Michael drove back to Spyglass Darkly House in a black mood. He went to his studio and placed Emma’s photograph on his worktable. It was in his mind to pin it to the wall and rock in front of it. But Emma deserved no such honor. It both angered and disheartened him to think she had so little inkling of his true quality as to imagine him agreeable to a liaison with a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed woman with no aspirations in life beyond being a barnacle. The painter paced instead of rocked, though his thoughts barely kept up with his steps.

What the reporter said about a hundred lovers was nonsense, but it was the sort of poisonous seed that found rich soil in the suitor's heart. Such rapid speculation was too much a pattern for him: the over-thinking of an under-acting man. Imagination was Michael’s friend in art, but his enemy in everything else. If paranoia did not doom his emerging unions with women from the outset, then inaction and overtaking circumstances surely would later on. Reckless passion and insecurity made for easy wounds, so he was reluctant to expose himself to injuries he could otherwise avoid. This timidity (or cowardice) invariably brought out the worst in women. Lovers readily confused his silence with acceptance of their terms, and what began with little discussion unfailingly ended with no discussion at all.

The distressed man was torn into a thousand pieces: a thousand familiar pieces. It was always a vicious cycle for him, one that made keeping his distance from women the more prudent course, especially where extenuating factors such as boyfriends and lovers were involved. They were not only irritating obstacles, but also demeaning by virtue of who they were. The more particular his universal objet d’art became, the more tainted and mortal she was likely to appear by association to her past and present attachments. The idealistic artist had chosen a lonely life largely because he was finicky (perhaps too exacting) in his dating criteria. It irked him when women could so little differentiate between mediocrity and him. He suspected the females who were attracted to him over the years would have been just as happy with less, if not happier. Initially he thought it reflected badly on a woman if she desired so little as to be unchallenged in whom she loved, but in time he came to realize it was only water—tepid water—finding its level. Any judgment he would likely render on the woman’s taste would give him only the slimmest of satisfactions while being completely immaterial to the woman. Even worse (and less forgivable in his estimation) were women who so little valued his time they invited other men (often clinging ex’s or wannabe boyfriends) along on outings. Despite his obsequiousness, Michael was neither a eunuch nor without a measure of dignity. All love is a form of self-love, and he did not relish being the means to some woman’s vanity who did not return the favor.

He tied his happiness, his salvation, irrevocably to young women; and it was increasingly a losing proposition as he aged. The drift of time further separated him from his objects of regard. He grew older while they remained obstinately the same age. Even though he no longer had any stated interest in pursuing relationships with younger women, his inexhaustible idealization of them showed no signs of abating. What was dropping out of the picture was the middle part: the particular individual. Experience had something to do with it, but Michael believed, even given his faint-hearted attempts at dating, that somehow the middle part was never intended to work out. The accumulative annoyances of his few romantic unions, though sufferable at first, slowly calloused into the conviction he lacked the necessary virtue of subsumption so vital in making relationships work. The pedestrian aspects of domesticity always loomed like gathering clouds in his imagination, and simply picturing them on the horizon was enough to deaden any short-lived pang such indignities could be anything other than tedious; and what matter of woman, he wondered, could make them otherwise? His fear was not simply one of being rejected but also one of being mortally disappointed. In truth, life was the thankless business of getting on with things, and there were simply too many seconds in a day to fill up with thoughts of beauty. Michael, as a single man, possessed the luxury of turning his ideal off and on as it pleased him, but in the beginning of a relationship it took no great leap for him to realize that, when the switch would be flipped off, the woman would still be there taking up space and requiring attention.

At bottom, the irreconcilable duality of women (with the romantic ideal at one end and the sexual object at the other) was the bane of his existence. And it was a chasm that did not diminish with age but grew. There had always been a marked difference between those women Michael was romantically attracted to and those who elicited a purely physical response. Ironically, the more intense the feelings at either end, the less likely any middle ground could be carved out between them. Ideals could be so idealized the woman they were attached to could be politely ignored; conversely, the same could be done, less politely, with objects. Love made the painter a mindless slave; and lust, potentially, a mindless tyrant. As a result he loathed himself in either role, so never acted on any impulse to spare his conscience. Even given these well-practiced gripes, Michael would never escape the feeling such hair-splitting details added up to nothing. It was more than the foibles and vagaries of Emma’s youth and sex—more than her pathetic taste in lovers—that riled him. It was his hurt feelings. He loved her unreservedly from the beginning: had seen her as someone deserving of his love and talents. But she saw him only as someone to be handed off to another woman: another woman who, like her, was just as blind to his virtues. This is what was so obvious to Emma and not to him: This is what she intended to tell him earlier at the bedroom closet:

She cared nothing for him.

Michael was a fly in a bottle looking for a way out. Somehow he wound up in his bedroom rocking in front of his phone. He would stop periodically to pick up the receiver, cradle it to his ear like the barrel of a revolver, and then return it to the hook to resume rocking. After a few minutes of this, he augmented the routine by dialing six of seven phone digits before hanging up. This variation went on for a while until the last digit was added. However, the number was only allowed to make it halfway around the rotary before the call was terminated. After forty minutes of this excruciating roulette, he let the last digit drop.

“This is ‘The Personal Touch’ Maid Service Agency…”

He hung up without leaving Amber a message. The strand of her hair, which had been laid on the pillow as a confidence-building measure, was returned to his jacket pocket.

The brooder thought of heading off to find a Starbucks somewhere so he might work on his journal, but Emma had poisoned the well of one obsession without giving him the routine of another to take its place. For reasons he could not name, he found himself driving over and parking near Jacques’ eyesore-of-a-trailer. The police were loading the last of the dwarf’s belongings into a forensics van. The whole spectacle felt like it had been delayed until the painter arrived to witness it. Michael stayed low in his car, and ambled over inconspicuously for a closer look once the police cleared off. Crime tape was wrapped around the door, although it was left unlocked. The snooping man popped his head in; the trailer was empty but for a few porno magazines and Jacques’ creative milk crate furniture. A crooked nail protruded from a wall, and was presumably where a rope was slung for the asphyxiation. As the trespasser stepped gingerly over the left-behinds, his shoe stabbed at the glossy page of an opened centerfold in the floor. A word, written in ballpoint pen, leapt up off the nude woman’s body:

BLIND

Michael all but keeled forward to run his fingers through more pages of the pornographic magazine. The same word covered another nude—and then another. He rifled through other magazines and found more of the same. Staggering outside, he tripped over a plastic flowerpot to pivot round. A trashcan was toppled on one side of the dinky trailer, and high weeds around it were baited with videotapes. Gathering these up, the trespasser dumped the cargo in the backseat of his car and sped away down the street. He barely grasped what he was doing, and once back at the house the stack of tapes was dropped to the sofa in a cascade. One at random was carried to the VCR and shoved in. The screen was dark, but crinkled white lines indicated the cassette was playing. Nothing of substance was gleaned from the screen, either from adjusting the contrast or fast-forwarding in play mode. Michael worked his way down through the pile of videos to find them all frustratingly identical.

It had been taking form in his mind all morning. The tapes and phone messages, the staged scenes with Emma and others—all harkened back to something Omar said in Chicago. It was the farfetched theory about the reality TV show. If his life was being manipulated by the machinations of television producers, then their program was unlike any he ever encountered. They were not only invading his thoughts, but also his nightmares. Had these villains gotten to his sleeping pills, food, and drink to spike them with hallucinogenic drugs? It was unthinkable. His desire to avoid confrontation, his need for people not to think ill of him—these things made him a natural patsy. Everyone from his evil tenant neighbor to deceitful women could see him coming a mile off. He was easily cheated and manipulated because he would not be bothered to attend to his affairs. It was simpler to trust or hope to trust in others than it was to ask sensible and timely questions.