The Gallery

A short story by Fletcher Kovich

I was walking along the street on a sunny day with my heart lifted and step lightened and all my memories forgotten as I smiled for no reason and sang a melody that had not yet been invented and all around me I saw only saints. The air was warm with comfort as I passed that yellow and green poster announcing the delights of chocolate. I hummed the next verse, which had also not yet been invented—but I was trying. And the sound of traffic was invisible to my ears as my mind listened to the sea washing ashore a sandy beach. I thought I could feel my bare feet sinking in the soft sand and then I noticed the door. There were always doors. This one was standing in a shadow, not trying to conceal itself, not trying to pretend to be anything other than a door, a plain, black door. Only, in the sun, I almost missed it. For some reason, it stood out; it stood out to me. I stopped and tried its handle. Of course, it opened. I somehow knew I was supposed to enter, so why would it have not opened?—there was no part of me that expected to meet any resistance. I stepped inside, closed the door and found myself in an endless gallery of my own memories. Each wall contained a carefully laid out display with painstakingly typed descriptions attached to each memory.

Before long, I had lost my way. I had stepped through room after room, turned corners that should have returned me to the outdoors but had instead only transported me further backwards and then sideways and then forwards and then backwards again in time. I was lost.

I came to a halt in a room called ‘Melancholy’. I do not know how I got there and could see no way out. The light was low and my lungs seemed to have no interest in working. I could feel a distinct weight attached to my heart. Something, from some picture somewhere on those walls, seemed to be dragging at my heart and pulling me down with it, down into some suffocating darkness where life itself seemed afraid to go. I wanted to leave. The show was not to my liking.

“Tell me how to get out of here,” I thought. “Someone show me the exit; I want to get out and feel the daylight again.”

I would have shouted it, but I knew there was no point. No-one would have been able to hear. There was just me in there alone, parading around amongst my own memories.

I took a seat and began studying a picture. I saw no-one, heard no-one, could see no place, nor purpose; all I could feel was that weight tugging down on my heart; the more I looked, the more it tugged and the less I saw. And then I saw myself falling onto a knife. My right hand held it deliberately, its handle pressed against the floor and its sharp point entering my body as the earth pulled me down onto it. I saw myself jumping from a height. At last, I could see some purpose and that weight began to lessen. The pictures in that room brightened; they at last seemed to make sense and I could see them all clearly. But the room frightened me. I wanted to shout out again for the exit. “Someone, show me how to get out of here.” But I knew no-one would be able to hear, no-one would listen.

And then I could hear footsteps in an adjoining room and I found myself following them or trying to. I was passing from room to room, from corridor to corridor and the steps always seemed to be receding from me, as if deliberately shunning me. I turned into a darkened room and found it full of the sound of those steps, echoing round the room. The sound diminished and I noticed a single picture, from which the steps seemed to be emanating. My eyes followed the sound of those steps deep into the picture, which seemed to consist of nothing else other than the sound of those steps always walking away from me. My mind listened to the picture as my helpless eyes stood by. But then I turned to another wall and saw a silent picture. I saw Jonathan’s face looking at me. And there was nothing that either of us could say; all we could both do was stare, helplessly, as we both knew that we should be together but were now parted for life and in another picture, nearby, one which I recognised had been painted by myself over the years since our parting, I saw all my mistakes laid out, the wrong paths I took, and the so obvious things that I should have said to avoid this, this silence, the enforced dumbness, and this, his staring face, his heart connecting with mine, from deep inside his body, that knowledge within both of us, that we should be together, if only I had done those obvious things, and not been driven by my own deformed impressions. I saw his face, looking back at me from within that picture and heard those footsteps receding from me.

I turned to another wall and saw a tunnel, its path disappearing into the distance, as though tunnelling deep into a dark hillside, though I knew that it was, in reality, tunnelling deep down into my own heart and I realized, with alarm, that the name of this room was ‘My True Loves’. It contained my most treasured, yet my most feared pictures. These were the remnants of the men who had become lodged deep within my own heart. Next to the tunnel, I saw another face, the face of Lee. He was staring up at me as he hung over a cliff’s edge, his fingers gripping for life. Our eyes, again, watched each other helplessly, and in my mind another gallery of mistakes played out its images, each of them a lifeline that Lee could have grasped, had I not mistaken it for a rejection and tidied it away into my grave where one day I would join it and lie there alone with those tattered, misunderstood ropes, my only company.

And now the air in there was suffocating me; I could not breath; I had to get out. I turned and heard traffic noise, and then the sound of seagulls circling overhead and swooping by. I followed them and found myself back in childhood.

I was playing on a beach. There were two, indistinct figures sat nearby on deckchairs. Neither of them had voices, it seemed, for they were occasionally making mumbled noises like the barking of beached seals. Their faces, though, I could see clearly. My mother’s and father’s eyes looked out helplessly from the faces of these forms. Occasionally they glanced at us, and less frequently at one another, but mainly they seemed harassed by the fear of falling back down into the formless bodies that surrounded them, as though those very bodies were their graves. Sat around me were my siblings, though again they seemed not to posses a voice. I could stand the silence no longer and I ran off to play alone. I felt the sand beneath my feet, first cold, then warm as I ran out into a more sunny area. I slowed to a stroll and felt liberated; I could see no more pictures and as I looked about me, I found that I was outside again in the blinding sun. I glanced back at that yellow and green poster and resolved to never again eat chocolate.

As I walked along the street, there was a dim image at the back of my mind, a picture glimpsed from somewhere inside that gallery. It began quickly fading in the dazzling sun until I could no longer see myself misshapen by the burden of indulging in illicit pleasures. And then the image had gone and my mind was clear. I strode on, feeling the warmth of the sun on my face.

6 January 2009

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