“No. I don’t want her to. There’s a gallery in Berlin that wants to represent her and, I don’t know . . . she’s at an important time in her career and stuff. I don’t want to bring her down with me, you know?”

“Have you broken up?”

“No,” Ben says. “But, yeah, we’re at kind of different stages of our lives, I guess. I suppose I’ve realized recently that I want less than what Anj wants. I want family and, like, a normal, stable job, and a little house. I want to find someone and settle down and grow old. And Anj is kind of chasing this massive dream.”

“That’s not less,” I say.

“Hmm?”

“The stuff you want.” Ben looks at me. “It isn’t less than what Anju wants.” I want to tell him that that’s the stuff I really want too, but that it’s stuff I’ll never be able to have, and that, because it’s something I’ll never have, I can see the immense value in it. I can see that what Ben wants is more of a life than what Anju is chasing, which is, I suppose, a version of what I have naturally—immortality, essentially, but through art.

“We’re not meant to want that kind of thing, though, are we, as artists,” Ben says. “I feel like most people would probably see my art as insincere if they found out I wasn’t putting all of my life into it, if they found out I wasn’t trading a life with family and kids and a stable income and everything else for it.”

“Maybe those people are stupid, though,” I say. I’m getting a little movement back in my body. My fingers. I ball them into fists, and squeeze.

“I don’t know. I suppose I keep thinking that maybe I’m like a degenerate artist or something, like I’m missing a piece of what makes artists good, the part that makes them not think about all the kind of normal life things and that makes them focus on not being forgotten after they die,” Ben says.