You're not sure just when it happened. But you must have still been young, before the worm rules of possible-or-not had burrowed through your mind, weakening its foundations and crumbling its pinnacles till only the familiar, the mundane remained standing.
Think. Logically, it must have been after the day mother's friend gave you a watercolor set for your birthday. He'd taken the price tag off but you knew it was the cheapest one they sold: injection-molded ovals filled with colored powder, flaking and congealed, and a sad little brush of plastic and artificial hairs. You were old enough to know the gift was for mother's benefit, not yours, and for days the yellow plastic case sat on an unused shelf, shrink-wrapped and silent. But one lonely afternoon you ripped it open. After five minutes, you were intrigued. After twenty, you were enthralled. And after an hour, you knew you were a painter, and always would be. And you were right.
It must have been after that when you met the stooped old man in the art shop. You had worn away the little ovals many times over by then, each week taking some of the money mother left for you on the end table to the little art store on the corner and buying a new set of watercolors. Finally the stooped old man, his faded blue sweater alive with staticy loose threads, took you to the dusty back aisles to where the paints and brushes were sold individually, and taught you how different brushes had different textures, and different kinds of paints each had their own mood and temper.
"I used to know someone about your age," he said with a sad smile, "who just loved to paint."
Then it must have been later still when it happened, after the day you made Mrs. Halloran cry. In the dead of January, she asked the class to draw a picture of someplace green and summery. You worked all week, the shades and brush strokes requiring worlds of thought but hardly any physical effort. When you brought your picture to class, Mrs. Halloran was kind, at first. "The assignment was to draw your own picture," she said sweetly, putting a hand on your head, "not bring in someone else's." Later she was angry. "See me after class, so we can have a talk about lying," she said, tight-lipped. After class she became frustrated, thumbing through her big art book, muttering, "I'm sure I've seen this before. It's a Raphael or a Botticelli, a copy, I suppose. I wish you would be honest and tell me where you got it."
So you stayed late and drew another one, just for her, and when you were done, she cried.
Your memory of those days is jumbled up and fractured, like an upended puzzle, each piece perfectly distinct in itself but the bigger picture hopelessly muddled. There were mother's furiously animated phone conversations, smoking endlessly with one hand while twirling the twisted cord round and round her finger in the other; flash bulbs and stage lights in your face, pinning you to sweaty chairs with burning heat and cold white fierceness; the man from the art store on TV with a huge TV smile and a TV suit instead of a sweater; bottles of alcohol, two thirds empty, one overturned above a puddle of sticky sharp fumes; mother's pen swirling and scribbling above a checkbook; and handshakes, always handshakes. There were suits and cigars and diamond rings and secret smiles and stern lectures and old men with frightening phony belly laughs. There was a man who smelled like mouthwash and aftershave and said he was your father who took you away on a car ride one night. He took you away from the painting you were working on and you never saw it again. You can still picture it, in every detail. You still know the exact brush stroke that needs to be made next.
Out of the sea of memories it is only the times you could paint that you remember, and those with a rank vivid tang that rivals your perception of real moments, of presentness. Painting and memory are interdependent in your mind, stuck together like electricity and magnetism, impossible except in union. So you remember the grain on a wood-paneled floor in a windowed veranda, sunlight burning through the windows as you breathed details into a landscape. You remember the heavy presence of summer crickets, chaotic yet syncopated deep in the blood, as you mixed colors in a dark basement studio. You remember the lush glow of firelight on wet oils, the smell of cream paper drinking in dyed water, the splintery texture of a fine wood brush arousing your fingertips with warm physicality. And you remember the paintings most of all, every one preserved in your mind more securely and lovingly than any museum could hope to do.
There is no before in these memories, but all this must have been before, if any moment in your life deserves to be the fulcrum of before and after. You were always a painter; until the sad yellow watercolor set crossed your path you just hadn't realized it yet. But in crisp contrast, there was a moment, a clear and definable moment with jumbled befores and heady afters, a moment when you first became a Wayfarer.
People have been frightened by the way you paint, by the fearsome intensity with which you throw your body and mind at the canvas. This has always seemed odd to you. What other way should you live, than with fearsome intensity? How else to love something, than with every joule of energy in your body and every amp of electricity in your brain? But there was no one to comment or observe, the first time it happened. You were alone with your work.
You were simply intent on the painting, as always: nerve and neuron focused not on colors, on brush strokes, but on the world behind them. That had always come first to you, the reality behind the art: your hand first becoming a tool to manipulate paints and brush, then, as your skill increased, the implements themselves a tool to manipulate color, form, and dimension. Finally these things themselves became merely the way you caused some other world to live, to be. You became so intent on your creation that day that it was some time before you realized you had done exactly that.
The paper, the brush, the paint were gone, and you stood... where? Not inside the canvas; you knew right away that there was nothing mystical about the painting itself, no magic in your brush or glamour in your colors. Was it a dream? You thought so at first, and maybe, but if so you have never woken up. The best you could say is that you were somewhere before, and then you were somewhere else. Simplified, unsatisfying, true.
It was a purple somewhere else.
The shade was exactly what you had mixed, orange and blue and hints of burnt yellow-gold. It filled the spaces between the great white trees, trunks mottled with a flaking, paper-thin skin far too small for your brush to have detailed and yet still exactly as you had imagined.
You took a deep breath, and became conscious of a fading tingling, like a billion microscopic aftershocks shaking every cell of your body. Somewhere else was infinite orders of magnitude too small, you sensed, knew instinctively. You were not just in some other country, other time, other planet, other galaxy. Even universe seemed too small a word to encapsulate the difference you felt through the whole of your being, as if the very physical laws governing the subatomic particles of your body had shifted, altered in some indefinable way, like the face of a friend not seen for a year, the same yet for a moment disturbing and different.
Somewhere else.
Oversized droplets fell a little too slowly from the sky, glowing bright and faintly green (the color took some care to get right) and you knew they would not harm you. The strange tingling was fading, leaving behind a different thrill of wonder and delight. You let one of the droplets splash on your hand, tiny curtains and spheres of phosphorescent milk arcing everywhere, momentary fluid anarchy. You laughed, and the sound rebounded through the plum-cream forest.
And then something groaned behind you.
You froze. Underbrush snapped under heavy feet. Ragged breathing suddenly scraped in your ears, the breathing of something humanoid but not human, coming closer, and angry.
Without thinking, joy hardened to terror, you leapt forward. The glowing droplets spattered your face, shimmering wildly as they exploded into fragments, the rich purple darkness around you turned to bruised shadows. The thing behind lurched after you with a wet crash. Branches slashed at your arms, muddy white pools sucked your shoes, and the terrible breathing came closer, closer.
Finally, you couldn't help yourself: you turned your head and for one instant caught its slit-eyed gaze, its hungry crusted teeth, and then you tripped and fell down a sudden, muddy slope, tumbling and clawing at red-brown soil, then at nothing.
You landed with a painful crash, and before you could even breathe in a hand had grabbed your wrist. You struggled to free yourself, but the grip was warm and firm, and with desperate insight you realized it was not the hand of the creature but of something like you, and let it tug you into the darkness of bushes.
The man-beast stomped by, somewhere close, heavy, ragged breathing sending terror through your trembling body.
When the shuddering noises finally receded, and the crashing sounds gave way to the quiet lull of the forest once again, you at last found the courage to open your eyes. A sea of faces looked back: children, like you, curious, and not quite as scared. The clothes they wore were simpler than yours, the skin colors not quite the same, but they were human, or close enough (somewhere else) and you never thought such a simple thing could be so pleasing.
The one who grabbed you opened her mouth to speak. It would not be till later that you would wonder why you could understand her; not till much, much later would you wonder why you could always understand them. Just then, all you could wonder was how to answer her question: "How did you get here?"
You told them as best you could. They didn't believe you, but they took you back to the village anyway, to the place that would become home. For a time.
You spent some months in that purple world of danger and beauty curdled together, making friends, fitting in despite your strange arrival. But then one night, you felt a strange tingling in your fingertips, and wondered if you could do it again.
You hadn't touched a brush since the day of your arrival, but the moment you grasped the smooth wood handle it was somehow as if you'd never stopped painting.
It was easier the second time, and your long journey through the somewhere else had begun.