Closer to the Canvas

After his fake art exhibition, Wheeler's friends decided to take him to a popular surgical pub called Retractor. He had worked on his poorly-conceived creations all month to impress his friends, and they were eager to show their appreciation. The hostess led the five of them through the crowded bar area to an operating table and laid the drink menus down on a heavyset male dummy. Wheeler reached for a menu, but Reena slapped his hand away.

"Drinks are on us, Piscasco," she said, slurring.

"That's really cool of you." Wheeler rubbed his hand. "But can I decide what I want first?"

"Oh, you're right," Reena said, giggling.

Reena, Paulette, Max, and Clark started in on Wheeler's show as he studied the menu.

"It was the absolutely the worst," Max said, clearly still awestruck from the exhibition. "I've never seen such a miserable mess in full display."

"I agree," Paulette said. "A complete fiasco." She beamed at Wheeler, who looked up from the menu and conjured a devilish grin to show appreciation.

Reena nodded and giggled some more. The free wine from the art show had obviously caught up to her, but Wheeler didn't mind. They were at Retractor to celebrate his lousy art, not for a serious surgery score. And Max would keep her from wandering over to any groups that were.

Clark, standing across from Wheeler, shook his head. "I really can't get over it, Wheeler. Well done, sir. And by that, I mean 'horribly' done."

The waiter, a young woman dressed in OR scrubs, approached.

"Hi, everyone. I'm Ana and this," she said, waving her arms over the large dummy laying on the greenly-lit table, "is Dudley. Dudley is a Wall Street stockbroker suffering from a blocked aortic valve in his left ventricle, so it's looking like a cardiothoracic kind of night! What can I get you to drink?"

The group ordered their beverages, Ana left, and the glowing condemnations for Wheeler's show continued.

"To call your paintings and sculptures 'godawful' doesn't do them justice," Paulette said as she picked up one of the scalpels laid out near their table. "You're the master of dreck, Wheeler."

"Agrees with," Reena mustered, maintaining her balance somehow.

Paulette lowered the blade above the faux patient before catching herself. She lifted her gaze to the Wheeler. "May I?" she asked. "I mean, you are the man of the hour."

Wheeler gave a thumbs-up and Paulette sliced into Dudley's chest.

The dummies weren't filled with blood or viscera for obvious reasons, but Reena pantomimed as though she were getting splashed. The others politely smiled as they clamped the edges of Dudley's synthetic skin, revealing his store-bought sternum.

Their drinks arrived and Clark offered a toast. "To Wheeler's delightfully inelegant style. To his clumsy, clichéd themes. And to all of the mundane works of art - each to be drowned in the wake of the truly despicable ones we gazed upon tonight."

Reena lifted her glass emphatically. "Thass amoré, baby." She took a deep drink, and Max smiled nervously to the others. Confused, she began to look for a place to set down her drink. Patient Dudley took up the main table's surface, backed by a green "Go" light. Max gently removed the scotch & soda from Reena's hand and placed it out of her reach, off to the side on one of the smaller tables.

"Well, I'm glad you hated it, you guys," Wheeler said, smiling. He took a sip of his drink. The cocktail burned going down his throat and he wondered if the bartender was rewarding or punishing him. The others were starting to select surgical tools to try and revive Dudley's plastic bum ticker.

Wheeler lifted his drink again and they all froze. "We should also thank the Fountain Center Trust," he started. "I couldn't have procured the space without their support. It was cool of them to believe in me, even if it was kind of a prank."

Paulette laughed and looked over to Clark. "More like an exploded septic tank," she said.

Wheeler continued as though he hadn't heard her. "And I'd also like to thank some of the people that said some really nice things tonight, in spite of the obvious poor quality of the collection. I mean, I know it was pretty bad, but it still took a lot of time and...yeah. So, that was cool too."

"Totally, man," Max said, a bit concerned. "Totally. But...I mean, you knew that it was going to be the worst thing you'd ever done in your entire life, right?"

"Yeah, I know." Wheeler looked down and saw that he had emptied his drink. He shook his head a bit. "I know."

Before any of them realized what was happening, Reena reached into Dudley's chest and pulled out the heart. The dummy was lifted off of the table for a moment before the plastic tubes masquerading as arteries and aortas snapped away. Dudley fell back onto the table with a thud. Reena brought the heart to her mouth and pretended to eat it, complete with loud munching sounds.

"Myyummmm, yumm, yumm."

The green light beneath the dummy turned red and "You Lose" music blasted over their group. Max tried to wrestle the heart away from Reena, who couldn't stop laughing.

"C'mon, not cool," Clark said. Reena had knocked his drink over when she lifted the dummy off the table. "Jesus, where's the waitress?" Paulette joined Max in a chase around the table as Reena played a delirious game of keep-away with the dummy heart.

Wheeler began to laugh. It was the first time in weeks he'd laughed at someone other than himself, and it brought back pieces of his soul that he didn't know he'd lost. Reena was giving him and his friends something his bad art couldn't, not with all the work he'd put into it and certainly not by fooling himself into thinking it was better than it was. All it had taken Reena was complimentary wine and a surgical dummy to show Wheeler that joy comes from an honest place; painfully genuine, fearlessly true.

Wheeler waved for their waitress to reset poor Dudley for another round. Quietly, the terrible artist hoped it would be he who had the courage to tear the heart out next time.