Here he was in control, his body less nervous, his eyes less vulnerable. He raised the lid of a terrarium, and behind a cactus a dun lizard's tail lashed the sand. I love these, he said, reaching in to touch a cactus spine. Look at them. They know the secret.
Life is a drug.
We'll turn ourselves into anything to have it. I looked again at the drawings, and all at once they were morbid. Around the edge of each object, tossed onto the white shore of paper by an unfathomable sea, was an intense, obliterating space. Every line in the drawing battled this void. The overdrawn precision was claustrophobic.