“Come look at this,” said Kim-Ange, recognizing a bored person when she saw it. “These are cool. It’s a guy who went mad. And he painted pictures of his madness. And they’re the best insights into trauma I think we have.”

Cormac was expecting something weird and surreal—melting clocks maybe. He wasn’t expecting what he saw. The upper galleries were dimly lit, practically dark, and he found himself in a small room, shaped like a pentagon, with large canvases hanging on each felt-covered wall. The effect was close and claustrophobic.

The first thing he noticed was there was nothing on them: no shapes, no drawings of anything at all, just great blocks of pure color looming above him. What on earth was this? What a complete waste of his time. He didn’t understand modern art, and that was that. Kim-Ange, meanwhile, was off to the side, staring, utterly rapt.

He peered closer, then took a step back, so he could take in the whole of a canvas at one go. It was three blocks of color, but it could—did, in fact—look like the ground, the sea, and the sky. The sky section was a deep rust color, like dried blood or the warning of something ominous; the blue section below was battered and rough, as if the sky was upsetting the sea, because something terrible was coming; and the earth was brown and dry, as if everything was hopeless and everything had need; it was unutterably bleak, extraordinarily beautiful. How? Cormac thought. It’s just some paint on a wall. But it filled him with deep and heavy emotions.

“Oh my God,” he said finally.

“I know,” said Kim-Ange, who had a look of fervent reverence on her face, as if having a religious experience. “Aren’t they amazing?”

Cormac looked at another one. Here there was a diseased yellow, the color itself, the very pigment, like a howl of disgust and misery. It had the ability to spear his mood, get right to the heart of him; he felt the artist was crying out, personally, for help, straight to him.

“Who is this artist?”

“Mark,” said Kim-Ange, respectfully. “Mark Rothko.”

“Is he still alive? What happened to him?”

Kim-Ange looked at Cormac and he immediately knew the answer.

“Suicide,” he said. “It’s written there.”

“Plain as day,” said Kim-Ange, with an uncharacteristically grim tone.

Suddenly Cormac found himself thinking: of Robbie, yes, but also of Lissa. Is this how she had felt? Why she’d had to move?

“Amazing,” he said, gazing at the paintings.

They passed through halls and rooms of modernism, of the world sliced up and twisted around.

“Why did they start doing this?” he said.

“Why do you think?” said Kim-Ange, pointing out a Braques. “Look when it all started, a hundred years ago.”

Cormac blinked. “After the First World War.”