Cover Your Face by Shane Jones
“The problem is you’re the guy who paints fucking purple mountains”
Fiction by Shane James
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There’s a purple mountain. As the man paints the purple mountain he decides on leopard spots. From a distance, the purple mountain is all purple except for forty-five purple spots surrounded with a haze of white canvas.
The man agrees to do an American television show commonly known in the art industry as “the show.”
“A very big step for you,” says the man’s agent. “You’re doing the right thing.”
The man only nods. He walks to his studio and touches the forty-five purple spots with his nose.
“Am I nervous?”
“Yes. Are you nervous about the show? How you will be perceived. How many years without an interview? They will ask why you painted so many spots on the mountain. Hm. How do I put this correctly. Yes. They will ask why you painted a mountain like a purple leopard.”
“The only thing I’m nervous about,” says the man. “Is what you’re advising me now, and what you’re about to say.”
The night before the show, the man enters his studio and paints one spot the color orange. He sleeps all night with a blanket over his face, the fabric caving into his open mouth as he breaths and dreams of nothing but black space and the sad strange feeling of moving through nothing but black space. In the morning, he remembers seeing a single car headlight coming at him through the dark. As the light came closer, he entered the light and the screech of a car engine ringed his neck and he saw a perfect sphere of glassy orange.
“You did this, this, whatever it is you did, on purpose?” asks the agent in the morning.
“I did what I did because it had to be done. It was, was, an impulse. And I don’t see a problem.”
“The problem? The problem is you’re the guy who paints fucking purple mountains with a weird leopard animal thing going on. And now, this.” The man pokes the orange spot. “This here is all LaValle will talk about. Boy. You thought you had it tough before. Well, things just got a whole lot more intense and this here orange spot is your head.”
The man has dinner with his wife and the two discuss the interview. She has plenty of questions, mostly all resorting back to why. There is no reason to allow this interview. Look at all his success by staying silent. Look at all the purple mountains he’s created that no one has ever done before. The man says he has something to say. When his wife asks what that is exactly, the man says it will come out naturally through his hands. Like the purple spots on the painting.
The studio where the show is shot is located on the upper east side of Manhattan. A limo is sent for the man, the gleaming black of the car’s body shark-like through Queens. When the agent knocks on the door the man opens the door to revel that he’s wearing a silk purple robe. Near the heart, a painted orange circle, glossy in the sun.
“Fuck,” says the agent.
On the ride to the show, the man tells his agent that his wife is going to leave him.
“Seriously?”
“No.”
“Then why did you just say that?”
“Just to see your reaction,” says the man. “It’s a good one. If you reacted without some surprise…then I’d be in trouble.”
The man’s agent smiles and relaxes into the black cushion of the limo seats. He sits with his legs splayed wide, the suit pants tight on the thighs with a material that appears to sweat. The thin blue tie, the silken facial complexion with layers of expensive lotion, the manicured weekly haircut…the man studies it all.
When the man comes out of the limo the agent whispers now what the fuck when he notices the man is walking with both hands covering his face.
“You going to keep this up until you walk on stage?” he asks the hands.
In a droned muffle the man says something.
The applause sign lights up and the twenty or so art students with one or two older true believers, clap self-consciously toward the stage which is nothing more than a dark blue sphere holding two brown chairs angled toward each other. The lights are concentrated and are a greasy bright aimed directly on the two chairs.
The show’s host, LaValle, speed walks into the light, one hand raised as if to catch the applause. Once settled in his brown chair, he crosses his legs and adjusts his pant-leg so it adequately covers, but still shows slightly the red and pink striped socks he purchased over the weekend.
After a long and wandering introduction, the hype of finally convincing this reclusive artist to do an interview reaching a breaking point when LaValle notices in the audience a bearded NYU student roll his eyes then reach for his phone, the man is brought onto the stage. He’s covering his face with his hands. From a room backstage, the agent, sitting with another agent who represents an artist who paints little girls in women’s lingerie, says to the television, “Dead man walking right there. LaValle is going to punish him for acting out first. For taking all the attention from him from the get-go.”
The other agent says, “Does it matter? He’s going to sell.”
“LaValle is full of hate. He doesn’t love art anymore. Think about LaValle, like early LaValle, and look at LaValle the past five years.”
Once seated, with the assistance of two interns who help the man into his seat, LaValle smirks at the audience and says, “Well, I told you this was special.”
Terrible laughter.
For a few moments there’s silence as LaValle flips through a thin stack of index cards, the artist sitting freakishly upright in his robe, hands flat and tombstone-upright against his face. Audience members bob in their seats from left to right, as if the correct angle will show them the face no one has ever seen.
“So would you say that this,” says LaValle, “is a work in progress? This hands over your face act?”
The man nods.
There’s a few laughs from the audience and someone says, “He’s a genius” to which LaValle hears and smiles.
“Can you please,” says LaValle, “comment on your beginnings as an artist. Tell us about the red squares, the plastic bags in trees series, everything featured in that wonderful first show at Woods.”
The man, still with hands over his face, doesn’t move. His body appears to sit even more upright, somehow the body stretches upward and into the lights.
Standing now, the agent a few feet from the television. “What in the fuck is he doing? He agrees to do the show and then he pulls this shit?”
“Easy,” says the other agent. “He’s going to sell big time. People will eat this up. That should be your concern.”
“He’s never acted like this though,” says the man’s agent. Then: “How much more will he sell?”
“A lot. And just think. If he gets really crazy he might kill himself and whoa doggie, that’s where the big bucks are.”
On stage LaValle begins firing off questions, each one the man either nods to, or shakes his head no. There a question about the new orange circle on a purple mountain painting. LaValle points to the orange circle on the man’s robe and the man says nothing while circling his head in a bizarre stretch.
LaValle isn’t acting like LaValle.
“Tell us,” says LaValle leaning forward, trying to see between the man’s fingers, “what is your work about?”
The audience goes silent inside a deeper silence. The man doesn’t nod or shake his head. What he does is this: he separates two fingers half an inch on his right hand and shows one blue eye. Cameras flash. Posters will be made.
When time is up, LaValle storms off the stage, his index cards scattered. The man remains sitting with his hands over his face until two assistants come out and guide him off stage. Before being put back in the limo, the man hears LaValle arguing with his agent.
On the limo drive home the man’s agent asks if he’s okay and why wouldn’t he show his face. The man has removed his hands from his face.
“Because,” says the man. “My face is like every other face. No one wants that.”
The agent bites his bottom lip. “You do realize you won’t be invited back?”
“That’s the goal, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“To make money.”
“I’m not following.”
The agent drinks from a tiny plastic bottle of water as the limo takes a wide turn through an intersection of shirtless children.
“I just want to make things and have no face,” says the man. “I don’t want questions and I don’t want words and I don’t want my eyes.”
The agent looks at the man while twisting the tiny plastic top to the water bottle.
“And I imagine,” says the man, “that what I just did will cause more harm than good. Somehow I thought I could do it, like everyone else. But I don’t want any of it because all of it eats the face. I had to protect my face from them.”
The agent swishes water around his mouth while looking out the window. “Well, we’ll see what happens,” says the agent. “You either sell or you don’t. But are you okay? I mean, do you feel like suicidal or anything?”
The man leans forward and places his head between his knees. The agent doesn’t notice because he’s still looking out the window, not at the sun, but at a woman waiting at bus stop with five children. When the light turns green, the man concentrates on the black space he’s created between his face and the floor of the limo.
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Shane Jones is the author of Light Boxes, The Failure Six, and A Cake Appeared. A new novel, Daniel Fights a Hurricane, will be published by Penguin in August. Learn more about Shane Jones' newest novel at the official website: www.danielfightsahurricane.com
His location: Albany, New York.