The Fireman's Artifacts
by Mike Donkin © 2009
Joseph Cohen was a painter who lived in a kind of warehouse in which he kept very little furniture and an old bathtub that sat peculiarly in the middle of the floor. The floor was always soiled with dirt and screws and the painter had never bothered to clean it since moving into the warehouse. Also were many canvases and a great spotlight which shined from far behind him as he moved animatedly, painting the shadows of objects he had set upon a small table. The shadows would appear on the wall behind the table. There were no other lights in the warehouse. Rather than painting the shadows themselves he painted the images he imagined they represented. The shadows of the objects would seem to interact with each other, led by the movements of his own less dark shadow which would seem to instigate their interactions. He slept on a cot at night with a pillow of soiled clothes. And despite his recent but quite minor success as a painter he never considered modifying anything in the warehouse.
He often wished that he had built a great fire that burned of newspapers and old canvas. He dreamed of hanging all the objects he kept in the warehouse from a clothesline—gloves, shoes, shirts, a drinking glass, bottles of wine and a jug of brandy, and other such things—and putting them all before the fire which would, in his stead, lead them as a conductor of an orchestra, or perhaps as the music itself. The fire would cause their shadows to dance. Most of all he desired to place a special memento on the table. It was a clay head of a man, its expression demented. The eyes, hauntingly, seemed to focus on nothing whatsoever. The head's mouth was tautly drawn and described a frustrated despair. The nose was strong, but clearly asymmetrical. It had been painted bronze and thousands of fervid slices had been made with a fine blade to signify the head's helmet-like hair which came down unevenly, like a guillotine, over the eyebrows. Joseph's mother, now dead, had created the strange head in an art class when she was only fifteen. After uncovering it in the attic of his childhood, just before her death, Joseph became obsessed with it. At night he would dream of the shadows of the other objects dancing about the head and paying it homage. Unfortunately, Joseph's landlord forced him to keep a smoke detector, thus preventing him from building fires.
One night Joseph, very drunk on wine, returned to the warehouse and started to think—with a drunkard's zeal—about his ideal work of art. With all the flammable materials he could find, including turpentine and grain alcohol, he built a bonfire in the bathtub. He positioned the bathtub exactly between the canvas he had prepared and his subject. He had propped the head boldly upon a chair, and the chair upon the table. Joseph lighted the fire with a single match. The fire caught. In a moment it towered and eclipsed the head, so he could no longer see it. Joseph, brush in hand and poised to begin his painting, became furious and tried to calm the blaze with a broom, only to become startled when the conflagration showed no signs of relenting and the fire alarm sounded. In an attempt to put out the flames by smothering them with a blanket, his sleeve caught fire. Eventually his entire back was aflame and he resorted to rolling around on the ground. In his fevered movement, Joseph came too close to the still life, and, with a violent contortion, unwittingly kicked out one of the table legs. He heard a thunk. Joseph groped around in the smoke in a panic until he came upon the head. It had cracked down the middle, an eye now to each half. On his knees, he took the halves up in his arms and cradled them like a baby, then fell onto his side. For a long time he thought about the cracked head and a euphoria passed over him. He imagined that all the dreams the sculpture had contained—which were actually his own—were now rising like the smoke to the high ceiling of the warehouse and getting trapped inside for him to look to whenever he needed inspiration.
The firemen, who were late in arriving, found Joseph balled up on his side. The two halves of the head had been brought in close to his breast. The fire was now almost out, and when they tried to get Joseph's attention they soon realized he was not breathing.
After removing the body, two firemen returned and looked at the two halves of the head which lay sadly on the floor. For a few seconds they stared at the broken head in silence, until one of the firemen said, “Something odd has happened tonight,” and left. The other fireman took the two halves up in his hands and pieced them together. He looked into the blank eyes and was frightened. Without telling anyone, he concealed the broken head and brought it to his apartment.
Today it sits on a mantle next to several different artifacts, each found in the wake of a subsequent tragedy. They all share two features in common. They have all been broken or ripped—sometimes into multitudinous fragments—and each was found in the arms of its dead owner. The fireman had recognized the importance in each of these objects; though he has never been able to understand the nature or cause of their power. He is not bothered by this. Simply by becoming the keeper of these artifacts he has become capable of understanding the innermost thoughts and feelings of numerous unfortunate and tormented souls whose thoughts and feelings, if he had never encountered the artifacts, would have remained forever a mystery to him.