The studio was dark, save for the moonlight reflecting off the white-tinted panels of Purity. The black rectangles of Obedience seemed to suck all the light out of the world, and as my vision adjusted to the gloom, a crack sounded, loud and terribly close.

At first, I held still in the darkness, watching the moon inch across the sky through the ribbing of the plastic-paneled skylights, waiting for something, anything to happen—but nothing happened at all. There were no more noises from anywhere, except for the rhythmic rise and fall of my own lungs. I switched on the lights and told myself sternly to be brave. The fluorescent bars above revealed that the only things in the studio were me and my paintings. All twenty-eight panels of my seven enormous Rich Ugly Old Maids—my precious, impossible livelihood—took up nearly every square foot of space.

At last, I went hard on Obedience.

The only taste in my mouth was blackness and murk, colors that bruised every part of Tyler’s house. Lake stones and pieces of the crumbling dock outside Carey’s studio rolled across my tongue; chewed-up pieces of the neon-green lichen that grew on the end of the Eliot House dock across the water stuck to my lips. I coughed out the air of their house, tasting the cement walls, so hard they made your teeth hurt just looking at them, the vines they let run wild through it, the dirt they slept in every night like a tomb. I pulled handfuls of the beautiful Dutch-style peonies painted on the black walls of Max’s office from my throat and tried to choke back the lush, strawberry velvet of her chaise. My teeth and jawbones became the red enamel of Charlie’s stools and the matte-black tailpipe of his Ducati motorcycle, all these consummately designed objects intersecting with nature, in a futuristic, self-sufficient house that would one day sink beneath vegetation, for not even concrete and rebar can withstand the power of roots and earthquakes. I felt Carey Logan walk into the lake in her cement-filled boots, I drank the fear in her skin, and, so possessed, I worked in a trance until the sun sank again.

By two in the morning, I felt it—it was time to stop. The ocean of oily slabs gleamed, each one a tiny universe unto itself, and it became obvious to me that they were done, each of them complete, not a one in need of a single drop of anything.

They weren’t yet dry, but they were, at long last, complete. They had to be.

I was out of time.

*  *  *