A Five-Minute Life

I laughed and put my hand over my heart. During my eighteen months of amnesia, Jim had watched all nine seasons of The Office. Four times.

“Go,” he said. “They’re waiting for you to knock ’em dead.”

Eme and I gave a guided tour of the exhibit to a group of art aficionados, critics, dealers, and press. Around us, the general public perused at their leisure while attendants circulated with little trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres.

“This first room is called ‘Desert Spring,’” Eme said. “The artist ready to bloom into her craft.”

I leaned into Eme. “Bloom into my craft?”

“Just go with it,” she murmured back.

“Desert Spring” featured my work from art school—the pyramids and desert scenes, the Nile and the Sphinx.

Eme led us into the next area, called “Scream.” The drawings of Egypt now scratched out of word chains. My cries for help. There weren’t many—only those Jimmy and Dr. Chen had saved in the weeks before the first stem cell procedure.

I overheard murmurs of awe and muffled talk as the group craned their necks to read the chains of tiny, precise script. I cocked my head to read one.

Carried buried bury born torn mourn moan loan alone lone lonely lonely lonely

My skin broke out in gooseflesh. It’d been so lonely in the amnesia, but those days were harder to remember and fading away with every passing moment with Jimmy and Jack.

“Next, we have ‘Turning Point,’” Eme said.

Only one painting was displayed here: the ruined canvas of New York City. A bouquet of skyscrapers sprouting out of Central Park and black swaths of paint slapped across the blue sky.

I shivered again and said a silent prayer for anyone else who’d suffered assault or abuse or bullying—little boys on playgrounds or women trapped in their own beds—who felt they didn’t have a voice left.

I see you, I thought and knew Jimmy did too. He’d made it his life’s purpose to give kids their voices back.

“Thea?”

I blinked out of my thoughts.

Then came “Transition.” Here were the Jackson Pollock-like paintings from after the first procedure. A different kind of cry for help lay in the composition. To be free to experience the world and all its colors. Not be contained to a single canvas.

A dimly lit alcove housed the paintings I made after I went back into the amnesia. All the paintings of New Yo

rk at night as seen from the Arthouse Hotel. A few other canvases showing Times Square in geometric planes of color. Abstract, like photographic flares.

“This,” Eme said dramatically, “is called ‘Dreamscape.’”

I grinned. “Subtle.”

“Shh, they love it.”

Finally, the last room, brightly lit and the most colorful, was hung with the paintings I made after the second procedure. My best work from the last ten years. No more vast deserts or cityscapes, these canvases were all scenes from our little home in Boones Mill.

Jimmy on a Saturday morning, sleeping with our infant son on his chest. The two of them with their mouths open in identical expressions.

Our living room coffee table cluttered with Jack’s toys and my sketches.

Jimmy’s guitar in the corner of a room, the light streaming in from the window. Always with sunlight pouring in from every window.

The tour concluded, and the group murmured and perused and snapped photos.

“Do you hear that?” Eme said. “That’s the sound of your art reaching them and making them want it to reach even further. Well done, my dear. Not that I’m surprised. I have an eye for these things.”

“Thank you, Eme. For everything.”