Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Minor Watt

MINOR WATT, THE real estate developer and art collector, was seated at the Jacobean dining table with the fat baluster legs that served as his desk, waiting for his wife — soon to be ex-wife — to arrive. He had been thinking of himself, but the graceful Chinese vase with a tall flared neck, resting on the antique table, made him reflect that, as with so many things he owned — perhaps all of them — he was able to discern its inner meaning in its subtle underglaze, the circumstances of his acquiring it, its price of course, its provenance, all the hands that had touched it and yet left it undamaged, its relation to his own life, its secret history, its human dimension, almost as though this pale porcelain with the tracery of a red peony scroll was human flesh. And then after this flicker of distraction he thought of himself again.

How people said, “You’re the calmest man in the world.”

He always replied, “As I made more money my jokes got funnier.” And when they laughed, he added, “And I got better-looking.”

“You’re amazing,” they said, and with a glance at his collection — the Noland painting Lunar Whirl on the wall behind him, the objects glinting on side tables and shelves and in the glass cabinet. Was that a human skull?

“And my collection got more valuable.”

“One of a kind,” they said.

The only gift anyone can make to a much wealthier person is an extravagant compliment, often in the circumstances the opposite of what the poorer person feels, yet inevitably with a grain of truth and a stammer of ambiguity. The visible fact of his wealth, Minor Watt knew — his collection like a set of trophies — made these people at times incoherent and yet obvious. Instead of “He has this great thing,” they thought, “I don’t have this great thing.”

He lifted his gaze to the works arrayed in his office, a sampling of his areas of collecting: the Noland, a Khmer head of Vishnu in stone, a Chola bronze Shiva Nataraj, an old Dan mask with red everted lips, and a squat Luba fetish figure bristling with rusty nails; a greenish celadon salver propped on a stand, a massive Marquesan u’u club with small skull-shaped bas-reliefs for eyes, and beside it, like an echo, an Asmat skull. More human skulls were ranged on a backlit shelf. Among collectors of tribal art, skulls constituted a silent trade, and they were an early and lasting passion with Minor Watt: New Guinea ancestor skulls with cowries lodged in the eye sockets and others overmodeled with clay and painted like masks, some of them shiny from use as headrests, like large chestnuts, the same rich color; Kenyah skulls from Sarawak scratched with scrimshaw lizards on the cranial dome; smoke-dark Ifugao enemy skulls sitting side by side on a smoky plank; Tibetan skulls and skull cups, chased in silver; and more, all of them saturated with mana.

No one said “One of a kind” with surprise. Minor Watt had grown prosperous in the roofing business in New York, city of flat roofs. “A flat roof is designed to leak,” he said, and his familiarity with the bones of these buildings led him to speculate successfully in real estate. From the age of thirty or so, Minor Watt had had everything he’d ever wanted, every dollar, every woman, every serious business deal, every artifact — his eye fell upon a standing bodhisattva, a mustached Maitreya from Gandhara carved in schist, second century, Kushan period, clutching a plump vial that contained the elixir of immortality. A duplex on Park Avenue, a house by the sea in Connecticut, with a set of buildings that served as his personal museum. A loving wife — where was she?

His artworks were not for warehousing but for display — showing them was his incentive to collecting. He’d loved taking his wife to the opera, Inca gold glittering at her throat. Even more than the joy that drove his collecting passion was the knowledge that in buying a rare object he had prevented someone else from owning it. Another pleasure in his collection was his certainty that, even as he was examining a piece, its value was rising, no matter what the stock market was doing. He had bought a small Bacon in London — a head of George Dyer. Over the years its value had increased two hundred — fold. Those human skulls: if similar ones could be found, which was doubtful, they’d cost twenty times what he’d paid.

One of the paradoxes of the people who praised these objects was that in most cases they had no idea what they were looking at. At first Minor Watt’s pride made this almost a sorrow to him; and then, out of snobbery, such ignorant remarks delighted him. “I love this African stuff,” someone would say, smiling at a fierce-faced Timor house post. The Gandharan piece from the Swat Valley was taken to be Greek. “Byzantine,” an art historian said of an eighteenth-century Lalibela painting of the Ethiopian saint Gabbra Menfes Qeddus. His old cartoonish reverse-glass paintings done by itinerant Chinese in Gujarat baffled all viewers. “Indonesia? Bali?” A bulb-headed Fijian throwing club known as an ulu was assumed to be a Zulu knobkerrie, and no one ever noticed that the ivory inserts on its lobes were human molars, from its five victims.

And which of them would know that this Chinese vase was Ming? Minor Watt and his wife had bought it together after much discussion in Shanghai, after a Yangtze cruise in 1980, and had hand-carried it back to the States. The vase, treasured, as all these objects were, like members of their family, had accompanied them through six changes of address. As though demanding custody, she’d included it as part of the divorce settlement. Had she noticed it glowing in the display cabinet on her previous visit with her lawyer?

Thinking of the woman, he heard his intercom buzz, and then his secretary’s voice: “Your wife is here.”

Already it was an odd word, since they’d agreed to the divorce months before and had now signed most of the papers. In mentally moving her out of his life he was reminded of his mood when he sent a piece to be auctioned, how he had no feeling for it; even though it still had monetary value, it was dumb and mummified, and, the thing having lost all meaning and hope, he smiled as he let it slip away.

He had wondered which woman would show up — the angry woman, the sad woman, the wild-eyed woman, the oversensitive woman, the rejected one, the triumphant one, the sulker, the smirker, the old friend.

She was none of these when she entered the room. She looked thinner — all the fury was gone, leaving her pinched, the anger wrung out of her. Such corrosive emotion was unsustainable over so many months: she looked cured of an illness, weaker, subdued, much paler. The fighting had ended, and now, like people who knew each other far too well, they were rueful with disillusionment, meeting merely to observe a few formalities, wishing they were strangers.

“Hello, Minor.” She spoke in the spongy voice of languor and abandonment, and her eyes were drawn to the vase.

She was here to pick up the valuable old keepsake and then to go. She had been reluctant to come. He had told her it was too fragile to risk mailing, but this was turning into a formal ritual of farewell. He would pass her this lovely vase and she’d carry it away in its cushioned box — the Chinese purpose-built cushioned coffin with the sliding lid and the rope-like handle — carry it as they had done more than twenty years ago in what had been one of their many treasure hunts, but an important one: he’d also been an early investor in the Chinese economic miracle.

“Sunny.” Her name was Sonia.

She sat down in the antique Savonarola-style chair, in the same knees-together posture, as she had done many times, but this was perhaps the last time — not perhaps. It was all at an end, a true breakup. No more wifehood for her — she’d probably never remarry and forfeit the alimony. He smiled thinking of his rich pretense of complaining about money, knowing in his heart that money never mattered, because there was always money; but such a vase as this was, even as the philistines guessed, one of a kind. It was promised to Sonia, and yet he could not see beyond the finality of this handover to any future for himself.

She hadn’t been a trophy wife: he had loved her, she had been part of his great luck and his achievement, and he had educated her in appreciating his vast art collection. Now she knew what a Scythian chariot finial was, and she knew why this Ming vase was precious for its copper-red underglaze, so fragile and yet unmarked. Knowing his collection this well, she was the only person who truly knew him.

“I can’t stay long.”

Saying this, still looking at the vase, it seemed that she had moved on, and she had the unimpressed body-snatched look of a woman who was perhaps newly involved with another man.

“I understand. I’ve got things to do. I’m still in business, in spite of what’s happening.” Not until he spoke did he realize he was resentful. He went on, “You expected to see me ruined?” She wasn’t listening. So he said, “I hate these people who are complaining about the economy. They created the downturn. I did too. That’s why I saw it coming. Only a fool thinks it’s straight north forever. I’d love to find a way to show them how foolish they’ve been.” She didn’t react. He leaned toward her. “It wasn’t straight north with us. It’s south now.”

Her eyes were dark and unperforated.

He said, “So here it is.”

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Thanks.”

She meant, Thanks for agreeing to give it to me — because she knew its value. It had symbolized that long-ago trip, the best phase of their marriage, as well as the taste that she had acquired from him and her insight into his personality.

But she didn’t know that he had already surrendered it, that he was merely going through the motions. He didn’t care about it anymore. He was surprised that she had agreed to this meeting, which was trouble for her, since she’d gotten the Connecticut house in the settlement, but had put it up for sale and now lived elsewhere — she refused to give him her address. Yet the thought of her being inconvenienced gave him some satisfaction.

“I know just what I’m going to do with it. I have the perfect place for it.”

This annoyed him. It meant that she had a house or an apartment that she loved — a shelf in that place, perhaps someone to admire it with her. I found it in Shanghai when China was just opening up. He resented her certainty, the way it seemed to represent a part of her future that she’d already begun to live without him. He was wrong about her seeming to be weakened after an illness; she was strengthened in her recovery.

“I’ve got the old box for you to carry it in.” He tapped the lid.

The pale cedar box was still crusted with the red wax seal from the antiques dealer in Shanghai, the folded export permit, a tissue-flimsy certificate, marked with chops and stiff at one corner with glued-on stamps. The box was as venerable as the vase, though Sonia didn’t seem to think so. It held as many memories, perhaps more, for being unregarded, plainer, and more durable.

All this time he had been sitting behind the great carved dining table that was his desk, talking across his blotter as if to an employee. He got up and walked to the front of it, avoiding Sonia’s side, circling, so that he stood apart, facing the vase.

“If you’re pressed for time — you’ve a place for it, huh? — you might as well take it away.”

He leaned, reached, and lifted it, then turned to her. Startled by his sudden offer, she raised both her hands to receive it, a mother’s gesture, to bring it to her body and cradle it like a baby. With a sudden warp of nausea in his throat he let it drop, and before she could grasp it, it plunged in a blurred column of its own pale light. As it smashed, she clawed the empty air with feral fingers and a second later put her futile hands to her face.

“Sorry,” he said softly, the word no more than a breath in the aftermath of the smash.

She let out a sharp cry, as though she’d seen a precious creature die. Even in the worst moments of their marriage he had never seen that look of loss on her face, an expression of pain amounting to agony. But the exaggerated expression seemed comic, as terror sometimes does to a bystander. He surprised himself by laughing — and because it was involuntary, like the reaction to a wisecrack, it was full-throated, a great guffaw, a joyous snort-honk of gusto that was like a sound of health.

Hearing him she began to cry, bobbing her head with sobs, and when he stepped nearer to comfort her, he lowered his foot onto the broken pieces, rocking his shoe, grinding them smaller, like a big jaw masticating nuts. Any hope that the fragments could be glued back together ended with the heavy molar-crunch of that footfall.

She did not say another word. When she left — he could see in her posture, in her shoulders, the angle of her neck and head — she was a different and defeated woman.

He said sorry again, and it was like the eloquence of the richest satire. The exhilaration was still rattling in his throat. He had not thought he was capable of such an elaborate undoing of the ritual. He shouted again across his office as the door shut: “Sorry!”

“An accident,” he murmured after she’d gone. But was it? People said, There are no accidents. They would have added, It was an unconscious wish to break the vase and upset Sonia.

And she had been — devastated. He had not realized how passionately she must have craved it until the thing broke and her face fell, until she left the office, moving stiffly, wounded, her posture altered, one shoulder higher than the other. She would not have looked more punished if he had physically assaulted her, beaten her head against a wall. Yet — for the sake of melodrama, he lifted his hands in a slow sacramental way — he had not laid a finger on her.

It was one thing to withhold an irreplaceable piece, or to sell it; it was another thing entirely to destroy it. Fascinated to think that the vase — such a live presence moments ago — no longer existed, he felt a thrill that very nearly undid the ache of incompleteness he’d sensed in himself that morning, the vase on his desk, knowing that Sonia was on her way. In the past, the nearest he’d come to this feeling was in a casino, stacks of chips piled in front of him, the roulette wheel spinning, Sonia round-shouldered behind him, horrified that he might lose it all. But he hadn’t cared — he was giddy at the prospect of losing. The thrill was visceral, an access of strength, a physical lift, an intimation of perverse power that drained from him when he won. In defiance, he put all his winnings on one number, and he was so exultant when he lost that he could recall each witnessing slack-jawed face at the table.

The memory of Sonia and the vase was most of all a memory of her fear: how scared she looked, wild-eyed in terror as the thing fell, and not just by the shattering of the vase, but by his laughter — the insult of it — and she had hurried away as though from a murderer. The act undid everything she knew about him; it made him a stranger to her. He was well aware of being self-taught and inarticulate, yet this smash showed virtuosity.

“The Ming vase,” he told friends. “It got T-boned. By me.”

He smiled at their shocked silence. People at the periphery could be possessive of someone else’s treasures, as if these things were aspects of the friendship. Did they think he was so rich that he would hand them over?

These memories buoyed him through the rest of the divorce, the last of the paperwork, the depositions, all the signatures, the summing up, the attorneys’ fees. Whenever he became glum — wondering What next? — he summoned up the moment in his office when the vase slipped from his fingers, the finality of its breaking, the shoe crunch, and the look of loss on her face.

Minor Watt had a collector’s caressing habit when alone, of padding around his apartment in slippers, picking up the smaller objects in his collection, holding them to the light, and turning them slowly, as you were forbidden to do in museums. He savored the details that made them unique, the subtle flourishes, not only the texture carved into an elephant tusk but the buttery hue of old ivory, the tiny human stick figure like a petroglyph incised into the shaft of a Tongan war club, the scarification represented on the cheeks of a Chokwe pwo mask, the lizard gouged into the dome of a Kenyah skull, the diamond in the forehead of a small seated silver-cast Buddha. Leonard Baskin sometimes wrote a note in pen strokes on a watercolor in his elegant hand. Minor Watt owned three such Baskins — three different notes. No two Francis Bacons were alike; many seemed provisional and splashed. Minor Watt’s Study for Head of George Dyer was overpainted in one corner, streaked in another, rubbed with the dust from Bacon’s studio. The painting was not large, but all Bacons were valuable, almost absurdly so. Some collectors kept them in vaults, with albums of Krugerrands and taped blocks of hundred-dollar bills.

He’d been eating. He rose from the table and lifted the Study for Head of George Dyer from the wall and propped it against the silver Victorian wine cooler near his plate of meat. Imitating the George Dyer pout, he braced and gripped his steak knife and raked the canvas, two swipes, then held it on his lap. He marveled at the sight of his own knees through the slashes he’d made — the real world framed by the rags of the painting. He poked at the long slashes. Hearing him grunt, his servant, Manolo, opened the dining room door. “You okay, boss?”

But Minor Watt’s feeling was muted. He’d wished someone had seen him, as Sonia had. Not Manolo, who had no idea, but a true witness — even better, a connoisseur.

He called a friend, Doug Redman, who owned several Bacons, but prints, the limited-edition signed lithographs. Redman had often remarked on this painting.

Redman came over that same night, because Minor Watt had said, “It’s about my Bacon. I want you to see it.”

Minor Watt was sitting before his fireplace when Redman entered the room. At first he did not believe that the slashed painting in his lap was the Head of George Dyer. The profile was familiar, the frame unmistakable.

Minor Watt said, “It’s the Bacon. You know it’s the Bacon.”

“But what fuckwit damaged it?”

“I did!” Minor Watt cried out, giddy from hearing his own shrieky voice. The man leaned closer and looked pained, seeing that it was the Bacon. Minor Watt threw it into the fire and at once the canvas caught and flames rushed over it, making a black hole in the slower-burning frame.

Redman groaned and made as if to snatch at it, but the canvas was just smut and soot.

“What’s wrong with you?” he said in a tentative voice, too fearful to be angry, as though dealing with a crazy man who might run at him.

He’d expected this art collector’s shock, but Redman’s terror made Minor Watt even happier.

“Gone!” Minor Watt said, and Redman stepped back. “Totaled!”

“How can you do a thing like that, especially in this economy?”

“Your objection is that I’m wasting money, not destroying a work of art. You’re the fuckwit. You don’t deserve to live.”

Afterward Redman talked, word got around, but no one asked straight-out if Minor Watt had destroyed the painting. To several friends Minor Watt said, “By the way, I fried the Bacon.”

A witness gave the destruction a greater meaning and made it all the more satisfying. But the problem was to find someone who knew enough about such an eclectic collection to care. Most of the idiots had no idea. What good was it to smash something in private? Someone else had to know, someone had to care. Who better than the painter himself? The Noland target painting was an early one from 1965. Minor Watt invited Kenneth Noland to his house and encouraged the softly smiling white-haired man to admire his own painting. “One of my favorites,” the old man said. And then, with Noland watching, Minor Watt stepped close and shot an arrow into the bull’s-eye. Before the startled Noland could protest, Minor Watt threw down his bow and swiped at the painting with a dagger.

“Whoa,” Noland said, staggering a little and raising his hands to protect his face, as though he expected to be assaulted. And then, cursing, he hurried from the room.

“It was like wasting one of his children,” Minor Watt told Noland’s dealer, because the dealer had once asked to buy back the painting.

The dealer said, “I don’t think anyone has ever done what you’ve done.”

“People used to tell me that all the time,” Minor Watt said, “but for once I think you’re right.”

He owned a set of crockery, a dinner service for eight, that had been used at Vailima by Robert Louis Stevenson. He invited seven friends, Manolo served a gourmet meal, Minor Watt told the story of the plates, how they had been brought by old Mrs. Stevenson, visiting from Edinburgh (“They’d been in the family for years”), explained the monogram, called attention to the gilded rims. Over dinner the talk was of selling valuables and budgeting. “We’re selling our plane.” “We’ve auctioned our Stella.” “We’ve put Palm Beach on the market.”

When the meal was over, he asked the diners to carry the plates out to the upper deck of his penthouse. He stacked them and, fascinated by the oddity of the pile of plates resting on a rail, a pillar of bone china, the diners watched him push them over the edge onto the tiled terrace below.

As a woman screamed, Minor Watt said, “Now we don’t have to wash them.”

That look of joy meant he had to be insane, probably dangerous — they were afraid. They would never forget this, he knew. And he saw how they sidled away, made excuses to leave.

About fifteen minutes later, one of them, Irby Wilders, came back.

“Minor — you okay?”

“Never better. You?”

Irby’s mouth was shut tight, his eyes narrowed, like a man on the deck of a ship in a gale. He said, “I’m wondering where the bottom is.”

“It’s down there,” Minor Watt said, pointing to the smashed plates.

He knew this disillusioned investor thought he was crazed by the recession. But “never better” was exactly how he felt. He was strengthened by the dropping of the irreplaceable plates.

Minor Watt did not say the word, but he knew the feeling that preceded this act of violence. It was disgust. Disgust had made him drop the Ming vase. What was the origin of his disgust? He did not know. It wasn’t money, but it was related to wealth, a kind of fatness. Many people he knew were embarrassing themselves in their economies. Now they believed him when he said, “None of that for me.” He was well aware that by ridding himself of the rare objects all the sourness in him was gone, and he had an appetite again.

He saw the point of murder now, and not simple homicide, but cannibalism. He’d found the cabinet of skulls an aesthetic satisfaction, like a rare ossuary. He’d never understood the pleasure of eating the bodies of these men, of emptying these skulls of the brain and spooning it into a bowl and gorging on the gray jelly sponge. Now he appreciated the magnificence of eating flesh, the great appetite, the ritual devouring. The destruction of the vase and the plates and paintings — pieces as unique as any man — was not vandalism. It was enrichment, a source of power. He was eating art.

Two couples, dinner guests at the plate-drop, the Diamonds and the DeSilvas, called separately, expressing concern, pretending to sympathize. “You must be under a lot of pressure.” And they suggested to Minor Watt that if there were any other items in his collection that he wanted to get rid of, they would be glad to accept them. He’d smashed the plates, therefore — their reasoning went — he didn’t care about them, and would probably hand over a precious object for nothing or very little.

“But I do care,” Minor Watt said after he’d hung up. “That’s why I did it.”

You do something spontaneously, perhaps accidentally, with no thought of the consequences, he thought, and sometimes you’re surprised at what you’ve provoked. His roofing career leading to real estate had proven that. Smashing china was a revelation, and a cure.

The Diamonds said they had always been very fond of Minor Watt’s Tang celadon bowl, smuggled out of Cambodia, perhaps stolen from the National Museum in Phnom Penh. The man who’d sold it to him had remarked on its solidity, how this thick piece of pottery had survived through twelve centuries.

“That piece could take a direct hit.”

Minor Watt had always smiled, and felt small and somewhat in awe, remembering those words. He invited the Diamonds for tea. He called attention to the jade-colored glaze, the inimitable crackle, and allowed them to salivate at the prospect of the gift — they were actually swallowing, gulping in anticipation. Then he asked them to put on protective goggles. “You’ll see it better.” Humoring him — he was insane, wasn’t he? — they put them on, and Minor Watt took a hammer to the bowl and, with his tongue clamped in his teeth, pounded the celadon to dust.

The DeSilvas had hinted on the phone of their liking for an Edward Lear watercolor of the Nile depicting Kasr el-Saidi among some riverside palms. These people, too, pleased to be invited for tea, let their covetous gaze wander over the painting.

“The color is brighter without the glass,” Minor Watt said, and removed the painting from its frame. He served tea, and after filling their cups he dribbled the pot of hot tea over the watercolor, as the man held his sobbing wife.

Minor Watt said, “Sorry,” as mockery, but he thought, Of course I know what I’m doing. Power over works of art that he owned, but also power over these people. He had the power to terrorize them, too, without ever touching them.

Each thing he destroyed strengthened him; each person he terrified through his destruction made him someone to be feared. It had never been his intention; it was all a revelation. Money had no meaning anymore. He’d amassed his art collection believing it would inspire respect — and it had, to a degree; and it had inspired envy, too. The assumption in New York was that he would eventually give the collection to a museum. To these people, and perhaps to a museum, these objects represented wealth — the absurd bias toward money. Even a museum would not regard them as collectors’ items, one of a kind. These days a museum would sell them, to stay afloat, and Minor Watt would be forgotten. It disgusted him to think that, transformed into money, they were replaceable. The collector’s conceit was always that he or she was a temporary custodian.

“No — I am the owner — the last owner!” Minor Watt said.

Destroying them meant that he was the equal of the person who made them — more than that, he was more powerful. He wiped these rare things from the face of the earth, leaving only a memory in which he mattered; and a memory was the more evocative, even mystical, for its vagueness. After centuries of use and veneration, of being handled and crated and resold, catalogued, photographed, admired, the small thin-rimmed jade bowl balanced on Minor Watt’s fingers, in his lovely kitchen, before the blinking eyes of the museum curator, was tipped into a blender. And before the man could react, Minor Watt clapped the lid on and poked the button labeled Liquefy.

More ingenious in devising ways to destroy these works of art, each one appropriate to the object, his intention was to make the destruction as memorable as the object itself: the memory of its extinction.

He had some supporters, all of them art students, video artists, creators of installations, one who worked with decaying food, another with human blood, who interpreted Minor Watt’s destruction as a form of art, a kind of ritual theater, performance art. They sent him letters. They praised him for turning his back on art history to create something new.

“You are a total hero,” one of them said — a pretty purple-haired woman, very thin, black fingernails, neck tattoo, torn black clothes, greasy boots.

Her praise alarmed him, though her look kept him watching. She had come with a group to his uptown office. He had agreed to meet them in the foyer, his security people in attendance.

“You got a Rauschenberg?” a man in the group asked — spiky hair, mascara, the same boots.

“An early one,” Minor Watt said. “Birds, animals.”

“Wipe it! Whack it! Know what Rauschenberg did? Bought a de Kooning drawing and erased it. Erased it! Exhibited it as his own work. It’s in a museum. Is that radical?”

“You’re way beyond that, man. You’re like a whole new movement — iconoclasm.”

He smiled and sent them away. Iconoclasm was nothing new. The word had been in use for five centuries. Minor Watt continued destroying because destruction itself gave him a greater appetite for shattering a whole lovely thing. The breaking of each piece meant the breaking of a barrier that admitted him to a region of cold ferocity. The act of destruction had nothing to do with art. He laughed at the students who claimed his destruction as a form of conceptual art. No, he went on breaking his collection because — he felt sure — he had entered a realm of self-indulgence he’d never guessed at before. He was gluttonous for more. He was not an artist, he was a child smashing a doll, and he was also a ruler punishing a province, a tyrant carrying out a massacre. He did it with a smile, and knew that the great destroyers were smilers — destruction was the certain proof of wealth.

He went on smiling and never uttered the simple truth that he had discovered: “No matter how outrageous my assault on art, no one can stop me.”

He still bought art. And at auctions, when he saw how passionately someone wanted to acquire something, he wagged a finger and outbid them. Later, he contrived ways to show these people that he’d destroyed the thing they had craved. Other bidders hated to see him enter at a sale, but he could not be banned — and he knew that the auctioneers were secretly pleased that he was bidding, because he bid without limit.

Who could prevent him from destroying a thing he owned? He jeered at his critics. “You’d think I was committing murder!” It was worse than murder for some of these people. And these were the same people who’d stood by, indifferent to the cruelty of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan — stoning women to death for adultery, hacking the hands from thieves, and after Friday prayers, the beheadings. And who cared? But when the Taliban dynamited the sixth-century giant standing Buddhas in Bamiyan, these hypocrites howled in pain, demanding military action, the overthrow of the Taliban, the siege of Kabul — and it had happened!

But Minor Watt now understood the Taliban, and their earlier incarnation, the White Huns of the fifth century, who’d taken their saddle axes to the Buddhas and stupas of Gandhara, not far from Bamiyan. (He had such an ax, a tabar-i-zin, with Victory from God and Imminent Conquest engraved in gold on its blade in Persian. He used it on one of his Hockneys.) What lay behind these furious acts of purification was a demonstration of will. Never had these destroyers seemed stronger, fiercer, less sentimental, more resolute, more intent in their mission: inaccessible, unappeasable figures of pure horror and domination. It was certain that invaders or rulers who would dynamite a beautiful work of art placed a much lower value on human life, because artworks were one of a kind and people were pretty much the same. Even those people whom Minor Watt knew seemed to feel this way.

So in vandalizing his artworks he was regarded as worse than a crank. He was a homicidal maniac.

He told people he knew, who objected, that he might have stopped had the reaction against him not been so strong. He wondered if what he said was the truth, because the reaction — the sense of outrage, the condemnation — energized him. What right did they have to say “How dare you”?

Though it was unimaginable to the art collectors and connoisseurs, the destruction became easier for him. “Why am I doing it? Why am I so effective and precise? Because I am a connoisseur!”

How fragile, how insubstantial these objects were. A Japanese woodblock print was made of rice paper. Even his greatest Utamaro hardly raised a flame before the astonished and insulted eyes of Mr. Harada, and it left a mere smudge of ash. The value of a gourd cricket cage was its lid, a deeply carved cookie of ivory that could be pinched apart, and the gourd was easily crumbled. In a gesture of strangulation he broke these things in his hands, and to be certain they wouldn’t be reassembled, he stamped his shoe on them, grinding them with his foot sole. He slashed paintings, he crushed porcelain, he hammered silver pots flat.

And he required witnesses — the effort was almost wasted without someone watching, especially someone who cared, who would report it.

These witnesses believed they could persuade him not to destroy the thing. They tried (as they saw it) to talk him off the ledge. “Think of the implications of what you’re doing.” He thought of the implications. They were his motives. Their concern only made him more intent on finishing the job.

Minor Watt never raised his voice; he was not angry. His calm way in this destruction unnerved anyone who watched him, as though he was about to stick a knife in their eye. There were always plenty of willing witnesses these days, since their hope was that at the last minute he’d have a change of heart. But the witnesses themselves roused his conviction.

Something else that animated him was the desire to destroy each thing differently. “I could simply set my house on fire,” he told one collector. “I could stack everything I own onto a pile and set it alight. But that would be meaningless.”

And he wanted to add that a massacre can mean less than a single execution.

“So what you’re doing has a meaning?” Doug Redman had asked.

“Yes, I think so. The experience of seeing a lovely thing leave the world forever. The drama of extinction, so to speak. It’s a death.”

He was not, he said, the first person to destroy works of art. The Vandals had given the world a word by doing it. The Chinese emperor Ch’in Shih-huang had burned every book in his kingdom in 213 B.C. Spanish conquistadors had stolen golden ornaments from the Inca people and hammered them into crucifixes. In 1942 bombing raids by the Germans had targeted specific churches and museums, not only to demoralize the British but to demonstrate German might. Baron Gustav Braun von Sturm said, “We shall go out and bomb every building marked with three stars in the Baedeker Guide.” The devastating raids on Britain called the Baedeker Blitz leveled thousands of ancient buildings, their contents — paintings, furniture, silver — reduced to ashes. Most of the Old Master paintings stolen by Irish terrorists in the 1970s from English houses and museums had never been found and had probably been kicked to bits or sold for guns.

Compared to this, trashing a Francis Bacon was negligible. Bacon himself regularly destroyed paintings he’d done that didn’t suit him, and laughed when the critics howled. The destruction had not diminished him; it had made him loom larger.

But though the historical precedent for the destruction of artwork was ancient, the novelty that Minor Watt introduced was his using his own art collection, piece by piece; and while it seemed a form of insanity, it was both unprecedented and lawful.

He felt no remorse — far from it. He was suffused with an unexpected sense of power, greater than anything he’d felt in acquiring the works. He knew the joy of a winning bid, the cry of “Sold!” The arrival of the wooden crate, the dismantling, the revealing of the painting, the urn, the skull, the statue, the goblet. But destroying any of these things gave him the intense pleasure that could only compare with devouring something rare — eating an endangered animal, the feeling the Chinese had when feasting on a bear paw or a moose nose or the liver of a tiger.

He envisioned no end to it. He had enough money to go on buying art. The disgusted foretaste of destroying a thing he saw in a salesroom or a catalogue filled him with an urgency to buy it.

The discouraged Bennett Hembergs said, “It’s not yours — art belongs to the world. We are merely the preservers, keeping these pieces for future generations.”

“I disagree,” Minor Watt said in his quiet way. “I am disproving that. By destroying them I am making them mine.”

He did not say (though he implied it) that it was his intention that no one would ever see them again. Or hold them or touch them or smell them — the smell of such antiques was distinct and musty, like that of leaf mold or dried meat. No one would bear witness to them. Knowing they were irreplaceable, he did his best to prevent anyone from photographing them whole.

“You’re like a murderer, a rapist who kills his victims!”

He laughed — the tyrant laugh. “You don’t know what murder is!” These were things that belonged to him. “No one can prevent me from destroying my own property, providing I do it in safety.”

The great pity, in Minor Watt’s mind, was that he was the true connoisseur: he had studied these pieces with such care that no one saw as deeply into them as he did. “What a loss,” they said, but they didn’t know the half of it. The witnesses, the gallery owners, the collectors, were not ignorant, but neither did they fully understand the works — their historical importance, even their monetary value.

Art critics condemned him; his name became a euphemism for gratuitous violation. He was denounced and vilified. Yet he gloried in the abuse. It proved how successful he’d been: he wanted his efforts to be known. And, by the way, it showed how wealthy he was — the word “potlatch” was used for his destruction made into a ritual. He’d caused the moneymen to be afraid and, in their cowering, to look small and mean.

Not everyone howled. Some women were attracted to him for these acts of destruction. Unstable women, on the whole, too eager, excited by the danger, by being so close to the fires that scorched his paintings, the dazzle of the knife blades, the clubs that smashed the pots. They were like the panting people who chased fire engines or joined window-breaking mobs or wrote letters to serial killers, falling in love with them, marrying them on death row. The women were perhaps destructive themselves and had lived by ruining other people — but not on this scale. The ingenuity of Minor Watt shredding his paintings, smashing his porcelain, crushing the decorated skulls, microwaving his majolica, roasting his Polynesian clubs in his fireplace, had not occurred to them — they didn’t own any works of art. He avoided these women. What did they know?

And at the parties he attended he was treated as notorious. Stab a Stella and people flee — or hang around, transfixed. He stopped going to parties. “Charisma vampires,” he said; they sapped his energy.

What alarmed the art world was that Minor Watt had the means to replace these works. When he showed up at auctions the other bidders glared at him, and when he was successful gloom descended on the salesroom, for it was known that the piece he’d bought — painting, book, pot, sculpture, dueling pistol, helmet, whatever — would be shattered to bits. And if it happened to be a rare South Indian bronze, it would be blowtorched into a sorry lump of unrecognizable metal. Ownership to Minor Watt meant oblivion.

Some works cried out to be destroyed. Certain statues, certain paintings, the carvings that collectors referred to as “exquisite.” They seemed defiant, and not just the delicate ones but the robust images too. The broad black strokes in a wall-sized Rothko seemed to stare at Minor Watt and say, “Kick me.”

Had these artworks been people, he would have been arrested, convicted of murder, and imprisoned. But what he did was regarded by most people who knew of it as worse than murder. Yet he was almost delirious in his innocence, free to slash paintings and shatter gold Mayan ornaments and all the rest, because the objects belonged to him.

Furious people visited him to vent their feelings. Even a policeman: “Your neighbors are complaining… smoke… noise.” He laughed: what noise? Even stepped on, a Meissen shepherdess made less noise than someone chewing corn flakes. “Your neighbors said they heard gunshots.”

“Yes. I blew holes in a Jasper Johns. It seemed created to be shot at. Then I burned it. I have a permit to carry a gun.”

“I’ll need to write it up. It was a painting?”

“It was a target.”

The sound of the gunshots had rippled through him and swelled him with a sense of power. He felt bigger, stronger, more visible; his name was on people’s lips. He was better known, more famous, as a destroyer of art than he’d ever been as a collector. And that was another motivator, the conceits of the other collectors, the presumption, the calculation. He laughed when one of them said, “A piece just like that sold at auction for a million-two.” In the past they had ignored him, taken him for a philistine. What philistine? His eye was unerring in choosing the greatest works to destroy — the best went first, then the lesser works. In this way he proved that he had taste. Had he been a philistine, he would not have discriminated. But he was a connoisseur, and he brought all his connoisseurship to his destruction.

Some dealers — not many — avoided him. Some auction houses tried publicly to bar him from sales. But because of the money he was willing to pay, in a period when business had never been worse, he was discreetly welcome, usually after hours, in the galleries and studios. And he was willing to pay more than anyone else. He didn’t haggle. If he saw a thing he liked, he bought it without hesitating.

He grew to love the twitch of greedy anticipation in the moist eyes of the art dealer on his entering the gallery, the subtle hints that a certain object might be worthy of his attention — not the best piece in the place, but always the most expensive.

This afternoon the dealer was Tony Faris. He had an early Hopper. He called to his assistant, Mara, to prop the painting on an easel.

Buyers and collectors said, “Can you make me a price?” or “What’s the best you can do?”

Minor Watt smiled at Faris and said, “How much?”

The price was named. He studied Faris’s mouth uttering the big number, the dry lips, the licking tongue, the jerking head.

“I’ll write you a check,” he said. Then, because Faris had hesitated and Mara had glanced at her boss, he said, “How do you want me to pay for it?”

He loved the way Faris said, “Cash is good.”

“Send it to me. Pack it well.”

He knew he was sending the piece to its doom. They all did. Collaborators!

“I know you’ll be happy with it.”

Happy, yes, because if it were not of such great quality, he would not have bought it, would not trouble himself to slash it, burn it, pour acid over it, melt it, batter it with a hammer.

Mara brought the Hopper to him in a taxi. He invited her up to his apartment and led her through part of his collection, his usual challenge, daring her to identify this or that piece.

“Naga,” she said, correctly, of a red-beaded necklace in a framed box. “Reverse-glass painting, Hanuman,” and “Mughal khanjar, real jewels in the hilt.” She seemed reverential, even moved by the objects. “And that is a dah,” she said of a silver dagger.

“You know what you’re looking at.”

“Many of these things have a practical use.” She was glancing from the Marquesan club to the Dan mask to a Zulu headrest. “Not art objects, but useful tools,” she said. “To you they are emblems of power.”

He lifted the Marquesan u’u and wondered if he should smash it.

“The language of things,” she said.

He knew why the dealers were so willing to consign these artworks to oblivion. The money he paid was one incentive, but there was a larger issue: the scarcer the work, the rarer the masterpiece in any area, the greater the demand and the higher the price. A finite number of Hoppers existed. Minor Watt’s Hopper was an oil the painter had executed in Rockland, Maine, in the summer of 1926—moored fishing boats, a clutter of drooping telephone wires, the serene old culture, the ugly tilted crosstrees. Hopper had spent less than three months in Rockland. He’d done fewer than a dozen paintings. The destruction of this painting increased the value of all the rest of them, probably a better one that Faris had kept for himself.

The Noland prices rose on the news that he’d wrecked two early targets. He pounded his Gandharan Maitreya figure, a “Buddha of the future,” into fragments and the market for these strangely Hellenic central Asian sculptures became buoyant.

He had never collected coins, inros, netsukes, perfume bottles; apart from a few pieces he’d given Sonia, jewelry left him cold. And what sort of spectacle would they make on a bonfire or in a crucible — a sparklet, a fizz, a bad smell. Even melted, the heaviest earrings — West African or Indian — would amount to no more than a twisted nugget of gold. He craved a visible triumph, a blaze, a marble statue reduced to powder, to be sneezed into nothingness.

The painter Tristram Cowley invited him to his studio, and Minor Watt sat while Cowley showed him his latest work. Minor Watt admired the detail, made comments. He knew what these painters wanted him to do — buy a picture, not the best one. They held back. Minor Watt was patient. He chatted, waiting until the better pictures were slid out and leaned against the wall. Cowley’s pieces were based on x-rays. Minor Watt chose Compound Fracture.

“You know where to send it.”

Cowley knew what would happen to Compound Fracture. And he knew what would happen to his reputation, to the value of his work: it would be a breakthrough.

But such a painter was not the best witness to the destruction. Critics were excellent — they grieved. And the most knowledgeable critics were the best. They were able to appreciate the worth of the pieces. They could put a price tag on them, but few of them could afford to buy them, and so they were truly shocked to see Minor Watt slash them to rags.

After a nighttime visit to the New York studio of another painter, Minor Watt was walking to the corner to find a taxi when he was set upon and pushed to the sidewalk by two men. At that moment, a police cruiser happened to drift past, interrupting the assault, though the two attackers slipped between buildings and got away.

“You okay?” one cop asked. “They get anything?”

“I’m fine. I have my wallet. My watch.” Patting himself, Minor Watt was glad that he felt no pain.

“I guess we got here just in time. Lucky. They could have done some damage.”

Minor Watt smiled at that notion — that they might have broken his bones. Maybe they were men who objected to what he was doing. Or maybe they were thugs looking for trouble.

It happened again — this time a gunshot fired into his car, which was parked in a public lot. He was not in the car, but the bullet through the windshield entered at the level of his head. That was a message: not a random act of violence but an attempted murder. He lost count of the people who would be glad to see him dead. Sonia would smile and tell people what a bastard he was — and never mention how they had loved each other. He bought a bulletproof car and hired a bodyguard, and, secure, he was gleeful, thinking that there were people who were so outraged by the destruction of his artworks that they were prepared to kill him.

The phone rang in his bulletproof car, a woman. “This is the Tony Faris gallery. Mr. Faris would like to speak with you.”

“Put him on,” Minor Watt said.

“Right away. But I just wanted to say that I read about that trouble you had and I’m really sorry.”

“Thanks for noticing. You’re Mara?”

“You remember.”

“‘The language of things.’ I liked that.”

Then Faris was on the line, saying, “Are you all right?”

Other people called — dealers, galleries, auctioneers, painters, sculptors. In almost every case, they were people who wished to sell him work, all of them well aware of his plans for the piece: the knife, the hammer, the acid bath, the crucible, the bonfire, the oven.

Sonia called. She sounded terrified, and her anxious questions told him that she was afraid he might hurt her.

After the mugging and the gunshot, his protective measures took so much of his time that for three weeks or more he did not destroy anything. In this period of reflection he realized that he would never run out of works to destroy. He felt a twinge of inhibition. Faris’s sale of the Edward Hopper gave him his first intimation. Even if he concentrated on, say, Chola bronzes — a niche of Indian art — he’d only find at most a dozen masterpieces. Museums and die-hard collectors had the rest, which would be the more valuable for his destruction of the others.

And so he stopped and pondered what to do next. This pause proved accidentally helpful. He saw that he was regarded as a dominant force in the art world, almost as though his destruction was a form of art criticism, causing fear and gratitude. His spell of doing nothing created suspense. He liked the idea that he was spreading alarm by not lifting a finger, that he’d become a symbol of intimidation.

I have not drawn blood, he thought, not one drop. I have not hurt a single person physically. I have not put a hand on anyone. I have never raised my voice. I have not cursed, nor shown anger, nor damaged anyone else’s property.

The paradox he saw in the partial destruction of his collection was that he had helped to stimulate the art market and inflate some prices. This was a drawback, if not a defeat. In his period of inaction and watchfulness, his phone warbled all the time — dealers chattering to do business — and he was tempted. But he knew their motives. He was being used. Perhaps this was to be expected, but he saw it as a diminution of his power. He despised them, but he began to doubt himself for having set a wayward impulse loose.

Escaping his apartment, leaving his phone behind, he walked the New York streets in dark glasses and loitered in the open spaces where other anonymous people were idling — Central Park, Union Square, Battery Park. He strolled, sensing that he was being watched, possibly followed; the shutter click of someone ducking out of view whenever he turned. Maybe one of those demented art students.

Sitting on a bench one day in Central Park, near the zoo, he became aware that it was trembling beneath him — the slats, even a gentle rocking of the frame. At the far end of the bench a young woman sat with her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving. She might have been crooning a lullaby softly to herself, but she was sobbing.

At first Minor Watt turned away and prepared to go. What made him linger was the suspicion that the woman would think, in his abrupt departure, he was rejecting her — and that might make her feel even worse.

Seemingly grief-stricken, she turned her smeared face to him and said, “I’m so sorry.”

Now it was too late for him to leave. Nodding at her with a look of consolation, he saw that she was beautiful. Her misery made her fragile and pretty, her sorrow creasing her features with complexity.

“You’re Mr. Watt,” she said.

He was not surprised. He felt that the world knew him, even in his dark glasses and his oblique outings.

Looking closer, he recognized her as the woman from the gallery — Faris’s assistant, where he’d bought the Hopper he’d destroyed. The language of things.

What he’d first noticed about her — her Asiatic pallor, the porcelain smoothness of her skin — was more emphatic, probably because of her weeping. She had the ageless look of someone who’d been kept in a darkened room her whole life: the luminous delicacy of her face, her small shoulders, her slender hands. In contrast was the fullness of her breasts, which seemed to have a personality of their own — when she leaned they seemed to swing for him. Why had he not noticed her beauty before?

“I know you,” he said.

“Mara,” she said.

“How about a cup of coffee?”

At the nearby outdoor café, she told him she was being evicted for not paying her rent. And the reason she had no money was that Faris had laid her off after Minor Watt had stopped buying pictures. “No one’s buying art these days.”

In this period, Minor Watt felt responsible for much that was happening in the world of business, and in the city generally. He sensed that had influenced great shifts of money, not just in the art market but all over, because art was linked to so many areas of the economy. His destruction had made art an even more valuable commodity.

“I used to destroy my artwork,” he said. “You know I’m famous for that. I sometimes think that it was my wish to be an ascetic.”

“No,” Mara said, and got his attention — no one ever disagreed with him. She went on, “Ascetics are driven by pride, the desire to be like gods. You are different from anyone else.”

He stared at the pretty lips that had said this. He thought of installing Mara in his apartment. He had plenty of room. But he said, “How much are we talking about?”

Mara mentioned a round figure. It was nothing to him, yet with facial expressions and movements of his head he made his habitual show of puzzling over the amount.

He normally carried a quantity of ready cash, in case he might see a piece he wanted to buy, and dealers almost swooned when they saw real money. He picked out the amount she had named from his wallet, folded it, and pushed it across the table, the way he might ante up in a poker game.

Palming the money, Mara began to cry again, and then, dabbing her eyes, she wrote something on a napkin and put it into his hand. And, as though overcome by his kindness, she hurried away without another word.

He saw that a telephone number had been stabbed into the limp napkin. But he didn’t call her. Almost a week went by, and she called him, asking him whether he wished to visit her.

“Because you’re responsible for my being here,” she said. “I make good coffee.”

Had she forgotten saying that? Because when he visited her, she opened a bottle of wine and poured him a glass.

“How have you been doing?”

“You know this economy better than I do. I’ve sent out a million résumés.”

He understood what she meant: I don’t have any work.

“I know the art galleries are hurting.”

“You did them a huge favor,” she said. “But my background is finance.”

She was a banker, reduced to flunkying for Tony Faris. To make it easier for her, he said, “How much do you need?”

She mentioned a figure, she raised it by a third, she smiled sadly. She said, “I’ll pay you back with my first paycheck.”

She took the money and made it disappear in her pale hand. She was beautiful, perhaps the more so for looking submissive, with her slightly tangled hair, wearing her best dress. She had a dancer’s legs, slender and yet strong, like her fingers, and her head was small and well shaped on her long neck.

As he was reflecting on her doll-like beauty — thinking, Chinese? Cambodian? — she said, “The first time I saw you with Faris in the gallery I knew you were powerful, the way you carried yourself. I knew you by reputation. I hadn’t realized how young and handsome you were.”

“Very kind of you,” Minor Watt said. “Made my day.”

And as he got up to leave, Mara said, “You don’t have to rush off.”

He said, “I’m tempted to stay.”

But he kissed her lightly and left, wondering at this turn of events.

Then it was he who called her, and met her again at the café in the park. He offered her more money, and she took it without mentioning that she’d pay him back. This happened two more times. It seemed that his giving her money kept her from finding a job, though at the third meeting she said she was still sending out résumés.

“Anyone interested?”

“Sporadically,” she said, and held his hand, tugging. She told him about her family, from Mizoram, next to Assam, all Baptists, yet with an ancient pedigree. Her full name was Mara Lal Pawl. That was how she’d known the Naga necklace and the khanjar and the silver dah. But she was alone here; she had not found another Mizo in New York. Minor Watt thought, Imagine!

“Meet me tomorrow,” he said, and specified a store on Madison Avenue.

He took her to buy jewelry. He helped her pick out shoes. She selected some clothes. He sat while she tried them on, and he thought how she was like a small daughter saying, “How do you like my new dress, Daddy?” He paid for the clothes.

They left the last store — Barneys — and walked around the corner to the Pierre for a drink. He said, “You should have a boyfriend, pretty girl like you.”

“Fired him,” she said. “Besides, I have you.”

He did not reply, just kept walking, and he could see that she was thrown. He said, “Would you do something for me?”

Mara didn’t hesitate. She said, “Anything.”

He let her move into an empty apartment in one of the buildings he owned that was visible from where he lived. Using binoculars he could sometimes see her at her window. He began to live for these glimpses, Mara flashing past, or lingering to look out, not knowing that she was being caressed by his gaze.

Minor Watt went on visiting in the oblique way of a wealthy and secretive friend. He sat and held her in a scrutinizing way, thinking: What is it about her that makes her lovely? The only way to possess her was not to love her, but to support her, to satisfy her with money, and yet to keep her a little hungry and apart. He knew that feeling — the poor might be content with the little they have, but the rich always want more. Sonia had always resisted, her defiance subdued him, and he loved her, but he had never truly possessed her.

By the second month Mara, in her acceptance, became entirely dependent on him.

“I saw Faris the other day,” he said. “He told me I was ruthless.”

“He doesn’t know anything. You’re really very compassionate.”

“You think so?”

She had a beautiful smile. “Oh, yes.”

She didn’t know him. He was a stranger, as featureless as a bank, which was all he was to her, a source of light and money, her sole support.

But with the connoisseurship he’d acquired over many years, he knew her well. She was as familiar to him as any object he’d studied, and like those objects she was an empty vessel, self-regarding, inward-looking, even smug and needing to be held, like all the art he’d ever owned. But that didn’t matter. She was also one of a kind, exotic for being a Mizo, lovely in her own way, perhaps lovelier, more delicate and fragile, more breakable than any piece that had ever passed through his hands. And she belonged to him.

What Minor Watt imagined happening, and what he rehearsed in his mind, was that on the anniversary of Sonia’s leaving him, the beginning of the stock market slide, he would take out the dah that she had once recognized and named. He would carry it to the apartment that Mara occupied, and he would confront her, gripping the foot-long dagger by its silver hilt. And then, as before, when facing Sonia with the rare vase, he would hope for inspiration. Perhaps nothing would happen. Perhaps in dramatic finality he would lift his hand and slash Mara’s throat and watch her bleed to death on the carpet from Khotan. And he would say to all the people who condemned him, “Now do you see?”

What actually happened was that he visited the apartment, the dah tucked inside his jacket. Mara smiled when she let him in, but she also seemed to notice that his posture was odd. He was slightly canted to one side, favoring a crease in his jacket.

Minor Watt touched her, smoothing her pale slender neck with his fingers, a characteristic gesture.

Then he said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Mara stepped back with widened eyes, moving her lips, as though translating what he had just said into her own language, and terrified by it. Surprised by her reaction — why wasn’t she reassured? — Minor Watt slipped his hand beneath his jacket and located the knife. But Mara was quicker. She moved on him with an old-fashioned slap, an efficient Asiatic chop, and the knife clattered to the hardwood floor. She dived at it and with a sweeping gesture grasped the handle, shook off its scabbard, and poked the blade at him. Flapping his hands in distress, Minor Watt shrieked. His own voice scared him: she had cut him, she had drawn blood. No one had ever injured him. Fearing for his life, he grew small as Mara loomed. In that moment she ceased to be ornamental. She was a horror to him, as though one of his pieces of art had come alive. Turning into a tribeswoman, suddenly feline, with blazing eyes, she pointed the dagger at him.

Minor Watt was murmuring as if in prayer, pleading for his life, as Mara said, “This is a Burmese dah, but we have similar knives in Mizoram. Some are well made. Most of them are tools,” she went on, examining the blade, “instruments for cutting — for killing.” Now she held it to his anguished face. “They are not trophies. Not art, but useful objects. Now I think you know that.”

Minor Watt backed away, looking at the ugly thing in her hand, reminding her that he had been kind to her.

“Here’s what I want you to do for me,” Mara said.

“Anything,” he said.

“Remove all your clothes,” she said.

Without raising her voice, Mara repeated her request. And he obeyed, undressing slowly, and finally stepping out of his boxer shorts, one hand cupped at his groin for the sake of modesty, the other raised to protect his face, at the level of the blade.

Begging her now, he was gabbling, and Mara’s look of disgust convinced him that she meant to kill him. She made as if to slash him, but only nicked his chin. Even so, he howled at the sight of the blood that dripped on his pale belly.

She prodded again, moving him with the blade into the elevator and down to the ground floor, then let him run. And — grateful, eager — he fled from the apartment, out of the building, naked, his hands and body smeared, absurd, from his touching his wounds, a laughingstock on the busy street, a hilarious news item in these anxious times.