From afar it had been one painting, but upon closer inspection he could see it was actually a triptych of three, individual segments comprising one comprehensive landscape that was smaller upon approach. Up close, Aldo could see the tiny hexagonal lines, fissures of gold so delicate they made the painting look as if it had scales, splintering its content into smaller pieces.
It didn’t appear at first to have a subject. Nothing in it was strictly identifiable, either as a scene or an object, only Aldo felt very strongly as if he’d been transported in time and space. He was no longer inside of a bright white museum looking at a painting, but instead he was on top of his roof, looking at the sky.
“I think it’s incredibly human what you do,” Regan had said, turning her head to look at him. （He’d been smoking and mumbling about Euclidean space.） “Is it?” he asked, doubtful, “because as far as I know, other humans seem to disagree.”
She made a noise she often made, usually to indicate that he was being ridiculous, hush, stop. “You look for explanations,” she said. “It’s part of our fundamental code to wonder, don’t you think? The Babylonians did it, and so do you.”
“Yes, and yet,” Aldo exhaled, “Zeus’ affairs are more common knowledge than Babylonian math.”
“Well, sex is human, too,” Regan said. “But they’re still both ways of telling stories about existence. You just happen to use a language that only you and—” She paused to estimate it. “Maybe ten other people understand.”
“What about art?” he countered. “Isn’t that storytelling?”
“No, not really.” She leaned over, taking a puff from the spliff between his fingers. “Art isn’t about explaining shit,” she said, coughing once. “It’s about sharing things—experiences, feelings. Art is something we do to feel human, not because we are.”
“Do you feel human?”
“In some interconnected way, like I’m part of a common species? Not often. You?”
“Almost never.”
“Well, it was a good try.”
She’d taken another hit, leaning her cheek against his shoulder, and he’d thought with a sudden, sparkling clarity: Whatever you are made of, Charlotte Regan, I am made of it, too.
“What is this used for?” someone had asked him later in class. It was a variant of questioning that he was, by then, beyond sick of, but which he deigned to answer that day, about linear partial differential equations. Perhaps because he was tired and his defenses were weak; or, perhaps, because he had lain his head down the previous night next to a woman whose thoughts and matter he wanted desperately to know, and who, if she had been there, would have asked him some variation of the same thing.
Aldo, what’s The Truth?
The easy answer, and the one he would have given had he not been tired or in love, was simply that linear partial differential equations were used for describing changes over time within the scope of quantum mechanics. The answer he gave, however, was something like this: “We map things,” he said, “and chart things, observing and modeling and predicting, because we have no other choice, and this is the language we have agreed, collectively, to use. Because we have agreed, collectively, that to proceed without knowledge or understanding is a stupid kind of bravery, an impulsive kind of blindness, but that to be alone without wonder or curiosity is to chip away any possible value we might discover in existing.”
She, the student doing the asking, was later the only one to give his class a five-star rating, saying, “I really don’t understand what Damiani’s talking about most of the time, but I feel like he actually cares and that’s pretty cool. Nobody cares anymore. Anyway I probably failed this class but I liked it, sort of. As much as you can like differential equations.”
In the present, Aldo felt a tap on his shoulder; someone wanted to get by to look at another painting. He snapped to attention, nodding quickly and stepping closer to read the plaque below the triptych.
Alone with You in the Ether, it said, followed by Oils and acrylics.
Below, in smaller letters: C. Regan.
“Oh, this is pretty,” remarked someone beside him, pointing to Regan’s work, and Aldo turned his head, suddenly irritated.
It isn’t pretty, he wanted to say, it’s lonely, it’s desolate, it’s a chilling portrait of vastness. How ignorant are you to look at this and diminish it to some kind of trinket, are you dead? It’s the human condition! It’s the entire universe itself! It’s the depths of spacetime you utter fucking philistine and how dare you, how fucking dare you stand there and fail to weep? What kind of sad, unremarkable nothingness have you so callously lived that you can witness the splendor of her existence and not fall to your knees for having missed it, for having misunderstood it all this time? Pretty, that’s what you think this is? You think that’s all she’s capable of? You fool, she’s done the impossible. She has explained everything there is to know about the world in less than the time it took for your eyes to fully focus, and do you realize that I will spend a lifetime trying to do the same and never come close? This is an opus!, this is a triumph!, this is the meaning of life and you would think the answer would be satire, but it isn’t, it’s Truth. She told the Truth like you could never dream of telling it, and I pity you, that you could see the inside of your own soul and reduce it like this, so pitilessly. So carelessly. With the vacuous deficiency of, Oh, this is pretty.