Free How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti Page B

three days.”
    Recently, Margaux had been trying to reassure me that I had a good brain. My brain had not worried me when I was younger, but over the past year I had become convinced that I did not think as well as other people. No, that was putting it gently—­that I didn’t know how to think at all. Other people knew how to think, I thought, had opinions on things, a point of view. I did not.
    As we walked down the side of the Miami highway, my arm linked through hers, the crescent moon faint in the sky overhead, I again brought up my fear. I explained that I felt my insides ­were a blank—­a total neutrality—­null.
    â€œThat’s amazing!” she said. “ God , everyone ­else is like these automatic windup toys.”
    â€œBut I feel like other people are seeing and perceiving and synthesizing, and I’m—­I’m not doing any of that!”
    â€œYou’re doing something, boy, let me tell you. I think mainly people have opinions on, Well, what do you think about abortion? Everybody we hang out with is pretty competent at vaguely intelligent party talk, but you say things that help me think better, you know?”
    I shrugged, but inside was filled with something new, and prayed that what she said was true.
    In any case, I believed it to be gold and held it near.
    We finally found a cab and took Margaux’s paintings to Scope—­a large, makeshift tent in the center of a muddy field in a park, in what the taxi driver told us was a very bad neighborhood that the city was trying to fix with art. Having delivered her paintings, we got into another taxi, then dropped our bags at our cookie-­cutter hotel. We hoped to get dinner in Little Havana, at the other end of town, and walked around for a while trying to find a bus stop.
    At four ­o’clock, we stepped onto a bus, midway through a conversation about what you need to know in writing and what you need to know in art. We came to the same conclusion: you have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything. Sit ting up front, across from a seat labeled I n M emory of R osa P arks , we tested out this theory.
    MARGAUX
    David Lynch is pretty funny.
    SHEILA
    And Harmony Korine is hysterical. And do you think Werner Herzog is hysterical?
    MARGAUX
    ( laughing ) Oh my God, yeah. He’s really funny in a Kafka kind of way.
    SHEILA
    I think Manet is funny.
    MARGAUX
    Yeah, Manet is very funny.
    SHEILA
    And Kierkegaard is really funny.
    MARGAUX
    Really? I see him as so sweet. I see him so much more like poetry.
    SHEILA
    Do you think Nietz­sche’s funny?
    MARGAUX
    I ­haven’t read him much. Baudrillard?
    SHEILA
    Â­Haven’t read him enou—­hmm. Richard Serra’s not funny.
    MARGAUX
    No. He seems to take himself and art very seriously. It’s nice to take it seriously while also leaving your back door open. I mean, your pants down.
    SHEILA
    ( laughing ) You mean slipping on a banana peel.
    MARGAUX
    You know, I didn’t realize that you—­you ­can’t really slip on a banana peel unless it’s rotten. Which is what happened to me.
    SHEILA
    Was the buttery side down?
    MARGAUX
    It was all black, so it was hard to tell.
    SHEILA
    ( laughs ) How about Jackson Pollock?
    MARGAUX
    Not funny.
    SHEILA
    Mark Rothko?
    MARGAUX
    I mean, all those guys are—­I mean, one of them would have been enough for me.
    After finishing our dinner, we returned to Scope and arrived just as it was closing. A tall, aloofly handsome Asian man blithely dragged behind him a cabbage on a leash, making his way into and out of the rooms. People noticed, but no one cared. Since the lights ­were going down, we walked superfast through all the booths: like it . . . hate it . . . don’t like it . . . don’t care ... then walked out through the doors and into the night after pausing briefly to say hello to a pale, thin, blond Chelsea dealer we