Except that when I drew—holding in my mind those friendly lines, the patterns of shade that defined a fat man’s chin or the hips of a serving woman—it did not matter how closely I hewed to the task, what emerged was the sort of contemptible, wild imagining from which I had made my useless fame. The shark was everywhere, tiny and vast, playful and appalling. One of the smallest sketches was the most awful, somehow staring out of the wall and watching you as you moved, the way portraits are supposed to, though I have never seen it except in this one case, as if I had captured a perfect essence of predation and execution in my little cell, and now I was imprisoned with my own personal memento venatoris. I did not own my hands, my arms. Day upon day I threw my pencil away, and—seeing how I failed and failed—whenever they came and snapped another of my bones, they likewise replaced the stub with another. Sometimes it was a fine artist’s charcoal or a soft lead, sometimes a colour, so that I would be drawn, bruised and shaking and stained with sweat and the inevitable piss of sudden agony, to repeat my failure. They encouraged me to addict myself to that combination of failure and pain and thereby made me torture myself. I could not stop trying, and each attempt embroidered the mosaic of image and strangeness on my walls and ceiling until the cell was the best work I had ever done, and the most bizarre, a many-eyed woman gazing at me from above while my own image cowered in a corner and was lifted up by three others, like some Bible scene in a church.