Free The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque by Jeffrey Ford Page A

that dim shadow I
    had been trying to capture on paper now moved wildly, changing shape, calling into question whether there had ever been anything there to draw at all.
    The Sibyl
    "Imagine," she said, "a friendless child with a mother I who does not love her or her father and a father who spends his time reading the will of God in the formations of snowflakes. How could I possibly have been anything else but a believer? I needed power and importance, and I desperately wanted to be noticed for more than my abil-ity to spray the specimens as my father held them up on toothpicks. He was my hero, and I wanted to be, like him, a conduit of the divine message."
    "So you fantasized the voice of the Twins," I said.
    "Not consciously, Mr. Piambo, but yes, I swear to you, I could hear them. Loneliness can make magicians of us, not to mention prophets."
    "What of the shooting star, though?" I asked. "What of the corpse of the man from the supply team?
    You actu-ally did know where he was."
    "Undoubtedly coincidence. The picture was in the book that had fallen open, but my father had many books with pictures of the heavens. I know from my extensive travels in Europe that there is an entire theory of the psyche being conceived of in Austria now which makes the case that there are no accidents. We are supposedly sentient on many levels, and those desires we do not choose to be aware of manifest themselves through what we think of as mishaps. The other two instances of my seeing the shooting star, when I closed the door and when my mother struck me, might have been more wishful thinking than anything else. As to the corpse, there were very few places on the mountain trail where it would have been as easy to wander from the beaten track in a storm. The path into that meadow forked off the main trail and then died at our picnic spot.
    Maybe somehow I uncon-sciously surmised that that was the most likely place for the poor man to have lost his way."

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    "But you continued with this notion of the Twins as the years progressed?" I asked.
    "I became 'the Sibyl," she said, "and eventually it twisted my heart."
    "The Sibyl?"
    Upon voicing my question, the door opened and Watkin announced that my time was up. I remembered that it was Friday, so I wished Mrs. Charbuque a pleasant weekend and took my leave. As
    Watkin led me to the front door, I said to him, "You have the most uncanny sense of bad timing."
    "Thank you, sir. It is my specialty," he said as I passed him and stepped outside.
    "I'll be seeing you," I said, and he slammed shut the door.
    I was thoroughly exhausted from not having slept at all the previous night. The macabre image of that woman on the street, losing her life through her eyes, had done something to me. It was as if, after witnessing that horror, I had to take in through my eyes all that she was losing through hers, and therefore dared not close them.
    As it was, I barely made it to the Sixth Avenue street-car for the trip downtown. Once aboard and seated, I stared out the window at the multiplicity of faces and fig-ures on the street. People came and went, well dressed and ragged, beautiful and homely, no two alike, all existing together as atoms of the monster known as New York, and yet each unique, each alone with his own, her own, secret self and past, isolated within on distant mountaintops. God may have been fallible, but was there ever a painter who worked with a more varied palette, a writer who struck an irony more perfect than the two-headed race-horse of life and death, a musician who could weave the threads of so many diverse tunes into such an all-encompassing symphony?
    God was also a raucous vaudevillian, and I was obvi-ously his foil at the moment. The joke had to do with eyes—Watkin's, the bleeding woman's, my own unable to see Mrs. Charbuque, her confabulatory supernatural sight. Were I to read an account of something similar, even in a novel by a writer of arabesques, I could not help but scoff and