Fiction Sep 01 1996 The Twelve Plagues When the phone rang, Rosenthal was kicking a canvas to shreds in the middle of his studio. He’d already thrown a can of wet brushes against the far wall and had kicked a tray of paint across the room, leaving an attractive boat-shaped smear of burnt sienna sailing along the whitewashed floorboards. The place should have been condemned, and so should Rosenthal: trapped inside another night of failure in a season of failure, locked in a listless, drifting orbit around a failing sun.