The Changed Mural

Zhu carried him out into the courtyard and sat him down on the stone bench in the sun. The abbot brought water. Chen drank, and blinked, and looked at his friend as if he were seeing him for the first time, which, in a way, he was.

Where was I? Chen said. His voice was hoarse. Zhu did not answer at once, because Zhu did not know the answer, and because he had begun to suspect that the answer was not a place he could say aloud.

Inside, Zhu said at last. You were inside the painting. You stood at the wall for a morning. We called you, and you did not come, and the old monk chanted, and then you came.

Chen put his face in his hands. He did not say he had dreamed. He did not say it had been nothing. He sat for a long time in the sun, with his friend beside him, and his shoulders moved once or twice, and then he was still.

After a while he stood up and walked back into the hall. Zhu and the abbot followed. The light was ordinary now, and the temple was only a temple, and the murals were only old paint on old plaster.

But on the north wall, among the companies of the blessed, and beside the heavenly maiden with the half-loosed hair, there was a new figure. It was a young scholar in the clothes Chen had been wearing that morning, standing among the painted flowers with his head turned, looking toward the maiden the way one looks toward a door one has just been lucky enough to walk out of.

The abbot put his hands together. It happens, he said, when a man loves a painting as though it were a woman, and the painting loves him back. He is in it now, a little, the way a man leaves a little of himself wherever he has been happy.

Chen stood and looked at his own face on the wall. He did not reach out to touch it. He did not, this time, lean too close. He stood at a proper distance, the way a man stands at the edge of a dream when the dream has finally let him go.

Will I come back? he asked the abbot. Not in the way you mean, the old man said. The painting does not call twice. It is enough, for one man and for one painting, that you were there. The rest is only paint, and a wall, and a story that people will not believe when you tell it.

Chen went home that afternoon with his friend. He never spoke of the painting to anyone but Zhu, and even then he did not speak of it often. But to the end of his days, when he looked at a beautiful thing a moment too long, he would feel his friend's hand on his shoulder, and he would pull himself back, and he was grateful for the hand, and grateful, too, that the wall had let him out before it had kept him forever.