My mom and I stayed at the kitchen table and talked, a rarity. The quiet woman I’d known all my life was unusually loquacious, and for the first time, I saw her as a separate person, not just my mother, and recognized that she was lonely. At one point, she said she was proud of me and all I had accomplished, and she brought out a scrapbook she kept with photos from my college graduations and my degrees, articles and pictures of exhibitions and reviews, a couple of interviews, all laminated, a total surprise. It made me feel really bad that I hardly saw her, and when she asked me to stay over so we could have breakfast together, I said yes.

My old room was preserved like a museum, but to what I wasn’t sure. There were none of those sports banners or trophies that “good” high school boys had in their bedrooms. Mine still had posters for Judas Priest’s Painkiller album, one for Iron Maiden, and the flyer I’d framed from GG Allin and the Murder Junkies’ last performance. The lava lamp I had thought so cool at thirteen was still on my nightstand, along with three books, European Artists, Fight Club, and Colleges in America. I flipped through the college book, noted the pages I had turned down and the places I’d circled twenty years ago, all art schools.

I looked through European Artists for a while, then caught up on a few emails. I tried to sleep but couldn’t, my old bed too narrow and too soft. I watched a YouTube video about a virtual reality project the Louvre was going to unveil with its upcoming Leonardo exhibition: a seven-minute ride inside the Mona Lisa where the viewer got a speedy art history lesson including highlights of Leonardo’s methods and Lisa del Giocondo’s life, ending with a virtual ride on one of Leonardo’s flying machines, as if it had actually been built, the viewer soaring through the painting’s dreamy landscape.

Part of me wanted to take that ride—mainly to see if I might catch a glimpse of Chaudron’s initials, though if they existed, the Louvre would surely not reveal them. I was sure the experience would be fun and easy; sit back, do nothing, be entertained. Nothing wrong with that. Or was there? Did people really need to take an imaginary flight inside a painted landscape? Couldn’t they just look at the artwork? Wasn’t that enough? The thing that really got me was that you didn’t have to be in the museum or anywhere near the painting, just get on a virtual reality platform and voilà! The only thing missing was the actual painting.

I switched off the YouTube video, thinking always something new, but the idea irritated me. Or did it threaten me—threaten the notion of old-fashioned painting? Old-fashioned. Was that what I’d become? I could hear Vincent sneering at the cubists, saw him fleeing Picasso’s studio, running from the future into the safety of the past. I hated the idea of being conservative or nostalgic, something every artist had to face, how much of the past we wanted to preserve while moving forward.