked up at Van Gogh and he was smiling. He was finally smiling.
    “What do you think? I’m doing it finally, am I not?” I said. Van Gogh said nothing. He just kept smiling
    I drifted off in my office chair and awoke late afternoon the next day. I could hear Lena in the kitchen boiling water timidly, doing her best to make the least amount of noise possible. I could almost see her face strained, bunched up in a ball of twine, as she poured the hot water into her ceramic teapot. I rushed out into the kitchen, disregarding the pain rushing from my foot up my leg, and started rambling excitedly to Lena about my work from the previous night. The words melted into one another and became one long run on sentence from an unknown dialect of the English language. After explaining my work, I got to the one topic that really mattered.
    “Would Van Gogh have been famous if he wasn’t mad?”
    “Please, you have to stop this. Van Gogh has nothing to do with anything, you are falling apart. You haven’t eaten in days, you are not sleeping, and your foot is surely broken. You need to stop this, please. I love you.” She was crying again. I did not understand. I only asked her a simple question about Van Gogh.
    “Just answer me. Would Van Gogh be as famous as he is if he wasn’t regarded a lunatic? Do you understand what I am saying? I have been trying to answer this for a while now and there is nothing I can come up with.” I was panting wildly. My face was painted red and my eyes were bulging from my head. I could not speak fast enough to get the words out that I wanted to communicate. “You see, it has to be one of two. Either he became famous because he was insane, everyone likes a good story, you know. His paintings are valued not because of what they are but because of what they represent. Or, his paintings were so good because he was insane. It was his tortured mind, and only his, that could have created such glorious works of art. Well, what is it?”
    Before she could answer my question, I raced back to my office, the snapped bones in my foot grinding and shredding the muscle inside, and sat back down at my desk. I could hear her sobbing in the kitchen but that did not matter. The fire was on. There was no world besides the one in my head. Nothing mattered anymore but the words, the potential of what they could do. I typed for ten hours straight, not once looking up from the laptop. My mouth was arid, my gut churned in pain, screeching for relief, and the bones in my body creaked with overuse. My soul, however, was free. It flew across plains that were unknown to any writer who had ever lived. The greats cheered me on from their graves. Shakespeare and Keats and Byron chanted my name in unison as Blake and Thoreau and Emerson drummed in a primitive circle. I could feel their power flowing through me, straining their methods into the sieve of my mind, using what I could but in a way that only I was able to. By the time I was done I had typed two hundred pages, all of it coherent and moving, with techniques that had rarely been employed properly and with language that made the soul sing with ecstasy.
    Van Gogh frowned at me. A patch of blood began to spread on his bandage. He was telling me that I was not close, I could not be with just a few sessions. This would have to go on and on until the day of my death. He would not let me off with a few measly hours. He had given his life in the end, fired a shot into his chest, and every hour before that was the art’s property. Most people shoot themselves in the head when they want to commit suicide, but not this ginger madman. He fired a shot into his chest where the most important part of the human lies buried. He smirked at me contemptuously. I was not done. I never would be.
    This thought sent me straight back into despair. I was beginning to look forward to a good meal, a sunny walk with Lena and a loving night in bed. Was I never allowed to be happy again? Was it impossible to meld these two worlds? Van Gogh mouthed the word ‘no’. I looked outside at the night sky and saw the world rushing in turbulent flow, shaking madly with passion and love and despair. Brilliant blues smashed into yellows and reds exploding in an orgy of pain and pleasure. I darted to the bathroom, fell once from the pain in my foot and screamed sharply. I felt as if my mind was being split in three directions, bound to a rope and horse, the commands of the executioner bidding the horses to pull harder. I wanted it to stop. I took a razor and split the plastic so that I could hold the blade with more control.
    When Lena got to me, I was covered with blood and tears. I sobbed uncontrollably, begging for her forgiveness. I would rather have love and pleasure than to be an artist, in the end it was not worth it. I handed her my ear and at first glance she did not know what it was she was holding. She took a long, hard look at the bloody, limp hunk of flesh and puzzled herself as to what it could have been. When reality registered, she tossed the ear on the ground and hugged me. She soothingly whispered in my good ear to get in the car and I followed her commands without a word of protest. On the way to the hospital I began to feel better, deep down I knew everything would be okay as long as I quit writing and burned that damned Van Gogh print. Maybe the lumberjack needed help, perhaps I would make a good employee for him. And then again maybe not.

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