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Show 348 or thirty canvases which he removed from their stretchers and rolled up, loaded everything into the back of his green Pontiac, which to his brother's chagrin he repossessed on the spot, and that same afternoon, the car belching smoke from its tailpipe, after telling his parents he would have to work it out on his own hook and having their stricken faces pressed into his memory to haunt him forever, set off for California. His state of mind was still unclear, he decided during the long familiar drive across the trackless wastes of southern Utah, Nevada, California's Mojave, most of it under the panoply of hard winking stars in the cold desert night (he drove without stopping, except for gas and rest rooms, and a hamburger in St. George and another, at dawn, in Fontana), but he thought he detected small seeds of resentment starting to twitch, turn over, and sprout inside him. It was hard to remember, in the rubble his life had just become, that he was still only days away from the first warm embrace with Alice. But other things firmly connected his present with his past, and it was these things that needed careful thinking through. The unidentifiable creeping malaise, for instance, that he had become aware of those long months ago, had remained with him, but had crept further rather than retreated since his excommunication. His very bones felt thin and mealy. Touching his fingertips to the pulse in his wrist or his temples made him ill in the same way that running his hand over the stump of a leg would make him ill. Worms had continued to crawl along the nerve endings the length of his legs each night, and more and more often the voices had murmured their inscrutable messages inside his head as he had been fading into sleep at night. Very few nights had passed, before or since his excommunication, in which his dreams had not contained this sequence, or a variant: He is walking through the grounds of a deserted |
