One night, another Lithuanian stopped in, an artist named Aidas Bareikis. They had dinner and then began drinking vodka. After a while, Koenig suggested that they try snorting the vodka instead, which can be rough on the nasal passages but in this instance had the desired effect of fostering an atmosphere conducive to the telling of life stories.
Bareikis, who was twenty-nine, had a good one. After two months, a Soviet general paid his unit a visit. He was sent to the brig—solitary confinement in a pitch-black cistern buried in the ground—and then to a mental hospital, where doctors could not find evidence that his affection for his native republic had anything to do with madness.
He was shipped off to Afghanistan, to fight the mujahideen. Later, his convoy was ambushed, and he spent three days and nights behind a rock, pinned down by enemy fire. Bareikis and a few other Baltic draftees began scrounging for pencils and grinding the graphite into powder, which they inhaled through their noses in an effort to poison themselves. They also tried rolling fingernail parings into their cigarettes and depriving themselves of sleep.
Bareikis decided to tell the truth, and the officer decided to help him. Bareikis was hospitalized and declared unfit for combat. Eventually, he returned to Vilnius, finished school, won a Fulbright, and, in , made his way to New York, to pursue an M. He spoke almost no English. For money, he did construction and demolition work. He was often homeless. He found that if he slept in a tree in Central Park no one would bother him.
In general, his work was hard to sell, and even harder to look at, but in some circles he acquired a reputation as a sort of a beacon—the genuine article. Koenig considers the night he met Bareikis to be one of the best of his life. They stayed up past dawn and became fast friends. The gallery was in Williamsburg.
