Daniel trudged home. The nights were still coming around six, and they got cold quickly. Even though the college was in its spring semester, the weather refused to reflect the sentiment. It was nearly February, and there was a long way to go before anything resembling spring showed itself. Daniel's thoughts were not on the chill air that crept into the sleeves of his jacket and bit at his bare neck. They weren't on the darkness, either, although he was vaguely considering the beguiling way the night melted over the glass and metal skyscrapers and pooled into the streets of downtown. His eyes, though not actually focusing on anything, took in the honeycombs of light flecking the sides of the innumerable buildings. They took in the dim atmosphere of dusk coating everything it touched, a matrix of diminishing color, using a palette of pale blues and grays and shadows to paint the world. His ears heard but didn't exactly listen to the commotion of rush hour traffic and indecipherable conversations held in the air between mouths that passed him by. Snow, days-old and dirty, flanked the sidewalks, pushed aside by some unnamed worker responsible for invisibly keeping the city lovely and useable. Some stores still had Christmas lights in their windows, though it would probably not be long before their employees revolted and removed the decorations themselves. Coats and hats and legs of masked people—hardly people in Daniel's mind, more substances that came and went in his range of vision—moved around him like iridescent strands in an oil slick. They had no faces, because he did not acknowledge them; they were not self-existing beings, because he did not think of them. It was all very normal, and if he had been of average mind, he would have recognized it as such, but he was virtually unaware of his surroundings. There was nothing novel around him, and so the world did not catch his attention the way some large, single star in an expanse of black sky might.

If someone had stopped him in his walking and asked Daniel what was so occupying his mind, he wouldn't have been able to say. His thoughts were focused on distances he couldn't quite perceive and hardly knew he was reaching for. He didn't know that his mind wandered, really. He knew that, very often, he wasn't focusing on the world around him, but he wasn't affected much by the realization. Retreating into his mind was not a mechanism of escape for him, as it was for some; for Daniel, it was inherent. It was as instinctive for him to preoccupy his thoughts as it was for a swallow to migrate. He wouldn't have been able to function without his mental wanderings. His capacity for survival was based on his ability to divide himself from the surrounding world. He might not have existed had he paid too much attention to reality. All the concreteness might have overwhelmed him—locked his brain into blocks with rigid edges, sliced through the filmy haze in his head and confine it into a strict shape. Such a world—a place with firm structures and unmoving lines—was no place for him, and so his mind seldom dwelt long in it.

His classes had been all right today. He hadn't learned much new information, but he'd garnered a concept for a new piece. For as long as he remembered, he'd been working in oils. He loved oils: The smells of the paints and the turpentine mixtures, the linseed oil's greasy texture, the way the colors could be blended and morph into new ones hours after they'd been applied. He revered them. They were what he looked forward to returning to each night as he moved through the impartial city toward his apartment. Their mingled smells were as sensual to him as any perfume or cologne; the manner in which the paints snaked out of their tubes and the way his brushes smoothed them into one another gave him more satisfaction than anything he could imagine. His heart raced to think of painting again, the way a teenager's heart raced when thinking of a crush. Daniel's mind broke into brilliant colors when he considered his work.

His subject matter, lately, had been color itself. Daniel had been painting color. Giving each shade of the rainbow clear definition. Each hue had been masterfully, devotedly explored on six-foot-high and four-foot-wide stretches of canvas. At present, Daniel was defining blue. He was in the process of chronicling blue's life and luster—he was mapping out blue's progression from various shades as light as the ethereal gleam of an icicle to the darkness of absolute sorrow. His painting was a diary of blue's soul. Daniel had become infatuated with each color he'd put to canvas so far. His discernment of the various tints had deepened to a level at which he felt intimate, personal connection. Once he'd mastered the essence of each color, he could fully be worthy of using them in his subsequent pieces. Each color was a life force—each held knowledge too deep for one to comprehend at surface level. Human beings took color at face value; they took it for granted. They saw color. They merely dusted it with their physical eyes. They didn't view color as a solid object in itself, a thing with presence and existence all its own. They understood only that it was held within other objects; that other things—stuff—contained color . . . but Daniel knew differently. There was much more to color than what the human eye was capable of seeing. If the existence of an entity was determined by the fact that it could be seen, then very much of what others termed reality would disappear when sight did so. Certainly, many things' existence was determined also by the fact that they could be heard with the ear or felt with nerves; humans' perception through the senses was what caused them to believe that anything existed at all. But when hearing was lost, did music die? When taste was lost, did it mean no flavor existed? Therefore, if the world went blind, color must still exist, whether it could be seen or not. It was something far more tangible and real than it was visual; Daniel knew this, and so he'd sought to develop personal understanding and relationship with each color. Even other artists took advantage of color without knowing anything of it—he was not like them. He took advantage of nothing.

His mind traced a thought. Something had been said to him today, just as his first class had been ending. Someone had told him he needed color—that he'd been pale. And he was working on the palest blue, then, at home and in his head (a pale lavender-blue, the color of certain violets). That was likely why he was reminded of the comment. It had been said by the professor—what was his name? Daniel could not recall. The man had stopped him as he'd been gathering his notebook and supplies and getting ready to leave. "You all right, son?" the man had asked. "You look kind of pale. No color in you, you know?"

Daniel couldn't recall if he'd responded. He felt that he had, but he couldn't remember his words. Color—in him? The man had been saying he lacked color. How ironic that the very thing Daniel had been so meticulously working to understand was, in the opinion of another, something he himself lacked. There was no color in him, apparently. No color in his flesh, he assumed the man had meant.

Hardly knowing what he was doing, Daniel paused his walking. Some weight bumped into him from behind, jarring him a bit, but he remained standing and was virtually incognizant of the presence of a person shouldering past him with angry words. Absent-mindedly, Daniel moved over on the sidewalk, toward the brightness of a fluorescent light-post outside a gigantic pane of drugstore window. His breath condensing, out of the way of other people as they hurried beyond him, Daniel looked down at his hands. They were mostly covered by gloves; he couldn't see much of his actual skin. A strange panic had risen in the back of his throat at the thought of what that man had said. What if . . . what if he'd been right? Absurd as it sounded, what if Daniel actually had no color? He'd never thought much about the hues of the human flesh and realized, suddenly, how horribly inadequate his color study was if it missed the entire body of skin tones. Did he have color? He must know. He never looked in mirrors—he didn't even own one—so he wasn't sure at all if he had color!

Trembling, his hands nearly uncontrollable, Daniel picked at the fingers of one glove, quickly drawing it off. Then, anxiously, he lifted the bare hand toward his face. His breath moved in clouds between his long, thin fingers. His eyes darted across the skin-coated bones of his knuckles, so defined, and the smooth nails on his fingertips. He noted the dryness of his skin; the cold weather had turned it into a lattice of lines and cracks that resembled a dry creek bed whose mud-bottom had split into thousands of little angular islands. The precision of each triangle of skin fascinated him, and momentarily, Daniel was lost in his speculation. But then his previous fear returned to him, and he shifted his concentration from the patterns of his skin to the colors of it. He didn't know how long he stood there, bringing his hand close to his face, then backing away from it, drawing it near again and then narrowing his eyes, lifting it closer to the light and then dropping it toward the shadows. Hours could have passed, for all he knew; he wasn't concerned with the time. He was only thinking of ridding himself of the panic, and as he scrutinized his own flesh, the fear of being colorless dissolved and was replaced with a sense not only of relief but also of amusement. His skin was anything but colorless. It, in fact, possessed more color than he could ever have imagined! He saw pinks gracing the knobs of his bone joints and yellows seeping into them. There was a strange sort of pinkish-blue edged with white where his veins were prominent, and certain tans and sienna tints were vibrant in the scattered freckles. There were little black lines toward his wrists where hairs began to sprout, and the indentations of the cracked skin were a subtle gray. His flesh was alive with color. There was absolutely no evidence to the contrary; how could that man ever have questioned it?

Sighing with relief, Daniel smiled at the bare hand before him, then slowly pulled his glove back over it. The slight warmth the threadbare wool produced was hardly noticed; Daniel could've left his hand out in the cold for hours and hardly felt it—his mind was flooded with this new recognition of the color he held within himself. His thoughts boiled with wonder and ideas for how he could imbue a painting with the vibrancy of human skin. He would not notice anything on the remainder of his walk. During his bus ride, he would pay no heed to the curious glances that strayed his way. He would be entirely unaware of the young woman next to him who tried to begin a conversation about the chilly weather, or to the middle-aged couple who were arguing in the back of the bus. He wouldn't notice the group of high-school-aged boys who were sitting on the stoop of his apartment complex and tried to give him trouble as he muddled through them. He knew nothing but his own sudden and complete enthrallment with his concepts and the wonder of his own color. That night, he would complete blue and begin skin tones. He would be awake the entire night, working furiously and tirelessly, and his absorption would last through the next day. He would neglect his classes and ignore any outside interruptions. Nothing would tear him from his passion—not until he'd completed his work.