Guest art by Nina Fides Garcia
Episode 8: Caught Between Trains
Hana and James sat together on the commuter train, watching the various scenes of the city race across the wide windows ahead of them. Apartment buildings, trees, houses and the river flashed past as they headed to the art museum to work on a school project. Their soundtrack to these moving pictures was a recording of classical guitar being played by one of James’ idols, a long-dead man named Guildenstern Tropic. James had burnt the recording onto a cd so he could listen to it while bicycling to school, but Hana displayed an interest in it so he decided to bring it along for their journey. Together they listened to the recording on the walkman resting between them, sharing the ear buds so that James had the left one in his left ear and Hana had the right one in her right ear.
The first track ended when Hana and James arrived at their stop. James collected the ear buds and wrapped them around his walkman before stashing the bundle inside of his backpack.
‘What did you think?’ he asked as they stepped off the train and onto a yellow platform.
‘I think I liked the fast bits better than the faster bits,’ Hana said. ‘It’s impressive how he could sometimes make his guitar sound like a crying cat, though.’
‘Yeah. He’s actually the inventor of that. It’s called the Wailing Cat Technique.’
They headed down cement steps that led onto a street-level walkway. The walkway was busy with people rushing to and from the train, but Hana and James nimbly weaved between them, sticking together so as not to become lost. They were soon on the sidewalk of one of the city’s busiest intersections, with heavy traffic in all directions from both people and cars.
‘I think this might’ve been a bad idea,’ Hana said worriedly.
‘Why? We’re almost there. Just follow me!’
James then took her hand to lead her to the art museum but suddenly froze, gazing at her hand in his. He quickly let go.
‘Hold onto my backpack,’ he told her, turning away to hide his reddened face.
Hana grabbed onto an open pouch on the back of his backpack and tugged it. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Ready, Freddy?’
‘Allons-y, allons-o,’ James said, and he began pulling her across a pedestrian crossing.
‘What does that mean?’ Hana asked as businessmen and businesswomen moved along either side of them. The drab shades of grey and beige that made up the businesspeople’s suits contrasted sharply with the bright blues and oranges that Hana and James wore.
‘Er, Gorey said it once,’ James explained. ‘I think it means “let’s go, daddy-o”, or something like that.’
‘If Gorey said it then it probably means “I need food, get me money”,’ Hana said.
After crossing two more intersections, the pair turned a corner and headed down a brightly-lit alley formed by cobbled walls that were topped with plants. The alley was a welcome diversion from the usual cement walls and buildings that they had been staring at ever since getting off the train. Once they were out of the alley they could spot the art museum just another block away.
With a few notable exceptions – a fire that had burnt away the left wing and an annual coating of paint, each year bringing a new colour – the art museum remained roughly unchanged since its creation fifty years earlier. Utilising some of the same optical tricks that were popularised by the painters of the time, the building’s exterior appeared much smaller than the actual dimensions of its interior. Walking into it was like entering a pocket of space that had been secreted away.
‘The teacher said we just have to find a painting, draw it and write about it, right?’ James asked.
‘Yep. It’s one of the easier assignments we’ve received this year, which is probably why Henri already finished his.’
Hana and James entered the art museum and already felt lost. Some entranceways turned out to be paintings and some paintings turned out to be entranceways that the duo had to step through in order to access the next exhibit. The museum’s sole map, found in a room that would be a janitor’s closet in any other museum, was an expressionist painting that they could not figure out. The painting was especially frustrating considering that the You Are Here arrow pointed to the floor beneath it.
They gave up on trying to find their bearings and let the museum take them wherever it was that it needed them to go. Apparently that entailed bringing them into a room filled with portraits of entirely random people, from clowns with half-done makeup to cowboys with monobrows and beauty queens with unicorn horns. Hana found a portrait of a boy with snot dripping from his nose and sat cross-legged in front of it, pulling her notebook out of her backpack so she could sketch it out and jot down a few notes.
‘Is that really the painting you want to do your project on?’ James asked with some disgust.
‘Yeah. Why not? I sort of feel like I can empathise with him. After all, he has to spend his entire life with a runny nose.’
‘How do you know that? This painting was probably done when he had a cold.’
‘The boy in the painting is totally different from the boy it was based on. The boy in the painting will never be able to sniff it up or wipe it away with a tissue. His runny nose will always be there. I’ll always have my dandruff.’
‘You can’t be sure about that.’
Hana shrugged and continued sketching. James, not willing to leave the exhibit to find a painting more to his liking, sat with his back to Hana’s and sketched out the monobrowed cowboy. They sat like this for some time, with the only sound being the skritch-skritching of their pencils on paper. Every once in a while an adult would come in to look at the paintings and mutter comments about the colours and shapes before heading to the next exhibit.
James sat up, holding his pencil and finished sketch in one hand and lifting his backpack with his other. The sketch had the title of the original painting printed on it along with the name of the artist. He looked down over Hana’s shoulder as she erased the boy’s upper lip with the back of her pencil. She brushed away the lingering pink bits and paused before drawing in the snot again.
‘I can’t seem to get it right,’ she said.
‘Just get the idea down,’ he told her. ‘You can put in the detail later.’
She nibbled on the eraser while staring at her sketch. That did not stop it from looking more awkward than she wanted it to, however. She sighed and considered that James might have a good idea for once.
‘Okay, maybe I will.’
She left the snot how it was and drew the upper lip back in.
‘You know, the strange thing is that I could perfectly recreate the painting using my dandruff. But when I try to do it normally with a pencil and paper, I fail.’
‘I don’t think you fail. I think the teacher wants us to sketch out a painting so we can see how different artists can see the same thing differently. Think about how you would look if both Henri and I drew you – would you be the same in both pictures? Maybe I would draw you with a halo of dandruff around your head, while Henri wouldn’t even draw in your dandruff at all. The pictures would look different but they would still be you.’
‘Maybe you should write that down; you could get an A for once.’
‘Hey, I get As all the time – depending on when we share notes, of course.’
Hana stuffed her sketch into her backpack and then shrugged her backpack back on.
‘I guess we have to figure out how to get out of here now.’
‘Let’s try this way,’ James said, and then he walked into a painting of an exit.
They ended up being lost in the art museum for twenty minutes. When they finally made it out of the building – thankfully alive – they noticed a green figure walking down a sidewalk leading away from them. The figure had curly dark green hair.
‘It’s Brussel!’ Hana said intensely under her breath.
‘I wonder what he’s up to,’ James added suspiciously.
‘I guess we’ll have to follow him.’
First they sidled behind a nearby bush and peered carefully around its side. Then they swiftly pressed ahead to the next bush, which rustled as they ducked behind it. Brussel did not seem to notice, however, as he continued on his eerie way.
Right when they were about to head to the next bush, Brussel paused. Hana and James froze in their spots, each with one leg in the air, hoping that he had not spotted them. They could feel the sweat trickle down their temples as they wished Brussel into moving along. Instead he turned his head in their direction, causing them to gulp. He then turned his head in the other direction, causing them to sigh in relief.
‘I guess he’s just looking both ways before crossing the road,’ Hana whispered, to which James nodded in agreement.
Brussel walked onto the road as if to prove them right, but then he climbed down an open manhole to prove them wrong. Hana and James stared at the open sewer before sitting down behind the bush to gather their thoughts.
‘Does this mean Brussel really does live in the sewer?’ James asked.
‘That would explain a lot,’ Hana said.
‘Should we follow him down?’
Hana did not even have to think about it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ll do something else – we’ll send down a dandruff robot for reconnaissance. I read a science fiction short story recently where the enemy army sent little robot spies into a rebel base. It seemed to work out all right, except for the bit where the good guys ended up winning anyway.’
‘Cool. I think that’ll work for us. I mean, I’m pretty sure we’re the good guys.’
Hana nodded and began shaking out her dandruff into a small pile before them. James watched quietly as Hana pressed the pile together into a dense mass. She then began sculpting the mass into a spherical shape, adding bumps that she soon formed into various buttons. Once the buttons were finished – a wide assortment that nearly covered half the sphere – Hana labelled them with her fingernails: the smallest button, which was actually a tiny hole, became the ON/OFF button, accessible only by pressing one of her hairclips into it; another button, larger and more traditionally outward, became the RECORD button, while the button beside it became the PLAY button; and so on.
‘I think I’m starting to have second thoughts about this working,’ James said as Hana added a small, awkward head and two sets of wheels for feet.
‘I don’t see why it won’t,’ she said. ‘And if for some reason it doesn’t work, it’s not like it’s a big loss or anything. There’s a lot more dandruff where that came from.’
Opening a hatch on the dandruff robot’s back, she tinkered around inside of it with a dandruff screwdriver, closing one eye and pressing her tongue out the corner of her mouth in concentration as she did so. There was a short pop from within the robot, and that was when Hana closed the hatch, tossed her dandruff screwdriver into the bush and turned the robot around so that it was facing her. She pulled a hairclip out of her hair, shook off the dandruff and pressed it into the ON/OFF hole. Then she pulled out the hairclip, shook off the dandruff again and placed it back in her hair, where it attracted yet more dandruff.
The dandruff robot buzzed amiably at them from somewhere within its flaky, circuitous interior.
‘I believe that’s Dandruff Robot for “hello”,’ Hana translated.
‘Oh. Uh. Hello.’ James held out his hand in greeting, but the dandruff robot had no hands of its own to shake it.
Hana then picked up the dandruff robot and carried it over to the open manhole. She set it down by the opening and pulled a dandruff rope out of her hair, which she proceeded to tie around the robot’s body. The dandruff robot buzzed continuously throughout the entire process.
‘Shh,’ she shushed it. ‘You’re going to have to be quiet once you’re down there. I need you to find a green boy named Brussel and record everything you see once you spot him. After you record something important, like his hideout or something, I want you to wait under that bush over there. You can cover yourself with leaves or something. James and I will come after school tomorrow to see what you’ve found.’
The robot buzzed its understanding and acceptance of Hana’s orders. If she had given it arms, the robot would have saluted.
Hana pressed the RECORD button and then carefully lowered the dandruff robot down the manhole using the dandruff rope. The rope slackened, letting her know that the robot had made it safely down. That was when she let go of the rope and slapped her hands clean.
‘That should take care of some things,’ she said, resting her hands on her hips as she looked down the manhole with a triumphant smile.
‘So, uh, why didn’t you give the robot arms, again?’ James asked as he looked down the manhole with her, expecting a clever explanation.
She continued gazing down into the black portal of the open sewer, her hands still on her hips and her smile still on her face. Only her smile was now somewhat askew.
‘My mistake,’ she said.
After giving up on figuring out how to fish the robot out of the sewer, Hana and James boarded the silver commuter train that would soon bring them home, or at least to the station that was near their homes. This time they sat so that their view of the city was of the other side, filled with tall commercial buildings and other concrete mountains, the roofs of schools and small households. These sights were garnished with green splashes of parks and gardens.
James rifled through his backpack, looking for the Guildenstern Tropic cd to bookend their visit to the art museum. When he found it he offered the left ear bud to Hana.
‘No thanks,’ she told him. ‘I’d rather listen to the hum of the train right now.’
‘Are you still feeling bad about the robot?’
‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.’
James smacked the floor with his bat. ‘You shouldn’t give up so easily,’ he told her. ‘I’ll bet an entire tea can that we’ll find the robot under the bush tomorrow.’
Staring out the window, Hana could have sworn that she had just spotted a giant red mass moving amongst a copse of trees. It was only for a split second, however, and James’ bet had distracted her from paying too much attention to it. But it might have been. It could have been.
She shook the uncertainty out of her head, a few flakes of dandruff flying out along with it, and refocused her attention on James.
‘An entire tea can?’ she asked, her taste buds wetly anticipating confirmation.
James nodded gravely. After turning away so that he could not see her face, Hana smiled, grateful that James would offer her such a win-win situation in the face of her own failure.
‘You’re on,’ she said.
To Be Continued In Episode Nine: Brussel's Secret Laboratory
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6
Episode 7
Episode 8
Episode 9
Episode 10
Episode 11
Episode 12
Episode 13
Episode 14
Volume 1