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It occurred to me that a medium was also a person
who took dictation from the Great Beyond, and that
made me laughA little nervously, it's true
I went into the bedroom, at first not sure what I
was afterThen I looked at the closet and knew
465
The week before, I'd had Jack take me shopping -
not at the Crossroads Mall but at one of the men's
shops on StArmand's Circle - and I'd bought half
a dozen shirts, the kind that button up the front
When she was a little kid, Ilse used to call them
Big People ShirtsThey were still in their
cellophane bagsI tore the bags off, pulled out
the pins, and tossed the shirts back into the
closet, where they landed in a heapI didn't want
the shirtsWhat I wanted were the cardboard
inserts
Those bright chanel jewelry online white rectangles of cardboard
I found a Sharpie in a pocket of my PowerBook
carrying caseIn my old life I'd hated Sharpies
for both the smell of the ink and their tendency
to smearIn this one I'd come to love the fat
boldness of the lines they created, lines that
seem to insist on their own absolute realityI
took the cardboard inserts, the Sharpie, and the
X-ray of Wireman's brain out to the Florida room,
where the light was bright and declamatory
The itch in my missing arm deepenedBy now it
felt almost like a friend
466
I didn't have the sort of light-box doctors stick
X-rays and MRI scans on when they want to study
them, but the Florida room's glass wall made a
very acceptable substituteI didn't even need
Scotch tapeI was able to snap 925 tiffany and co. jewelry the X-ray into the
crack between the glass and the chrome facing, and
there it was, a thing many claimed did not exist:
the brain of a lawyerIt floated against the Gulf
I stared at it for awhile, I don't know how long -
two minutes? four? - fascinated by the way the
blue water looked when viewed through the gray
crenellations, how those folds changed the water
to fog
The slug was a black chip, slightly fragmentedIt
looked a little like a small shipLike a rowboat
floating on the caldoI had meant only to draw his
brain intact - no slug - but it ended up being
more than thatI went on and added the water, you
see, because the picture seemed to demand itOr maybe they were the sameIt
was just a suggestion of the Gulf, but it was
there, and it tiffany cross necklace was enough to be successful, because
I really was a talented sonofabitchIt only took
467
twenty minutes, and when I was done I had drawn a
human brain floating on the Gulf of MexicoIt was,
in a way, way cool
It was also horrifyingIt isn't a word I want to
use about my own work, but it's unavoidableAs I
took the X-ray down and compared it to my picture
- slug in the science, no slug in the art - I
realized something I perhaps should have seen much
earlierCertainly after I started the Girl and
Ship seriesWhat I was doing didn't work just
because it played on the nerve-endings; it worked
because people knew - on some level they really
did know - that what they were looking at had come
from a place beyond talentThe feeling those gucci uk Duma
pictures conveyed was horror, barely held in check
Horror waiting to happenInbound on rotted sails
v
I was hungry againI made myself a sandwich and
ate it in front of my computerI was catching up
with The Hummingbirds - they had become quite the
little obsession with me - when the phone rang
468
"My headache's gone," he said
"Do you always say hello like that?" I asked"Can
I maybe expect your next call to begin 'I just
evacuated my bowels'?"
"Don't make light of thisMy head has ached ever
since I woke up on the dining room floor after
shooting myselfSometimes it's just background
noise and sometimes it rings like New Year's Eve
in hell, but it always achesAnd then, half an
hour ago, it just quitI was making myself a cup
of coffee and it d |