Parasomnia

Part 2 - The Exhibition

Leo sipped his drink, some kind of fruity cocktail. Cheap garbage. He couldn't even taste the liquor. Men and women wearing the height of fashion's latest trends milled about him, paying him no mind as he stared at the painting, arms crossed. It reminded him of Escher, except Escher's works had been original. This was a copy of a copy, needlessly complicated, colors clashing in horrific ways. He knew the artist. Her works were always this way. He never understood why people liked them so much.

"It expresses the inner turmoil we all feel. That fear of being lost." She told him; voice trained to sound bored in contrast to her wide-eyed excitement.

"I feel it." He lied before walking her to his own painting. They stopped before it and gazed silently.

Jessie crossed her arms, eyes scanning the work. A nondescript shadow atop a singular rowboat, adrift in a violent, tumultuous ocean. A nearly photo-realistic scene, though each brush stroke had been painstakingly crafted to give an odd surrealist aspect to the painting. It was disconcerting to look at. It sort of swallowed you as you gazed into it.

"Is that me in the boat? Leo, did you put me in one of your paintings?" Jessie smiled.

A middle-aged couple walked by, muttering to each other.

"It's like the artist put me in his painting." The woman said.

"Interesting," The man replied, "I could have sworn I saw my face on that character in that rowboat."

Jessie's smile flipped, thin lips curling into a most unattractive pout. She walked away and Leo smiled. She was a fraud, a hack, like most of the artists present. People who threw paint on a canvas and then made-up stories to define the mess they had made. Jessie was the worst of all though, not a single work of hers was original.

A server glided by, carrying a silver tray of drinks. Leo swapped his empty glass with a full one. He hated these events. Small galleries were fine, they felt friendly. This felt like he was a fish waiting to be devoured by a shark. Everyone was at each other's throats. The artists maneuvering and insulting each other to make themselves look better, dealers sneaking around like snakes trying to get the best deal while ensuring the artists themselves made nothing. It was a shit show. Larger exhibitions always were.

Leo propped himself against a column, eyes glazing over as he stared out into the sea of humanity that moved from one end of the exhibition hall to the other. Here and there he would shake hands with someone who recognized him, but mostly he was a ghost. He preferred it that way. Less pressure.

His eyelids grew heavy as he sipped his drink. Alcohol was not his preferred drug of choice. He usually preferred uppers. Cocaine was the best, though he had chilled out on it recently. He had blamed the night terrors on it and had gone through a hell of a comedown getting off the stuff. How long had it been since he last slept through the night? At least a month, or was it longer?

Leo rubbed his eyes with his free hand, pressing his fingers into the sockets until the fuzzy white lights behind his eyes morphed into blotches of green and yellow. He smiled, thinking about the bottle of sugar pills in his jacket pocket. Doctor Ipsom thought she was clever, but he had a suspicion early on those pills weren't doing anything, and had supplemented them with even more caffeine. It would be a short time now before he crashed and crashed hard. Perhaps when it finally happened, when his body couldn't take it anymore, when it gave up and turned off, perhaps then he could sleep through the night again. All he really wanted was some cocaine.

"Mr. Haar!" A male voice with an accent somewhere between British and pretentious asshole rang out from behind him. He knew exactly who it belonged to.