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hallucinogenic effect, distorting our perception of the real world to the extent that I sometimes felt like Ruby and I were figments of Victor’s imagination—that the drawing was reality and we were characters inside it.
    I fear that I’m not making sense again. Let me put it this way: we had to take a lot of breaks for fresh air.
     
     
    SO THAT WAS THE PARADOX I FACED: how to exhibit an artistic Theory of Everything in fragments.
    After a lot of thought and struggle, I settled on showing ten-by-ten segments, a decision that yielded “canvases” approximately seven feet by nine. The gallery could not accommodate more than fifteen or so—or about one percent of the total work. I would suspend the canvases away from the wall, allowing viewers to walk all around them, to see the drawings’ luminous fronts as well as their systematic backs, which I came to interpret as a war between Victor’s right and left brain.
    He had done his best to create a work of art that thwarted the notion of public exhibition; however, I am not easily put off, and I hate to fail once I’ve begun. In short, I didn’t give a damn about the creator’s intent.
    I told you I behaved badly, didn’t I? I did. You were warned.
     
     
    HE DID MORE THAN DRAW. He wrote as well. A few of the boxes contained thick, faux-leather-bound journals dating back to 1963. In them he had recorded the weather, his daily intake of food, and his church attendance, each category filling several volumes: thousands of entries, many of them identical. The food journal, in particular, was mind-numbing.
     

     

     
    His meals never varied, with the exception of Christmas, when he ate roast beef, and one week in January 1967, when he ate oatmeal for breakfast—an experiment that must have failed, because by the following week he was back to scrambled eggs, a habit dutifully recorded for the next thirty-six years.
    The weather journal, while it varied every day (containing information on temperature, humidity, and general conditions), conveyed much the same effect.
    They made for dreadful bathroom reading. But I saw a kinship between the journals and the drawings, the same obsessiveness and strict adherence to routine. You could even call it love; for what is love, if not the willingness to repeat oneself?
    Whereas the church journal made the idea of a benevolent, present God seem absurd. If you prayed every day, three times a day or sometimes more, wrote down all your rosaries and Hail Marys and trips to the confessional, and yet
nothing changed
—your meals remained the same, the weather kept on being gray or slushy or muggy, just like it always had been—how could you continue to believe? “Mass” began to sound like just that and no more: a bulk of useless activity that added up to nothing.
    Lest you think I was reading too much into the work, let me tell you that I was not alone in finding something awe-inspiring about the journals. They were Ruby’s favorite part of the installation, much preferred to the drawings, which she found somewhat overbearing. At her behest I decided to display the journals in their own corner, without explanatory text. We would let people decide for themselves.
    We put the opening on the books for July 29. Usually I run shows for four to six weeks. I slotted Victor Cracke in for eight, with a mind to let him run longer if I so chose. We hadn’t even touched the bulk of the work, but I simply could not wait to get the pieces up. I called Kristjana and told her that her Arctic ice pack installation would have to wait. She swore at me, threatened me, told me I’d hear from her lawyer.
    I didn’t care. I was lovesick.
    For those six months I barely went out. Marilyn would come by the storage locker after work, bring me a panino and a bottle of water. She’d tell me I looked like a homeless person. I’d ignore her and eventually she’d shrug and leave.
    While Ruby and I labored to compile the catalogue raisonné, Nat handled the