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Show 423 him a nasty surprise one morning when he had reached to shut it off without looking. He always plugged it into a wall on the other side of any room he slept in now, so that however deeply he might be sleeping when it buzzed he would have time to see it before he got there to shut it off. You couldn't stop them from touching your things, if that was what they were going to do, but you didn't have to blunder into them in the dark. He ate a bowl of granola sitting crosslegged on his bed in the corner, holding the bowl close to his chin so he wouldn't drip milk into the hair on his stomach. He had outgrown his squalid but comfortable little room, and as soon as he got his next raise he intended to move. The walls were covered with drawings he had torn from sketchbooks and thumb-tacked there to study where his lines had gone soft, and he would need more walls. The drawings contained the germ of a hundred studies, more than he could work out on canvas in a year. He sometimes got a prickly feeling on the soles of his feet when he studied them, because he was not sure why he should have been able to do them. They had been culled from the thousands of sketches he had made in the pre-dawn hours over several months, and he had made them without a model. The result was unsettling. The faces, for one thing, had a look of specificity to them, as though he had known their owners intimately. Tacked to the wall over his bed were sheets of paper covered with thin faces, warped and disturbed faces, faces with beaky noses and warts under the eyes, faces whose mouths had irregular teeth and smirking corners. There were faces of young women in heat, of boys with nasty habits, of crones who had no food in their cupboards. There were faces of men who were successful but had cheated. There were patriarchal men with kindly smiles but whose breath you knew smelled of dirty cheese. He had never achieved this level of verisimilitude working from a model. There |