A Steadier Hand

The painting was almost good.

I had been at it for forty days. Each morning I came into the studio with the conviction that today I would finally see what was wrong with the lower-left corner. Each evening I left with the corner still wrong and the rest of the canvas slumping toward it, the way a body slumps toward whatever it is leaning against.

The bills fanned across the table where I used to mix oils — a hand of cards I kept losing. Sami Larsen, age thirty-four, who once told his grandmother that painters had it best because they got paid to look at things. Who had had one show, eleven years ago, in a coffee shop, and sold three pieces. Two to his mother. The third to a kind stranger who said it reminded her of her father.

I had until the end of the month.

•

The fair was in the convention center near the river. Free admission with a student ID — I borrowed Tilda's from upstairs. Inside it smelled like every conference smells: warm laminate, espresso, a faint chemical sweetness from the carpet glue.

I wandered along the rows. A startup wanted to grow you a new tooth from your own cells. Another would quietly relocate your memories of a person if you no longer wanted to think about them. A long line wound back from a booth offering intentional dreams. Beside it, almost incidental, was the trait booth.

It looked more like a kiosk for moisturizer than for the rewriting of a person. Warm wood paneling. Soft orange lighting. A woman in a pale linen jacket smiled and asked if I wanted to enter the drawing.

“For what?” I said.

“A graft,” she said. “Today only. One free trait from the donor pool. Painters, mostly — we partnered with the Halvorsen estate last quarter.”

She said it the way you might say free brownies with any purchase. The brochure showed a brain in cutaway, with a small bright spot annotated imprinted region. Below it, in smaller type: Trait grafts are an emerging neurological procedure. Reversible within thirty days. Side effects may include transient changes in preference, taste, and memory. See full disclosure.

“Reversible,” I said.

“Within thirty days, yes.” She smiled. “It is still very new, but the safety data is good. The waiver covers the rest.”

I filled out the form. I wrote my name and my email and the kind of work I did. Under why I wrote: I want to be better. I almost crossed it out.

•

I won.

They called my phone that evening while I was reheating soup. The woman with the linen jacket — Maren, her name was Maren — congratulated me and explained that the donor was Rune Halvorsen, the painter, who had died two years ago and willed a percentage of his cognitive map to the program. I knew the name. Everyone knew the name. The big skies. The unfinished hands. The exhibition my school took us to when I was nineteen, where I had stood in front of his Harbor at Skagen for so long that the teacher had to come back for me.

The trait on offer, she said, was something they were still calibrating a name for. Internally they called it attentional grain — the way some painters can hold the whole composition in their attention while painting any one stroke. Halvorsen had been famous for it. They could give me a graft of his version.

I sat down on the kitchen floor.

I went in the next morning.

•

The procedure was twenty minutes. They reclined the chair until I was looking at the ceiling tiles, which were dotted in a soft asymmetrical pattern I would later realize had been chosen, very deliberately, to be calming. Two clicks. A pressure I could feel without locating. A warmth.

That was it.

I walked home. I made tea. I sat in front of the painting that had been ruining my life for forty days. I picked up a brush and I put it down again because for the first time in eleven years I saw the painting instead of looking at it. The lower-left corner was wrong because the rest of the painting was apologizing to it. I had been trying to fix the wrong thing.

I worked through the night and into the next morning. By Tuesday, the painting was finished.

By Friday I had started another. By the following Friday I had finished it, and a gallery had taken it on consignment, and the gallery had sold it within six hours to a woman whose name I had read in art magazines.

•

The first thing I noticed — the first thing that was not the work — was the coffee.

I have always taken coffee with a great deal of milk. My grandmother used to laugh at me because by the time I was finished, the cup was the color of sand. On a Tuesday in October I poured a cup and drank it black and did not notice until I was halfway through. I thought: huh. Interesting.

A week later I caught myself disliking a song I had loved since I was seventeen. Not disliking — finding it slight. Finding it the kind of song someone wrote because they had not heard enough good songs to know the difference.

I had heard enough good songs to know the difference.

I had not.

I went for a walk and felt — for a moment, like a cold draft in a warm room — homesick for a city I had never been to. The streets there were narrower than I had pictured them. The light was wrong here.

I sat on a bench in the park near the river and looked at my hands and waited for the feeling to pass. It passed.

•

By November the gallery had sold four of my paintings. The owner asked me to consider a solo show in the spring. He used the word vision a lot. I had stopped sleeping more than four hours at a stretch because I was always seeing something to paint — but not seeing in the eager, scattered way I used to. Seeing in long careful arcs, like I was inside a slow weather system that was, also, me.

I called my mother and she cried because the paintings were going to people whose names she recognized. I went to see her on a Sunday. We had lunch. Halfway through the soup she said, “You are holding your spoon funny.”

I looked at my hand. It was true. I was holding the spoon the way Halvorsen had held his brushes — not in the fingers but in the palm, with the thumb laid flat along the side. I had seen him do it in an interview, on a low-resolution video, and at the time it had only struck me as a strange habit.

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess I am.”

She watched me for a long moment. “When did you start doing that?”

I could not remember.

•

I started keeping a list, in a notebook by the bed, of things I had stopped doing or had started doing without deciding to. The list got long quickly.

Don't put milk in the coffee anymore.

Hum a tune I don't know the name of. (It is the slow part of a Sibelius symphony. I have never listened to Sibelius. I am sure of this. But I know which symphony.)

Brushes laid flat-to-fat, not the other way.

The smell of pine needles makes me sad. It never did before.

Marit. There is no Marit. There is no Marit I know. Why am I writing the name Marit.

I went back.

•

Maren was kind, in the way that people are when they are very, very worried that you are about to escalate the situation. They reclined the chair again. There were more clicks. There was a different warmth. A different pressure.

When I sat up the technician would not meet my eyes.

“It's gone?” I said.

“The graft is gone,” Maren said.

“And the rest of it?”

She was quiet.

“It spreads,” she said. “We didn't know how much, when we launched. It's not a sticker. It's a seed. Once it takes root, the root system is yours. We can pull the seed. We can't pull the roots.”

“So I'm —”

She looked at me. There was real feeling in her face. I almost wished there had not been; it would have made it easier to be angry.

“You're you,” she said. “And some of him. And the boundary isn't a line anymore. We were extremely clear in the waiver, but I know that's — I know that's not the comfort you came here for.”

I went home and I painted for nine hours and I wept and I painted some more and the painting was, by any honest measure, the best thing I had ever made.

•

My solo show is in March.

The gallerist sent over the press materials and the bio reads like someone else's, which it sort of is. I corrected one small thing — they had me born in the wrong town — and approved the rest. Sami Larsen has emerged as a singular new voice in contemporary representational painting, it says. His work has been compared to —

I won't tell you who.

There is a Sami who used to take a great deal of milk in his coffee, and who liked very much a particular song he had loved since he was seventeen, and who held a brush like his father had held a wrench. I miss him. Some days I can almost remember being him. I light a candle for him, which is not a thing I would ever have done, before. I have always been a little embarrassed by candles. Now I am not. Now I find them clarifying.

I am told by people who knew me before that I laugh in a different register. That I stand differently in a room. That my eyes go to different things first when I walk into a gallery — the corners, the seams, the hangings — instead of the paintings.

I tell them: I am still here.

I am mostly still here.

•

There is a store now on Birch Street. The big one. I pass it on my walks. The window is warm wood paneling, soft orange lighting; it could be a kiosk for moisturizer. Inside, a kid in a green sweatshirt is filling out a form. He cannot be more than nineteen. He is holding the pen too tightly, the way I used to hold a brush.

I can see, from the sidewalk, what he has written under why. He has written: I want to be a great painter.

The woman in the linen jacket is smiling. She is telling him about the donor. She is telling him it is reversible within thirty days. She is telling him the safety data is good.

He looks up.

For a second — for one second — he sees me through the glass.

I should go in. I should put my hand on the door and tell him. I have the words. I have, in fact, four or five different ways of saying it, depending on what would land — that's part of what Halvorsen gave me, the gift of knowing what people will hear. I could choose the one that would stop him.

I do not move.

I stand on the sidewalk and watch the door close behind him.

The light is very beautiful, this time of year.

I should be painting.