Duma Key(25)

"What's with Duma, Jack? Nine miles of prime Florida real estate, a great beach, and it's never been developed? What's up with that?"

He shrugged. "Some kind of long-running legal dispute is all I know. Want me to see if I can find out?"

I thought about it, then shook my head.

"Do you mind it?" Jack looked honestly curious. "All the quiet? Because it'd get on my nerves a little, to tell you the God's honest."

"No," I said. "Not at all." And that was the truth. Healing is a kind of revolt, and as I think I've said, all successful revolts begin in secret.

"What do you do? If you don't mind me asking?"

"Exercise in the mornings. Read. Sleep in the afternoons. And I draw. I may eventually try painting, but I'm not ready for that yet."

"Some of your stuff looks pretty good for an amateur."

"Thank you, Jack, that's very kind."

I didn't know if kind was all he was being or if he was telling me his version of the truth. Maybe it didn't matter. When it comes to things like pictures, it's always just someone's opinion, isn't it? I only knew that something was going on for me. Inside me. Sometimes it felt a little scary. Mostly it felt pretty goddam wonderful.

I did most of my drawing upstairs, in the room I'd come to think of as Little Pink. The only view from there was of the Gulf and that flat horizon-line, but I had a digital camera and I took pictures of other things sometimes, printed them out, clipped them to my easel (which Jack and I turned so the strong afternoon light would strike across the paper), and drew that stuff. There was no rhyme or reason to those snapshots, although when I told Kamen this in an e-mail, he responded that the unconscious mind writes poetry if it's left alone.

Maybe s , maybe no.

I drew my mailbox. I drew the stuff growing around Big Pink, then had Jack buy me a book - Common Plants of the Florida Coast - so I could put names to my pictures. Naming seemed to help - to add power, somehow. By then I was on my second box of colored pencils... and I had a third waiting in the wings. There was aloe vera; sea lavender with its bursts of tiny yellow flowers (each possessing a tiny heart of deepest violet); inkberry with its long spade-shaped leaves; and my favorite, sophora, which Common Plants of the Florida Coast also identified as necklace-bush, for the tiny podlike necklaces that grow on its branches.

I drew shells, too. Of course I did. There were shells everywhere, an eternity of shells just within my limited walking distance. Duma Key was made of shells, and soon I'd brought back dozens.

And almost every night when the sun went down, I drew the sunset. I knew sunsets were a clich , and that's why I did them. It seemed to me that if I could break through that wall of been-there-done-that even once, I might be getting somewhere. So I piled up picture after picture, and none of them looked like much. I tried overlaying Venus Yellow with Venus Orange again, but subsequent efforts didn't work. The sullen furnace-glow was always missing. Each sunset was only a penciled piece of shit where the colors said I'm trying to tell you the horizon's on fire. You could undoubtedly have bought forty better ones at any sidewalk art show on a Saturday in Sarasota or Venice Beach. I saved some of those drawings, but I was so disgusted with most of them that I threw them away.

One evening after another bunch of failures, once again watching the top arc of the sun disappear, leaving that flush of Halloween color trailing behind, I thought: It was the ship. That was what gave my first one a little sip of magic. How the sunset seemed to be shining right through it. Maybe, but there was no ship out there now to break the horizon; it was a straight line with darkest blue below and brilliant orange-yellow above, fading to a delicate greenish shade I could see but not duplicate, not out of my meager box of colored pencils.

There were twenty or thirty photo printouts scattered around the feet of my easel. My eye happened on a close-up of a sophora necklace. Looking at it, my phantom right arm began to itch. I clamped my yellow pencil between my teeth, bent over, picked up the sophora photo, and studied it. The light was failing now, but only by degrees - the upper room I called Little Pink held light for a long time - and there was more than enough to admire the details; my digital camera took exquisite close-ups.

Without thinking about what I was doing, I clamped the photo to the edge of the easel and added the sophora bracelet to my sunset. I worked quickly, first sketching - really nothing more than a series of arcs, that's sophora - and then coloring: brown overlaying black, then a bright dab of yellow, the remains of one flower. I remember my concentration being fined down to a brilliant cone, the way it sometimes was in the early days of my business, when every building (every bid, really) was make or break. I remember clamping a pencil in my mouth once again at some point, so I could scratch at the arm that wasn't there; I was always forgetting the lost part of me. When distracted and carrying something in my left hand, I sometimes reached out with my right one to open a door. Amputees forget, that's all. Their minds forget and as they heal, their bodies let them.

What I mostly remember about that evening is the wonderful, blissful sensation of having caught an actual bolt of lightning in a bottle for three or four minutes. By then the room had begun to dim out, the shadows seeming to swim forward over the rose-colored carpet toward the fading rectangle of the picture window. Even with the last light striking across my easel, I couldn't get a good look at what I'd done. I got up, limped around the treadmill to the switch by the door, and flipped on the overhead. Then I went back, turned the easel, and caught my breath.