Red Gates

I know this is a bit of a longer piece. But please! read and give feedback! This concept provided quite the wrestle.

I can only faintly remember the first time I saw it happen. I must have been very young; too young to question my surroundings, but old enough to be drawn to the obscure. Thinking back now it’s a wonder I never thought to ask about what I saw. It must start at that time in a child’s life when falsehoods do not exist and everything about the world is tangible, even if only through the imagination.

            I believe the first time I saw them was in the house we lived in before my sister was born. It was in the kitchen. I remember my mother to be a particularly nervous person. She moved slowly while her words and eyes darted across the room and windows, as if she was waiting on an invisible force to creep out of the dark corners of the house and drag her down to hell. Perhaps that is why I never mentioned what I saw. Even at that young age I sensed how it would have driven her to madness so needlessly.

            The first time it was red. Not a deep, threatening colour, but a childish pastel that slowly painted an arch above the oven that heated our tiny kitchen to a sauna. I remember being intrigued, as naturally a child of that age would. I had pulled a chair over to the stove. Ideally, my arms would have been just long enough to reach over the hotplates. I would press my fingertips against the red and feel its texture over brittle yellow.

            But my mother did not see the red glide over the wallpaper, or the tiny spherical drips that would have fit perfectly under my childhood fingerprints. Instead she only saw a small boy perching over an ignited stove, one hand precariously quivering over a pot of hot chili sauce.

            It was not an overly common occurrence at that age. I know because I remember the particular sense of curious thrill and wonderment that would so passionately propel my small body towards the arising pigment. I yearned to gain physical interaction whenever I saw them as a child. I craved assurance that these things were real; part of this world.  Like this first incident however, the colour always appeared in the most difficult of locations, or at the most inconvenient of times.

            In that same house, I remember a streak of bluish-green drew a beautiful curve that flowed upward and then dropped back down in the opposite direction again, creating a point. It was just above my father’s armoire. I didn’t feel intense compulsion to touch it after it dried, but it always caught my eye as I entered the room.

            

The move to Oklahoma I remember to be particularly dramatic for my family. My mother’s pregnancy and all the anxieties it embedded in both her and my father would soon be replaced with the presence of a helpless infant. I remember that tension, but not because of the great change it brought to our family. I remember because I believe it is what brought the colours back. I must have been about seven years old.

            There was a vibrant orange, drifting in waves across my ceiling. I lay across my bed flat on my back, paralyzed at the beauty of the movements and vibrant hue. It drowned out a baby’s squeals and the aggravation between a man and a woman. It drowned out the crash of boxes filled with kitchenware. I remember how I gathered every solid looking object in the room and constructed a precarious stairway to heaven in which my small body could find no fault.

            This new house was a great deal more spacious than our last. The living room was what one would call an open-concept design. There were floor to ceiling windows that looked out on a backyard just slightly too large, even for two growing children. I remember worrying about what was breathing behind the tall weeds that entangled the back fence, curtaining the lower torso of the woods that lurked beyond.

            I sat in that hollow living room often, looking through those big bay windows as I picked at the plaster cast that engulfed my arm and 5 inch wrist.

            The walls had started as shimmering white stucco, but by the time we left that house they were slashed with every colour of the rainbow, and perhaps a few more hues I couldn’t think to name. I wondered briefly if my parents decided to later move away because they grew tired of the ever-multiplying vibrancy, but just never mentioned it out loud. After all, there are many things that exist between two people that are never spoken about, and these things cause great anxiety. My parents taught me it is best to run from these things; these things that are not ever tangible to ear nor touch, but are potent nonetheless.

            But my parents often spoke of other things they found uncomfortable, such as the peculiar old couple next door or the odd creaking in the hot water pipes. I figured with all they had to talk worriedly about, it would be silly to bring up the colour on the walls. I remember I loved them both at that time, my parents and the colours. They were both abstract and bright.

            I had my eleventh birthday in the house with the big bay windows. I remember my father insisted I invite friends over to the house to make it more special. I didn’t like having friends over, since my sister was six years my junior and had a tendency to cry when she wasn’t included.

            My parents gave me a bike for my eleventh birthday. My friend tried very little to act just as enthralled as I was. I think he was too pre-occupied with the fact that I didn’t know how to ride a bike to do a good job at pretending, a sport at which we had once all been champions. I had never had any interest in learning to ride a bike before, but I cannot remember if I told my friend that or not. I must have felt his arid disapproval however, as I remember I thought I could impress him by pointing out the vibrant slashes on the walls. We sat on the couch in that open-concept living room, facing the windows that framed my bike as it sat alone in the backyard. Chart hits from the 40s and 50s leaked into the silence between us from my mother’s radio in the kitchen. 

            

“What do you think of our walls?”

He looked at me with more judgment on his face than confusion. “I think they’re kind of …boring.”

            The word “…boring” has an odd sound to it. I remember it hung in the air for a minute, in between his face and mine. If our walls were boring, what must his house be like? I wondered this silently, and a few years later forgot his last name.

            By that time my family was living in our third house in Seattle. I couldn’t tell if my mother’s anxiety was getting better or I was just paying less attention to her and it was staying the same. Maybe it was getting worse.

            As a fourteen year old with two parents and an eight-year-old roommate, I found this third and final family dwelling place to be much too crowded. But, my mother lost her job, and that’s what happens when income becomes precarious: sacrifice. That house is where she remains today, sheltered by a tightly knit forest of houses that all look the same.

            The time I spent at home diminished as much as could be allowed by parents with anxiety problems and a son in high school. I believe the colours sensed this tension, and the growing distaste I was acquiring for my surroundings. They followed my consciousness to where it spent most of its time, and I began to see them outside the walls of my house. It even seemed, that as I scrambled out of childhood into the precarious, black-mailing realm of child-to-adult transition, that the colours no longer felt the need to contribute to the illusion that the world is beautiful. I remember sitting in the back of a classroom, listening to a greying woman explain the concept of forbidden love and Shakespeare to a group of adolescents that spoke of nothing but each other. It was there I saw the transition.

            There, tucked up in the corner at the front of the room, it started to grow. A pale and strikingly sickly yellow crawled across the wall, just above the chalkboard.

            I remember staring intently, suspended in the suspense, waiting to see if the drops sprouting from its spindly yellow arms would pierce the black of the board. They never did. The greying woman turned and wrote “Love is heavy and light…” just as I had predicted the soured yellow would contrast the rich black of a region not often reached by chalk in the hands of 5’5’’ teachers.

            I studied that yellow closely every time I had a class within that little room. This is not to say that other colours did not inhabit the school, such could not be farther from the truth. But that yellow, that grotesque and sickly yellow was the first to enter. There was something oddly disconcerting about that pale limb that lay across the wall and ended just before the clock that dictated the lives of so many. I had always loved the yellow designs as a child. They had seemed the most vibrant, the most promising. Yellow was nature’s bravest colour, decorating royal bees and bringing warmth to sunsets and life to the chill of fall. But this colour seemed poisonous. It was the colour of decay. It was the colour of wallpaper that curled behind a stove that once boiled chili sauce.

           

I’d like to assume that few people who lived in and amongst the worries, emotions, and discoveries of high school left unscathed. Characters are built, corroded, weeded and broken. The colours ran ramped through this atmosphere, but they no longer allowed me to see their beauty, and I was no longer able to use them to find joy.

            Pale hues, seemingly faded from sitting out in the sun, ran along doorways or slithered out of corners throughout most of my adolescence. I decided not to mention it to anyone, for risk they think I was boring. By graduation, I had almost completely forgotten the vibrancy of my childhood; one pigmented by youthful ignorance and summers where clocks were mere ornaments that hung on a wall amidst abstract streaks of orange, blue, purple, green and red.

I remember when my whole life was ahead of me, and how the colours reminded me that life drains out of us day by day, drop by drop, like a leaky faucet diluting a paint can full of visions and unborn fingerprints.

I remember that time moved, and the pales began to govern my family’s small house. But I remember standing transfixed again, as a colour I could never describe with words in my language crept out of the corner of a darkened hallway. It was neither blue nor brown, nor purple nor black, and the droplets that bled off its branches reflected light with such intensity comparable to the finest oil. It grew in uneven increments, pulsating with an unsettling life that in its uncanny existence stood on the verge of every category that builds our world. It seemed to stare back at me as its arms reached further and further out of the corner, spiraling and jutting off in different directions to form harsh angles alongside organic shape. I stared more intently, and it reflected the image of my eyes. It was staring back at me. I remember I was struck, struck with the fact that I did not know what the colours were, and that they did not comply to the realities of this earth. The familiar had become the unfamiliar, and I ran.

 When I was nineteen I moved out of my parent’s house. I hoped that the colours would be as vibrant as they were in my childhood there, though I had not seen them as I walked out the door. My mother’s anxiety probably skyrocketed as I settled into an apartment in a city 3 hours away, but I didn’t pay this much concern. I knew the colours were still bright in the house that no longer held my grown body, and that hues of life and warmth still rushed along ceilings and narrated the rise and fall of voices. Perhaps these would save her, or hold her. Perhaps my father would notice her, and they could become a glowing calm. I hoped they would one day remind me of a sunrise on a lake or a glass of water perched and forgotten on a blue tablecloth.

I found work in that city, and tried to keep myself too busy to notice any movement of colour that was not tangible, not part of the universe that buzzed so vividly around me. I remember this didn't work well when I returned home. I lived in an apartment seventeen stories above the ground. The hallway was dimly lit, and I often avoided looking into corners; my relationship with the colours had grown so full of distrust. They ran about as before, but they rarely contained much pigment and moved to form more intricate and continuous figures. I remember the feeling that rushed through my lungs to my feet as I watched them while eating dinner over a yellow tablecloth. 

 It was the only pastel coloured thing in the apartment, as I had hoped keeping such a scheme would bring back the streaks and rainbows of my youth. I wanted no part in what I saw then, in my early twenties. 

I remember eating dinner over that yellow one night. Chart hits from the 40’s played on the radio in the kitchen, almost 20 years past their prime. I often debated if a dining room existed in my apartment, or if my table merely stood in the purgatory that was neither kitchen nor living room. I looked around at the space. The walls were littered with dozens of strokes and sweeps, circles and lines. Most were shades or grey or sometimes white, mixed in with the appalling pale colours that had lived with me through high school. 

“Blue Flame” began to ooze out of the radio, and the low notes drifted across the floor like heavy smoke. Movement to the right of me across the room caught my eye. A pale blue slid around the corner in time with the simple melody held in the saxophone. Solo clarinet took over as the blue quivered and jumped in sync, and in doing so fell in tone from a baby blue to a dark navy. I remember being stunned. I hadn’t seen such vivid pigment for what my insides felt to be an eternity. I rose from my seat as trumpets swelled and dropped. I approached slowly, intrigued and quivering along side the instruments as smoke swirled at my feet. I reached out as the trumpets blasted and held their second last note, and as they dropped to the final pitch there was a knock at the door. The colour soaked into the wall instantly, leaving a dry, faded stain.

I remember a girl lived in the apartment across the hall from me. She began living there two years after I had, but it was on that night that she heard the clarinet coming from my kitchen. She often crossed the hall to come to my door after that. I must have been about twenty-four; it must have been about a year after that incident with the blue. I remember I thought her to be a woman unlike most. She was full of ideas and questions. She was never like I remember my mother. Her questions were not fearful or wary, but more so triumphant in their crusade to interpret the world around her. 

Out of the corner of my eye I watched the colours; pale intertwined with dark would weave up and down the room as she spoke, sometimes splattering as she exclaimed in speech or in love.

 They perplexed me, and appeared as abstract countenances that my peripherals tried not to see with spiraling circles as eyes. I did not leave her side when I saw them, even to fit the drops under my fingertips. I was happy with her there. I remember being distracted by the imagery of her slim face, silhouetted by light setting through glass doors that led to a concrete balcony. I remember the way bodies blended with white sheets and auburn hair painted the bed in familiar streaks. I remember the contrast that eyes and lips made on skin made of white crystals.

I remember I would listen intently as she spoke, whether it be about other people or her own mind, or mine. She thought, she talked, and she overthought. She would speak again and look intently at me and at my tiny home soaked and stained with streaks of grey and faded blue. I remember wondering what to say, if it would measure up, if it would be boring. 

We lay for a while on the floor of my living room one night, our shoulders overlapped and our heads close enough to the balcony doors to feel the cold air coming off glass beat with rain water.

“What do you think of the walls?”

I waited with almost as much intimidation as intrigue. I had pierced a comfortable silence like a stone splitting a crack on a frozen pond. I dared not move my head to look at her, as I did my friend years ago. My index finger moved over her knuckles. I remember she laughed slightly.

“I think they’re wonderful.”

I remember being relieved, and I remember that I was about to tell her I loved her. But instead I was struck speechless by what I saw on the ceiling above me. 

It crept from the corner, a black more dark than anything I had seen made on this earth. It lunged forward in a disturbing motion that made me jump and squirm backward, sitting up now with my back against the cold perspiring glass. She said something beside me; I remember her tone sounded mildly concerned. I kept my eyes locked on the black. It was thicker than oil, but moved with the fluidity of the wine that spilled onto the floor off the coffee table I had kicked. Black came from every corner now, congregating in the centre of my ceiling. I watched with horror and intrigue as I saw the image begin to emerge out of the chaos of thick black streaks and feathered strokes. A grotesque face the size of my upper torso hung its jaw open and stared at me with yellow eyes that pierced through mine until they watered.

I remember there was such incredible detail, and I squinted my eyes to see it clearer. The black continued slithering about through the face, causing its features to reconstruct with every heartbeat like a stop-motion animation. In this it looked barely human, but as my skin quivered and my eyes burned watching, I saw it take on the essence of everyone I had ever known. I saw my mother, paralyzed in fear by a sound outside her window. I saw my elementary school peers, scorning my habits or my interests. I saw the disapproval of a high school teacher, the sneer of a girl I had asked to dance. I saw the disinterest of the people I passed on my way to work, the frustration of the man who drove a full bus on rainy days. I saw my father on his death bed, I saw the sorrow that would mount itself on the face of the girl who then sat beside me. I saw colours that couldn’t exist in real life begin to form droplets off of the vicious eyes and tongue of the creature that hung above me. 

I remember I could take it no longer, and I leaped onto my feet and into the air. As I pressed my hand against the ceiling, the black spread apart and the face formed again on the the sliding balcony door. I turned and lunged at the door just as the face disappeared again. I remember I threw open the glass in frustration, searching for what had never stopped haunting me. I remember she looked at me in confusion and almost anger. I saw it again, across the room on my front door. It grew in a detail that terrified me but still drew me near in a passion that had yearned to be released for as long as I can remember. I remember I screamed at her.

“Can’t you see it?! Can’t you see them?”

But she just stood there, her face pained in an attempt to understand. I remember it was at that moment after my scream and after her cry that the face sprung into the most terrifying of grins, as its now red eyes swirled and perhaps even glowed. Its mouth opened and it flew up the wall and across the ceiling as every colour I’d ever seen spewed from its blackness and coated my walls.

 In a frustration that swelled to a rage my body flew across the room in its pursuit. I remember the streaks whizzing as the face rushed off the ceiling, through the glass doors and over the balcony we flew.

I remember that’s when I reached it. It was as I put one leg on the patio chair and the next on the balcony railing that my arms were finally long enough, brave enough, to plunge my fingers into the pigment. As I touched that horrible face the black turned into vibrant colours that are swirling and encircling me. They are falling with me, and I hear only in the muffled background of my mind the noises of the world all around me. Perhaps it is the sound of screaming. Perhaps it is cheering. But I know I have won. I am touching the soul of what has followed me my whole life. It is either heaven or hell. I can’t yet be sure, but there is a red arch on the horizon.

 

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is! (Act 1, scene 1)” " Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet.   

 

Author's Note

This was kind of a really abstract idea, and it was quite difficult to work with at times. Let me know how you think it turned out.