“Great,” I said, “but if you don’t mind me asking, why are you handing this to me?”

I can’t describe the look in his eyes. You hear about lost souls.

He said, “I made it for you. I couldn’t think of anyone else. You’re my oldest friend.”

“Chaz, what about Mark? Shouldn’t you share this with-”

“No, not Mark,” he said with as bleak an expression as I’d ever seen on a human face. I thought he was going to cry.

“Then I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” I said. But I sort of did, as a queasy feeling cranked up in my gut. I have little experience with insanity. My family has been blessed with mental health, my kids went through adolescence with barely a blip, and the raving mad, if you except the people who make movies, are not often found in the fields where I have chosen to work. Thus I found myself tongue-tied in the presence of what I now saw was a paranoid breakdown of some kind.

Perhaps he sensed my feelings, because he patted my arm and smiled, a ghost of the old Chaz showing there.

“No, I may be crazy, but I’m not crazy in that way. There really are people after me. Look, I have to go someplace now. Listen to that and we’ll talk in the morning.” He held out his hand like a normal person, we shook, and he vanished into the crowd.

I went back to the Omni then, poured myself a scotch from the minibar, and slipped Chaz’s CD into the slot in my laptop, thinking, Okay, at worst it’s eighty minutes, and if it’s just raving, I don’t have to listen, but it wasn’t just a recording. It was a dozen or so compressed sound files, representing hours and hours of recorded speech. Well, what to do? I was tired, I wanted my bed, but I also wanted to find out if Chaz Wilmot was really around the bend.

And another thing. I have sketched my life here, a singularly bland existence strung around the cusp of the century, and I suppose I wanted a taste of, I don’t know, extravaganza, which is what the life of an artist, which I had declined in terror long ago, had always represented to me. Perhaps that’s why the Americans worship celebrities, although I deplore this and refuse to participate, or only to a slight degree. But here I had my own private peep show, and it was irresistible. I selected the first file and clicked the appropriate buttons, whereupon the voice of Chaz Wilmot, Jr., came floating from the speakers.

Thanks for listening. I realize this is an imposition, but when I heard Mark was throwing this party and he said he’d invited you, I thought it was perfect timing. There’s other stuff I want to talk about, but that can wait until I see you again. It’s a shame you haven’t seen the actual painting-those posters are shit, like all reproductions-but I guess you’ve read the stories about how it was found and all that. These are lies, or may be lies. Reality seems to be more flexible than I’d imagined. Anyway, let me set the stage for this.

Did you ever do any acid, back in the day? Yeah, now that I think about it, I believe I gave you your first hit, blotter acid, purple in color, and we spent the day in Riverside Park walking, and we had that conversation about seagulls, what it was like to be one, and I seem to recall you transmitted your consciousness to one of them and kited along the Hudson, and then later we spent the bad part of the trip in your room in the apartment. It was just before spring break our senior year. When I asked you how you liked it after, you said you couldn’t wait for it to be over. Oh, yes.

And that’s my point-it implied that you knew you were doping, knew you were hallucinating, even though the hallucinations might have seemed totally real. One time-did I ever tell you about this?-I was tripped out on acid and I happened to have this triangular tortoiseshell guitar pick on me, and I spent half the night staring at it, and all those little brown swirls came alive and showed me the entire history of Western art, from Lascaux cave painting, through Cycladic sculpture and the Greeks and Giotto, Raphael, Caravaggio, right up to Cézanne, and not only that-it revealed to me the future of art, shapes and images that would break through the sterile wastelands of postmodernism and generate a new era in the great pageant of human creativity.

And of course after that I couldn’t wait to trip again, so the next weekend I got all my art supplies lined up and the guitar pick in hand and I dropped a huge fucking dose, and nothing. Worse than nothing, because the guitar pick was just what it was, a cheap piece of plastic, but there was a malign presence in the room, like a giant black Pillsbury Doughboy, and I was being squashed and smothered under it and it was laughing at me, because the whole guitar pick event was a scam designed to get me to trip again so this thing could eat me.

You remember Zubkoff, don’t you, my old roommate? Pre-med? The guy who stayed in his room studying all the time. We called him the Magic Mushroom? I heard from him again, out of the blue. He’s a research scientist now. I joined a study he was doing on a drug to enhance creativity.

Did you ever wonder how your brain worked? Like, say, where do ideas come from? I mean, where do they come from? A completely new idea, like relativity or using perspective in painting. Or, why are some people terrifically creative and others are patzers? Okay, being you, maybe the whole issue never came up.

But it’s always fascinated me, the question of questions, and even beyond that I desperately wanted to get back to the guitar pick, I wanted to see what’s next. I mean, in Western art. I still can’t quite believe that it’s all gurgled down to the nothing that it looks like now, big kitsch statues of cartoon characters, and wallpaper and jukeboxes, and pickled corpses, and piles of dry-cleaning bags in the corner of a white room, and “This is a cock.” Of course you might say, well, things pass. Europeans stopped doing representational art for a thousand years and then they started up again. Verse epics used to be the heart of literature all over the world and then they stopped getting written. So maybe the same thing has happened to easel painting. And we have the movies now. But then you have to ask, why is the art market so huge? People want paintings, and all that’s available is this terrible crap. There has to be some way of not being swamped in the ruthless torrent of innovation, as Kenneth Clark called it. As my father was always saying.

I mean, you really have to ask, do we love the old masters because they’re old and rare, just portable chunks of capital, or do we love them because they give us something precious and eternally valuable? If the latter, why aren’t we still doing it? Okay, everybody’s forgotten how to draw, but still…

Drifting here. Back to Zubkoff. He called me up. He said he was running a study out of the Columbia med school, lots of funding from the government, National Institutes of Mental Health, or whatever, to explore whether human creativity could be enhanced by taking a drug. They were using art students, music students, and he also wanted to get some older artists in on it, so they could check if age was a variable. And he thought of me. Well, free dope. That was never a hard sell.

Anyway, I volunteered, and here we all are. And I’m sure you’re wondering now why, after however long it is, old Wilmot is dropping all this on me. Because you’re the only one left, the only person who knows me and who doesn’t care enough about me to humor me if I’m nuts. I’m being blunt, I know, but it’s true. And while I’m being blunt, of all the people I’ve known, you’re the one with the solidest grasp of what the world calls reality. You have no imagination at all. Again, sorry to drop this on you. I’m dying to know what you think.

Setting the stage, interesting phrase, that, like our life is a drama, act one, act two, act three, curtains. So let’s start with me at twenty-one, just out of college. Did you ever wonder how I graduated? How could I be an art major and flunk three art courses? This my advisor asked me. Well, sir, the reproductions make me sick, I can’t look at them and I can’t write about painting, the words seem like jokes. It took me three years to learn how to fake it, and if it wasn’t for Slotsky I would’ve failed the other courses too. A genius at doing art papers, Slotsky; if they hung twelve-hundred-word art papers in museums, Slotsky would be one of the great artists of our generation.