Chapter5 What to Keep Must not have Kept 16

Blue spent a couple of days looking for page sixteen and in the process waded through twenty-plus years of documents, photos and artwork ranging from brilliant to barely recognizable as coming from his own hand. Most disturbing to Blue was finding an image which was quite brilliantly drawn and coming to the conclusion that he wasn't actually the person who drew it. He decided that it would have to make its way to the new "Leer" pages whether he drew it or not. After all, it was to his credit that he managed to hold onto someone else's drawing for that long anyway, right?

So page sixteen of version "whatever" of Leer was lost and if it looked anything like page 24, no great loss. A bigger problem was staring Blue in the face. He had some really nicely laid out pages with half-decent drawings going, but the supporting text was lost. Blue prided himself on keeping the most useless piles of trash with an unshakable commitment to the notion that he would one day spin them into gold. John's words were not trash, yet apparently, Blue had disposed of them somewhere between the East and West coasts of the USA, and he was in no position to panhandle the entire country. Pages seventeen through thirty shared similar characteristics to one another, they were drawn, to varying levels of completion but were essentially text free.

They remained that way for days...