Sorry, I was wrong about the gunshot. My bad.
I wasn’t used to the sound so I misidentified it, but I doubt any other modern middle school girl would make the same mistake─which is to say, what I actually heard was the ersatz shutter click a smartphone makes when you take a picture.
You know, Kachak!
A sound the kiddy phone they gave me would never make in a million years.
Anyway, the photographer was none other than the child genius.
He was pointing the lens on the back of his phone at the rows of paintings, and clicking away like a tourist snapping pictures of some famous landmark.
It seemed like he was planning to photograph each of the thirty-three paintings.
“Y-Yubiwa, what are you doing?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.
Since he never answers his senior club member (me), I had a hard time telling whether he was ignoring me because he was focused on his photography, or just plain ignoring me.
“Ha ha ha. Be patient, young Dojima. Sosaku appears to have something in mind.”
If the president says so, then patient I will be.
At the very least, Sosaku was more likely to have something in mind than the president, who never seems to have anything in his mind at all─hmm, maybe by taking pictures of the paintings and converting them to digital data, he could perform an image search online?
And then he might be able to figure out who’d painted them?
As far as I could tell when I was passing them down from the crawl space, none of them were signed on either front or back (which further weakened my theory that they were student works someone couldn’t bear to throw away), but if we could identify the artist, that information might well offer a clue as to why they seemed so strange.
It might also help determine their value (I still hadn’t discarded the “hidden treasure” theory─in contrast to Mr. Bare-Legs, who’d suggested it in the first place but seemed to have forgotten about it completely. Did that mean he didn’t want his share?).
But once the child genius was done photographing the paintings, his next move wasn’t anything so high-tech as a digital image search.
On the contrary, it was startlingly analog.
Pulling out a felt-tip pen from who knows where, he abruptly began writing on the screen of his smartphone─what the hell was this kid doing?!
I rushed over, intending to put a stop to his eccentric behavior, but the leader halted me in my tracks, repeating, “Be patient, young Dojima. Sosaku appears to have something in mind.”
“And you appear incapable of saying anything else!!”
Whatever the child genius had in mind, I wouldn’t call writing directly on the screen of your phone the act of a sane person. I could maybe understand if he were using a stylus, but the writing utensil in the child genius’s hand was far more primitive than that.
Just because LCDs are my natural enemy, that didn’t mean I could overlook this act of wanton vandalism─but while I was dealing with the leader, Yubiwa seemed to have finished his “drawing.”
First the ceiling, now an LCD─I was starting to wonder if this guy just drew on everything, but when he turned his phone toward me, I realized what was actually going on.
His intention became immediately obvious.
Needless to say, he wasn’t showing the screen to me specifically, he was showing it to Sotoin─but anyway.
“O─Ohhhhh! Oh oh oh!”
My voice rang out before I could stop it. Not a very beautiful one, either.
This truly was a case of a picture being worth a thousand words.
Or perhaps I should say, of one glance being enough.
The photo the child genius had pulled up on his screen was of the painting at the far end of the row─with his line drawing overlayed on it.
It was a quick sketch, so it wasn’t very detailed, but all the same I could make out several figures bent forward─
“It’s Millet’s The Cleaners!” I blurted out.
“The Gleaners, I believe,” Sakiguchi corrected curtly, dampening my high spirits.
Come on, man, read the room.
Any confusion over the name is probably just a question of translation anyway, so we’ll set that aside. The point is, the painting was that famous work by the French master─except that the human figures had been removed from the frame.
Simply put, the artist had taken the same viewpoint as Millet, but had only painted the scenery.
It was only natural that we had a sense of déjà vu, that we felt like something was missing.
What was missing was the people.
I guess the child genius had realized this right away, and run with the eccentric idea of drawing on his phone in order to run it by the rest of us.
True, his method revealed the truth at a glance, but I’m pretty sure a few words would’ve sufficed to achieve the same effect… Does he really hate talking that much?
Anyway, a single example was enough.
He didn’t need to deface his screen any further (would the ink even come off? Though I guess for someone with his economic resources, a smartphone might as well be a portable whiteboard)─we could assume the situation was the same for the other thirty-two paintings.
A second look confirmed it.
The sense of familiarity, of oddness, of déjà vu, of something missing, it all made sense now.
That painting over there was The Swing by Fragonard, but without the people.
That one was Ophelia by Millais, but it was just the background.
That one was Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass, but again, no people.
That one was Renoir’s Dance at Le moulin de la galette. But no people.
The same contrivance had been applied to paintings by Picasso and Dalí, Botticelli and Van Gogh, even one of Hokusai’s masterpieces.
These weren’t landscapes and still lifes, they were paintings that had been turned into landscapes and still lifes─it was so simple, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner.
A pitch-perfect solution. Or make that a picture-perfect one.
Once that became clear, it also became clear why each of us had gotten a weird feeling from a different number of the paintings─the spread reflected our familiarity or lack thereof with the classic paintings these works were based on.
Since I had said half of them looked odd, that meant I had some knowledge of sixteen of the thirty-three paintings, give or take (even if I didn’t necessarily know the names of the original paintings or their creators)─conversely, I couldn’t feel like something was missing from the remaining sixteen or seventeen paintings because I wasn’t familiar with the sources.
The fact that the delinquent only thought ten of them looked odd meant that he only knew a paltry ten of the original paintings, compared to my sixteen.
“Yesss! I beat the ignorant delinquent!”
“Dojima, your brain filter is off,” he sighed. “Your true colors are starting to show”─but let him say what he wants.