Within the Painting

What Chen experienced next, he could never quite explain, even to himself. One moment he was standing in the dim hall, leaning toward a painted woman on a wall. The next the wall was not a wall at all, but a threshold he had stepped through without noticing.

The air was warmer. The painted flowers were real flowers, and they smelled, and their petals were soft against his hands when he reached out. The painted maiden was no longer on a wall. She was standing a little way off, among the flowers, with her head turned, and the smile on her lips was finished now, and it was entirely for him.

You have come, she said. She did not sound surprised. She sounded like a woman who has been waiting by a road for a traveler she knew was on his way, and is only now allowing herself to say it aloud.

Chen tried to speak and found he did not know what he was. He was a scholar from a small town, and the wall of a temple, and a painting by a dead man. Which of these things was he meant to be here? The maiden, as if she understood, took his hand and led him through the flowers, and the question seemed, walking, less important than it had seemed standing.

They walked in a country that was clearly a painting, because the sky was the particular blue that only paint has, and because the distance between the trees was just a little too neat, the way a painter leaves it. Yet it was warm, and it was real to the hand, and it held him the way a dream holds a man: completely, and without asking for proof.

She told him her name, and he told her his, and they said the things people say when they are not sure how long they have. He told her of his town, and his restless face, and the way he looked at beautiful things a moment too long. She listened, and her listening was the kind that makes a man feel, for the first time, that he has been understood.

He could not have said how long it lasted. Hours, perhaps. Perhaps the morning, perhaps a season. Inside a painting, the hours do not run the way they run outside, because there is no one there to count them but the people inside it, and they have stopped counting.

Once, he asked her whether she was really there, or whether he was only standing in a temple hall, leaning too close to a wall. She did not answer with words. She touched his face, and her hand was warm, and the warmth was not the warmth of a thing imagined, and he understood that the question was the wrong one to ask.

It was she who told him, at last, that it was time. She said it gently, the way one says a hard thing to a child. She said: They are calling you. Your friend has come to the wall. If I keep you now, you will become, like me, a thing that waits and does not move.

She led him back through the flowers to the edge of the painted world. He could see, from the edge, the dark hall of the temple, and his friend's face close to the wall, and the hand that was reaching for him. The painted maiden stood behind him among her flowers, and she did not wave, and she did not weep, and the smile on her lips was unfinished again, on purpose this time.