“Hello, Dali,” he heard himself say. Janus looked around as his voice reverberated briefly in the oak paneled gallery to make sure no one else heard him. He had been talking to himself a lot lately, ever since the accident. No one heard him. Or if they did, they didn’t care to acknowledge it.
Now that his wife was finally dead, Janus could get out and do things again. That was a horrible way to put it, he thought, but that’s how it crossed his mind. The coma, the respirator, the hours of talking to Miriam with no response, not even a twitch, had taken its toll on him. The so-called quiet moments, with the maddening cadence of the machine, its tube down her throat, filling her lungs with air, and then letting gravity force the air back out, haunted his wretched sleep.
And when she was gone… well, she was gone months before – drained from the body like some precious fluid… but when the heart that had owned him stopped beating despite the doctors’ best efforts, and they had shut off the machinery and the electronics, and they had left him alone to spend a few last moments with the body that, dead, looked no different than it had looked alive for the prior months, true silence rushed in with a roar that frightened him.
And then, after so many months of effort to keep her alive, everyone suddenly seemed terribly eager to bury her, as if to hide their mistakes, or their mistaken belief that they could save her, despite the months-long gray line drawn on the black monitor screen suspended above her bed.
And as Janus had quieted the clatter and wheeze of the respirator with his own voice, so did he quiet the roar.
He stared at the Dali. “Interesting,” he said aloud, again to no one’s ears but his own. Interesting indeed that he would venture out for the first time in months and, on a whim, divert into the art museum, and wind up here.
Warrior, the placard read.
Janus identified with him – the gaunt face, the distant, tired eyes that reflected… what? The faces of those he conquered? Of the one? Of her?
Janus looked around again. Had he said that out loud?
“No, I didn’t,” he said out loud.
But fear gripped him. He backed away from the painting. Could others read his face as he had read the Warrior’s? He had fought long and hard. He had survived. Could they see her in his eyes? Could they see the freedom he saw, at the top of the ladder on the other side of the door, in the crimped hose clenched in his fist?
“You were a fraud, Dali!” The sound of his voice reverberating in the gallery made Janus aware he had shouted, to the dismay of the others who heard him.
Janus fled to his home where he fought to drown out the silence with his own voice.
