“So, Michael. What can you tell me about him?” Phineas asked Michael’s mother. Phineas was a biographer of what he called “the especially notable”. He didn’t write about presidents or humanitarians, or anything so boring as that. And he certainly did not waste his time writing exploitive, feel-good trash about the lives and deaths of misguided youths who chose the wrong damn people to say “but I DO believe in Jesus!” or “Hey now Mr. Communist, if you want to do anything with that tank, you’ll have to go through ME!” to. Rather, he preferred to search for life’s local legends, for the people whose personalities and behaviors were so note-worthy as to shake and mold and entire community. He’d already won critical acclaim for his book “All That And A Bag of Chips”, the life story of a little old lady who had managed to scam every single citizen of a town into thinking they’d purchased the rights to the town from her, as well as a personal-sized can of Pringles.

Today, he was searching for Michael Adonis, or at least memories of him. He’d received a call from a woman from Michael’s town last week, and something about her tone enticed Phineas greatly. Irksomely, however, whenever he asked for details she would become too flustered, and at one point even spoke in tongues. Phineas was annoyed, and wouldn’t have bothered to check the situation out had his current well of potential biographees been so shallow. He was a man slowly, and crushingly coming to realize that once you dig deep through life’s many layers of banality, you don’t find some nugget of eccentricity or true humanity that makes it all worth while, you just find more banality.

Speaking of banality, Michael’s vapid-looking (really, she was despondent more than anything else, though Phineas had difficulty telling the difference) mother seemed to have forgotten that Phineas asked a question. Annoyed, he asked again. “Did you hear me? I asked you how you’d describe Michael. Your son. The one that used to live in your womb. What was he like?”

She seemed to give it a moment’s thought, and then answered. “Beautiful.” She said.

“Beautiful?” Phineas asked. He wasn’t sure if he should be irate, or intrigued. He tried to be a little bit of both, and his stomach did unpleasant things.

“Yes, beautiful… Of course, I always thought my little baby was beautiful, even from the beginning, when he came out all scrunchy and covered in blood… He was mine, after all. He lived in me, I had to love him. But then… he grew up, and as time went on, I realized that there was something different about him. Something about him was very striking, very pleasing.”

“You mean he was handsome?”

“No, it was more than that. It doesn’t just affect the eyes, you know? Michael’s… beauty… reaches out from every part of him, and into your soul. You see him, and you hear him, and you feel him and you know him. It was like his spirit extended beyond his body more and more as he grew up, drawing us all in. By the time he was 12, the entire community was at his feet, doing what he wanted, being what he wanted. He got a kick out of it, believe me.”

Phineas looked outside. The town since then had obviously lost its purpose. It seemed to have once been a nice town, maybe even a great one. Every house had a garden, and every yard seemed to have worthwhile play equipment. On three sides of the town there was a huge, thick forest. The kind you could once lose yourself in for a summer afternoon. The kind where magic would run in the rivers instead of water. The whole thing was like a Hallmark card come to life, but without the falsehood.

Like anyone who’d been jaded by too much falsehood, however, Phineas would have been blind to the town’s true former beauty. As it was now, the town was obviously in decline. The gardens were shriveled, the flowers’ nectar dried into dust. The play equipment was all rusty and broken, and the forest just seemed like a clump of trees. At the very least, it retained its honesty.

“Seems like that wasn’t too good for the town.” Phineas said finally, drawing his attention away from the window. Michael’s mother sighed.

“I don’t know about that… It seemed like Michael’s beauty enhanced everything around it. When he was out and about, everything was better. It was like we fed off of it. But when he left us, everything went down hill. People became depressed, and the town suffered.”

“Ah, so he is dead?” Phineas remarked. He had figured as much. He hated to seem so glib about it towards the boy’s mother, but that was a lie. Glibness was his specialty. To rub a bit of salt in the wound, he started to roll a cigarette. He wasn’t especially torn up by the fact, after all. In fact, he would have been sorely surprised had she said-

“Oh, no, he’s quite alive.”

In his surprise, Phineas accidentally swallowed the cigarette he’d been putting to his mouth. Hacking viciously, he coughed it out into his hand. The glibness fairy was a prickly one indeed. “Alive?” He said finally, enticed at the idea of getting a better idea of what all of this vague talk of beauty and whatnot actually meant. Maybe if he were able to actually meet him, and figure out what was going on, things would work better…

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“He… well, like I said, Michael was very beautiful. But he wanted to create beauty as well, beauty that wasn’t just inside of him. He wasn’t content just to exist, you know? He tried his hand at art, and…”

“It sucked?”

“No, it was excellent! Some of the most beautiful stuff any of us had ever seen, except Michael, of course. And that was the problem, no matter how talented he was, no matter how naturally beauty came to him even in his actions, he could never match himself for beauty. Especially because, as time went on, he just kept becoming more beautiful. It drove him crazy, and he ran away.”

“So you don’t know where he is?” Phineas asked. Ms. Adonis looked at him as if he were challenged.

“Sir, I’m his mother. Of course I know where he is. But he never lets me see him anymore. He says that he’s become too much, that I can’t be allowed to… Oh, it breaks my heart so, but he does talk to me sometimes. Whispering, of course, through the walls so I can’t hear his voice as well.”

“Ma’am…” Phineas started, sensing a possibility. “…If I were to attempt to talk to your son, and convince him to let you see him, would you be willing to tell me where he’s hiding?” Ms. Adonis bit her lip.

“I don’t know… It seems-“

“Ma’am, please. For your sake, and for your son’s sake. I’m all about reuniting families.”

Finally, she gave in. She scrawled a note on a piece of paper, and Phineas was on his way.

He drove for about a half an hour into the heart of the woods, until he came to a shack in the middle of it. Phineas stepped in, wincing at the creak of the old door, and was taken aback by the shack’s contents. Or rather, by the quality of the shack’s contents. Superficially, it seemed exactly like a shack in the woods, perhaps the type recently inhabited by the Unabomber. Scraps of paper lined with mad scribblings were littered across the floor, along with a few broken pieces of furniture, some discarded food, and a large piece of driftwood. However, for some reason, all of it seemed absolutely beautiful, like pristine artwork. The scribblings could have been the transcribed subconscious of Mozart, and the half-eaten hotdog under Phineas’s heel was a thing of religious significance. Most beautiful however, was the driftwood.

It was the gateway. Not just in a metaphorical sense, but in a transcendent sense as well. It felt as if it was the gateway. Perhaps the gates of heaven, or the door behind which sat absolute truth. Phineas moved it over, and found that it was actually just covering up the mouth of a cave. He was understandably disappointed.

Grabbing a flashlight, Phineas slid into the cave, but he found that it wasn’t necessary. The walls radiated with brilliant light, and seemed to be made of marble, or platinum. The stalactites were like giant, glistening fountains. One had to admit, they were very nice stalactites.

“Hello?” Phineas called out into the cave. From around the bend, a man appeared. Or maybe an angel. Phineas couldn’t tell, and he didn’t even believe in angels, which certainly made this a point in their favor. It was, to put it quite simply, beautiful. Not just in terms of looks, but also in terms of the way it carried itself, the way the air around it tasted. It also had a look of anguish across its face. “M-Michael?” Phineas asked, cowed.

Michael replied, and his voice and his words were splendid. They wanted Phineas gone, they wanted to be alone. They didn’t want to be seen by anyone, they didn’t want their radiance anymore. The words he spoke hurt Michael to listen to, not because of the message they gave, but because his ears simply ached to hear anything so near perfection. Michael was about to say something, to offer his humble apology to the creature, before it began to grow more enchanting again.

Molten gold dribbled from Michael’s pores, slowly slipping down his fingertips before splashing to the floor. Perhaps it was this that tormented him, or something else- some change in his spirit that was too much even for him to bear himself. Whatever it was, it drove him mad. He ran about in circles, screaming a tormented melody. As he ran, the gold continued to drip from him and slip off of the bottom of his feet. He would splash through the puddles, and smear them, spreading the gold all around in great lines and shapes.

Phineas had to shield his eyes, and close his ears, as it had all become too much, but STILL he could feel Michael’s presence in the room, his complete perfection. He couldn’t see, yet he could sense it when Michael’s radiance overtook him, causing him to burst into a plume of flames of colours nothing can repeat. Phineas shook there, huddled up, waiting for the perfection to stop until finally Michael had burned himself away completely.

When he opened his eyes, his head felt very near to bursting. He slowly stepped out of the cave, when his eyes fell to the floor. There, smeared in gold and speckled with Michael’s remains, Phineas saw something hideously wonderful. He saw that which Michael had always wanted, a creation that triumphed his own beauty.

Phineas left that place, and never wrote his book. He never saw Michael’s mother again to explain what happened to her. He’d let her piece things together, when she went to see her son and found his cave filled with cement. She couldn’t be allowed to see what was down there, after all. She was too susceptible to beauty.