The Cyan Girl
© Stephen Cain
1422 words
The book had pages that were unusually heavy and soft, almost like fabric. She had inhabited the book like a ghost. She had long, fine hair and was thin, thin enough to slip in and out of it like the busy bookmark of a heavily addicted reader. She would be seen sitting around the flat, accepting a caress from the tendrils of white light admitted by a recessed skylight, disappearing back between the pages when you began to feel that you might like to get to know her better.
Gray felt that she was a true archetype. She was the phantom of phantoms, the soft, blue-green light, the fair one of remote places. He knew that she called silently from beyond the ferns and rocky outcrops on the misty fringes of every soul, and so he painted her. He mixed fluorescent colours until they glowed in precisely the right shades, working with fevered intensity until she drifted pale and spectral within the depths of the heavy art paper. He showed the painting to Dori. He assumed without question that Dori understood. Surely everyone knew her: she was an archetype.
When Dori and Gray moved up to a city flat with views over Christchurch's Avon River and Hagley Park beyond, Dori put the painting in an old wooden frame and it found its way onto the living room wall. Thus Gray's cyan girl intertwined with his life in a perfectly ordinary way. She lived in the void that was all those things that merged to become the lining of his world, always close, soft as satin, hardly ever noticed. Friends sometimes admired the painting. Gray always protested the acclaim, feeling without quite knowing why that he did not deserve credit for it.
She had been sitting in the living room weeping, although she was always back in her frame by the time anyone entered the room, leaving behind nothing but a faint trace of blue-green on the air. Gray could not explain the sadness that he perceived as though it were in another world. He tried to tell himself that it did not exist, but he was not all that good at lying to himself. She was only an archetype, no more than a beautiful mental image that Gray imagined to be universal. One could not hope to meet an archetype; there was nothing to be gained or lost. The archetype cried cyan tears. She cried so much that the world became stained with their tint — plants and other green things became more vivid and moist-looking and if you let your eyes go out of focus the fuzzy edges of things had become distinctly green.
Gray did not mention the odd colours he had been seeing: you can't go around telling people about things like that. The doctor's eyes swam grotesquely behind the thick lenses of his black-rimmed spectacles. If unexplained sadness was the question then antidepressants were the answer and were duly prescribed.
"The doctor won't be back until threen hour." The receptionist had spoken to her tiny headset microphone with the exaggerated clarity of underwater receptionists everywhere. Clicking the waiting room door shut behind him, Gray was vaguely trying to make sense of what she had said. He had just seen the doctor so she must have been talking about some other doctor or… Preoccupied, he did not notice the wraith that floated up the dark stairway and into the doctor's rooms as he drifted down. Desperate for some alleviation of the crushing sadness, he asked the pharmacist for a glass of water and took one of the capsules as soon as she gave them to him. He returned to work for the remainder of the afternoon. A couple of hours later as he walked up to the square to catch a bus home his mood had changed markedly, but the new feeling was not pleasant either. It began to occur to him that if he had thought that this medication was going to make him feel better then he may have been mistaken. He supposed that things would improve after a while, but he soon noticed that his fellow passengers on the bus were beginning to look as weird as he felt — "elfish" was the word that seeped darkly into his mind, but these were not storybook elves: he found himself hemmed in by a crowd of silent and disconcertingly malign "people" all of whom had black hair and sallow skin, widow's peaks, cryptic eyebrows and even, it seemed to Gray, pointed ears. He had had enough of this stuff. If this is the cure, he thought, then I'll stick with the disease, thank you very much. He threw the brown plastic bottle with the black and white instructions on the label into the trash when he got back to the flat. Dori came in a little later. He did not tell her about his visit to the doctor or his trip home on the elves' bus. He did not return to that doctor. The elves did not bother him again either.
It would have been difficult to say when she vanished, sometime after the elves perhaps. Not immediately though. And she did not vanish all at once. At first, Gray began to imagine he saw her sitting in a new place, on the edge of a great playing field, staring at nothing, a cold wind burning her lips and dragging the moisture from her skin and jelly eyes, or wandering lost amid the endlessly green corridors of some vast complex of buildings. Later she was one of the weightless inhabitants of the lounge of a great liner that had sailed down beneath the ocean decades ago, drowned but not dead, not unconscious of the mean, pinching deep-sea crabs that had made their home in her body, decaying yet unable to sleep, unable to be still yet unable to move, unable to tell the little waiters who came around every hundred years or so pushing trolleys of coloured drinks and tablets in paper cups, or the tall thin doctor who had clouds of blood leaking from his eyes and spoke in cryptograms, or the doctor who wore worsted suits and was so quick that he could catch his own words before they flew from his lips and write them on little cards to give you to treasure and turn to in times of darkness and confusion — important words, magic words, words to heal, to set you free, free to feel pain again, and perhaps even something else, but even if it is only pain then it is still better than this blank, mean, joyless, libido-less, pinching discomfort and inability to speak or go to the toilet that is the final distillation of modern medicine's compassion for those who do not live in this world nor in any other… unable to tell them. And as if there were any such healing words anyway and, besides, even if such words existed they would only do so within these guttering thoughts, these thoughts that are not even words, and these thoughts that are not even words are identical with nothingness for if you think you see something in one moment in the next moment you see nothing and there is no difference. No difference. He could hardly say that she had gone away because she hadn't been there in the first place, still, he missed her. He tried to find some real-world thing that would correlate with the absence of something that hadn't been there in the first place.
"Dori?"
"What?"
"Do you know that book?"
"What book?"
He had searched high and low for it, but it had vanished.
"I know it was here!"
"When did you last see it?"
"Oh — I don't know. Before we moved, I think."
"What do you want it for anyway?"
"I thought there was something… something in it. Something I wanted to read again."
"And you don't remember what it was called?"
It was odd, but he didn't. He could not remember a single thing about it, just that there had been an old book that had had pages that felt soft to the touch, like fabric. He looked up at the cyan girl for the first time in ages and tried to remember what had made him want to paint it, what thoughts had passed through his mind as he had worked on it, what thoughts had inspired this brush mark or that, but it was as though it had been painted by someone else.