| OCR Text |
Show 419 swam with gauzy wings. In a few minutes he got up and plugged in the popcorn popper he had filled with water the night before and shook instant coffee from a jar into his mug. The mug was brown from not having been washed for a week, and he could feel a crust on the rim. While he waited for his water to heat he groped in the cardboard box under the table for his spiral drawing pad and his jar of pencils, which he carried back to bed, and then he went to pour his coffee. The water was still barely tepid but he didn't want to wait. The light in the room was the color of cold chrome. He reset his alarm clock for two hours hence and turned it to the wall so he wouldn't be able to see it getting close to the time it would buzz again, and then returned to the bed and opened his pad to the first clean page. Kneeling over it, feeling the lumps of twisted blanket under his shins, his face close to the paper so he could make out what he was doing without turning on the overhead light, he began to draw lines. He had been drawing lines for a week, ever since he discovered he had begun cheating, and he thought he was beginning to see improvement. When your intuitions were behaving you could let them go for a while and concentrate on your technique. That brought tone back to your motor nerves and cleaned up your spirit. Today's lines, for instance, were already more supple and various than yesterday's lines. Yesterday he had begun to coax contrasting thicknesses out of his pencil's tip by a careful adjustment of thumb pressure and the angle of his wrist, without slowing or speeding the movement of his hand across the page, and today he was able to take that flexibility for granted while he drew lines that would do other things as well. He watched as a line materialized in the track of his pencil that resembled a python that had swallowed a pig, and then abruptly-the extension of the line also changed the scale of the thing it resembled-an |
