One day, a dealer from an art gallery in London emails you. You aren’t expecting an email but are pleasantly surprised. You’re on their mailing list. He informs you that due to moving galleries, he has a number of pieces by an artist you’re partial to for sale. You look at the gallery offerings and are delighted to see a piece that you find inspiring.
It is a drawing by the British artist, Glen Baxter.
[[To purchase the untitled Glen Baxter drawing, turn to page 7.]]
[[To ask your wife about the purchase, turn to page 8. ]]
No need to hesitate. It's your money. Just buy the drawing. Just click pay. Don't look at the VAT. You buy the drawing and you wedge the information in over grilled cheese sandwiches and a robust kale salad for dinner. In your delivery, you are firm, curt, and assertive.
“I bought the drawing and I’m going to put it in my office. There’s no way to return it. We’ll have to adjust.” You place your hands on the table and scoot back in your chair, as if you are finalizing a transaction. She nods once and you hear her sigh in the kitchen, deeply.
Hannah has been married to you for fifteen years. She's not stupid. She's seen this before, and she just sighs with annoyance, but technically, the annoyance isn't pushback, it's acceptance. So it's a done deal. You track the package every day. It excites you, it's a little something to look forward to and enjoy the progression of in the middle of a day.
Everything is fine, right? It’s fine. She’s fine, you’re fine. You never notice the invisible tether unclipped from her body to yours, that omnipresent connection binding you both to each other. Nothing dramatic happens, she stays with you, the budget absorbs the cost, and you admire the drawing. If it were evident that she didn’t love you anymore, you can’t quite tell. But you also can’t put your finger on the distance between you anymore. What happened to your love?
But work and life impede and you are very busy. You spend a lot of time in your home office, after all. It’s a soothing and tidy place. You can see the drawing from your chair when you lean back and sprawl, admiring your professional prowess.
The drawing delights you for a period of time, maybe six months. You feel as if you have accomplished something, until you realize you have a bottomless hole in your heart that can’t be filled. It’s the approximate shape and size of a small, framed drawing, but it’s inextricable in substance, and no matter how many beautiful objects or people or creatures you have in your orbit it will never be rendered whole.
[[To purchase a Kevin Chupik, turn to page 10.]]
[[To purchase a pistol, turn to page 12. ]]
Gently, one night over dinner, you ask your wife about the drawing. You take a large bite of chicken and chew with a smile. To your shock, she laughs at you.
“We definitely don’t have $3,300 to spend on a painting for your office right now.”
You feel a little emasculated and irritated, like the cosmic sensation of razor burn on your skin, but somewhere deeper, your ego or your frictionless ooze through the world.
You push back from your chair. You can't tell if you want to excuse yourself from the table and leave dinner, or excuse yourself from whatever your life has become that you can't enjoy your own life and purchase things when you want them. Hannah looks at you quizically, waiting for a response. You know exactly what you should say, but in your heart, you also know what you want to say, and you're increasingly afraid with the weight of the discussion that you're unlikely to enjoy your acquisition given the timbre of the conversation as-is. It is imperative that you pivot immediately.
[[To correct her and remind her actually, it’s a drawing, then to page 24.]]
[[To push back, turn to page 91.]]
[[To agree, turn to page 86.]]
"Actually, it's a drawing, Hannah," you say with the shimmer of a slightly self-satisfied smile.
"It's not even a painting?" She looks confused.
"There's no way we can afford that. Please, baby, just tell them no. It's weird that they even reached out to you in the first place, you must be on some mailing list. They just want to drum up sales. It's not something you need right now, you were just saying you have an art backlog of things to frame. He's a dealer." Her words cut, but her voice and expression are compassionate.
"We can't afford it right now."
Her argument is solid. You decide to bite the bullet and write back.
“Sorry,” you say to the gallerist,
“I can’t quite afford it right now.” The usually prompt owner does not reply for two weeks. There is no text in the body of the email when you receive a response, but your heart leaps at the sight of the familiar name in your inbox. Maybe it's been returned, and they'd like to offer it to you as a discount. Perhaps the artist has sensed a deep kinship in your enthusiasm and acute awareness of the juicer juxtaposition and has offered it to you as a gift, as appreciation of your knack for appreciation. You feel a little warmer as you click.
In their response is attached a video. It’s a short clip of someone with Belgravian affect reading your email. The audience is comprised of about twenty Londoners in their thirties, all attractive and very well dressed and laughing at a volume that drowns out the reading of your email response.
The entire art world acutely knows your shame and shuts you out. You are no longer sent any special offers by any galleries. You are no longer legally permitted to buy art. Everyone you have ever known now knows you don’t have the pocket money to purchase a modest drawing, basically mass produced for a pittance. The world laughs at you hard and long.
Maybe a poster of A Clockwork Orange would satisfy? Your eyes burn and you head to the nearest Target, knowing your place in the world and accepting it. The drawing is purchased by a collector on the UES who owns sixty of them, housed in his third residence. He also owns the large Alessi sculpture you always wanted. You learn this when you meet him at a party, and later on in the night, emboldened by decent champagne, he propositions your wife and she accepts. Everything you were afraid of in your darkest hours are true. The only value in life is monetary, and you are simply not up to snuff.
You are alone with no drawing.
''
The End
''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]She rolls her eyes and puts her fork down.
“Honey, we argued about the Mapplethorpe in 2023 and it went just like this, remember? You turned your gears for a week and felt awful and nothing changed. You don’t have a Mapplethorpe, and our day trip to the craft fair ended up in a big fight. Why not avoid the stress?”
She is beautiful. Her neck is graceful and elongated and she looks at you with compassion and perhaps a little fatigue. You didn't want to ruin the day at the craft fair or that one week off that you both had together, but there's something about this that you cannot shake.
You cannot tell her that you cannot avoid the stress. You are like a greyhound seized with prey drive and an incessant need to consume. Something is deeply broken in your brain that //needs// this like you needed the Mapplethorpe, or the MGB, or the teak sailboat you park in your dad’s backyard.
Something compels you to seek something you either see yourself as, or wish you could be, or know intrinsically that you are not and still yearn to embody.
You wish you could tell her that this is just the manifestation of yourself as a sad seven-year old in cowboy boots, resigned to painful loneliness, a true American cowboy with curly blonde hair, an you open your mouth and say,
[["Fuck you, that’s like 1% of my salary," turn to page 33.]]
[["Well, since I didn’t get the Mapplethorpe, this is the least you can do," turn to page 46.]] "No, you're right," you say. She doesn't see the way the tears swimming in your eyes distort the plate of pasta in front of you, and you swallow the lump of hard disappointment in your throat. Stupid man, crying about a silly drawing.
"There are many other things we could spend that money on right now that would benefit the house and our lives than something aesthetic for the sheer desire of it." If she sees your tears, she doesn't say anything, and you appreciate that, because you feel embarrassed right now in your ill-fitting emotional maturity.
You cannot stop thinking about the drawing. You try to put it out of your mind and a few weeks later, resign to purchasing it. You'll figure it out. You always figure it out.
But the drawing has already sold. They're sorry, but they have many others, perhaps you'd like to consider the one of the cowboy throwing a bottle of 2005 Haut-Brion across the saloon? It's had a lot of interest.
You click out of the email and push your chair back from your desk.
You stare into the void of uncompromising misery and realize that actually, this //was// the only thing between you and happiness, and your fumbling idiocy has caused you to lose it. This was it. This was the grail, although you had no idea at the time.
The grail distorts into an omen.
You spend hours looking at the grainy scan online. The gallery eventually stops returning your calls begging, pleading, offering double to the person who purchased it without such qualms. You lose sleep thinking about it. You cry at night considering the locus of your own stupidity.
Nothing is worth more to you than this, at this moment, and knowing — truly knowing deep at the core that you would be genuinely and actually happier, a much better version of yourself imbued with deep satisfaction had you owned this object.
And you don’t, and you don’t know who or what you are anymore.
[[To purchase a pistol, turn to page 12.]]
[[To purchase a Kevin Chupik, turn to page 10.]] "That's a good point," she says with a degree of hesitation. You're not crazy about manipulating her, but you reassure yourself that it's not manipulation, you're just //right//.
You can never admit to her that you neither recall the argument about the Mapplethorpe or the piece that so intrigued you in the first place. It, like many other things that have caught your eye was little more than an acquisition upon a large trash heap of acquisitions that you scratch to soothe a deep internal itch that you can't quite place.
She relents. She has relented before. You've relented too, isn't that what marriage is, a series of give and take?
"But I need you to do something for me," she says, piercing the last slice of roasted tofu with her fork.
"What's that?" You feel jovial, you start to clear the dishes. You refresh her water glass. In the kitchen, you write a quick "yes, accepted" email to the gallery, relieved that the fate of the drawing no longer hangs in the balance and will instead hang in your office.
"Can you schedule a session with Charlie again?"
Charlie is your therapist, your on-again, off-again guy. Lately the sessions haven't been as productive in conjunction with the medication you're taking, and you figure as long as you can maintain your routine and take your anti-depressants a few times a day, forking over $100 for an hour with him just adds insult to injury.
[["What's the point? He doesn't contribute anything of value to my life. He's just another expense that I dread paying for. I don't feel better after seeing him," on page 82.]]
[["Yeah, I can do that," on page 105.]]You tell your wife, Hannah, that you bought the painting. She asks you how much you paid, and you tell her. Her face softens, and her eyes fill with tears. She explains to you that she had earmarked that money for something important and begs you to return it to the gallery, or sell it locally.
You scrape your fork against the vestiges of your poulet au vinaigrette, a slight curdling feeling in the bottom of your stomach. You weren't sure why you weren't anticipating pushback, but at the apex of this clash, you aren't quite sure what to do. What you thought was an easy reflex has turned into a conflict you don't entirely understand, a conflict between your own self and the self you want to be.
[[To refuse, turn to page 6.]]
[[To refuse and have it framed, turn to page 8.]]
"I bought the drawing already," you say hesitantly. Hannah doesn't respond. In truth, you hadn't quite committed to it, but no backing out now, right?
You buy the drawing but you don’t feel any differently, just a sinking sense of disappointment that //whoops, you’ve done it again, haven’t you?// feeling in your heart.
Now you’ll pick up your own mess and tighten up and get your story straight to find yourself the cash to make this issue go away. You wonder if you aren’t truly yourself without a self-imposed problem to solve, the very definition of tsuris. The gallery sends it rolled in a tube and you keep meaning to frame it, but things get in the way. It sits for years and eventually, you get it framed, but it doesn’t quite sit right with you, something about the colors or the texture or the office feels wrong and out of place. You have a few friends over for dinner one night, people you love but haven’t seen in some time. You all eat chicken marbella and share a bottle of Riesling and you offer them, in a genteel, no-pressure way, another tour of the house.
“Lot of good changes, nothing crazy,” non-chalant as you want them to feel the shift. You lead them upstairs and down the hallway, you pause for the obligatory pomp and circumstance over the color you painted the walls – Benjamin Moore’s Cinnamon Slate and the way you redid the trim and the smoothness of the plaster and eventually, they arrive at your office, still gleaming with excitement, and look at the furniture and the new rug and the framed artwork and desk toys and you gesture over to the drawing, somewhat engulfed by the rest of the room, and you say,
“It’s a Glen Baxter,” and they say,
“Oh, cool,” and you wish they connected the juicer and the cowboy to the rest of your hyper-curated interests and desires as a person, but they don’t, and someone else says,
“Oh, isn’t that that juicer you have downstairs?”
And you nod with excitement, eager to elaborate, but the topic of conversation has quickly moved on.
You realize you had higher expectations out of the drawing than the drawing itself could ever fulfill, that you were this grand arbiter of taste, when secretly you know in the marrow of your soul that taste is trial and error with a little luck thrown in and so, so much money spent, and that the social capital this has afforded you is really, truly insignificant. You are insignificant.
One day, you take the drawing down and you don’t put it back up, and you later sell it on eBay for $1,500 Buy It Now and recoup a $950 profit, after the framing and shipping and fees. A man in San Francisco purchases it, the founder of a modest AI startup he sold three years in for an ungodly amount of money.
''The End
''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]"I tried," you say, your hands soft and upturned in reconciliation.
"I tried hard, but there's just not a lot of gallery interest right now, the market is a little saturated, I'll try again. No harm in displaying it for now, right? It's an illiquid asset but eventually there will be liquidity."
Her body softens but her eyes harden, never pausing, always scanning you, trying to intuit something about you that you yourself barely comprehend.
One night, you come home from the grocery store and the lights are low. She is wearing your favorite negligee and has a pair of gleaming metal handcuffs in her hands. On the bed is a bottle of peach-flavored Hint Water and a small, covered box.
Your wife handcuffs you to the bed and kisses you. Maybe the Glen Baxter’s irreverence and the way it ties your newly redone office together has coaxed the flame of arousal out of her. You are thrilled to have made exactly the right decision despite her misgivings and resolve to apply this logic in future decisions moving forward. You return her kiss and she pours a little Hint in your mouth, then a little more, then slaps you in the face hard. The water splatters a little and warms against your cheek. She pours more, a cascade, and some goes into your nose. You sputter and yell and she stuffs a sock in your mouth.
She uncovers the box. It is a shredder. She shreds the drawing in front of you and leaves you in bed.
Before she leaves, she turns to you. My god, she is gorgeous, and deep in your heart you're seized with a kneejerk terror that this is the last straw, and that you will never see her again. And why would she want to come back? What have you done to keep her here?
She sneers. “Now //that// was an excellent way to spend $3,300, in my opinion. Also, I hate you, Paul. It’s not even a painting, it’s a fucking drawing. Did you know there’s more film footage of the Wild West than there is actual archival evidence? Your fantasies of American masculinity and absurdism are pathetic. Why would you pay a British man to draw a cowboy?”
She leaves the handcuff key at the foot of the bed and spends the night at her mom’s house. You move in each other's orbits, but something has shifted. You don't blame her for spending more time with her friends. You don't blame her for how this has fallen apart in your hands.
You collect the pieces of the drawing and resolve to frame them, but lose track of them several months later. It’s a good story, but for various and reasonable reasons, you don’t want to tell it to other people, and you don’t have anyone to show the art to anymore. Isn't this what you wanted? Just you, and the art, unfiltered. You got it, in the end. You have what you wanted.
Don't you?
''
The End
''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]You have the Glen Baxter framed on a day Hannah is at work. You spend an hour flirting with the sales associate at the frame shop, not for the love of the game or any real animus, you just want to feel naughty. Really, you like the single-pane lens through which he views you as a successful man framing a handsome drawing, ostensibly one of many that you have lovingly framed at well. You like imagining your own life through his eyes.
Hannah takes your car in early because she has to have the muffler replaced, then calls you later.
“It’s just noise, right? Let’s wait a week. I need to do some budget shuffling.”
You say something kind and reassuring and shift to grocery shopping priorities for that week, and you ask her to add liquid egg whites to the list, for your smoothies. She reminds you she already bought two cartons, says she loves you, and has to go. She’s teaching a class in ten minutes.
A police officer with kind eyes knocks on your door around eight that night. He’s sorry, but when the muffler fell off on the highway, the truck behind her tried to maneuver. There was a three-car pileup. She didn’t feel any pain, but of course, we can’t substantiate that.
He makes careful, compassionate conversation around your goldfish-open mouth. Times are hard, and he estimates the muffler would have likely cost $3,300, but of course, a reliable and diligent man like you already knew that and likely intended to do it, perhaps that day. He wouldn’t blame you if it was too expensive, car parts these days, you know? You seem like a good husband, and he’s very sorry. He squeezes your shoulder and leaves.
You turn to a funhouse world that is a slight but massive distortion from the world you knew ten minutes prior. You find that suddenly, it is increasingly difficult to breathe. All at once, every single item in your house is heavy with the weight of your awful decisions and at the center lies the Glen Baxter drawing, like a tombstone.
[[To display the drawing for the remainder of your earthly days as a reminder of your shallow frivolity, turn to page 9.]]
[[To purchase a pistol, turn to page 12.]]
You display the drawing, but that doesn't diminish the throb of pain in the center of your head.
Several days later, you have a local tattoo artist -- admittedly, one of fairly decent repute, decent enough to ask you if you're positive you really want this -- render a version, to scale, across the center of your chest. You don't cry when he renders the lasso around your pectoral, but you feel the tingle of pain in the tip of your nose when he uses the silver ink to accent the juicer.
The tattoo hums with pain in a perfect vertical rectangle, but you sleep decently that night.
When it stops hurting, you're wide awake.
You can't sleep, and you can't exist.
One day, you buy yourself a Stetson. When you open the front door to your house, you realize you have no remaining counterspace for the hat. The countertops gleam with the shine of several -- many, really -- brand new Alessi juicers.
The only thing left are the boots and the lasso.
After that, who can say? You can tie a decent slip knot, and the night is young ,and you miss Hannah with a grief as deep as the oldestr canyon, a grief no artist could ever capture.
But wouldn't it make a beautiful single-panel comic?
''
THE END''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]You get a quote for a Kevin Chupik painting and decide to take the plunge. God, he's incredible, isn't he? He’s taking commissions, the level of deep customization is vast, almost endless. You don’t quite know what to ask him for, but you’ll get there. You feel a little wave of relief wash over your body. You’ll get there.
In the meantime, you examine the drawing further. A bit pastiche, isn’t it? Almost like having a Gary Larson comic taped to your office door like your professors did in college, but more expensive. You consider the valuation of this, and wonder how and why a man born in 1944 still needs to charge $3,000 for something he regularly churns out. You wonder why you bought it beyond the kneejerk impulse of seeing something and loving it, the masculine pretense to need to capture and own something and control it.
You wonder what your long-term plan is, if you intend to define yourself by this acquisition or simply add it to a long list of things you hope will finally satiate you, you sad little Erystichon.
You wonder if your intention is for your family or friends to truly understand you when you die by this small item, that you are a person who sees himself as a cowboy and appreciates modernism in that order. Or perhaps they’ll eye it for an annoying illiquid asset that could have compounded a neat 4% year over year — that’s about $11,000 in thirty years, and you can’t deny that the drawings don’t appreciate that much over time, even though the artist is long and dead now.
But you’ll also be long and dead and you can’t take it with you, so you just look at it. You wonder if you’d have been happier if you moved to Wyoming when you were twenty-five and herded modernist juicers in a Stetson. You realize that you haven’t used your own Alessi Salif juicer in years because it’s handsome and you don’t want to mar the patina, but more because you don’t really like it. You don’t find it functionally appropriate, you just like that it exists in your house, collecting dust on a shelf.
You realize you are a person who collects things because they exist, which makes you utterly boring, truly banal on a deep level that cannot be sloughed off, incomparably dull compared to the emotional risks you see others take every day.
With this in mind, you are determined to make something better of yourself, and you decide to bake your wife some cookies. Your head hurts and you glance at your mail, seeing another bill, and an increase in your internet, and a contractor’s flier for metal roofs. Your head throbs and you pause, briefly, while sifting flour, realizing now that you are sweaty. You sit abruptly and the pain hits, the pain your body intrinsically recognizes as death and although you have dreamed of this moment many times before, nothing compares to the feeling.
When your wife finds you, hours later, stiff and covered in flour, you do not realize you have made a mistake that has set several small and large forces in motion. You do not experience the experience of knowing your final act was to saddle your most beloved with an irritating tertiary bill and an illiquid, smarmy asset.
You do not exist, and you do not know who Glen Baxter is, or what a cowboy is, or what juice is, or Alessi, or love, or the experience of pushing back from the table and saying,
//No thanks, I’m okay,// and simply declining.
You are id in its purest form now, and the world continues to turn. You will never know this final act cost your wife the house, but should be comforted beyond the grave knowing that this proverbial nail in your literal coffin pushed her away from the sorry docks you tethered your life to and allowed her to experience an unmoored life free of your follies and burdens. She will be happier not because you are dead, but in spite of it. The world is at peace without you.
Eventually, the drawing is sold at auction and ends up in a thrift shop. The college student who buys it doesn’t know or care of the provenance, or the Faustian bargain it took to get there. It is just a sweet thing, purchased for $75 in the off-season in coastal Maine, and spends the remainder of its days in the corner of a hallway.
''The End''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]Like most of your acquisitions, you spend a considerable amount of time ramping up, learning, doing the research, diving deep, and then pulling the trigger.
The ten pounds that it takes to pull the trigger of the immaculate, gleaming Korth Mongoose you now own almost feels insubstantial compared to the weight of your misery, but it barely matters now.
While on one hand, you can't believe that this is the reason you're killing yourself, on the other hand, it all feels correct and just. Of course you'd spiral and spin out over something small and shiny that caught your eye, because you are the definition of human entropy. You are not capable of self-correction or self-adjustment or even meeting the people you love halfway. You consume, but what you never realized in the relentless pursuit of consumption, is that something larger will always consume you.
This is that something larger, Paul.
You consume and you are also consumed. You fulfill a very grand, slightly ironic, but largely sad cosmic loop in facilitating this action.
The sole witness to your minor tragedy is the drawing.
''
THE END''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]You sigh after you say this, like a great weight has left your body. Hannah reaches across the dinner table and grips your hands.
"I know it's not easy."
Tears swim in your eyes again and this time, threaten to well over.
"It's not that it isn't easy, it just feels too large for him. It's too large for one hour a week. It's too large for me, Hannah. I'm a forty-five year old man and I feel like my priorities are driven by something larger and smaller than me that is out of my control. It can't be medicated and it can't be talked through."
Her gaze softens. It pains you that there's a small part of you that hopes that she will just allow you to get the drawing, just so that you can put a brief balm on the inner turmoil you are feeling. You never formally left therapy, but you would go back to therapy with renewed dedication. You would consider the drawing a turning point and use it as a locus for positive change.
[["Yeah, I can do that," on page 105.]]
[["You know what? I'll do it, and I'll get the drawing," on page 99.]]Your session with Charlie isn't productive. Well, it's not as productive as you thought, because you've had this discussion with Charlie before.
"It's sticky, isn't it? The feedback loop," he said. Even from behind the computer screen, he had a compassionate expression on his face. You blush a little. You don't like the feedback loop.
You shift a little in your desk chair, feeling like a guilty child.
"It's common with OCD. I know we've discussed the feedback loop before," you manage to say. You don't like discussing the OCD. It's medicated, it's largely managed, and it's just something you manage like another person might handle arthritis or a prosthetic hand. It's a chronic condition with occasional flares.
But those flares are hard, and they hit harder when you're not anticipating them.
"I don't know what it was, but it hit something in me that made me feel...I don't know, seen."
Charlie looked thoughtful. "By the artist?"
At times you are annoyed by the obtuseness of his questions, but he needs context.
"No, by...the world. It felt correct. I felt like having the drawing would...I don't know, knit something inside of me that felt hidden. There was pressure to buy it because it was an original piece of art. It made the stakes higher."
"It isn't fair to make the stakes higher on yourself, but it's not you doing that to yourself on purpose. And Paul, the art is a mirror. It's you who saw the specialness in it. You're going to see specialness again, you're going to see it all over the place, forever."
You wanted to feel better by this, but the sting of the moment still resonates at your core. Charlie picks up on this, because he continued.
"Does it feel like something got away from you, or like you're not going to see specialness again, or something else?"
You feel your eyes sting with tears as you explain.
"It feels like it got away. It feels...like a cosmic wrong. It's a fucking Glen Baxter drawing, Charlie. They're overvalued and produced in massive quantities but I wanted one, and I told myself I'd get one if I found the right one. I was content not finding the right one until I found the right one. I didn't want to pressure myself. I did all the right things to keep the obsessive thoughts at bay. And I didn't even find it, the dealer reached out to me, and I felt this time pressure and anxiety to get it, and it did feel perfect. I hate that I put up all the right safeguards to make a conscious and informed decision and got swept away anyway."
Now you are crying in earnest, the tears hot on your palate and cheeks.
You can see Charlie clicking around on his screen.
"Hmm. Wasn't familiar with his work. Kind of absurdist, huh?" You nod.
"Probably feels similarly silly that all of this is happening. Everything is 'off' in the world of the Glen Baxter drawing. Things are a little askew, and you're feeling that in your brain, too. I wonder if you related to the silliness of the situation."
You howl into the screen. "It felt like an homage to my own idiocy!"
"But you're not idiotic. It made you feel a feeling. It wasn't wrong to feel that feeling. Art does that, and you can't control when or how art makes you feel that way. Sometimes I think it's a little insidious that we can purchase beauty like that at all, and how people can commodify it. Of course he has every right to make a living, but there should be no financial barrier to experiencing that beauty." He cleared his throat. "I guess what I'm trying to tell you is that the beauty and the feeling you felt wasn't in the drawing. It came from you, and it was triggered by the drawing. You'll feel it again. You've felt it before."
You feel very small. "I wanted to own the drawing so I could keep feeling the feeling. It was beautiful in its absurdity."
Charlie smiled. "Do you feel beautiful in your absurdity?"
[["Yes," turn to page 42.]]
[["No," turn to page 6.]]Hannah pushes back from the table. Her eyes are wide and she looks almost a little frightened, like you've whipped out your dick and placed it with a dull thud on the dinner table. Like you're pointing at it in its aggression, wielding a cudgel you swore you'd never wield when you promised you'd take care of your family.
Her lower lip trembles and immediately, you regret your assertion and the snarling, casual way you aggressed and reminded her of your value in the world, your power, despite knowing that it's a drop in the bucket compared to the billionaires who exist and retain power in our modern-day society.
“1% of your gross salary, idiot,” she says sadly. "The budget has been set for the year. We don't have the room for it. I don't understand why this keeps happening." She gets up from the table and goes into your bedroom and shuts the door. You don't speak for the rest of the evening. There's a slight pounding in your head that you dismiss as residual stress from the tension.
You purchase the drawing that night after psyching yourself up for it. You've earned it. It's a nominal sum compared to the value you provide to your household every day.
It was marked as £3,000 and discounted to £2,500 to close the deal, which ends up costing you $3,300 USD given the current weakness of the dollar and the current tariffs on fine art coming into the States. A little more expensive than you had anticipated.
It is an untitled, uncaptioned drawing — crayon and pencil on paper — sent in a small tube. It is not framed. The drawing depicts a cowboy roping and wrangling an Alessi ‘Salif’ juicer similar to the one in your own kitchen. You received the juicer as a Hanukkah gift from your mother in 2022. Or maybe it was the juicer you received from your wedding registry in 2023. There have been several juicers in your life and more than several Alessi purchases. What can you say? You're a man of singular taste.
Its irreverence and absurdity delights you, and you display it in your office.
[[To enjoy the drawing, turn to page 23.]]
[[To reveal the truth to your wife, turn to page 12.]] Something in Hannah breaks, and you can see the vestiges of a smile across her lips. Her eyes look briefly concerned, but you're busy scheduling an appointment with Charlie.
You respond to the gallery and purchase the drawing.
A few weeks pass by without incident. You forget you have ordered the drawing, and your session with Charlie is frankly, quite productive.
Later that night, there is a shooting in Washington, DC. A beloved but controversial diplomat is killed, and the gunman was employed by your company although you never worked together. There is a media blitz, several weeks of chaos, and your department is consolidated several weeks later.
You are now unemployed, and own a fairly expensive drawing. You're not sure what the future holds for you, for your marriage, or for humanity on a whole.
[[Several years pass, and you turn to page 269.]]He smiles back at you.
"We have to end our session now, but you are beautiful in your absurdity. And for what it's worth, I don't think the things you want are absurd. I don't think it's bad to want things, and I think you're brave for wanting."
He shuts off the camera and the call ends.
You sit alone in your office for a moment, adrift in your own thoughts. A man, alone, wrangling the juicers of his own mind astride a bucking desk chair. Non-functional, twinkly juicers impeding the daily progress of making juice. A lonely island of thoughts, a cowboy of his own inner world.
Hannah had slipped an envelope under your door during the session. You didn't even notice, you were so immersed in the conversation. That feels like a good sign. Nevertheless, your heart swells with excitement. There is a small part of you that still thinks that you will get the drawing. There is a not-insignificant part of you that is determined to tie up the loose ends in your life.
That part of you is not bad or wrong or stupid for wanting that.
That part of you is good and true and optimistic and tries hard and sometimes fails. That part of you is sensitive and understands the world you are in and always, always hopes for the best.
That part of you is easily hurt. That part of you will bruise and heal and callus over and peel and bruise again.
That is the part of you that has the most love, and the tenderest of ache.
[[Open the envelope on page 41.]]You feel a weight lifted from you just by admitting that you still feel shitty.
"It's okay to still feel shitty, Paul. For what it's worth...I think you're beautiful."
You blink from across the screen, thousands of miles away.
"You think I'm beautiful?"
Hannah has told you you are handsome many times before, but this is the first time you have felt revealed as something more ethereal. There is something in his expression that you cannot read. Something open and curious.
You feel your breath catch.
"You were so brave to want the drawing. You must want so much that you cannot have," he says.
You are transfixed.
"I do want so much that I cannot have," you whisper into the screen, licking your lips.
He levels his gaze with yours. "Let me give you everything you want."
This goes so far beyond the appropriate thresholds for therapist-client relationships that you don't even know how to respond, but you sense that he is about to offer you the drawing.
His voice is nearly a low whisper. "Leave it all for me. Let's put the drawing in my boudoir. We can look at it together when we make love."
Two cowboys. The thought has not occurred to you, but suddenly, the path forward is clear.
[["To be clear, if I leave my life behind, you will buy me the drawing?" on page 16.]]
[["I should probably find another therapist and not leave my wife," on page 95.]]In the Great War of 2040, the only commodity is warmth.
You have long since burnt your beautiful desk, chopped clumsily with a cleaver, and your wife begs you,
"Please, Paul, please."
"But I can’t," you say, "my Glen Baxter," and eventually you relent. Once, it was so important. Critical, even.
There is vast beauty in impermanence.
You realize in this moment as you squat over the fire while the paper curls that you are more of a cowboy than ever before. You are rugged. You are strong. You have walked on fire to provide for your family. The drawing disappears in a single slow blink.
The glory of this recognition does not register in the slightest. It dawns on you no more than the dawn of sunrise on a dead man's eyelids.
Your wife stokes the fire with the smoky tines of the Alessi juicer.
''
THE END
''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]You open the envelope with slightly shaky hands.
It's not the drawing. Well, it's //a// drawing.
It's a drawing in handwriting -- Hannah's handwriting. It's lovingly rendered in colored pencil in a single-panel sketch to resemble a Glen Baxter painting.
It's //you.//
You are the cowboy in the story, and you are wrangling -- what is that, an email? Several emails? No, it's a juicer. It's the Salif juicer, by Alessi. Your brow is furrowed underneath the brim of your hat as the sun sets. Or maybe as it rises? You are in the middle of an infinite, cracked expanse of earth. In your hand is a plump tangerine.
The caption reads, "FOR THE FOURTEENTH HOUR, TEX CONTEMPLATED THE STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF THE HORIZON."
It's magnificent.
[[Apologize to Hannah on page 68.]]"You came!" she says. She says this as if you have been away for many, many years, even though you have just been upstairs this whole time, spinning your wheels in therapy.
"I saw the drawing," you said, and in an instant, you watch her face fall just a little. You can tell she isn't sure if you liked it, or how you'd react. You soften with compassion for her, knowing that the grip of your emotions can hold so much strength on the day your family has.
You are powerful.
You really are.
[["I loved it. It's perfect," on page 14.]]
[["I kind of think it would be a fun and cheeky and definitely doubly irreverent gesture to display the two as a diptych," on page 72.]]When Hannah leaves you, it is not with a snarl, but a whisper.
The divorce papers are neatly signed. She asks for half, nothing more, nothing less.
Except for the fact that she reserves you $3,300 in your favor to purchase the drawing.
You still display them as a diptych in your home office. Over time, you can't quite tell the difference between the two, which has a strange effect on your consciousness over time.
You do not marry again.
''
THE END''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]"Thank you," you say, and before you know it, she is across the counter embracing you. She is crying. You are crying.
You don't know what to say.
"I was trapped in a Glen Baxter cartoon," is what you settle on. Which is a fairly benign way of taking accountability for your crippling, occasionally debilitating, absurdist mental illness and part-time affliction, but it makes sense.
You were trapped in an absurd space where the rules didn't make sense. Where there were no rules, not really, or the rules were bent and contorted in a way that threw you for a loop.
It wasn't your fault.
You didn't ask to be trapped.
Cowboys weren't meant to be trapped.
They were meant to be weathered.
So you weather yourself, little by little. You harden to the small cruelties of the time and the place. You extract yourself from the trap. And sooner or later, you reveal the sweetest of juice.
It is worth the squeeze.
''
THE END''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]He smiles. "Anything you want."
For a brief second, you can see your life with your therapist. You would live in Florida and have a small pool in the backyard and all of your furniture would be from Ikea. You wouldn't have kids and you'd fill all the rooms with what you now recognize as slightly, if not overtly, homoerotic art. Your life would exist for you and you alone.
But you realize that you don't really love Charlie, not really, you just love the temporary solution to the problem you're facing that he has dubiously offered. As much as you want the drawing, so badly, you feel guilt and despair at the idea of leaving Hannah over something silly, like an illicit affair with your therapist -- affairapist? -- all with the goal of acquiring a small and silly piece of artwork.
Graciously, you decline his offer, but not before showing him your dick.
You do not return to therapy, and you do not purchase the drawing. You do reveal the proposition to Hannah, who laughs and laughs and holds you just a little bit tighter that night.
You sense she would not be so forgiving as to your brief indiscretion had you purchased the drawing, and you feel very, very lucky to be so attractive to both your wife and someone to a degree that they violate a professional boundary.
And you are lucky.
''
THE END''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]Charlie seems taken aback. He looks a little sheepish and clears his throat, fiddling with his tie.
"I understand. But I've realized the extent of my affection to you, and if I can't have you as my client or my lover, I need you to know that I'm going to buy the drawing for myself."
I am aghast. "No! Charlie! How could you?"
He shifts a little in his chair. "Well, you were never going to get it anyway. You had no way to purchase it."
You're a little taken aback. "I...I don't know. I was...you never know," you settle. "I think you're very handsome, this is just a massive...I can't do this. You're really going to buy it?"
"I would have given it to you. But I fell in love with the drawing as deeply as I fell in love with you. It is emblematic of your eccentric beauty. It's a symbol that I can purchase. You understand that if you do this, you'll never get the drawing." He smiles sadly.
"I know," I whisper. "It's not going to happen. I can't do it."
"Admitting failure is the first step to a deeper understanding of the self," he whispers.
But you realize you're not a failure in that moment. You haven't failed to do anything, not really, you're just at the whim and ebb and flow of a higher power and the general, fairly ubiquitous culture of art pricing and gallery gatekeeping and overhead. It's not your fault. Someday, the things you want will happen to you in the way you want them to.
Just not now.
"Never say never, Charlie." You smile mysteriously and hover your cursor over the 'close window' button. His eyes meet yours, and your tongue feels tight, a size too large in your mouth.
When you close the window, you are still uncertain, and still sad and a little kicked to the curb. You still feel a little behind in things, now more than ever, but you're left with a murky, if steely resolve deep in your heart.
You go downstairs and kiss Hannah, deep and hard. She kisses you back.
The future is full. Life is long.
Who knows what could happen?
''
THE END''
[[Go back to the start, Paul.]]You close your eyes, and take a deep breath.
Before you is a gallery page.
[[The Acquisition]]