Duke swapped his uniform for street clothes while I sat in the players’ lounge with my things. The team got us a town car to his apartment, which was north of the stadium, farther up the lake, on the opposite end of the city from his childhood home. It was already dark outside, but it got darker still as we drove along the shoreline, until finally every trace of blue and purple withdrew from the sky and nothing but black remained. It was only when the highway cut even closer to the shore, running almost over the lake’s edge, that you could rate this a body of water rather than a void adumbrated by hundreds of lights.
When the road swept away from the lake again, toward the interior, the buildings we could make out in the fog seemed uniformly stunted and shrunken, even when they occupied entire blocks. You imagined, for a moment, they must have been yellowed by time, even though the streetlights were responsible for that complexion. Yes, in the morning, the buildings would reveal themselves to be the familiar faded gray of sun-battered concrete. On the opposite side of the highway, however, along the lakeshore, a great variety of architectural styles bloomed, and even in the dark you knew everything here was fifty years newer.
Our driver, a generic American white who gave you little to remember him by, seemed familiar to Duke; he might have shuttled the receiver to work and back regularly, given how much farther Duke lived from the facility than the rest of the team. In deference to the great distance we needed to cover, our rate of travel soon tipped into surreality, the surrounding cars on the highway shooting past us backwards as we slalomed ahead. The entire time, I had the feeling, deep in my guts, of hydroplaning, though the asphalt wasn’t really wet enough for that. Silence reigned for almost an hour. Duke had nodded off as soon as he’d gotten in the car, his head pressed against the window. Whenever I would search out our driver’s hazel eyes in the mirror, I realized I existed for him only as an obstacle to his line of sight while he switched lanes or searched for highway patrol—which was probably all to the good, he was going so fast. Any small lapse in concentration and there might be nothing left of us or the car.
Really, I didn’t mind the quiet, as by now I was feeling quite light-headed, though it was hard to say why. All I could think was that I’d forgotten to bring any Theria with me. Not forgotten, exactly. I’d just assumed it wouldn’t be necessary. Duke was the face of the product and a member of its target audience. Surely Garrett would keep him well-supplied with the drink? Whatever the case, I had to wonder whether the churning of my guts and that sense of the fantastic that increasingly pervaded my experience—not to mention the forlornness that crept in, out of all proportion to prevailing circumstances—traced back to this privation. Could I even be seeing less well, too? Hadn’t I very badly mistimed those footballs Duke had thrown that went plunging into my chest, leaving bruises that would last for days? And could those moribund buildings along the highway I’d been seeing actually be more variegated than that, and more vital?
Eventually, as our driver took the off-ramp, the car dropped to down to a somewhat more reasonable (not to say legal) speed. A fuller awareness returned to him, so that finally he regarded me in the mirror, if only briefly, as one might a sentient being. Now that the world was no longer blurring past us, I could see we’d arrived in an unusually barren part of town. Yet desolation scanned here as a form of luxury, the way it did in Malibu. Between grand residential edifices—broad, flat-roofed mansions; slashing obelisks; castle-like replicas of other times and places; and everything else—were vast swathes of buffering emptiness and naked shore. It wasn’t long before we were pulling into one of these lake-front properties: a shiny black brick rising some dozen stories, with only one floor lighted near the base, so that the building seemed, as it ascended, to lose all light and merge completely with the night. Architecturally, the residence maintained a poker face, embodying a particularly nihilistic strain of the International Style, now liberated, if you wanted to use that word, from Radiant City utopianism. Which is to say, no air of reformation or rebirth could be sniffed as Duke and I got out of the town car and stepped into the wide stone plaza. In a voice just acclimating to wakefulness, the receiver explained that there was just one apartment per floor—no families, a few couples—and no shared spaces: gardens, roof decks, balconies, or bike racks. To me, it sounded expressly designed for millionaires who frowned not only on inadvertently seeing anyone down in the street—which was virtually impossible, actually, as there were no sidewalks nearby—but who chafed at any common zones whatever. There would be no cities within a city here, I mean, where the accord and harmony of the property’s elements might impel tenants toward the same.
Sheila, Duke’s mother, couldn’t believe this is what he wanted for himself. Frankly, speaking as a sociologist, she’d said, the place disgusted her. (Duke reported this to me with a smile, of course.) Here, each loft constituted a city of its own, and as we shuttled to the twelfth floor via an elevator with freight dimensions but a silent, commercial glide, I couldn’t help but think that in a place like this, even if you didn’t quite view your neighbor with suspicion or hostility, you were still happiest when you didn’t cross paths. And, in fact, as we’d entered the driveway, there was a woman in plain sight in pastel blue Chanel, waiting for a hired car, I assumed, who declined even to raise her eyes as we inched past her. Around here, the only place of potential intimacy might have been the elevators, though the developer had accounted for this liability, too: there was an unusually large bank of lifts, all uselessly massive for a building of relatively small scale, further reducing the chances of having to share a ride.
Every communitarian tendency of modernism seemed to have been inverted in Duke’s building, a celebration of privacy even when it could still be framed in the dead language of collectivist architecture. Driving in, less than a quarter-mile to the east, I’d noticed several original Brutalist complexes, much vaster than Duke’s one; these had hundreds of tiny windows each, and were in much worse shape. Yet there was something about those apartments that signaled honest hope, even if it had been dashed by time and fortune. Duke’s home, however, was obviously, painfully, built without any hope at all: if anything, it was a taunt to those earnest architectural disasters just across the way—the projects, still waiting to be dynamited. This shiny onyx-esque construction was no second crack at the promised land, but just for the super-premium crowd. This was utopian only if utopia involved thinning out the madding crowd, not in the way Matthew Arnold had envisaged it, dissolving the masses into families living quasi-pastorally in green suburbs, but all the way down to lone souls. Yet, I had to ask myself, did it nevertheless speak to some desire in us, not ones we proudly avow, of course, but ones that anyway make us tick? A desire for peace, which perhaps might be guaranteed only by absolute seclusion—solitary confinement, so to speak—even in the heart of a metropolis?
The interior of Duke’s apartment turned out to be much like the building’s exterior. His space was two or three thousand square feet and remarkably free of dividers, so it remained in a disturbingly pure state, a state untroubled by people and very close to the architect’s blueprint, where all forms save for the rectangle had been annihilated or never so much as conceived. In itself, of course, this kind of gesture long ago ceased to be radical, ever since the heyday of Gropius and the Bauhaus. What was actually radical, though, even now, was what Duke had done with it, by placing the bed almost dead center in the room, configuring this massive penthouse as if it were a tiny city studio akin to the places he’d lived along the way.
“Twenty thousand a month,” he said peremptorily as we roamed around that bed—this must have been the extent of the tour. “I think twenty. It hasn’t been long.” You could almost mistake the place for an unsold unit, or for the room of a wealthy ascetic, it was so underfurnished. But then you’d also have to forget what century you were in.
I had some trouble deciding where to sit, as the floor seemed my only option. So I stood. “How long have you been here?” I asked.
“A week and a half, maybe.” He put his arm on my shoulder. “People want to destroy buildings like this now.”
“Well, the old ones. I don’t know what they think of brand-new ones that are this grand.”
“What do you think?”
I shook my head vaguely. He didn’t press me, there was no point.
“My agent thought it was weird. Why’d I want something so dated, right? Designed for millionaire shut-ins, Howard Hughes types—and I’m not even a millionaire. So I’m renting.” He seemed about to laugh, as if something funny had just crossed his mind. Then he began to walk toward one of several glass doors facing the lake. “Freddie thought I should be closer to the team, to where we practice. No-one else lives this far north. But the places he was finding for me weren’t this... committed. A lot of them weren’t near the water either, or they were meant for guys who can drop fifty, seventy-five grand a month. Not me.”
Duke slid the glass to one side and turned off all the lights. Together, we stepped out onto the terrace—one of two—twelve floors up. The shore, the lake, were so devoid of light that the water revealed its presence to us only by sloshing against the sand. “I didn’t want any real neighbors, though. I’m not even sure anyone actually lives in this place full-time. It’s like those ghost cities you hear about in China. Perfect, empty.”
The edge in the winds coming off the water soon drove us back inside. We strolled past the curiously small open kitchen, the bathroom the size of a studio apartment, and a corner where a cream drape had been thrown over various irregularly shaped things. Instead of uncovering them, Duke turned back toward the only real landmark around here, the bed. I’d never seen one this size. No-one had, except in music videos. It was probably twice the size of a king, made up starkly in off-white sheets that were stiff and cheap when I rested my fingers on them. Duke had no nightstand and no need of one; the bed’s periphery served. On it sat his wallet and keys and phone, even some loosely piled bills and mail, mostly junk.
There was no other bed in the apartment, you could see that at a glance. I suppose this meant the only guests who’d be staying the night would be staying with him; he could accommodate a harem within the borders of his mattress. I wandered toward the kitchen while he unbuttoned his fitted oxford and tossed it next to the mail on his bed. Why he’d needed to leave practice dressed like this, as if he’d just come from a post-game press conference, I didn’t know.
“This time,” he said, catching my eyes in the long mirror without turning around, “before we get fucked up, we should get something done.”
“Front first?”
I wasn’t feeling especially well; the nausea had clung to me. But he was right, we should work. My state could worsen, and then I might not even be able to sketch him properly, the raison d’être of my trip. Duke turned toward me and I pulled my giant pad from the portfolio, which wasn’t much bigger than the paper itself. He turned away and I trailed him to a wall lined with small, intense spotlights meant to illuminate artwork that hadn’t been mounted yet—anyone with this much money owned work, of course. Instead, the lights brightened Duke’s chest, or really, the woman’s visage tattooed over his heart. She had a frilly collar that put me in mind of Magellan; she looked to be some sort of noble, or else was pretending to be. This was all quite rare in a tattoo, I thought. The model for all this fine hatching etched into black flesh would have been an old engraving. If this were paper rather than living tissue, you might have opted for scratchboard instead, just for the contrast of white strokes on black ground. But tattoo ink was generally dark like Duke, so that only under the spotlights did this image, all the fineness of its details, dark on dark, truly become legible. From this range I could smell him, too, the eucalyptus he’d used to wash today’s practice away. He declined to look at me as I went about the business of rendering him onto the pad, which I’d laid right on the ground. I don’t think he was nervous per se, though he was probably more used to women admiring him in this fashion, perhaps a whole roomful of them, right before he did as he liked.
“We’ve got time, right?” I squatted down, assessing his abdomen.
“Enjoying yourself?” He was laughing with lovely contempt. “When we finish all this bullshit, you know we’re going out.”
This is just what Garrett would have imagined, me trailing Duke around Chicago, though the relish in Duke’s voice as he said these words made me wonder what exactly he was envisioning. We looked around the apartment for something short for him to climb up on. There weren’t many places to look, mainly just under the large tarp. No stool, though. What we found there instead, among piles and piles of books: three crates full of supplements, all sorts of powders and pills. A personal pharmacy.
“This is the juice,” he sneered. “All the things in the juice.”
We unloaded all the bottles and lined them up against the wall. Then we flipped over the crate and set it down near the lights. Once he mounted it, you couldn’t help but think of those antebellum stages on which men were set for purposes of inspection. Though I was examining him for different qualities today, his great-great-grandparents would have been similarly scrutinized, for fitness for the fields. I should have checked his teeth, too. He showed me his gums all on his own. The joke was, of course, that the NFL had long had its own version of the slave auction—the combine—in which half-clothed twenty-year-olds, mostly black, flaunted their bodies for the procurers, the scouts. Hadn’t Duke done well at the combine? That’s why he’d been able to sneak into the NFL despite the cloud that hung over him. I wondered how he took it.
I’d not drawn a shirtless man in some time, not since my first days in New York, when I’d spent my time in life-drawing classes around the boroughs, particularly the Arts Student League, which was nice in most respects, except for Norman Rockwell’s time there being mentioned by someone or other at least once a session. In the end it drove me to abandon the place. Rockwell put me off life drawing; that’s the story in a nutshell. The body unadorned rarely appeared in my work again. Instead, it was the intermingling of nature and culture, necessity and choice, that occupied me.
Looking up at Duke now while standing with my toes brushing the crate, an unusually tall one for housing all his supplements in two rows, I found myself, my face, closer to his groin than I might have wished. He smiled down at me radiantly, teasing me with the prospect of a thrust that would take his still clothed crotch right into my chin. But I was in thrall to the woman on his chest, shining in the light. Only the musk of his testes, cutting through the soap, alerted me to the precarious relationship of our bodies. My angle on the woman was perfect, though. I held my ground.
“Want me to tell you who? Or you want to guess. You’re going to guess.”
“I’ll guess.”
“It won’t happen.”
“Let’s see.”
I took a step back and bent down over the pad, which was now resting on the other two crates, to facilitate my work. I was drawing and talking, something I used to eschew, finding it unthinkable, a kind of sacrilege. The very idea of a subject’s being put at ease struck me as vulgar, no matter how illustrious the artists who’d done it. I could only think of hairdressers and fashion photographers and prostitutes whenever the phrase came up. I’d begun more recently to introduce talk into my sessions purely as a creative act. Far from relaxing anyone or instilling confidence, I could jolt my sitter’s psyche, apply pressure to his identity, test its strength from this angle and that, feeling for fissures. A cat-and-mouse game took shape, showing itself through changes undergone by the sitter’s body, the exact contours of his posture as he twisted around or through this rhetorical force. Once in a while—and that’s all you could reasonably expect, once in a while—the results were startling, all from the fear I’d pumped into him.
“Margaret of Anjou,” I declared, having made him wait a long while, though the name had come to me quickly.
“Not too bad. Marguerite de Navarre. Know her?”
“Not really, no. Not by sight. But what an odd idea for a tattoo.” I regarded him somewhat cruelly.
“And the other woman wouldn’t have been? Why’d you guess her? Why that name?”
“It came to me.”
“Just intuition.”
I smiled tightly and carried on transposing her, Navarre, to paper, nearly to scale: the jewels at her neck, rubies and diamonds in alternation; the frilly, billowing dress she wore; and the miniscule book, presumably a book of hours, I discovered in her hands, after leaning very close. In doing all of this I had also to account for the uneven ground of his chest, its rhythmic swells. Everything needed to go over.
“My mother had me read her. Made me. My brothers, too. To see what a woman could do way back when even. Only one who got away was my sister. She didn’t need a lesson.”
Lower on his body, the pictures were easier to recognize. The one on his stomach, for instance, I’d seen at the Louvre, on a visit several years back, the same sojourn that took me to Iceland. I recalled how excruciating I’d found this grand museum, Napoleon’s museum—the first of its kind in the world, in fact—with so much art thrust into such proximity that each piece ended up seeming small and insufficient. This was, in fact, a problem for every kind of vast collection: streaming services holding decades of songs and films, say, or metropolises packing countless bodies together. Yet I suppose the Louvre and its ilk did represent a certain achieved omnipotence on the part of mankind, the world brought to one’s fingertips, not merely at the level of the individual collector, as with the cabinet of curiosities, or the family, as with a royal court’s collection, but on a grander scale: a collection to be browsed by an entire country, a people, at their leisure. There was something repellant to me still, but the concept had more substance to it than I’d wanted to admit, articulating as it did the full bloom of a form of life—modern life. There was something profound in that, even if I felt at some distance from it. I had to bear some of that responsibility. In the end, there needn’t be anything wrong with a broader culture carrying on in parallel with its dissidents.
The name of this painting, though, the one on his stomach—what was it? The piece was definitely a Brueghel, but the figures had been radically reimagined by the tattoo artist. Africanized, you could say. I should have known it straight off, but my thoughts wouldn’t settle, jumping from here to there. Things were getting lost.
“Well?” The same quiz from Duke. On another night I may have been game, but now, with my head throbbing, I wasn’t in the frame of mind for it.
“This is based on The Beggars, right?”
“No-one has ever, ever got that right. The Cripples is what you mean, though.”
He was impressed. Maybe that would keep him quiet for a while as I pressed on, interpreting his body, which was taxing me more heavily than any of my recent work. The floodlights were hot and the situation atypical, and so I found myself drenched in sweat, with a parched throat. Meanwhile, Duke looked beatific, standing there. The appearance of nerves in me, or what would have resembled nerves anyway, probably brought it on, I thought. More and more, these past days, I’d found myself turning to Theria, even when I had nothing much to do, and I wasn’t busy assessing it or anything else. It was joining the bedrock of my life. I wouldn’t call my relationship to it an addiction per se. It had only been a few weeks since I’d first tasted it, and perhaps the most notable withdrawal symptom so far, after six or eight hours, seemed to be the subtle sense that experience, vision and thought, had lost their natural density. Theria instilled a certain curiosity in you, by now I knew this was no illusion. It created rather than slaked thirst, making the world cry out for devouring, parsing—although unlike marijuana or LSD, it left your brain in a state capable of doing the job.
If it turned out, when the FDA got hold of the final formulation—it was still being tinkered with, as was almost anything in Garrett’s purview; every product was perpetually in flux, and each case of the energy or smart drink he sent me struck me as subtly different in color and taste—if Theria happened to have some significant side-effects, it could end up in the category of a drug like Adderall: useful but dangerous. But if it cleared that hurdle, if it was as harmless as water, or close to it, there was nothing to prevent its becoming part of day-to-day Western life in much the manner of coffee, the great constructive drug of the modern period, one that doctors positively applauded for its salutary effects. Might Garrett have synthesized something like caffeine, but more potent, and more richly tied to the imaginative powers? Surely this was his hope.
Almost all the imagery Duke wore on his body had art historical resonances, distant symbolisms. Many pictures had been interestingly simplified or abstracted. These weren’t the gods, the mothers, the children most athletes bore. Yet he was so thickly covered with tattoos, and his skin so aggressively black, that they were, even with the aid of spotlights, difficult to pick out.
“Can you?” I gestured at his belly and his jeans with a graphite stick, while my head was buried down in the details of the drawing beneath me.
He did nothing.
Finally I looked at him, as he’d wanted me to. I was only asking for the jeans to come off. I would have had to, at some point, if I was to be his artist, his visual biographer, no less than his doctor would eventually have to see him in ways others didn’t. The only reason I hadn’t asked the same of Daphne was the presence of other awkwardnesses between us that afternoon, the drinking that altered the equation.
He pulled his face in lasciviously. Why such contraction ought to signal just that, physiognomically, I’m not sure, but it did. The jut of his lips told the story, too, a beckoning for a kiss. I quickly dabbed that in on the corner of the next sheet. I wanted that lip, somewhere, sometime. I was harvesting details, not building complete images. Real composition would come later. But the details, they’re just what couldn’t wait.
He glared at me salaciously, and for a long time. His lust could have been phony, meant only to strike one more variety of fear into me. Terrorizing people had caused him all sorts of trouble so far in his life; nothing could be put beyond him on this score. I also had to consider the possibility that he was, in fact, interested—that he was as reckless in his sex life as he was on the field, turning to homosexuality not out of bona fide desire, but for the still-active sense of deviancy in it, especially among male athletes. I’d found, in my research into his past, that the orgies were wild in many ways; that there had been men in the mix, at least in college. It wasn’t clear whether he’d been with them, too, or if this was just the garden-variety homoeroticism that all team sports shared in. He seemed to cultivate confusion on this point, as on so many others. It had made enemies of certain of his teammates, apparently, his unwillingness to come down strongly as hetero. So now, as our exchange developed, I watched him watch me, wishing I could see my part in it, see what exactly my eyes held out for him that remained a mystery to me, simply because the eye cannot properly see itself, not without mirrors and tricks.
Duke bent in two and tugged his jeans down in a quick motion and straightened up again, all without looking at me. Now we were down to underwear, his genitalia stretching a pair of oxblood briefs to the limit. His thighs were lighter-toned than the rest of him. I tried focusing on this, the imagery that jumped out, by virtue of its location, more starkly than on his torso. It was also more personal, as befit the region, the nearness to his sex. Two countenances dominated his upper legs, curving with his thighs and hamstrings. You had to examine these pictures around their cylindrical support, not so different than vellum, only still cleaving to the animal. So I slowly circled him, tracking the faces and expressions of his lower half. The left visage faced backward, the right forward, and neither of them did I recognize. The one looking forward was a grizzled man, old and poor and white, to judge by his matted hair, though without any religious inflection. He was no Jesus: there was, after all, nothing particularly elevated about staring at Duke’s testes, as this man was.
Duke nearly laughed, between glints of lust. He was enjoying me studying him as a paleographer might, bringing my face close, of necessity. He’d been examined many times before, one felt, by countless women and some number of men, whether lovers or simply colleagues. He spent a good deal of his life in a place where nudity was prosaic: the locker room. The water boy would have been drawing conclusions about him from the tattoos, just as I was. Duke turned his head around to watch me interpret his buttocks—or rather, fail to interpret them, as they were still mostly covered in red fabric. I had the strong feeling, soon confirmed, that they would be immaculate, unmarked. Why exactly, I never figured out.
The second man, on Duke’s other thigh, faced backward, just below his ass: the headdress made him a Roman warrior, perhaps a statesman, too, a frequent blend. Strong-nosed and strong-chinned, this man bore none of the infirmity of his counterpart. He was majestically composed, with a feathery touch and delicate modulation of color and line that were readily apparent. Yet the net effect of this picture was no less Rabelaisian than the other: the warrior’s head leaned back, so that he was staring upward on a sightline that, I was guessing, intersected Duke’s asshole.
Finally I arrived at Duke’s feet, lighter in tone than all else I’d seen of him. He’d done something peculiar with them, cramming landscape scenes sideways onto their tops, even though the dimensions of human feet naturally would suit them to portraiture, supposing you intended them to be legible to someone standing directly in front of you, or else yourself, and not someone off to your side. He’d not used just any landscapes. His left foot, I was sure of it, was a Pissarro I’d once been attached to, though I didn’t ask him to confirm, and thankfully he didn’t test me this time. Perhaps he was taking the lightness of his skin here as an opportunity to deal in nuances lost on the rest of his body. I bent down very low to see just what I was seeing, which immediately sharpened the queasiness I’d been feeling for a while now. Sweat fell from my brow onto his foot. He might have kicked me in the face if he’d been inclined, and he did actually lift his foot quite near my face, my lips in particular. I declined the offering and kept turning the pages of the massive pad, mapping his body like a surveyor, and not just the tattooed parts.
I got back up, unsteady on my feet, and met his gaze, which would have stayed with me the entire time I spent reading his lower half. Then, without warning, he put his thumbs under the waistband of his briefs, hoping to up the stakes. I greeted his lust, feigned or not, with a matter-of-factness that infuriated him, as I was preoccupied at the time with my own sickness. What else was left to him? He pulled the briefs off and tossed them at my feet.
“So... who did all these?” I asked, giving his cock a forensic squint. For altogether different reasons, I assume, I felt like I could vomit.
“The same guy does them all,” he said, cupping his balls, massaging them almost. He was going to enjoy himself. “A guy in Alphabet City. He doesn’t really own a studio anymore, just works out of his apartment.”
“He’s good.”
“But he has to be, doesn’t he? If he’s going to use me like canvas. You can just throw that in the garbage,” Duke said, pointing to my pad. “The stakes are different—unless you think you can throw me in the trash.” He winked and bared his teeth, but then, this was also a kind of grin, and I liked to think he meant it both ways.
“I guess you think your drawings are historical, though,” he resumed. “Not like a tattoo.”
I kept studying his cock, which seemed to me only half-flaccid, for any trace of ink. All the while my face ran with sweat and my hands trembled. The organ seemed to be plumping right before me, now that it had been set free and no longer had to be imagined. My eyes, I thought, might even be doing the job, a version of the observer effect. Yet now that his penis was out, it was fair game. For a small moment, its growth struck me as a kind of threat. But that feeling was soon tamed by my years of life drawing. The atelier had been my locker room, even if those models never looked at you quite the way Duke looked at me, or used their nudity to put you in mind of slavery or sodomy. But I couldn’t easily be put off the job, even when it came to cocks and balls presented with a little roll of the hips, which happened more than once.
Duke’s face wasn’t especially attractive, that much was true. And maybe he was too stocky to be beautiful in body either. But he certainly possessed force. His genitalia, it turned out, were entirely uninked. I drew dismembered versions of his cock and balls, floating in the void, and without a trace of flattery, of which there was no need.
We took a breather after I finished his scrotum. I was surprised he’d not pushed for a break sooner, but this might have been a matter of pride. I ended up having to ask for it, as my hand was shaking uncontrollably, and aching, too. I’d gone through I don’t know how many sheets, a quilt that together would account for his body, and my mind was a mess.
We didn’t talk much then, and he refused to clothe himself, though he did return to his bed, to read his mail, actually, and then to shut his eyes for a moment and rest his body. Modeling was an exertion even a professional athlete might not have been prepared for. No-one could believe that standing still could be so exhausting. I spent my time on the balcony going through three Stellas to settle me down, thinking I might vomit over the edge at any minute, right into a Great Lake. Outside turned out to be the only place you could find any privacy in Duke’s apartment, never mind how large it was.
Soon it was time to do his back—the great fresco I’d glimpsed earlier. Little by little, under the lights, I made out the smaller scenes from which a kind of master image had been woven, and eventually, with some pleasure, recognized them to form a collection of Redons.
“The Noirs,” he said softly.
“Another of your mom’s favorites.”
“She hates the shit. Hates tattoos—obviously. But French painting? She likes Corot, Courbet, the realists.”
Frankly Duke’s mother sounded quite discerning: Redon and the Symbolists were a regression from Manet and Degas. That was my view. They were too quick to turn mystical where there might be a more telling lucidity. Sadly, history hadn’t yet figured this out.
Ever since my own life had begun to seem starved in various ways, I’d been thinking about certain reductions of technique and media. More than once, perusing my collection of prints, Redon had crossed my mind and my eye, for the way he’d managed to unshackle himself from the psychedelic fantasia of Butterflies and take his palette down to a monochrome—fifty years before Reinhardt and Ryman—and his media down to chalk and charcoal. It wouldn’t have been easy, embracing such poverty of means. I knew this for myself.
The tattoo man had taken those noirs, the floating heads and eyeball-balloons and bearded wild men looking like nothing besides death, and simplified the forms internally. But he added complexity, too, by situating them within a single space, Duke’s back. The only artist missing from his body, I thought, was Goya. There was still room, though: his buttocks, the backs of one thigh. In time, then, the gap might be filled, the link between Brueghel and Redon restored.
“I should meet this guy,” I said.
“Oh, he’d never. Ronnie doesn’t see anyone but me now—and the people he deals to.”
“I could pick up, sure.”
“Just let me know, then.”
“Ronnie’s your personal tattoo artist.”
“I’m his work of art.”
Duke, now that he was mostly over his theatrics, became a fine model. His tolerance for pain served him well in freezing himself solid for me, and my hand was steadier now with the alcohol masking whatever it was that was wrong with me. We ran straight past midnight, with ten-minute breaks in which we’d go out on the terrace and I would smoke, which I’d been doing more of since starting on Theria. Finally I was feeling more together, which meant there was some irony, toward the end, when during one break Duke came outside with a bottle of Theria, the thing for which I’d not even thought to ask him. Karen had been keeping him supplied, apparently, though he was running low himself: this was his last bottle.
We resumed our session and began to talk less guardedly. If he’d had interest in me sexually, if any of that was real, it now seemed somewhat faded, which of course left me hoping it had been phony all along.
“Does that really help you on the field?” I asked, pointing to the bottle.
“Did you see me out there with Brooks? The visor didn’t hurt either.”
“What does it do, you think?”
“What about you?”
“I guess there’s the clarity.”
“A lot of things do that, though. Ronnie can set you up with everything you need for that.”
I knew, of course, my answer was unsatisfactory. But I didn’t want to start dwelling on Theria, now that I was testing my capacity to go without it. I was more keen on drawing Duke’s calves at this point, or transcribing them; they were the only linguistic portions of this all-over tattoo Ronnie had turned him into. Mostly I thought these had the sound of gang handles—Keleyo; Boodink; The Chimp—perhaps all the suicide-by-cops he knew. Unlikely, maybe, but it felt telling all the same. I was only summoning our common dream life through him, our archetypes, not to parody or critique them, nor even to represent them precisely, pinning them to the dissection board. Rather, I was massaging their allure, their glamor even, into recognizable forms that might suggest an outside, without suggesting that the outside was where we ought to make our escape, that it was in any way more habitable; that there were other dreamscapes we might inhabit, other fantasies we might swap them out for, in particular, that there were more neutral or universal ways of imagining people and things—wasn’t this the perennial desire of every rationalist, in which post-Enlightenment was just a phase of the Enlightenment, as post-modernism was of modernism?
To what point, though? To whom did we owe this search for neutrality? The longer I worked with Antral, the less interest I had in any sort of disinterest. More and more, Garrett and I both suspected that, deep in our hearts, most of us didn’t either, even when we knew in some way that impartiality might be more pleasant, more fair, for some people, that a greater number of their choices might be realized through it. Was fairness the prime good toward which all other aims must be bent? Was the fairest world the worthiest? Did getting what you want ipso facto better your life? Were our desires and our wills at all the best guides to our wellbeing? Surely it was the limits on our desires, our agency, that created interest, value. It was why, for instance, the art produced in stable democratic regimes often seemed sterile and pointless: the artists didn’t meet with enough resistance to generate any heat. They were too free.
Ultimately, it seemed to me that the exact depth of our interest in justice, as well as the value of happiness itself, was thrown into doubt by so much of how we comported ourselves. The world was as unjust and unhappy as it was precisely because we didn’t think such values trumped all else. No, they were just a couple of the many competing aims that guided a meaningful life. I wanted to share with Duke the thoughts to which I’d been led by drawing his person, but I didn’t. My mind might have been scrambled by withdrawal. Yet this was what made looking so agreeable to me, its relationship to thinking, the way it could help you transcend the realm of sight, but honestly.
“Did you see me read that play out on the field? Take my boy Brooks apart? He’s a vet, but I was seeing more than he was.”
“You must have always had an instinct for that, though.”
He twisted his head around and regarded me sharply. “How would you know? You’re not sounding like a believer in the products, man. How are we going to sell them with you acting like this?” He untwisted and continued: “What really surprised me out there, though, especially on that last catch, before the tip-ball work, was how I was just able to know where that ball was heading. I was so sure, I had time to fuck with Brooks. A six-inch window, that’s what I saw, and I could sense just how much he was off-line. I’m good—really good—but that was something else, something new. It could have just been the drink, but the visor might have taken me over the top. I don’t know yet. But these things the Cal man gets me, they just help.”
“I thought Brooks was going to get to you with his cleats, afterward.”
“Well, Arête can’t do anything about that. But Brooks isn’t a fool. He knows I don’t just play here—I’m from Chicago.” His tone brightened: “You know, tonight, we’re going to meet some of the people Brooks would have ended up meeting if anything happened out there. I still shouldn’t have shown him up, though. I wasn’t trying to, actually. I was just sort of shocked by what I could do.”
“Superhero stuff.”
“Testing my powers. X-Men shit. I really don’t know what’s in this drink. How it can be legal. You?”
He might have been probing my relationship with Garrett here, seeing how much more I knew than he did. The truth was, if his ignorance was to be believed, not much more.
“I’m going to go by his lab again,” I said.
“I almost don’t want to know. And I don’t want anyone I play against using it either.”
“I bet it’ll turn out placebo. It always does.”
“Isn’t it helping you? I mean, there’s nothing real clear about all this.” He turned around and pointed at one of my sketches of his nose that I’d torn out. I’d made it deeply Negroid, more so than his actually was. But there was also a tiny bit of almost Edwardian sharpness to its end. “It seems to be doing something to you—not that I can say what.”
“I haven’t been drinking it today.”
“Do you wear the lenses ever?”
“Not really, not yet.”
“So this is just how you are? A lot of people might see this sketch as, I don’t know, off. How about that?”
I reached to take the sheet back but he hopped down from the crate and caught my hand, which appeared like a baby’s next to his.
“In a sort of inspired way, though,” he said, marveling at the nose while feeling his own. “Do you want any now?” He pointed to the sealike substance sitting in the bottle, on the floor next to the crate he’d stood on. I was tempted. He could see that. “It’s not easy without the stuff, is it?” He picked up the bottle and sipped. “Really, I try everything Arête sends down the pike. All of Fred’s clients do. We’re working out the details with the lenses, finding what would suit me best. But right now I think you need to have some more of the blue drank.” He insisted, and we were mostly done now, and I was definitely tiring. Why not? I would have gone for something as quaint as Red Bull at this point. Theria, though, you didn’t have to gulp it down. You wanted to savor it, however chemical its origins may turn out to be; its ethereal, algae-like tone was almost as entrancing as the beverage itself.
Duke got a glass and poured nearly half the bottle. “This is some of my last shit I’m giving you, you realize that? Because it’s no fun being out of it, I know. Freddie’s saying I should have more by tomorrow. But I’m a man of mercy. I can see you’re in need. So I’m splitting it with you.”
I finished up the session with Theria’s aid, although exhaustion itself offered a certain sort of clarity: who could say what was responsible for what? I think the drink steadied me, though. My time was mostly spent on those impressionist landscapes on the tops of his feet. When I’d finished with Duke, he quickly pulled on sweats and disappeared downstairs without explanation. Strange to say, but I hardly noticed; I went on till two in the morning, riffing off everything in the pad, and everything I felt then. Time accelerated but I lost no control. I felt entirely within the drawings lacing his body, the gallery that was his person. In the midst of the work, it was as if I were drawing him into life, though all I possessed were fragments. Yet these were no less real to me than Duke was. Once I’d inscribed the last page of the sketchbook—that’s the only reason I stopped, the paper was gone—I paged slowly through it and, it seemed to me, apprehended the whole of Duke in these pieces, so that I didn’t miss the absent man at all.