In January, when Lurie learned that Perry’s work was going to appear in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, he got drunk and wrote an update on his Facebook page: “This psychopath has driven me from my home, and now he’s having a group show in Brooklyn. What happened to civilization?” Wolf made him delete it. But the abortive outburst had inspired a Turkish fan of Lurie’s—with his subsequent endorsement—to start a “Support for John Lurie” Facebook page, which declared that “John Lurie had to leave his home in New York because a friend of his went insane.” Soon, more than two thousand people were fans of the page, and many posted messages of love and concern; the actress and eighties club denizen Ann Magnuson wrote, “Sending John major hugs from La La Land. Let me know how I can help!” Perry joined the fray, using the pseudonym Ron Beal, to defend his reputation. “Although [Perry] has no fame and less money,” he wrote, “he has the love and admiration of REAL cats in New York who know him as a stand-up person.”

Believing that Perry sounded reasonable, Jill Goodwin sent him a Facebook message telling him that Lurie was despondent and drinking too much. “Please, as someone who once cared about John, realize that he needs help . . . for someone who is already feeling emasculated by a crazy illness, it has just been too much for him. He has been living in constant fear; sleeping with weapons, never able to relax.”

When Perry turned from his computer, Laksmi Hedemark says, “he was white.” He e-mailed Lurie that evening, writing that he really didn’t want any harm to befall his old friend and—responding somewhat ambiguously to Goodwin’s concerns—added, “As sick as you are . . . you probably would have taken a beating, even, just to prove [you weren’t a coward].” He also acknowledged that his behavior in the weeks following the video shoot “was not only wrong but perhaps disproportionate to the events that precipitated it,” and declared, “As much as I’ve loved any friend, I loved you, and still do. I think I had forgotten that until I saw you in my mind’s eye, in the state Jill described.”

Lurie wrote back, saying that he would love to accept the olive branch, but “unfortunately, that would make me an idiot.” He knew that Perry had heard previous accounts of the effect of his campaign on Lurie, and believed the apology was motivated less by solicitude than by Perry’s concern about the Facebook page. He went on, “YOU MADE EVERY EFFORT TO CONVINCE ME THAT YOU WERE INSANE AND DANGEROUS,” and listed, at considerable length, all of Perry’s harassments. “Where do you learn this stuff? Stalkers’ Monthly?” He concluded, “I FORGIVE YOU. But do not ask me to believe you.”

After a further e-mail exchange, Perry observed, “YOU are the one obsessed. YOU are stalking ME.” He told me he wasn’t surprised by Lurie’s response: “John knows how tenacious and committed I can be, and I knew his respect for me would increase his fear. I also knew, given John’s ego, that his imagination would do the rest. He’d buy into the idea that I was stalking him because he sees himself as a celebrity, and to have a stalker is to say, ‘I’m in the highest echelon of notable people.’ ”

Neither man wants to apologize unilaterally—or, really, at all. Perry told me, “I regret the whole thing, it was silly and cruel.” But, he added, “I’d like John to be able to say, ‘John, you scared the fuck out of me, you’re a heartless, coldhearted motherfucker—but, at the same time, I shouldn’t have said I’d call the cops, I shouldn’t have called all your friends, I should have answered the phone when you needed me.’ ”

Lurie told me that he’d done nothing wrong and said, “I could forgive John Perry if he’s just insane. But if he were enjoying this? That would be unacceptable, and I’d have to destroy him.” When his symptoms recede, he feels eager to resolve the maddening anxieties and ambiguities once and for all, and often says to himself, “God, I hope he comes now!”

I drove Lurie back from Joshua Tree late in the afternoon. He slumped in the front seat, saying that his head was roaring. As the sun slipped behind the Little San Bernardino Mountains, Lurie said, “Illness has a beautiful way of bestowing a glow on you. You notice the way the light hits the top of the trees.” Then he fell silent for thirty miles. As we passed the outskirts of Indio—a scatter of isolated houses braced against the darkness—he said, “How do these people end up here? Do they all have stalkers?”

The dream of artists—which is simply the dream of friends and lovers, magnified—is to plant themselves in other people’s heads. By that standard, John Perry has created a masterpiece. Last summer, Lurie wrote a friend that Perry “has been in every facet of my consciousness for months. . . . Every dream, every brush stroke. He has infected my mind.”

Perry, too, continues to have Lurie on the brain. One night not long ago, he e-mailed me to say, “It is 3:24 A.M., and I thought I should let you know immediately that I just dialed John’s number from my phone book by accident. I heard the voice on the machine and hung up.” When I inquired how this accident had occurred, Perry said that he had been looking up Lurie’s home number on his cell phone in preparation for calling Time Warner Cable. He was planning to again pretend to be Lurie to try to determine for exactly how many minutes Lurie had watched the Jones-Calzaghe fight, and thereby to ascertain, once and for all, maybe, whether Lurie really had been sick.

The protracted duet has become a kind of living performance piece, but neither man is able to see it as art: Perry because he views himself solely as a painter, and Lurie because he never before associated art with a fear of death. Curiously, though, the struggle seems to have inspired them both; artists sometimes require an enemy. Perry sold two pieces at his December show, one for nine thousand dollars, and just had a show of nudes at a downtown boutique. When he looked at the footage from “The Drawing Show” recently, he thought it could actually make a pilot. And, now that his life has begun to improve, Perry said, Lurie should feel emboldened to come home: “I wouldn’t shove him down at this point—if only not to give him the satisfaction of being right.” He laughed, then added wistfully, “Anyway, I can’t kill him over the phone—he should call me.”

Lurie recently had successful shows in Japan and Los Angeles. He told me, “It’s strange, but being ready to fight every day—I think it’s made me younger. I look better. If something this formidable hadn’t happened, I would never have left my apartment. But I got away, I started painting again, I saw the whales in Big Sur. . . . On the other hand, the whole thing has left me really confused about the nature of life. I guess I expected there to be more sanity in the world.”

He left Palm Springs in May, but he hasn’t decided where to settle next. Thailand seems interesting, or Cuba. He thought about driving to Las Vegas and entering the World Series of Poker, relishing the idea that he would emerge from hiding on national television. After not playing his saxophones since 2001, Lurie recently had them repaired, and on good days he thinks about coming home and working his lip back into shape. “Putting together another band and touring—ennh,” he said. “Too much stress, and I don’t have the armor anymore to deal with people. I’d probably just play on the street. There’s a spot on Astor Place, near where the cube is, between Broadway and Lafayette—a saxophone sounds incredible there at about six o’clock.” ♦