RICHARD POWERS (15 page)

N
aw. You know the thing is a team effort. The guys wrote all the code. I plundered everybody, totally copycat. All I did was cut and paste Henri's Caesar salad onto lots of lollipop sticks. But wait until
— I mean your one-woman show. Your solo opener.
Her smile seized up, seeing the ambush. Gail's smile. Not in any curl or turn of the lip. Just its crumple of fear. Its carmine fight or flight.
What was the name
ofthat
shop again? God, I used to know them all by heart. Not to mention how much commission each of them scraped off the top. Near Broadway and Spring Street. Francis
Hinger
Gallery. Francis
Hinger,
Adie
echoed. The elephant stopped moving. She
set it down.

How
long ago was that, exactly?

Doesn't matter.

No,
wait. I'll tell you exactly when it was. August of.
..
What year is it now? August of
1979.

Opened in July,
she said, through the side of her mouth.
But who's counting?

Adie Klarpol. Only you were going by Adia back then.

My name.

What were you, all of seventeen? Twenty-seven. Old enough to know better.

Oh, nobody's ever that. A well-received show, as these things go. Some kind of awful literary name
...

"Halations" What's so awful about that?

What does it mean, anyway? It sounds like bad breath caused by asthma.

It's a technical term. Describing what I did.

Pastel penumbra halo stains. Lots of high-frequency colors. Not uninteresting. Inkblot tests on minor hallucinogens. Seemingly abstract, until you looked closely enough to make out the ghosted high realism. There was one called
Infinite Coastline,
if I remember right. Kind of a hand-drawn Mandelbrot, a couple of years before everybody in the industrialized nations dosed out on
Mandelbrots.

I cant believe you remember that. I cant believe you even saw the show. I didnt think anyone saw that show. Except my mother, and she only came because I paid her airfare.

Come on. Nice little squib in
artforum.
They built you up. The next hot commodity. All set to unfurl.

Karl. Please.

Let me guess. You wanted to change the world. Right? Make a difference? Am I right?

Well, whatever I wanted
...
She laughed again. Her shoulders came down. She returned to her tablet. The ambush had passed.
I didn't exactly produce the cure for cancer.

Were you any
good,
do you think?

Screw you, Karl. You saw the work. You're the voting public. You're supposed to tell me.

Now. If you really mean to give the last word to the voting public, the only mystery is how you lasted until twenty-seven.
Ebesen picked at his fraying sleeve, at some crib-sheet answer inked there.
Beautiful was supposed to be back. Craft and exactitude and representation. That didnt even last the allotted fifteen minutes, now did it?

She made herself a pillar of calm. Mary in the bower of roses, by Stefan
Lochner.
She returned to working at her creatures, under an impregnable halo.
Know what's funny? The only people who are willing to pay you a steady salary to paint? Businesspeople? They still kind of like those things.

So that's what did it for you? That's what prompted you to quit the downtown scene and go straight?

Oh for heavens sake. It doesn't matter.

I know it doesn't matter.
The last person on earth to tell anyone that anything mattered.
I'm just interested.

Leave me alone, Karl. You should talk.
She flinched at her own words.

He stood still.
All right. I had no idea it was still a live topic.

It's not a live topic.

I just wanted to know what made you ...

She cocked forward on her stool, ready to spring. But some late-heard pressure on his "you" scattered the attack. She sat back and inhaled.
Art
is
...
pretty sick now, isn't it?

Life is sick. Art's just the recording nurse.

Either way. It's not something I needed to live with all day long.

He started to sing, in a tenor hinting at how it used to saunter, before the osteoporosis.
"I
got troubles of my own."

Exactly. Exactly!
The first through tears, the second through a wet, cracked giggle.
What's it to ya, bub?

She sat up, pulled her knees together, and folded her hands on them. Ebesen stood holding his greasy valise, ready to flee at anything that resembled intimacy.

Shit,
she said. She wiped her face with the butt of her hands.
This is pathetic.
She consolidated her body, pulling and tucking. OK.
I'm OK. Here. Sit over there.
She stood and installed him at a vacant workstation.
At least make yourself useful, would you? Here's the palette and the set of brushes. Go on. Make the monkey jump.

It was some proof for the God of the mathematicians that existence offered exactly as many penances as it afforded sins. The two artists worked away in silence. Her hands moved rapidly, like shorebirds, circling. His moved almost not at all, wavering as narrowly as a mantis's. He etched in short crosshatches, with brute, surgical fastidiousness. Each head bent down over its drawing, monks in a scriptorium furnishing a continent with gold leaf and cerulean.

Ebesen painted, satisfied to be Klarpo's apprentice, for as long as it took to pay off her distress. But not a heartbeat longer. An internal timer somewhere between his riddled heart and savaged liver told him the precise moment when it was safe to badger her again.

So
what did it finally come down to? The bits of crockery glued to the canvas?

No. I kinda liked those. Wasn't crazy about the price tags
...

Was it the prohibition against affirmation? As I remember, your stuff ranked pretty low in the doom-and-detritus department. More of the
— how shall we say?—Glad Game persuasion.

She snorted at the caricature.
Let's just say that my talents
...
never really tended toward originality.

Nu? That hasn't stopped half of the
artforum
pantheon. The trick out there is exactly the same as it is in here. You just have to find a way of being uniquely derivative.

Don't like it out there. Like it in here.
Singsong pugilistic.
Safer in here.

I don't get that at all. How can commercial art be safe, when it involves millions of viewers and trillions of dollars, and high art be dangerous when it sells for eight thousand bucks and sits in the foyer of some summer home in the Hamptons?

High art's a bit of a joke, wouldn't you say? The go-go frenzy. The lives chewed up and spit out for the sake of novelty and glam. Reputations manufactured and deflated, fortunes thrown at trash. Then the transaction written up as if it's the stock market. All that fuss about something that's not even real.

What is? Real, I mean.

She shrugged. She waved her hand around her to indicate her captors.
TeraSys. Exxon. GM. Things that make this world. Things people believe in. I'll tell you what's real. Microsoft is real. The gallery world is a wannabe dress-up game.

Ebesen threw up his hands. For a moment he was the white-smocked firing-range victim in Goya's
Third of May. Then why stay with art at all? Why not ditch picture making altogether and go into a legitimate line of work? Something really real, like sales and marketing? I understand there are a few openings.

Because making the elephant trumpet is not exactly what I'd call art. But it sure beats working.

Oh, I see. Pictures are fun, so long as they don't matter.

In his outburst's aftershock, Ebesen looked up. Adie was cringing again, crooked over her animations.

Don't
ride me, Karl. I'm making a living, the same as you. You had more talent than I did.
He grunted at his screen. Adie craned over, examining the work of his hands. The monkey lived. In three quickly executed slices, Rousseau's manic marmoset-macaque swung on his branch in a sweep that was pure simian.

She looked up at the bagman, the sorry statesman of all RL eccentricities.
Just
how
much talent did you have?

Ebesen lifted his eyebrows and let them fall. He shuffled to his feet as if the bailiff had just proclaimed, "All rise." He scratched the dog Pinkham behind one ear and vanished from the room. But he came back again, helpless, the following evening.

15

This new room still has no place to relieve yourself. The fact seems hopeful, although hope is fast going relative. They can't keep you here for long without leaving you somewhere to pee. Solid plank floors; plaster walls. The chain on your leg would restrict urination to a six-foot radius of where you sit. Surely even these zealots don't expect you
to foul your own bed.

You wait. At least now you can wait in the half-light. Someone will come before the pressure to relieve yourself kills you. Come with food or word of your release. Or barring that, something to piss in.

You wait. The waiting becomes a game. Then the game becomes a contest. They mean to break your will. They find this cute. Some kind of victory for the world's downtrodden, to make mighty America wet its pants. So it turns into a State Department mission, to suppress your bladder until the enemy concedes respect.

The pain goes crippling. A stone forms in your urethra. The denied moisture begins to trickle out of your eyes. You've lost, lost against your body, against time, against your captors. You place the blindfold over your head and call out, as contritely as the pain allows.

Someone bangs once on your door and it opens. A voice from dark-ness's northeast calls out "Yes, please?"

Not your previous visitor, the one who fondled your ear with his gun. This one sounds shorter, rounder, slower on the uptake.

"I am sorry," you babble. "I need to pee very badly. Urinate. Toilet? You understand?"

You've learned the Arabic word, but in the press of need, the language tapes fail you. You stand and resort to body language, hips forward, hand to groin, the little Belgian boy, writing your name in the snow of some dream Low Country, universes away.

"Yes, please. OK. I know. You wait."

You burst out in a sharp laugh that splits your gut. The man leaves, raising an alarm like the home team's during the First Crusade. You must be the first person this band has ever chained up. That Americans have bladders has never occurred to them.

The little round voice scurries back. He holds something up to the vee of your pants. You peek under the lip of the blindfold, into the mouth of a sawn-off plastic bleach bottle. You unbutton yourself with your battered thumbs and roll down the waistband of your underwear. But it's hopeless. Desperation changes nothing. You never could piss in public.

"Please. I hold. You leave."

"OK." The man fumbles the container into your hands. "You take."

"Thank you. You go now. Goodbye." He walks off a few feet. But no door closes. It will have to do. Under the blindfold, by force of will, you imagine the room empty. Your boarded-up hole, bare but for the mattress and radiator. The floodgates open; coarse yarn pulls out of your urethra at high speed.

You collapse against the wall in relief. Your head falls back, slack against the plaster.
"Merhadh."
Toilet.
"Merhadh"
you sob, all fluids flowing out of you at once.

"Yes, yes," your captor laughs.
"Merhadh, merhadh.
I understand."

Not the word a native would have used. Pronunciation not even close. Failing to come until long after you needed it. Yet these two syllables, on his tongue, send him into delight.

"Good, good. I leave bottle here. You use ... all the time. Make water only. No shit. Shit, mornings only. I come take you. Empty bottle. Good? Yes, please?"

"Listen. Can you bring me something to drink? Water. Another bottle for water. I am very dry
...
"
You make obscure hand gestures meant to signify dehydration. Dust in the throat. "Not good. Not healthy. I must have water. A bottle to drink from." You will work on fluid for now. And put forward the concept of nourishment later.

"OK. No problem. I bring for you. Soon.
Inshallah"

God willing.
You pray the tag line is just a formula.

The door closes upon silence. You lift your blindfold to the emptied room.