Salt Lake City - Day One

I’m writing this from the lobby of the Marriott in Salt Lake City. It’s for my MRI job, a training conference for the new machines we’re installing.

My hotel room looks like this.



Nothing special, but there is a mountain outside my window, so that’s cool.



And look, it’s the poster art for John Carpenter’s The Thing!



I got on the plane yesterday and realized I’d forgotten my headphones, so instead of watching Double Indemnity at 37,000 feet, I ended up reading about two hundred pages of Michael Chabon’s excellent The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. This book came out last year and I don’t remember how it was received, but friends, it is excellent. Chabon is one of those writers who takes so much joy makes you want to write.

So in the spirit of that, I present to you, today’s story seed:

In the early 1940s, during the Nazi occupation of France, a brilliant artist, dying of tuberculosis, flees Europe leaving his wife and children behind. He winds up living in Colorado under an assumed name, where he encounters a young boy on the run from his mother and abusive stepfather. The artist takes the boy in, and slowly and methodically begins tattooing the boy’s body with his final work, adding elements until nearly every inch of the boy’s body is covered in ink. Within a month, the boy’s small pale body has been transformed into the Sistine Chapel.

Flash forward sixty-five years, to New York, a hotel suite at the Plaza Hotel. The boy, now an old man, sits on the corner of the bed in a bathrobe, anxiously sipping his tea as the sounds of traffic rise up from Fifth Avenue. There’s a knock at the door and a beautiful old French woman walks in, her face made all the more lovely by grief and time. She is the last surviving child of the artist in exile, the only one to outlast Hitler’s war machine. She looks at the man, who slips off his robe, and for the first time the woman lays eyes on the masterpiece that her father abandoned her and her family to complete.

Where does it go from here?