They decided that drinks could wait and darted straight into the thick of the exhibition. Amidst bodies against bodies in the mass of beholders, they pushed through together like worms in dirt until suddenly Thomas was alone in the crowd. Finding himself before it, The Tower of Babel mesmerized him. Remembering its appearance in dreams, his own writing, and so much of what he had read, he felt a keen sense of singular connection. Additionally, despite the friction and compression of the surrounding throng, his usual anxiety dissipated. It was brief though, and the clarity eventually gave way as he remembered his friends and began worriedly scanning the room for where they might have gone.
All he could see was the thick horde of strangers in blazers and dresses, their backs turned with gazes affixed upon the canvases beyond. Their din of formless voices melded together in hushed privacies interrupted by the occasional squeals of an excited reunion. Yet searching for one of his own to no avail, Thomas looked back into the canvas while seeking to overcome the swelling discomfort. He imagined himself in an empty room standing before it, but he found no relief. He could see both simultaneously, trapped within the liminal space between the physical mass felt pressing against him and the center of calm meditation he was seeking to enter. The vision flickered within as he sought to free himself from the bodily sensations and, torn between the room and the crowd, he witnessed a flash of the canvas as the apparent tower and a vivid chamber within the imagined room.
Suddenly thrust back into the gallery, the sight echoed in his mind—a circular chamber of dimly lit bookshelves spun endlessly to disappear into darkness above a fireplace illuminating a cloaked figure. The person’s neck was craning over its shoulder with a piercing eye, and he could see his reflection in the pupil. Yet as the otherworldly painting lingered nebulously in mind, Thomas felt the mass and the din tearing him backward. They were dragging him under, drowning him, and a surging panic, a desire to retrieve and understand the image swelled within him. However, with every passing second the vision was disintegrating into fragments, images into words, clarity into impression, becoming incomplete, escaping. And there he was, just standing in the gallery like a fish in a school.
Thomas was no stranger to these dislocations though—at work, in life, every day a new imagined crisis—and he knew to remain as still as the canvases, more attuned to his breath, and patient despite his muscles’ clamoring dissonance. Mindfully searching for a step forward, he peered through the crowd, and as he did so, a woman at his four o’clock looked over her shoulder and a reverberation of the vision engulfed the room as her eye met his, ever so briefly. It was the same one he had witnessed in the painting, the distant pupil pulsating in memory, and though it all quickly disappeared again into the scene before him as the woman’s back turned, he stepped forward without thinking. With neither breath nor body, single-mindedly compelled, his mind overcame the heel stepped on lightly, the tiny bump that almost spilled a glass of wine, and the absence of his friends.
Then, standing alongside the woman, her face obscured by dark voluminous tufts, Thomas stood silently as the gallery sunk around them and he grasped at strings of language he might utter. Yet, as he did so, the events leading to this moment lashed in the back of his mind—the tower, the chamber, the dimly illuminated shelves, the cloaked figure and eye disintegrating the gallery into confusion, and there was no combination of threads to bind his arrival and a subsequent action into a discernable order. Sure, a simple hello and inquiry further, perhaps, but why, if so much of it was imagined? Before him he could only see the path of pretending, small talk and normality, and the path of insanity—“can you see the world beyond the canvas?”
Yes, none of what he had imagined was real he determined. Thus, a wave of relief washed against the shore. There were no words to be found because it was all in his head. Thus, a deep breath later, feeling light, he spoke silently within himself, reassuringly as if rising to stand upon two feet. There was only this space, this unknown woman, all these unaware strangers in the world grounded, and catching himself in that state, he was finally able to see the canvas before him.
The fantastic landscape unfolded as steep forested cliffs curving to contain a roiling bay while the maelstrom upon the sea’s horizon enclosed the painting as if into a circle. Beyond it, amidst the coming storm of endarkening clouds, a sliver of black drew his attention. It was as if it were a tear in the fabric. He felt a frantic need to examine the detail, and in his mind’s eye, the surface of the rift unraveled into threads and nothingness beyond it. Then he began to imagine the painter with brush in hand producing this layer first, nothing but the shades, before arriving upon the shore to sew luminescence together into a discernable form. Yet, as his awareness broadened to see the cliffs anew, the enigma remained in the distance, and he found himself standing upon a plateau of anxiety. He couldn’t make sense of the dissonance of the depths within the clouds. They felt as if they exerted a force like gravity. It was nesting within his clenching chest and shoulders, breath shallow, and for a moment the waves began to roll, and he could feel the wind in the trees surrounding him until the shock of a delighted shriek.
The woman alongside him was excitedly embracing a slenderer figure with long fine blonde hair glowing in contrast to the now depressed colors within the frame, and oddly, he noted, relative to the crowd beyond them. Observing them through his peripheral vision, attempting to pick their words from the blending whispers, his mind flashed with suspicions about what had drawn him to her, what had just unfolded, all the concern and magical thinking about the unmoored current, and as he looked to the lifeless canvas, he felt rigid.
Too petrified to speak and too fascinated to uproot himself, he stared into the canvas remembering the brief otherworldly moment. He wanted to feel it all again, to dive deeper into whatever it was, the delusion, and yet he stood there impotently seeing it all in memory as one does a fantasy when only a moment before it had all been so vividly real. It had been so intense that he could still feel the dew of a chill gust from the sea upon his cheek. Yet as he sought to manifest whatever gateway into madness he had perceived, a sharp frustration began to augment the rising storm within him until the blonde woman spoke clearly and his attention was rapt.
“This is this the one I wanted you to see”, she stated plainly to the woman between them as Thomas pretended to continue staring forward.
“You mentioned that the eye in the storm was like a bridge”, the dark-haired woman bemused curiously as a hope swelled within Thomas. “It’s all so dreamlike, I…”
“I feel like this is where it becomes clear”, the blonde woman interjected before adding, “Like I said, I want you to see this the way I see it.”
The brunette scoffed in annoyance at the reminder, retorting sarcastically, “and I have to be patient for it to all make sense, this world you see in it all.”
The blonde woman took a deeper breath then and her eyes locked suspiciously onto Thomas’s peripheral glance. He immediately averted them into the frame, perceiving a tower on the far end of the cliff now where previously he had seen only the endless forest. The tower was suspiciously similar to the one of Babel, albeit miniature, and he overheard the now unseen woman speaking, “and you can see it all now.”
So without thinking, Thomas responded, “Yes.”
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