Shattered by highway headlights and fuel dust, Klimt’s first floor apartment was either New York bleak or utter shit. He had two rooms, uneven floors and an interesting crack right across the living room window. He’d made the mistake of saying ‘interesting crack’ in front of Josh once. Ah, yes, hilarity ensued. Klimt had tried to pass it off all high-brow and not even giggle but he’d ended up rolling on the floor, knees clutched to his chest and cheek pressing into a plop of pizza sauce that he’d forgotten to mop up earlier. When a truck rolled by, the window gave a glassy quiver. Initially, he’d been afraid the two parts would separate, plunge below and slice a passer-by in half. Now he barely noticed the crack.
Klimt had abandoned his Fine Arts Degree after two years—too expensive and too pretentious. Following that, he’d worked various monotonous and soul-dampening roles. Now it was nearly a year since the night-fill manager had found him in the corner of the forklift bay curled up, snoring, atop a pile of nappies, and thus his foray into permanent ongoing work was abruptly ended.
Still, he was busy. He’d been painting the heron for a month. It was a gift for someone special. No, it was THE gift. When he brought The Heron—yes, he had a better title—into the gallery and showed Melly he wouldn’t have to explain because the work would speak for him but if he had to he’d tell her that the first time they met—well, not met, since what they did was collide, both literally and atomically—his atoms had been altered in an instant. He could tell hers had too, since when her hand touched his shoulder and their eyes met, her cheeks had turned as scarlet as her glasses. Sorry, he’d said, and, who are you? and then launched into an explanation of how when he got excited his thoughts emerged out of his mouth of their own accord. She had covered her mouth when she giggled, remembered herself and drawn her hand away, and he’d noticed how her little pink tongue had pressed up against her teeth when she’d laughed.
They had banged into one another while both staring at the same painting. It was yellow. Yellowene. Was that a word? That’s what Melly’d called it; she had said it should be called yellowene when it was the shot of translucent yellow that bathed everything before and behind in sunshine. Like Bowie, he’d said, even though that didn’t make a lot of sense, and he’d explained Bowie was Gaelic or something meaning yellow-haired and whenever he saw him in his mind, he had a yellowene halo. And she had actually reached out and rubbed a lock of his hair together as if she were testing the yellowness. His face had scrunched at the noise of the hairs rubbing and she had given a big cackle, pink tongue pushed right up between the gap in her teeth.
Melly worked at the gallery down the road two days a week. Risk Gallery was the one cool thing in his area. It was a dare for the wealthy to risk everything venturing to Bladdersfield—where punks jumped you if they didn’t like the way you walked, or jerking addicts screamed at you—just to purchase art. Oh-ha-ha-ha. The gallery owner was a bit of a wank, according to everybody, and had specifically said that good art was a risk, bad art a compromise.
A month ago Klimt had made the mistake of mentioning Melly to Josh in what he’d assumed was an offhand way but Josh had immediately ceased his diatribe against the warbling pigeons roosting on his roof. Stopping mid-mocking warble, his eyes had flashed. Ohhhhhwwwww! What do we have here? Wittle cru-ush? Are you sure she’s...? That was a reference to Klimt’s bisexuality. Pretty sure she’s like me, Klimt had replied. Right, Josh had said, getting serious like he did when he expected to be deferred to as the expert—in this case on heterosexuality. Josh informed him of ‘the gesture’. Considering Klimt’s freckly skin, forelock and generally unimpressive physique, not to mention his weird way of talking, if he were to bag a chick like Melly then he needed a gesture—a massive one. What’s she into? Josh had asked.
Art, of course.
For Josh, that was food for thought.
An image soared into Klimt’s mind.
When Melly had reached up and rubbed his hair between her fingers, her sleeve had ridden up and her wrist had been revealed. On top of her azure wrist veins was the tiniest tattoo: a heron in flight. He had hovered a finger over it. What’s that?
In that same weird, vacant tone they got when their eyes were travelling inside their minds they had simultaneously said—the heron carries the universe on its back. It was a myth.
He would paint the grandest, most breathtaking heron ever. It would be more than a heron. It had to make a person stop and question: What is this life? What are WE in this moment? The heron would command: LOOK! LOOK and never stop LOOKING!
The painter Georgia O’Keeffe said that when you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. She wanted to give that world to someone else but he would do more than that with his heron. His heron carried the soul of the universe on its back. It carried him and Melly, together. It carried ultimate love and past and future, and ALL possibility. When Melly saw it, she would see all of him and nothing would separate them.
At the supermarket he avoided the aisles where the items he could not afford lived—the tumescent abundance of silken cheeses and fat salamis. In the freezer aisle he stared into windows where frozen curls of cloud spun over icy surfaces. A blue tub of ice cream caught his eye. The blue was not right but it was close. For the heron to be right, to be breathtaking, he needed a specific blue sky. He would paint it with spinning dervishes of frost cloud, whirling through the fertile-blue sky. Fertile-blue was a cobalt blue so brimming, so saturated and resplendent that when you looked at it, it poured into your eyes, down your throat and out your nose. Excuse me. A frowning woman pressed her trolley into his toe. In the bread aisle he grabbed the half-pack of bachelor’s bread which, with a spurt of organic unsweetened ketchup and a pack of half-price artisan sausages, would last him the week.
On the walk home he noted how strangely beautiful the world was. Glittering cars blasting snippets of pounding rap or thrumming guitar riffs, montaged with the polar-bear brilliance of curls atop the elderly lady with the maroon walker who inched across in front of the cars. Along the street, light tricked and blazed. It converted letterboxes into gasps of white and alerted his eyes and pores to incredible magnificence. All the strange little sights were separate and yet, made this great random whole that possessed a truth he could only access through art. He rushed, plastic bag thumping against his thigh.
Soon Klimt stood at the cracked window in his dim little apartment, but he was not there. He was inside the heron painting—in the world of it, feeling the resistance of feathers in the wind, the soft, cool, moving air condensing and separating as wings stretched. His painting was quite advanced now. The heron itself, all except the dark twigs of trailing feet, was done.
His apartment was dotted with molehills of clothing, papers, zines, and towers of stacked dishes—teacup inside mug, inside thin-lipped yellow bowl, inside deep turquoise dish, inside wooden noodle soup tureen. He dumped the plastic bag and scooped armfuls of clothing in wrestling gestures, herding them into the bedroom. His brushes were soaking in oil in a steel tray atop the cabinet, next to the canvas in front of the window. When he looked at the heron—the delicacy of feather spines, how the light danced through the brilliant lit feather-tips—he completely forgot that the canvas had cost $39.
He dried a brush, holding it between his teeth while he grappled in the drawer for the paint. Carmine, ebony, cerise, ochre, napalm brown...every shade, except blue. He searched the tubs under his bed, the shoebox in the top cupboard, and the drawer where crusted chopsticks and two-pronged salad servers were pasted to the mouldy drawer liner: not one tube of blue.
His phone was on the fritz and only lit up when it wanted to. He switched it on now. Perched on the end of his bed, he began a text to his mother; the transition from hey, how are you? to could I borrow? eluded him. He considered the amount of assurance the text would cost: yes, he’d applied for three jobs that week; one was hopeful; and yes, he did understand that every single person needed to work and that he was not special.
He checked his emails, hoping a Russian oligarch might want to use his bank account to offload cash. Josh had forwarded an email. Do it! Josh had written. So the moment had finally come—the moment which came in every true artist’s life. The email called for medical trial participants—quick cash, guaranteed. He auto-filled the form, hurrying, anxiousness rising in his chest. He wasn’t sure whether the panic was because his phone might die before he’d signed up, or because he might be successful.
The future of AI. Maximise your mind. Earn while you sleep. A checkbox sprung up in the bottom left-hand corner: did he agree to the terms and conditions? A link was provided. His phone flickered. Check, yes! The screen washed with that luminous blackness, neither off nor displaying anything. He’d caught the address: 115 Ruthers Road, 9am, he chanted, scribbling it down on the corner of the Hawk’s Big Tools mailer.
Christ, look at the sight of ya, Josh said, shoving him aside and coming in. Got coffee? A quick coffee before we go? Josh lived in the last apartment in his block next to the railway and often knocked on his door at random hours. He’d knocked last night to check Klimt was on for the medical trial. He hadn’t known what would be required either and didn’t care.
Outside 115 Ruthers Road, a scraggly bush overgrew a silver address plate. No business name. They buzzed at the glass door, watching as a receptionist crossed their names off a printout. She looked them up and down, and waggled her thumb backwards, indicating a door.
In the middle of an empty warehouse was a queue consisting of one couple, attached at the hip, and two squat dudes who stood close to one another but did not exchange a word. They queued in front of a girl checking IDs and getting forms signed.
Afterwards Klimt only ever thought of that day in the very early mornings when his sleep was light and flashing with images. They had gone into a green waiting area where he was asked a million questions. He remembered wondering what exactly was a thyroid? He was given a brain scan and then lost Josh.
A dark-haired nurse in aqua scrubs had asked all about his sleep. She tapped her screen and said he’d already agreed to sedation. Had he? He’d asked about the money and she’d smiled, flashing dimples. Save those questions for The Team.
Finally in the boardroom he’d met The Team. A long white table sat under fluorescent lights so bright that his eyes watered. A row of men with that same defined square jaw sat opposite and soon a short polished blond woman in a lab coat entered. Hi, she said to him, as if it were only him and her there. I’m Shannon—Dr Shannon Murray. These are my colleagues, Dr Rankin, Dr Mulgrave, Elroy McInnes, and that’s Frank. On the far end, Frank winked.
We’re here for your questions, Dr Shannon said. They had pictures. They had diagrams. They had a video, three dimensional images in black and white plus colour maps of brain scans but in the end he couldn’t be made to understand, which deeply concerned them. Frank lost it a little, slapped palms on the table. Look, it’s actually very straightforward. While you sleep parts of your brain are active, specifically those parts that respond while dreaming such as the amygdala and hypothalamus, areas that determine your response to stimuli, whereas other parts, like the frontal lobes—where conscious thoughts form—are not used. We’ve worked out how to utilize the processing power of these unused neurotransmissions during sleep to increase our AI capabilities. You’re not using all your brain while you sleep, so we’re going to.
Elroy cut in. With our neuron forest network collection we’ve freed over a billion hours of input and data labour to be used for re-invigoration of brain power, rebuilding and sustaining the eternal loop.
Rest, he means rest, Dr Shannon said. We are creating rest in the world. People have become so inundated with input, with the ‘attention economy’—she made air quotes—with advertising and never-ending commitments; we are freeing up some of those, creating longstanding sustainable rest.
Pausing between each word, Klimt got out, how—does—it—work? Frank deflated, sinking onto the table. Dr Shannon pressed her fingertips together. Her voice was measured. Let’s focus on what’s required. From her folder she drew out a plain black eye mask. Frank chuckled. You sleep with that on and wake up two hundred bucks richer! Dr Shannon pre-empted Klimt’s next question. Our preliminary results show participants have better focus—are able to concentrate on the task in front of them, complete it, and continue to the next. They report uninterrupted, refreshing sleep. Lifelong coffee addicts have found that since coming on the program, they feel so good in the mornings they no longer think of coffee.
Despite being excited about waking up richer, Klimt managed to sleep well. In shared flats he’d often slept with an eye mask and this one was silkier and lighter, while having an incredible sensitivity to and attraction for neuron transmissions. He had a courier pack to pop it in. Within the hour they’d have it and his money would be in. They weren’t kidding: he was immediately awake with no drowsiness. He felt more refreshed than he had in months. His brain felt roomy, brighter, and action-focussed.
Out of habit he set the coffee going, glimpsing his painting on the way to kitchen. He hurried, trying not to register a terrible realisation. The heron did not look resplendent. It looked a bit shit. He tried not to look toward the lounge; instead, he cupped his coffee and thought about what to do with the day. First he’d go to the iPhone store and sign up to a plan. He could use the phone to make a budget and work out when he’d have enough for the kicks he’d seen on High Street. Come to think of it, there was A LOT he needed. He could probably get a better flat. He’d need to save for that. He wondered if there were other parts of his brain he wasn’t using. Maybe he could earn double the money? Josh had phoned him afterwards; he hadn’t been selected. He was a bad sleeper, had a terrible diet. Klimt had promised to give him fifty bucks consolation but now that he thought about it, it was Josh’s fault. He could change his diet, get to bed at a decent hour. If he handed over his cash he would be enabling Josh. You know what, Klimt needed the money. There was so much he didn’t have.
He made a list, highlighting and numbering each item. First was the phone. He’d have to go to the mall. He hated the mall but today the thought of its clean, solid lines and uniform temperature felt relaxing. He might browse, see what else he needed. He walked the usual route to the train station and arrived ten minutes early. Normally he had to sprint up the ramp not to miss it. Today he hadn’t stopped to look at glistening leaf veins, how light slicked surfaces, or how a cloud floated through the flawless sky.
Usually he hurried through the mall, shut out and disturbed by the extravagance and excess. Today he imagined marching in and saying, I’ll take that, and that, and that. Sir, that shirt is four hundred dollars. And he’d flash his iPhone and ping it through while rolling his eyes. He passed the art store, hesitating at the window. Vaguely, he thought, I need something there, and couldn’t put his finger on what. In the queue at the iPhone store he remembered—blue paint. An image of the bird in the bright light this morning as he opened the curtains pushed into his mind. It was really just a bird. Any old bird. When he thought about it, Melly probably wasn’t his type. She seemed more of a process person, whereas now he thought he might be results driven. Plus, he had money now. Their lifestyles would be different.
On the train home he inputted numbers into his new phone. He checked out features and downloaded apps. He did not look up once, not even to see how the clouds were threadbare, pierced by gilded blue or how the sky striated pale blue into blue-peach, into electric, into cerulean, azure, sapphire, midnight and, way up high, into pools of blistering fertile-blue broken only by a dark speck, which might well be a white heron, moving slowly, the entire universe on its back.