The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [79]
“I bought it at an auction of your father’s things,” Jameson said. “I suppose your mother didn’t want it in her house.”
“Something this desk and I have in common,” Canada said.
On the desk was a legal pad in a leather portfolio, along with a selection of pens, two pencils, and a sharpener. (A computer had been offered, but Nada’d made a face and sent it away.) More of her father’s possessions were displayed around her—books on shelves and paintings on walls. “I’m something of a Solomon Gold collector,” Jameson admitted. She recognized the carpet as having come from his office. The space wasn’t an exact replica, but Jameson had enough original stuff for an imitation of Solomon’s office, which, to Nada, was mostly just the place where her father had died.
“I thought you’d like to be surrounded by your father’s things,” Jameson said.
He’s not as smart as I thought, she said to her spider.
Across from the desk, where in her father’s real office had been a mural of Florence, were seventeen tiles painted by Patrick Blackburn. Burning Patrick. Each had been mounted on a thin rod and pushed out about six inches from the plaster. Jameson explained that the spatial relationship between the tiles was nothing close to scale—even this enormous house could not contain Burning Patrick’s vision—but he had guessed where each might belong in relation to the others.
Canada had spent almost the entire morning with a cup of coffee, staring blankly at the fragmented mural. She attributed the loud ringing and sharp pain to the previous night’s good red wine—better even than Bea and Donald’s old Bordeaux.
Nada thought about calling Bea again, but she didn’t. She was anxious to get news about Phillip Truman but still wasn’t ready to be scolded. Nada planned to go back. She’d even left some of those chips in the closet for her building super, casino chips being something like Las Vegas city scrip. Ten grand would cover her rent for a few months, with a tip generous enough that he’d keep an eye on the place and sweep the grit and sand from her vestibule. More chips went into storage off Boulder Highway. The chips were her “out button,” the little disk they put at your chair when you want to sit out a poker hand but remain in the game. She thought maybe they could hold her place in Las Vegas until she put herself together.
The night before, over Molly’s stuffed chicken, Nada had politely responded to Gary’s and Myra’s questions about her father’s work and made her own inquiries about Burning Patrick. Jameson related gossip and legend and amusing tales of the lengths collectors would go for a particular tile or adjacent pair.
“Do you know what they say about the musically inclined?” Jameson asked, perhaps about her father, perhaps about Patrick Blackburn, perhaps about both.
Nada lifted her eyebrows. Obviously no.
“They say if you look at the MRIs—the brain scans of randomly selected individuals—an expert eye can tell you which of those people are musicians. Just by looking at their brains. Isn’t that remarkable?”
Myra said, “In a few years you won’t need an MRI. Everyone will have a computer in his head eventually. You want to know something about a person, you just download it to your laptop. Or your phone.”
Jameson laughed. “Like diagnostics on a car.”
Now Nada looked back across the room at the seventeen tiles and from this distance, maybe forty feet, her mind began filling in the missing squares—thousands of them, even tens of thousands, by Jameson’s estimation, most of which had yet to be painted, probably never would be painted. The images that came to her were horrible; each one was more fantastical than the last—dragons and bombs and bullets and soldiers and sea monsters and yeti and gargoyles and trolls and tanks and tsunamis and zombies and demons—but she let them come and go, eventually turning them off with her toggle. Sitting here is pointless.
Nada stood and browsed through her father’s old things. A shelf of old books—math and music, mostly. A few awards, although not his Oscar. That, her