The Sketch

By the following autumn, Archie had filled eleven sketchbooks.

They stood in a row on the shelf above his drafting table in the rented studio in Portsmouth: black cloth covers, red spines, the edges gone soft with handling. He had begun the first one on a Sunday in December, with the snow coming down, and a girl in a camel coat sitting on the bed. He had not meant to. He had sat with the pencil in his fist for twenty minutes, and then, without any decision at all, it had begun to move.

It had drawn a hand.

It was a hand held out, palm up, in a gesture of invitation. Then another beside it, and then a sleeve, and then a face. The face had a grin. It had a scar in the left eyebrow, and a wild unruly shock of hair, and a pair of large, dark, crinkling eyes, and it had looked up from the page at Archie with a faint expression of amusement.

I looked cool though, right?

He had put the pencil down. He had cried then, properly, for the first time since the pod bay, with his face in his hands, while Zoe sat beside him on the bed and did not say a word.

After that he drew every day.

…

He drew Venn laughing. He drew Venn at the long table at Thornkeep with a leg of mutton in his fist and gravy on his chin. He drew Venn on the stairs of the Ashmore tenement, skinning his knuckles on a Static. He drew Venn with a hammer, with a spear, with his hair on end in the wind of the Great Tree, and Venn looking back over his shoulder at the end of the world with a flash of white teeth.

He drew the others, too. He couldn't help it. They came on every page, in the corners and the margins, like guests who had followed the host in. Jin pushing up his glasses. Jin bowed over a book, with the lamp on his hair. Zoe in a red dress at a window. Zoe with a silver spear. Zoe in the ring of light under the Tree, with her mouth open, singing.

He drew Elena in her scarred armor, and Gregor with his tomato, and Thomas Crane behind his bar. He drew a green-handed Keeper in a hall of roots, with her eyes closed. He drew the Mirror World's faceless crowds, and the gray square, and the gap of silver light.

He drew rain on a window in Ashmore City, over and over, in a dozen versions, until Zoe laughed and said it looked like a wallpaper catalog.

"It's all I've got," he said.

"It's a lot."

"It's not enough."

"No," she agreed. "It isn't. But it's something." She turned a page. "Archie, these are good."

"They're not good. They're a record."

"They can be both."

…

The exhibition was her idea.

She proposed it in September, over the phone, from the kitchen of the apartment in New York, with her mother's pills lined up on the counter and a pot boiling over on the stove. She did it in the brisk, slightly bullying tone of a woman who has run a household for twelve months and learned to expect obedience.

"There's a gallery on Congress Street," she said. "Little place. Run by a friend of a friend. They have a gap in November."

"I'm not an artist."

"You're an architect."

"I'm a former architect."

"You're a man with eleven sketchbooks and a beautiful hand." A pot lid clattered. "Please. I'd like to see them on a wall."

He had said no. He had said it three times. And then, at four in the morning, lying awake in his little rented room, he had thought of a line of green on a screen, and a shock of hair on a pillow, and a voice saying, in the dark, Don't let it just be a record.

He rang her at six.

"Fine," he said.

"Fine, what?"

"Fine. All right. I'll do it."

"I'll book it," said Zoe, and he could hear her smiling.

…

They called it The Last Dimension.

It was a small show, forty pieces in all, hung in a long whitewashed room with a floor of scuffed pine. The first third were buildings. He'd drawn them for twenty years and never shown them to anyone: a library in the shape of an open book, a bridge like a bent bow, a school with a roof that looked like folded paper. They were fine. They were competent, and finished, and slightly cold. The visitors drifted past them, nodding.

The second third were not.

At the far end of the room, the architecture began to bend. A tower grew roots. A bridge turned into the branch of a Tree. A tenement stair gave way, three steps up, to the grim, lovely, ink-dark skyline of a city that did not exist. And hidden in the corners of each drawing, so small that one had to lean close to see them, were people. A man with a hammer. A girl with a spear. A small scholar with spectacles. A woman with a bow.

And in the center of the last wall, alone, in a plain black frame, hung the largest piece.

It was five feet across. It was drawn in charcoal and a little red conté, on a sheet of heavy cream paper that had taken him six weeks. It showed the foot of an enormous Tree. Its roots went down and down into the dark, and its trunk rose out of the top of the picture, too tall to fit, and under its branches in a ring of soft light stood four people.

They were holding hands.

They were not looking at the viewer. They were looking up, at the leaves, and on each face was an expression of wonder so complete, so unguarded, that it made visitors stop. A woman in a green silk blouse stood in front of it for twenty minutes. A schoolboy came back three times. A very old man in a tweed cap leaned on his stick before it and said, to nobody, "Well. That's what it's for, isn't it?"

Nobody asked what he meant.

…

The opening was on a Friday.

It rained. It rained steadily and gently from four o'clock, the slow gray New England rain of late autumn, and the cobbles of Congress Street shone under the lamps like wet slate. Inside, the gallery was warm. A few dozen people drifted about with plastic cups. A small man in a tweed jacket was explaining the brushwork to a larger man who was not listening.

Zoe came in at six.

She wore the red dress. She had told him she would, and he had not believed her. She came through the door, shaking out an umbrella, and her hair was pinned up in a dark twist and her eyes were bright and she looked, in the lamplight, like something out of a painting. He felt his heart do an absurd, undignified, helpless thing.

"You look," he said.

"Don't."

"I was going to say terrible."

"You were not." She kissed his cheek. Her lips were cool. "Where's Jin?"

"Flowers."

She followed his nod.

They stood on a plinth in the corner: a huge, extravagant, entirely impractical arrangement of white lilies and blue delphiniums, in a vase the size of a bucket. A card was tucked into the blooms. It read, in a spidery hand:

For the best I have ever read. — J.

P.S. I couldn't get a flight. Work. But I would have come. I will come next time.

"He's always like that," said Zoe, fondly. "Do you know he sent me a spreadsheet of the ways I'm brave?"

"Did he?"

"Fifteen columns."

Otis was there, too. He had driven all the way from the institute in a borrowed suit that was two sizes too large, and he stood in a corner with a cup of lukewarm wine, gazing at the big picture with an expression of fixed, helpless adoration. Luca had come, to Archie's astonishment. He stood at the other end of the room in a dark overcoat, alone, with his hands behind his back, looking at the Tree. He did not speak to anyone. When he saw Archie looking, he inclined his head.

He did not smile.

Nobody said Venn's name.

It was strange. They all spoke to one another: about the weather, about the hanging, about the bread rolls, which were stale. They said a great many kind and inconsequential things. But the name hung between every sentence, like a window left open. When a stranger asked, innocently, "And who's this? The one on the left, with the hammer?" Archie opened his mouth and could not answer. Zoe stepped in smoothly. "A friend," she said.

"He looks like fun."

"He was," said Zoe. "He is."

The stranger moved on.

…

It was after nine when the last of them left.

The rain had thickened. The caretaker, a thin silent man in a gray cardigan, stacked the last of the plastic cups and said, "You want me to lock up, Mr. Moran?"

"Give me ten minutes."

"Take your time."

He went out. The door sighed shut. Zoe had gone to find a taxi, with a lingering look at the door and a promise to return. The room was empty and quiet, and warm, and smelled of lilies and rain. The lights had been dimmed to a low gold.

Archie went to the end wall.

He stood in front of the big picture for some time. He had made it, but he looked at it as one looks at something belonging to someone else. He noticed things in it he had not meant to put. The set of Jin's shoulders. The way Zoe's hand lay in his own. And on the left, a little apart, where the Tree's root made a seat, the dark-haired young man with the hammer, whose head was turned very slightly as though someone had called him.

Ten seconds, he thought. Ten seconds is all it took.

He knew now what the others had known from the first. It was not the leaving. It was not the choice, or even the door. It was that the world had gone on turning, afterward, with perfect cheerfulness, as if nothing had happened. That the sun came up. That people ate pastries. That a man could stand in a warm room and be applauded, and sell a drawing of a Tree, and sleep at night.

He would carry it. He had learned that much. It would be his, like his lungs and his hands and the smallness of the clone body he had woken in, and he would walk with it every day for however many days were left to him. Eighteen months, Luca said. Perhaps three years.

He would not put it down.

He put out his hand and touched the glass over the painted shoulder. The charcoal under it was cold.

"I'm sorry, bro," he said.

It came out as a whisper, hardly louder than the rain.

For a moment, nothing answered. The caretaker, in the corridor, rattled a mop in a pail. A taxi hissed by in the street. The painted Tree stood over the painted four with its branches full of silent leaves, and its light lay on all their faces, and it was entirely still.

Then, from far away, in a place where a green line ticked across a black screen and a man slept in a pod beside a woman who kept watch, something stirred. A single flicker. A pulse. Too small for any machine to catch, too faint for any doctor to name.

Nobody was there to see it.

Archie took his hand from the glass. He picked up his coat. At the door he turned off the lights, one by one, and went out into the rain.