We were on Route 64 now and I watched the speedometer creep past eighty. I tried to shift my thinking to the absolute insanity that I was now out of prison because of Jesse Jameson Williams. Just the idea of him having known my name sent a thrill through me, though I still couldn’t help but feel he’d had me confused with another Morgan Christopher. Yet what was the likelihood there was another young artist—some young black artist, maybe—with my name in North Carolina? I wished I knew how he’d learned about me. It wasn’t like I’d been a top student. If my lifelong passion for art had been enough, I would have been a star, but my desire to create hadn’t been enough. One of my not-so-tactful professors told me I was in the top of the pack when it came to effort, but the “bottom of the middle of the pack” when it came to talent. “Talent can’t be taught,” he told me. He’d crushed me with those words. I’d thought of dropping out then, but art was all I’d ever cared about. Trey told me to tough it out. “He’s an asshole,” he said about my professor. “Your work is awesome.” Trey always had a way of building me up when I was down, but he wasn’t an artist, so what did he know? And then the accident happened and I’d landed in prison, and that pretty much made the “drop out/don’t drop out” decision for me.

“What did you mean about the artist going crazy?” I asked Lisa. “What does that mean, exactly? Schizophrenia? Psychosis? Things were different back then. Maybe she’d just been depressed and was never able to get treatment for it.” I thought I knew something about going crazy. Sometimes in the past year, I’d felt insanity creeping in. Paranoia in my case, but that had been based in reality. There’d been women in the prison out to get me.

Lisa kept her eyes on the road and shrugged almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know,” she said. “My father told me that about her one time and I didn’t think to ask him anything more. I’d never seen the mural, so I didn’t really care, but I think he was obsessed with it.” She looked in her rearview mirror and put on her blinker to change lanes. “Whatever was wrong with the artist, it was enough to prevent her from turning the mural over to the post office and getting paid, so it must have been pretty serious.”

“What’s the subject of the mural?” I asked, trying to focus on conversation to keep my mind off the road.