“Okay, then just tell me what’s it a picture of.”
“I don’t know, Teresa…”
“How can you say you love me if you won’t even break the rules to help me?”
“No, I mean I really don’t know. Like I said, art is not my thing. I’m just a delivery guy. Besides—” He blushed.
“You know what my thing is.”
“Well, my thing is art,” I said. “And I’m going to lose the chance of a lifetime—hell, of more than that, of artistic inmortalidad—if I don’t come up with something pretty soon.”
“Teresa, quit worrying,” he said. “The painting’s so famous even I’ve heard of it. There’s no way it can not happen. Meanwhile, let’s don’t spend our last—”
“Our what? Our last what? Why are you standing there with your hands behind your back?”
He pulled out a rose. “Don’t you understand? This Chronolink closes forever after the pickup tonight. I don’t know where my next job will take me, but it won’t be here.”
“So what’s the rose for?”
“To remember our… our…” He burst into tears.
Girls cry hard and fast and it’s over. Guys from the future are more sentimental, and Shorty cried himself to sleep.
After comforting him as best I could, I pulled on my T-shirt and underpants and found a clean brush and started pacing again. I left him snoring on the bed, a short brown Adonis without even a fig leaf.
“Wake me up at four,” he mumbled, then went back to sleep.
I looked at the rosa he had brought. The roses of the future had soft thorns; that was encouraging. I laid it on the pillow next to his cheek and that was when it came to me, in the form of a whole picture, which is how it always comes to me when it finally does. (And it always does.)
When I’m painting and it’s going well, I forget everything. It seemed like only minutes before the phone rang.
“Well? How’s it going?”
“Borogove, it’s almost four in the morning.”
“No, it’s not, it’s four in the afternoon. You’ve been working all night and all day, Teresa, I can tell. But you really have to call me Mimsy.”
“I can’t talk now,” I said. “I have a live model. Sort of.”
“I thought you didn’t work from live models.”
“This time I am.”
“Whatever. Don’t let me bother you while you’re working; I can tell you’re getting somewhere. The opening is at seven. I’m sending a van for you at six.”
“Make it a limo, Mimsy,” I said. “We’re making art history.”
“It’s beautiful,” Borogove said, as I unveiled “La Rosa del Futuro” for her. “But who’s the model? He looks vaguely familiar.”
“He’s been around the art world for years and years,” I said.
The gallery was packed. The show was a huge success. “La Rosa,” “De Mon Mouse,” and “Los Tres” were already marked SOLD, and SOLD stickers went up on my other paintings at the rate of one every twenty minutes.
Everybody wanted to meet me. I had left Shorty directions and cab fare by the bed, and at eleven-thirty he showed up wearing only my old boyfriend’s trenchcoat, saying that his shimmery suit had disappeared into thin air while he was pulling it on.
I wasn’t surprised. We were in the middle of a Timeslip, after all.
“Who’s the barefoot guy in the fabulous Burberry?” Borogove asked. “He looks vaguely familiar.”