Duma Key

"Too late for that, too," I said, and looked at my stump. "I'll never be heaven again."

The wrong word. Always the wrong word, and it would go on like that for-fucking-ever. I felt like knocking everything off my stupid goddam play-tables and onto the floor.

"Even," I said, deliberately low and deliberately slow. "I'll never be eeee- ven again. I'm odd-arm-out." That wasn't very funny (or even very sensible), but the anger started seeping away just the same. Hearing myself say the right word helped. It usually did.

I turned my thoughts from my stump to my wife's gloves. HANDS OFF, indeed.

With a sigh - there might have been some relief in it, I don't remember for sure, but it's likely - I set them on the table where I put my model objects, took a brush out of a turp jar, cleaned it with a rag, rinsed it, and looked at the blank canvas. Did I mean to paint the gloves anyway? Why, for fuck's sake? Why?

All at once the idea that I had been painting at all seemed ridiculous. The idea that I didn't know how seemed a hell of a lot more plausible. If I dipped this brush in black and then put it on that forbidding white-space, surely the best I'd be able to do would be a series of marching stick figures: Ten little Indians went out to dine, One drowned her baby self, Then there were nine. Nine little Indians, Stayed up very late -

That was spooky. I got up from my chair, and fast. Suddenly I didn't want to be here, not in Little Pink, not in Big Pink, not on Duma Key, not in my stupid pointless limping retired retarded life. How many lies was I telling? That I was an artist? Ridiculous. Kamen could cry STUNNED and YOU MUST NOT STOP in his patented e-mail capitals, but Kamen specialized in tricking the victims of terrible accidents into believing the pallid imitations of life they were living were as good as the real thing. When it came to positive reinforcement, Kamen and Kathi Green the Rehab Queen were a tag-steam. They were FUCKING BRILLIANT, and most of their grateful patients cried YOU MUST NOT STOP. Was I telling myself I was psychic? Possessed of a phantom arm capable of seeing into the unknown? That wasn't ridiculous, it was pitiful and insane.

There was a 7-Eleven in Nokomis. I decided I would try my driving skills, pick up a couple of six-packs, and get drunk. Things might look better tomorrow, through the haze of a hangover. I did not see how they could look much worse. I reached for my crutch and my foot - my left one, my good foot, for Christ's sake - caught under my chair. I stumbled. My right leg wasn't strong enough to hold me up and I fell full-length, reaching out with my right arm to break my fall.

Just instinct, of course... except it did break my fall. It did. I didn't see it - my eyes were squeezed shut, the way you squeeze them when you know you're going to take one for the team - but if I hadn't broken my fall, I would almost certainly have done myself significant damage, carpet or no carpet. I could have sprained my neck, or even broken it.

I lay there a moment, confirming to myself that I was still alive, then got to my knees, my hip aching fiercely, holding my throbbing right arm up in front of my eyes. There was no arm there. I set my chair up on its legs, leaned on it with my left forearm... then darted my head forward and bit my right arm.

I felt the crescents of my teeth sink in just below the elbow. The pain.

I felt more. I felt the flesh of my forearm against my lips. Then I drew back, panting. "Jesus! Jesus! What's happening? What is this?"

I almost expected to see the arm swirl into existence. It didn't, but it was there, all right. I reached across the seat of my chair for one of my brushes. I could feel my fingers grasp it, but the brush didn't move. I thought: So this is what it's like to be a ghost.

I scrambled into the chair. My hip was snarling, but that pain seemed to be happening far downriver. With my left hand I snatched up the brush I'd cleaned and put it behind my left ear. Cleaned another and put it in the gutter of the easel. Cleaned a third and put that in the gutter, as well. Thought about cleaning a fourth and decided I didn't want to take the time. That fever was on me again, that hunger. It was as sudden and violent as my fits of rage. If the smoke detectors had gone off downstairs, announcing the house was on fire, I would have paid no attention. I stripped the cellophane from a brand-new brush, dipped black, and began to paint.

As with the picture I'd called The End of the Game, I don't remember much about the actual creation of Friends with Benefits. All I know is it happened in a violent explosion, and sunsets had nothing to do with it. It was mostly black and blue, the color of bruises, and when it was done, my left arm ached from the exercise. My hand was splattered with paint all the way to the wrist.