Drowning Lessons by Peter Selgin

do? No prolific master of twentieth-century art has ever been sore at me before.
    I knock. The door opens. Picasso wears a white terry-cloth robe. With a nod he motions me into the cool, rattan-shaded space. On the desk: papers spread out under scattered crayons. He’s been sketching. On the topmost sheet figures float in a sea of childish waves, blood arrows wheeling like gulls around them. He has mapped our collision, charted its course, latitude, longitude, vector. Annotations filigree the margins, state’s evidence: the geometry of disaster. A heavy
X
marks the point of impact. I recognize my foot. Where it strikes Picasso’s Minotaur head the sketch is animated with a series of pulsing slashes. For the rest of me Picasso has drawn not man but whale: precisely, he has drawn Monstro, the grinning leviathan that swallowed Pinocchio and his toy-maker father, Gepetto. He’s signed the goddamn thing.
    â€œWhat’s all this about?” I say, picking it up.
    He seizes and crumples the sketch into a ball, then lies back inhis bed with a wad of tissue pressed to his nose. The ceiling fan squeaks.
    The road narrows; the lines of perspective converge. Peripheries are nullified as the geometry of death reasserts itself. We plunge into a funnel. I’ve grown suspicious of our destination, wondering if we’ll ever get where we’re going, supposedly.
    â€œDon’t you have to be dead to be a saint?” I ask.
    â€œIt helps,” says Picasso. “But unless one has the goods, one may drop dead forever and it will get one nowhere.”
    â€œIt would be a shame to drive all this way for nothing,” I say.
    â€œYou are a skeptic. And anyway can you not simply enjoy the ride? Why does a journey need a purpose anyway?” says Picasso. “For the same reason a picture needs a subject: merely as an excuse for the paint, to have something to hang shapes, colors, and textures on.”
    â€œAre you sure you didn’t make her up?”
    â€œWho?”
    â€œSister Whatsherface, the saint.”
    â€œThe saint, the saint!” Picasso throws his hands in the air. “Is that all you can think about? Such a hopelessly narrow mind for such a broad body! With that sort of mentality how do you expect to get anywhere?”
    â€œShe doesn’t exist, does she?”
    â€œYou will never be an artist, that’s for sure!”
    â€œIt’s all a bunch of bullshit, isn’t it?”
    â€œYou will be one of the countless poor sods who dream of painting but end up only making pictures of things.”
    â€œDoes it occur to you, Mr. Picasso, that I don’t
want
to be a painter?”
    Picasso says nothing. He sits with arms folded, bottom lip pugnaciously pursed, steaming like an espresso pot. We ride in silence for a mile or two. Then he blurts:
    â€œYou want a purpose? Fine! Pick one! Whatever strikes your fancy. Say you want to go mushroom hunting, or mountain climbing, or spelunking with those big, fat, flat feet. Maybe you and I will track down Bigfoot or the Abominable Snowman — the South American one! Don’t like my suggestions? Come up with your own. Whatever you pick, I will happily accept. And if you can’t come up with a purpose, come up with a texture, or a color. Call it a brown journey, or a blue one. Whatever you say, Maestro, Picasso will back you 100 percent!”
    We reach the Andes, which shed their cool color and their charm as we transgress them. The Topolino struggles. Now I know why Picasso calls it the goat. Wishful thinking! A goat would chew up these hills! But our little mouse quakes in fear. Halfway up a near-vertical grade, with a gouge of smoke the engine dies. Soon we’re side by side, backs to the bumper, pushing.
    â€œFucking Fiat,” I say, forgetting myself.
    â€œIt was just so with me and Monsieur Braque,” says Picasso. “Two mountaineers roped together, scaling the heights!”
    â€œI told