Terrified, the painter stared at his painting, and back at him stared the migrant family, whom he had probably murdered.
Grabbing the canvas, the easel, and the paints, the painter raced to his favorite intersection, to the bakery.
An enormous construction site had replaced it. A huge foundation pit, full of earth and crawling machines, had swallowed the nineteenth-century alley. Trembling over the fresh grave of his beloved site, the painter understood what Izvosia's gift had meant. Nothing that had appeared on the canvas would ever come back. The world was coming to an end. Who knows how many such canvases the old classmate had distributed in art stores and on street corners?
He couldn't dump those tools of death—they would be found by others. The painter trudged through the streets, looking for the spot where he'd picked them up. Everywhere he encountered fresh ruins, through which prowled huge mechanisms that resembled bloodthirsty dinosaurs.
The painter wanted to find Izvosia, make a deal with him, persuade him to take back his "equipment" and release everyone who had been trapped inside it. He intended to offer Izvosia his apartment; he couldn't pay the lawyer, anyway. Or Izvosia could take the painter's life—what did he need it for, if Vera and her entire family had perished?
