In his studio, the black flies still circled the same heap of soft apples and limp bananas.

 

 And if it helps, they tell Fletcher, the printmaker only got famous because he murdered a lazy sculptor, who in turn had murdered a pushy painter, who had murdered a sell-out collage maker.

 

 All those people are still dead while their work sits in a museum, like a bank account every minute snowballing in value. And not even pretty value, as the colors go brown as a van Gogh sunflower, the paint and varnish cracking and turning yellow. Always so much smaller than people would expect after waiting all day in line.

 

 The art market had worked this way for centuries, the critic said. If Terry chose not to take this, his first real “commission,” it was no problem. But he still had a long future of unsettled court cases, charges still outstanding against him. These art people could wipe out all that with a phone call. Or they could make it worse. Even if he did nothing, Terry Fletcher could still go to jail for a long, long time. That scratched green cell.

 

 After that, who would believe the word of a jailbird?

 

 So Terry Fletcher, he says: Yes.

 

 It helps that he’s never met the printmaker. The gallery owner gives him a gun and tells him to wear a nylon stocking over his head. The gun is only the size of your hand with the fingers straight but held tight together. A tool easy to hide in your palm, it’s only the size of a package label, but does a job just as forever. The sloppy printmaker will be in the gallery until it closes. After that, he’ll walk home.

 

 That night, Terry Fletcher shoots him, three times—pop, pop, pop—in the back. A job faster than hanging his dog, Boner, in the Guggenheim Museum.

 

 A month later, Fletcher has his first real show in a gallery.

 

 This is NOT the Pell/Mell Gallery. It has the same black and pink checkerboard tiles on the floor, and a matching striped canopy over the door, and oodles of smart people go there to invest in art, but this is some other, let’s-pretend kind of gallery. Filled withfakesmart people.

 

 It’s after that Terry’s career gets complicated. You might say he did his job too well, because the art critic sends him off to kill a conceptual artist in Germany. A performance artist in San Francisco. A kinetic sculptor in Barcelona. Everyone thinks Andy Warhol died from gallbladder surgery. You think Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. That Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe died from AIDS.

 

 The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

 

 This whole time, the critic says if Fletcher backs down the art world will frame him for the first murder. Or worse.

 

 Terry asks, What’s worse?

 

 And they don’t say.

 

 Leave it to an American to take something too far.

 

 Between killing every sell-out artist, every lazy, sloppy artist, Terry Fletcher has no time to do his own art well. Even the pictures of Rudy and his mom, they look rushed, messy, as if he couldn’t care less. More and more, he’s knocking out different versions of the dancing, flute-playing Kokopelli. He’s blowing up photos of theMona Lisato wall-sized, then hand-coloring the photos in colors popular for room decoration that year. Still, if his signature is at the bottom, people buy it. Museums buy it.

 

 And after this year of being famous . . .

 

 After that year, he’s in an art gallery, talking to the owner. The same man who lent him a gun the year before. NOT Dennis Bradshaw. The street outside is dark. His wristwatch says eleven o’clock. The galley owner says he needs to close up and get home himself. Whatever happened to that gun, Terry doesn’t know.

 

 The owner opens the front door, and outside is the dark sidewalk. The black-and-pink-striped canopy. The long walk home.

 

 Outside, the lampposts are glued with the little paintings of people you’ll never know. The street is pasted with their unsigned artwork. It’s this long walk into the dark that will happen, if not tonight, then some night. With this next step, every night will be a walk into the world where every artist wants a chance to be known.

 

 

 

 

8.

 

 We’re in the Mayan foyer, the walls covered with plaster, pitted to look like lava rock. The fake lava rock is carved to look like warriors wearing loincloths and feather headdresses. The warriors wearing capes of spotted fur to look like leopards. The whole room telling the story it wants you to accept as the truth.

 

 Carved plaster parrots trail tailfeathers in rainbows of orange and red.

 

 From fake cracks and crumbling places in the plaster stone, made to look ancient, high above our heads sprout chains of fat purple orchids made of paper.

 

 “Mr. Whittier was right,” says Mrs. Clark, looking around. “We do create the drama that fills up our life.”

 

 Only dust dulls the orange feathers and purple flowers. Fake-leopard-spot fur covers the black wood sofas. The sofas and leering warrior faces and fake lava rock, they’re all cobwebbed together with strands of gray.

 

 Mrs. Clark says, Sometimes it seems that we spend the first half of our lives looking for some disaster. And she looks down at her straight-out chest—a look made almost impossible by her enhanced lips. As young people, she says, we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we’d planned as children—a life of constant dashing around.

 

 “We still create the drama and pain we need,” says Mrs. Clark. “But this first disaster is a vaccination, an inoculation.”

 

 Your whole life, she says, you’re searching for disaster—you’re auditioning disasters—so you’ll be well rehearsed when the ultimate disaster finally arrives.

 

 “For when you die,” Mrs. Clark says.

 

 Here in the Mayan foyer, the black wood sofas and chairs are carved to look like the altars on top of pyramids where human sacrifices would go to get their hearts torn out.

 

 The carpet is some lunar calendar, circles inside circles, patterned black-on-orange and sticky with spilled sodas. At our feet spreads a moldy stain branching arms and legs.

 

 Sitting down on the fake-fur cushions, you can still smell popcorn.

 

 That’s her theory. The Mrs. Clark extension to the theory of Mr. Whittier.

 

 We have pain and hate and love and joy and war in the world because we want them. And we want all that drama to prepare us for the test of facing death, someday.

 

 Mother Nature, sitting with both arms out straight in front of her, sleepwalker-style, she spreads her fingers and looks at the smudged dark henna designs painted on her skin. With the fingers of one hand, she feels around the base of each finger on her other hand. Feeling the bone, for how thick, Mother Nature says, “Do you think Lady Baglady was ready?” She says, “Do you think Mr. Whittier was?”

 

 And Mrs. Clark shrugs. She says, “Does that matter?”

 

 Sitting on the fake fur next to Mother Nature, Director Denial has twisted a nylon stocking around the wrist of her left hand. With her right hand, she twists the stocking tighter as the fingers of her left hand turn white. So white, even the pale cat hair looks dark against her blue-white skin. Until those white feeling-nothing fingers wilt and hang, limp from her wrist.

 

 In his lap, Saint Gut-Free works the thumb of his right hand, stroking the thumb up and down with the fist of his left hand. Feeling the bumps and knuckles of his thumb so he’ll never forget. For after it’s gone.

 

 We all sit here, watching each other. Waiting for the next plot point or bit of dialogue to catch and squirrel away for our marketable version of the truth.

 

 Agent Tattletale moves his camera spotlight from person to person. The Earl of Slander’s little-mesh microphone peeks out of his shirt pocket.

 

 This moment foreshadowing the real horror of the next. This moment’s already taping over the death of Mr. Whittier, which taped over the death of Lady Baglady, which taped over Miss America holding a knife to Mr. Whittier’s throat.

 

 To Mrs. Clark, Mother Nature says, “So why did you love him?”

 

 “I didn’t come here because I lovedhim,” Mrs. Clark says. To Agent Tattletale, she says, “Donotpoint that camera at me. I look terrible on video . . .” Still, in the heat of the camera’s spotlight, Mrs. Clark smiles with her teeth clenched, a clown’s smile with her water-balloon lips, saying, “I came here because I saw an advertisement . . .”

 

 And she trusted herself to this man she didn’t know? She followed him and helped him? Even knowing he’d trap her behind a locked door? It doesn’t make sense.

 

 The Reverend Godless, with his stitched-meat face, his eyebrows shaved off, his fingernails so long he can’t make a fist, he says, “But you cried . . .”

 

 “Every apostle or disciple,” Mrs. Clark says, “as much as they’re running to follow their savior—they’re running just as hard to escape something else.”

 

 With the warriors carved to watch us, the paper orchids dyed and folded to look natural, Mrs. Clark says how she used to have a daughter. A husband.

 

 “Cassie was fifteen,” she says.

 

 She says, “Her name was Cassandra.”

 

 Mrs. Clark says, sometimes when the police find a shallow grave or the dumped body of a murder victim, the detectives will hide a microphone there. It’s standard procedure.

 

 She nods at the Earl of Slander, at the tape recorder in his pocket.

 

 The police will hide nearby, and listen for days or weeks. Because almost always the killer will come back and talk to the victim. Pretty much always. We need to tell the story of our life to someone, and the killer can only discuss his crime with a person who won’t punish him. His prey.

 

 Even a killer needs to talk, to tell his life story, so bad he’ll come and sit beside a grave or a rotting body and just blab, blab, blab at it for hours. Until he makes sense. Until the killer can convince himself with the story of his new reality. The reality that—he was right.

 

 That’s why the police wait.

 

 Still smiling, she says, “And that’s why I’m here.” Mrs. Clark says, “Like the rest of you, I only wanted some way to tell my story . . .”

 

 Still in the warm circle of Agent Tattletale’s spotlight, Mrs. Clark says, “Please.” She cups both hands to cover her face, and through her fingers tight together, she says, “It was a video camera that wrecked my marriage . . .”

 

  

 

 Looking Back

 

 A Poem About Mrs. Clark

 

 “You’re training a new employee,” says Mrs. Clark, “to take over your boring old job.”

 

 When you raise a child.

 

 

 Mrs. Clark onstage, her arms wrap across the front of her,

 

 each hand cupping the other elbow

 

 to cradle breasts chosen by a much braver woman.

 

 With a much stronger back.

 

 This chest, now a reminder of every mistake she hoped would save her.

 

 Her eyelids are tattooed the orange that looked so chic

 

 two decades ago,

 

 her lips siliconed to the size and shape of suction cups,

 

 then tattooed a forgotten shade of frosty peach.

 

 Her Mrs. Clark hairdo and clothes, frozen from a time

 

 when she lost her nerve, and stopped taking any new risk.

 

 

 Onstage, instead of a spotlight, a movie fragment:

 

 Home movies show a little girl wearing a party hat of paper, strapped

 

 under her chin with a string of elastic,

 

 blowing out five birthday candles.

 

 “Before you get fired,” Mrs. Clark says, “you train this new person by telling her . . .”

 

 Don’t touch. Hot!

 

 Feet off the sofa!

 

 And—never buyanythingwith a nylon zipper.

 

 With every lecture, you’re forced to look again at every choice you’ve made

 

 over the lesson-by-lesson chain of your entire life.

 

 And after all these years, you see how little you have to work with,

 

 how limited your life and education have been.

 

 How scant was your courage and curiosity.

 

 Not to mention your expectations.

 

 

 Mrs. Clark onstage, she sighs, her breasts rising big as soufflés

 

 or loaves of bread, then falling, settling, resting.

 

 She says how maybe the best advice is what you can’t tell her at all:

 

 To preserve yourself as the center of the world,

 

 to stay your own best authority on everything,

 

 your own expert on all topics,