“What is contact paper, anyway?” Underwood asked. Baruch didn’t want to admit that he didn’t know. “It’s something artists use,” he said. They had just spent an agonizing moment gazing at an art piece that looked like the aftermath of an violent argument between a henhouse and a grandfather clock. The only artistic thing about it had been the neat label that gave the piece’s title as “Morro Castle Goes Native” and then listed the various materials used in its construction, one of which was contact paper. “It’s not flypaper then?” Underwood asked. “I would have thought it would be flypaper. You know, flies come in contact with it and that’s that.” “It has more to do with images than with flies,” Baruch answered. “It keeps an image of something it touches. Or maybe you have to rub it, like a tombstone.” “Hmm. Did you see any in that piece?” “Any what? Tombstones? The whole piece could have been a tombstone for all I could tell. I wish it was the artist’s tombstone and she was dead.” “That’s not really very nice.” “It wasn’t a very nice work of art.” They stopped to look at a work in a more traditional form, an oil painting. “I like this one,” Baruch said, but why do the cabbages have hair?” “Those are trolls.” Baruch leaned closer, adjusting his fashionably tiny glasses. “What are trolls doing buried up to their necks in a vegetable garden?” “Don’t trolls live in the ground?” “I don’t know, but these can’t be alive. Maybe this is where the dead trolls go. Valhalla, or whatever it’s called.” They continued to stand in front of the painting, puzzling over it as a stream of old ladies passed them.
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