Ike’s Inks

With just four colors Ike can see it all.

Patterns on paper absorbing and reflecting light. Unreal images perceived as if they were true, tricking the mind, engaging the imagination in vicarious perception. The images lock into Ike’s brain, connecting with the human mind’s relentless need to parse, perceive, and resolve everything it sees. His hunger for understanding will overwhelm his senses and create a vision inside his thoughts. It is an ancient survival mechanism—a way to play out life and death without the consequences. He can imagine the possibilities, risk fee, and take his chances when he needs to.

Ike dips the brush into one of the bottles in front of him. The translucent liquid wicks up the bristles. He pulls it up, out, lets it drip, then presses it down onto the white board, and the bristles almost sigh as they spread apart.  Getting a little capillary action, he thinks to himself.

He leaves one long, curving swipe across the page, and then drops his head down onto the desk to view the pigment from a new perspective. The medium vaporizes—a chemical reaction that leaves a colored stain on the white cardboard the can never be undone. An irrevocable act that he’s committed a thousand times before.  Each time is harder than the last.

Ike tries to pull his head back up, but for a moment it is stuck to the table. He cannot fight it, overcome by intensity, trapped by gravity, and his own weakness. He is paralyzed only for a moment, and then his nervous system engages. The muscles in his neck and back twitch and contract, lifting him up above the page.

He sees the mark that he has left there, and tries to not let the mark become something, yet. Just let it be… abstract… a ribbon of magenta and nothing more.  He dips another brush—yellow. He pulls it across, leaving blood where it crosses over other line.

He shakes his head and he laughs at his little joke. It always starts out with blood, but rarely ends that way. He spatters on some cyan with a dirty brush and lets it expand. The vision is resolving against his will. He can see the future rushing up to meet him. Ike can smell it in the air, the tangy, almost musty, odor of the ink flowing with possibility.

Ike tips the bottle of black against his thumb, leaving a wet circle. He lets a single drop fall from his hand and explode across the board, then uses all his fingers to smear it as far as it will go. There is less abstraction in every moment. And against his better judgment—every damn time —he opens up the last bottle, cyan, and tips it onto the board. The sapphire tears roll downward, streaking through the other colors as it goes.

He sets the bottle down, and makes a futile gesture to clean his stained, shaking hands by rubbing them against a rough, dry cloth. But it doesn’t matter. The image is complete.

Ike just needs to open his eyes and he will see the future. It will leap off the page, and overtake his thoughts, wiping any other possibility. What it will be. And like all of the futures that he has ever seen, it will be unstoppable. Another death, another victory, another secret that he can, and will, exploit to make his life just that much better. But it isn’t about the payoff.

For Ike the future is just an itch that needs to be scratched.—a chemical dependency every bit as pathetic as any other addiction. In a second he will open the wild staring eyes of a junkie, satisfying the feeling of need, of release, of false power in an instant. And like any other drug, it will give Ike what he most desires, and then fade away. And he’ll chase it again and again, until the day that it reveals his own death, unstoppable, and inevitable.