Sammy’s madness was out of control. In the gutted-out building that had been Arch’s, he had mounted dozens of pieces of battered stone to wood pedestals, and he had handwritten the title of each on an index card. Some of the pieces had the appearance of concrete broken apart by street workers bent over jackhammers. There was not a single work of merit—even with the generosity of artistic forgiveness—among the entire collection.

“Well?” Sammy said eagerly.

“Jesus,” I mumbled.

“What?”

I recovered and swallowed. “This is—well, incredible.”

Sammy beamed. “You like what you see, Bobo? I mean, do you really like it?”

I nodded professorially and wandered to a piece and touched its rough surface. I read the title: Suffering. Yes, I thought. It is.

“Like I’ve said before, Sammy, sculpture’s not my medium, but this is—”

“Different, right?” Sammy suggested eagerly. “It is, Bobo. At least it is for me. I picked it up from listening to some skinny-assed poet over in Woodstock. He was reading some free-form stuff—you know, putting down whatever word popped up when he was holding the pen—and it struck me: that’s what I should try. Free-form sculpting. But it’s not as simple as it looks, Bobo, or as I thought it would be. When I first started doing it, I’d take my sledgehammer and whack the shit out of a piece of stone until it started to look like something, and then I’d take the chisel and clean it up a little.” He tapped his temple with his finger. “That was before I started thinking,” he emphasized. “You know what they say about something being buried in every piece of stone? Well, you can’t just knock it out. You’ve got to think it out. You’ve got to see what’s in there before you start. And you know how you do that, Bobo? You do it by seeing the weak stuff, the stuff that you’re going to take off. When it’s gone, what’s left is what you were thinking. Now I guess I could polish it up a little bit, like the Italians, but I like the original, rough look. What do you think? It’s different, right?”

“Definitely,” I said. I could not tell the difference between Sammy’s thinking and his whacking.

“Let me show you the piece I was telling you about,” Sammy urged. “The one for your friend’s memorial, if you want it.”

He led me across the shop to a piece of granite that was two feet high and had the shape of a grotesque head, like some petrified evidence of disease.