I go down into the kitchen at dawn and fill a bowl with artichoke hearts, and I move through the house and select a few things I would like to take with me: Akila’s Captain Planet mug, Eric’s Bumblebee Unlimited vinyl, and a half-used bottle of Rebecca’s ginger and bergamot perfume. I wrap the breakables in a pair of jeans, and at nine, I haul my bags to Rebecca’s truck. The morning is blank and sullen, and the AC is dead. We stop for coffee, and the back of Rebecca’s shirt is dark with sweat. I try to make small talk and she puts on her sunglasses and says Yeah, yeah, though I did not ask a question and there is no sun. On the radio, every station is muddied by the echo of an approximate frequency, and it is only when we reach Crown Heights and Rebecca kills the engine that I hear a voice say, Tonight only, before we climb the stairs to my apartment, a sixth-floor walk-up with a brand-new toilet and too-friendly cat. I am happy to find that my roommate, who has texted only to ask if I am allergic to nuts, is not home. Rebecca goes through the apartment and turns all the faucets on, and after I am done spraying the perimeter of my room with Raid, I come out and find she has disassembled them all, the chrome, rubber, and silicone coils laid out neatly on damp paper towels. Your water pressure is terrible, she says, and I am tempted to say that she should’ve paid me more. I am tempted to ask why her sporadic payments included so many coins. After, the water pressure is better, but I cannot help feeling that any attempt to improve this situation, the indelible ruin of New York real estate, is absurd. My new full bed, which has been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for two days, already has something of a smell. It takes us a while to get it up the stairs, and a couple of times Rebecca falls. We don’t bicker, but after, we wash our faces violently, and then we share a cigarette outside. She touches the inside of my wrist, and immediately I feel like I might cry. Don’t tell him, I say, and when we are back in the apartment, we share a small bottle of vodka I stole from the Marriott minibar and I use my roommate’s record player to listen to the vinyl, which, despite Eric’s preservation method, has been warped by heat. And so as we drink, we are constantly adjusting the needle, though when it is dark, we give up and let it skip, the interval long enough to justify the return and render it almost invisible, though on some level we are aware of the drone and how we have begun to mirror its signature as we talk, the content of our words increasingly illegible as we move around each other like two magnets of identical charge. I hold this frustration inside myself until we are once again on opposite sides of the room, and I say Don’t move, too loudly. When she obeys, I think we are both surprised. But immediately after, there is an expectation in the air, the language that we share now whittled down to the essential vocabulary, to soft, yearning words, conjugations that are ardent and hard. I tell her to get undressed, to take her time, partly because I am getting my oils together and partly because I want to spend time with the body that has been showing itself to me, for months, in small, insolent degrees. When she is undressed, I still feel the old impulse to compare, but otherwise her body is like a dagger, like the body of a woman who is in the business of sending off the dead. And this is how she holds herself, like a person uninterested by her own anatomical drama, her bearing unselfconscious, indifferent. It feels like a challenge. I mix my paints, deep, quaternary colors, rust, ash, dirty turquoise, and then I take her face into my hands and pull her mouth back with my fingers so that I can see her teeth.

* * *

When she doesn’t protest, I arrange her into the position I want, one limb at a time, until she is taut. There is no coy, lingering touch, though I can feel her expectation of me when I press an arch into her back, and I am struck by the soft knots of her spine, the way her body feels mutable, her age a vivid, enviable thing. I feel her commitment as she rises up onto her toes, and I have made the pose demanding on purpose, but as I collect my palette and take my place on the floor, it feels overly punitive, and I am not sure if after all of this, I will even be able to paint it faithfully. But then I see her seriousness, the way she remains as she was arranged, and the work begins on its own, her nakedness gorgeous data that in translation does not feel salacious. As we work, the light changes in the room, and the painting becomes a composite of contradictory shadows. When I turn it around to show her, she comes down onto her heels and puts a hand up to her mouth. Oh, she says, and then she takes a while to put on her clothes. I look away to give her privacy, but also because it is suddenly hard to watch, the indulgence so close to the aftermath that it feels indecent to watch her tie her shoes. But when this is done, there is no ceremony. There are no words, and she lets herself out.

When she is gone, I stow the painting in a place I am unlikely to notice it regularly, and for a moment, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to be alone. It is not that I want company, but that I want to be affirmed by another pair of eyes. The acceptable interval for which I can be embarrassed for what I said to the doctors has passed, but I still think about it for weeks, what I meant when I said I was an artist. I think about the painting in the clinic and the canvas fibers curled beneath the oil. All the raw materials that are gathered and processed into shadow and light. The pigments drawn from sand and Canterbury bells, the carbon black drawn from fire and spread onto slick cave walls. A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t. So I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.