Struck by a sudden fancy, Landrude decides to pause at the apex of the Knoxville greenway; he’ll enjoy his cigar and then sketch this gorgeous forest island he’s only today noticing, though he must have passed it a hundred times.
The cigar’s a weekly treat and an old habit. So’s the ticket. The cigar’s a matter of taste; the ticket’s a reminder of the times when the prize would have been all the money in the world, and the five-dollar price an extravagance. This week’s selection is a green-foil shiny thing with a blackjack theme, purchased at a gas station along the way, but Landrude’s only rubbed away one disc when he feels the creative urge and knows he’d rather be sketching the island.
Every drawing begins with observance. He reaches for the cigar.
With deliberate and ceremonial anticipation he unwraps, clips, and lights, procuring the necessary accoutrements from various pockets of his trademark powder-blue suit. He folds the cellophane wrapper precisely and stows it in an inner pocket, along with the still-unfinished ticket. A man on the taller side, in middle life with a full head of upswept salted hair, rangy features tamed somewhat by a well-scrubbed look and a recently developing belly; portrait of the once-starving artist in the comfortable repose of satisfactory success. Puffing, he surveys the island, really taking his time with it, drinking it in; just a bit of wooded elevation, thin on one end and widening at the other, sort of a wedge rising up from the middle of the slow-running Tennessee river. The island’s been there every other day, he presumes, just he’s never marked it before. Now, though, it holds some quality that calls to him. Maybe it’s the way the Knoxville autumn has burnt the leaves yellow and red in almost a checkerboard; maybe it’s the way the island’s shape hugs the shore, or the way the sudden rise and fall of trees upon it suggest a slumbering cat…but of course it’s not that. It’s the name on the plaque—that particular name. How could you have missed seeing it before? It must have entered subliminally at some point, informed your work without your knowledge.
In any case, he knows he’ll have to sketch it or else spend the week regretting the missed opportunity. The greenway—a long stretch of well-maintained elevated boardwalk that rises and falls as it tracks the river’s winding course through the city—is a perfect post-work walk, beginning a half-mile from Landrude’s house and stretching up from Sequoyah Park to downtown Knoxville. It gives a fine prospect of the island from one of its peaks, right here where Landrude’s standing, and the light’s going to be perfect in a few minutes when the sun dips below that low hang of clouds in the west…but what’s this? There’s a commemorative plaque set here in the railing…how interesting…
“Got a cigarette, man?”
Landrude looks up. It’s a glamorously disheveled couple in their early twenties walking up the greenway with their arms draped around each other. The soul-patched fellow’s got the half-hopeful, half-bashful glint of every cigarette bum ever, and his lady looks away, too cool for school, though clearly she’ll be sharing whatever smokable treat her squire might procure. Landrude, sorry to disappoint, displays his smoldering stub between two fingers. “Afraid I only ever puff these.” True enough. Cigarette smoke makes him cough unendurably; the cigar’s flavors only ever reach his mouth.
The kids shrug and move on, murmuring to each other. They’re a decent stretch away when he hears it. Down the boardwalk it carries; the fellow to his lady: See that blue suit? I think that dude’s Landrude Markson, the guy who draws the…Landrude allows himself a half-smile. Recognition is an occurrence just common enough to feel familiar, just rare enough to savor. It happens mostly just like this, the chance encounter on the evening walk. It’s mostly kids who take the greenway, and it’s mostly kids who enjoy his stuff. Speaking of savor…Landrude takes the final draw off the cigar—Partagus, nice and peppery—before sedulously extinguishing it on the sole of his polished shoe.
Back to this plaque, now. It’s a brass job gone nearly entirely to oxidation. Landrude fishes out his reading glasses to examine it.
LOONEY ISLAND
ONCE A PROPOSED SITE FOR THE TENNESSEE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT’S RESIDENCE, LOONEY ISLAND’S CENTRAL PLACEMENT ALONG THE LOONY BEND OF THE TENNESSEE RIVER, AND ITS STEEP ELEVATION, AFFORDS IT SCENIC VISTAS OF THE SEQUOYAH HILLS ON THE NORTH BANK OF THE CITY OF KNOXVILLE. AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH CENTURY, IT WAS A POPULAR RECREATION DESTINATION FOR STUDENTS, WHO WOULD REGULARLY BOAT OVER TO PICNIC, TAKE IN THE VIEW, AND OBSERVE THE REMAINING RUINS OF THE DEFENSIVE OUTPOST BUILT IN 1797 BY ISAAC “BAREFOOT” RUNYAN, FAMOUS EARLY LEADER OF THE NEIGHBORING PIGEON FORGE SETTLEMENT.
Out comes the small sketchpad and the pencil. His hands work with ease of practice, his eyes darting up and down and between. The important thing is to get the shape, the shading…you’ll be able to do a finish later; your memory can capture color, enhance detail…and there might be a story here, a narrative utilizing some old local tale…the old fort would be something interesting to see, you should hire a boat—or better, the romantic notion—make the swim yourself some morning, picnic there as your forebears once did…
Landrude’s eyes dart up, startled. The island seems to be…swimming, or even underwater. No, it’s not the island, it’s…it’s everything. What the hell is happening here? Vision warping, as if he’s looking through thermals across the vastness of a baking noontime desert, rather than a manicured suburban Knoxville autumn. And then it seems as if he himself is slewing into some form, some new shape. It’s like a soul nausea, as if he’s becoming something other than he was, all while remaining himself, a snake shedding its skin to become a porcupine, an eagle becoming briefly aware it will someday die.
Mercifully, the sensation ends. Landrude glances up, and wishes he could tell himself that what he’s seeing had been there from the beginning, but no, no, he’d been paying the island far too much attention for self-delusion. Look there: Visible above the island treeline rise the poniards of an ancient wooden fort. Hoping to steady himself, Landrude leans forward on the railing, sees the plaque, bright and shiny, polished, well-maintained:
PROPERTY OF LOVE FORGEWORKS, INC.
LOONY ISLAND DIVISION
All Trespassing Strictly Forbidden.
Below this exhortation, the craftsman has etched a triptych of images: a blacksmith at his forge, a fountain, a pigeon by a stream.
Landrude reels backward, catches himself on the opposite railing, fights against a scream. He closes his eyes, tight as he can. When he opens them, it will have all gone back to normal. It will have. It will. He opens them. No good. It’s all still wrong, all still changed. Even “Looney” is now spelled “Loony.” Landrude sinks to his haunches and tries to control his breathing. He concentrates on things that seem the same: the boards of the greenway, the powder blue of his suit, the smell of tobacco rising from his hand. But even these things seem wrong, different, changed in ways that he can’t define, because there’s no context for “normal” to which to compare—it all has the same wrongness. He’s nearly convinced himself nothing has really changed after all, when it all starts to slew back again; the same sensation, only reversing…guided by some unknowable instinct, Landrude flips his pad to a fresh page, tears it out, holds it against the plaque. With the side of his pencil, he makes a desultory rubbing, the ridges of the signage quickly transferring to paper the approximation: forge, fountain, pigeon, stream, warning.
When he removes the paper, the world’s gone back the way it was before. Only the etching tells of the way it’s been: the forge, the fountain, the bird.
Appetite for a walk or a sketch utterly vanished, Landrude turns and walks back down the greenway toward home. Before long, the walk becomes a run, etching still clutched in one hand, pencil in the other, running from the greenway as if pursued by some numinous beast. He knows already he’ll never walk that way again.
There’s a flood of relief as the door closes behind. Hand trembling, he allows the paper with the rubbing to fall to the foyer floor and stumbles in, trying not to think of brain tumors or even worse fates—God damn, but what the hell was that, anyway? At least he has the rubbing as proof; it still shows forge fountain bird, proof that his experience was a real one—though whether that proof is a comfort or not, he can’t say.
Landrude makes for the kitchen to pour himself something to take the edge off—it’s only Tuesday, but after this, he decides it’s allowable. Returning with his drink in hand, he stops and stares.
The paper lying in the foyer has changed into something different.
Even from here he can see it’s his own work, but he has no memory of crafting it. Picking it up, he can see it’s finished work. Glossy, torn from a published book. A page, split into two vertical panels of equal width: On the left, a view of some boardwalk, some corny carnival, gift shops and the hillbilly revues. Rubes and slickers and tourists lined up, faces tacky with partially moistened cotton candy, lips salty with remnants of fried pork skin, holding their prematurely obese children roughly by the upper arm, all standing awaiting their turn in the latest thrill ride—can you even call it a “ride”? A harness affixed to taut rubber bands has sent the passenger screaming up up up into the night air; the panel is drawn from a low angle looking up so you can see him, just a speck of yellow and red way up there. Soon he’ll be careering, newly weightless, back down again.
Here, on the right panel, the view has reversed itself; now it looks down at the crowd from high in the air, where the passenger, just a boy in a mustard-and-ketch-up T-shirt, has—disgusting!—in his sudden gutless nausea spewed a parabola of yellow over the ground and crowd below, the vomit lit up ghastly and vivid in the flashing lights of the rides and of the midway and from the spotlight from the Big Red Comedy Barn, yellow ropes of disgusting half-digested candy and ice cream and hot dog, trapped on the page, stories above the earth, mere seconds before the elastic will catch it and him already crying from fear and relief and the shame and surprise of sickness. And, in the panel’s corner, a caption:
Remember this boy. Remember everything.
If you forget, did it ever happen?
Remember everything.
Too late, the thing that’s been bothering him resolves itself in his mind: the slightest lingering scent of cigarette smoke—But you live alone, and you don’t smoke cigarettes.
“So,” a voice says from behind him. “You’re the one.”
Landrude turns. There, in his study, beside a door that has never been there before, a man regards him with something like loathing. But not just any man, no. He’s wearing a suit, too. It’s gray, not powder blue, but in all other ways…
“You look just like me,” Landrude says, dumbly.
“Yes,” the man replies. “I warrant on the other side, you’ll look just like me.”
To this, Landrude can only blink.
“Better make yourself ready,” the man says, drawing briskly nearer.
“Wait,” Landrude says. He walks backward and the man follows, until they’re crowded up against his own front door. “Wait,” he says: “Wait.” But the man doesn’t wait.
“You haven’t given me your name,” Landrude says inanely, his head swimming.
“No, but you’ll give me yours,” the other says, and then he removes his hand from the inner coat pocket and plunges the needle of a syringe into Landrude’s neck.