My girlfriend Carissa wears breasts like no other. I am eleven, but she stoops on account of my painting ability and my bank account. Truly, I am prodigious at art. I have had four shows that sold out even before the doors were open. Mahmoud says the Lady Who Made Me bought them all. Mahmoud is a liar and an incontinent. He is also my best friend. The Lady Who Made Me drinks port until her planet looks bright. I pay the gas bills.
My dealer is named Fenton. It happened once that I fell asleep on a palette and Fenton sold it for enough to remodel our kitchen. I was not proud. I severely reprimanded him with the aid of my elbows. Recently, he has been thieving items from my room, dubbing the 'Hope in Candyland,’ and 'Sink,' and ’Cat Call,' and whatnot, and selling them to businessmen for extortionate sums. His house is as big as three houses. He says my sloth-like manner of painting injures us both. Yesterday, he suggested employing a team of people to paint on my behalf. We were sipping chair at the office. Again, I forcibly ejected the idea from his brain with physical violence.
I work exclusively in oil and on a large scale. I paint on average eight hours a day. The highest price ever paid for a piece of my work was £215,000. The piece was titled Dear Mum, Please Go Back In Time And Abort Me. They buyer wished to remain anonymous but failed to do so and was later identified by the Daily Mail as a Congolese kleptocrat named Patrice.
Today, Carissa met me at the school gates the same way Carissa always meets me at the school gates. With her lips, she sucked up a reef of the busted blood vessel on my neck. I noticed we were being dogged by a man with a skull-sized camera strapped to his ribs and I lobbed my lunchbox at his head and he went away.
We continued with Mahmoud on the motorway bridge. He came with double malt beer and a fax machine. Once the beer was gone, we scrolled through the passing cars, looking for a suitable target. The fax machine was a sizeable crater in what Mahmoud insists was a Bugatti. I told him he was blind. He told me he was lumpy.
"Kimchi," I said, on account of it being our safe word.
Cars are art but so is destroying expensive things that don't belong to you.
Carissa cradled me like a baby and carried me to safety as the supposed Bugatti driver emerged to holler at the clouds above. Carissa is twenty. A palm reader once promised she was immortal. Truly she is the most angelic being either side of the Thames. There are times when she makes me forget the impossibility of a higher power.
Partial list of misappropriated hood ornaments in my current collection: 12 Mercedes tri-stars, 4 broken chains of Audi rings, 1 Rolls Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, 2 leaping Jaguars, 1 custom chrome skull with red glass eyes.
I left school at eleven this morning and had Calabassi drive me to the studio. Attendance is not mandatory for the prodigious on account of our futures lying above the sad tracks of exam papers and whatnot. Our superpowers cannot be learned from books because they're already inside us, waiting to be dug out.
I recommenced work on a 6' × 4' reimagining of the Last Supper in which ever face is my face and every meal is me. Truly I am modest but I am also fair and I think it is a work of genius. Fenton and me admired it while sipping tea and shucking pistachios.
Carissa arrived at four. She looked as though she'd spent the day being waterboarded. I offered her tea. She screamed when I tried to touch her.
"What is it?" I said. She pelted my clavicles with her open hands.
"I wish you didn't exists,’ she told me. She left.
I ventured off to drink beer and empty my skull of tears on the motorway bridge. I was recognised by a middle aged man who attempted to photograph me with his phone until I smacked my bottle and chased him with the jagged remains. Truthfully, I am grateful to be remembered. But I want to be alone.
Aggressive tendencies, an unrivalled ability to concentrate for long periods of time, and an impressive vocabulary means that many adults have suspected some kind of disorder at work in my brain. I failed the test for autism twice. The only thing wrong with me is me.
It was Friday when Carissa ate my heart. Today is Monday. I spent the entire weekend in the studio, chewing coffee beans to stay awake and pitching paint at giant canvases.
It did not work.
I made nothing.
My new paintings look like the paintings of an eleven year old. All of them gutter-balls. My notoriety and future are heavily dependent on me being an eleven year old whose paintings do not look like the paintings of an eleven year old. I have made a list of the tallest buildings in the city. Not only did I fail to produce anything new, I squandered several promising works in progress with zigzags and failure to keep colour where it should be. I draw stick people now. Women with triangles for dresses. Suns with smiling faces. It’s all over I am going to sleep.
Fenton woke me with a soft jab to the cheek and immediately began extolling my efforts. He spun in circles, gesturing with his clammy hands, leaking spit like a lawn sprinkler. He called it a whole new kind of primitivism. He said it was the most exciting work I'd had produced. He vomited large numbers, promising we’d become richer than we already are, and attempted to embrace me. I kicked him in the shin.
I told him they were the worst, and I was the worst, and the paintings would be used as fuel for a colossal bonfire around which I would dance naked save for a waterproof poncho. He commenced the hailing of many Marys. He told me I was insane. Three times he asked me whether I would set money alight.
"No," I told him. "Probably not."
"Then I imply you to let me have them," he said.
I upper cut his ball sack and left him for dead.
Later I returned to the studio and, with the aid of my driver, Calabassi, proceeded to remove every canvas and board. We relocated them to my bedroom. I laid him off with a generous severance package and triple locked my door. A metal grill has now been fitted. I am not coming out.
The first painting I sold was a 4' × 4' oil on wood depiction of The Lady Who Made Me getting explicit with a gang of great apes. It was titled "Hopes For The Future." Every newspaper jumped. The Man Whose Sperm Is In My Foundation was around then. His hobbies included beer and bed and online poker. Six times since leaving he asked me for money via requests written on Birthday cards sent on day that are absolutely not my birthday. I sent them straight back. I am not interested.
It is more important now than ever to continue on with the expansion of my collection of car ornaments. I cannot paint but I can repurpose. Last night when the sun left, I exited through the window and commenced hunting for suitable vehicles.
After my first show, I bought our current house specifically because it lies in a wealthy area studded with impressive cars. Some cars have retractable mascots. Most do not. Badges are fairly easy to chip off but difficult to remove in one piece. BMWs are the biggest challenge. A thin chisel is needed. I do not know why but Mercedes tri-stars come off the easiest. I have mugged several cars in the area multiple times. Now their owners are getting their replacements fixed on with Araldite to prevent them from doing so.
Anyways, I only managed an Alpha Romeo and the foot of a Peugeot lion. My heart was somewhere else.
Nine missed calls from Mahmoud. Nineteen missed calls from Fenton. Six hundred and fourteen unread emails.
Today I thought of Carissa and her breasts and the way she flaps her hands when she's excited and I screamed all manner of sadness at The Dog Star.
The little lump of meat that is me had multiple appearances on breakfast TV, late night TV, lunchtime talk radio, and a celebrity cooking show in which I attempted to make a risotto and found that I could not. There are people besides Fenton in charge of who I am. A woman named Louise is tasked with making me look as young as possible at all times to keep my prices high. Once I arrived at a show in New York with beer on my breath and she made me chew fifteen tablets of gum before engaging in any conversation. You’re eleven, she told me. I know, I said. That night three women accompanied me to my hotel room and we played Yahtzee until I fell asleep. I felt like a minor deity.
The Lady Who Made Me spent her entire day fist fighting with my bedroom door. She begged me to come out. She told me I was being selfish and that I needed to get ready for the show. She made mention of glass chalets on Lake Como, Apple watches, and an ultra-rare Armagnac that re-dates the Boer War. Fenton had been whispering at her through phones.
"Surrender." she shouted.
"Never," I shouted back.
Various slices of processed meat were pushed beneath the door to keep me from dying. Chorizo, serrano, Ibérico, salami, pastrami, ham, Parma ham, corned beef. She passed out against my door. Fenton came and shifted her body out of the way. He came with some form of professional negotiator who made me promise on everything that I was not tying nooses or swallowing pills.
"Just give me something," Fenton pleased. "Anything. The gallery are asking questions."
"I want Carissa," I told him and then I went quiet.
Fenton did not relent. He continued to scrawl notes on Rizla papers and push them into my personal space.
I Carissa did not want me to exist, then I do not want to exist. If I cannot paint, I will not pretend to paint. I will eat pastrami. I will abort the coming days.
Notes received from Fenton:
Please just fall asleep on more palettes.
Bad shows are better than no shows.
You'll be forgotten faster than breakfast.
If you want to know the truth I am afraid. The majority of child prodigies grow into competent but unexceptional adults. I want to be the most exceptional of all the adults. I want to be selected for the first Mars expeditions. I want newly discovered species of jungle moth to be named after my name. I do not want to continue and fade and shrink like something pedaling away at the end of a mediocre evening.
Mahmoud's face appeared behind my window right when I was on the verge of sleeping. I told him to disappear but he'd come carrying medium-rare Aberdeen Angus steaks and also gun. We ate cross-legged on the floor. Truthfully I was getting sick of being alone. I am the most social out of all the animals and I had not seen even one face for a whole week.
"What did you do?" I said.
"Handstands," Mahmoud said. "You?"
I gestured at the walls. They are adorned now with every car badge I stole. I glued them into a kind of scale pattern. It looks like the skin of a robot shark.
We drank and ate and left via the window in order to search out the adornments of cars. Mahmoud is indiscriminate. He left with two Renaults. We drank and broke and what we could break.
"You okay?" Mahmoud said.
"I don't want to do it," I said.
"I know. But what else?"
"Kimchi," I said.
I donated my phone to the clouds and sprinted home.
Fenton may have taken up residence in my house. Every morning he's at my door, promising boats and gold and what not. At noon, The Lady Who Made Me joins him. She swallows beer for breakfast. He get frantic. They want me out. They want more smiling suns. They want anything.
"No," I scream for the nine thousandth time.
"If you don't create, you'll die," Mahmoud said, in a pitiful attempt to reignite his most lucrative steam of income.
I argued with Mahmoud for three hours about which Wes Anderson film is the best Wes Anderson film. Truly he is doomed if he is not convinced it is Rushmore. He said Fenton had been selling crumbs of plaster from the studio. He advised me to release a formal statement. I agreed.
I chewed my toenails.
I made a cape from the curtain.
The planet felt so small.
Conversation held with Fenton through the keyhole:
"I can't paint."
You don't have to."
"I want to."
"Throw me out some things from your room."
"Cancel the show."
You're throwing it all away."
"I'm allowed to throw it away if I want to. It's mine."
"Please don't."
"Cancel the show, you idiot piece of shit, and fuck off out my house."
'11-year-old artist Elliot Vostock today announced his retirement in a statement relayed to the Guardian by telephone. It has been rumoured that the child prodigy has isolated himself completely for the past two weeks, ahead of his upcoming show at M. It is unclear whether or not the show will go ahead. When asked for a comment, his art dealer Charles Fenton began to sob and shadowbox the space around him. More details to follow.'
There were journalists outside the house today. I hailed them with coffee cups until they went away. Police came. Police left. I allowed Fenton into my room. He told me I'd done it. He bowed to the wall of his car badges. His eyes burned and he bounced on the spot. He was more excited that I've ever seen him.
"You can't take them," I said. "They're stolen."
"It's found art," he said, phone pressed to his ear.
The first time I drew it was to make Mahmoud laugh. We'd both been dismissed to the corridor following a most raucous read-through of some dumb sonnet. I drew our red-cheeked teaching attempting to engage in self-fellatio. Fenton discovered me when I was nine. After that we got rich and it was hard to go outside.
I am leaving. Mahmoud is coming too. And The Lady Who Made Me. We'll be going somewhere calm and tropical. Somewhere with white sand and rum. I won't paint. I want to learn to fix brains or lungs, or I design cars, or make sushi.
Today, I made nothing and did not die.
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