“I don’t know why I do what I do,” he said. “If I did, would l be here?”
I said nothing.
“I hope this happens to you one day,” he said. “Feeling this passive. Weak. You think my skin’s so weird? What’s weird about it? Every shrink I talked to told me skin wasn’t important, the thing was to look within. Get past the surface.”
“How many shrinks have you talked to?”
“Too many. All assholes like you.” He closed his eyes. “Talking faces, little crushing rooms just like this … Get past the skin, the skin, look inside. Man, I like the skin. The skin is all. The skin holds it all in.”
The eyes opened. “C’mon, man, get these things off, let me touch my skin. When I can’t touch it I feel like I’m not there.”
“In time,Donny.”
He moaned and rolled his head away from me.
“Your skin,” I said. “Did you do all that yourself?”
“Idiot. How could I do the back?”
“What about the rest of it?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you did. It’s good work. You’re talented. I’ve seen your other artwork.”
Silence.
“The Anatomy Lesson,” I said. “All those other masterpieces. Zero Tollrance.”
His body jerked. I waited for him to speak.
Nothing.
“I think I understand why you chose that name,
Donny. You have zero tolerance for stupidity. You don’t suffer fools.” Like father …
He whispered something.
“What’s that? “I said.
“Patience … is not a virtue.”
“Why not, Donny?”
“You wait, nothing happens. You wait long enough, you choke. Rot. Time dies.”
“People die, time goes on.”
“You don’t get it,” he said, a bit louder. “People dying is nothing—worm food. Time dies, everything freezes.”
“When you paint,” I said, “what happens to time?”
A tiny smile showed itself amid the beard. “Eternity.”
“And when you’re not painting?”
“I’m too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“Responses, being there, everything—my timing’s off. I’ve got a sick brain, maybe the limbic system, maybe the prefrontal lobes, the temporals, the thalamus. Nothing moves at the right pace.”
“Do you have a place where you can paint now?”
He stared at me. “Screw you. Get me out of here.”
“You offered your art to your father, but he wouldn’t accept it,” I said. “After he was gone, you tried to give it to the world. To show them what you were capable of.”
His lips folded inward and he chewed on them.
“Did you kill him, Donny?”
I bent closer. Close enough for him to bite my nose.
He didn’t. Just stayed in place, prone, staring at the ceiling.
“Did you?” I said.
“No,” he finally said. “Too late. As usual.”
After that, he shut up tight. Ten minutes into the impasse, the straw-haired nurse came in carrying a metal tray that held a plastic cup of water and two pills, one oblong and pink, the other a white disc.
“Breakfast in bed,” she announced. “Two-hundred-milligram morsel with a one-hundred chaser.”
Donny was panting. He forgot his restraints, tried to sit up. The cuffs snapped against his wrists and he slammed back down, breathing even faster.
“No water,” he said. “I won’t be drowned.”
The nurse frowned at me as if I was to blame. “Suit yourself, Senor Salcido. But if you can’t swallow it dry, I’m not going back to the doctor to authorize an injection.”
“Dry is good. Dry is safe.”
She handed me the tray. “Here, you give it to him, I’m not getting my fingers bit off.”
She watched as I took the pink pill and brought it close to Donny’s face. His mouth was already wide open. His molars and most of his bicuspids were missing. Putrid breath streamed up at me. I dropped in the pink lozenge. He caught it on his gray tongue, flipped it backward, gulped, said, “Delicious.”
In went the white pill. He grinned. Burped. The nurse snatched the tray and left, looking disgusted.
I sat back down.
“There you go,” I said.
“Now you go,” he said. “I had enough of you.”
I tried awhile longer, asking him if he’d ever actually gotten into the apartment, what did he think of his father’s library, had he read Beowulf. Mention of the book drew no response from him.