I woke up with the taste of copper in my mouth and the distinct sensation that I had lost a significant amount of time. The concrete floor was pressing against my cheekbone and numbing the nerves on the right side of my face, leaving a dull ache that pulsed with my heartbeat. I pushed myself up to a sitting position and the room spun with a nauseating centrifugal force that made me grab the leg of the work table for stability. The light coming through the skylights was a heavy, bruised purple that suggested either dawn or dusk in a city that had forgotten the sun. My joints felt calcified, as if the dampness of the Berlin winter had finally succeeded in turning my marrow into limestone. I looked at my hands and saw that they were stained with a mixture of dried pigments and dark fluids that had caked under my fingernails.
The canvas was standing on the easel directly in front of me, illuminated by the dying light of the afternoon. I did not remember putting it there, nor did I remember the last forty-eight hours of labor that must have taken place. The last clear memory I possessed was the image of the red paint bleeding from the scratch, defying the laws of physics and chemistry. I looked at the surface of the painting now and felt a cold shock wash over my skin that had nothing to do with the temperature of the loft. It was finished. The damage was not just repaired but obliterated, smoothed over with a technique that was terrifying in its perfection. The woman's dress was rendered with a precision that surpassed the original artist's capability, the velvet folds catching the light in a way that made the fabric look three-dimensional.
I stood up and my knees buckled slightly before locking into place. I walked closer to the easel, drawn by the magnetic pull of the restored image. The background, which had been a mess of darkened varnish and grime, was now a deep, lustrous interior that swallowed the light. The mirror behind the woman was no longer a cloud of mold but a dark, reflective surface waiting for the final cleaning. I tried to recall the act of painting those final layers but my memory was a smooth, black wall with no handholds. It felt as though another operator had stepped into the machinery of my body while the pilot was unconscious. I had been a passenger in my own skull, watching from behind a thick glass while someone else used my hands to create this impossible object.
I needed to tell her that the work was done. I needed Mara to see that I had conquered the entropy she had brought into my house and fixed the unfixable. I found my phone under a pile of solvent-soaked rags that smelled of linseed oil and something sweeter, like rotting fruit. The battery was in the red, clinging to the last percentage of life it had left. I dialed the number that was saved in the call history, the only number I had dialed in weeks. It rang once, a hollow digital tone that echoed in the receiver. Then there was a click and a silence that was absolute. An automated voice spoke in a flat, monotone German. "The number you have dialed is not in service."
I stared at the screen until it went black and reflected my own exhausted face back at me. There was no Mara. The thought did not panic me as it should have, but rather settled into the empty spaces of my mind like a stone sinking into a deep pond. It was a logical conclusion to a sequence of irrational events. She was a catalyst, a chemical agent introduced to the reaction to accelerate the process. Now that the reaction was complete, the catalyst was no longer necessary. I dropped the phone onto the concrete floor. The screen cracked, a spiderweb of fractures blooming across the glass. It did not matter. Communication with the outside world was a distraction I could no longer afford.
I sat down on the stool in front of the painting. The silence in the loft was thick enough to choke on, a physical weight that pressed against my eardrums. The dripping tap had stopped or perhaps I had just gone deaf to its frequency after listening to it for so long. I picked up the scalpel from the tray. There was one last layer of oxidized varnish over the face in the mirror. It was the final veil. I needed to scrape it away to see the truth of the restoration. I needed to see who the woman was looking at in that dark room.
My hand was steady now, steadier than it had ever been in my entire career. The tremor that had ruined the canvas days ago was gone, replaced by a rigor that felt almost mechanical. I applied the blade to the surface of the painted mirror. The varnish flaked away in tiny, amber curls that drifted down like snow. I worked with the focus of a surgeon performing a lobotomy. I scraped away the yellow film of history. I scraped away the accumulated grime of the years. I scraped away the lies.
The image emerged from the darkness. It was not a woman. It was not a void. The face in the mirror was pale and gaunt with eyes that were sunken into dark sockets, surrounded by bruised flesh. It was a face I shaved every morning. It was me. But it was not me as I sat there in the quiet of the studio. It was me screaming. The painted Henrik was trapped in the glass, his mouth open in a silent, eternal howl, his hands pressing against the surface from the inside as if trying to break the barrier between his world and mine.
I stared at my own damnation rendered in oil and pigment. The detail was microscopic. I could see the burst capillaries in the whites of the painted eyes. I could see the terror etched into the lines of the forehead. It was a recursive loop. I was looking at a painting of myself looking out at myself. The artist and the subject had collapsed into a single point of singularity. I dropped the scalpel. It clattered onto the floor, the sound impossibly loud in the dead air. I did not move. I could not look away. The scream in the painting was vibrating in my own throat, silent and stuck.
Then came the noise. It was not the buzzer. It was a heavy, dull thud against the steel door that shook the frame of the entrance. Then another. Wood splintered. Metal shrieked as the bolts were forced against their housings. Voices shouted in German, muffled by the thickness of the door but unmistakable in their urgency. "Polizei! Öffnen Sie die Tür!" The sounds were distant, as if they were coming from a television in another room or from a memory of a life I no longer lived. I did not move. I was locked in eye contact with the painted version of myself.
The door gave way with a crash that sent dust billowing into the hallway light. Beams of harsh white light cut through the gloom of the studio, sweeping across the floor and the walls. Men in uniforms rushed in, their boots heavy on the concrete. They were covering their noses and mouths with their hands or pulling their collars up. One of them gagged audibly as he entered the space. They pointed weapons at me. "Hands up! Step away from the wall!"
I looked at them and then I looked back at my masterpiece. They were not seeing what I was seeing. Their eyes were wide with a different kind of horror, a disgust that belonged to the sanitary world of the living. I looked at the canvas again. The paint was gone. The woman was gone. The mirror was gone. There was only a white canvas, shredded and torn into ribbons. The fabric hung in tatters from the wooden stretcher bars.
I looked at my hands. My fingernails were broken and bloody. The skin of my fingertips was worn raw. The canvas was covered in red smears and gouges where I had clawed at the fabric for days, tearing at the weave until my own blood had replaced the pigment. There was no restoration. There was no varnish. There was only the destruction of the surface. The smell that had brought them here was not chemicals. It was the smell of filth, of unwashed bodies, and the metallic tang of dried blood that had been festering in the closed room.
The officer grabbed my shoulder and pulled me away from the easel. I did not resist. My body felt light, as if I were made of hollow reeds. I looked back at the ruined canvas one last time as they dragged me toward the door. It was beautiful. It was the purest thing I had ever created. I had spent my life trying to preserve lies, trying to fix the decay of the past. But this was truth. I had stripped away everything. I had removed the image, the illusion, the history, and the vanity.
I felt a smile stretch my cracked lips, the skin splitting with the movement. The police officer looked at me with revulsion, but I did not care. He did not understand the nature of the work. He saw ruin. I saw the completion of the cycle. I had finally captured the essence of the world. It was empty. It was a blank slate waiting for a meaning that would never come. I closed my eyes and let the darkness take me, the silence finally perfect and unbroken.