I told him. I told him about the fancy loft and my key not working in my door and the guy in Bosco’s place and it added up to…what? Someone had stolen my life and replaced me with someone else? And even as I said the words they seemed the very definition of crazy to me, a short step from conversations with space aliens and the messages from the CIA. But he heard me out and then said, “We got a problem, kid.”
“We?”
“Oh, yeah. I just guaranteed Castelli you’re going to do his ceiling and now you’re having a nervous breakdown on me.”
A little glow of hope here. “So the ceiling is a real job and I, like, wouldn’t have taken a job like that unless I was a starving hack commercial guy, would I?”
“I don’t know, Chaz. Maybe you needed a break. Maybe you’re fascinated by Tiepolo. Who knows what artists will do? Hockney did all those Polaroids for years-”
“Fuck Hockney!” I said, louder than I had intended, and people in the bar looked our way. “And fuck you! What happened to my Clinton painting?”
“What are you talking about, Chaz? What Clinton painting?”
“That one, the one next to the bar that’s been there for years, and the bartender’s wrong-”
“Chaz! Calm yourself the fuck down!”
“Just tell me I’m who I am!” I was shouting now, and he replied, in just the sort of soothing voice that does more than anything else to inflame incipient madness, “What good would that do, man? If you’re as nuts as you say, you could be imagining me saying just what you want to hear. Or the opposite. Look, let’s get out of here, you’re going to get eighty-sixed if you keep screaming like that.”
He threw some money on the table, more than necessary to cover our tab with a generous tip, and hustled me out into the street. There he used his cell to call his black car, and in a few minutes it appeared and we got in. Which was fine with me at that point. Black car, Mark talking on his cell to some client, a normal situation-he wasn’t particularly concerned with what had happened to me, so why should I be? Yes, crazy logic, but just then that was all the logic I had.
We pulled up in front of his gallery and got out. He had some business to transact; I could wait in his office, upstairs from the showroom. I was content to do so; I had no pressing engagements. I sat in Mark’s big leather chair and closed my eyes. Maybe I could go to sleep, I thought, and when I woke up everything would be back to normal. No, that wasn’t going to work, I was wired despite the drinks. Okay, I kept coming back to the idea that this had to be a side effect of salvinorin, something they hadn’t figured on, some delicate system in my brain had collapsed and I was hallucinating an alternate reality as a successful painter of the kind of paintings I happened to despise.
Then I thought, Wait a second, I have a life, with all kinds of physical traces, bank accounts, paper trails, websites, I’ll just check it out right now, and so I turned to Mark’s computer and Googled myself. I had a website, it seemed, a beautiful one, all about my wonderfully slick nudes, and strangely enough it displayed some paintings, early stuff, that I actually recalled doing. The website I remembered, with my magazine illustrations on it, was gone.
I tried to get into my bank account online. My password didn’t work.
I pulled out my cell phone and brought up my phone book. I had the name of every magazine art director in New York in that list, and they were all gone, replaced by a bunch of names I didn’t recognize. But Lotte’s name was there, and almost without volition I found myself ringing the home number associated with her name, a number I didn’t recognize, a Manhattan number. It rang; then a message telling me that I’d reached the home of Lotte Rothschild, Chaz Wilmot, Milo, and Rose, and I could leave a message at the beep. I left no message.
No hope then, the hallucination was complete. The me I remembered no longer existed. Except for Mark. And now I was terrified of Mark. Mark was God now; he could erase me with a word. So I passed the time until he chose to reappear. I played computer solitaire. I cleaned my nails with my Swiss Army knife. While I had the knife out I carved my monogram into the side of his desk drawer, so in case this was a complete hallucination and I was really someplace else, I could come back and check. If I remembered.
It turns out that when you’re going crazy it’s probably better to be with a complete narcissist like Slotsky than with a caring person. Your agony is so trivial to him that in a strange way it stops being so all-consuming to you. Mark came bouncing in with a big smile, talking about some killing he’d just made on a painting. He was in the mood to celebrate and he just happened to have an invitation to a big opening at Claude Demme in Chelsea. Sushi from Mara was promised, and unlimited Taittinger. My little difficulty was apparently forgotten, and I was willing to pretend it was no big deal for the nonce, because I was waiting to wake up. One day at a time, as they say in rehab. It goes for the minutes too.
So I followed him out like a wooden pull-toy and we traveled in the black car to Claude Demme on West Twenty-sixth Street. It was a three-man show by guys who were fifteen years younger than me; their work was about what you’d expect, and the people too, art hags, Eurotrash, dealers, a couple of A-list celebrities. Mark filled a plate with pricey sushi and started his usual schmoozing and air-kissing. I air-kissed not and filled my belly with champagne. After half a dozen flutes I felt the need for air and strolled out down the street toward Eighth Avenue.
All the galleries were lit, and I passed them without much interest until I came to a large storefront with a plaque on the wall that said ENSO GALLERY in artful calligraphy, white on black, and stopped to stare at a large painting in the window. It was of a nude woman unusually well rendered, and she was clutching tenderly to her breast a miniature version of herself, another spasm of irony wrung out of the corpse of surrealism, although the guy could really draw. It took me a couple of seconds to realize it was in exactly the same style as the unfinished piece I’d seen in the fancy loft. I stopped breathing and looked at the window card. It read RECENT WORK BY CHARLES WILMOT, JR., and sure enough, there was my monogram painted in the lower right of the painting.
I went in, shaking all over. There were a few people in the small white space and maybe ten paintings on the walls. All nudes, a few men, mostly women, more than a few young girls. The technique was realistic: flat lighting, concealing nothing, a good deal of crotch hair depicted, a soft-core effect, a little Balthus, a little Ron Mueck, a little Magritte. I recognized some of the models, women I’d known; Lotte and Suzanne were there too. The prices were up in the high five figures and quite a few had been sold. I’d never seen any of them in my life.
I went up to the girl behind the desk, a pretty blue-eyes with extra-large round spectacles and gelled punk-black hair. She looked up and gave me a big smile: “Hello, Mr. Wilmot,” she said, and I said, “What the hell is going on here?”
Her smile faded and she asked, “What do you mean?”
“You know me?” I demanded.
“Uh-huh.” Carefully. “Yeah, you’re the artist. Is something wrong?”
And I snapped.
The poor failed bastard I was in my every memory grew knuckle hair and tusks and shouted, “Is something wrong? Is something wrong? Yeah, I’ll tell you what’s wrong, darling: I never painted any of this shit.”
I gave a yell and took out my knife and attacked the paintings, slashing through the beautiful, oh-so-salable surfaces, and my God, it felt good! The art lovers were screaming and running out and the girl screamed too and called out, “Serge!” and reached for the phone. I ran over to the window display and grabbed the card that had my name on it, and I was trying to slice it up with the knife when I was grabbed from behind by, I imagine, the Serge whom she’d called. The card with the knife still stuck in it fell from my hand as we struggled. I broke free and threw the first serious punch I’d let loose since the schoolyard, and he slipped it with an ease one doesn’t really expect in a gallery manager and connected with a left jab, then a powerful right cross, and I went down and out.