“Those doodles,” Peter used to say, “they're worth millions today.”
You used to say.
In the Wood and Gold Room, they serve butter in little crocks, only now each pad has a little picture carved in it. A little figure study.
Maybe it's a picture of a tree or the particular way a hillside in Misty's imagination slopes, right to left. There's a cliff, and a waterfall from a hanging canyon, and a small ravine full of shade and mossy boulders and vines around the thick trunks of trees, and by the time she's imagined it all and sketched it on a paper napkin, people are coming to the bus station to refill their own cups of coffee. People tap their glasses with forks to get her attention. They snap their fingers. These summer people.
They don't tip.
A hillside. A mountain stream. A cave in a riverbank. A tendril of ivy. All these details come to her, and Misty just can't let them go. By the end of her dinner shift, she has shreds of napkins and paper towels and credit card receipts, each one with some detail drawn on it.
In her attic room, in the heap of paper scraps, she's collected the patterns of leaves and flowers she's never seen. In another heap, she has abstract shapes that look like rocks and mountaintops on the horizon. There are the branching shapes of trees, the cluster of bushes. What could be briers. Birds.
What you don't understand you can make mean anything.
When you sit on the toilet for hours, sketching nonsense on a sheet of toilet paper until your ass is ready to fall out—take a pill.
When you just stop going down to work altogether, you just stay in your room and phone for room service. You tell everyone you're sick so you can stay up all night and day sketching landscapes you've never seen, then it's time to take a pill.
When your daughter knocks and begs you for a good-night kiss, and you keep telling her to go to bed, that you'll be there in a minute, and finally her grandmother takes her away from the door, and you can hear her crying as they go down the hallway—take two pills.
When you find the rhinestone bracelet she's pushed under the door, take another.
When nobody seems to notice your bad behavior, they just smile and say, “So, Misty, how's the painting coming along?” it's pill time.
When the headaches won't let you eat. Your pants fall down because your ass is gone. You pass a mirror and don't recognize the thin, sagging ghost you see. Your hands only stop shaking when you're holding a paintbrush or a pencil. Then take a pill. And before you're half through the bottle, Dr. Touchet leaves another bottle at the front desk with your name on it.
When you just cannot stop working. When completing this one project is all you can imagine. Then take a pill.
Because Peter's right.
You're right.
Because everything is important. Every detail. We just don't know why yet.
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history's in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes.
Everything you do shows your hand.
Peter used to say, an artist's job is to pay attention, collect, organize, archive, preserve, then write a report. Document. Make your presentation. The job of an artist is just not to forget.
July 21—
The Third-Quarter Moon
ANGEL DELAPORTE holds up one painting, then another, all of them watercolors. They're different subjects, some just the outline of a strange horizon, some of them are landscapes of sunny fields. Pine forests. The shape of a house or a village in the middle distance. In his face, only Angel's eyes move, jumping back and forth on every sheet of paper.
“Incredible,” he says. “You look terrible, but your work . . . my God.”
Just for the record, Angel and Misty, they're in Oysterville. This is somebody's missing family room. They've crawled in through another hole to take pictures and see the graffiti.
Your graffiti.
The way Misty looks, how she can't get warm, even wearing two sweaters, her teeth chatter. How her hand shakes when she holds a picture out to Angel, she makes the stiff watercolor paper flap. It's some intestinal bug lingering from her case of food poisoning. Even here in a dim sealed room with only the light filtered through the drapes, she's wearing sunglasses.
Angel drags along his camera bag. Misty brings her portfolio. It's her old black plastic one from school, a thin suitcase with a zipper that goes around three sides so you can open it and lay it flat. Thin straps of elastic hold watercolor paintings to one side of the portfolio. On the other side, sketches are tucked in pockets of different sizes.
Angel's snapping pictures while Misty opens the portfolio on the sofa. When she takes out her pill bottle, her hand's shaking so much you can hear the capsules rattle inside. Pinching a capsule out of the bottle, she tells Angel, “Green algae. It's for headaches.” Misty puts the capsule in her mouth and says, “Come look at some pictures and tell me what you think.”
Across the sofa, Peter's spray-painted something. His black words scrawl across framed family photos on the wall. Across needlepoint pillows. Silk lampshades. He's pulled the pleated drapes shut and spray-painted his words across the inside of them.
You have.
Angel takes the bottle of pills out of her hand and holds it up to light from the window. He shakes the bottle, the capsules inside. He says, “These are huge.”
The gelatin capsule in her mouth is getting soft, and inside you can taste salt and tinfoil, the taste of blood.
Angel hands her the flask of gin from his camera bag, and Misty gulps her bitter mouthful. Just for
