and sun-dried tomato sausage for no special occasion. Cooking is my only potentially lucrative art. I have named her. I was calling her Golem during the early stages of development but after watching a Discovery Channel special on the Loch Ness monster I decided on Nessie. The main difference between her and the dinosaur is that, as far as I know, she has never been spotted and there isn’t a TV special about her. Yet. Nessie doesn’t find much use in clothes, which isn’t to say she is walking around naked all the time. She has about forty bathrobes of different styles and colors that she rotates weekly, daily, hourly. And on those days after a dreamless sleep, I imagine she changes her bathrobe every forty-five seconds or so. It is a harmless game of clothing roulette—when she reaches her last clean bathrobe, she wears it until I get home and do six loads of bathrobe laundry. Permanent press with scent-free detergent and medium heat dry with cool down cycle. She doesn’t like for me to hang her bathrobes. She arranges them by sleeve length, hem style, color, robe length, length of waist tie, fineness of fabric, softness of fabric—she arranges them about as often as she changes them on a day after dreamless sleep, and still she tells me she has no use for clothes. On the mornings after Nessie doesn’t dream I blame myself. I can see the sadness in her eyes and I know I haven’t stimulated her enough. Usually after dinner we watch a movie or read together. Since she memorizes books and movies instantly, there are few that have replay value. There Will Be
Blood and The Secret Garden are the only two movies she is almost always in the mood for and I usually have to talk her out of reading either the Tao Te Ching or Of Mice and Men because even I have these memorized by now. Some days I am too tired or too disinterested to settle into stimulation. Some days I just want to sit on my balcony and smoke handrolled cigarettes and watch the traffic forty-two stories below me. Nessie doesn’t drink but she doesn’t object to my whisky and she tells me she can see the practical application. And I always respond, “that’s more than I can say for my family.” She likes that. On my first day off in weeks I woke up to find Nessie’s bedroom/studio covered in paint. I own this loft so I don’t mind. We finished The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus around two in the morning and I was surprised by her response. I couldn’t shut up about it but she hardly said a word. Usually we talk for hours about movies of this caliber. But she just walked over to her treadmill and started jogging with a five pound weight in each hand. I went to bed. In the morning I realized she had liked it. More than I had, for that matter, as she not only recreated Mount Parnassus but did so in some kind of tach-realism, a genre of art that exists about as much as Nessie. “This is one of my favorites, Nessie. I mean that.” “That’s usually what you say. Thirty four out of fifty seven times.” Nessie remembers everything. And she reduces fractions: out of the four hundred and fifty six pieces she has com31