THE TRAP
THE TRAP
THE TRAP
THE TRAP

Spencer Seward

One day, Daryl woke from restless dreams to find himself in a cage. It was a strange cage. It extended outward from his torso a few inches in each direction and formed a square that rose from his waist to his neck. There it was attached by a belt and collar.

On his back, he gripped the bars and tried shifting its weight. The steel was cold and somewhat worn-looking, as if previously used. But it seemed only he could feel and see it. Next to him, his wife Kate rose, yawned, then kissed him good morning as if the cage were not there at all. It was then that Daryl grew worried. He wanted to tell Kate what was happening, but he did not know how to begin. Anything he said would be taken as proof he’d lost his mind. So, he said nothing.

The cage fit him close, like a vest. His head was free above the bars. So were his arms through the sides. He heard Kate’s humming from the shower, steam wafting through the cracked bathroom door. Not knowing what else to do, he rose and joined her. The cage was heavier standing up, and the belt and collar bit at his waist and neck as he walked.

So began his day. He showered in the cage. He shaved in the cage. He made Kate and their two daughters breakfast in the cage. But though they were able to hug and kiss him goodbye, when they touched him, he felt nothing, as if the cage had rendered him numb. The only sensations he could feel were those of the cage itself.

Daryl was a painter who worked in a home studio. He relied on and even enjoyed having the daytime hours to himself, but not today. The front door shut. The clock ticked. The SUV started, the transmission shifted into reverse, and his wife backed down the driveway and sped off down the street.

As the sound receded, Daryl felt the cage grow heavier. He did not like the empty house. Yet he wandered it aimlessly, unable to start his day. He washed dishes, then did some calisthenics to relax his mind, all of this a pain in the ass in his cage. His cage. He was already calling it that.

Finally, frustrated at wasting so much of his time, he descended to his basement studio to work, opening the shutters on narrow windows, the light revealing a large, clean workspace with an easel and drafting table in the middle. A workbench ran the circumference, neatly ordered with supplies.

He mixed some colors, then began to paint. But everything that emerged seemed asinine. He was an artist of modest renown who many said would someday get a museum show. He had no set style; he was always changing. He liked this about himself. But today this quality seemed terrible. Finally, in disgust, he set down his brush.

He stared at the discarded sheets of heavy paper, the half-filled sketch on the easel accusing in its ugliness. And then it came to him. He should paint his cage. He went to the mirror at the opposite end of the studio and examined himself. The cage had no lock or hinge. It seemed to be of one piece and was even rusting at the joints. For the first time, he noticed each side had three bars. He rather liked this symmetry. It seemed especially designed for him.

Daryl studied his reflection a moment longer. Then he returned to the easel and painted himself in his cage, framed at portrait distance against a gradient green background. The lines were clean, simple, the colors plain but vivid. In the final version, his figure gripped the bars loosely, suggesting a long familiarity with their shape, his head raised and his face blank as it held the viewer’s gaze. Daryl had not intended this, but he liked it. It seemed true. The casual grip, the sad lean in his posture. The background had some blue in it, and he liked that, too.

But when he showed Kate the painting that evening, she was confused.

“Daryl,” she said. “Why did you paint yourself in a cage?”

Daryl did not know how to state the obvious. So what he said was lame.

“It’s an idea I had,” he explained.

Kate continued to look puzzled. “Is it a metaphor or something?”

“It’s just the truth,” Daryl said.

“Is that supposed to be enigmatic?” she said, tapping distractedly at her phone. “You know, you don’t have to be mysterious to make great art.”

“No,” Daryl began angrily. “I’m…”

It was then one of the girls broke a plate. She hates it, Daryl thought, sweeping up the shards in the kitchen while Kate put the girls to bed. He regretted showing her the portrait. What had he expected her to think? His work had not been going well for some time, he had to admit this to himself, and it was clear now that in his desperation he had stooped to an absurdity. And thinking this, he was overcome with anger at Kate. The least she could do was be truthful with him. Didn’t she owe him this? She had a habit of avoiding difficult truths, and he’d always disliked this about her.

“You know you can just tell me when you hate my work,” he said later in the bedroom. “You don’t have to hide it.”

“I didn’t hate it,” Kate said. “I was just confused. And anyway, it was a bad time to talk.”

“A bad time,” Daryl repeated.

“After dinner is always chaotic. You know that.”

“Well, I want to matter,” Daryl said, feeling stupid as the words left his mouth. “I want to be important enough to interrupt something for.”

Kate wrinkled her nose. “Why are you yelling?”

“I’m not.”

But he was. He had a flashlight in his hand, and he was waving it around. He did not know how it got there. He set the flashlight down.

“Fuck,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know. My neck hurts.”

“Do you want Tylenol?”

“No.”

“It’s easy, I can get you some…”

“I don’t need fucking Tylenol!” Daryl shouted. Then, before he could stop himself, he whirled around and punched the wall, leaving a crumbling dent around the size of a baseball.

Kate gasped and covered her mouth. “Daryl,” she said. “Why did you do that?”

Daryl stared at his now aching right hand. He felt a terrible electricity surging through his body.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well,” said Kate, taking a deep breath. “You’re scaring me. Please stop. Now.” Daryl closed his eyes. The cage was even heavier now. He imagined the girls pretending to be asleep in their beds, trying to conceal their whispers. When he opened his eyes, Kate was by his side and taking his hand.

“Please don’t touch me,” he said.

She dropped his hand as if it were a worm.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For all of it. I’ll fix the wall.”

“Okay,” Kate said. But her look was pained.

Daryl pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Do you think the girls heard?”

“Probably not.”

“What if they did?”

She studied him carefully. “Then you’ll have some explaining to do.”

Daryl said nothing to this. “I’ll patch the hole in the morning. Right now, I need to sleep.”

“It’s early. I was going to read for a bit. Will that bother you?”

“Can you do it downstairs?”

“Like on the couch?”

Daryl nodded. “I want it dark.”

“Okay,” Kate said, after a moment. “Fine.”

When she was gone, Daryl turned out all the lights and lay down in his boxer shorts and his cage. But though he felt exhausted, he could not sleep. Soon, his eyes adjusted to the dark, and the small crater where he’d punched the wall above his head revealed itself. He tried to recall the last time he’d lost his temper. Was it days? Weeks? Months? And had there been a cage? He was nagged by a sense of deja-vu that he could not place. Yet he could not remember. And he felt silly for trying in the first place.

An hour later, Kate slid into bed. At first, she lay with her back turned to him. Then she rolled over and laid her head on his chest.

A kind of optical illusion emerged then: her body was both inside the cage and out. Daryl felt no touch, only steel. Kate dozed off, snoring softly, leaving him awake, thinking about his painting and the hole in the wall. He needed to tell her about the cage. This was vital. Yet he remained certain she would call him crazy or say he was making an excuse. Isn’t that what an asshole who wanted to exonerate himself would do? Make up something imaginary to blame? How could she not say this? Wouldn’t he say this too? And where would he be once she did?

Right back here, he thought.

It was 3 AM when he fell asleep.

︎

The next evening, Daryl and Kate attended a house party. He had spent the entire day painting himself again: three canvases, all different poses and backgrounds, but all essentially the same as the first portrait. Just as before, he’d shown Kate the work. And just as before, she’d been confused. He did not know why he’d painted more portraits, nor why he’d shown Kate, especially after yesterday. He hadn’t exactly wanted to do it, either. Still, he found her reaction grating. Why can’t you see what I mean? he wanted to shout. But clearly, she could not.

“Do you think there’s anything here?” he said.

It took her a moment to answer. “Is it a series?” she said finally.

His heart fell, though he did not know why. He suspected anything she might have said would have upset him. They had yet to discuss the incident from last night. Daryl was secretly hoping to keep it that way.

“It might be a series,” he said. “But it doesn’t really matter. I get it. They suck.”

“They don’t suck.”

“Sure, Kate,” Daryl said. Then he began to gather the canvases quickly, as if meaning to hide them. Kate watched him, first with worry, then with growing detachment. At last she shrugged.

“Are we going to talk about the hole in the wall?”

Daryl tried to act natural. “I fixed it already.”

“I saw you patched the hole, yes.”

“So?”

“So we should talk about it.”

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“Daryl,” she said.

I’m trapped in a cage, he screamed at her in his mind.

“Really,” he said. “It was a mistake. Just a bad day. And I am sorry.”

She studied him skeptically, while he tried to look pleasant.

“Fine,” she said. “I’m going to trust you. But you get that this is too much, right? Even if I do understand that you can lose your temper.”

He nodded in agreement, and later, when Kate was bathing the girls and reminding them how to behave with the babysitter, Daryl quickly finished the dishes, hurried downstairs, gathered the portraits into a trash bag, walked into the alley, and hurled them into the dumpster.

When this was done, however, he felt no relief. He could already see he would retrieve the canvases in the morning. And even if he did not do this, he would certainly paint more portraits of himself in his cage, no matter how much he insisted with each step that he would not.

He was thinking about all this at the hors d’oeuvres table, munching on coconut shrimp he could not taste. Several people passed, shaking his hand, greeting Kate and inquiring about her work as an editor, or asking after Daryl’s latest work, about which he was vague. No one saw the cage. When Kate wandered off, Daryl retreated to a couch, where he watched Double Indemnity with an elderly man who did not acknowledge him or notice the awkward way Daryl contorted his body to accommodate the cage digging into his back. This corner of the house was empty. Daryl was grateful. Perhaps he could pass the rest of the party here in peace.

Ten minutes later, his friend Mark appeared and sat down on the couch next to him. Daryl tried to look happy to see him, which he was not.

“This party sucks, buddy,” Mark said, clapping him on the back.

“All parties suck,” said Daryl.

“Do you think you can show at Albert’s next weekend? Someone dropped out, and he’s been bugging me about you.” Mark was a sculptor whose work Daryl genuinely admired. He was also far more famous than Daryl.

“I don’t know.”

Mark held up a joint.

“Anti-party suck medicine?”

Daryl nodded. They passed it back and forth. To Daryl’s surprise, it helped. The cage seemed less of a burden. The weight and bite on his waist and neck loosened, and the bars seemed to retreat from their hold. He even laughed and joked with Mark about the fights their daughters picked with their wives. But when he excused himself to the bathroom to piss and caught his reflection in the mirror, his stomach twisted with dismay: he was still in the cage.

He returned to the couch, but Mark was nowhere to be found. Neither was the old man. Two women, friends lost in conversation, had replaced them and changed the channel.

Unsure what to do with himself, Daryl made his way through the house and joined Kate outside by the pool, where she was talking to a group of women about the terrible things their bosses had said or done to them at work. Each story was worse than the last. Daryl felt his high wearing off and the cage growing heavier. When one of the women in the group asked his opinion about a story that had just been told, he found he could not recall a single detail. He felt ashamed.

“Men are animals,” he said. “We should kill them all.”

Everyone laughed.

“Not even we would go that far,” the woman said.

Kate took his arm and gave him a worried look. They mingled for a bit longer, and the party began to wind down. Mark, now drunk, caught Daryl by the door and made him promise he would show at Albert’s.

“It will be fun!” he said, when Daryl agreed. “We can get stoned again.”

In the car, Kate said:

“Do you really think we should kill all the men?”

Daryl did not look at her. “Probably.”

The tires hummed below them.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” she said.

He did not answer. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I wasn’t the best party guest.” She seemed to want to hear more, but he found he did not know what to say after that.

At home, they paid the babysitter, checked in on the sleeping girls, then went to bed. Kate fell asleep immediately, but Daryl lay awake again, his cage heavy on his chest. He had agreed to a gallery showing, but he had no art to show. Except these portraits. The thought of sharing them seemed ludicrous, but he could see he was stuck. The show was in a week. What else did he have?

In the morning, he’d made up his mind, and when his wife took the girls to ballet rehearsal, Daryl snuck into the alley, made sure his neighbors weren’t looking, and dug the canvases from the trash.

He finished two more paintings the next day, but the work was tedious. By now his doubts had crept in. What if the cage really was all in his head? What if people thought he was crazy painting a series like this? What if the portraits really did suck and he badly embarrassed himself at the show? Then, thought Daryl, I won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

This time, he did not show Kate the new portraits, and when over takeout dinner that evening she asked if he’d kept on with the “cage stuff,” he told her “no.” He immediately wished he hadn’t done this. It made him feel stupid and childish to lie. But he did not know how to take it back.

“What are you working on then?” she said. “I thought you were showing something new at Albert’s.”

He grinned weakly. “I’m as confused as you.”

She laughed, crinkling her face. “Alright then.”

Later, he bathed the girls, then read them their bedtime story. They snuggled up close to him, ignorant of the cage and its stifling weight, and again, he felt nothing, no warmth from their touch, no strength in their bodies, a strength at which he often marveled, their growth so fast and overwhelming. He felt helpless, feeling nothing like this, and he began to read the story very dramatically, as if the book were a lifeboat, and for a moment, it was, and they laughed at his funny voices and gasped at his scary ones, and in their joy, he managed to forget about the cage.

They fell asleep to his reading, snoring softly.

Then, with sadness, as if perhaps he’d never do it again, Daryl extricated himself from the tangle of his daughters without waking them and returned to the living room, where he found Kate asleep on the couch, a history documentary on low in the background. The television flashed its alien light. Daryl was no longer real. The cage weighed everything. It was him, and he was it.

He woke her.

“Good show?” he said.

“Mesopotamia,” she murmured.

“Come to bed,” he said.

“Sleep here.”

“We can snuggle,” he said, though he knew he would feel nothing.

“Sleep here,” she repeated.

“Okay,” he said.

For a moment, her eyes remained open. Daryl willed himself to confess the cage then, no matter how incomprehensible or ridiculous. But the words would not come. Kate’s eyes drifted closed. Climbing the stairs, he could not shake the feeling he had missed his last chance.


The next morning, the cage lay upon him like a coffin. The waist and collar were so tight he could hardly breathe. It was Sunday. He heard Kate and the girls in the kitchen downstairs, laughing, the smell of waffles filling the house. He tried to stand. He could not. He closed his eyes and fell back to sleep.


Kate woke him at noon, shoving back the curtains. Light pierced the bedroom, burning his eyes.

“What’s gotten into you?” she said, laughing. “You’re sleeping like a teenager.”

“Leave me alone,” he said, and rolled over.

She put her hands on her hips. “Daryl,” she said. “Will you please tell me what the fuck is going on?”

When he did not reply, she crossed her arms.

“The girls want to play to catch,” she said.

“Not now.”

“You promised.”

“I did?”

She reminded him. The memory came to him hazily. He gathered all his strength and rolled himself from bed.

Outside, the sunlight was loathsome. He played catch like a corpse, his throws often errant. Not even his daughters’ laughter brought him back from the brink. The rest of the day was a blur of frustration and despair. And then it was Monday, and the week’s routine returned.

The gallery show was on Friday, and he spent the whole week painting. Yet he did not enjoy it. Each piece was harder than the last, as if he were extracting some poison from himself. He began to avoid Kate and the girls, explaining this behavior as a need to work. Twice, he even slept on the studio couch.

It was much to his surprise then, when on Thursday he lined all the finished paintings in a row to get a sense of how he might display them, he found that the colors and poses he chose had not been random but had been getting darker and more somber with each new portrait. He arranged them accordingly and saw that the last two paintings were almost muted: all greys and blacks, even his face and figure, as if he and the cage were disappearing into the background. He thought: I need to conclude this. So he put a blank canvas on the easel and filled it all in with black paint. Then he slept the rest of the afternoon.

The next evening was the gallery show. Kate drove, the girls in the backseat, and Daryl’s completed canvases secured in the  trunk. A mere twenty-four hours had passed since he had concluded the series, yet he felt as if some stranger utterly foreign to himself had painted the work. Not only were the portraits embarrassing, he had no idea how he would explain their existence to anyone. The certainty he had felt arranging them in sequence yesterday was gone, replaced by dread of the certain humiliation waiting for him at the gallery.

He had been so busy with work that he had not spoken with Kate about any of this. Yet though he knew he’d been avoiding her, this struck him then as somehow her fault, and he was angry with her.

In the backseat, his daughters were singing a made-up song out of key.

“Be quiet,” Daryl said. He pressed his fingers to his temples. But the girls did not stop.

“I said be quiet!”

This time, they did.

“What’s wrong with Daddy?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “But he promised me no stupid stuff.” She looked at him sternly. And suddenly he did not want to be at the gallery, or in this car, or anywhere. He could not show this work. It was awful. He was awful. And so was his vile, worthless, inexplicable cage. The cage tightened sharply then, like a noose cinching into place, and Daryl’s throat constricted, and he was seized by the feeling that if he did not do something immediately, he would drown.

“Turn the car around,” he said.

“What?”

“Turn the fucking car around!”

He had raised his voice without realizing it. His daughters began to cry.

“Jesus, Daryl, stop yelling,” Kate said, trying to keep her voice calm. “I’m not turning the car around. We’re almost there.”

“Do it right now.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

He slammed his fists on the dashboard.

“Goddamnit, I said turn this car around now!”

They reached a stoplight. The driver next to them glanced over quickly before looking away again.

“Are you finished?” Kate said, staring at him in disbelief. “Actually, truly, finished?”

His daughters were sniffling in the backseat. The light turned green.

Daryl sat back. The same surge of electricity from the bedroom pulsed through him now.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Holy shit, I’m so sorry.”

“Everything’s okay,” Kate said in a gentle voice to the girls in the rear view, ignoring Daryl. “Daddy just got overwhelmed. It happens. He’s been really busy with work.” She looked at him sternly again. “And he’s not been managing his emotions well. At all.”

“Don’t be sad, Daddy,” said his daughters through sniffles.

The cage moaned in protest as he turned in his seat. “I’m not sad, girls, I’m just…”

Trapped.

He opened and closed his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” he said, glancing impotently at Kate. “Your mother is right. It’s been a difficult week.”

He turned back in his seat and reached out to take Kate’s hand. She pulled it away. The canvases mumbled in the trunk. The girls did not resume their singing. And to Daryl’s dismay, they arrived.

It was an Albert show, which meant too much booze, and soon, all the guests were drunk. Mark’s work, a series of abstract nudes in bronze, was lauded. And in Daryl’s little corner, people came and went, staring at his gradiently-arranged self-portraits with puzzled and worried looks. No one lingered long. He felt as if he had thrown his own funeral.

Kate and the girls sat quietly nearby, his wife drinking more wine than usual. She’d given the girls two juice boxes she’d had in her purse, along with a card game and a pep talk.

“You’re lucky I have these,” she’d whispered to him in the parking lot as they and an intern unloaded the canvases onto a cart. “You scared the living shit out of them. And me. What the fuck did I say about this was too much?”

Daryl nodded lamely.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re always sorry, Daryl,” Kate said. “So I’m not sure what that means to me right now.”

It had been no better entering the gallery.

“Daddy,” the girls said when they saw the portraits. “These paintings are scary. Is that really you? Is that a cage? Why do you look so sad, Daddy?”

He thought this and the puzzled looks from the guests would be the worst of it. But soon Mark himself appeared, lively and inebriated as usual. He did not greet Daryl or Kate, but instead walked directly up to Daryl’s first portrait and then circled through the series of paintings three times. He then stood staring at the final all-black canvas in a pose that Daryl found obnoxious: leaning slightly, his head cocked, his hand supporting his elbow, and his chin resting on his fist. He studied the canvas intently. Then he stepped back and swept his arms wide.

“Genius,” he said.

“What?” said Daryl.

“Genius!” Mark yelled. “The whole thing’s fucking genius!” Many nearby in the gallery turned to look. And that was that. The word of Mark’s verdict about Daryl’s paintings spread, and soon Daryl’s space was flooded, and he and his cage paintings were lauded in praise just like Mark’s work, and he was forced to endure handshake after handshake and hug after hug, all without feeling a thing.

At the very least, the sudden rush of people seemed to lift his family’s spirits. Perhaps they were simply relieved. But Daryl was miserable. He hated each compliment. He hated each guest.

And he hated their analysis of his work and their questions about it most of all.

“How brilliant, how original! A true modern parable!”

“I think it’s about masochism!”

“I think it’s about freedom!”

“Tell me, am I right that this series reflects man’s condition in the universe?”

It reflects “go fuck yourself,” thought Daryl as he smiled and nodded his way through each comment. The cage bit his neck and squeezed his waist like a fiend, and all of the praise and all of the attention meant nothing to him, and instead of thinking about his change of fortune, he was thinking about the hole in the wall, and his fists on the dashboard, and his frightened daughters in the backseat, and his cage, and its steel and its weight, and the icy fact that when he got home, it would still be there.

He could see now that he’d wanted people to know the truth about his cage. This is why he’d painted the portraits. But though he’d confessed his predicament, no one could see it was real. They thought he meant something else. They thought he meant a symbol.

Mark appeared then with a joint. Wishing to escape all the people, Daryl ducked into the alley with him and got stoned. He thanked Mark for his review.

“What are friends for?” Mark said, and then quickly changed the subject.

It was not until Daryl was making his way back from the bathroom that it occurred to him that Mark had done what he had out of pity. Resentment and self-loathing overwhelmed him then, and moments later, a man he did not know in glasses and a crisp white shirt approached and introduced himself. His name was Lee, he said, and he had just taken over the new museum downtown. He wished to have drinks and discuss a show.

“I’m not ready,” Daryl said, who was dismayed to think his cage paintings would be the reason for this. He was already dreaming of rushing home to light each canvas on fire.

“Of course you are,” Lee said. He gave Daryl his card. Daryl thanked him and then quickly excused himself. He found Kate and his daughters talking with two strangers.

“I think it’s time for us to go,” Daryl said, interrupting the conversation and smiling weakly at the two guests.

Kate and his daughters appeared relieved. Daryl said his goodbyes and then thanked Albert. At the door, he caught sight of Lee in his crisp shirt. Lee raised his glass. Daryl looked away and then followed Kate and the girls outside.


In the parking lot, the family sat together in the car in silence, the engine idling as Kate dug into the console for a misplaced lip balm. His daughters began to play-fight in the backseat. Daryl looked down at the steel bars, wondering if perhaps he had missed a keyhole or secret clasp somewhere, when just like that, the cage was gone.

For a moment, he did not believe it. He touched his chest and stomach, then let out a little laugh.

“Got it!” Kate cried, holding up the lip balm. She then turned to Daryl suspiciously. “What’s so funny?”

He stared at her open-mouthed. Then he leaned across the console and kissed her hard on the mouth.

He felt her warmth, her taste, the curve of her hip. They breathed deep.

“It’s gone,” he said, when he pulled away.

She gave him a surprised look.

“What is?”

“The cage,” said Daryl.

“You mean your paintings?”

“Nevermind,” Daryl said quickly, reaching back to tickle the girls.

“Don’t be a loser, Dad!” one of them shrieked. But they laughed until they could hardly breathe.

“Daryl, is everything…”

He took Kate’s hand. “Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” she said skeptically, and shifted the car into gear.

Everything the cage had stolen from Daryl now returned in technicolor. He could hardly believe it: he could laugh, he could talk, he could feel again! And he did. He told Kate and the girls about Lee and the museum. He listened to the girls’ stories about ballet rehearsal and their squabbles with friends at school. He even managed to make Kate laugh by mocking the obnoxious comments guests had made to him throughout the night. A few times he touched his waist and neck, still frightened the cage might return. But when they hit the highway, he could no longer resist embracing his freedom, and he turned the radio to an oldies station and put the volume up loud, dancing in the front seat as his daughters sang along.

Kate, though clearly uncertain about Daryl’s sudden shift, cracked a smile. They crested an overpass. The girls were happy and out of key. The city spread out sparkling. Daryl was free.

The cage was gone.

It was at this giddy moment that Daryl remembered with painful clarity that he had been trapped in the cage many times before. This is why the steel had appeared worn and rusted: it was. For a revolting moment, his mind recalled every instance, the images flashing by like a photo-roman film, the sequences different from his recent days, yet the same. Though he had never cracked in front of the girls before. Tonight, he realized with dismay, was the first time.

Daryl also saw that though he’d never directly painted the cage before, he had always been painting the cage. And he saw that no matter how many times he urged himself to prepare for its return, he was doomed to forget the existence of the cage, as surely as he had forgotten before, and as surely he would forget now again.

All of this came to him in a simple rush, as total and sudden as a religious revelation, and as untenable too, and he stared at the road, feeling as if he’d been tipped into a well. Then he began to panic. He looked for a piece of paper. None was to be found. His phone was in the trunk in his backpack; so too was Kate’s in her purse. So he turned to Kate. If he could not remember, perhaps she could. He opened his mouth, ready to explain everything, but it was then, as they passed under a billboard for a summer car sale, that he forgot.

Traffic slowed, then snarled, and soon they were surrounded by people bored in their cars. Daryl rolled down his window. What had he just been thinking about? And why did he feel so light? The pop song was still loud, and the girls were still singing along. He smiled as if nothing was wrong, though he felt strange. They arrived home.

Daryl had taken several canvases home with him, leaving only a few key pieces behind in the gallery. In the commotion of the drive, he had forgotten all about them. But it would hardly have mattered if he had remembered. Unloading them in the garage, he felt like a man handling the remnants of an alien civilization. He would have suggested to Kate that they had taken home another artist’s work were it not for his own face staring back at him.

In the privacy of his studio, he considered the portraits with quiet alarm. What on earth had he meant painting all this? And why couldn’t he remember? Half an hour later, he concluded the series must be a metaphor, though for what, he could not say.

Returning upstairs, he joined Kate and the girls for a movie. But the mystery nagged. Why the same portrait over and over? And why did he have the sensation, however distant, that he had portrayed something vital and real? His body began to itch, and he grew restless. Halfway through the movie, he excused himself to the bathroom.

There he stared at his reflection in the mirror until he grew uncomfortable. He did not know what he was expecting. But nothing happened.

Scolding himself for his childishness, he returned to the couch, where the movie was almost over. The girls and Kate were asleep. He wrapped an arm around them. When the credits rolled, he carried the girls to bed, then tried to do the same with Kate. She half-opened her eyes.

“Leave me here.”

“Your back will hurt.”

“I’m already asleep.”

“Don’t complain to me tomorrow then.”

“I won’t.” She closed her eyes. “Daryl.”

“What?”

“We need to talk.”

“Now?”

“No. Tomorrow.”

“Is everything… okay?”

Her eyes snapped open. “You’re kidding. You don’t remember the car on the way to the gallery?”

A memory of shouting and pounding his fists against the dashboard came to him hazily. “Oh,” he said. “Right.”

“And the hole in the wall?”

Daryl hazily recalled this, too. Suddenly he did not feel well.

“You’ve kind of sucked.”

“I understand.”

“I’m glad the show went well.”

Daryl said nothing. Kate waited for him to reply, then closed her eyes.

“Just tell me the truth tomorrow. Whatever is going on with you. Okay?”

Daryl felt anything he said in response would be a lie. But he did not know why this should be.

“Okay,” he said finally. But Kate was already asleep.

Upstairs, alone in the bedroom, the poorly patched hole in the wall confronted him.

Daryl stared at it. He understood he had done this, but he did not recall why. Surely there had to be a good reason. But though he searched and searched his mind, he could find none. I’ll patch that better in the morning, he told himself. But he could not stop staring at the hole.

Down the hall, one of the girls cried out in her dream. Then she fell quiet.

In the bathroom, Daryl found Lee’s business card in his pocket. He threw it in the trash, feeling a disgust with himself he did not understand. Then he retrieved the card and placed it on his bedside table. In the morning, he still could not decide whether he wanted to call.

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