Read Online Diary by Chuck Palahniuk - Free Book Online Page B

kids' section, and your wife's in her own personal coma: the art book section.
    What they teach you in art school is that famous old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio and van Eyck, they just traced. They drew the way Tabbi's teacher won't let her. Hans Holbein, Diego Velázquez, they sat in a velvet tent in the murky dark and sketched the outside world that shined in through a small lens. Or bounced off a curved mirror. Or like a pinhole camera, just projected into their tiny dark room through a little hole. Projecting the outside world onto the screen of their canvas. Canaletto, Gainsborough, Vermeer, they stayed there in the dark for hours or days, tracing the building or naked model in the bright sunlight outside. Sometimes they even painted the colors straight over the projected colors, matching the shine of a fabric as it fell in projected folds. Painting an exact portrait in a single afternoon.
    Just for the record, camera obscura is Latin for “dark chamber.”
    Where the assembly line meets the masterpiece. A camera using paint instead of silver oxide. Canvas instead of film.
    They spend all morning here, and at some point Tabbi comes to stand next to her mother. Tabbi's holding a book open in her hands and says, “Mom?” Her nose still on the page, she tells Misty, “Did you know it takes a fire of at least sixteen-hundred degrees lasting seven hours to consume the average human body?”
    The book's got black-and-white photos of burn victims curled into the “pugilist position,” their charred arms pulled up in front of their faces. Their hands are clenched into fists, cooked by the heat of the fire. Charred black prizefighters. The book's called
Fire Forensic Investigation
.
    Just for the record, today's weather is nervous disgust with tentative apprehension.
    Mrs. Terrymore looks up from her desk. Misty tells Tabbi, “Put it back.”
    Today in the library, in the art section, your wife's touching books at random on the reference shelf. For no reason, she opens a book, and it says how when an artist used a mirror to throw an image onto canvas, the image would be reversed. This is why everyone in so many old-master paintings is left-handed. When they used a lens, the image would be upside down. Whatever way they saw the image, it was distorted. In this book, an old woodcut print shows an artist tracing a projection. Across the page, someone's written, “You can do this with your mind.”
    It's why birds sing, to mark their territory. It's why dogs pee.
    The same as the bottom of the table in the Wood and Gold Dining Room, Maura Kincaid's life-after-death message:
    “Choose any book at the library,” she wrote.
    Her lasting effect in pencil. Her homemade immortality.
    This new message is signed
Constance Burton
.
    “You can do this with your mind.”
    At random, Misty pulls down another book and lets it fall open. It's about the artist Charles Meryon, a brilliant French engraver who became schizophrenic and died in an asylum. In one engraving of the French Marine Ministry, a classic stone building behind a row of tall fluted columns, the work looks perfect until you notice a swarm of monsters decending from the sky.
    And written across the clouds above the monsters, in pencil, it says: “We are their bait and their trap.” Signed
Maura Kincaid
.
    With her eyes closed, Misty walks her fingers across the spines of books on the shelf. Feeling the ridges of leather and paper and cloth, she pulls out a book without looking and lets it fall open in her hand.
    Here's Francisco Goya, poisoned by the lead in his bright paints. Colors he applied with his fingers and thumbs, scooping them out of tubs until he suffered from lead encephalopathy, leading to deafness, depression, and insanity. Here on the page is a painting of the god Saturn eating his children—a murky mix of black around a bug-eyed giant biting the arms off a headless body. In the white margin of the page, someone's written: “If you've found