Original Fiction: The Way The Service Works
Hi all!
For the second installation of my newsletter, I thought I’d share a piece I’ve been having a difficult time placing (maybe because it starts the same way as a Dr. Who episode — but it goes to very different places). Anyway, this story, should you feel like reading it, is about AI, art, and the compulsion to create at all costs. It’s called “The Way the Service Works.”
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THE WAY THE SERVICE WORKS
I came down in Auvers-sur-Oise. It was impossible to change the past. That was part of the deal. The Service only worked one way, and I had no fantasies that it would be any different for me. I needed something other than change from Van Gogh, though it would have brought me comfort to save him.
I needed proof that it wasn’t sickness, it wasn’t folly, there was something real and human in me, something that all the reason in the world couldn’t reason away.
But that wasn’t how anyone saw it.
And, so, into the Pod, the quiet hum of years winding backwards, and then out gently, landing on the firm ground of a time passed. Coming down to the artist’s colony just south of Paris that I knew from so many visits to “View of Auvers” and “Landscape at Twilight.”
The field behind Van Gogh's cottage glowed through the window of the room where I stood, the lines of his bright vision rising from it. I saw the blood, too, red in the green and yellow grass. The decision had been made, carried out. It was the evening of July 27th, 1890. All that was left were the few feverish hours.
In his room, his chest was bare but for the bloody dressings. They stuck to his wounds. Someone had tried to make him comfortable, but such an endeavor was useless. He was dying. All the pain – the madness, the institutionalization, the depression – it hung, choking, in the air.
His paints and brushes stood on the desk nearby, not unlike my own small studio back in my own time – though he had kept his instruments tidy to the end. His still-wet paintings lined the walls. Like mine they were unsold, uncared for. Genius radiated from his works.
It wasn’t going to save him.
I turned back to him. There was nothing to be done. I winced from the blood.
He looked at me, his eyes sunk deep in pain – physical, spiritual, emotional. The anguish was palpable. I thought of the fool’s errand I was on, how it was hubris to fight against a sea of turgid despair.
I sat next to him.
“Vincent, you must tell me,” I said.
He looked at me, not comprehending.
“Why couldn’t you stop?” I asked.
He coughed, choked on the blood in his lungs. “Stop?” he repeated, his voice slow and quiet.
“Why couldn’t you stop painting? Why was there nothing for you but --” I gestured around the room, at the wet paintings -- “but this?”
He couldn’t answer me. The Service only worked one way. He didn’t have anything left inside him. Not the madness that had driven him here, to his deathbed, and not the other kind of madness, the one that had driven him to waste his life away, a slave to the muses.
` “Why couldn’t you stop?” I insisted again. I took his shoulders in my hands, pulling him close. I felt the madness in me that everyone else saw.
“Please,” he rasped. “Leave me to die.”
“You don’t understand what you’ll mean to people,” I said. “You'll never know what your life and your work will be worth. But you still had a chance. There’s nothing left for people like me. And yet we do as you did -- we trade all we have just to create the things that no one cares for, no one pays attention to, and never will. You motherfucker, you had a chance.”
His eyes were glossy. I gently let go his shoulders. I looked to the field, but now the vision of his bright chaos had dimmed from the world. A trick of the light? A passing cloud? It was dull, sterile, starched, like my own world. Vincent’s light had flickered out, leaving a grey heaviness.
Time sagged under the weight of a great life coming to its end. It didn’t feel so different from the burden I had carried into the past.
*
I came back through the Pod into a time where art was madness, the time I was from yet never belonged to.
Outside the Pod, at the front desk, the Receptionist looked bored, flipping through a magazine filed with AI models. He glanced up when I came through the door.
“Get what you wanted out of it?” he asked.
“No,” I replied bluntly.
He nodded. “The Service doesn’t always please.”
“All of the money I had for fifteen minutes that didn’t matter at all,” I said.
“There’s the rule,” he said. “The rule about not changing anything. It’s part of the Service.”
“I didn’t want to change anything for him,” I said. My voice was high, and I could hear in it the emotion, the madness that others always said they heard. “I wanted to change something for me. Cure myself of this. Get rid of it. Find an answer why and find a way out.”
He nodded. The Receptionists, who saw the time travelers out of the Pod, were trained in psychology. Not quite doctors, but they were there to ease the passage of the Service, the hopes that those who engaged in it had pinned on it.
“There’s no money back,” he said. “But we can talk if you want.”
“I just want to know why,” I said.
“Why?” he asked. “You traveled to Van Gogh to ask why?”
“Yes. Why can’t I put it down? I thought he -- who suffered so much, who was considered mad himself -- would understand. But you sent me back too late to know.”
“Put what down?” he asked.
“The painting,” I replied, my eyes down. There was no point in hiding it now, no matter what the consequences might be.
“You’re…a painter? I’ve heard of them. But I’ve never met one, not in real life. I’ve seen television shows, heard stories -- but I’ve never seen one of you.”
“They say it’s madness,” I said. “And they’re probably right.”
He nodded and looked down at his magazine. “I’m supposed to report you, you know.”
I stared at my shoes, and when I looked back, he was pressing a small piece of paper into my hand.
“You didn’t get this from me,” he said. “Call the number.”
I looked at the phone number scribbled there in ink. Nodding, I left the facility.
*
Back in my apartment that night, I paced through the mess. There were brushes everywhere, the carpet smelled of turpentine from spilled containers. Empty bottles of ketamine on the table. The light therapy headset. The self-hypnosis app beeped on my phone, reminding me of its presence. None of it worked.
I thought back to the order that Van Gogh had kept in his room until the end. He had supposedly suffered from a similar madness to me, though, over time, his had been redeemed by his innovations, his singular vision.
There was no such hope for me.
Art had become something that bordered on criminal, and the pursuit of it, outside a passing dalliance with AI configurations when needed, was considered an illness. It was no longer taught in schools, was never spoken of in polite conversation.
And it was the only thing I really loved. I thought about painting all the time. I could never hold a job, and when I did, I always traded any money I had to make more art.
The evidence of my illness was unsold and unloved, piled around my apartment. Just looking at it filled me with furious anger. The paintings weren’t going to save me. My eviction notice was coming full term, and soon it would all be in the dumpster outside my apartment window -- next to the little, decrepit courtyard.
As I pored over my creations, their countless hours wasted, their fleeting bliss, there was a knock on my door. I peered through to see a friendly face, the girl from 14F. She was pretty, nicely dressed. She had a good job.
She stood close to the peephole. “I know you’re in there,” she said. “You’re always in there.”
I opened the door a crack, positioning myself between her and any view of the gallery of madness filling my apartment. She’d have to report it if she saw.
Her voice softened. “I brought some wine. I thought we could watch something on our phones together…”
“Maybe next time,” I said, shifting between her and the paintings.
“You said ‘maybe next time’ last time,” she rebutted. “What are you hiding?”
“Hiding?”
“You’re blocking the door. You can just tell me you’re with someone else.” She frowned, turned, and walked away.
I wasn’t with someone else. I never was. But she would never understand.
I shut the door, walked to a canvas, and kicked a hole in it.
My regret was immediate. It was a large canvas I’d spent months on. I began patching it, then took from other pieces together to fill the hole, then took anything I could grab nearby -- shellacked dictionary pages, burned cloth, discarded wrappers, leaves, chips of paint from the walls. The girl from 14F, my regret, myself -- all of it disappeared. There was only creation. Hours passed without counting, and I had a new piece, something between a painting and a collage of destruction.
The sun was rising outside, pinkening the sky. I reached in my pocket for my pack of cigarettes and found the piece of paper the Receptionist had pressed into my palm. The phone number he’d told me to call. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and dialed the number.
*
The man who called himself “The Dealer” was short and bespectacled. His house was austere, the perfect reflection of the times. Unlike my place, his walls were bare, and the style was minimalist. He wore a grey button-down shirt with a grey wool vest over it. On his balding head was a little grey cabbie hat.
“Ah, Winston’s friend,” he said as I came through his open door.
“I don’t know that we’re friends,” I said.
“But Winston knew you well enough to send you to me, which means he knows more about you than one should,” he said.
“We’re in dangerous territory,” I said.
“I’ve guarded that territory my whole life, trust me,” he said. “Did you bring what I asked?”
I put down the large suitcase I’d brought with me and extracted the two paintings that had fit in it. He lifted them and touched them and admired them.
“Real oil paint,” he said. “Where did you get it?”
“The materials for it aren’t illegal,” I said. “You just have to know how to make it.”
“Where did you learn?”
“Long ago, from a family member,” he said.
“He taught you a dangerous thing,” The Dealer said with a small smile.
“It hasn’t served me well,” I agreed.
“How much do you need?” he said.
“For the paintings? I need a few thousand dollars. I want to go back to another time. One where I can get answers.”
“I didn’t ask for all that,” The Dealer said. “The less I know, the better.” He handed me a wad of money, wrapped in a rubber band. “This should be more than you asked for.”
“Where do you keep them?” I asked, looking around.
“It’s better you don’t know,” he said. “If there are questions…”
“No one followed me,” I said. “I’m just a sick man, who society pities.”
“Good of you to come in the back door,” he said.
“I know what I’m doing.”
He nodded and motioned for me to follow. And through several doors, past a fake wall, through a locked safe, we came to a room where the piles of paintings shone and glowed. Ones I had only seen in museums, long ago, when museums still held such things. All piled against the walls, packed on top of each other.
“And they think I’m sick,” I said.
“It’s a compulsion,” he agreed. “Once I began, I couldn’t stop. One day they’ll find them -- find me. And it will all be over. But for now. For now, I am rescuing something.”
“What, though? Madness?”
“The artists -- they’ve been called this, yes. Others have said they simply saw as few others did. What I know -- what I can see -- is the beauty. Madness or not, there is beauty, no?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “That’s a question I’ve never been able to answer.”
*
The next day, I was back at the building where they performed the Service.
“Where’s Winston?” I asked the new Receptionist. “His day off?”
“Gone,” he replied. “Didn’t show up to work. Didn’t answer his phone. No one quite knows where he’s at.”
I nodded. I wondered if someone had found out about the phone number, about his deviation from his duties. If so, they could be waiting for me. I didn’t think about it long. I handed over bills I’d collected from The Dealer, and told this Receptionist where I wanted to go. And I went back to the Pod.
The Service put me down in Brooklyn, in the year 2052. The street I landed on was so familiar that I could almost see my child self running up it, lightning bolting the stairs, screaming and laughing into the arms of my great uncle, Martin. I did not see my child self, though much of my life would have been spent wishing that I could have been there that day, done something to change fate. The Service only works one way. At most, I could tell him who I would become, who he would make me.
The street around me whirred with quiet machinery. Everyone -- the ones riding their solar-powered scooters, the ones walking, the ones riding razor kickboards -- was dressed the same. They wore tight gray clothes that made them all look like they’d shopped the same rack. Lack of choice in outerwear had been decided upon long ago for greater efficiency. Everything on the street was efficient, from the solar lights that lined the sidewalk to the vehicles that had long since foregone fossil fuels to make them move. I dodged a scooter, maneuvered through the dull din of modernity to my uncle’s front door.
He sat in his armchair when I walked in. Around him the room was crowded with prints of paintings, with poems torn from books, with small animal skulls and gemstones he must’ve picked up at an occult store, with a heavy Oxford English Dictionary I remembered trying to decipher whenever I visited him. He was eccentric, yes, but his sort of life was still, if barely, tolerated back then.
He was in one of his melancholy moments. The world, he often said, did not hold the magic it used to. It did not hold the art and the beauty, it did not hold regard for any such thing. Had it ever? he wondered sometimes. Or had it always been that those who poured everything into beauty saw so little return? His melancholy hit suddenly, some days, and stayed for hours. It was then that he would shoo me away, tell me that it was time to go home, stop looking at his paintings and prints and books. And I would, dutifully, child that I was.
I would never try to help, to change things.
It was after he died that I started painting in earnest, to remember him and the world he lived in. And I never stopped, even though it was considered an ancient practice, mostly dead, then all together wrong.
“Martin,” I said.
He looked up slowly. I could see from his eyes that he had already taken the pills that would kill him. Seventeen opiate-based pills that would stop his dear heart.
“Martin,” I said again.
“Hello, boy,” he said, recognizing me, even though I had been a small child when he had seen me weeks before. Time travel was in its nascent stages then, and little was out of the realm of possibility. He called me the term of endearment he had always bestowed upon me, and went on sadly. “It’s almost time to go. Not that it will make a bit of difference.”
I wanted to tell him he was wrong. I wanted to tell him that the oils and the brushes and the turpentine and the watercolors he would leave for me would be something that haunted my life, that I made great things out of. But my works stood in piles in my small apartment. Painting was a dead art. And more than dead, something punishable.
“I still paint, Uncle Martin,” I said.
“Why?” he asked me.
“Because you taught me about Van Gogh. You taught me how to make oil paints. You taught me about the stillness you can find yourself in on the canvas. And I never lost it. Do you think Van Gogh felt that same stillness, Martin? Do you think the world disappeared in the most beautiful way when he touched his canvases? Do you think maybe that was worth it?”
“I’m so sorry for teaching you all that,” he said.
“But, Martin, this was ours.”
I wanted to fight with him, but it didn’t seem to matter. The Service only worked one way. His chin drooped to his chest.
“I’m so sorry for filling your head with the nonsense that was in mine. It was never worth anything, boy.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I don’t think I’d trade it. I don’t see how I could live any other way.”
And there, I had my answer. An answer Van Gogh hadn’t been able to give me, nor my uncle. An answer I could only have come to myself. An answer that wouldn’t save me from my madness, or from the world that hated me for it. There was only one solution to that now.
Martin nodded, once, his chin rested on his chest and stayed there. His eyes closed.
There was nothing else I could say. I couldn’t tell him he was wrong about the world. I couldn’t even tell him that his sadness wouldn’t live past him – it would, so deeply and darkly in his great nephew.
I held his hand as he fell asleep and stayed asleep. I held him in a long embrace.
And then I went back to the Pod, the gentle whirr dragging me back to the time I was from.
*
At the front desk, the same bored Receptionist was thumbing his phone.
“How do you feel?” he said, not looking up.
“The same as before,” I said.
“That’s sort of what happens,” he agreed. He shrugged. “Was it worth it?”
“It doesn’t matter if it wasn’t,” I say. “No refunds.”
“It’s a service that doesn’t always please,” he said, just as Winston had said before him. “A lot of people think that if they just told their father they loved him on his deathbed, or something like that, it would change something for them, change their lives entirely. It never does. You’d think for how expensive it is, something would be different. But no.” He went on. “Why didn’t you go to the future to look in and see what would come for you? That – at least that could have been something new, something just for you.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered, would it? I’d still be the same. The world would still be the same.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Not much.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not going to kill yourself from the futility of it all, are you?” he said. I think he was joking.
“Would that change anything?” I think he thought I was joking, too.
He picked up the magazine again, shrugging. “Your money, your choices. That’s that.”
“The Service only works one way,” I replied, leaving.
I went back home, home to the crowded studio apartment with an eviction reminder posted to the door, with papers and canvases and the paints and the brushes scattered or placed or piled inside.
Nothing had changed.
My great uncle, a man of art and history and music and words, had died alone in a world that didn’t need him anymore. Van Gogh had still painted his sunflowers and put a bullet in his own chest. His work existed, as it had before, without the benefit of his happiness. Sometimes, through my life, and through his, it seemed, that had been as firm a rule as not changing anything in the past – you can have the art, or you can have your happy life, but what you can’t have is both.
I had nothing left to my name, but my revelation. The art was part of me, inseparable. I’d never be free of it. It wouldn’t save me. It couldn’t. There never been a choice, not for any of us. We had dreamed of making the world more beautiful, more bright, more human. And we had, in our way, suffering all the while for this hubris.
I walked to the safe where I kept the gun. It was a choice that might not even have been a choice. I brought the gun to my work desk. I had been “sick” for as long as I could remember. I didn’t regret it. I couldn’t. I could only paint.
As I held the gun under my chin, I paused for a moment. I thought I heard something outside, a gentle hum of time, from the grass of the derelict courtyard, beyond the dumpster where my paintings would soon reside. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I waited.