Wave Portrait #10088

The painter Kaiga once proclaimed, “The sea is a door, waves the ever-shifting locks. Artists are the locksmiths and thus, the bridges to the divine.”

Forty-five years and over 10,000 paintings later, Old Kaiga had yet to prove his proclamations. He never left that stormy village though, his brined hut and barnacle-crusted rowboat as much artifact and legend as the man himself.

His door flailed open with a bang that prickly Sunday, when a storm yet again crept from the south on warm, humid gusts. The promise of lashing rain and thunder weighed like sagging sacks of mud on the villagers’ shoulders, yet Kaiga, arms laden with canvases, scuttled across the packed sand like an eager baby turtle. Storms, after all, hailed the approach of divinity, though whether this divinity were dragons or gods depended entirely on Kaiga’s mood that day.

Today he felt, or his stiff joints felt, both dragons and gods on their way. An auspicious day. Pah to whatever drivel the village diviner chanted. A vivacity Kaiga had believed dead in his veins boiled anew, as he lowered one stack of canvases, then another, into the belly of his rowboat. He seized up the corners of the starchy tarpaulin lining the hull and tied the bundle closed. His boat appeared to carry a great sack of treasure.

Appearances, however, did not fool Gonta, whose protruding knees earned him his name. Huddled among the furred beachgrass growing wild alongside Kaiga’s hut, he scrubbed aside the snot dribbling from his piggish nose. All part of the job, he told himself. The littler kids liked when he brought more news and tales about the crabby old man on the beach. The adults too, who gave him strips of salted, dried mackerel as reward for information. Without Gonta, no one would have known what caused Old Kaiga’s bellowing at night. Or that the man even painted.

“He’s not even that good!” Gonta once reported. He had figured out the perfect time to spy: exactly noon sharp the day before Kaiga loaded up his boat, through the vertical slats of the hut’s side window. “He doesn’t even paint the full page and they’re all just lines and spots!”

They were also grays and corals and blues and blacks. White spray against recursive waves. Yet Gonta could never articulate why he stared so long at those half-finished paintings, that the beach beetles would fearlessly skitter across his feet.

Gonta did, however, know this day, with its thrumming dark clouds and choppy sea, was better spent painting indoor. He leaned his face out of the brush as Old Kaiga scurried around the rowboat.

“Damn snot-nosed brats.” The old painter groused and spun about, patting nonexistent pockets as well as his backside. “I swear the next time I see them, I’ll…”

Gonta ducked back into the weeds and curled his toes close. Stupid old man. ‘The next time’ Kaiga saw them, he should pay his thanks and swear upon his indebted life! Hiding the crusty yōkai’s oars and saving his life took bravery and courage, neither of which deserved the beating Old Kaiga’s cursing threatened.

So Gonta, the bravest of his gang, stood up for his underlings. He pulled out one of the hidden oars and stomped out of hiding. “Yai, you stupid old monster!” Never would he admit to the chills that raced down his arms when Kaiga’s rheumy eyes swiveled to him. Gonta tightened his clammy grip and flailed the oar about like a warding stick. “You should be thanking us, ‘cos now you’re not gonna go die out there!”

Kaiga raised gnarled, stained fingers over his grimy face and scratched his scalp. “That where youse hid them?” He cursed on another click of his tongue and stalked past Gonta. Completely ignoring the boy’s protesting yips, Kaiga rummaged through the brush and pulled the second oar free.

“Ha! But I have the other one!” Gonta scampered in retreat as Kaiga passed him again. “You need two to row! Hey, are your ears broken or something? You need two to row!”

The clunk of the oar hitting the boat’s bottom drowned out Kaiga’s snap. Mutters kept moving his thin lips as he tightened the knot of his jinbei and braced himself at the boat’s stern. Cracked heels digging into the wet sand, Kaiga pushed the boat, inch by inch, to the water.

Gonta’s mouth dropped. “Wait!” He ran, awkwardly, the oar between his summery brown arms flapping side-to-side. His voice squeaked, not an ounce of bravery in it like the divers and spear-fishing men. “Wait, Old Man! Pa says the storm’s gonna be bad! You have to stay inside!”

The waves, however, drew lapping circles under the belly of Kaiga’s boat and slipped him and his sack of treasure away from shore. Gonta stamped his foot and smashed his oar into the sand. “Crazy! Stupid! You never listen! That’s why everyone thinks you’re a yōkai! ‘Cos you’re sick in the head!”

But Old Kaiga drifted away, just as he had always done every week for forty-five years. The boat disappeared into a dip in the waves and rolled him up to the crest again, bobbing and bobbing as his singular oar carved lines of froth into the green-gray, darkening sea.

Gonta’s screeches disappeared under the bluster and roar of mountainous waves.

***

Sea and sky pitched like the wave between yin and yang. Kaiga steadied the bundle of canvases with one foot as he paddled on. Spray washed away the sand crusting his feet in flecks, while a salty mist starched his jinbei and sweat plastered the linen to his aching back.

Another pitch tossed Kaiga down a marbled slope of ocean until the boat skimmed to a halt on a most peculiar—promisingly peculiar!—stillness in the middle of the bay. Mouth flapping open, he crawled on his knees and squinted up at the heavens. Storm clouds roiled in a ring around a pinhole in the sky, the aperture through which god witnessed man.

Its light, however, had gone out. So, the sun goddess had given up on Kaiga’s efforts, eh? Pah to that fickle broad! Old Kaiga’s works are for the greater discerning eye, anyway! Dare he say, for greater gods, like the emperor of the skies—

Yes! Exactly! Like the almighty ruler of the heavens, who with their omnipotent view had no choice but to witness all mortal goings!

Kaiga rammed his oar under his seat, gratitude rising up his stomach like a geyser and spraying vehement swears over his scraggly beard. Man shall bridge the divine. Let Kaiga show proof, by unlocking this teeming sea with its perfect key.

Bemusement filtered through the hole in the clouds.

He tore open the bundle and slid the first canvas, #10086, into the water. Inky waves caressed the empty half of the painting. Curiously. Experimentally. A peak of the wavelets attempted to match a stroke of gray. A splash paled its color to meet a curve of painted froth. But nothing—the sea gave up and receded from the canvas.

Kaiga tossed #10086 behind him, its splash already lost to him as he next dipped #10087.

Harmony stirred deep within his ear. The canvas warmed between his palms while the waters churned with excitement. Kaiga glanced into the depths, unsure if that cloaked light belonged to the sea’s divinity, or his own madness.

The waves froze for one fleeting moment against the canvas. Yes—yes! This wasn’t madness! The hole in the sky swiveled wider open as the sea’s briny peaks aligned with their painted counterparts. The blacks and navies and grays matched. A glare through the waves followed a shining painted line.

But dammit, dammit! Too much gold, too much consideration of the sun in this portrait! The harmony died, the cloaked light of the sea shrank. The sky’s aperture closed and another failed painting slapped into the eddies behind Kaiga.

#10088. He held his breath. Chewed his lip. He slid #10088’s blank end into the water.

The world shifted around him.

Waves pasted onto the unpainted space, every line and curve and dot of spray met those Kaiga left on the canvas. The painting seared in his hands and he leaped back yowling, leaving the painting suspended over the sea. Waters swirled and expanded and the inked lines spilled from the canvas as the surge threw Kaiga’s boat back. He slammed the back of his head against the gunwale, stars bursting in his eyes at the same time a low, harmonious timbre of bell and lute and song swelled in his ears again. Lightning flashes danced along the undersides of the clouds while thunder drummed in the distance.

Old Kaiga, with his aching head and sweating back and freezing limbs, gaped at the sky. A parade of dragons and veiled gods swirled, descending on stairs of golden clouds, while the depths of the sea twisted and roared up to the opening door. On the salty gales came the scent of liquor and flowers and peaches. Sea spray scattered into plum and cherry petals.

Warmth flooded the old painter’s tense, knotted body and pushed out all discomfort as his eager hands balled into shaking fists. Yes. Yes! The parade progressed ever downward! The sea whorled up! Eureka! Kaiga whooped and clapped his hands, his boat rocking. Heavens bear witness! Eureka! Eureka! The world danced in torque! The portrait of the waves, of the moment man bridged abyss to heaven, immortalized in its glory by the artist Kaiga! Eure—!

A boom rent—Raijin’s final beat. Kaiga tripped forward in his boat, a faint “no” on his breath. The gods dissipated in spinning streams of golden mist, up, up back to the hole in the sky. “No.” Rain lashed. The sea burst as the door burbled shut.

“No!”

Old Kaiga flew into the air, canvases and splinters scattered around him.

***

Later, after the seamen of the village squeezed the seawater out of Kaiga’s lungs, they brought him the sole salvaged piece: Wave Portrait #10088. Cold and waterlogged yet its colors and wave forms vibrant and pristine. Kaiga, eyes vacant, thumbed the hues.

The piece was incomplete.

Gonta plunked into the sand next to the old man. “Hey.”

The storm passed on, a parade marching to the next leg of its route.

“Hey, Old Man.” Gonta’s teeth chattered, goosebumps stark down his arms. “You’re gonna paint what came afterward, right?”

Afterward. The missing piece of the portrait: the ensemble of divinity that followed the opened door of the sea. Old Kaiga whirled, wheezing back at Gonta.

“You’ve gotta,” said Gonta with round eyes. “You’ve gotta paint it, Old Man! I’ll—I’ll help—you’ll hafta teach me—but I’ll help! So you gotta paint it! Alright?”

A cloaked light gleamed deep in the boy’s eyes.