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We walked across the waiting area and found two seats that had opened up. I kept looking back at the TV, but it had gone to commercials. Mal unwrapped and retightened the towel on his hand. I watched as the blood on my hands and feet slowly dried.

“I don't remember ever bleeding like this before,” I
said. I was a little scared. I didn't know if this meant something had happened to me. How many nail holes could a person have before it was too many?

Mal coughed into his hand. “I'm moving out when we leave here.”

I looked at him and didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say.

“No,” he said. “Forget that. You move out. I need that shitty little room. You'll make big money in no time. I've got no place else to go.”

“Fine,” I said, and then I made my way across the room. My stomach growled and I felt slightly dizzy. I hadn't had much to eat all day. I headed toward a table with coffee and cookies. On the TV my image popped back up, out of focus and shaking, about to perform the trick that drove me out of Texas.

My friendship with Mal ended just that quickly. He'd gone from being a guardian in Texas to abusing me in New York and now he'd kicked me out in an effort to get away from my success—if you could call being on a late-night video show success—angry that we'd headed east rather than west. I didn't know where to go or what to do. I was hungry and there was food on the table in front of me. As I continued to it I bumped into the young doctor, only now he had a mop and a bucket. Revealed as not a doctor but the janitor, more concerned with the cleanliness of the floor than the suffering of those on it, he slapped water to tiles.

“Hey, asshole,” he said. “Quit walking around. You keep bleeding on my floor.” He pulled the mop after me as I walked across the room, all the way to the cookies, and smeared my bloody footprints with his dirty gray water that smelled like black cherry soda.

FOR A VERY
brief moment after Mal kicked me out of our hotel room, I thought I would end up living on the streets. The idea didn't scare me. The street just presented itself, without any other options around it. I left Mal at the hospital and took a cab to the hotel. On the way back it occurred to me that I held the money from my unexpected performance, so when I got to the hotel I stopped at the front desk to get a room of my own. I wondered if I'd ever had a room of my own.

The thin woman behind the glass, with her ringed eyes and beakish nose, looked like a strange, denuded bird on display. I thought she would never leave her cage, and it looked rarely cleaned. She asked if I wanted the room for the night or just for an hour.

“The night,” I said.

“Wait, you're one of the guys in room seven, right?” She pulled out a piece of torn paper, a corner from a tabloid. “You got a phone call here while you was out.” She slipped the paper under the half-circle hole in the glass and on it I found, written in the neatest hand I'd ever seen, a simple, telegram-style message:

The Manhattan phone number at the bottom looked important; somehow the digits all made sense together. I memorized them without trying.

Mal was right. I'd have little trouble finding money, an agent, or attention for doing what came naturally to me: inserting sharp and jagged objects into my skin.

The next morning I called the number to talk to Michael. Instead I talked to his enthusiastic assistant, Robert. Robert took my call as a great sign. He'd seen my “show” live and gotten my number from Redbach.

“I know Michael will be happy you called.” Robert spoke in a professionally manic voice. “You know, I showed him the tape. Even though it was, like, a copy of a copy of a copy, it was still pretty good. Michael agreed. We both thought you just have to have an agent.” He sounded like a prophet revealing the mysteries of life.

“Great.” I fought an urge to hang up. “Thanks.”

Michael's office was in Times Square. The woman
behind the desk, who under any other circumstance would have crossed the street to avoid my type, warmed to me as if I had diamonds falling from my pockets.

Alternating mirrors and movie and television posters lined the waiting room walls. I glanced around. My face flashed by in the mirrors. I sat down and buried my face in an issue of
People
.

When Robert came to get me he led me down a hall lined with more mirrors and posters. Only then did I realize how bad I looked. I had worn my suit because I really didn't have any other clothes. Mal had lent me most of my other outfits. Now I was myself: crumpled, dirty. And the tear in the right pants leg from Caesar's claws hadn't repaired well.

“I'm so glad you called us.” Robert flashed smiles at me over his shoulder, a beacon as we wandered through a maze of halls to Michael's office. “You know, I showed Michael the tape, and he loved it. He was shocked to find out you didn't have an agent.” He said this as if he hadn't told me the exact same thing when we spoke on the phone.

“Yeah. By the way, did you have to pay Redbach for my number?”

“Well, he made us buy the tape before he'd tell us.”

I asked what they'd seen on the tape. I had imagined it was me in Caesar's cage. I was wrong.

“It's you nailed to his bar. He sells them for twenty-five dollars.”

“I didn't know there was a tape of that.”

“You mean there are other tapes?”

“Yeah, well, it could have been the one of me in a lion's cage.”

Saying that brought the reaction people normally save for watching me pierce nails through my hands. Robert stopped short and a man in a much better suit than mine stood in a doorway, eyebrows arched and mouth gaping. Their excitement made me nervous. They looked at each other a moment, then Robert smiled and said, “Michael, this is him.”

Michael smiled back at Robert. It was some sort of infection. “Let's go into my office.”

A window aimed up Broadway dominated the room. It was actually three windows that formed a slight arc, and the crowds on the street below flowed like a tide. The room felt like the bridge of a great ship plowing through the people. I imagined the building moving forward, the masses being left behind.

Michael and I sat in chairs facing the windows. We looked at each other over a small table with ice water pitchers and crackers. Robert brought a couple cups of coffee, then disappeared.

Michael reclined heavily into his chair, almost as if pushing back in order to tip it. His suit remained neat, even while sitting, and the sunlight coming through the window caught highlights in his slick hair. He treated the view as something he'd seen too many times for too
many days. A distraction. Me he watched. It wasn't a gawk or a stare, which I normally received. Just an appraisal. I grew very aware of scabs and scars littering the skin between my fingers and thumbs. The staple holes along my neck and in my earlobes. The cuts on my lips from biting myself. The nicks on my face and neck from my razor. I could be so clumsy even while standing still. Even the cuts and punctures down my back and buttocks felt revealed. He took it all in, a judge of how I'd treated myself.

He remained silent.

“I'm not sure why I'm here,” I said.

He grinned. “That's okay. I do.”

Another minute went by in silence and the chair no longer seemed as comfortable. Michael noticed my fidgeting and poured me a glass of water. “Most people would want to pitch you this or that,” he said. “I just want to tell you a story. You want to hear a story?”

“Sure.”

“It's your story, actually. But I don't think you know it as I do. You know your story one way, just as you lived it. But I know it as it's presented right now, in one shot, just from the way you sit there, looking around and nervously jiggling your knees. I know it as the image of you as you are right now.”

He stood and removed his jacket, placed it on a hanger on the back of his door, retook his seat.

“You're not really certain of where you've come from
or how you got here. Everything is a bit overwhelming, scary even. You're uncertain of whom can be trusted because you've been deceived in the past. But through all this uncertainty and deception, and sometimes good times, but often hard, you've had one thing, a gift, a talent that you have that no one else seems to have.”

Michael stopped to turn one of the cups of coffee into a mess. He slopped too much cream and sugar into it. Tan liquid spilled over the cup's rim and settled into the saucer. He stirred at it as if beating it back and then laid the spoon on the table. A trickle of coffee trailed from the spoon's underside.

He lifted the cup to his lips, one hand positioned underneath to catch drips that would have landed in his lap. Before setting the cup back in the saucer he pulled three paper napkins from the serving tray. He lay them in the saucer, then placed the cup on top. He cleaned the spilled coffee from both cup and saucer. He lifted the cup and removed the napkins. He wiped the spoon and stray drops. He placed the cup in its saucer and the spoon to the side on a napkin, then threw the ball of used napkins in a wastebasket in the corner. He leaned back in his chair, and I examined the perfect still life he'd created out of his cup of coffee. The mess made just moments before gone, Michael returned his gaze to me. He'd obliterated disorder.
This is what Michael does,
I thought.
He takes the mess away and makes things neat and organized.

“As I was saying,” he continued, “you've never done
more with your talent than a quick display here and there. Few people have seen it, but when they do they are impressed. Despite this, you don't seem able to get anywhere. You feel like you're skimming along the surface. You don't know if you know what's happening. You don't know if you can trust people because you've been let down.”

I was sure it hadn't been so warm when I'd come in. “Could I have some water?”

Michael nodded at the glass he'd already poured for me. “I know how hard it is to hear your own story from a stranger. How do I know all this? Because it's every artist's story.”

“Artist?”

“Sure. Why not? You have a canvas; it just happens to be your skin. I can see the marks of your work on your hands and neck.” Michael pointed at the window. “See the crowds out there? They don't know they need you yet, because we haven't made them need you. We'll carve them up into two camps, those who hate you and those who love you. When they argue about you, you'll be more than just a guy with pins in his skin. You'll be your own work of art.”

I said, “I'll be a commodity.”

Michael followed my eyes. “Exactly.” He drank the rest of his coffee.

As I sipped my ice water I spotted something floating along the bottom. Something black and hard and crusty.
“You haven't even asked me where I'm from. About my past or who I was working with in the video.”

“That's because nobody cares. It's not important.”

“It's not?”

“Of course not.” He went to a cabinet in the wall and opened it, revealing shelves filled with cameras, carefully laid out files and pictures, and a column of drawers running up to the ceiling, each neatly labeled. He removed a packet of film from one and loaded a Polaroid camera. “You want to tell your story. I'll help you tell it. Show me your biggest scar.”

For an instant I thought about leaving. Then I felt myself scratching at my right leg through the stitched-up pants. Maybe there is something about wounds that makes them want to be seen; the ones Caesar gave me itched.

Michael mistook my delay for embarrassment. “Trust me.” He locked the door. “No one sees this picture if you don't want them to, but when I take it you'll see what is important about your story and what isn't. You'll see who you can be.”

I unbuckled my belt and lowered my pants. I showed him the scar that ran along my thigh.

“Oh, God. That's big,” he said. “Hold still.” He took a picture. I expected him to take more, to use up all the film from different angles and then create a file filled with my scars. Instead he took just the one, then turned back to the shelves. He put the camera back into its
proper place, shut the cabinet, and fanned himself lazily with the picture, waiting for it to reveal my image.

He said, “There's something you're hiding from me. What you are afraid to say to me is the stuff you want to keep for yourself and that's fine. Don't tell me, don't tell anyone. If you share too much, it will start to haunt you. We're painting a picture of you. It can look any way we want it to.”

The room quieted a moment, and the view of the street continued to plow along. Michael stopped flapping the photo and said, “I understand you've been trying to locate a shop that may be the place your suit is from. How's that going?”

“How do you know that?”

A shrug. “That guy selling the tapes sells more than just tapes. How goes the search?”

“Not good.”

Michael smiled. “I didn't think so. You look lost. But you don't have to be. Leave what information you have with Robert and we'll get somebody on it. In the meantime, I want you to understand we can make you as big as you want to be.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It is.” Michael looked at the picture. “This is the picture of you that we're painting for the public. I think it's a pretty amazing picture.” He handed it to me.

Instead of a picture of my thigh, focusing on the scar, I saw a picture of me. All of me. I looked confused and
tired, my pants dangling around my knees, my eyes focused up and to the left, toward the window that you couldn't see in the picture. The light from outside illuminated me, and my hands hung at my sides. I must have been about to say something, though I couldn't remember what, because I looked ready to speak. I was sweaty and shiny and something in my face made me think of Mal. I felt tired and scared.

I said, “You're always looking for new talent, right?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I have a friend. He's got a great act, breathing fire and juggling. He could use an agent too.”

Michael nodded. He avoided eye contact. “I could talk to him, see his act. I'd have to see what he can do before I could agree.”

“Sure. But if you were my agent and he wanted to meet with you—”

With a great smile Michael said, “My door is always open for my clients' friends.” He took the photo back and said, “This picture is just the first that will be taken of you. Are you ready to start helping me show you to the public?”

I said I was. I pulled my pants up and buckled my belt.