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are mostly comic book art. Manga and stuff, but not always. Lately my art has been getting more and more abstract, asif the lines are pulling my hand rather than the other way around. There’s an anxiety to it now when I begin. An urgent need to see where the lines are taking me.
    I work as diligently as I can on the sketches of Shelby’s characters, but am impatient about it. The moment I have one colored pencil in my hand, I’m itching to drop it and grab another one. I see the lines I’m drawing, but not the whole. I love drawing characters, but today it’s like the joy is running a few yards ahead of my thoughts and I can’t catch up.
    I show her my sketch of Xargon, her new and improved bloodbath-proof battle-team leader.
    “Sloppy,” she says. “If you’re not gonna take this seriously—”
    “It’s the best I can do today, all right? Some days I feel it, some days I don’t.” And then I add, “Maybe it’s your sketchy character descriptions making my artwork sketchy.”
    “Just try harder,” she says. “You used to be so . . . concrete.”
    I shrug. “So? Everyone’s style evolves. Look at Picasso.”
    “Fine. When Picasso designs a computer game, I’ll let you know.”
    And while our meetings are always about butting heads, which is half the fun of it, today feels different because deep down I know Shelby is right. My artwork isn’t evolving, it’s deconstructing, and I don’t know why.

20. Parrots Always Smile
    The captain calls me in for a meeting in spite of the fact that I have tried to keep a low profile.
    “You’re in trouble now,” the navigator tells me as I leave our cabin. “Trouble, Hubble, hobble, gobble—he’s been known to gobble down crewmen whole.”
    It makes me think of my dream in the White Plastic Kitchen—but the captain isn’t in that dream.
    The captain’s “ready room” is aft, at the very back of the ship. He says it’s so he can reflect on where he’s been. Right now he’s not reflecting. He’s not in his ready room at all. Only the parrot is there, sitting on a perch between the captain’s cluttered desk and a globe that has all the landmasses wrong.
    “Good of you to come, good of you to come!” says the parrot. “Sit, sit.”
    I sit down and wait. The parrot sidesteps from one end of his perch to the other, and back again.
    “So, why am I here?” I ask him.
    “Exactly,” says the parrot. “ WHY are you here? Or should I ask ‘Why are YOU here?’ Or ‘Why are you HERE ?’”
    I begin to lose my patience. “Is the captain coming, because if he’s not—”
    “The captain didn’t call for you,” the parrot says. “I did, I did.” Then he bobs his head, to indicate a piece of paper on the desk. “Please fill out the questionnaire.”
    “With what?” I ask. “There’s no pen.”
    The parrot hops down to the desk, kicks around some of the mess, and when he finds no pen, he gnaws off a blue-green feather from his back. It falls to the desk like an old-fashioned quill.
    “Very clever,” I tell him, “but there’s no ink.”
    “Touch it to the pitch between the planks,” the parrot says. I reach to the nearest wall and touch the tip of the quill to the darkness residing between two slats of wood, and something darker than ink sucks into the hollow of the quill. The sight of it makes me shiver. As I fill out the questionnaire, I make sure not to let any of the stuff touch my skin.
    “Does everyone have to do this?” I ask.
    “Everyone.”
    “Do I have to answer every question?”
    “Every question.”
    “Why does any of this matter?”
    “It matters.”
    When I’m done, we just look at each other. It occurs to me that parrots always appear to have a pleasant smile, kind of like dolphins, so you never truly know what they’re thinking. A dolphin might be thinking of ripping your heart out, or poking you to death with its bottlenose, the way it might do to a shark, but since it’s always smiling, you think it’s your