The man wearing the 1980s-cut black jeans stood in front of
a drafting table.
You rarely saw him sitting.
He had a big tablet in front of him, newsprint sheets as big
as drafting paper, and he was drawing sketch after huge sketch.
His white shirt, tucked in and belted, billowed around his
arms above rolled-up cuffs.
His head was shaved.
On the page he drew forests, cities, cloudscapes and mountain
ranges. Never one thing. Mountains stairstepped into clouds from which towers
spired into further heavens.
A chrysanthemum housed a series of pillbox apartments, in
which dwelt gnomes on whose windowsills gardens of snapdragons and nasturtiums grew
in boxes, housing tenements of spiders who grew climbing roses around the doors
of their webby abodes.
The charcoal never smudged, though there was a dusting of
black on the outside of his left hand — for he was left-handed, though
sometimes he added a quick detail with the red pencil he held in his right.
He never erased.
His ears were pierced, though he wore no earrings.
This man was pristine and ambiguous as Vin Diesel. Look at
him and you saw an effeminate man or a manly man, a black man or a white man, a
fellow in his late 20s or his early 50s. You saw bluecollar wholesomeness or Asiatic
exoticism. You saw a reflection, not exactly of yourself or your desires, but
of a liminal figure, someone just enough on the edge of respectability to pique
your interest.
The room had a pale wooden floor and broad whitewashed walls
and a high whitewashed ceiling and big windows with small panes, opening onto
vortices of blue. No tree, no building. Just swirling azure, that billowed his
sleeves and lifted the corner of the paper until he pinned it down with a jade
statue of a cat.
The man threw sketch after sketch onto the floor, and the
wind blew them up against the walls where the collected like winnowings.
A bell rang.
The man in the black jeans pulled a smartphone out of his
pocket and listened.
“Oh no,” he said. “That contract’s been signed.” Then: “No
need. I’ll be right there.”
He put down his pencils and strode to a door. Beside the
door stood an umbrella stand, the only furniture in the room except the
drafting table. The man lifted from behind a Degas-print umbrella featuring the
Blue Dancers a katana.
Light rippled on the blade like indigo silk.
Holding the katana bare in his hand, the man in the black
jeans left the room.
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