White by Roland Burrows

I only saw white when I opened my eyes. The ceiling was all smoothed-over plaster, and it took a few seconds for me to realize that I could actually see. I was warm, and I could tell I was in a comfortable place. I could feel a source of heat on my stomach. I touched it and it was skin. I followed it and saw his face and screamed. I pushed all the blankets and pillows between us and fell off the bed. The carpet was rough on my feet and knees as I struggled to the corner. I knocked over a lamp and the bulb smashed against the ground. I don’t remember any sound, I might have just kept screaming. I watched him as he tried to step closer, holding his palms out to me. His eyes were scared, they shifted as he looked through his mind, trying to understand what was going on. I imagine I looked the same.

It was quiet, he didn’t know what to say and I couldn’t say anything at all. Whoever he was, I could feel that he wasn’t a threat. He was still holding his hands out, inching closer. His arms bobbed with every step he took, as if to say ‘calm down, down, down.‘ He stumbled over a stuffed animal and some kind of plastic toy, but quickly recovered himself and brought his eyes back to mine. He was close to me, reaching out his hands. He slowly placed them on my arms. “It’s alright.” he said. It didn’t sound true, and I don’t think he was sure either. We sat there in the corner, huddled and shaking. He was wrapped around me like a cocoon.

He kept asking me what was wrong, and mixing it with reassurances. I could feel his stubble rubbing against my skin as he looked around the room for a hint. I didn’t know what to ask first, there wasn’t anything familiar. I saw a picture on the nightstand, of him and a woman. They were dressed in fancy clothes, him in a tuxedo and her in a multicoloured floor length dress. There were hanging lights all around and they were smiling. Whatever way she was moving was making the dress spread out, it looked like he had just spun her in a dance.

“Who’s that.” I said. I felt the stubble again as he turned towards the picture.

“That’s us.” he said. “Right after one of your shows. You don’t remember it, do you?” I shook my head and buried it in his chest.

“Are there other pictures…like that one?” I asked him.

“Everywhere.” He said. “You love taking them. You always say it’s like-”

“Making memories.”

He gave me a look of confusion, but it seemed more positive. “Let’s get up, Okay? And we’ll see them?” His eyes were green but I couldn’t get past the whites around them. I nodded, and we stood up without letting go of each other.

We stepped over the fallen lamp and he looked back at it. I followed his eyes and saw the mess of white sheets and pillows from my awakening. We kept moving, and the carpet was softer on my feet now that my body wasn’t dragging itself across it. Everything was lighter, the sun had risen a bit more and was coming in through the thin strip of windows along the wall, high up near the ceiling. I could see tree branches outside. I looked at the picture of us dancing and I wondered if I should run. I turned away from the bright wall and we walked out of the bedroom.

 

We walked down the steps outside the door to our room. The whole place was covered in the same off-white carpet. When we reached the bottom of the stairs I looked back up them and realized we had passed another room and I didn’t even notice. I couldn’t see into it from the bottom of the stairs because it was dark.

“Here!” His voice cut through the air and pulled my attention. I looked towards him and his arm was stretched out pointing to a photo on a small table by the door. The silver frame was leaning against a bowl of keys. I picked the photo up and caught sight of my reflection. It was distorted by the curves of the frame, but no matter how clear it was it didn’t look like me. “We were camping.” he said.

I looked at the photo. We were sitting in a hammock. He was lying down and I was leaning on his chest, looking at the camera. Smiling again. The colours were all faded. “It’s old.” I said. I saw him bite his lip.

“Yeah, we were young, that was maybe 10 years ago.” I flipped the picture over and there was writing on the back. I didn’t bother trying to read it, I was looking at the loops and tails of the letters instead . “Is this my…” I turned to him and he put a picture frame face down. “Handwriting?”

“Uh, we did it together, it’s both of ours. You wrote where it was, I wrote the date.” He pushed the down-turned photo aside and picked up another one.

“This is us too.” We were sitting on an ATV. He was driving, wearing a bright red helmet and I was holding onto his waist.

“Where’s all the new ones?” I asked. “This one’s old too.”

“There’s plenty, here and there.” He quickly looked around in different directions. “Let’s go to the basement though, you can see your studio. You spend all your time down there anyway, maybe something will come back to you.” He grabbed me, gently but suddenly, and moved me towards a staircase that led into the basement. The walls near the door were all white drywall but as we went down further tiny fingerprints and smudges of different colours got denser and denser until I couldn’t see the drywall anymore. “You look around, okay? I’m gonna try calling a doctor.” I tried not think about it.

 

The studio had a few tables against the walls, and they were speckled with half-full glasses of murky water. Paint brushes were sticking out of them like little flowers in vases, and even more were strewn about on the tabletops and floors. There didn’t appear to be any order to anything down there. I heard the footsteps move on the floor above my head and then pass by the doorway.

“Hey Doc, its Jeremy Kell again. Yeah, it was a rough night for sure. No it’s about Jess this time. She’s…she can’t remember anything. She woke up this morning, didn’t know who I was, who she was. No, nothing about him. Hysterical? When she first woke up she-oh, that’s what it’s called, alright.” I stepped forward to hear better and the floor creaked. He looked down at me and shook his head. “You mean she just…doesn’t know he’s gone?” He put his hand over the phone and stepped out of view, and earshot.

 

I looked back to the easel. It had an empty white canvas on it, but behind it there were a bunch of other thin, small canvases. I pulled one of them out and compared it to all the other ones. There were half a dozen canvases leaning against the walls, all of them still-life paintings and  landscapes. The one in my hands just had a bunch of paint spread all over it, different colours with no real patterns. There wasn’t any thought to it, whoever did this was just having fun. In the bottom right corner in bright yellow children’s handwriting it said “Harry.”

I tucked it behind the blank canvas and grabbed a handful of paint tubes. I uncapped one of them and smeared some of it on the white surface, coating it in a dark green film. I spread some of the paint in other places, uncapped a different colour and did the same again and again until all the white was completely gone.