Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (best time to read books txt) 📕

his coat. Nothing too big, but he could put double-sided mounting tape on the back, and when the right moment came . . . just stick the painting on the wall. Right there for the world to see, between the Rubens and the Picasso . . . an original work by Terry Fletcher.

In the Tate Gallery, crowding the Turner painting of Snow Storm: Hannibal and His Army Crossing the Alps, there would be Terry's mom, smiling. She'd be drying her hands in a red-and-white-striped dishtowel. In the Prado Museum, butted up against the Velázquez portrait of the Infanta would be his girlfriend, Rudy. Or his dog, Boner.

Sure, it was his work, his signature, but this would be about heaping glory on the people he loved.

It's too bad that most of his work would end up hung in a museum's bathroom. It was the only space without a guard or security camera. During slow hours, he could even step into the ladies' room and hang a picture.

Not every tourist went into every gallery of a museum, but they all went to the bathroom.

It almost didn't seem to matter, how the picture looked. What made it art, a masterpiece, that seemed to depend on where it hung . . . how rich the frame looked . . . and what other work it hung beside. If he did his research, found the right antique frame, and hung his picture in the center of a crowded wall, it would be there for days, maybe weeks, before he got a call from the museum staff. Or the police.

Then came the charges: malicious mischief, destruction of public property, graffiti.

“Litter,” a judge called his art, and slapped Terry with a fine and a night in jail.

In the cell the police give Terry Fletcher, everybody before him had been an artist, scratching away the green paint to make pictures on each wall. Then to sign their name. Petroglyphs more original than Kokopelli. The Mona Lisa. By names that weren't Pablo Picasso. It was that night, looking at those pictures, Terry almost gave up.

Almost.

The next day, a man came to his studio, where black flies circled a pile of fruit Terry had been trying to paint when he was arrested. This was the lead art critic for a chain of newspapers. He was a friend of the judge from the night before, and this critic said, yes, he found the whole story funny as hell. A perfect story for his syndicated column about the art world. Even with the sweet smell of the rotting fruit, the flies buzzing, this man said he'd love to see Terry's work.

“Very good,” the critic said, looking at canvas after canvas, each of them small enough to fit inside a trench coat. “Very, very good.”

The black flies kept circling, landing on the spotted apples and black bananas, then buzzing around the two men.

The critic wore eyeglasses with each lens as thick as the porthole on a ship. Talking to him, you'd want to shout, the way you'd yell to someone behind an upstairs window, inside a big house and not coming to answer the locked door.

Still, he was absolutely, positively, undeniably NOT Tannity Brewster.

Most of the best pictures, Terry told him, they were still in lockup as evidence in future trials.

But the critic said that didn't matter. The day after, he brought a gallery owner and a collector, both of them famous from their opinions being in national magazines all the time. The group of them look at his work. They keep repeating the name of an artist famous for his messy prints of dead celebrities and signing his work huge with a can of red spray paint.

Again, this gallery owner was not Dennis Bradshaw. And when she spoke, this art collector had a Texan accent. Her red-blond hair was the exact creepy orange-peel color as her tanned shoulders and neck, but she was not Bret Hillary Beales.

She's a totally made-up character. But as she looked at his painting, she kept using the word “bankable.”

She even had a little tattoo that said “Sugar” in lacy script on her ankle, just above her sandaled foot, but she was in no way, absolutely not, nope, NOT Miss Bret Hillary Beales.

No, this fake, made-up critic, art collector, and gallery owner, at last, they tell our artist: Here's the deal. They have millions invested in the work of this messy printmaker, but his current output was flooding the art market. He was making money with volume, but driving down the value of his earlier work. The value of their investment.

The deal was, if Terry Fletcher will kill the printmaker—then the art critic, the gallery owner, and the collector will make Terry famous. They'll turn him into a good investment. His work will sell for a fortune. The pictures of his mother and girlfriend, his dog and hamster, they'll get the buildup they need to become as classic as the Mona Lisa. As the Kokopelli, that Hopi god of mischief.

In his studio, the black flies still circled the same heap of soft apples and limp bananas.

And if it helps, they tell Fletcher, the printmaker only got famous because he murdered a lazy sculptor, who in turn had murdered a pushy painter, who had murdered a sell-out collage maker.

All those people are still dead while their work sits in a museum, like a bank account every minute snowballing in value. And not even pretty value, as the colors go brown as a van Gogh sunflower, the paint and varnish cracking and turning yellow. Always so much smaller than people would expect after waiting all day in line.

The art market had worked this way for centuries, the critic said. If Terry chose not to take this, his first real “commission,” it was no problem. But he still had a long future of unsettled court cases, charges still outstanding against him. These art people could wipe out all that with a phone call. Or they could make it worse. Even if