Read Online The Delusionist by Grant Buday - Free Book Online

Strickland’s brazen drunk indifference to everything, including the man who wanted to buy his work. What confidence, what clarity, what perverse defiance. Then there was a film on Van Gogh in which he eats a tube of paint. Cyril had no desire to eat paint, but he envied those three men their focus and energy, their drive and direction; they knew who they were and where they were going and nothing was getting in their way. They did not merely accept their calling, they pursued it, ran it down like wolves. He found an autobiography by Salvador Dali, a man who was as eccentric as surrealism itself. In it Dali pours honey down his chest so he can study the flies that come to feed. One morning after his mother left for work and Cyril had a few hours before his shift at the IGA , he got the honey from the cupboard ready to do his own Salvador Dali. Unfortunately, it was creamed honey, solid. He carved some from the jar with a knife and smoothed it over his chest and lay back in bed with the window open. He heard lawn mowers and the opening and closing of hearse doors in the cemetery. Finally one fly came bumbling in and landed on him and got stuck, one wing whirring pathetically. Eventually another fly circled and got stuck, then a bee, then two more flies. Cyril watched them buzz and struggle. Now what? Was this Existential? He took a shower, still not quite sure what the crazy Spaniard was on about, and wondering if this lack of understanding was a lack of artistic vision.
    With just a week to go before the art school entrance interview, Cyril came home from his shift at the IGA one evening and discovered all eight drawings missing. He found his mother watching TV .
    â€œ . . . My drawings  . . . ”
    â€œThey’re gone,” she said.
    â€œI kind of noticed that. Where have they gone to?”
    She shrugged and kept her eyes on Charlie McCarthy and Edgar Bergen. Cyril watched her watch, then abruptly started searching. The fireplace was clean. The pail under the sink was empty. He went out and looked in the garbage can: nothing.
    â€œDraw flowers or fruit,” she said when he came back in. “People like flowers and fruit. They put them on their walls. Do some nice sunflowers and I’ll buy them.”
    Cyril searched the closets, the attic, behind the furnace. From downstairs he shouted up through the main floor. “I worked hard on those, ma!” He pounded back up the steps and into the living room.
    On the TV screen the wooden dummy’s jaw clacked mockingly up and down. “Why do you have to keep him alive?” she asked.
    â€œI’m going to miss the application deadline.”
    â€œYou know what he did.”
    â€œAre pictures that powerful?”
    â€œHe starved us.”
    Cyril was stymied. “I worked hard on them  . . .” He heard how hollow his words sounded.
    â€œThree million.”
    â€œThey were mine.”
    She was wearing a black cardigan and smoking a cigarette—a habit she’d maintained after Darrel left—feet in their hen-feather slippers on the grey Formica coffee table next to the Province and a stack of Reader’s Digest s. She turned back to the TV . “Better you get trade.”
    â€œYou hate me.”
    â€œYou are my son.”
    â€œYou still hate me.”
    She turned her head slowly like a tank turret and aimed her gaze at him, her eyes wet but tearless, her voice steady. “I love you.”
    â€œIt’s revenge. You’re getting back at me.”
    She swivelled her gaze back to the TV .
    â€œI’ll draw them again.”
    â€œDraw, don’t draw. Just don’t let me see.”

    The interviewer frowned at the picture Cyril had drawn that very morning, torn from his sketchbook and mounted on poster board. The man took up another of the same subject, a be-robed owl whirling dervish-wise, wings out, head tipped, eyes closed. There was a copy of the giddy Stalin on a