The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,38

a chance to speak to their holy man?

The problem, as it had always been, was his art. For as long as he could remember, he had felt an insatiable need to create something new, something never seen before. But this was a world where everything had already been seen, studied, and archived. Nowadays, most artists were satisfied painting pretty pictures or just copying the mortal masters.

“So I painted the Mona Lisa,” a girlfriend back in art school had said to him. “What’s the big deal?” Her canvas was indistinguishable from the original. Except that it wasn’t the original. Ezra couldn’t see the point – but apparently he was the only one, because the girl received an A in the class, and he got a C.

“Your turmoil hinders you,” the teacher had told him. “Find peace and you will find your way.” But all he found was futility and discontent even in his best work.

He knew that the greats suffered for their art. He tried to suffer. When he was a teenager, hearing that Van Gogh had shorn off an ear in a fit of delusional pique, he tried it himself. It stung for a few moments until his nanites deadened the pain and got to work repairing the damage. By the next morning the ear had grown back good as new.

Ezra’s older brother, who was in no way Theo van Gogh, told their parents what he had done, and they sent him off to Harsh-School – the kind of place where kids at risk of choosing an unsavory lifestyle were coached in the delights of discipline. Ezra was underwhelmed, because it turned out that Harsh-School wasn’t all that harsh.

Since no one flunked out of Harsh-School, he graduated with a “satisfactory” rating. He had asked the Thunderhead precisely what that meant.

“Satisfactory is satisfactory,” it had told him. “Not good, not bad. Acceptable.”

But as an artist, Ezra wanted to be more than just acceptable. He wanted to be exceptional. Because if he couldn’t be exceptional, what was the point?

In the end, he found work, as all artists do, for there were no starving artists anymore. Now he painted playground murals. Smiling children, big-eyed bunnies, and pink fluffy unicorns dancing on rainbows.

“I don’t see what you’re complaining about,” his brother had said. “Your murals are wonderful – everyone loves them.”

His brother had become an investment banker, but since the world economy was no longer subject to fluctuations in the market, it was just another playground with bunnies and rainbows. Sure, the Thunderhead created financial drama, but it was all pretend, and everyone knew it. So to find a greater sense of fulfillment, his brother decided to learn a dead language. Now he could converse fluently in Sanskrit and did so once a week at the local Dead Language Club.

“Supplant me,” Ezra had begged the Thunderhead. “If you have any mercy, please make me someone else.” The idea of having his memories completely erased and replaced with new ones – fictional ones that would feel every bit as real as his own – was an attractive idea to him. But it was not to be.

“I only supplant those who are beyond all other options,” the Thunderhead had told him. “Give it time. You’ll settle into a life you can enjoy. Everyone eventually does.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then I will guide you in a direction of fulfillment.”

And then the Thunderhead labeled him unsavory along with everyone else, and that was the end of its guidance.

Of course, he couldn’t tell all of that to the aging Tonist curate. She would not care. All she wanted was a reason to dismiss him, and a monologue of his woes was certainly cause to be turned away.

“I’m hoping the Toll might help me bring meaning to my art,” he told her.

Those aging eyes of hers brightened. “You’re an artist?”

He sighed. “I paint public murals,” he told her, almost apologetically. As it turned out, a skilled mural artist was exactly what the Tonists wanted.

Five weeks later he was in Lenape City, on the docket for a morning audience with the Toll.

“Only five weeks!” said the greeter at the welcome center. “You must be special. Most people who are granted an audience get put on a six-month waiting list!”

He didn’t feel special. He felt, more than anything, out of place. Most people there were devout Tonists, dressed in their drab brown frocks and tunics, intoning together to find transcendent harmonies, or tonal discord, depending on their reason for being here. It was