Chapter 15

Jimothy Whyte

April

I dream my painting, and I paint my dream.

- Vincent van Gogh

KC: Jim!

KC: Guess what!!

JW: What?

KC: It’s me!

KC: Kate!

KC: ;)

JW: Cool!

KC: <3

KC: What are you up to today, Jim?

JW: Homework mostly

KC: The ole GED?

KC: Keep at it, Jim!

JW: The reading is fine.

KC: Yeah! You like reading

JW: Because when you read a story it’s okay if you don’t understand it all the way

JW: so it’s like painting

JW: or people

KC: :D

KC: yeah!

KC: Need any help with those maths again?

JW: Math and science are so different

JW: there’s always just one right answer

JW: it can’t be any other way

KC: I’ll take that as a negatory! You got this, Jim!

JW: It’s absolute

JW: how is that like reality?

KC: are you okay?

JW: I don’t get how math can be real in the same world where people are real

KC: oh no

KC: Jim you just need to not worry about that and just do the problems okay?

JW: People don’t have answers.

KC: okay Jimothy Whyte, listen up!

KC: you’re not crazy! People and art are real, but math and science are real too! And they’re not as different as you think!

KC: our eyeballs are super complicated, and colors and light are also complicated, and that’s SCIENCE and it’s BEAUTIFUL and it’s the reason why you can paint!

JW: But people are more important

KC: what’s wrong, Jim?

KC: why are you sad?

KC: is it the nightmares?

JW: How do you know?

JW: oh

JW: You were there

KC: yeah

KC: <:(

JW: Sorry about that

KC: don’t be sorry about things that aren’t your fault!

JW: Sorry, yeah.

JW: Oh, that was another one, wasn’t it?

JW: I’m just nervous about things.

KC: I know how you feel

KC: but you can’t see the whole story, even when you dream.

KC: there is so much more going on!

KC: I don’t know very much about what’s going to happen

KC: maybe you know more than I do

KC: but I DO know that we’ll get to meet soon

KC: in person!

JW: Wow really?

KC: so don’t be sad, okay?

KC: Mike will take good care of you

KC: and soon you’ll have even more friends!

JW: Thanks Kate

JW: I might actually need help with some homework later

KC: No worries!

KC: you were talking earlier about art and science, but you know what is BOTH of those things?

KC: Chess!

KC: which reminds me of a story that might cheer you up!

KC: it is about my favorite chess player, Mikhail Tal!

JW: Okay

KC: they called him the Magician from Riga

KC: he was the best attacker EVER so all his games are really exciting!

KC: he had ectrodactyly, which means that he had only three deformed fingers on one hand, but he was a skilled pianist anyway!

JW: Wow!

KC: he was a weirdo like us, Jim

KC: one time he was stuck on a move, and he spent a half hour thinking

KC: but his thoughts wandered to a poem about a hippo in a bog

KC: and he thought, “how WOULD you get a hippo out of a bog?!?”

KC: and he spent all his time devising a lifting mechanism for extracting a hippopotamus from a quagmire, Jim!

KC: and when he remembered the game, he just made a move on instinct because he was almost out of time

KC: like you!

KC: and it was the right move, and everyone was impressed by how he spent a half hour figuring it all out

JW: Hahaha!

KC: he was a weird and cool guy

KC: he had problems, but there was no one like him

KC: he said that every game of chess is as inimitable and invaluable as a poem

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

KC: he loved the game, Jim!

KC: just like you love painting

JW: I don’t really understand why you told me all of that

JW: But it did cheer me up

JW: so thanks

KC: ;)

JW: We got a thing from mr. Sheppard

KC: a THING?!?!?

JW: yeah

JW: It’s like this

JW: thing

KC: :D

KC: it’s probably important!

KC: you can trust Mr. Sheppard, Jim

JW: That’s what I told Mike

JW: ‘Kate says you can trust Mr Sheppard’

JW: And he said okay well I trust you so I guess I’ll trust you trusting Kate trusting mr Sheppard

KC: are you remembering the line?

JW: Yeah. Is that important?

KC: I think so!

JW: Ok. I don’t really understand that, but i’ll try!

KC: keep painting, Jim!

KC: and even if it gets hard, don’t give up!

KC: I believe in you!

KC: talk to you later, okay Jim?

JW: Yeah

JW: anytime

KC: ok!

KC: <3

Jimothy grinned. Was he going to get his birthday wish? All of them together? That was exciting, even if his dreams were making him nervous. Just thinking about his dreams made him start to get a headache.

He swiveled in his desk chair to look at his most recent projects. One of them was an oil rendering of Black , a larger version of the one he had done for Isaac in crayon. It rested on an easel in the corner. It was…black. Black like ink, tar, creosote. It had been hard to get the paint black enough, even with oils. The best way was to have layers mixed very subtly with dark blues and greens and maroons, so that there was only the tiniest perceptible difference between the different layers of black. He had used a lot of paint on that one. It was a half inch thick in some places. It wasn’t quite finished, but Jimothy didn’t know if he could finish it now. He had done too good of a job. The painting frightened him. In a superstitious way he was scared of finishing it, as though the figure vaguely depicted in the darkness might coalesce and climb out of the frame.

Looking at it made his headache worse. Time to lie down for a while, like Mike said he should when he got the headaches. Take a nap.

Jimothy stood, carefully made his way to the light switch by the door, and flipped it off. He stood there for a moment, noting that although it was midmorning, the sky outside was dark and overcast. He turned it back on, went to his desk and flipped the night light on, then went back and turned off the ceiling light again. The night light projected a slowly shifting kaleidoscope of colors on the ceiling. Jimothy crawled into his bed.

He laid there for a few minutes, then sat up. He dismounted the bed, stepped over to the easel carrying Black , picked it up, and rotated it so that it faced the wall. Then he got back in bed.

He opened his eyes and sat up. He squinted against the sunlight. He sat in his backyard, except that it suffered from a curious lack of Hazel. The sky was pure blue overhead, and a warm breeze rushed through the trees. A beautiful day! He stood up. It was surprisingly easy. This made him suspicious. He closed his eyes and found the Line. It was there, shining in his mind like a glowing white ribbon. He was on the unreal side of it. This was a dream.

“What was that?” someone asked to his right, who sounded like they were on the verge of breaking into laughter. “Was that the Line?”

Jimothy turned. On a chair on his back porch, not far away, sat a…person? An alien? It was humanoid, short, with pebbly tangerine skin, wearing normal clothes and no shoes. Bright orange spines ran down the sides of its neck and clustered around its eyes and fingers. It had a distinctly lizard-like appearance. Its eyes were lidded and looking in different directions, and its hands, resting on its stomach in relaxation, were split like a chameleon’s. The creature appeared to be smiling at him with its broad lipless grin, so Jimothy smiled back. Jimothy normally avoided eye contact with people, but something was fascinating and unnerving about the intense orange eyes of this stranger.

“Um, yeah,” he said. “That was the Line. Can you see it too?” Jimothy’s voice came out clear and clean, all words in the correct order and at the correct speed. Another evidence of the falsehood of this experience.

The creature shrugged, then laughed a wide toothless laugh. “Sort-of. With your help, remember?” The creature reached out a leg, at the end of which was another chameleon foot, and grabbed onto the column supporting the wooden awning overhead. Another foot followed, and then a hand, and the alien grappled onto the post like a gecko. “It was a brilliant idea!” He laughed again. His voice sounded strangely normal. Like just another kid on the street, although probably a little older than Jim. The other person’s skin was changing colors, shifting to green, blue. He began ascending the wooden column. “It’s like I told you: you get it, Jim, even if you don’t get that you get it. Belief has power here.” He leaned over backwards to look at Jim upside-down while holding the beam with his feet. He winked at Jim with a weird chameleon eye. “That’s why we’re the best.” He giggled to himself, reached down, and transitioned into a handstand. “We’re painters!”

“Oh,” said Jim. “Do…do I know you?”

The alien, still doing a handstand, twisted its head upright to look at Jim. “D-man, remember? That’s what you called me. Yeah, I died. Again.” He somehow pretzeled his body into a sitting position next to Jimothy, then collapsed in a sudden outburst of mirth, gasping and giggling on the back deck.

Jim frowned, puzzled. “D-man?”

“Yeah, it’s a joke. A joke! Because I’m…uh…” He looked at Jimothy as though expecting him to remember. One of his eyes stayed on Jimothy while the other began to wander, inspecting the yard, the porch, the sky. It made Jim smile.

Jimothy thought back. He was pretty sure he hadn’t met this person before, or anything like him. He shook his head.

D-man smacked himself in the face with one of his odd hands. “Oh no. No, no, no. Did I screw this up? Is this, like, before any of it happened?” His expression indicated that he thought this idea was the funniest thing in the world.

Jimothy looked around. It was still just his backyard. “I think, um, maybe?”

D-man tried to speak, but he was rolling on the deck laughing too hard. Finally, breathing hard, he said, “T-trickfate! Ehehehe! Well! Well…” He took a deep breath and fell onto his back in front of Jimothy, looking up at the sky. “Guess I died for nothing. Sorry, everyone.”

“Hey, don’t say that!” said Jim. “You don’t, uh, look very dead.”

D-man turned one eye toward Jimothy. His spines shimmered with orange light. “I guess we shouldn’t talk, then. Not now. I mean, not you. I guess? I don’t know if it matters. Especially now that I’m…” he stood up. “Nice to meet you again, Jim. It was a pleasure reliving the awkwardness of our first encounter. Which…maybe was my own fault, because of this? Haha!”

He continued to laugh for a while, and his laughter was contagious the way that genuine, joyful laughter can sometimes be. It made Jimothy smile, and he even almost began laughing as well even though he didn’t understand anything that D-man was saying.

When the stranger finally calmed down, he was looking at the trees swaying in the wind over the backyard, and the clouds in the blue sky beyond them. “Hey, I like your world,” he said. Jimothy was surprised to see that D-man was crying. Tears, sparkling like molten copper, dripped down his scaly cheeks. “It’s nice. So much green. It really is a beautiful color.” He laughed again, briefly, but this time it was sad. Jimothy didn’t think he had ever heard sad laughter before, but here it was. He didn’t know what to say.

“I guess you don’t know this,” D-man continued, “but I know everything you’re dealing with right now. So listen: it’s all going to be okay. Is time a closed loop? Acarnus says so. I’m not so sure. You following, Jim?”

“No.”

“They’re going to tell you that you can’t fight entropy. They’re going to say that happy endings don’t exist. And they’re not wrong, but it’s our job to disagree anyway, right? Because we’re painters. We’re prophets.”

Jimothy blinked at the stranger. “I…I like my world, too.”

“I know you’re struggling to keep up,” said D-man, his spines shimmering. “I’m reading your mind right now; hope you don’t mind…” he was clearly about to continue, but he interrupted himself by laughing for about twenty seconds. He was out of breath by the time he continued. He leaned closer to Jim and spoke in a lower, conspiratorial whisper. “We can do it, friend. Together.” His chameleon eyes were too bright, too intense; Jim had to look away.

“Listen,” D-man continued. “You’re going to meet me in your future. I won’t remember this conversation. I might even be a jerk at first. But when you talk to me, tell me this: that I’m…” he swallowed a fit of giggles; his skin turned bright green. “Tell me that you know I’m in love…with Fiora. Okay? Because I told you. Haha! That’ll get my attention. Can you do that?”

Jim nodded slowly. “I…maybe?”

“I’m gonna put a trigger in your mind so you don’t forget this. Is that okay?”

It took Jimothy a moment to realize that D-man was waiting for permission to do something. It sounded important. Did he trust this D-man? He found that he did. But also, did it matter? This was a dream.

D-man was laughing again. “Look at the Line, Jim. Am I real? You tell me.”

Jim found the Line. To his immense surprise, D-man was real. “Yeah,” said Jimothy faintly. “You can do the trigger thing.”

D-man stopped laughing long enough to say, “I knew you’d say that.”

Everything went orange for a moment. Then they were sitting on the back porch again, and D-man was looking out at the great world beyond and appreciating the colors just as much as Jimothy was.

Then the D-man said, “I’m fading, and you’re waking up. We’ll talk later, ok? Those who love each other will never meet for the last time.” He paused. “But wait! Before you go, here’s a riddle for the road:

No blindness but our sight

No beginning but the end

No darkness but the light

No enemies but our friends

D-man smiled at Jim. His spines glowed orange, and a strange multi-tonal hum arose around him. Jimothy felt the hairs of his arms stand on end. D-man reached out, and exhaustion overwhelmed him. He fell…

…and opened his eyes. He saw the kaleidoscope of colors from his night-light on the ceiling. He thought he had just had a very strange dream, but he couldn’t quite…it had seemed like maybe it was important. He closed his eyes and tried to see the Line. He usually remembered his dreams perfectly with The Line. He had a lot of trouble this time. Something obscured the Line. Something…orange? He wasn’t sure why he thought it was orange, but that just seemed correct.

Not being able to see the Line worried him a little. He sat up and looked to where the easel holding Black stood in a corner of the room. Did that corner look a little darker than usual? Without the Line he couldn’t be sure. Without the Line he couldn’t really be sure of anything.

He should probably burn that painting, though.