“Your turmoil hinders you,” the teacher had told him. “Find peace and you will find your way.” But all he found was futility and discontent even in his best work.
He knew that the greats suffered for their art. He tried to suffer. When he was a teenager, hearing that Van Gogh had shorn off an ear in a fit of delusional pique, he tried it himself. It stung for a few moments until his nanites deadened the pain and got to work repairing the damage. By the next morning the ear had grown back good as new.
Ezra’s older brother, who was in no way Theo van Gogh, told their parents what he had done, and they sent him off to Harsh-School – the kind of place where kids at risk of choosing an unsavory lifestyle were coached in the delights of discipline. Ezra was underwhelmed, because it turned out that Harsh-School wasn’t all that harsh.
Since no one flunked out of Harsh-School, he graduated with a “satisfactory” rating. He had asked the Thunderhead precisely what that meant.
“Satisfactory is satisfactory,” it had told him. “Not good, not bad. Acceptable.”
But as an artist, Ezra wanted to be more than just acceptable. He wanted to be exceptional. Because if he couldn’t be exceptional, what was the point?
In the end, he found work, as all artists do, for there were no starving artists anymore. Now he painted playground murals. Smiling children, big-eyed bunnies, and pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.
“I don’t see what you’re complaining about,” his brother had said. “Your murals are wonderful – everyone loves them.”
His brother had become an investment banker, but since the world economy was no longer subject to fluctuations in the market, it was just another playground with bunnies and rainbows. Sure, the Thunderhead created financial drama, but it was all pretend, and everyone knew it. So to find a greater sense of fulfillment, his brother decided to learn a dead language. Now he could converse fluently in Sanskrit and did so once a week at the local Dead Language Club.
“Supplant me,” Ezra had begged the Thunderhead. “If you have any mercy, please make me someone else.” The idea of having his memories completely erased and replaced with new ones – fictional ones that would feel every bit as real as his own – was an attractive idea to him. But it was not to be.
“I only supplant those who are beyond all other options,” the Thunderhead had told him. “Give it time. You’ll settle into a life you can enjoy. Everyone eventually does.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I will guide you in a direction of fulfillment.”
And then the Thunderhead labeled him unsavory along with everyone else, and that was the end of its guidance.
Of course, he couldn’t tell all of that to the aging Tonist curate. She would not care. All she wanted was a reason to dismiss him, and a monologue of his woes was certainly cause to be turned away.
“I’m hoping the Toll might help me bring meaning to my art,” he told her.
Those aging eyes of hers brightened. “You’re an artist?”
He sighed. “I paint public murals,” he told her, almost apologetically. As it turned out, a skilled mural artist was exactly what the Tonists wanted.
Five weeks later he was in Lenape City, on the docket for a morning audience with the Toll.
“Only five weeks!” said the greeter at the welcome center. “You must be special. Most people who are granted an audience get put on a six-month waiting list!”
He didn’t feel special. He felt, more than anything, out of place. Most people there were devout Tonists, dressed in their drab brown frocks and tunics, intoning together to find transcendent harmonies, or tonal discord, depending on their reason for being here. It was all so much silliness to him, but he did his best not to be judgmental. After all, he had come to them, not the other way around.
There was one scrawny Tonist, with frightening eyes, who tried to draw him into conversation.
“The Toll doesn’t like almonds,” he told Ezra. “I’ve been burning almond orchards, because they are an abomination.”
Ezra picked himself up and moved to the opposite side of the room with the more reasonable Tonists. He supposed everything was relative.
Soon everyone scheduled for a morning audience was gathered, and a Tonist monk who was nowhere near as friendly as the greeter gave them strict instructions.
“If you are not present when you are called for your audience, you will lose your slot. As you approach the arch, you will find the five yellow lines of a treble staff. You are to take off your shoes and place them in the position of C.”
One of the few other non-Tonists present asked which position that was. He was immediately deemed not worthy and expelled.
“You will speak to the Toll only when spoken to. You will cast your eyes down. You will bow upon greeting him, bow upon being dismissed, and leave briskly, as to be considerate to the others who are waiting.”
The buildup was actually making his heart race in spite of himself.
Ezra stepped up when his name was called an hour later, followed the protocol precisely, remembering from childhood music classes which spot on the staff was C, and idly wondered if a trapdoor would open for people who got it wrong, sending them plunging to the water below.
He slowly approached the figure seated beneath the towering arch. The simple chair he sat in was by no means a throne. It was under a heated canopy to protect the Toll from the elements, because the tongue of roadway that extended to the arch was chilly and swept by February winds.
The artist didn’t know what to expect. Tonists claimed that the Toll was a supernatural being – a link between cold, hard science and ethereal spirit, whatever the hell that meant – they were full of their own garbage. But at this point, he didn’t care. If the Toll could give some sort of purpose to calm his soul, then he’d be more than happy to worship the man as the Tonists did. At the very least, he could find out if there was any truth to the rumors that the Thunderhead still spoke to him.
But as he drew nearer, the artist found himself increasingly disappointed. The Toll was not a wizened man – he seemed little more than a boy. He was thin and lackluster, wearing a long, rough-woven purple tunic, covered by an intricately embroidered scapular that draped over his shoulders like a scarf and flowed nearly to the ground. Not surprisingly, the embroidery was some sort of sound pattern.
“Your name is Ezra Van Otterloo, and you’re a mural artist,” the Toll said, as if magically pulling the fact out of the air, “and you want to paint a mural of me.”
Ezra found his respect dwindling even further. “If you know everything, then you know that’s not true.”
The Toll grinned. “I never said I knew everything. In fact, I never said I knew anything at all.” He threw a glance toward the welcome center. “The curates told me that’s why you’re here. But another source tells me that they’re the ones who want the mural – and that you agreed to paint one in return for this audience. But I won’t hold you to it.”
This, Ezra knew, was nothing but smoke and mirrors. It was a scam perpetuated by the Tonists to build their following. Ezra could now see the small device in the Toll’s ear. No doubt he was being fed information by one of the curates. Ezra found himself increasingly angered that he had wasted his time coming here.