CHAPTER ONE  

On a Wednesday noon, after his fifth message, I let myself be summoned to Waylon Goodman’s  hilltop estate so he could try and pass me another forgery. His property looked down off ten  paperclip switchbacks pressed in a hillside west-facing the Pacific Ocean. Waylon’s  acquaintances drank his cocktails up there. You knew he lived there because that’s where his  convertibles were parked. That’s where he had his Grecian breakfast patio. I’d have traded my  freak eyes for one of Waylon’s collector convertibles in a hot second. A convertible might have  added some value to my life. A tan. Windblown hair.  

 Waylon’s sun-kissed canvas of hillside called itself The Seacliffs. The town at its feet, the  one I dragged up from, was Skysill Beach. The hill and the beach gripped a lonely piece of  California shore halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, with nothing but the thin Pacific  Coast Highway to edge off the waves and tie in the outside world. And the outside world poured  through Skysill every weekend. Lured in. Commercially accosted. Sent home dazed and content.   I left my place on its little coastal fold with all its useless light and its one unfinished  painting, and went winging up into The Seacliffs. I hair-pinned Skyline Drive and the beach  dwindled and the ocean plattered out blue behind me. I kept my colors leashed in a band I  thought might be normal vision. Though honestly how could I know? I just clipped them, so  instead of twenty thousand shades of euphoric, mind blasting aquatic radiance, the ocean looked  blue. A nice safe blue.  

 Skyward I twisted, and the view began to lash the houses into crazy ambition, and they  foaled out rooftop decks and infinity pools, each more infinite than the one before, while Skyline

hunched and narrowed and pushed up the same way it had since 1830, if you believed our  historical markers. I took my time on the drive, just to establish in advance that it was mine. It  was a point Waylon liked to forget.  

 Skyline finally expired through a windswept saddle into a cul-de-sac ringed by a stucco  wall. Two gates stood against the uphill side. Behind the gates rose private drives that slipped  into quiet eucalyptus shade. Opposite, on the ocean half of the cul-de-sac, a scrim of pure azure  horizon backdropped the entrance to Waylon’s compound. Vanilla stucco framed the entrance  and bougainvillea overtopped that, and forged black iron gates beat in like angel wings.   To look out through Waylon’s gate was to teeter on the sill of the sky. It was reason  number one of the two reasons I occasionally crawled up his hill. Now I sat behind my wheel,  and just for a minute I let the world saturate, just to make the trip worth it. My rods and cones  did their magic and the visible colors blossomed by the billions. Waylon’s simple bougainvillea pink archway splintered into sprays of damp-pink and summer-pink and smokey-pink and  toenail-pink and toenail-pink #24 and all the rest, in the cosmic color wheel of the world.   I know it’s not good for me. All I wanted was one hit of color and the view. I never take  more than a toke these days. I keep the ultraviolet colors, the Highers, prudently off. That makes  the chroma storms less frequent. See, I’m actually very prudent, considering.   Today I got the multi-colored-marvels. Thick sweet color hit me in clouds and I chortled  up a bit of mania. The sound bounced happy trails in my car, and out my window and down  Waylon’s driveway. But Happy trails are a bad sign. Laughing means I’m having one of my  sensitive days. Still I soaked in eyeball pageantry for summer long seconds before I pinched the  rainbow back, so the giddy feeling went away. Nothing took its place.

 The ocean was blue again.  

 Then I was ready for Waylon. His lane dove down through more bougainvillea and agave  swords and some palms throwing shade. I left my car in the cul-de-sac and walked onto the  property. At the end of the drive, Waylon’s five car garage came in view, inside a ring of coastal  oaks bonsai-ed into obsequious hedges. Usually when I got to the garage I’d see Waylon’s  convertibles getting walked or just taking the air. But the garage was closed today. Everything  was quiet. I heard only the cry of a scrub jay and the echo of shovel work behind the garage.   Waylon’s long car shed had walls of ghost washed river rock, shutters, tide-green eaves  and a lot of iron filigree in case it was still 1920 and you needed somewhere for your hat. I  walked around one filigreed corner. Beyond it the main house rambled, and in between the house  and garage stretched a wide courtyard boxed by actual hedges. The flagstones had been pried up  and stacked in piles. New, thigh-deep trenches burrowed away from the house. Strings on stakes  with ribbons plotted a master scheme.  

 The excavation was Damien’s. I watched him grunt and lever, digging away without any  rhythm. Damien’s made of elephant bones. Long arms, short legs, bloused in a t-shirt hanging  past his knees. As far as I knew he was Waylon’s personal handyman. Through all the six years  I‘d occasionally visited the Goodman estate, Damien and Waylon had been involved in ongoing  renovations and passive aggressive disagreements over payment, and sometimes Damien refused  to work for a week, time I knew he spent practicing his drinking when we’d see each other at  The Charles.  

 He took a rest and saw me. Something had happened to his right eye long ago and it  puckered closed, but his left made up for that with enough evasive emptiness for a whole work

crew. He swiped his cap off to cool his hair, each strand as thick as a porcupine quill, some of  them greying.  

 “Hey Damien,” I told him. He worked me over with his eye. “I guess Waylon’s off  counting his money someplace? So, do I climb through here, or… ”  

 The scrub jay called. Damien stared, and I saw how things were. He’d gone sullen, which  he had every right to do considering who he worked for.  

 “He wants his master bedroom bigger,” Damien muttered, and I thought maybe we’d  trade a few complaints about Waylon, just so the trip wouldn’t be a total waste, and I’d leave.   “Try making the rest of the house smaller, he’ll never notice,” I said. “Lop off the east  bathroom, that’s never been used.”  

 “It’ll all take longer than he thinks,” Damien muttered, sweaty. “Cost too much. He don’t  care.”  

 “Is he having you build this all yourself?”  

 He nodded and raised his shoulders. “He says it will be better.”  

 “That’s just millionaire optimism, it’s not real.”  

 “And then today he has some problem inside, won’t come out and see what I tell him!”   “He only comes out once a year. He’s the one groundhog on Forbes’ Richest Persons  list.”  

 “I’m not a trench digger! I am a carpenter!”  

 I felt like I was keeping up my half of the conversation but that Damien and I might be  having different conversations. Then he threw his shovel.

 “Ok, you know what, just walk in the holes,” he said with a savage kick. “Kick them, ruin  it. It won’t matter. This will cost too much.”  

 I did the neatest job I could. I only took out one stake. Then I followed his trench, which  was straight and very competent for a carpenter and led me around a corner, and Damien  disappeared with his shovel and his reasonable complaints while I climbed back onto flagstones  and then stepped up on the porch. Three front doors—two arched french astride an oaken ship slab overtaken with more filigree—invited me to wait patiently where I was until the Queen  could get back to her summer cottage. More ironwork crawled on the lintel and the porch beams  and down to a doorbell forged into an octopus. I put my finger into the octopus and got the gong.   The middle door swung in to my right. Rose, Waylon’s small housekeeper, stood and  blinked from the cool foyer with her wide and insubstantial face. She was my age, but her job  had aged her. She’d become a lot like the dust she feathered from Waylon’s driftwood chairs, or  maybe one of her parents had been a dandelion, but you felt she could waft backward just  blinking and tumble out an open window. Out relationship was the best. She always greeted me  with an honest face and sometimes she ran her dust wand over me, without really looking. Habit  cleaning.  

 But she wasn’t wafting anywhere today. Instead she looked weighed and confused, like  the moth who flew through the sprinkler. There was something cockeyed the way she stared that  made me stare back, and brought up a pulse of fellow feeling, which is always dangerous for me.  Her eyes were pink and swollen. We passed our stare between us like two broken staring dolls. I  stepped through the door. Rose’s face was blotched. I wanted to use my right hand to point  toward the living room and ask what was happening with Waylon, but my hand, like a miser with

a nickel, had bitten down around the door knob, and it wouldn’t come free. I considered Rose:  distraught. Not in a good way. I pulled at my hand. I pulled harder.  

 But I was too late. The chroma storm had come. I should have known when I laughed in  the car. The sensitive days are the least predictable.  

 My body was locked onto the doorknob—no opening that hand for a good while now— but my visual cortex unbolted to swing wide like barn doors. Behind my eyes everything turned  on. Rose’s face bloomed; this stage of going chromatic, right at the beginning, always feels so  fucking good. Everybody wants to feel, right? Whatever it is—sadness, horror, glory—beggars  can’t be choosers, I take what’s on the shelf. So my eyes brought it rich, and Rose’s sad streaked  cheeks became a talcum white canvas, her eye sockets became bruised peach skin, and her ink  blue capillaries spidered under lily jaws, faded puce worry blushed on her throat and blackberry  arteries pumped her neck and copper chili fingertips pressing her clavicle and I felt jesus christ— this is going to be bad.  

 I had just enough sense to be happy the ultraviolet Higher Colors weren’t streaming in. If  the Higher’s forced their way onto the scene they’d end up slamming us all into a mountainside.   “Rose!” I heard. Was that me? Ok, yeah. Consumed. Distraught. “Did something happen?  

Are you all right? Rose? Are you all right?” Because, see, Rose was distraught. So distraught.   “Hi, Mr. Gale,” she said, startled back into the house. “It’s Mr. Goodman—“   All-the-colors-everywhere deepened and spaced and dropped down, the world got bright and I yanked against the door but my hand was a rictus. It still felt good, though. A total rush.  Color punching in, feeling, because you can’t have the color without the emotion. I reached into  the foyer with my left hand clubbed in a fist and my right hand clubbed to the door knob and

surprised Rose around the waist like a pirate with his swain because she was small and selfless  and brave. I held her, and commiserated, and misery had never felt so good, and she was olive  and lavender and had curled chocolate cherry hair and eyes green like ocean sand.   Everything miserable emptied her face really fast right then, but it only stayed empty one  second before dead shock expanded in. Was she having a horrible memory, or—oh. And at that  point, the entire experience stopped being amazing for me. Her fear, that focused me. She was  afraid. Too much. I was too much. Of course I was. Like a rabid psychotic tsunami.   My insides broke in primer-red sorrow as the chroma storm really stared to heave. Blood  ocher pulled chasms under me, rocked me, a silver flash of fear for Rose, she had enough  problems. She pushed me and backed out of reach while I clung without choice to the doorknob  and pawed a clenched fist to her. It was heart breaking. In her eyes bulged the very reasonable  question what the actual FUCK? I was sobbing.

And that was my cue.  

 That’s just, always my cue. When I hear myself sobbing, I know I’m chromatic. Lost.  This one was bad. But no Highers. Thank god for meaningless favors.  

 There’s an almost foolproof process I discovered a few years ago to pull out, when I get  to the point that I remember to want to. Amelia helped me discover it. First I look away from  whoever—or whatever—set me chromatic to begin with. So now I looked away from Rose.  Trembling gold encrusted Rose. I looked away. Then I squeezed my eyes closed. After that I  knelt beside the door. And I crossed my eyes. Crossed them as hard as possible. Until I felt like  they’d pop, or get pushed into my brain. I don’t know why it works, but it does. Eventually this  drags me back. Unless there are Highers. In which case I pass out.

 I hung from the door and I wrenched my rods and cones, spectrum by spectrum, yanked  them back from the brink. My emotional maelstrom flattened out. That happens fast too. I  clipped everything hard, for safety, as soon as I could. What did I look like to Rose? Like a  monster trying to keep his balance on a spinning ship? I fell forward on my hands, and knew it  was over because I was unlatched from the door, and I grabbed quick breaths, and I uncrossed  my eyes, opened them, and stood.  

 Apologize. Sometimes I have to move fast, or people are gone. I had a good idea I needed  to apologize to Rose. Sometimes apologies aren’t enough but I try. When it seems like it matters.  So, not that often. Rose mattered, I thought, but Rose was gone, and that was easy to understand.  I don’t blame people for running.  

 Well, I blame two of them. But that’s something else.  

 So then I stood in the foyer while the afternoon got a bit longer, handling an apology no  one would ever hear.  

 The thing is, even when I pinch the saturation just flat, which I try most of the time, I can  still break a thousand colors out where normal people see just one. It happens at random, or  when I’m shocked, or when I’m tired, or when it’s just the least fucking convenient time  possible.  

 The uniform red of everyday stop signs? To my eyes it’s not red or uniform at all, unless I  work hard to make it that way. It’s a lunatic canvas. That’s fifteen thousand colors beating  circles, plankton-orange, weather-blue, cider-purple and all the colors in between those colors,  the colors normal eyes can’t slice the spectrum fine enough to perceive. Just, not red. And  sometimes when the colors shatter just right it catches me, my feelings surge, I go chromatic. My

life used to be nothing but than chroma storm, until I was sixteen. Ten years ago I was passing  out five times a day. So this is better. Baby steps.  

 Unfortunately the visible spectrum’s not the whole problem. The real problem is all the  rest of it, the Higher Colors. All the ultraviolet shades of light and pigment I can see, the things  only the other Fenestram artists of Skysill Beach know about. And the ultraviolet Colors come  with a whole different set of issues, just for me.  

 My life would be better if I just never looked at anything. But Waylon’s forgeries piss me  off. I can’t help coming up here to find and destroy them.