He looks over the canvas that he started when he realized the camera wasn’t going to work, that he wouldn’t be able to make himself go back and see the women again. Those frenzied nights when he’d painted until his hands were too stiff to hold a brush. If he destroyed it, who would ever know? If he didn’t, someone might think he had something to do with those women. He took it off of the easel, imagined himself breaking it over his knee, making it small enough to throw away, but he couldn’t bring himself to ruin it. It was another way to say: I SEE.

It had been so long since he painted—two years? three?—but he soon relived the pleasure of blending paint, the instant satisfaction of a slash of color against the blankness of a canvas. His grandmother teaching him, so long ago, to copy from photographs. The joy on her face when he showed her a finished picture—he always thought it was the happiest he ever saw her, when he brought her something he had made. To think, he once assumed that was how he would spend his life: Showing people what they overlooked. Making sure they didn’t forget. He did paintings of the wreckage from the last hurricane, when the town got pulled apart. Paintings of the days when the casinos closed down, bits of them sold off. Men walking down the street hugging disco balls, slot machines being loaded into the beds of trucks. The portrait of the man who gave him the two-dollar bill—the only kindness Luis could offer after he died. One of a man who bought from him, a man who also sold old chairs, stacks of mismatched plates, tins of buttons. Every month Luis would bring him another picture, until one day he went back and the seller’s tent was gone. He never saw him again. Another person the city simply swallowed up.

He wishes he had realized how much painting would soothe him, thinks that the fires might have been a mistake, but now it’s too late. The last part of himself that the city has taken—he has become someone who thinks to ruin before he thinks to create.

HE PACES the long hallways that snake through the casino, his hand on his matches in his pocket. He feels the cameras watching him, all of those little eyes embedded in the ceiling. He starts to feel like everyone is looking at him with suspicion. The guards, the dealers, the grounds crew, the girls who carry drinks. The other day he stood behind the blonde woman while she watched a screen: eight views of the hallways and rooms. She pressed a button, and then the windows went black, disappeared.