Still, he was absolutely, positively, undeniably NOT Tannity Brewster.

Most of the best pictures, Terry told him, they were still in lockup as evidence in future trials.

But the critic said that didn't matter. The day after, he brought a gallery owner and a collector, both of them famous from their opinions being in national magazines all the time. The group of them look at his work. They keep repeating the name of an artist famous for his messy prints of dead celebrities and signing his work huge with a can of red spray paint.

Again, this gallery owner was not Dennis Bradshaw. And when she spoke, this art collector had a Texan accent. Her red-blond hair was the exact creepy orange-peel color as her tanned shoulders and neck, but she was not Bret Hillary Beales.

She's a totally made-up character. But as she looked at his painting, she kept using the word “bankable.”

She even had a little tattoo that said “Sugar” in lacy script on her ankle, just above her sandaled foot, but she was in no way, absolutely not, nope, NOT Miss Bret Hillary Beales.

No, this fake, made-up critic, art collector, and gallery owner, at last, they tell our artist: Here's the deal. They have millions invested in the work of this messy printmaker, but his current output was flooding the art market. He was making money with volume, but driving down the value of his earlier work. The value of their investment.

The deal was, if Terry Fletcher will kill the printmaker—then the art critic, the gallery owner, and the collector will make Terry famous. They'll turn him into a good investment. His work will sell for a fortune. The pictures of his mother and girlfriend, his dog and hamster, they'll get the buildup they need to become as classic as the Mona Lisa. As the Kokopelli, that Hopi god of mischief.

In his studio, the black flies still circled the same heap of soft apples and limp bananas.

And if it helps, they tell Fletcher, the printmaker only got famous because he murdered a lazy sculptor, who in turn had murdered a pushy painter, who had murdered a sell-out collage maker.

All those people are still dead while their work sits in a museum, like a bank account every minute snowballing in value. And not even pretty value, as the colors go brown as a van Gogh sunflower, the paint and varnish cracking and turning yellow. Always so much smaller than people would expect after waiting all day in line.

The art market had worked this way for centuries, the critic said. If Terry chose not to take this, his first real “commission,” it was no problem. But he still had a long future of unsettled court cases, charges still outstanding against him. These art people could wipe out all that with a phone call. Or they could make it worse. Even if he did nothing, Terry Fletcher could still go to jail for a long, long time. That scratched green cell.

After that, who would believe the word of a jailbird?

So Terry Fletcher, he says: Yes.

It helps that he's never met the printmaker. The gallery owner gives him a gun and tells him to wear a nylon stocking over his head. The gun is only the size of your hand with the fingers straight but held tight together. A tool easy to hide in your palm, it's only the size of a package label, but does a job just as forever. The sloppy printmaker will be in the gallery until it closes. After that, he'll walk home.

That night, Terry Fletcher shoots him, three times—pop, pop, pop—in the back. A job faster than hanging his dog, Boner, in the Guggenheim Museum.

A month later, Fletcher has his first real show in a gallery.

This is NOT the Pell/Mell Gallery. It has the same black and pink checkerboard tiles on the floor, and a matching striped canopy over the door, and oodles of smart people go there to invest in art, but this is some other, let's-pretend kind of gallery. Filled with fake smart people.

It's after that Terry's career gets complicated. You might say he did his job too well, because the art critic sends him off to kill a conceptual artist in Germany. A performance artist in San Francisco. A kinetic sculptor in Barcelona. Everyone thinks Andy Warhol died from gallbladder surgery. You think Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. That Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe died from AIDS.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

This whole time, the critic says if Fletcher backs down the art world will frame him for the first murder. Or worse.

Terry asks, What's worse?

And they don't say.

Leave it to an American to take something too far.

Between killing every sell-out artist, every lazy, sloppy artist, Terry Fletcher has no time to do his own art well. Even the pictures of Rudy and his mom, they look rushed, messy, as if he couldn't care less. More and more, he's knocking out different versions of the dancing, flute-playing Kokopelli. He's blowing up photos of the Mona Lisa to wall-sized, then hand-coloring the photos in colors popular for room decoration that year. Still, if his signature is at the bottom, people buy it. Museums buy it.

And after this year of being famous . . .

After that year, he's in an art gallery, talking to the owner. The same man who lent him a gun the year before. NOT Dennis Bradshaw. The street outside is dark. His wristwatch says eleven o'clock. The galley owner says he needs to close up and get home himself. Whatever happened to that gun, Terry doesn't know.

The owner opens the front door, and outside is the dark sidewalk. The black-and-pink-striped canopy. The long walk home.

Outside, the lampposts are glued with the little paintings of people you'll never know. The street is pasted with their unsigned artwork. It's this long walk into the dark that will happen, if not tonight, then some night. With this next step, every night will be a walk into the world where every artist wants a chance to be known.

8

We're in the Mayan foyer, the walls covered with plaster, pitted to look like lava rock. The fake lava rock is carved to look like warriors wearing loincloths and feather headdresses. The warriors wearing capes of spotted fur to look like leopards. The whole room telling the story it wants you to accept as the truth.

Carved plaster parrots trail tailfeathers in rainbows of orange and red.

From fake cracks and crumbling places in the plaster stone, made to look ancient, high above our heads sprout chains of fat purple orchids made of paper.

“Mr. Whittier was right,” says Mrs. Clark, looking around. “We do create the drama that fills up our life.”

Only dust dulls the orange feathers and purple flowers. Fake-leopard-spot fur covers the black wood sofas. The sofas and leering warrior faces and fake lava rock, they're all cobwebbed together with strands of gray.

Mrs. Clark says, Sometimes it seems that we spend the first half of our lives looking for some disaster. And she looks down at her straight-out chest—a look made almost impossible by her enhanced lips. As young people, she says, we want something to slow us down and keep us trapped in one place long enough to look below the surface of the world. That disaster is a car crash or a war. To make us sit still. It can be getting cancer or getting pregnant. The important part is how it seems to catch us by surprise. That disaster stops us from living the life we'd planned as children—a life of constant dashing around.

“We still create the drama and pain we need,” says Mrs. Clark. “But this first disaster is a vaccination, an inoculation.”

Your whole life, she says, you're searching for disaster—you're auditioning disasters—so you'll be well rehearsed when the ultimate disaster finally arrives.

“For when you die,” Mrs. Clark says.

Here in the Mayan foyer, the black wood sofas and chairs are carved to look like the altars on top of pyramids where human sacrifices would go to get their hearts torn out.