The Tesseract School

Canvases crowded the lofty, well-lit atelier. Darrow let his eyes rove around the room, noting its air of sloppy creative intensity. Paint splashes trailed across the floor, and even dotted the furniture and walls. Turning, Darrow saw there was a long table against the wall behind him, next to the door he'd just entered. A tray covered with an assortment of pastries -- probably two dozen in all, of various types and flavors -- sat on the table, along with an urn Darrow assumed held hot coffee. A stack of paper cups next to the urn implied that a small crowd was expected.

Was the artist about to host an opening here, in his creative space?

Darrow took another look, inspecting the canvases that sat on easels or propped against walls, work benches, armchairs. They were everywhere, and they all seemed to communicate horror, terror, violence, and death, with warped perspectives and a predominance of black and various grey tones. Standing out starkly were streaks and sprays of neon lime-green, eerie splotches of red, and thickly applied globs of white that looked as though they had been set and shaped with a trowel.

As Darrow frowned, peering at one large painting in particular, the constituent elements began to coalesce into an image... and then a story. A towering block of dark reddish-brown loomed over a winding grey river... the river resolved before Darrow's eyes into a mass of people, arms raised and hands clasped behind their heads, as though fending off lashes from a whip...

And there, that black, vague, fork-shaped space -- that was the man who wielded the whip. There was something of a multitude implied in the sinuously shaped space; it seemed writhing, and sinister. The blocky rectangle set next to the grey river of suffering humanity was a boxcar... many boxcars, stretching into the distance, like a damp bank limning the river. The grey seemed to be a mass of shabby uniforms, maybe prison garments, and now Darrow could even make out faces, twisted in expressions of pain and fear. Darrow leaned closer, captivated, his attention zeroing in on one face in particular.

Then he noticed the pink dots scattered across the surface of the river... no, not dots, tiny triangles, unnaturally precise and acute, clearly pointed and crisply in focus, in contrast to the muddy, wavering character of the rest of the painting. The tiny pink triangles stood out in multitudes, more and more of them, like stars manifesting in a twilight sky as the fixed eye gazed...

Darrow tore his attention away from the canvas. It was lurid, horrifying, and hypnotic. He felt dread and anxiety twist through him. This was definitely not happy viewing.

"Most people find my work disturbing," a voice announced, carrying through the large space as though in a cavern -- or a cathedral. Darrow couldn't pinpoint the voice based on direction, since it seemed to come from all around, but after a moment he didn't need to. Encenio Morales stood before him, faded jeans and yellowed T-shirt almost flowing off his too-thin form, paint splotches scattered across his person the same way they marked the floor and walls.

"Are you expecting others?" Darrow asked, half-turning to indicate the pastry-laden table. As he did so, his eye fell on another canvas by the door -- it looked like two cubes, one nestled inside the other, with the edges of the smaller cube attached by slanted planes to the inner edges of the larger cube.

"The refreshments are for the party," Morales said. "When the rest of you jack-booted thugs arrive."

Darrow turned back to the painter, puzzled and surprised. "As far as I know," he said, "I am the only one coming to talk to you this morning. And I hope I don't fit the description of a 'jack-booted thug.' "

Morales smiled, stepped closer, and held out a hand. He had a handsome face, a little lined and weathered, and Darrow found himself looking more closely than he usually did when interviewing someone in a professional capacity. But there was something about Morales, something Darrow's eye didn't wish to surrender.

"Encenio Morales," he said. "And you're...?"

"Special Agent Henry Darrow, FBI." Darrow released Morales' hand and gestured at his own lapel. "You want to see my identification?"

"Skip it," Morales said. "I guess you're here about the ravings on the Internet, that I'm some sort of serial killer?"

"Are you?" Darrow asked, reflexively.

"I might paint horrible images, Agent Darrow, but my only crime is to show things as I see them. I don't make the world the place it is."

Darrow kept his gaze trained on Morales as the painter turned and made his way across the space, headed toward a cluster of canvases stacked toward the back. Morales turned to see whether Darrow was following; then Darrow saw what it was that made the man's face so arresting. Despite his handsome grin, Morales had a strained, weary look. Haunted from the visions that tormented him until he committed them to paint? Or worn out from battles with a guilty conscience night after night?

His expression was not so different from the faces in his paintings. Darrow knew many, many of the man's works from having pored over dozens of gallery catalogues and spending hours online, looking into allegations that Morales had taken the themes for his works from grisly real-life killings and other crimes.

The catch was that Morales had been painting these works for decades, and the crimes his canvases seemed to echo had actually taken place years after the paintings had been completed. Ari Lipschitz, an art dealer in Tampa, Florida, had raised the alarm when he'd noticed an old canvas by Morales that seemed to address the serial kidnappings, rapes, and murders of a number of children in the area -- four girls and three boys over a three-year period. The painting in question depicted seven small, juvenile figures, four seeming to be female and three male. The canvas dated to twelve years before the first child was taken, but Lipschitz posited that Morales had used the painting as a way of visualizing the crime well in advance of committing it.

There was nothing to indicate that Morales had been in the Tampa area when any of the children disappeared, but the charge had gained currency online in art forums and true crime chat rooms. Darrow could understand why: The faces of the children in the canvas were strikingly similar to those of the victims. The features were not cartoonish, but they were warped and distorted -- as though seen through a lens of suffering anguish, or insanity. Even so -- this was what Lipschitz claimed, anyway -- there was no denying that these were the same seven children.

A furor had broken out in art circles, among conspiracy theorists, and finally the mass media. Darrow's superiors had taken notice and, not wanting to risk a situation in which the bureau risked criticism for taking no action when the painter might be shown to be somehow connected to the crimes his paintings apparently depicted. Then they chose Darrow for the case.

It was only the latest in a string of oddball assignments Darrow had drawn. He couldn't help asking himself whether he'd pissed somebody off, or unwittingly demonstrated a special ability for solving strange crimes. Whatever the reason, Darrow had become the FBI's go-to guy for the weird and inexplicable.

Before coming here to Morales' New York City studio, Darrow had paid a visit to Lipschitz's gallery in Tampa. Lipschitz had seemed certain that Morales was painting from experience, or at least intention; he'd been positively rabid in his insistence that Morales was a murderer, and worse. Darrow began to suspect that some underlying feud between the two was motivating Lipschitz's animus toward Morales. When Darrow pointed out the fact that the painting Lipschitz claimed was Exhibit A had been executed more than a decade before the crime the art dealer was campaigning to pin on the artist, Lipschitz launched into a raging tirade.

It was no wonder there had been such a long lapse between the painting's completion and the first victim, Lipschitz had told Darrow. So much time went by between the painting and the child killings simply because Morales had been waiting for his first victim -- a girl who would look like the girl in his painting. Her name had been Lara Vigil. She'd disappeared one August morning, and been found almost four years later in a mass grave where the remains of the other victims also rested.

The painted version of Lara Vigil, if that was indeed what it was, startled the viewer both for its violence and its chilling deadness. The painted girl's features looked slack and void, mouth agape, eyes staring slightly off-kilter, her abdomen twin bursts of crimson. Darrow could admit to understanding Lipschitz's argument, given that the real life victim had been raped and then practically eviscerated. The killer had slashed and hacked her open, and then clumsily removed her liver and spleen.

The other children had similarly been mutilated. Lipschitz was eager to point out in detail how the painting appeared to reflect... or predict... those bodily insults as well. Darrow clung to his professional objectivism, but noted that Lipschitz was correct: The parallels were eerie... no, they were downright sickening.

But that didn't prove anything, least of all that Morales was some sort of monster --�and especially given the timing. Even if Morales had waited all those years for a suitable victim -- someone who resembled the girl in the painting --�that didn't explain why the other victims resembled the remaining figures in the canvas, faces and clothing alike matching with uncanny precision those of the murdered children.

Darrow just couldn't see the accusation of murder as credible. What was going on here was something else... something much more mysterious, maybe even more frightening than the work of a serial killer.

Even so, having seen that one painting, Darrow found himself flashing back to its hideous distortions and wild, yet precise and forensic, indications of physical mayhem. As Darrow had continued his research, looking over images of Morales' corpus of work and cross-referenced the images with criminal cases around the country, he'd started to see other uncannily accurate depictions -- and not only of murders and other violent crimes against individuals. He also spotted what seemed to be a painting of a nightclub fire, made three years before the club burned. There was a canvas that portrayed, in spookily accurate detail, the aftermath of a carjacking in Philadelphia that took place nine years later -- an SUV left in the middle of a street, stripped and burned.

Indeed, fire was a favorite theme: Morales had more than a dozen canvases showing what appeared to be tenement fires, and a few that seemed to depict factories burning down. One beautiful, terrible canvas wound black and orange into a diabolical conflagration by night, behind what seemed to be a river lit up with reflections of high, intense flames, the sinking silhouettes of houseboats caught in perfect miniature. Darrow had yet to match this painting with any similar event, but once he did -- and he expected that he would -- he knew he'd have to ask local authorities to look into the case files, to determine whether the blaze had been suspicious and, if so, whether any suspects had been identified or arrested.

"Lipschitz is certainly having a field day," Morales said, referencing the Tampa art dealer who'd started the fuss. "There's nothing that girl likes more than a little drama with her morning coffee. Speaking of which, why don't you help yourself?" Morales nodded toward the table of refreshments.

"No thanks, I'm on duty," Darrow said, taking note of Morales calling Lipschitz by the feminine pronoun. Did the two men have a romantic history? Had things ended badly between them? That might explain the venom with which Lipschitz prosecuted his case against the painter.

"I've examined a number of your works, Mr. Morales," Darrow continued, "and there are a number of works that do appear to depict actual killings and also other tragic incidents..."

"Yes, Lipschitz has started blogging about those as well," sighed Morales. "And some guy from Piedmont says he thinks a painting I did that shows a Cessna airplane crashing into a barge proves that I have terrorist friends. Then there are the conspiracy theories about the painting of a construction crane toppling off a building in Chicago..."

"Which you painted three years before that accident happened," Darrow said. "And the painting shows very clearly what the building looks like, not to mention the buildings in the vicinity. It's a skillful rendering. It's also dead-on accurate. It can't simply be coincidence."

"But it's also not terrorism or any other criminal activity," Morales said, pulling a canvas free from the stack he was inspecting. He turned to Darrow, hefting the canvas.

The painting was a self-portrait, but one marred by violent blue and yellow streaks. Through the middle of the scene a bright red spike hurled itself forth, piercing the image of Morales through the heart.

"Next week," Morales said, "this is what happens to me." Darrow lifted his eyes from the painting to meet Morales' gaze. "I painted this fifteen years ago," the painter added.

"This is a possibility I considered," Darrow murmured, walking toward the painting. "You're painting the future." Hearing his own voice say those words, he felt he might have an inkling as to why he kept getting the assignments he did: Because he was willing to think so far outside the box.

"Yes," Morales said. "That, if anything, is my crime." He set the canvas down, then slumped down on a stool. "It's not the first time the art world has been rocked by scandal over choices of style and theme. Picasso and Brach created quite a stir, you know, by daring to depart from traditional linear perspective. With cubism, they chopped up space and rearranged visual perception. If I'm going to be saddled with these visions of horrible things, I decided I might as well try to found my own school of artistic thought."

"A school of prescience?" Darrow asked.

"I call it the Tesseract school," Morales replied, his weary grin returning. "I'm chopping and folding the fourth dimension of time the way Picasso played with spatial relationships. Dragging the temporal elements of past and future into a single statement, where they can play off each other, reflect each other... That painting you like so well, with the mass of people in the grey coats? That's history repeating. It was the Jews in the early 1940s, in Germany, in Poland... A few years from now, right here in America, it's going to be gays. Trans people. So-called 'libertines.' Atheists. Whatever, whoever. The unworthy. The 'suspect classes.' "

"That's a pretty extreme comparison to make," Darrow said. "President Kirsch may be for too far on the right for most people's taste, but they did elect him; he still draws his power from a system of government that provides checks and balances; this is still America. We're still the envy of the free world for our very freedoms."

Morales chuckled. "I see you know who signs your paychecks," he said. "Yes, I grant you, this is still America --�the land of the free and all of that," he said, his voice suddenly louder, as if to forestall Darrow's further objections. "America's become a tolerant place recently, far more broadly and rapidly than anybody might have thought even a decade ago. But do you know that a similar flourishing of freedom and acceptance was flowering in the 1920s? The Great Depression nipped that in the bud, and wiped out all the progress that sexual minorities enjoyed in that brief window of time. It was Weimar right here at home, before Weimar happened, and no one today remembers it."

"The Great Depression?" Darrow asked.

"A crisis created thanks to greed and recklessness on a major scale. A completely human, and completely predictable, fuck-up. But what happened? America reacted to a man-made catastrophe by acting as though it was God's punishment for our loose, wicked ways. Maybe it was punishment, of a karmic sort, for moral laxness... but the guilty parties were the bankers and businessmen, not gays. The perpetrators who survived the economic fallout never even faced the moral backlash. Blaming the 'sinners' made it safe for the people who had done the harm to hole up, lay their plans for the future, and eventually commit the very same financial crimes in 2008. We pulled ourselves back from the brink that time, but there's nothing to stop them from doing it yet again. Which is what's going to happen, Agent Darrow, and not so long from now. They're moving in. Time is running out."

It sounded as though Morales had an axe of his own to grind. But Darrow had enough conspiracy theories on his plate at the moment; he didn't need to sample any more just yet. The agent held his peace and let Morales talk himself out. When the painter fell silent, Darrow spoke up.

"I'm not a student of economic history. What I need to know is whether your paintings reflect horrors you've seen, or crimes you've committed... or crimes you plan to commit." Darrow looked meaningfully at a large canvas in which a glass skyscraper stood wreathed in orange and black. It might have been something akin to 9/11, or it might have been a scene from "The Towering Inferno."

"Flames and death," whispered Morales. "No. I don't commit these acts of destruction. I don't know who does. I don't know where or when, but what you see in that painting is going to happen."

"Is it a warning?" Darrow asked.

"It is what all art is -- the artist seeing to communicate and express. Is it a warning? Maybe. Is it art? That might be the more essential question. One thing I can tell you is that Lipschitz's hysterics have been good for sales. You Feds, you're not the only ones taking an interest in my work these days." Morales' grin widened into a smile, an expression radiant with pleasure and triumph.

Darrow felt a surge of revulsion, but also sympathy. How could Morales hope to profit off disaster and suffering? But on the other hand, having suffered so much in witnessing the things he saw and in committing them to paint, wasn't he entitled to a little recognition -- even a little celebration? Something to make the terrifying visions worth enduring? Wasn't art a means of processing and understanding extreme events? Saturn devouring his own children. Romans carrying off the women of the Sabines. Follies and horrors, orgies and bacchanalian frenzies... All of those things the subjects of the Renaissance painters, and no one accused the Old Masters of moral deficiency for envisioning those episodes of violence and chaos. And who knew but that Morales' gift might not one day be taken seriously and used to prevent disasters and crimes before they could unfold...

There was a loud bang, and a confused uproar of shouts. Darrow whirled to see the door had been forced off its top hinge by a blow from a battering ram; a small army of men in black, wearing helmets and bulletproof vests and brandishing large weapons, poured into the atelier.

Their shouts were a confusion of orders: "Hands up!" "Don't move!" "Get on the floor!" "Now!"

Darrow raised his hands as the crowd of men rushed toward him, but they all simply ran past, ignoring him and tackling Morales to the floor.

"Stop resisting!" yelled one black-geared man, though Morales wasn't putting up any fight at all. If anything, he seemed to have relaxed into the fray.

The man who had yelled pulled Morales' head back by the hair, then slammed him face first into the floor. Another man looped a plastic tie around the painter's wrists and yanked tight and hard, the plastic constricting hard around his hands.

"Fellas, take it easy on him," Darrow cried.

"Who asked you, Feeb?" one of the men snarled.

Darrow grew angry. "So you know who I am? You know this is my suspect in a case I'm working on, and this is what you do? Who are you? Do you have an arrest warrant? Because all I have is an investigation here, nothing actionable."

"You keep interfering with us, and your conduct will actionable," the snarling man shot back.

"Back down," another black-garbed man snapped, stepping up and interposing himself between his colleague and Darrow.

Other men were yanking Morales to his feet by his bound arms, pulling his shoulder back and causing him to yelp.

Darrow turned to the man who seemed to be in charge. "Is it necessary to be so rough? He's not fighting you."

"This is how we treat terrorists," the man replied in a hard tone.

"How about some I.D., friend?" Darrow shot back.

A small knot of men half-dragged Morales past, toward the ruined door. Morales, his nose running blood, caught Darrow's eye.

"Don't worry about me, Agent," Morales said. "Look to your own future."

"Shut up," one of the men ordered, giving Morales a shove that almost sent him sprawling. The other men yanked hard on him once again to keep him on his feet. Morales yelped a second time.

Darrow turned back to the man in charge. "You know I'm FBI," he barked into the man's face. "You'd do better to show the respect the agency deserves."

"I've done exactly that," the man tossed off dismissively, and then shoved past Darrow, deliberately body checking him with a shoulder.

The knot of men in black passed out of the room like a storm cloud. They left no one behind to gather evidence, photograph the scene, or begin a search of the premises. They couldn't possibly have believed their own story that Morales was a terrorist, or they would never have left the atelier unsecured.

Darrow, alone, looked around the artist's space, wondering if there was anything he should secure. Nothing jumped out at him... nothing except Morales parting words, the look he'd given Darrow --�a look of resignation? Of knowing? Darrow wandered back to the painting of the boxcars and the grey river of humanity, screaming and grimacing, being herded by demonic black shapes, their pink triangles as smart and precise as accusations on their chests.

Leaning closer once again to the painting, Darrow took another look at the face that had captured his attention earlier -- his own face, wide-eyed and stricken, in the midst of that river of human torment.

A few moments later Darrow stormed toward the broken door, past the neglected table of pastries and coffee that sat there like a last futile joke.

This wasn't right. Someone was going to fix it or give a reason why.

Beyond that, there was something wrong with this entire picture -- something rotten, something sinister. If there were answers to be had Darrow was going to get them, and hopefully soon, because he found himself believing Morales when he said that time was running out.

Those stacks and stacks of terrifying canvases in Morales' atelier were documents of the future, and somebody knew that -- somebody who wanted to keep the future under wraps. Somebody who had everything to gain from a future that held horrors in store for everyone else.

Darrow felt rage, fear, and even panic gripping him at the throat as he started down the steps of the decrepit building. He had to figure this out, and the only way to do it was to plunge straight into that grim future into which Morales had seen.

Clamping down on his terror, Darrow swore that was exactly what he was going to do. If the future was coming for him, then he, Henry Darrow, was coming every bit as hell bent for leather toward whatever lay in store.