In her apartment on East Wilson, Dee St Clair is crying. You can tell by her eyes that she has been crying for some time. She’s sitting in that living room of hers with the view out across Lake Monona, and you can see the lights of the houses across the shore, and the star trails of fireworks in the darkened city sky, and smell the jasmine and grapefruit candles burning slow around the room, but Dee isn’t looking out the window and even if she was, she probably wouldn’t notice the lights or the lake or the fireworks or any damn thing at all. Dee isn’t aware of the scented candles either; she is barely aware of her own breathing. Dee is responding to emails and texts and calls because she has no option any more. Not all of them. Sometimes the screen of her iPhone flares up and flashes and she winces and looks away until it stops. She wishes it could all stop without anyone else getting hurt, but the way it’s going, that’s not likely. She wishes it had never started in the first place. But it did, and willingly or not, she is at the heart of it. So she texts, and she emails, and she sometimes pulls herself together to talk without sounding as if she’s falling apart, and in between times, she cries. If only she had never met him. If only fate wasn’t fate. She cries and she cries and she cries. But when the call comes, the call to move, Dee will do what she’s called to do. It’s too late now to do anything else.
In a store room in the cellar of the converted grain store on West Wacker, Dave Ricks is making a telephone call. We can’t hear what he’s saying, or tell if he’s angry, or excited, or upset. Well, maybe we could if we came a little closer, but we don’t really want to. We know we’re going to find out soon enough, and sometimes it’s better to wait. Sometimes it’s better, and sometimes we’re a little uneasy about learning the truth, even when deep down we know it’s what we want. There’s a riot of emotion in Dave’s face, that’s for sure. In the meantime, we’re looking around the room, and thinking this must be the office Dave started the design consultancy in. From little acorns. But the longer we look the sooner we stop thinking about design consultancies, or business acumen, or Chicago architecture. The longer we look the sooner we stop thinking at all. Soon all we do is look, is stare, is gape.
For the walls of the cellar are covered with paintings, hundreds of paintings, barely a square inch of wall space to be seen. The paintings are of different sizes. Some are framed, and what a variety of frames, gilt, and steel, and plain and painted wood. Some are behind glass, some are bare canvas. The paintings are in different styles, some clear as a photograph, some thick with swirling paint, some naturalistic, some almost abstract. The paintings come in different colors, some bright and garish, some muted and monochrome.
But for all these differences between them, our eyes gradually begin to find what they have in common. And it dawns on us that every single painting depicts the same scene. The scene is a window, which is dark, but which either reflects, or is surrounded by, not just bright light, but fire light. Sometimes it is the merest flicker, sometimes it is in full blaze. And in the window there are two children. Sometimes you can make out their little faces; sometimes they are abstracted until they are mere shapes; sometimes they are death’s heads, skulls or ghouls. But in every picture, it is the same: two children, gazing out in fear, at the flames that will devour them.