Triptych

by Sutherland Douglass

Anderson remembered that, before Billy died, the art history teacher at his progressive, non¬grade-giving, no-assigned-seating, Montessori-like school explained that many of the so-called Masters—they who could supposedly freehand one perfect circle after another—were actually, truth be told Little-Billy, much more workmanlike in their ways. That, instead and indeed, they all often employed elaborately arranged apparatuses to better hatch, homunculus-like, their works of art.
…..Take for example (she had said) Signor Luca Signorelli’s triptych series “At the Resurrection of the Body,” which the famed painter finished shortly after the hard-to-take death of his own young son. Its panels, last seen adorning the mission door of a lost Naples basilica, showed Luca rather disinterestedly drawing his child, who himself reclined calmly (and quite nude) behind a string-and-wire screen (one of his dad’s own inventions) the fulmen claustrum grid.
…..Luca insisted on girding all of his subjects with this Renaissance (or “perspective”) grid so as to divide their dense and hard-to-render details into discrete, digestible chunks; breaking up the mounting pressure of each, next, more-perfect-than-the-last masterpiece into some kind of kiddy game, a Connect the Blocks or Jumble! Jumble! via his drawing machine.
…..Which led to another example of fake genius, their teacher told them while arranged in a circle on the indoor/outdoor carpet of their “learning lab,” these Masters’ annoying habit of, often, just thumbnailing the gist of their G-d-given work of art and leaving the actual “doing” of it to their veritable stable of apprentices: Restless, feckless protégés who constantly sulked around and among the studio-slash-rooming house-slash-bath house, with nothing better to do but learn to ape their father’s strutting feathers all the better, always on hand and on call for whatever little thing their Big Men might need.
…..To better demonstrate her point, Billy’s teacher spent six weeks (mostly after school and on weekends) dressing the students in bodysuits and painting them so they resembled a larger-than-lifesize grid, one that recreated, block by child-shaped block, Luca’s famous painting. The point of the painting being that Luca (who like all his most important Renaissance peers was as many parts science as art) pictured himself in its panels acting out various stages of grief—acting them out while also rooting around in his son’s body a black blot.
…..The first panel depicted the boy splayed on a table in Luca’s studio, with Signorelli-his-dad perched above him, straddling his son with his bony body like he had no shame. A nearby cart held mystico-medical equipment:
…..Saws and snub-nosed scalpels;
…..Twine and wire wound tightly around spools;
…..Accordion bellows and screens stained with strange, offal faces;
…..And—most importantly for the picture’s composition—a mysterious, compact black box about the size of a pill (etched across its top a crude lightning bolt).
…..Above the table stood a complicated scaffolding to which was tacked the rent flaps of his dead boy’s skin, an intricate ladder- or lattice-work from which any number of straps and buckles swung.
…..The second panel showed Luca inching himself into a painful-looking harness suspended from the scaffolding. The black, expandable corset (louvered and wrapped in rubber hoses) made Luca look like a deep-sea diver or submersible fisher of men. Working pulleys, Luca dangled himself over his son’s body of water, clearly anxious to begin. Before he did though the painting made it clear that he’d placed the cart’s diminutive, boxy “pill” inside his mouth, nuzzling its right angles into his stuck-out tongue, grinding it like planting a black seed in his tastebuds-the¬ground. (Except what kind of seed, Anderson wanted to know, could sprout in the ground of Luca’s unturned head?)
…..The panel offered no explanation, and instead showed Luca’s head angled at his son’s gut like an arrow, his bulging chin and Adam’s apple—skimming his son like a schooner, like some hot water ditch—already on their way in. Anderson always imagined at this moment Luca muttering something in the hopes of sounding out his kid, something like, “I seeee-eeeee yooo¬uuuuuuuu” (or its Italian equivalent that Anderson did not know), or “Ollie, Ollie Oxen Free,” or “Red Rover, Red Rover, send my oh-so-resurrectable son right over.”
…..Anderson’s eyes, flowing downhill like down steps to the next coordinate in the plane, saw Luca now fully submerged, floating freely in his son’s water table, apparently breathing just fine. (Anderson’d always guessed that this was due to that black pill lodged in or under his tongue—that nondescript little device being some sort of premodern breathing machine, one where Luca, by simply sucking on it like a lozenge, was drowning in all the oxygen he could need.)
…..And the painting here shifted to Luca’s p.o.v., staring up and out from the suddenly cavernous insides of his son. The outside world of the studio—the scaffolding from which Luca was still at least theoretically hitched—appeared as if miles away and in miniature. The room’s lone light, decoratively looped from the ceiling, was almost too-small a dot to see, now existing only as a kind of bauble moon or mini-sun.
…..It was, Anderson liked to think, as though Luca’d awoken one morning to find his studio implanted in a pill that was then swallowed by his son—that his son had one day gotten confused while taking his medicine and instead ingested most of the family’s plantain home he’d so grown to love–that, in addition to the provincial Signorelli estate, he’d also eaten acres of land and surrounding towns, boroughs suddenly existing as mere bubbles in his illimitable swill, until (before he knew it) Luca’d come home to discover his son a kind of protective tub engulfing all of Italy, its shoe-shaped peninsula bobbing like an upside-down boot between his canal and chute.
…..Luca, as pictured, absolutely loved it. He wheeled around in the wash of his son an ecstatic; happy to be bespattered with his inside sludge—playfully butting heads with now-defunct organs, bumping one into the other like duds, like underwater mines tied to the bottom of this ocean. When he wasn’t manhandling them—allowing himself a respite, a moment to recline on watery cush—they’d animate themselves: Luca’s son’s spleen wandering like a bloated halo behind his head; his son’s kidneys arraying themselves on his either side like attendants at court; his son’s lungs rippling like louvers while they hinged and piped, reaching around from behind his haunches for some unnamed sport. Anderson imagined him thinking:
…..“This son of mine—he’s a real pill!”
…..Invariably, this last panel was the best part of the painting for Anderson, soothing him like a salve, like that stinky bag balm his grandma used to use on his grandpa the minute he’d lumber in from a double-split-shift at the mill. Little-Anderson would look up from the TV to see his granddad silently shedding his soiled clothes willy-nilly, en route to the room where he’d belly flop naked onto his bed.
…..And she’d be trailing behind in a smile, rubbing and slapping her hands with balm until they were absolutely dripping—making Anderson think her red, chapped hands had been “bad” but now were all the better, heated and reeking for him.
…..(Except what Anderson smelled here didn’t stink; it was like a perfect blend. Its nose collecting just below his, a pacifier, a please.)
…..Making slurping sounds, he’d sit and suck it like his thumb, what Luca found so unfathomable about his son.

Anderson’s son was what science had called, in one of its more unguarded moments, a miracle kid. That is, when Billy was born, he was practically already dead. That is, when he came out of the chute, he was an already-rubbed root, unscrewing himself in one blighted- and blanched-looking bend after another: Like a flesh-and-blood but still-collectible miniature; a half-baked homunculus; a ruffled bunch of unresearched stem cell lines. His body spanned less than the length of his father’s fist—born smaller than small—smaller than Anderson’d thought was humanly possible to live.
…..It was this exact same thing, though, that Anderson had found so great about his kid. It was what kept Billy’s life, like those narrative church paintings, suspended in his dad’s big head. All the anxiety-filled months spent growing him in an intensive-care crib—keeping him stored and insulated in a black-tinted canister, an oblong swatch not much longer than a pill or bread box. (It had to be that dark, the doctors told Anderson, in order to protect his son’s undeveloped eyes and skin.)
…..But it made things impossible for him, spending his days pacing around an impenetrable shape when all he wanted to do was cop a glimpse. On a daily basis he’d had to take the doctors’ word that it was really Billy getting bigger and better in there and not something else, some pet project these off-their-rocker doctors were keeping hooked up to IVs just for kicks. They’d let him stroke what they said was his son with rubber gloves stuck blindly through openings in the opaque case, but it wasn’t like he could see—couldn’t even picture in his head—what his hands were ranging over. (He imagined the doctors in their lounges later, laughing at this less-than-a¬man, at he who was content every day to have such bunk, so to speak, stuck up his ass.)
…..And how was he supposed to know anyway, since his wife had banned him from the delivery? How was he supposed to feel anything except a big gulf between him and his held-ever-at-arm’s-length kid?
…..To pass the time spent sitting outside his wife’s private room, he’d tried to work out a way it would be all right, how he could turn his son’s misfortune (like a frown) upside down. He figured that, since his son had already survived so much, nothing more unduly or gratuitously bad could happen to him. That, since he’d already survived all the flack life had thrown at him— since life had already blown its wad on him so to speak—what could be left to dampen his fete? Under the hospital’s fluorescence, Anderson assumed it to be some unwritten cosmic law by which his hermetically-sealed son was made invulnerable:
…..Like a superhero who, through an accident with toxic waste or X- or gamma-rays from space, gained inexplicable abilities of which little was known or understood. Even to Anderson, it was only what he could guess, what he could divine or decode from his son’s strange tics, marveling at how his static-electric hair sometimes stood on end; or how his teeth sparked like battery posts when he’d laugh; or how bobbing thought balloons circled the pea soup of his cumulonimbus head.
…..It was why Anderson’d insisted on naming him Billy—after Shazam!, his favorite superhero as a kid. He’d always been Anderson’s favorite because he (i.e., Anderson) was the only one of his friends who understood how the lightning god worked. His friends wrongly thought that Shazam!’s alter ego—little Billy Batson(!)—physically turned into Shazam!. That when the former, corner newsboy said his name three times, Shazam!’s like-Olympian bulk literally erupted out of Billy’s gut. That, like those Styrofoam sponges made in the shape of animals and shoehorned into plastic pills would reveal what they hid when dropped in water, so too would Billy, whenever his switch was flipped.
…..But Anderson-as-a-kid knew better. He knew Shazam!’s greatest and most accomplished feat: That Billy, a beat-up, picked-on, tb’d kid–a jug-eared, polio-footed, 60-lb schmuck (oh Billy!)–didn’t transform into a god, Billy!)—didn’t transform into a god, but swapped places with him instead. That when Billy spoke Shazam! onto earth by saying his name (shh! he’s about to)—like G-d talk, like let-there¬be-Billy-but-better talk—Shazam! rode a lightning bolt to earth using Billy’s body as a kind of kooky conduit or homely homing device.
…..Meaning, Anderson tried to explain to his ignoramus friends, that Billy was sent wherever it was a god named Shazam! might live, whisked to his like fortress of solitude where he’d been waiting for this excitable 9-year-old to summon him thus. While Shazam! was on earth doing his dirty work, Billy was free to wander knee-deep in a magic land. Anderson pictured Billy pacing up and down the palace halls, or Billy bellying up to some sumptuous feast—Billy experimenting with time and space in the palace’s intestinally-packed floor plan, or Billy doing physics-defying belly flops in his unbelievable buddy’s pool-on-the-moon. Kiddy-Anderson knew the two were connected, umbilical-like, by an invisible current arcing across time and space (in the Golden Age comics they’d called it their “boom tube”: its one end residing in the extra-large tub of Shazam!’s master bath, the other coming out at about the general coordinates of Kid-Billy’s head). And even if by some hiccup in cosmic fate Shazam! were to fail on earth— to get beat and die(!)—in Anderson’s system, Billy’d be none the worse for wear, still permanently alive on like a permanent vacation.
…..Adult-Anderson came to think of his son like this, assuming Billy must be out adventuring whenever he couldn’t find him. Anderson assured his wife of this even as they lowered Billy’s coiffed corpse into the mouldering dirt, the shinned polish of his black coffin quite a gas: It was Shazam!’s remains stuffed inside that miniature cask. Billy was still ensconced in Shazam!’s stately, main manor, sitting Indian style in front of a mirror watching his own funeral unfold like a story in a door. Anderson knew the place was positively hung with with scads of said looking-panels, where Billy could spend hours and days and weeks and months–nay millennia and millennia—watching key periods from his life be replayed, until someone tapped him on the noggin and said:
…..“Time to wake up, you dunderhead!”

What Anderson gleaned, then, from the last panel of Luca’s deep-sea dive into his son—what universal truth he finally sounded out in that black-as-pitch Marianas Trench—escaped him just then. Because at the moment he sat distracted by his own Kind, arrayed along with 48 of his fellows in their version of the painted fulmen claustrum grid. They were swathed and swaddled, on their backs, planted on the school’s foyer floor below where Anderson and the other parents sat watching from a rotunda above.
…..For opening night, their Old Dame teacher had arranged an elaborate game, mixing up the kids in the multi-paneled grid so that their “painting” was out of order. Over the P.A. system she counted down in a drone, her long breaths assisted by the shiny black oxygen tank she kept at her heel. After a sudden intake, she’d gravelly command:
…..“Jum-ble! Jum-ble!”
…..At which point her little-kids-as-squares would start up like cogs, tremoring like one of those vibrating tabletop puzzles—Anderson’d had one as a kid—inching herky-jerky around to their next, assigned spot. (Because Anderson’d never been the brightest bulb, his favorite puzzle boxes had been the ones with the single, blank “cheat square,” a plain or blacked-out tile that could be moved around with impunity, that made it easier for him-the-dummkopf-kid to solve. Luca’d invented something like this in his grid as well: A solid black block he could use to obscure, at any given moment, whatever troublesome patch of the painting he couldn’t be bothered about…)
…..Anderson didn’t think it a coincidence that, in this recreation of the tiered Signorelli triptych, Billy had won the part of that blacked-out piece; the coveted role of mostly wandering spleen; he who waited patiently in the wings for any confusion or mistake. When a kid failed to “make” his spot Old-Mrs.-Can’t-be-dead could, using discrete lip and thumb tics, signal black-box Billy to sidle up and fill whatever hole had been left unplugged. The fact that no one noticed this except for Anderson—that, afterwards, no one could remember one whole kid they’d been watching was totally blank—was always a profound and significant mystery to him. Like a parable built to bewilder its audience, an aporetic ping—a hard-to-ponder thing—it was a missing little Mxyzptlk that didn’t care whether you said it backwards or forwards or what.
…..Thus this routine, repeated twice-yearly at open houses, brought a certain, temporary calm to Anderson. Sitting at his regular seat on the balcony’s lip, he would sigh while watching the blank heave of Billy’s chest as it shuffled about unnoticed amidst the other blockheaded (but in a good way) kids.
…..Except this year there was a problem. Billy, for some reason Anderson couldn’t guess, remained through several turns of the game stubbornly still. The longer Anderson looked from his upstairs seat—he was half-standing to better see his prone-and-prostrate son—the more an irrational fear grew: That Billy wasn’t playing dumb (or too petulant to come), but was in some actual, mortal danger. That suddenly and tragically—inexplicably and cryptically—he’d expired beneath the like-underwater weight of the opening-night pressure to perform, choking on the probably-toxic fumes from his socked and paint-stained head.
…..Convinced of this, Anderson rose the rest of the way—people staring at him now instead of the kids—and for lack of anything better to do started to wave, stretching his hands as high over his head as he humanly could. (As he did, he imagined a banner writ specifically for Billy; imagined himself a blinking sign ready to rewire his son’s powered-down grid.)
…..But Billy remained unfazed.
…..(Was he miffed or pissed? So mad at his dad that, even when he saw Anderson making a fool of himself in front of everyone, he absolutely would not let on like he did?)
…..Anderson found himself starting to panic. He found himself starting to scramble over the curled lip of the balcony. Sitting two seats away the assistant principal, a vague look of alarm on his face, attempted to coax Anderson back to his seat. Instead, Anderson kicked the young A.P. in the groin as hard as he could. Instead, he slung his other leg the rest of the way over the railing— somebody he couldn’t see tried to yank him back until he elbowed them indiscriminately—and proceeded to use the A.P.’s now-available back (bent over as he was by the pain) as a kind of springboard. He vaulted himself up and over, so that his next step—all in one smooth, balletic motion—gave way to nothing but air.
…..It was a 20-foot drop down to the kids. Anderson twisted awkwardly as he fell, landing spread-eagle and on top of as many of the students-arranged-as-a-painting as possible so as to better break his fall. While struggling to his feet he stepped on more—he couldn’t help it—his soles flattening noses and Adam’s apples as he scrambled to get to his son. He was vaguely aware of the ensuing screams and commotion, but found himself too busy in leaps and bounds to worry much about it, bouncing off the inflatable bladders that his son’s unfortunate friends had become.
…..And in half a dozen steps or less, he’d made it: Sliding one hand into the nape of Billy’s neck, the other into the small of his back, Anderson commenced doing mouth-to-mouth, blowing in Billy’s blue-black lips, punching him encouragingly in the gut. (Anderson was not unaware of how it must’ve looked to the progressively-schooled parents. He could rationally accept that it perhaps appeared as if Addled-Anderson was alternately French-kissing and heavy-petting his son—he knew full well what everyone had always suspected, what everyone at PTA would call him behind his back. But in the few, interior seconds before the outside scene crashed back in, Anderson thought how he might, quite calmly and convincingly, explain what he was doing. That, given the chance, he could explain his history of behavior as exceedingly normal and “okay,” the kind of thing any one of these parents in…their right minds would do.
…..But no.
…..He could only watch as two teachers hopscotched in between the balling and bunched-up students (who could blame them for trying to protect themselves like armadillos, Anderson thought between breaths) on their way to intercept him. When they got within reach, no questions asked—one high, one low—they threw their bodies into his, intent on ending ASAP his display. As he fought their momentum—tried not to smell their stinking aftershave and breath —he heard a finger-in-the-cheek pop as the seal on his and Billy’s mouth (he couldn’t help it) broke.
…..And the two teachers weren’t finished, fantastic looks on their faces letting him know the degree to which they were insisting he stop, taking turns driving his head into the tiled floor like they were pounding in a railroad spike. Like they were trying to ring a bell with his head a carnival hammer.
…..He kept thinking:
…..“But I’m here. I’m already here.”
…..With each blow their fingers worked further inside his mouth, their knees inching up his ass adding degrees to their leverage. He tried to rear back, to gnash his teeth—thrusting his stiff neck out like a tongue—but was repeatedly stopped by each teacher hanging off him like weights.
…..And though he knew his comatose son probably would not hear, Anderson could only try. Even though the tag-teaming teachers were doing their darnedest to chock and/or block him— even as his back teeth cut dully against their knuckled cords (dense, white worms hooking him on either side to expose both ganglia and teeth)—he chewed and he chewed and he chewed, until it was his voice he could hear breaking:
……………….
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