“Don’t do this to me, Carl. Don’t do this to us.”

  “Jesus, Tina. There is no us, okay? Not any more. I’m sorry, I really am, but that’s the way it is.” He started to step around her, but she grabbed his arm and stopped him.

  “Don’t walk away.” She spoke through clenched teeth. “We’re still talking.”

  Now anger did twist Carl’s features and he pulled free of her grip. “No, we’re finished. In every sense of the word.” Then more gently, “Just let me go to work, okay?”

  Tina became aware of a faint sound coming from somewhere behind her, a soft squeeek-squeeek-squeeek of wheels turning. She ignored it. “Not until you agree to try to fix things between us—and we can fix them, Carl, I know we can. It’ll take some work, and some time, but in the end it’ll be as good as before. Better, even!”

  “This is the end, Tina. Accept it and move on.” Carl gave her a last look that was a mixture of love and regret, resentment and pity, before walking toward the entrance of his office building.

  Squeeek-squeeek-squeeek. Louder now. Closer.

  “It’s not over, Carl!” she shouted. She took a step forward until she was standing at the edge of a large puddle. “Do you hear me? It’s NOT!”

  Other people heading into work turned to look at her, but Carl wasn’t one of them. He just kept going.

  The squeeeking drew up behind her and then stopped.

  “I’m not going to turn around,” she said, almost smugly.

  She heard a rustle of cloth, a soft grunt of effort, then shuffling footsteps. The little woman had gotten off her bike. She hobbled to Tina’s side and they stood there, silent, watching as the last few men and women made their way into the building to begin their workday. Moments later the parking lot was empty except for the two of them.

  “It’s not an illusion,” Tina said, still stubbornly refusing to look down at the little woman. “Control is possible; all you have to do is—”

  “Work hard enough,” the little woman finished for her in a mocking voice.

  Infuriated, Tina turned to the woman, intending to … to … she wasn’t sure what, but intending to do something. But when she saw the woman’s face, she froze. She was more fishlike than before—eyes wide, black and empty; cheeks covered with a scattering of scales; tiny gill slits on each side of her neck, opening and closing as they struggled to extract oxygen from the unforgiving air. But there was something else, something familiar about the shape of her nose, eyebrows, forehead, cheekbones, chin … Then Tina realized where she had seen those features before: on her mother’s face—and in the mirror every morning.

  The little woman’s pucker of a mouth stretched open in a hideous parody of smile, revealing twin rows of tiny sharp teeth. Then with a swift, sleek motion she dove headfirst into the puddle, sending up a splash of water that smelled like rotting algae and dead fish.

  Tina watched until the ripples subsided and the surface of the puddle grew still once more.

  Walk away, she told herself. Just turn around, go get in your car, and go home.

  But she didn’t. The puddle was just a puddle, not even an inch of rainwater over blacktop, and she was going to prove it.

  She took a step forward.

  Water around her, below her, above her … dark, so dark … but she’s not scared this time. She’s not a kid anymore, and she can swim, swim like a goddamned fish. She’s in control.

  She kicks toward the surface. Her wet clothes make swimming awkward, but she concentrates on remaining calm and strokes harder. Soon she’s rising through the black water. Up, up, up … and still there is no light, only darkness surrounding her on all sides. Her lungs begin to burn for air, but she ignores their need and keeps swimming.

  A thought occurs to her then: what if there is no surface—just an endless ocean of Nothingness above her?

  She dismisses the thought immediately. There is a surface because she says there is, and she’ll reach it. All she has to do is work hard enough.

  She senses unseen shapes moving in the water around her, circling, keeping pace with her, but she pays them no attention, continues moving her arms and legs, continues rising toward where the surface is—where it has to be.

  Rising … rising… rising …

  * * *

  1 Allegedly, the infamous 16th Century mathematician and alchemist John Dee, along with his assistant Edward Kelley (who claimed to communicate with angels) had enjoyed the patronage of the Haywards when the pair returned to England after years of wandering Europe.

  2 It has been speculated that the woman depicted in Franz von Stuck’s infamous painting The Sin was Octavia Shell. The painter almost certainly met von Kreitz, and perhaps Hugo Ayling, while on a brief, little-noted excursion to England in his 21st year (the same year in which he was admitted to the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe); the incident is mentioned briefly in the third chapter of an unfinished and untitled autobiography:

  “To celebrate my birthday, I went (with my mother’s blessing) across the sea to England, then directly to London and the Trismegistus Bookstore. It was on my second day of haunting the Tris (as it was known to its habitués) that at last I encountered the object of my voyage, the strange and terrible figure of Master von Kreitz, of whom I had heard such extraordinary things. He was a man who seemed ever just at the point of uttering some truth that would shock one to one’s core. That afternoon, as he thrust at me book after book (shamefully, none of which I could read), the Master inserted his ruined visage into a space two inches before mine and hissed, ‘Do you not yet understand that what is not painted has more spiritual significance than what is? That we have it in our power to bring forth a new reality?’ Before I could respond (before I had time in which to tell him an untruth), he produced a sketchbook of extraordinary size and gave me to gaze upon some half-dozen of its pages. Their contents have marked me all of my life. Henceforth, I knew that one of Art’s essential burdens has always been the depiction if not the enacting of the ever-shifting, ever-ungrounded, ambiguous contest between darkness and light, the greater strength being always that in which darkness can be seen to subsume the light. This was the case when I brought forth The Wild Chase, Lucifer, and, in a portrait of a woman known to us both, The Sin.” [Franz von Stuck, unfinished autobiography, trans. P. Straub (unpublished, n.d.).]

  3 Unlike such groups as the Golden Dawn, Gather, Wren, and Shell appeared much more interested in the applied study of those forms of ceremonial magic described in such medieval texts as The Lesser Key of Solomon.

  4 Despite Ayling’s expulsion from the Royal Academy for unspecified charges of “decadence,” Frith had been so impressed with the young man’s painting and skill that he readily took Ayling on as an apprentice. Within a year, however, Ayling was spending more and more of his time at Blane, arriving at Frith’s studio disheveled and distracted, his clothing in disarray, his manner slyly insubordinate. In an unpublished fourth volume of journals, Frith records both his unalloyed admiration for Ayling’s artistic abilities and his growing dismay at the evidence of his assistant’s gathering dissipation:

  “I cared not that he had been expelled from the Academy, and even less for his inversion. From the first, Ayling demonstrated great technical skill in the delicacy and shading of his brushwork, and within months I had entrusted him with much more than the backgrounds and passage-work of his initial tasks. With Ayling’s loyal and oft-inspired assistance, I found myself capable of taking on a greater number of commissions and fulfilling these with greater speed. Upon occasion, I am unashamed to admit, I was in fact ravished by the apprentice’s work. At several moments, I felt I had more to learn from him than the reverse. Only when [Ayling] began to spend every weekend at Blane did I begin to sense the dread presence of the inadmissible whispering within my studio’s walls.” [William Powell Frith, Memoirs, Fourth Volume, (unpublished manuscript in the collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University, n.d.).]

  5 It was after viewing Ayling’s then work-in-progress, The Gathered Clan, that Frith was finally forced to dismiss his apprentice:

  “I found myself for a moment unable to breathe before the queer monstrosity [The Gathered Clan], so greatly did I suffer the sensation that its surface did in some impossible fashion contain movement. I never before in my life endured so pronounced a sensation of wrongness before a work of art. Though it ostensibly depicts a handsome English family, servants, and their hangers-on, the true subject of the painting seemed something altogether other: I sensed the approach of a hot wind from some nameless region of torment and despair.”

  6 For von Kreitz, the appearance of Jack the Ripper in London’s East End constituted some mysterious sign for which he had apparently been waiting. The arrival of the Ripper was a clear indication, von Kreitz told the younger painters, that the grand fabric of the conventional world was slipping and losing coherence. “The Ripper,” von Kreitz whispered, “is the palm leaf to our new Jerusalem, the mule upon which we shall ride into the transfigured City.”

  7 MacDonald took holy orders in 1892 and died four years later of mysterious causes at the Monastery of St. Dunstan, in the words of his confessor Fr. Noyce, “shaking, trembling, crying out in pain, and most grievously beseeching the Lord’s mercy.”

  8 Hugo Ayling owes his survival, and that of The Gathered Clan, to the accident of his having fallen asleep beneath his easel on the lawn at the front of the estate, where he had taken the canvas for the purpose of making some final adjustments.

  9 Eight years later Mrs. Shell would reappear as the fiancée of the prominent Conservative politician Lord Auric Twysdon. Her “ageless beauty” was much remarked upon, as was her bewitching charm. Upon the death of her husband in 1905, the wealthy Lady Twysdon removed herself to America, where she was reunited with “Lord” Wren in Climax City, Michigan. The pair went on to found Aetherism, an authoritarian religious cult. [Rodney Messner, We Were Aetheric (Grand Rapids, MI: Sephiroth Publications, 1919).]

  10 Richard Dadd had likely been an influence on von Kreitz and the painters of the New Tremor. Prior to the second fire, von Kreitz had informed Baron Hayward that “chief amongst the works of art to survive into the glorious Dark Age to come” was Dadd’s masterpiece, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Von Kreitz had apparently visited Dadd in Bethlem sometime after his arrival in the UK. Curiously, in his former life Dadd had been an accomplished graduate of the Royal Academy, and a member of “The New Clique” of British painters, along with none other than Hugo Ayling’s later employer, William Powell Frith. Von Kreitz also referred to a specific paragraph from Dadd’s autobiographical musings upon the great transformative event of his life, a lengthy 1842 tour of Egypt with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips:

  “On my return from travel, I was roused to a consideration of subjects which I had previously never dreamed of, or thought about, connected with self; and I had such ideas that, had I spoken of them openly, I must, if answered in the world's fashion, have been told I was unreasonable. I concealed, of course, these secret admonitions. I knew not whence they came, although I could not question their propriety, nor could I separate myself from what appeared my fate. My religious opinions varied and do vary from the vulgar; I was inclined to fall in with the views of the ancients, and to regard the substitution of modern ideas thereon as not for the better. These and the like, coupled with an idea of a descent from the Egyptian god Osiris…” [Patricia Alleridge, The Late Richard Dadd: 1817-1866 (London: Tate Gallery, 1974), pp. 22-23.]

  “Had Dadd but brought his art into greater alignment with his concealed thoughts and considerations,” von Kreitz told the Baron, “he would ended not in a madhouse but on a throne.”

  11 According to the Rice Lake Telegraph of August 13, 1930, Hoxton Hayward was murdered by a never-identified man “in a Stetson hat and box-back coat.” Following his death, the painting passed into the hands of his American family, where it spent two decades in the cellar of Robert Hayward’s house on N. 44th Street in Milwaukee. The painting languished in his cellar until it was claimed by his ex-wife, Margaret (Margot) Hayward Mountjoy, who attempted to have it installed in a private art gallery established by her millionaire husband Harry Mountjoy. Rejected by Mr. Mountjoy as “too bizarre,” the painting was given to a brother, Tillman Hayward, who hung it in the den of his house in Columbus, Ohio. In 1958, Tillman Hayward’s wife loaned The Gathered Clan—without her husband’s knowledge or consent—to the Milwaukee Art Gallery, where, claimed as personal property by both Margot and Tillman in a pair of contesting lawsuits, it has remained locked, unseen, in storage ever since.

  12 Franz Marc (1880-1916), one of the founders of the Blaue Reiter group, had heard tales of von Kreitz from his father, Wilhelm Marc, a landscape painter briefly under his spell. In his unpublished autobiography Fruchtbares Leben eines Kunstlers, the elder Marc describes “the many occasions [when] I told my art-smitten little boy of my few but profound meetings with Master von Kreitz, both in Mannheim and Munich, the cities where I sought him out. I was never a philosopher, and much of what the great painter told me I did not have the capacity to understand. Of contradiction, which he found essential to ‘true sight,’ his master-goal and central teaching, I grasped little. Yet I believed whole-heartedly with him that painting of such true sight would be capable of altering in some way the material of fact. Any person who has been stirred to tears when beholding a great and speaking work of art knows this to be true.”

  Swimming Lessons

  The humidity was so thick, you could take a bite out of the air and chew. Scott sat on the hard plastic bleachers in the front row, close to the rec center’s pool, trying to ignore the dull ache in his lower back and wishing he had a more comfortable place to sit. Getting old, he thought.

  Kelsey was at the far end of the pool with the rest of her class, holding onto the edge of the pool for support as she bobbed up and down in unison with the other kids. Scott supposed there was some point to the exercise, but it looked like all they were doing was learning to play Marco Polo.

  The pool was filled with children of varying ages, from toddlers to middle-schoolers. At seven, Kelsey fell somewhere in between. The kids’ parents filled the bleachers, sitting hunched over, probably feeling the same ache in their lower backs as Scott did, their faces covered with slick sheens of sweat. Some talked listlessly on cell phones, some stared at open books with expressions of mild disinterest, and others chatted without energy or enthusiasm. They all looked as tired as Scott felt.

  He was here alone. Carley had to work this morning, even though it was a Saturday. She scheduled all their daughter’s activities and chauffered Lindsey to them, often alone—something of a sore point between them. One of many these days.

  Scott wiped sweat from his forehead and watched his daughter swim. The kids in her class were now lying on their backs in the water, holding onto yellow foam boards and kicking their legs with froglike motions as they swam backward.

  He sighed, and the sound was echoed by the parents around him. Sweat was dripping off of them now as if it were the height of August instead of early March.

  Scott wondered for perhaps the twentieth time that morning why Carley had felt it necessary to go into the office today. Sure, they had an ever-growing mountain of bills to pay, but things weren’t that desperate. She’d gone in last Saturday, too. He wondered if she were having an affair, wondered if he really cared. He wished he were having an affair, wished he were having something.

  He let out a deeper sigh this time, this one echoed just as deeply by the other bleacher-parents.

  Lindsey laughed as she finally reached the other side of the pool, and her teacher praised her determination.

  Scott wished he felt as carefree, that a simple word or two of praise could delight him so easily. Had it ever? he wondered. He couldn’t remember.

  Sweat ran down his chest and back, soaking his clothes. Rivulets trickled down his legs, past his ankles, began pooling around his shoes. The acrid smell of chlorine seared his nasal passages, and he told himself that it was the pool water he smelled, nothing else. More puddles formed at the feet of the other parents and chlorine-scented sweat ran down the bleachers in widening streams.

  So many worries … unsatisfying marriages, soul-grinding jobs, perpetual bills, noncommittal lovers, inadequacies both real and imagined, unfulfilled dreams, diminished expectations …

  Scott glanced at the thermometer mounted on the wall. Ninety-two degrees. God, it was stifling in here! The pool water looked so cool, so calm, so inviting …

  So free.

  He heard Lindy’s laughter as he reached up to smear away more sweat. His fingers sank into the wet flesh of his forehead, but he felt no pain. As if the action broke the surface tension of his body, Scott’s form shuddered and collapsed into water. He felt a surge of a half-remembered emotion that he thought might have been happiness as his liquid substance splashed his seat, flowed onto the floor, and slid toward the edge of the pool. He was joined by the other parents, and their watery substances merged, flowed into the pool, and together they lost themselves in joyous oblivion.

  Their children continued to swim and splash, not noticing that the bleachers were empty, laughing as they slurped in water and spit great mouthfuls of their parents at each other.

  Surface Tension

  You’re sitting at a window-side table in your favorite coffee shop. You’ve been here for—you check your cell phone for the time—almost three hours. You’ve had three cups of coffee (half-caff, two sugars, three creams) and two scones (one cinnamon, one blueberry). You brought a book with you, the latest volume in your favorite mystery series, but it lies on the table, unopened.