“Does anything strike you right away?”
	
        “No,” I said. We were in a lighted room looking at a painting which ran nearly seven feet up the wall. I wished that something really [i]did[/i] strike me about it, so I would have something to say to Leopold, who shuffled behind me as he talked and observed my expressions in a stout leather jacket.
	
        I was visiting Italy looking for adventure—my mother is Italian, or part Italian. I told my friends I was traveling to find my roots, to touch base with what I had forgotten. Leopold and I met outside the airport. He owned a taxi business, but was stranded for a day, due to a flight complication. He took an interest in me.
	
        “What do you think, eh?” he asked; the sense was the same but the question hit differently. I hunched my shoulders and squinted a little, and he laughed at my effort. “You know,” he said, as though I were suddenly an expert, “Tornelli underwent frequent psychoanalysis in the thirties. He thought it was a new thing in humanity, the study of the soul in all its movements. It was not a religion for him, but a cosmology, shall we say.”
	
        “Did he stay in Italy?” I asked. I could hear Leopold breathing next to me.
	
         He didn’t answer, but put his hands in the pockets of his big, stiff jacket, and smiled under his moustache. “What do you think?” he asked again. He had a new angle this time. “Was this done before or after his psychoanalysis?” 
	
         I thought about Kant, in response to him, and particles, and the Bhagavat Gita. I squinted some more—harder this time. The painting had a lustrous and imposing frame. I tried, but couldn’t resist it. All of Italy’s history might have been folded into its curlicues, I thought. Leopold was side-eyeing me, and I nearly answered him.      
	
        “What is it,” he said, though, it wasn’t a question anymore. 
	
        “It was made [i]before[/i] his psychoanalysis,” I asserted. “You can tell because you can see that the whole thing is a mirror of his dream. Italy was his great, big dream, like Michelangelo’s empyrean. When a man psychoanalyzes he no longer has dreams. He only has himself.” 

        The canvas was black, as dark as the door of a coffin. On it had been put a radiant blue cube, the color of nickel candy, which decanted down the surface into smaller cubes. Here, the artist had removed the gradient. What was left melted away into pools of monochrome, the sun on the Adriatic Sea, which fell through the bottom of the canvas space like a switch river passing into the still trench of a froggy braid.    
	
         The museum was cold. I felt myself shiver in the polyester throw-over I took from Maryland. I looked at Leopold. The smile had gone back into his moustache, and he looked up at the painting with a new expression, like a bushman fathoming the moon. It would be time to leave soon. I thought it would be best to leave him alone, though I wouldn’t—nor couldn’t—go without him. Would he leave without me? His distance shocked me. I nearly forgot what I was doing, and turned to the wall again.