Milos considered the possibilities.
It could be a fake. It could be a reproduction. It could be an imitation by another artist. Hell, it could be the outcome of a shared spark of inspiration that lead to a similar painting. Or, the scariest possibility was that he was misremembering. That could happen. He knew his memory was not infallible, and with an exceptionally long life behind him, memories were not only malleable, they could be suspect.
But he discarded all of the thoughts tumbling about in his confusion. He knew with certainty that the painting was hers. It was like seeing the curve of her body in the dark and knowing that it was her that laid beside him. His mind was flooded with the sensations of her memory, her smell reminiscent of lavender and cloves, the way her smile crooked up more on the left than the right, but somehow that made her all the more beautiful… the way her hair cascaded in the thick black curls when she bent over to kiss him. But above all those things, she knew.
Areti knew what he was from the start. And had loved him regardless.
How does one reconcile such a thing? He had begged her to join him time and time again, but she had refused each time. Instead, she painted. Areti always painted, from the moment she awoke in the early afternoon until she would fall asleep in his arms in the early morning. She worked with a madness that few could have understood. She would laugh at his disappointment in her refusal, and point to her latest canvas… ‘See this? It is temporary. I am the art, my love. I too am only temporary. If I am not, my art will not matter. And I know that I do. I matter.’
Milos would always agree, because she mattered greatly to him. Every time he would consider for a moment to disregard her feelings and bring her along against her will, but his love for her was greater than his fear to be without her. He watched her, smiled his smile, the one he only used for her, and she would laugh.
Oh gods, her laugh. Bright as the summer sky, brilliant as a sun flecked ocean wave. Milos grinned, again noting how well he remembered the sun. That would never go away. He watched her, year after year, grow old and somehow all the more beautiful. When she died, he had grieved furiously, but he was thankful for the many decades they had together. He had been lost for a long time after her death, but he came back to himself eventually-
“Sir?” A voice pulled at his reverie.
“Ah, yes?” Milos blinked and turned his head to find an elderly museum volunteer smiling graciously. Her name tag declared that her name was Martha and that she loved Van Gogh. “My apologies… Hello Martha.”
“It is closing time, dearie. You must have missed the overhead announcement.” She waved at the painting. “It is beautiful though, isn’t it? The legends about her work aside, she had a natural talent for capturing light, didn’t she?”
“Indeed. Those waves are nearly real, the energy of them as if they are about to crash on the shore.”
Martha nodded as if she understood and moved on to the next patron, directing the visitors towards the museum’s exit through the gift shop.
The painting hung on the museum wall had unraveled him. How long had he stood there, just blankly staring at her work, connecting them again across the centuries? How long had it taken him to realize that his memories of the sun, the waves, the summer sky were not his own, but his memory of her paintings? The grief he felt on the day she died manifested out of nothing, wrenching his heart in its grasp, the long span of time giving no comfort or lessening the passion of it.
Tears tracked down his face as he walked to the exit. The first tears he had cried since the late fifties… when Gertrude and Max had decided to take the flame. Their kind was going extinct, and not for any of the reasons that made sense. Maybe they were dying out because the world no longer needed them, their kind, the proverbial monsters in the dark.
Gertrude had said that humanity was beautiful and terrible and horrific. All the things they themselves had been labeled since time had begun. The world did not need monsters in the dark when the prey were nearly monsters themselves. The distance had shortened between them, and that was terrifying for the ones whom still remembered their own humanity. It was an unraveling of self, a threat of self-reflection that was too much to bear. Humanity had always been animals, red in tooth and claw, surviving and striving against whatever they perceived as a threat. Identifying the prey was not a simple calculation any longer.
Maybe it was the A-bomb. Maybe it was the war after war after war and all the atrocities that man wrought had on their perceived enemies. Maybe it was witnessing the modern world spring up so fast, contrary to all of human history where progress was slow and methodical and… adaptable. Gertrude and Max probably would have laughed watching Milos continuously learn to adapt to the latter decades of the twentieth century, and the advent of computers, cameras, the internet, and all the things that accelerated humanity ever faster into the twenty first century.
Maybe Gertrude and Max had seen it coming. They saw the ‘Modern World’ and had refused it outright. Better to choose oblivion than what was coming. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps not. Seeing Areti’s work on the wall had shifted something in Milos. A change that was building within him, energy coalescing and amplifying itself with ferocity.
Milos came to the decision before he knew he had even made one. As he walked out of the museum’s expansive exit, via the similarly expansive gift shop, and turned down the Fifth avenue, he found himself saying it aloud, giving the thought tangibility and making it real.
“I am going to rob the Met.”
Milos smiled his special smile, the wide one he saved for rare moments, and his overly long eye teeth glimmered in the bright lights of Fifth Avenue. He had taken five full steps before he realized that he was going to need help, and the thought shifted the hunter’s confident countenance to one of furrowed contemplation.
“Shit,” he muttered. “I am going to need help.”