Free Color Blind by Jonathan Santlofer Page A

good. The work she had ahead of her was no place for the creature of comfort and benevolence she had cultivated.

    Funny, thought Kate. She believed that she’d erased the tough cop from Queens, but damn it if she wasn’t always there, like that Glock she had not thrown away, waiting.

    Kate looped the holster over her shoulder and slipped the Glock in place.

    Of course Liz had been right. She needed to do something.

    Later there would be time to grieve. Now was the time for action.

FIVE
    B lackened shades shroud the windows, creating luminous skeletal outlines against shadowy walls; overhead fluorescents dim, softening the edges of the long table littered with paint tubes, pastels, and crayons, a beat-up-looking couch, canvases pinned to the gray walls.
    So often he imagines he can see those blinking lights, red, green, and blue, the ones she would string up in one dreary tenement after another, but of course it’s just an illusion and he knows it. It has been that way since the accident.

    He holds a pair of wraparound shades in his fingertips, gently swings them as he moves closer to the canvases.

    Was it all a waste of time? These tell him nothing. Absolutely nothing. Hair mashed into gray-black blood, colorless, unexciting. They were so vibrant, weren’t they—magenta and violet, wild strawberry, and raspberry?

    She wore a raspberry beret—

    He tries to remember while the song plays in the back of his brain, but it won’t come. It’s no good. Nothing is any good. He might as well be dead.

    One hundred twenty-three dead and still counting. The plane went down over a cornfield in rural—

    “Shhh!”

    He lets his body collapse onto the beat-up couch, feels tears on his cheeks and swipes them away with a fierce gesture. “Baby,” he says, annoyed with himself.

    Baby, baby, baby don’t leave me…

    Another one of those oldies she liked.

    “Stop!”

    The tune quiets. For the moment.

    He paws through boxes and bags on the couch, suddenly starving, pushing aside Oreos, mustard-flavored pretzels, Mr. Peanut Deluxe Party Assortment, and tears the tonguelike metal seal off a column of Pringles, stuffing handfuls of the uniform chips into his mouth, practically choking, his hunger a deep, never-sated void. He is always craving something.

    If asked, he would say that it is his work, only his work, his painting, that sustains him; that it is merely frustration, his need to see and know the truth that takes him out of his studio and into a gray world that he would prefer to ignore—a world not nearly as beautiful or wonderful or perfect as the one he strives to create on canvas. It’s a shame, really, that’s what he’d say, an annoyance and an interruption—no question he’d prefer to be left alone, painting—but then the need starts up and begins to grow inside him, expanding the emptiness until he can no longer stand it, and, work pushed aside, brushes left sodden with paint, canvases unfinished, he is off, the hunt commencing. It’s not really a decision, nothing to which he can say yes or no. It’s a need, a quest for knowledge, and, yes, a release and satisfaction, he will admit that much.

    When he is hunting his hunger abates, sustained by the chase alone. He goes days without food, thinking of nothing else—not eating or sleeping, or bathing—consumed by his need, until he has done it and he has seen what he must see and feel, and then, only then, does the real world intrude again, and the hunger for banal needs like food and drink and sleep return.

    It’s a process, really, like any other. Only, in his case, deadly.

    He sits up, swipes crumbs of broken chips from his lap and thinks, I am a seeker of the truth.

    He looks again at his most recent creations—ones made at the scenes—and is bathed with disappointment, like a baptism gone wrong.

    Why can’t it ever last? Isn’t he entitled to know? Why is he, and he alone, so severely punished?

    You’re grrrrrrrrrrrreat!

    “Am I, Tony?”