"THERE'S NOTHING TO DO," I complained to Chief Leopard Frog. "I've passed the point of absolute boredom into the zone of terminal boredom."
"Good, good, all good," Chief Leopard Frog counseled. "Now we can work on patience."
Back in the days of the famous French Impressionists and Fauvists, those daring, bohemian painters in Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who shocked the world with their new, liberated view of color and shape and subject, it was not unusual to find entire paintings devoted to an artist's chair, or his bed, or his window, or his lunch, or his table.
Indeed, according to the Disney comic book Uncle Scrooge on Art, Music, and Money, today such images are highly prized and hang in the world's finest collections and museums. Some, such as a yellow chair by Van Gogh, or a red tablecloth by Matisse, are worth millions and millions of dollars.
Why such a fuss over such ordinary subjects?
I can tell you.
Those guys were stuck in their rooms.
What else was there to look at?
They had no money to go anywhere, and if they did manage to scrape up a few francs to go somewhere it was most likely downstairs to the café to meet girls, where their money was quickly gone.
Better to spend a few days painting a likeness of the chest of drawers, however wobbly and unlikely the end result.
For the first time in my life I understood these paintings, although, of course, being a native of Paisley, Kansas, I'd never actually seen them. But I'd seen reproductions in several of the better books deeded to me by Mrs. Franks.
Now I was also a room-bound artist.
My paintbrush was a somewhat antiquated thirty-five-millimeter camera. My world was a bedroom measuring approximately twelve by fourteen feet. I did have one advantage over those tortured Frenchmen. I had a macro lens. If it suited me, I could photograph my bedspread close enough to see the hand-woven fibers crisscrossing like the ties on tiny railroad tracks.
My first exposure under my new circumstances was a fly that had parked himself on the top of my bookcase. Instead of swatting him with my mother's TV Guide, which I probably should have done, thereby dealing with two nuisances at once, I took his picture as he scratched his hairy legs. Only the click-thunk of the shutter scared him off.
Country flies are bold creatures.
Whereas Van Gogh concentrated on the entire piece of rough-hewn furniture in his habitat, I focused on the knobs, the grain of the wood, the imperfections in the paint.
A loose screw in a hinge became a visual metaphor for all that was wrong with my life. A dripping faucet in the bathroom was an opportunity to express the relentless passing of time. Rust stains around the bathtub drain spoke to me of age and futility. A casually discarded T-shirt, lying like a carcass on the floor, stood for the meaninglessness of personal attachments, the fragility of human bonds.
I was an artist in a cage.
Of course, I had no visitors.
Other than Chief Leopard Frog, who came and went as the mood struck him, and the occasional prison-guard visit from my mother, delivering food, I was utterly, entirely alone.
It didn't take long for me to learn that two pain pills would help to pass the time better than one, and three could get me through an afternoon.
I began to complain of increasing pain simply to get more pills.
No one questioned my motives.
And why should they? They perceived their lives, though empty, to be very busy. They'd move from one interruption of their idle thoughts to the next. Who cares if there's a kid out in the country somewhere who's getting more medication than he needs?
Certainly not the overworked (and overpaid) Dr. Appletree.
Certainly not the ever-changing pharmacists at Wal-Mart.
That I spent my days in a drug-induced stupor is adequately demonstrated in the several out-of-focus pictures that came back to me in the mail a fortnight later.
But the interior of T. J. Heath's General Merchandise Emporium was a prizewinner, if I do say so myself. The story that it told in an instant was profound. Most of the others in the collection were throwaways. Blurry coat hangers holding nothing. Boring bedposts. A toilet at the moment of flush. My talisman sitting on a windowsill.
That sort of thing.
But as had become the custom, there was a ghost in the mix from Sparkle Snapshot. This time the ghost was Mr. Heath. He was out in his lumberyard, gathering pieces of pine boards that had fallen from his handmade storage rack. He had a pained expression on his face.
Just before I passed out from all those pills, an idea began to form in my foggy mind.