Engales reached for a towel that hung on the doorknob of the closet, threw it at the man. He caught it, rubbed it over his shoulders, down his legs. Then the ten bright seconds faded, as quickly as they’d arrived. James Bennett could only be here to write about one thing: the accident, the hand. He imagined headlines—“Failed Painter Lands in Loony Bin.” “Crippled Artist Never to Paint Again.” “Hand and Career Severed.” Read all about it. He then imagined Lucy picking up the paper and seeing his sob story on the front page. There would be a close-up of his wrinkled arm, the black notches of the stitches appalling and obvious, Frankensteinian. He suddenly felt violated — the same way he had felt when the Telemondo guy didn’t tell his penny joke. The world would forever treat him differently, look at him differently; the hand would define him from here on out. The hand would be his only story.
“I’m not doing interviews,” Engales said quickly then, averting James Bennett’s gaze.
“Me neither,” said James, taking off his tiny round glasses to rub the water from his face.
“Then what are you doing here?” Engales said.
“Well,” James Bennett said breathlessly, as if he had just climbed many flights of stairs. “To tell you the truth, I’m trying to figure out the meaning of my life.”
Just then, when James Bennett returned his glasses to his face, Engales saw it: the telltale registering of the missing hand, which was laid out on the arm of Engales’s chair like a pink dick. This was the pattern: normal face, wide-eyed frightened face, rejiggered fake normal face, then sinking face. James Bennett had not known about the accident. He wasn’t here to write about the accident.
Usually there was a final resting stage: the eyebrow-tilt of pity. But James Bennett’s face didn’t move into the final stage. Instead, it shifted into a wide-eyed, slack-mouthed expression of what could only be considered awe.
“Shit,” James said.
Engales watched skeptically as James Bennett’s pale face contorted into a sort of euphoric mess: all eye-bulging and nostril-flaring and cheek-scrunching.
“It’s happening,” James said.
“What’s happening?” Engales asked; he was too curious not to.
“Um,” James managed, screeching a chair around next to Engales’s, padding his wet loafers across the linoleum, sitting, the whole time keeping his buggy eyes on Raul Engales’s face. Engales could feel the tug of the stitches in his arm, like they could burst.
“It’s like a crown,” James said, his head tilting. “Or kind of a halo. It’s sort of a golden color. It’s beautiful. It’s like the blue room. I knew it!”
Engales scooted his chair away a bit; the linoleum screamed. “You’re officially freaking me out,” he said. “So unless you tell me what the hell you’re talking about, I’m going to call Lupa back in.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” James said, taking off his glasses again to rub his eyes. “I’m being odd, aren’t I? I can’t help it. I just feel so much. You’re making me feel so much.”
“Lupa!” Engales yelled to the door, but Lupa didn’t come.
James jumped into an explanation: He had a sort of disability, he explained. No, an ability. He had an ability to see things that weren’t there, to hear things and to feel things and to smell things that did not exist in the real world. His wires were crossed, he explained. Like a switchboard operator who hooked the wrong two people up for conversation, and those two people ended up hitting it off.
Engales watched him, still highly skeptical. Rumi had been right on New Year’s when she had called James Bennett an odd duck. And yet Engales felt something he hadn’t felt in a while. He felt warm. Ever since the accident, he had been cold, as if his wound were an open window out of which all his body heat escaped. Now, in James Bennett’s presence, he felt his blood heating.
Just then Lupa blasted in, flared her nose and declared that visiting hours ended at precisely one o’clock and it was now one oh five and Mary Spinoza was going to fry her ass like a chicharrón if Bennett didn’t get out on the double. James stood, leaving a little puddle of rain where his ass had been, and reached out to shake Engales’s hand.
“Nice try,” Engales said. James Bennett looked down at his hand — he had defaulted to his right — and was overcome with what looked to be real shame.
“Shit,” James said.
“That’s what you have to say?” Engales said. “Shit?” He could feel the warmth leaving him.
“I’d like to leave something here if I could,” James had said, searching a bulky messenger bag Engales had not noticed before. He pulled a heavy brown leather book from the bag, dumped it onto Engales’s lap.
“What the fuck is this?” Engales said.
“What used to be the meaning of my life,” James Bennett said. “Let me know what you find.”
When Darcy left to play poker in the common room, Engales, curious, had explored the leather binder. On its edge, on a sticker, there was a cryptic scrawclass="underline" HUNGER / SUN YELLOW / RAUL ENGALES. What kind of psychotic labeling system was this? And why was Engales’s name involved? When he opened it, it was full of the tiny white squares of slides meant for projectors. Engales ran his left hand over the satisfyingly smooth plastic, then pulled one of the slides out of its little sleeve. He lifted it toward the window. In the little square he saw a face. He tilted the slide so the light worked its way into the face: it was Francis Bacon’s, the portrait of him by Lucian Freud. The same portrait Arlene had showed him on that first day in the studio, as the counterpoint to his own piece of shit.
The coincidence was eerie, just like the binder itself. Just like James Bennett himself, who had showed up out of nowhere for no reason Engales could understand, said some very weird shit, then left him with a bunch of slides and no projector. Or was there a projector? He recalled that he had seen one in the physical-therapy room, which Debbie used to give her Body and Soul lectures: a picture of a lean woman on a beach, a picture of a bowl of oatmeal, a picture of all the muscles in a hand. Luckily Debbie had a little thing for Engales — the way she massaged his arm during their lessons was nothing short of erotic — and so when he asked her to borrow the projector and the room she flirtatiously agreed, with a caveat: Only if I can stay and watch.
“Fine,” Engales said, pulling up two chairs and shutting the door of the physical-therapy room. He loaded a page of slides, and flicked on the projector. A vibrant picture appeared on the wall behind the robotic-looking shadows of the workout machines. It was another painting Engales knew: an untitled work by Francesco Clemente, of a woman flanked by two naked men. The woman had a wide red mouth and a thick braid coming down over one of her shoulders. The men stood in individual pools of blue, holding their hands over their heads, posing for her.
“I feel a ménage à trois coming on,” Debbie said, as if the painting were a television show of the sort he assumed she watched, where the girls wore jean jackets and chewed gum, just like she did.
Engales ignored her and let the image sink into him. He had loved the painting the moment he first saw it, at a show at one of the bigger galleries a couple years ago; he loved it still. He loved the frank fear that inhabited the woman’s face, and he loved the question the painting posed: Could one love two people? Or would so much love make them drown, as this woman’s pained face suggested? He thought of Lucy, loving some other man in his apartment. A bell rang inside him: perhaps she was drowning. Perhaps, even if she did love that man in the white suit, she also still loved him. The brilliance of the painting soothed him, the fact that it was making him think in so many layers. Two for two.