Duma Key(90)

The itch in my missing arm deepened. By now it felt almost like a friend.

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 substitute. I didn't even need Scotch tape. I was able to snap 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 lawyer. It 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 fragmented. It looked a little like a small ship. Like a rowboat floating on the caldo.

I began to draw. I had meant only to draw his brain intact no slug but it ended up being more than that. I went on and added the water, you see, because the picture seemed to demand it. Or my missing arm. Or maybe they were the same. It was just a suggestion of the Gulf, but it was there, and it was enough to be successful, because I really was a talented sonofabitch. It only took twenty minutes, and when I was done I had drawn a human brain floating on the Gulf of Mexico. It was, in a way, way cool.

It was also horrifying. It isn't a word I want to use about my own work, but it's unavoidable. As 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 earlier. Certainly after I started the Girl and Ship series. What 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 talent. The feeling those Duma pictures conveyed was horror, barely held in check. Horror waiting to happen. Inbound on rotted sails.

v

I was hungry again. I made myself a sandwich and ate it in front of my computer. I was catching up with The Hummingbirds they had become quite the little obsession with me when the phone rang. It was Wireman.

"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 this. My head has ached ever since I woke up on the dining room floor after shooting myself. Sometimes it's just background noise and sometimes it rings like New Year's Eve in hell, but it always aches. And then, half an hour ago, it just quit. I was making myself a cup of coffee and it quit. I couldn't believe it. At first I thought I was dead. I've been walking around on eggshells, waiting for it to come back and really wallop me with Maxwell's Silver Hammer, and it hasn't."

"Lennon- McCartney," I said. "1968. And don't tell me I'm wrong on that one."

He didn't tell me anything. Not for a long time. But I could hear him breathing. Then, at last, he said: "Did you do something, Edgar? Tell Wireman. Tell your Daddy."

I thought about telling him I hadn't done a damn thing. Then I considered him checking his X-ray folder and finding one was gone. I also considered my sandwich, wounded but far from dead. "What about your vision? Any change there?"

"Nope, the left lamp is still out. And according to Principe, it ain't coming back. Not in this life."

Shit. But hadn't part of me known the job wasn't done? This morning's diddling with Sharpie and Cardboard had been nothing like the previous night's full-blown orgasm. I was tired. I didn't want to do anything more today but sit and stare at the Gulf. Watch the sun go down in the caldo largo without painting the f**king thing. Only this was Wireman. Wireman, goddammit.

"You still there, muchacho?"

"Yes," I said. "Can you get Annmarie Whistler for a few hours later today?"

"Why? What for?"

"So you can sit for your portrait," I said. "If your eye's still out, I guess I need the actual Wireman."

"You did do something." His voice was low. "Did you paint me already? From memory?"

"Check the folder with your X-rays in it," I said. "Be here around four. I want to take a nap first. And bring something to eat. Painting makes me hungry." I thought of amending that to a certain kind of painting, and didn't. I thought I'd said enough.

vi

I wasn't sure I'd be able to nap, but I did. The alarm roused me at three o'clock. I went up to Little Pink and considered my store of blank canvases. The biggest was five feet long by three wide, and this was the one I chose. I pulled my easel's support-strut to full extension and set up the blank canvas longways. That blank shape, like a white coffin on end, touched off a little flutter of excitement in my stomach and down my right arm. I flexed those fingers. I couldn't see them, but I could feel them opening and closing. I could feel the nails digging into the palm. They were long, those nails. They had grown since the accident and there was no way to cut them.

vii

I was cleaning my brushes when Wireman came striding up the beach in his shambling, bearlike gait, the peeps fleeing before him. He was wearing jeans and a sweater, no coat. The temperatures had begun to moderate.

He hollered a hello at the front door and I yelled for him to come on upstairs. He got most of the way and saw the big canvas on the easel. "Holy shit, amigo, when you said portrait, I got the idea we were talking about a headshot."