“Thou shalt not be an unoriginal twat.”
LEVITICUS, 27:35
I.
When Hans first met the “aneurytic” artist, he had long gone by the name Leviticus. He’d seemed so proud of his moniker, as if it had taken him years of quiet rumination and wasn’t just some guttural invective looted from a first year’s artist’s manifesto.
Now, standing atop a roiling mountain range of disembowelled books and canvases pulled from their frames, of clay and stone and marble sculptures smashed to confetti, Leviticus spoke only of hypocrisy. Hans watched from the rear of the crowd as battle-scarred painters, sculptors, photographers, and writers alike cheered their savior on, their hands clutching packets of matches and lighters and liquor bottles stuffed with oil-soaked rags.
Beneath his coat, Hans felt the weight of his sketchbook growing heavier, growing hot. As Molotov cocktails were lit to both sides of him, he saw the keloid-white cross-hatching on the faces and arms of those who’d followed Leviticus to this vanishing point, from which there was no return.
Their unexpected champion extended his arms in invitation. The congregation responded by hurling their makeshift explosives toward the misshapen pyramid of creation at Leviticus’ feet. Hans ducked down beneath rows of outstretched arms drawing flaming arcs across the dark winter sky, and disappeared out the far end of the farmer’s field on which they’d lit their history aflame.
II.
His real name was Levine.
“What’s your last name?” Hans asked as they spooned on the couch in Hans’ studio.
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have any parents?”
Leviticus paused. “I killed a man,” he said suddenly, flatly. “He wanted to destroy the world, so I killed him and cut free my name. Severed it like an artery from which my past bled out and died.”
Hans frowned. “You have a past. You might think you’ve gotten rid of it, but it’s still there.” He hesitated. “You didn’t actually kill a man, did you?”
“I told you, he was trying to destroy the world.”
“How?”
“By being uninteresting.”
III.
Hans first heard of Leviticus while in fourth year. He’d arrived on campus to find the Dean and the university’s security force surrounding a Rembrandt that had at one point been housed in the seventh-floor library archives but now hung suspended from the ceiling of the convocation mall by heavy fisherman’s rope. The painting itself had been desecrated; several wide lacerations marked the canvas with an alphanumeric signature, “L:27:35.”
“What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” said a student to Hans’ left. “Leviticus?”
“Can’t be,” said another. “There’s no 27:35 in Leviticus.”
“It’s him,” a third said excitedly. Hans turned, recognizing Clara’s voice; they were in the same year.
“Who’s ‘him’?” he asked.
Clara scrunched up her face with the same discourteous look she gave during studio crits. “The Annihilator,” she said. “Leviticus. He’s here.” When Hans didn’t immediately respond, she audibly scoffed. She said Leviticus fashioned himself “a better Banksy,” but instead of interventions, the man she called The Annihilator and “the Eraser” was provoked conceptually by elimination. “No one knows who he really is.”
“What do you mean by ‘elimination’?”
“He wants to burn everything down and start fresh. Better watch yourself, Hans. He’ll probably start with you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“He’s only interested in originality,” She spun and started off. “You don’t have a chance.”
IV.
Hans was the last to leave the studio that night, as was often the case. While busily using a metal dog grooming comb to expel gelatinous clumps of oil paint from a two-inch brush, he heard a loud crash and the clang of several metal instruments falling to the ground.
He slowly craned his head around a short wall and peered into the exhibition space. On the ground was an open brown leather satchel and several paint-stained kitchen knives, X-Acto blades, and BIC lighters.
“Shit.”
Hans looked up. Partially hidden in the rafters of the converted textile factory-cum-artists’ studio was a man in his early thirties looping a length of rope around one of the horizontal beams. Suspended from the rope was a large four-by-four canvas painting. The oils were not yet dry; the rope stroked ribbed fault lines across its surface like a child making an angel in the snow.
“What are you doing to my work!” Hans cried.
“Destroying it,” answered the man. “Like you should’ve done the moment you finished.”
Hans picked one of the knives up off the ground and jogged over to his painting. Started sawing through the taught rope.
“Stop! Leave that alone.”
Hans grunted as he proceeded to cut through the thick, fibrous cord. “I’m going to salvage what I can and then I’m going to report your ass to the police. Breaking and entering, destruction of property—”
“You can’t do that.”
“The fuck I can’t.”
The man scrabbled across the rafters to a ladder propped against the wall. He climbed down quickly, dropping the final few rungs to the ground. Hans placed the canvas gently on the studio floor, freeing the last of the paint-coated rope from its damaged face.
Hans straightened up and thrust the knife out in front of him as the man approached. “Not another step.” His arm was shaking. “I’ll use this.”
“No you won’t.”
“You’re him, aren’t you? The one who cut up the Rembrandt? Leviticus.”
The man bowed. “At your service.”
“Shut up!” Hans flicked his eyes down. “You ruined it. You… you shit!”
Leviticus smiled with satisfaction. “That was sort of the point.” He nodded to the canvas. Visible between the waves created by the rope was a detailed black and white portrait of a family of four—Hans included—sitting together on a couch, nude. “This is your family, right? Why are they naked?”
“First you deface it, now you want to know why I painted it?”
“Enlighten me. Give me your rationale, and I’ll give you mine.”
“Quid pro fuck you.”
“I’m interested. Truly.”
A sudden pang of heartache gripped Hans’ insides. “I wanted to show them in a different light—my parents and sister. It’s about vulnerability and—”
“It’s shit,” said Leviticus. “Unmitigated, unoriginal shit.”
“What?”
“You think you’re the first artist to fetishize their family?” He dismissed Hans with a wave of his hand. “You aren’t even the first in your class.”
“What’s your problem?”
“There’s still hope for you. You’re unoriginal but not entirely without talent.” Leviticus backed away, glancing over his shoulder to the open window through which he’d entered.
“Don’t you dare,” said Hans.
“You’re not going to hurt me, and you’re not going to turn me in.” Leviticus pivoted and darted for the window. He swung one leg over the ledge and hesitated. Looked back. Hans was fixed in place. Leviticus reached into his pocket and removed a plastic baggie containing a flat pink pill the size of a fingernail and placed it on the windowsill.
“For you,” he said, and pulled himself out the window. “Be the artist you should have been.”
V.
Hans hadn’t thought anything of the pill—not at first. He left the studio that night with it tucked inside the satchel of Leviticus’ tools, determined first thing in the morning to call the police and file a report.
Before any of that, however, he went home and started researching his unexpected nemesis online. What he found was more of what he’d already seen: tales of an elusive vandal defacing and in some cases outright destroying famous and not-so-famous works of art with equal degrees of condemnation. Most called him a criminal, a renegade artist with a chip on his shoulder; others seemed inexplicably in awe of Leviticus’ apparent crusade to rid the world of works of mediocrity; of art he deemed unworthy.
The earliest accounts had him setting fire to work stolen from independent studios. Eventually he moved on from fire to blades, and was identified walking into privately owned galleries and public collections dressed all in black, weapons stuffed up his sleeves. It wasn’t until a year into his “crusade” that his alphanumeric signature first appeared, viciously opening the face of Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950, on display at the MoMA.
Nothing, however, about a little pink pill.
Hans was intrigued, but not convinced, by the unspoken rationale by which Leviticus operated. Much of what had so far been destroyed were famous works of art, or pieces with direct antecedents—portraiture and pastorals, iconography and religious works directly or indirectly inspired by artists who’d come before.
The following morning, as Clara examined Hans’ scarred painting, he asked what she knew about Leviticus.
“He was here, wasn’t he?” she said excitedly. “He did this to your painting?”
“Don’t sound so thrilled.”
“He did you a favor. Trust me.”
“Can you not right now?”
“You know what your problem is, Hans?”
“I really don’t ca—”
“You think you’re good.” She sneered at his wounded canvas. “You’re under the impression that shit like this is original. Risk-taking. It’s not.”
“And destroying the works of others is original how?”
“You don’t get it. You’re just so…prosaic.”
She walked away then. Hans watched, saw her reach into her pocket and pull out something small, something pink, which she quickly popped into her mouth.
VI.
Hans and Leviticus crossed paths again a year later. Hans was renting a small studio space on the fourth floor of a turn-of-the-century building that had been home to no fewer than five newspapers. The smell of ink and unfiltered cigarettes was imbedded thick in every square inch of pockmarked brick and concrete. When he found the padlock open at his feet, he naturally feared the worst.
Leviticus stood with his back to the door, a large, half-finished canvas at his knees, in his hand a gleaming chef’s knife. The brown leather satchel he’d left behind that night was open, resting on the short, paint-spackled table by the window.
“Your talent is wasted on pretty pictures and portraiture.”
“What do you want?”
Leviticus nodded at the open satchel of knives. “You had something of mine. I came to get it back.”
“Then take them and go.”
Leviticus’ shoulders slumped. He placed the chef’s knife in the satchel and tucked it under his arm. Hans backed away as Leviticus made for the exit. The Annihilator paused in the doorway, turned back around.
“Why did you hold onto this?” He held the satchel high. “You could have turned it over to the authorities.” He paused. “You took it, didn’t you? The gift I left for you that night.”
“You mean this?” Hans withdrew the pink pill, still in its plastic baggie, from the pocket of his jeans.
“But you’ve kept it on your person all this time.” Paused. “You know what it does. You’ve seen it.”
“After that night, yeah, I started seeing this little pink disaster all over the place—tucked away in tool kits, crushed up and snorted off light tables. People in my class…they started to change. Their work devolved into nothingness. Meaningless abstraction. They all whispered about you at first, like it was some big secret. Started invoking your name in studio crits as if you were the second coming. I bet not one of them knows who you really are.”
“Tell me—who am I?”
Hans stuffed the pill back into his pocket. “Point blank? You’re a grifter and a small-time drug peddler who gets off slicing up other people’s art and thinking that somehow makes it yours.”
“Is that all?”
“Bit of a prick, too.”
Leviticus grinned.
“What is it? The pill—what does it do?”
“It’s an aneurytic.”
“A what?”
“It creates micro-hemorrhages of a non-lethal variety. Designed to target the memory and image centers of the brain and offer a temporary tabula rasa—to give an artist space and time to think for themselves, without the burden of history.”
Hans’ mouth was agape. “Micro-hemorrhages . . .”
“Non-lethal hemorrhages, yes.”
“You’re insane. Why? What’s the point of all this?”
Leviticus closed the distance between them; came close enough that Hans could feel the heat of his breath.
“Because we are mendacious,” Leviticus said. “There’s no such thing as creativity anymore. Just piety. Reverence and mimicry.” He pointed to a stack of portraits leaning against the studio wall. “Today’s art is devotional shit masturbating to the art of yesterday, of hundreds of years gone by. Only way to move forward is to strip it all away.”
He leaned forward suddenly and kissed Hans tenderly on the forehead. Reached down and gently patted the pocket containing the aneurytic.
“It’s all right if you’re not ready to see what I see,” Leviticus said. “Take the pill and go to work. You’ll understand then.”
“I won’t,” Hans croaked.
Leviticus backed into the doorway. “But you won’t turn me in, either.” He paused. “Maybe you just need a push in the right direction.”
Hans instinctively moved between Leviticus and the stack of canvases.
Leviticus laughed, turned away. “Be seeing you,” he called over his shoulder before vanishing from sight, leaving Hans alone in his studio.
VII.
“Heard he was a chemist in a previous life.”
Hans watched as Janelle swayed on her feet. The half-empty champagne glass in her right hand tipped precipitously toward the gallery’s floor.
“You’ve tried it then?” Janelle nodded drunkenly. “What’s it like?”
“It’s like…there’s this pop inside your head, and you start feeling fuzzy, like your brain’s carbonated. You don’t even notice…you don’t know what you should be doing, you just know you need to do something.” She paused. “It’s…It’s freedom.”
This “freedom” was on full display that night. Hans had run into Janelle, whom he hadn’t seen since graduation, upon arriving at the Wallace Satellite for the opening of a new group exhibit titled Open Vein. He hadn’t known any of the artists named in the exhibition. But seeing Janelle there, and noting the new and all-too-visible cross-hatching of scar tissue on her face and neck, he realized whose world he’d stepped into.
The art on the walls was abstracted to an extreme, with canvases of all sizes that looked as if they’d been painted using toilet brushes, construction tools, and steel wool. Every one of them: Untitled. However, the art was only half of Hans’ discomfort; every artist there, and indeed many of the patrons, were scarred or burned on their faces and limbs. Some wounds looked old and had healed into pale surface arteries, while others appeared red and frayed and decidedly…fresh.
Janelle caught his eyes lingering on the scar tissue on her cheek. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He glanced at the other razor-slashed faces in the crowd, quickly digesting his revulsion. “I don’t think I understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand.” She produced an aneurytic and placed it on her tongue. Pulled Hans forward and kissed him, passing the pill between them before pushing him away. “It’s about unmaking yourself.”
Hans ran outside and spat the mostly dissolved pill into the street. It was too late, though; he felt the slight fizz of his world slipping away, losing shape, losing color. In his panic he tripped and fell, face-planting into the sidewalk.
When he raised his head off the pavement, the world around him was unfamiliar: a thinly drawn skeleton without context.
VIII.
Hans arrived at his studio the next morning, tired and ingloriously hung over.
Inside, Leviticus sat cross-legged at one end of the knotty forest-green sofa set against the far wall. “What kind of name is Hans Saito anyway?” he asked as Hans entered and shut the door behind him.
Hans sighed. “My mother was a German ex-pat living in Tokyo, where she met my father.”
Leviticus squinted. “Not much of mom in you, is there?”
Hans draped his coat over the far end of the sofa and folded his arms. “What the hell kind of name is Leviticus?”
“It’s the name I chose for myself. Represents—”
“Rhetorical question. Don’t care.” Leviticus huffed. “It isn’t real. It’s just something you’ve adopted—like the rest of this whole bullshit forget-me-please art movement.”
“It’s not just about art.”
Hans waved dismissively. “Either put your name to it or I’m calling shenanigans on this whole thing.”
“What’s in a name, Hans?”
“Integrity. Says you’re willing to stand for your ideas.”
“Oh please. Your name says absolutely nothing about anything except that you are, for whatever reason, beholden to your past.”
“What is it about you and the past?”
Leviticus’ face reddened. “Don’t you ever think to yourself, we’re all just stuck in place? When people say, ‘This person’s the new Shakespeare, or Michelangelo, or da Vinci,’ what they’re really saying is that our past is inescapable. It’s a millstone around our necks—a hindrance to true creativity.”
“That’s your whole thing, isn’t it? To free us from this hindrance?”
Leviticus straightened up. “I’m your very own swarm of locusts, drying rivers, and withering cattle.”
“You do love to hear yourself talk. You’ve already got your knives back, why are you here?”
Leviticus sat back down. Made himself comfortable. “I saw you last night. At the opening.”
“You were there?”
Leviticus nodded. “No one but you knows what I look like.”
“I don’t see any scars on you—you’d have stuck out like a sore thumb.”
He held up his hands, palms out. The skin of each was red and mangled, with wide ridges resembling mountain ranges as seen from space. It looked as if the flesh of his hands had been burned and sliced open before being glued back together again.
Hans recoiled. Leviticus dropped his palms to his knees. “I saw that girl kissing you. I know what she did. Tell me…what did you see?”
“You don’t know?”
“No two brains are alike, so no two reactions are ever the same.”
“Well now I feel safe.”
Leviticus fixed Hans with a shit-eating grin. “Safety has no place in art.”
Hans hesitated. “It was quicker than I expected. Seconds at best. It was like…all color was siphoned out of the world, leaving only an outline.”
Leviticus leaned forward eagerly. “What else?”
“Nothing. I vomited up what I could and slept it off.”
Leviticus stood abruptly and stalked to the door. “I was wrong about you,” he said, guarding his arms as if Han’s words were razors across his wrists. “You’re not ready.”
“Not ready for what? You stormed into my life, remember?”
Leviticus shook his head. “You’re still a child. It was wrong of me to come back here.” He left without looking back.
IX.
Time passed, and small artist-run centers and local indie galleries expressed moderate interest in Hans’ portraits and their “classical” approach. He was taken aback at first, but another type of work had squeezed out all competition. Larger gallery owners rushed to applaud the inventiveness of these new creators and their choice to represent, really, nothing at all. Soon the work of aneurytic artists became the norm they’d sought to undermine; complacency in their total rejection of form.
The shootings began the same night three artists, half a world away, clad in facial lacerations so deep as to mask their identities, stole into the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze and took twenty-pound sledgehammers to Michelangelo’s David.
The first shooting was reported by a man out walking his dog in the industrial district: he was passing a small studio on the ground floor of an old office building when he heard a loud crack, followed by screaming. The man followed the racket to a window and saw a wiry, anaemic-looking young man holding a gun in one hand as his other hovered shakily in front of a blood-splattered sheet of plywood painted picket-fence white.
The response from the community was prompt and aggressive. Within two weeks, Open Vein 2 was announced—an all-wounds exhibition. Most of the artists involved missed the opening night gala due to an overwhelming number of hospitalizations. Those who made it sported bloodied, gauze-wrapped limbs with filthy bandages days unchanged, borne like martyr’s wounds.
All were trumped, however, by the exhibition’s crown jewel—a stark white canvas, eight feet tall and three feet wide, with a red thousand-point star at its centre. It lay thick, with grey and white chunks throughout like globules of paint trapped in place, lacquered over with a fast-drying agent.
The wife of the artist stood stoic by the canvas, dressed in funeral black, from shoes to floppy southern belle sunhat. She clutched a single red rose in her black-gloved hands. To the other side, the artist’s statement—his suicide note. The wife was arrested before the night was over, having been the one who pulled the trigger. The ensuing conversation paid little attention to legalities and focused instead on the actual identity of the artist: the husband who’d conceived the piece, or his wife who had executed it. And him.
It was on the exhibition’s final night that Leviticus finally revealed himself. He urged his public on, convincing them to press forward by destroying that which they themselves had produced, to never allow their art to repeat—to never become a mockery of itself or, worse, inspiration to another.
Hans was there, among the injured but invigorated crowd. As Leviticus spoke, people to Hans’ left and right passed around large plastic bags filled with aneurytics. One by one they wiped themselves of what they’d just witnessed, of all inspiration, all influence, all possibility of creative intervention.
For the first time, Hans felt as if he were seeing the man behind the moniker. He watched as Leviticus jubilantly passed through the crowd, always with a pill on his tongue, which he gifted freely to every person he kissed. He stopped suddenly, face to face with Hans.
The two men stared at one another for several seconds, the air between them pregnant with mistrust. Hans, shaking, opened his mouth to receive.
Leviticus simply moved on, to the woman to Hans’ left, continuing until all but Hans had been saved.
X.
The stories continued:
He was a chemist who’d experimented on himself to unlock his “creative potential.”
He was an arsonist who’d given rationale to his incendiary “work.”
He was a vicious art collector hell bent on eliminating all competition.
These possibilities and more cycled through Hans’ mind when Leviticus again appeared in his studio. This time, however, Leviticus was framed by empty space; the only items left were an easel heavy and spackled with paint, the table, and the couch.
“You’ve thrown it all away,” said Leviticus.
“Moved them to a safer place. I didn’t trust the neighborhood.”
“If you’d only trusted yourself and gotten rid of them we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“I know how to rectify that.” Hans held open the studio door.
“You don’t really want me to go.”
“You’re always telling me what I want or don’t want. I’m done. I’m sick of it.”
Leviticus stood before him, arms at his sides, palms outward. “My name is Levine.”
Hans sighed. “Why are you telling me this?”
Levine crossed the distance between them. Cupped the back of Hans’ head and drew him in for a kiss. Hans allowed it, but only briefly. He turned away. Felt Levine’s breath on his neck, damp like late July. Levine pulled Hans toward the couch. Slipped off his shirt, then Hans’ shirt, and tossed both to the ground; pulled from his pocket a single pink aneurytic and placed it on the tip of his tongue. Unsure, Hans slowly lowered himself on top of Levine’s weathered body, and linked their lips and tongue together.
XI.
Hans’ head felt wrapped in fiberglass insulation. Levine lay asleep next to him on the couch. Instinctively, Hans reached for a small, leather sketchbook that had been tucked beneath the tools on the table. He opened to a blank page and stared at Leviticus—Levine—lost in a deep sleep. He simply looked like a man. Barely more than a boy in many respects. Certainly not the figurehead he’d transformed into, either by design or through circumstance.
Hans started to sketch.
Levine woke an hour later. He saw Hans sitting across from him and smiled sweetly. It was only when he’d fully opened his eyes that he saw the graphite in Hans’ hand.
“What are you doing?”
“You looked peaceful,” Hans said without looking up. “I wanted to remember it.”
“Then come over here and start remembering.”
“I’m almost done.”
“No, really—put the book down.”
Hans continued drawing.
Levine rolled off the couch and grabbed for the sketchbook. Hans clutched it to his chest. Levine snatched at it a second time and Hans scrabbled up and backed against the wall.
“What’s gotten into you?” Hans demanded.
Instead of answering, Leviticus gathered his things; slipped on his pants and fumbled with his belt. In the soft morning light, Hans could see every burn mark and abrasion adorning his lithe, wintery body—tattooed memories of past crimes.
“I thought we shared something last night,” Levine said. “You tasted it; I know you did.”
“It-it didn’t work.”
“Liar!”
“I’m telling the truth! Things changed at first, but…It didn’t last, Levine.”
“Don’t call me that!”
“I…I just wanted to capture the moment.”
“Moments aren’t for capturing, Hans Saito. They’re meant to pass.” He quieted. “Nothing you do is original.”
“And you’re the paragon of that?” Hans, incensed, stepped away from the wall.
“I am—”
“A swarm of locusts and withering cattle. Yeah, I got it. But so is everyone else. You’ve got people around the world taking your shitty little pills and pushing this cult of ‘the now,’ and you know what? Everyone’s so goddamn original that no one is. All your precious little snowflakes are starting to bleed the same blood and for what? To be the very thing you wanted to kneecap in the first place? Fuck you—I’ll make what I want, thank you very much.”
Levine stood silent in the face of Hans’ outburst. Unmoved. Then stormed out, shirt balled in his fist.
Alone again, Hans slumped back against the wall and slid to the ground.
XII.
Hans stopped at the Wallace Satellite the next morning. He peered inside the large front window. The lights were off and all artwork had been stripped from the walls. It was the same at the Contemporary Art Gallery down the street, and the Patterson-Morris Collection two blocks farther.
As he stared, an emaciated figure sidled up beside him. He glanced to his right to find Janelle looking as much a zombie as he felt. The cross-hatching on her neck now travelled all the way down her shoulder and arm, ending at her wrist.
“It’s done,” she said. “Last night everyone stormed in and tore their work from the walls. They tossed it all into the back of a flatbed pickup. He asked them to do it, they said. Said it was the next step.”
“What next step?” Hans asked.
Janelle handed Hans a scrap of paper torn from the edge of an arterial collage he recognized from Open Vein 2. Sketched hastily through the artfully drawn blood splotches was a map leading just outside of town.
“They’re going to burn it. When the sun goes down. They’re going to burn everything.”
XIII.
Hans made his way to the spot marked on the map—a farmer’s field south of the city, off Route 401—and parked at the end of a long row of vehicles stretching all the way around the plot. He heard the commotion as soon as he opened the door.
The field was cluttered and cacophonous, with burned, scarred, and otherwise wounded artists dotting the tall, dry winter grass like ants on a hill. In the centre of it all, standing atop a winding mountain of broken, torn, and half-destroyed works of art, Leviticus preached to his followers.
“In our sacrifice we cast off the shackles of our past and are reborn!”
Hans watched, frightened and all too aware of the weight of the sketchbook he clutched to his chest, hidden from all, as Leviticus danced atop the bones of his own movement; as the flock set fire to the pieces of their selves, smashed and shattered, piled at his feet.
Hans remained at the rear of the crowd, ducking as Molotov cocktails were hurled overhead. He held himself tight, afraid that at any minute one of Leviticus’ followers would somehow, amidst the popping and fizzing of their degrading memories, recognize him and drag him before their leader.
Eventually, the noise stopped. In its place, a stark, unsettling silence descended. Hans felt a growing arrhythmia like thunder in his eardrums. He stared ahead just in time to see the fire rising, enveloping Leviticus where he stood, arms upraised. Encased in flames, the aneurytic artist fell to his knees and thrashed around on top of the burning pile, crashing down its side to land at the feet of his flock. They backed away instinctively, to protect themselves. Stood there immobile, unsure if this had been his endgame all along. A few looked as if they wanted to strip their shirts and douse the flames. They didn’t.
As Leviticus’ thrashing slowed and then ceased altogether, many of his followers paused to take in what had just transpired. And as the flames quieted, and fell, they turned and walked in communal silence across the dead, brown grass, away from the devastation. Unable, or unwilling, to look at one another.
Hans observed from his car as the last of Leviticus’ followers departed, leaving behind the charred, ashen remains of their work and the shriveled corpse of a man whose real name was Levine. A man who no longer looked anything like the man in the pages of Hans’ sketchbook.