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and handed over the sketch. She took it.
    “Is that really me?” she asked.
    “It’s you,” I said.
    “Why did you stop?” she asked
    “You mean, why didn’t I keep drawing?”
    “Yeah, how do you know when you’re done?”
    “That’s a good question. The question of stopping.”
    “Well, how do you know when to stop?”
    “I guess I don’t.”
    “Why do you stop?”
    “I’ve got to stop sometime.”
    “But if this is me, am I finished?”
    “No, you’re a work in progress.”
    “But the drawing is finished, isn’t it?”
    “Sometimes, I do it fast, sometimes slow. My mother told me artists used to get intoxicated by the actual act of painting. As if, the inner life of the artist was more important. I stop when I got tired.
    Lisa continued to gaze on her image. It never failed. It was like magic. He didn’t copy her. That’s how I could do it so fast.
    “You expressed me.”
    “I could draw you so crudely, you wouldn’t recognize herself and you’d still view it with awe.”
    Somewhere in her, in us, somewhere in our brain, there remained this worship of the image, he thought.
    Tony stared at Lisa. She was beautiful but a pain in the ass. Always arguing with him. He tried once to explain to her that there’s a first bloom in all human feelings but she wouldn’t hear of it.
     
    As he acquired more concepts from Ivanova, Kruger felt a remorseless pessimism, “sickness unto art,” his own sickness for the world’s sickness despair, metaphysical isolation; there’s no such thing as pessimistic art, art affirms, he fought back.
    He was an increasingly isolated figure, at odds with the world, and deliberately evasive, increasingly working for his own satisfaction. He fascinated Ivanova.
    “You’re a visionary,” she said. “Aware as nobody else—what art might be.”
    “I’d like to think,” he said. “An exceptional artist could transcend the time, be understood as untimely.”
    “A German philosopher once said something familiar,” she said.
    Lisa Ivanova was about the same age as him—just past thirty. She sat there on a low stool, in her clinical white uniform she wore inside, and leant her chin in her hand. Her compact brown hair, already a little grey at the sides, was parted in the middle and waved over the temples, framing a sensitive, sympathetic, dark skinned face, which was Slavic in its facial structure, with a flat nose, accentuated cheek-bones, and little bright black eyes.
    After their discussions, he walked the streets and looked at the objects in the world. She encouraged him. On the streets he was aware of solids, utility, strangeness, overheard fragments. He saw himself as seeing, the myriad possibilities, the transitions, objects as massive obstacles, around which his thoughts could not pass. Kind of primitive society, everybody with tattoos, piercings; computers are illegal Slogans on walls, screens,
    Even the most virulent among them can survive that transcendent one-two punch— connoisseur concurrence and the passage of time.
    He confided in Ivanova. He even told her he enjoyed talking with her. He had never enjoyed talking before. She told him about the concept of cognitive dissonance psychology, and he was able to recognize his mental discomfort came from holding two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time and she confronted him with new information that conflicted with his existing ideas.
    “Strive for internal consistency,” she said.
    “That’s just not something I’ve been able to do,” said Kruger.
    After she told him consciousness is gone, dead—there’s only the brain and behavior—he said, “I’ve got consciousness at least. They used to say, my mother used to say, let animals be animals, let humans be humans. But then we learned we’re all animals anyway, so what were we supposed to let be? I love to wander the streets of Old San Frisco. Everything’s quiet here. Know what I saw once? A cow skull. Polished. They