“Is there a better reason to retire that I don’t know of?”
“Maybe not.” Raya’s gaze dropped to the broken eyeglasses tucked into Q’s coat pocket. “But there are worse,” she said quietly.
He glanced down. “You noticed.”
“I’m sorry. I know it’s none of my business but they’re hard to miss. Just like your—” She bit her lip.
“Mismatched shoes?”
Raya sighed. “Sorry.”
“I’m guessing that you already know the reason I stopped painting then.”
“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” Though Raya whispered the words, they seemed to echo around her.
“Have you ever looked through a keyhole?” Q said.
Raya nodded, dreading what he was going to say next.
“Halve it.” Q gripped the paper banister, crumpling it. A small letter “s” narrowly avoided getting squished. It crawled away, catching up to the word it belonged to.Accismus.The word went on its way without pausing or looking back. “Then halve it again.”
“Q—” She reached out to him and stopped, reminding herself that they were nothing more than strangers in a stairwell a long way from home.
“That’s what I could see before I boarded,” Q continued. “That’s why I was so convinced that all of this was just a dream. How could it possibly be anything else? I never dared to imagine that I would be able to see again. I guess you might say that I was—” He tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth only managed to lift a fourth of the way and tremble. “Aucalegon.”
“A neighbor whose house is on fire?” Raya said.
“And surrounded by so much smoke that he was convinced that it would be less painful to breathe all of it in and just get it over with.”
Q
The most difficult part about painting was knowing when a piece was done. There was no finish line to cross or horn that blared, no conclusion arrived at or answer reached. There was only a decision, a declaration that what was on canvas had told the truth as best it could, and that it was time to take a step back, put down the brush, and stop.
When Q had stood on the edge of the train station’s platform earlier that evening, he thought about all the paintings he had decided were done and the decision his father had made on a similar platform. For the first time since he passed, Q wondered if Quentin Sr. knew something that he did not. Who got to declare when a life was finished? Was deciding to put his brush down that much different from choosing to pick it up? People plotted their lives down to the minute but left their final hour to chance. Q had not intended to share his secrets with Raya, but they rushed out of him, hungry for light and air. Or maybe he shared them because a journey to nowhere was not a trip he wanted to take on his own. He recounted his path to a train platform, sparing no detail about his father’s death, the faceless woman who visited his dreams, and the darkness that had taken everything from him.
“Did you—” Raya’s voice dissolved into a breath.
“Kill myself?” Q looked at Raya, feeling like he was one of his sitters, and she, the painter holding the brush, coaxing the truth from the shadows of his face. Her question was neither abstract nor difficult, one answerable by a simple yes or no. After sharing an endless stairwell’s worth of his life’s story, a monosyllabic answer should have been easy. That is, if he knew what the answer was. If death was your darkest point, the ending of all your dreams, then he had crossed its door. And yet, he was also more alive than he had ever been, his sight restored by a magical train, his aches healed by a lavender-haired woman and a song.
“Q?” Raya said.
“I…” he stammered, as if he were peeling off a mask that he was afraid to ruin in case he needed to wear it again. He had witnessedthis unmasking take place in his studio, though always on someone else’s face. Tonight, he was the client, disrobing his defenses in front of a woman who was supposed to be a stranger, but in all the ways that mattered on a train made of thoughts, was not. Here, where he was reborn, he had known her his entire life. “I wanted to.”
His mask fell off, revealing his greatest shame. When so many others had built meaningful lives without sight, falling into despair at the loss of his vision made him no better than a spoiled child screaming because their toy was taken away. His eyes drifted over the words moving across the stairwell. It was a pity, he thought, that dictionaries only provided the definition of words and not people. It would have saved him a lot of grief if he could have looked up who he was supposed to be.
Q Chen Philips.
Proper noun.
Not his father.
In the absence of such a dictionary, it took a train’s bright headlights to illuminate the truth hidden in the dark. Q didn’t want to die. He wanted to see.
“But I couldn’t go through with it,” Q confessed. “I realized that I wasn’t finished. I wasn’t even close to being done. I backed away from the edge of the platform and boarded my train. Or so I thought. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor at the Lotus, staring up at a purple sky.”
“And you could see,” Raya said.
“The Elsewhere Express is my miracle, Raya. My second chance.”
