For a time it worked. I found a sort of simplicity. I sketched in charcoal, in little notebooks. For the first time in a long while, I sketched what was in front of me, and I wondered whether this was not, after all, a species of apocatastasis: a new primordial beginning. I had been celebrated as the transnational man, the Ethiopian who painted the industrial north-west. I was a post-primitivist riposte to Warhol, a neo-modern Irrealist dabbling in political anger. I knew this because it had been written in magazines. Perhaps more than anything, to the public and to the musicians and celebrities with whom I spent my time, I was the man who spoke to aliens—and yet, now the aliens had apparently stopped visiting, perhaps I might just be an artist. And if that meant I didn’t get invited to the upscale parties any more, maybe that, too, would be a survivable catastrophe.