Mr. Lin had thrown in a brand-new kit, just in case, and so I held up a finger and rooted around under the seat until I found it. While the man in the windbreaker shimmied under his van, spun the lugs, pulled the tire, and popped on a donut, I wondered if there was a body inside the van, whether the body was on ice or in a plastic bag or what. Bodies, plural, maybe. Were they in a box freezer? Were they stacked on special body-size shelves? Were they strapped to gurneys in some kind of ambulance pantomime? But I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell; the man in the windbreaker simply thanked me, returned the kit, and drove off.

Finally: I hit the gas and lurched forward. I must have noticed other things as I drove, but my enduring memory of leaving Manhattan will always be that coroner’s van and the bodies that I presumed were inside it.

I remember thinking at the time that I was lucky to get out alive.

*  *  *

The rushing current of the dawning traffic pushed me up the Henry Hudson and over the tiny bridge at Spuyten Duyvil, to the Bronx, the Saw Mill, and eventually onto the Taconic State Parkway, the gently sloping four-lane country highway that stretches along the state’s borders with Connecticut and Massachusetts. I drove slowly, with the windows down, the breezes lifting my hair one way and another, under the stone bridges, switching on my hazards at the short merges, careful of my cargo.

The first part of the drive was not unfamiliar. My first years in the Northeast were spent seventy miles north of the city, at the Academy. There I learned the basics of painting—color studies, painting from life, materiality—and the building blocks of my own taste. The faculty encouraged us to despise figuration (for its mistaken glorification of the corporeal; for its bloodstained history as a colonialist relic; and finally, most important, for its intellectual limitations) and to worship the visceral joy of abstract expression; the clean pseudo-godliness of minimalism; the intellectual detachment of the early conceptualists; and the raw passion of performance art. I was an eager student, swallowing it all whole inside a perpetually empty stomach, and got a taste for color.