It hung above his mantel, the painting, and on those nights when he could not sleep he would pour a glass of whisky and talk to the headless hawk, tell it the stuff of his life: he was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved (absolutely) – someone, in short without direction, and quite headless. Oh it wasn’t that he hadn’t tried – good beginnings, always, bad endings, always. Vincent, white, male, age thirty-six, college graduate: a man in the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed. It was there, all of it, in the painting, everything disconnected and cockeyed, and who was she that she should know so much?