The Painting

As Jack and Stephanie walked into the hot, dank apartment, Jack’s cat came running up to him and rubbed against his ankles. “Hey buddy, how are you?”

            Beast, (the cat’s name) meowed and followed Jack as he plopped onto the couch with a sigh. Stephanie sat on the other end of the couch, a little bit aloof.        

            Jack leaned back onto the second hand couch as he exhaled a huge, odorous plume of weed smoke into the air. He cradled the bong absent mindedly on his lap and looked into one of his paintings hanging on the wall of his apartment.

            The painting was an intricately detailed abstract. It resembled a maze of multi-colored roads on a map, but as one walked closer and closer to it, the intricacy was further revealed. The painting had no beginning or end. An endless combination of shapes and contexts could be derived from the sinuous abstractions. The borders of any number of contexts could be drawn at any place in the painting. If one stared at it long enough, it seemed to move, as if it were breathing.

            “Yeah, man,” Jack stated, “Sometimes I just sit here and chill out while staring at this painting. This idea of no end and no beginning was what I was trying to capture. You can just stare into this thing and get lost. I remember painting this while I was tripping and it felt like I was just melting into the canvas.”

            Stephanie gazed into the painting as Jack passed her the bong. It was an impressive painting, and somehow it captured something essential about Jack’s perspective. He had only created a few paintings, his first one being his most impressive and unique. Then, he had stopped. This was one window into himself that he had made before trying to shut the doors.

            Stephanie took a long toke from the bong, and coughed as she exhaled. As she looked back at the painting, it seemed to take on a sinister quality. “I like it Jack, but sometimes it freaks me out. It feels hot. It feels like I’m drowning in an ocean of lava and oil. There’s something about it that feels threatening.”

            Jack chuckled a little bit. “Yeah, it has different effects on different people. Sometimes it even freaks me out. I think it all depends on your frame of mind.”

            Stephanie set the bong back down onto the coffee table, which was littered with ash-trays, bills, and seeds and stems. She rubbed her abdomen absent mindedly, feeling a growing sense of anxiety as the effects of the weed began to wash over her.

            Jack took a strip of blotter from a bag on the table and cut up few pieces. “Do you want any, Steph?”

            She took a small piece and placed it on her tongue. Jack took two pieces and chewed them.

            “When is Doug supposed to get here Jack?” asked Stephanie.

            “He’ll be here soon. I called him before we left the restaurant. Don’t be in such a hurry. You shouldn’t even be taking that stuff. Coke is terrible for you.”

            Stephanie sighed, “Jack, what we’re doing now isn’t exactly good for us either.”

            Jack seemed a little irritated by this, “Steph, this blotter is going to open up your mind. This stuff will show you other dimensions, but I guess some people just don’t want to explore real knowledge because it scares them. The man, the government, and the powers that control the minds of most people just want us all to be obedient slaves.”

            “How do you know that Jack? You’re not really making much sense.” Stephanie replied.

            Jack seemed a little irritated. He didn’t like to be challenged openly. Jack got up and began to pantomime the behavior of an ape. He picked up his cat and spanked it in jest, but the cat was startled and it ran off as soon as he let it go. Jack made ape noises.

            “Well I guess I’m just a dumb ape! I don’t know anything.” Jack began dancing around the room until he got a plea from Stephanie for him to calm down.

            “Jack, take it easy. Why do you always do that? It makes me nervous, my god.”

            Now that Jack had diverted her attention away from a rational argument, he feigned and apology.

            He chuckled a little, “Aw, I’m just a little crazy. You know that, but I love you babe. C’mon, do you want any more?” Jack offered her some weed and blotter. Stephanie shook her head.

            “I’m still waiting for Doug to get here. He’s taking his damn time.” She said as she lit a cigarette.

            Jack became a little sullen when she mentioned Doug. He didn’t really like Doug, or the coke that Doug sold, but Stephanie liked coke, so Jack put up with him. Jack had met Stephanie through a friend of his who was living with her and dating her. When Jack’s friend found out that he and Stephanie were sleeping together, Jack asked Stephanie to live with him. Jack’s access to dope was a huge part of how he plied Stephanie away from her boyfriend, but this same tactic was used by a lot of the guys Jack knew, Doug included.

            Stephanie saw Jack pouting when she mentioned Doug. Something cruel and detached stirred in her as she saw Jack’s face twist into a frown.

            “Aw, Jack, don’t be jealous. I still love you.”

            Jack looked up, his face brightened a little. “Aw, babe, I love you too.”

            Stephanie felt a little guilty when she saw how Jack looked at her when she had told him she loved him. She meant it more casually than he took it, but that was always the case. He had pushed those words on her a while ago, and she sometimes just said it out of casual habit now, unfeeling, unthinking.

            Silence and smoke hung in the air for a little while. Jack was staring into the painting and he felt like suddenly running away from it. He felt as though if he stared into it for too long, it would bind him in its twisting waves of color, drowning him. He felt he was looking into a part of his life that perhaps he had unintentionally created, that there was now no way of escaping. He desperately considered Stephanie to be a form of salvation; a drowning man pushing his rescuer under the waves.

            “Babe, I really do love you. Do you ever think about the future, about us? You know we’ve talked about kids before. I always thought I’d make a good dad. I’m like a big kid myself. I’d be a cool fucking dad.”

            Stephanie felt sick when Jack mentioned kids. He talked about kids often, but she never did. Stephanie felt a vague twinge of some kind of affection for Jack, but she didn’t really love him as anything more than a friend she enjoyed fucking, and now she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to tell him, but she was sure she didn’t want it. She didn’t want to be trapped with Jack. He was just a temporary diversion, a hidden shelter.

            Stephanie had been staring into the abstract sea of Jack’s painting, and she hadn’t responded to his statement.

            “What, you don’t agree with me? You think I’d make a shitty dad? You don’t want kids?”

            Stephanie felt an irrational, intense panic seize her as Jack spoke. She gazed into the multicolored waves of ocean wherein the monsters of Jack’s mind seemed to swirl and grasp at her. As the blotter began to take effect, she felt blood flowing from between her legs.

            “Jack, I think you would make a terrible father.” She responded with an uncanny calmness as she rose and walked into the bathroom.

            Jack looked into the now sinister, acid like waves of his painting. Scaly tentacles reached out at him as he called vaguely for Stephanie, “Stephanie, babe, are you OK?”

            Stephanie heard Jack calling her, but she said nothing.