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After the camp, I moved in with Sam and set up my own space there. Some time later, Romualdas had a falling-out with Nika, and we began talking again. We had almost no money. Rent still had to be paid. Romualdas and I decided to go to Washington Square Park and sell our work with the canvases spread directly on the ground.

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At the center of the park stood a large circular fountain. Its spray reached us and our paintings. The park lived in a state of constant motion. Everyone came up to us: buyers, madmen, tourists, students, drug addicts. Sometimes it seemed as though the fountain itself decided when to splash harder and when to simply murmur in the background.

Every Tuesday, a Chinese man danced near us. He went shirtless, wearing nothing but shorts, moving strangely and juggling objects shaped like bowling pins. Other people were constantly joining him, and soon they would all be tossing the pins back and forth.

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For some reason, whenever he appeared, our sales stopped. Sometimes, when we had nothing to eat, we would watch him and become furious, as though he were somehow responsible for the fact that no one was buying our paintings. Everything about him irritated us, even though he had done nothing wrong.

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The Hare Krishnas were always there too—people with shaved heads who chanted their prayers and beat on drums for hours. Something strange happened again and again: the moment a buyer approached me and I named the price of a painting, the Hare Krishnas would seem to reach the crescendo of their prayer in perfect unison and begin pounding their drums with all their strength. An ordinary art sale would suddenly turn into some kind of mystical ritual.

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There was also a Black man who rode around on a bicycle, balancing either an enormous television or a giant wheel on his head.

A local philosopher wandered through the park—a white man in a black cloak. He approached everyone he encountered and started conversations about higher things. Sometimes he smelled rather strongly because he lived in the park.

Another man would cover his body in oil, stand in full view of the public, and make his pectoral muscles move one at a time. Even by the standards of Washington Square Park, it was extremely strange.

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All of this was a spiritual experience I would probably wish for every artist to have at least once. Washington Square Park felt like a gathering of extraterrestrial beings who had assumed human form. People appeared from nowhere, circled endlessly around the fountain, and then vanished again. It was a true intergalactic station—something utterly unforgettable.

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Later, I learned that the park had been built over an old city burial ground. According to historians, the remains of more than twenty thousand people still lie beneath it—the poor, the unknown, and victims of epidemics.

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All that time, it turned out, we had been sitting with our paintings above an entire invisible city of the dead. The living circled above us, the dead lay beneath us, and between them the fountain endlessly threw its water into the air and drew it back again. Perhaps that was why the park felt less like a park than a station between worlds.

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On our first day, we sold $145 worth of small paintings. It was enough for food, cigarettes, and coffee. After that, we kept coming back. We especially liked European tourists. They almost never bargained and often bought several works at once.

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Because we sold our paintings spread out directly on the ground, the police frequently approached us. They said that to sell legally, we needed a table and could not display prices on the work. So for a while, I brought a heavy table with me from Brooklyn every day. It was impossible to carry by hand, so I loaded it onto a cart.

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For about a month, I hauled that contraption from Willoughby Avenue on the G train to Eighth Street and Washington Square Park. Many of the stations had no elevators, so I had to drag the table and cart up and down the endless staircases of the New York subway. Eventually, I simply abandoned the idea. It took too much strength just to earn the right to sit beside my paintings.

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One day, several police officers walked past Romualdas and me. Among them was a Chinese policewoman in her early forties. Romualdas began talking to her, and an unexpected conversation developed between them.

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Both sides watched: the police officers and the people in the park, many of whom openly hated the police. Romualdas was an artist, part of the park itself, while she belonged to an entirely different world. But at some point, they simply embraced.

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For a few seconds, everyone seemed to freeze. They had broken some unspoken rule: people from the park did not touch police officers, and police officers tried not to touch people from the park. But for that moment, uniforms, appearances, and allegiance to opposing sides ceased to matter. All that remained were two human beings embracing in the middle of Washington Square Park. I have never forgotten it.

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One day, Romualdas went to the park without me. He urgently needed money, so he took two vinyl records I had given him to paint. He laid them directly on the ground without putting anything underneath them. It was a hot day, and after lying in the sun for so long, the records began to melt and warp.

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Romualdas was in complete despair. A Black woman noticed his work and bought both records anyway, paying forty dollars for each. Just like that, he had eighty dollars.

It was one of our most inexplicable sales. I kept telling Romualdas that art should not be placed directly on the ground. But sometimes people bought works from us even when they were dusty, dirty, or damaged. We could never understand why those were the ones they chose.

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We began speaking to the fountain as though it were alive. We asked it to make sure we had enough—if only for food. And strangely, it did. Not always immediately, but it did.

One day, when we were almost out of money again, Romualdas and I asked the fountain to give us enough to eat. A short time later, two rather pretty girls stopped beside our paintings. They said they had two portions of sushi left over from some very good restaurant and asked whether we would mind eating them. We thanked them and accepted the food.

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It felt like a small miracle. We had asked the fountain for money so that we could eat, but it seemed to hear not the words themselves, but the essence of our request. Instead of money, it gave us the food directly—through two strangers who had stopped to look at our paintings.

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One day, a man in his sixties approached us. He studied the work for a long time and said that he had only just understood something very simple: nothing needed to be changed; everything was already where it needed to be. It had taken him his entire life to realize it.

We sat beside the fountain, and drops of water sometimes landed on our canvases. Some of the paintings kept those pale splash marks forever. We never wiped them away.

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Sometimes Romualdas stayed overnight at my place. Sam was angry because Romualdas did not pay rent, but Romualdas still occasionally stayed despite his disapproval. Sometimes I secretly let him into the studio after Sam had fallen asleep.

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One day, Romualdas and I were riding home from the park when the three of us crossed paths in the subway. Sam was drunk. He began saying that if Romualdas did not pay rent, he had no right to stay with us. At some point, he grabbed the painting Romualdas was carrying and stepped on it, tearing through the canvas with his foot. Romualdas simply embraced him, unwilling to fight.

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The next day, I patched the canvas, and Romualdas sold it in the park for four hundred dollars.

We spent the entire summer beside the fountain. Every day, it gave us something: money for food, coffee, or cigarettes. We always left with at least something.

During the final week of summer, one of the park regulars said to me:

“Next summer, I don’t want to see you here.”

There was no hostility in his words. On the contrary, he was wishing us well. He hoped that by the following summer, we would no longer have to sit on the ground selling paintings just to eat.

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And as if in response to his words, the sales stopped completely.

During that entire final week, we sold nothing. It seemed as though the fountain had suddenly run dry. But it had not—the time we were meant to spend beside it had simply come to an end.

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The drops of that fountain remain in my memory to this day. They rose into the air, fell onto our paintings, and returned to the larger body of water.

Life at the very center of the world changed me. It hardened me and put everything into perspective. Even when we had almost nothing, consciousness and creativity remained with us. That was enough.