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Show 434 the murk of the room threatening to break through and dominate the brilliant overlay of raw colors, an effect that he overheard someone praise and nearly blew his cover. The double self-portraits were a comparatively new direction for him, and he found himself torn between wishing Noel could see them and hoping Noel did not by some chance materialize on the sidewalk in front of this gallery and walk in and recognize the theft of his idea. There were only two of these in his exhibit, but he had others at home, and still others that he knew were only waiting for the fleeting instant when the aperture between matter and principle were opened to spring out. Of the two that hung next to the fire exit, he was less fond of the one that showed him standing in a crowd of people on a sidewalk looking down at himself as he lay on his back on the pavement. A hazy giraffe straddled a pair of mansard roofs across the street. The other-it was long and narrow, and hung next to the thermostat on the short wall separating his unit from Brad's-had him facing the viewer, bearded and (on a whim) nude, smiling pleasantly as he stood next to an easel on which sat a drawing, crooked and distorted, in black and white, that crudely duplicated his smiling pink self but wore an expression of infinite sorrow and a crown of thorns. It also wore a bracelet of barbed wire around one thigh, and its member was noticeably larger than the other one's. Since Lorin wore no beard now the resemblance was not apparent, but to be safe he had not identified it as a self-portrait at all. There were five or six other paintings of his in the exhibit; they were at least a year old and he had included them only because he felt the numbers were necessary. He had had to look carefully through the accretion of his paintings of that year to find five or six that wouldn't |