Читать книгу The Fifth Wall - Rachel Nagelberg - Страница 8

The Real itself, in order to be sustained, has to be perceived as a nightmarish unreal spectre.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK, Welcome to the Desert of the Real

I awake in a trembling bedroom on an unusually sunny morning in a house that takes me six long and agonizing seconds to discern must belong to the contractor, Jesse, as the floor rumbles, the furniture shakes, the light fixture rattles, and the body beside me faintly stirs amidst a deep slumber, his calloused fingers twitching by my exposed thigh as the structure around us prepares for takeoff. It’s a sobering feeling—the movement of the Earth. Even growing up with these quick moments of terror doesn’t prepare you for the next one; each earthquake instills a slight shift in consciousness, as if parting the amnesiac fog of reality—a cosmic reminder that we exist on a complex living organism that is much, much larger than us, blindly orbiting in a universe that is wholly undiscovered. I quietly climb out of bed and tiptoe naked out of the drafty bedroom to find the toilet, the layout of the living room rendering subtly familiar, as I begin to recall flashes of the previous night’s ravenous activities from a cold, porcelain seat.

Right after my violent outburst with the axe, Jesse had buckled me into his truck and we’d driven back to San Francisco straight to a hole-in-the-wall bar that sometimes served Ethiopian food. Jesse knew the bartender, a large, intoxicated woman with a thick accent and burly presence, from whom he ordered two double margaritas. We sat at a round table next to a jukebox blasting Thriller, sipping the sour and salt as he told me about an experience he’d recently had while working at a site on some remote, woodsy location right up north next to a river, building a solar panel roof for a wealthy client. He’d brought his dog along, an ancient creature suffering from cataracts and some form of Alzheimer’s, whom he didn’t like to leave alone for more than a few hours, and the fresh air always calmed her. At some point he’d heard splashing and a high-pitched yelp, and he ran sprinting to the water to find old Maddie twenty feet deep into the river, unable to swim. He said his heart almost dropped out of his body. Without thinking twice, he rushed into the freezing cold after her, with clothes, boots, tools—everything—and reached her just as her legs gave out. Both of them panting, he pulled her towards the shore, threw her in the car, drove straight back to his house in the city and right into the hot shower—both of them shivering under the pressure and steam. He said nothing had ever terrified him more, nothing except for what had happened earlier that day, when I tore down the lawn towards my house, a giant axe raised in my palms like a crucifix.

I sensed less of a concern than a sparking interest. Jesse was gaping at me with an intensity I hadn’t experienced before. Our playful flirting the past week had been merely a tease at most, nothing to this degree. He listened intently as I—still partially in shock—told him I still had no recollection of what happened before he tackled me to the ground. I recalled standing in front of the house in deep contemplation when all of a sudden a bizarre feeling came over me—all-consuming. It was like a severe case of déjà vu, where everything around me looked both familiar and foreign at the same time. Oddly depthless. As if the landscape was lacking something vital for me to process as “real.” Jesse’s weight had shifted closer to me, his concentration stark and aggressive. I quietly told him about the secret tumor, and then the gun. How I found my mother dead in the hallway. At least that’s how I decided to tell it. I still haven’t been able to admit the whole truth out loud. I must still have a lot of anger bottled up, I tried to joke, although it wasn’t very funny. I’m always demeaning everything I feel strongly about. Is it out of some sort of embarrassment? Some flawed characteristic—a lack of conviction? It did concern me that that I had nearly killed myself with a very sharp, heavy object in some sort of unconscious state. I did distinctly remember waking up from it—seeing the actual fissures in the plaster in front of me, a heavy burning object in my hand, feeling a tight hold on my wrist. I remember that the heat was not from the axe but from my body’s elevated temperature. I remember rage unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, a feeling so foreign to me, and yet shockingly exhilarating. I had felt dangerous, beautifully and horrifically alive. I wanted, consciously, to destroy, to completely obliterate. To kill. I knew I was being filmed.

I also knew, as I returned Jesse’s gaze, that I was witnessing the innate attraction of this much older male to an acute madness inside me. It was a power I had felt only a handful of times. And I immediately loved it. Every second of it.

After one margarita I was smashed, but effectively hiding it, and we ordered two more and huddled closer together. Jesse, a young forty-seven, with a fit, trim body in his paint-splattered canvas Carhartt workpants and scuffed Timberlands—a dog lover with grit-encrusted nails, the energy of a stallion.

“Most people I work for want to build up,” Jesse raised his muscular arms, “like the whole of civilization, always reaching for the stars. The nature of progress. But you—you called me and said I want to unbuild, to alter the course of evolution. I was like, who is this woman?”

I sipped my sour drink and smiled.

“You’re lucky the house was beyond any sort of affordable repair. The termite damage was insurmountable. And the house was never fully secured onto its foundation in the first place—it would have been impossible to sell in its condition.”

“Yes, we’re doing everyone a favor,” I said. “The materials that aren’t damaged will become embedded into new projects in a continuous cycle of inevitable decay.”

Jesse laughed. “Your morbidity is terribly sexy.”

“The treacherous life cycle of a building—like a body with thousands of organ transplants and plastic surgeries, being kept alive by machinery.”

“I’m absolutely loving this.”

“I’m glad somebody is.”

“Most people take buildings for granted,” he said. “They think of them as permanent fixtures—as if they weren’t created by human hands.”

“They create stability. They’re always here, witnessing our lives.”

“You wouldn’t believe the panic attacks I’ve seen over trivial matters like a broken toilet, a hole in the roof, a basement leak … you’d think these people’s lives were ending. And here you’re literally taking it apart.”

“Well, you’re literally doing it. But yes, I’m extinguishing its power. Eradicating its history. There’s a dangerous power to spaces. They hold certain energies, like bodies. They trigger memories. I mean—the idea of ghosts haunting houses has existed for thousands of years, in different cultures across the globe. I think there’s something potent in this idea—in thinking about a house as a body-organism, a living structure designed to hold things, programmed for attachment.”

“Okay, so I see you’ve thought through this all theoretically. But what does the rest of your family think about all this? Are they even in the picture?”

I told him about my parents’ divorce when I was fifteen. How my dad, a tenured professor at Berkeley, lives now on a sailboat docked in Marin. For the past few years he’s been making calculated steps to ultimately moving “off the grid”—what I see as just a glorified way of disappearing. He removed his name from the lease years ago—he and my mother having rarely spoken in the past decade. She lived in that house all alone. Then there’s my brother, Caleb, who’s been traveling in Peru for the past couple of years studying shamanic plant medicine with a tribe of indigenous Shipibos. We hear from him infrequently—usually in the form of heavy-handed emotional correspondence often emailed or texted directly after some drug-induced state. He flew home for the week of the funeral, and then hopped right back on a plane to Lima. And all my grandparents are dead, with some aunts and uncles scattered around the country living separate, private lives. I am pretty much a lone wolf.

“It’s like you’re living the movies,” he snickered.

“Cinema does love the dysfunctional.”

“Why’d your parents get divorced?”

“I think that when two emotionally unavailable people couple, it can either be oddly functional or disastrous.”

Jesse moved in closer. “So what you’re saying is that the sex was terrible.”

“It always comes down to men and sex.”

“What can I say? It’s biological. We have absolutely no control.”

This was a man who had six chickens, was known in his neighborhood for leaving fresh eggs on doorsteps in recycled cartons decorated by his four-year-old niece. He sat inches from me, his knee just barely grazing my shin. He radiated a vibrant youthfulness, smiling with his whole body, seeming to speak a special language embedded with playfulness, laughter. But his intensity was alarming. His deep interest felt genuine, but also as possibly that of a predator who preys on the weak—one who gets off on playing the role of the knight in shining armor. But he lifted a heaviness in me I realized right then I’d been carrying without feeling its full weight. It escaped from me like sand bursting from an hourglass, scattering around me with shards of broken glass. I felt light, buoyant, incredibly alive.

We both knew where the night was headed, but pretended to be blind. After another round and some horrible Ethiopian, I told him I wanted to meet his chickens, so we headed for his place—right around the corner, no doubt—with buzzing bodies exuding a sexual tension that was sure to be catastrophic.

From then on the images are blurry, violent, tequila-infused. It takes a few minutes to get the pee out from all the soreness. But there is relief in the pain, something dark, and joyous.

Back in my apartment, I pause the recorded footage. I take a deep breath, and then rewind about ten minutes. I press play.

There I am, standing motionless, with my back to the camera, the silhouette of my body outlined against the towering, faceless structure. I am a thin frame of near-translucent skin. Wind tousles my hair, whips through branches and grass. The elastic strap of the filter mask hugs the back of my hair; two plastic points of safety goggles stick out from behind my ears.

To see myself from a third eye point of view. This is the power of the camera.

Around me, the construction crew prepares for the removal of the house’s non-load bearing walls. A few minutes pass where I do not move. There is something startling in seeing myself from this angle. Like witnessing something I’m not meant to see.

Oh, but here it begins—oh boy, is it coming. This scene is absolutely incredible. Academy Award-winning. Two thumbs up. It still gets me every time. All right, here we go. Watch it closely. At exactly TC 01:92:14:01 my right hand begins to stir. Do you see it? It’s like watching Frankenstein’s first awakening, or the hand of the wounded alien on the fanatical surgeon’s table in Independence Day—when the camera shot zooms right in to the first sign of life, purposefully directs our focus to its movement. (A typical film strategy for creating tension—movement returns first to the extremities.)

Here, ladies and gentleman, is me, SHEILA. I point to the screen for an imaginary audience, and circle my body with a fluorescent yellow pen. And here, about two feet beside me, I tell them, is a stray PICKAXE, which I also circle, but in fluorescent blue.

My hand starts to shake, and soon my entire body. I look like I’m convulsing. Perhaps it’s the lack of transition between my near five-minute paralysis and the sudden awakening, or the sheer dissonance I feel with my image on the screen—but the shock of the moment is terrifying. I watch myself slowly bow my head down and spot the PICKAXE. There is a three-second pause. Suddenly I’m bent down and grasping it, lifting it over my shoulder and into the air—a crazed tyrant, a rabid executioner. I’m sprinting with this heavy object that I’ve never before used down a small grassy incline and across the front lawn past a bunch of busy workers who appear to be in the process of still figuring out that something is not quite right. Jesus Christ—I swing the PICKAXE into the first floor’s outer wall. Look at how it breaks the skin and gets slightly caught, how I manage to pull it out, almost losing my balance, instead catching myself with a half-skip and wobble. It appears almost like a dance. Although I can’t see my face, I am ninety-six percent sure that I’m displaying what is known notoriously as the Sheila B. Ackerman Face—the contorted, pained expression I can’t help but make when I’m thinking hard, which happens often in class and also while creating art, and unfortunately, during sex, which often involves the guy asking if I’m all right, which can get fairly awkward at certain not-quite-the-right-moments. Watch me drive that fucker and hit the metal framing, which I can tell from afar because of the motion’s hard, visible pause. From this distance—if you look really hard—you can also spot the cracking of the second story’s SHEATHING, the slight shaking of the board above me, loosening with each blow. There is JESSE now, running towards me, waving his hands in the air and shouting, it looks like, although there is no sound.

I pause the video.

In the kitchen, Mal stands at the counter stirring a ceramic cup of Yerba Mate with her special metal straw. “Did you feel that five-point-seven this morning?” she asks, staring at her iPad.

“I woke up on a rocket ship,” I say while typing amnesia, paralysis, convulsions, and rage into the WebMD symptom checker app on my iPhone. It’s apparent she didn’t hear me sneak in this morning.

“This article says we’re in for a series of intense ones within the next couple of weeks.”

“Is that right?” The website says loading…

“First the drought, and now this—the planet’s obviously trying to tell us something.”

Upon moving back to California, I’d been shocked at the desolation of the city—trees that normally brim with lush greens are now brown and sagging, lacking vibrancy, stunted in their natural bloom. A thin layer of dust shrouds all cars and buildings. The air feels drier, deader—a vast thirstiness you can feel deep inside your bones. San Francisco is turning into a desert.

“They expect the next one to be at least a five-point-nine.” Mal covers her mouth.

“You better secure those jars.”

Mal looks up and quietly contemplates the kitchen. “The jars.” Her eyes widen.

I pour some leftover hot water into a French press lined with local fair trade coffee we get discounted from Mal’s barista friend, and watch the granules steep, while a screen the size of an index card loads all the possible medical threats to my living body. The kitchen looks like the combination between an apothecary and a meth lab. Alphabetically organized bottles of liquid herbal supplements line the counter along with stacked mason jars filled with soaking hemp seeds, raw nuts, lentils, and seaweed. There’s a food processor, a dehydrating oven, two juicers, and a bullet blender. Atop the refrigerator a Saran-wrapped container of homegrown tofu sprouts next to a fermenting kombucha mother hovering in a massive glass bowl. Somewhere during the three years I’d been away Mal had met the Angel Granola and converted to an artistic practice of naturo-pathology. I open a non-GMO Snickers bar and pour my coffee.

Mal and I met in undergrad at Berkeley in a Foundations art class. This was during a third-wave-feminist phase of hers—years before Miley Cyrus’ conversion—where she dressed in elastic onesies, platform shoes, and bleached her then long, wigishly thick hair as part of some grand, ironic public gesture of female assertion—a walking, talking caricature of herself. She worked in mediums of sculpture and performance, often creating works using solely untraditional materials, such as makeup, hair dye, and once even real menstrual blood in order to create what she called “authentic works of female desecration.” I’ll never forget modeling for her notorious Feminine Product Clothing line, my outfit composed of two hundred maxi-pads sewn together into a three-dimensional chastity belt, a push-up bra shaped with tampon applicators, and a set of diaphragm socks. I still sometimes use a photo from that show as my Facebook profile picture.

This past year has been a rough one for Mal as well. A gallery job she’d been working towards for quite sometime fell through, so she’d been forced to pick up more hours at an upscale pizza restaurant she’d been working at on and off since undergrad—a funny place to work for the now budding raw foodist. Then, with the rent doubling from the previous master tenant’s surprise move-out, she’d had to quickly find a replacement who could afford the difference—a young but balding Delaware transplant named Dustin who programs some kind of drones for Google, wears baggy JNCO jeans, and drinks beet juice incessantly out of a plastic-lidded cup with a straw. In just a few years San Francisco has turned into a tech scene cesspool, where a studio price now starts at about $1600 per month, and most of our mutual artist friends have moved across the bay to Oakland—now also considered an “up and coming” area that’s quickly becoming unaffordable. But Mal isn’t ready to give up the vibrant, eclectic city life, nor the queer scene she’s been involved with—formed an identity around—for years. Luckily I’ve moved back just in time to turn the awkward living situation into a threesome—we converted the old Victorian’s dining room into a viable bedroom using two thick curtains and a few layered oriental rugs.

Mal met my mother a handful of times—had joined us once for a wine tasting weekend up north during one of my mother’s unsuccessful attempts to have family time, a trip which proved to be a huge cover for my mother not knowing how to reveal to me that she had been asked to move to Paris by a former lover she’d recently reconnected with over the Internet (a “trained Ethnobotanist with a superior taste for French cuisine”), and that she was planning her move for that following spring. Of course that never actually happened, as the man turned out to be an ex-convict writing to her from a halfway house in Denver—which my mother luckily discovered before buying her ticket when mentioning his name to an old mutual friend—but a deep understanding had taken place there between Mallory and I, as she’d witnessed the extent of my mother’s neurosis first hand. In other words, the deconstruction makes sense to her on some level—albeit she worries, I’m sure, that it’s a lot more work—emotionally and physically—than it’s worth. But Mal’s not one to stop any project halfway; she’s a proponent of taking anything to its end.

Peripheral neuropathy, transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke), hypoglycemia, intoxication, cocaine abuse—I scroll through the virtual hypochondria—lead poisoning, epilepsy, premenstrual syndrome …

Mal hops off the counter. Her short, matted bed-hair sticks up in outrageous places, though appears somehow purposeful, framing her face beautifully, perfectly effortless. Her bare, olive-toned arms and upper torso showcase many visible moles and warped stick-and-poke tattoos, faded and bleeding out from the years. “I’m planning on going up to another retreat at Harbin next weekend, so you’ll have to keep an eye on these babies.”

I stare at the jar-filled cardboard box groggily, caramel sticky in my teeth. “Since when did you become such a retreat junkie?”

“Since I met that woman ‘Astral Sunflower’ a few years ago and she opened my eyes to an invisible world of pure, potential happiness. And extremely hot women.”

Multiple sclerosis, Lyme disease, weeverfish sting, cannibalism in Papua New Guinea. Weeverfish sting? Cannibalism in Papua New Guinea? I shut off my phone. “Isn’t that the woman who gave you herpes?” I say.

She glares at me. “Sheila, everyone has herpes.”

“I don’t have herpes.”

“You probably have herpes. They don’t even test for it anymore.”

“I sincerely doubt that, Mal.”

“Look it up—,” she reaches for my phone, “I’m telling you the truth, I swear!”

Dustin appears in the doorway wearing a Bluetooth headset, slurping a plastic cup caked with a day-old dried burgundy. I watch Mal slightly throw up in her mouth.

He grabs a half-eaten burrito from the refrigerator, speaking numbers quietly into the mic, and slithers back through the doorway.

“What do you even do at these retreats?” I sit at a counter stool and pour another coffee.

“Well, it depends on the retreat. This one’s at a hot springs and is called True Embodiment & the Realization of Self Truth.”

“You know that title uses ‘truth’ twice.”

Mal contemplates it for a second, and then shrugs.

“What does it even mean?” I ask.

“I mean, it’s a bogus title, Sheils, but it’s also pretty irrelevant—it’s like when a bad writer goes to see some really cool fucking art. If the art is legit, it transcends any wording catastrophes that try to box it in.”

I sip my coffee and nod. An image of one Mal’s first installations, Gut Feelings, comes to mind, where she arranged onto walls enclosed boxes of chicken livers and intestines tacked in various positions with hand-sized holes for daring audience members to stick gloved hands inside and feel around for the box’s surprise.

I wonder what my organs would feel like if dissected and rearranged, mounted in dark space.

“Whatever you say,” I shrug. “I know weird shit’s bound to happen at gatherings like that.”

“Weird shit happens all the time, everywhere, around the clock. Especially in this city. I mean, you’re from Berkeley.”

I give her the look.

“Okay, okay.” She concedes, and sits down next to me. “There was this one retreat, a few years ago—it was only my second or third one. It was up at Mount Shasta and we were staying in our own separate yurts, men separated from women, of course. After a week, all of the women’s yurts—mine included—started to reek of urine. We had absolutely no idea why this was happening—the outhouses were closer to the men’s yurts, and we were using a ton of sawdust.” She shakes her head. “Anyway, it turns out that one of the men was sneaking into all the women’s yurts and leaving drinking glasses filled with his own urine underneath our beds—I’m guessing as some sort of fetishistic gesture of leaving his scent…”

“That’s absolutely disgusting.”

“I know.”

“That’s like, even weirder than anything I had possibly imagined you were going to say.”

“Is it really?”

“Positively.”

“Well, you know, I’ve learned to research a lot since then. It’s like finding a gynecologist—you go to the one with the least amount of public lawsuits.”

I lower my head in defeat.

“By and large, you are not one to judge, Sheila Bee.” Mal wraps her arm around me, presses her warm cheek to my own, the sweet scents of peppermint and eucalyptus.

Her phone rings, the theme song to Strangers with Candy. Her aggression is quick and piercing on the phone, as if continuing a heated conversation put on hold. A wild persona reserved for specific people, times, places. “All I’m saying is I got a weird feeling, lady. Plus he doesn’t want to have sex with you, which is hot.” She motions for the doorway. “And your vagina is like Neverland—she loves the lost boys.”

Outside, the wind from the bay rips across telephone poles, knocks over garbage bins, thrusts between buildings in high-pitched resonances. The homeless poke through clinking glass bottles to sell back to the closest Safeway. A muscular woman leads a group of five children down the sidewalk all wearing dark sunglasses. A man walking by shouts HOW ARE MOMMY’S TEETH? into a Bluetooth. Beneath California, the Earth’s crust is preparing to release energy into shattering, seismic waves. The soil is preparing for its transition into sand. The Earth speaks, the city shudders. The smell of Southern Indian leaks through the vents.

An unsettling feeling fills my stomach. That feeling I felt yesterday in front of the house—that depthlessness that came over me, that extraordinary sense, that lack—like a swallowing. Nothing that I can categorize into a WebMD symptom app. The house, pulling me inside its time warp of trauma. It’s not enough to die. You still have to disappear. I read somewhere that in some surviving ancient Mayan cultures, the body of the deceased is sat upright in the shared main space of the family’s household for days, weeks, and sometimes months, so that they can witness the process of decay—the skin, sinew, and muscle sliding from bones, the process of decomposition a communal spectacle, a collective visual mourning—the townspeople often speeding up the process by eating its flesh and meat. These practices are seen as the first burials, the liminal states between life and death. After the body decays, the second burial takes place, where the bones are then buried in the ground, often underneath the floor of the immediate household, becoming literally embedded into its history.

The archaeologist who wrote the article visited this particular culture to observe this extraordinary death ritual. There, a townsperson asked him to account for burials in America, to explain the process of our transition from death to the next world. The archaeologist tried to explain embalming, but before he could even finish, the Mayan turned to the side and vomited, refusing afterwards to talk any more with any members of the team. The archaeologist supposed that the man was so offended by American practices, that he couldn’t even bear to accept their weight. The American Dream: to make the living dead look alive.

But to watch a loved one’s body decompose—at first it seems more honest. To really know and witness death as a part of life. It only seems natural. But where is the ritual when a dense black ball of matter spreads its icy fingers into one’s brain cavities without warning? Where is the ritual in suicide?

We had my mother cremated. Right after the small funeral, per her instructions (in a will she’d written and notarized a few weeks prior to her death), Caleb, my father, and I flew with her contents to an old horse farm in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, where her parents used to send her to camp in the summers. Apparently that was her favorite place in the world. None of us ever knew.

A German artist, Gregor Schneider, recently released an ad for a volunteer to spend his or her last living days in a museum space. He wants to sequester a dying individual in the confines of four white public walls and display his or her last moments to all. In an interview he said that he wanted to display a person dying naturally, in peace. That he didn’t understand why death couldn’t be a positive experience, why it’s such a complication to portray the beauty of death, to create human places for the dying and dead. People send him death threats.

There’s a three-second segment in a home video I salvaged in which my mother says something to the camera that I can’t quite make out. I’ve replayed it a countless number of times, to the point of an obsession I’m not quite yet readily able to admit. The film furrows and chafes; black and white lines zigzag along the cascading color image, light and dark grays forming up and down its quivering surface. From behind the camera, my dad asks her a question. He zooms in until her face fills the screen. My mother has one of those kinds of mouths that curl up to the side when she talks. She smiles and tilts her head a degree or two and says something to the camera and blinks. But her voice drowns out from the static on the tape.

It is a machine that walks, runs, climbs, and carries—a sleek, four-legged assemblage of algorithmic, interlocking parts. Headless and faceless, but with a computer as its brain. An engine as its spirit. Named the “Drog” by its creator in reference to its dog-like proportions and its drone-robotic technology, the machine is considered “intelligent,” can navigate a wide variety of terrains. There are sensors for locomotion, joint position, joint force. Planning, actuation, pose estimation, control. It has a GPS, stereo vision system, lidar, and gyrosope. Proprioception, exteroception, homeostasis. This is a machine that can see on its own.

“Four feet long, three feet high. This girl’s about the size of a Rottweiler.” The artist chats while an AV tech tries to get a sense of the Drog’s electronics to sync with the other pieces in SFMoMA’s new upcoming show, The Last Art. I stare at the artist while taking measurements for a custom barricade around the scary-looking thing for protection—whether for the Drog or for the public, I’m not exactly sure.

Behind the scenes, the museum is bustling with at least three times as many bodies due to the complex technological nature of the show. They brought their own exhibition and AV techs, plus thirteen different curators to work in tandem with our own curators, preparators, and electricians. We’ve begun to start referring to this setup as “the war room.”

“Its custom GPS allows for ‘human following’—you know, device drivers, data logging, visual odometry. We have sensors focusing directly on its internal state, monitoring the hydraulics, oil temp, battery charge, etcetera.” The artist is tall and lanky with dark inset eyes and pale, freckled skin. His nametag says Michael Landy. I can’t stop staring at his face. There’s something about him that looks just like Adam Black.

Michael Landy looks toward me, and I immediately resume focusing on my menial task at hand. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse the Drog in an uncanny seated position against the far wall, not yet activated. I feel the artist’s shadow approach me.

“Nice gloves,” he says, eyeing me.

I immediately look around me, my favorite gesture of pretending to be blind. “Who, me?”

He laughs. White gloves are mandatory for everyone in this room. He stands over me, silently.

“What’s … up?” I ask awkwardly. The AV tech rolls his eyes.

Michael Landy observes the chalked line I’ve been making around the Drog’s allotted roaming space. “You know in the labs we just let this baby run free.”

“Is that right?” I pretend to be busier than I am, studying the tape measure intensively and double-marking off lines. The resemblance to Adam is less in his face than his overall bone structure, his authoritative stance. The unadulterated, academic sureness.

“Yeah we have this little compound in L.A. We’re working on a whole Noah’s ark of machines that use drone technology to see, hear, and feel.”

“Will they all be headless?” I ask.

He laughs. “No, definitely not. This model is based on a military funded prototype invented a few years ago at MIT to take the place of humans in hazardous environments. But here we’ve stripped away the military context and are presenting the first introduction of this kind of automata into a gallery space. How do we look at this kind of technology as art? is the kind of question we’re after.”

“What does it mean to see without eyes?”

“Precisely,” he says, moving closer. A smirk forms on his lips. “Or—rather—what is a visionless gaze?”

The Last Art—a machine that sees for itself. What else could be left—a machine that dreams?

Michael Landy continues to observe me with a new interest I immediately recognize. My body starts to grow excited. I realize that right here, in this room, I’m holding all the power. The artists aren’t even allowed to touch their own work.

A timer goes off on my phone. In ten minutes there’s a mandatory team meeting about the museum’s acquisition of a multimillion-dollar Richard Serra sculpture—one of his infamous “torqued ellipses” entitled Band. It’s scheduled to open with The Last Art in three weeks. I begin to pack up my tools.

“I expect I’ll be running into you in the near future,” says Michael Landy, grinning, and walks back over to the AV tech handling his Drog.

I feel a slight shift of energy in the room, as if the world around me is rearranging. A hollowness forms inside of my body, but also a heightened sensation, a buzzing of attraction from the interest of this strange, yet uncannily familiar man.

I hadn’t seen Adam Black in over four years—and he was hardly on any social media. We met in my Introductory Film class freshman year, which he’d taught—a young PhD candidate in film studies, from whom I suffered years of romantic obsession after a drunken encounter at a party. I’d sent him a long, esoteric email during my first semester of grad school, which he never responded to. Our whole nonexistent relationship had from the beginning suffered from multiple bouts of intellectual intensity patterned with long absences of nothing—no communication—at all.

I’ve found that when you build up a fantasy, it tends to become stronger than the memory, strangling it to asphyxiation; it takes over the past. Adam Black: a figure ever since fixed indefinitely as the image of my absent lover.

On my way to the conference room, I stop to read a blurb about The Last Art tacked to a makeshift wall in the gallery:

THE LAST ART PRESENTS AN INTERACTIVE VENUE TO EXPERIENCE INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGY AS WORKS OF CONTEMPORARY ART. WHAT IS THE DIRECTION THAT ART IS MOVING IN? WHAT KIND OF HISTORICAL PERIOD DO WE FIND OURSELVES IN, NOW THAT WE’VE HISTORICIZED EVERYTHING UP TO THE PRESENT MOMENT? WITH THE FLOODING ADVENT OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES THAT ALLOW USERS TO ARCHIVE LIFE AS IT’S HAPPENING, WE FIND THAT CONTEMPORARY ART IS BECOMING A WAY OF ARCHIVING THE PRESENT—THE IDEA THAT NOT ONLY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS ARE ARCHIVISTS, BUT ALL WHO USE TECHNOLOGY, FOR WE ARE CONSTANTLY RECORDING LIFE AS IT IS HAPPENING. EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING LIVE. FROM HANDHELD RECORDING DEVICES AND GPS SYSTEMS TO VIRTUAL REALITY INTERFACES, SELF-DRIVING CARS, BIOTECHNOLOGICAL ANIMAL PROTEIN GROWTH, AND MECHANIZED ORGANS, WE HAVE ENTERED INTO A PERIOD WHERE WE NO LONGER NEED BODIES TO MOVE, OR EYES TO SEE. NOW THAT THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY ARE BECOMING EVER-BLURRED IN THEIR ATTEMPTS TO IMAGINE NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR THE FUTURE, WHAT WILL THE ERA OF THE POSTHUMAN HAVE IN STORE FOR US, AND FOR ART? WHAT WILL THE ROLE OF ART TAKE ON?

Printed below is an image of a sheep as the show’s advertised icon. It refers to the sculpture Dolly, a life-size replica of the infamous first living clone, Dolly the Sheep. It’s by the same artist famous for crystallizing an inoperative missile from the Iraq War.

Several minutes are all that remain of man. The line comes back to me from a podcast I listened to on the bus over here—a former designer of nuclear weapons on NPR. It’s no longer in our hands.

How could it be—in our society, where we go to the movies to view its own destruction as an aesthetic experience—that we’re still blind to the real life possibility of our own instantaneous deaths?

I think of the camera I’ve mounted in front of the deconstruction, surveilling 24/7 the dismantling of my childhood home—this window I’ve opened onto this dreadful process.

Perhaps it’s not that we romanticize our own destruction, but that we have to fantasize about it in order to understand it. That in this world now dominated by screens and images, we must stage massive fictions in order to live.

Light pours into the conference room from four floor-to-ceiling length windows, spreads a sheerness over a central oblong granite table, leather executive axis chairs. Seven of us fill the seats with an unfocused mid-afternoon Monday energy, slumped and yawning in front of to-go paper coffee cups amidst a scattered arrangement of recyclable cardboard sleeves. A handful of others line the walls behind us, a slight murmur filling the room.

On the far wall, Robby projects a video of Richard Serra’s Band in its initial exhibit at the New York MoMA in 2006. The sculpture looms before us, a gigantic and endless plane of movement, its form a twisted anatomy of a chocolatey-casted, weather-proof steel. Rising about twelve-and-a-half feet high and almost seventy-two feet in diameter, the surrealistic, slithering ribbon is a contorted rectangular strip on its side, an undulating band of one curvaceous body. From below, the camera focuses on Band’s concave façade, which appears windswept; it gives the illusion of an unfixed medium, like cotton, canvas, or felt. It defies any natural or architectural shape.

Robby has one of those soft, malleable faces where the skin around the edges hangs loosely from bone. He has a relatively thin frame—small arms and legs, though a bit of a protruding stomach. He carries himself with a sophisticated clarity, has what I’ve come to associate as a strictly European-American trait: the ability to transform physical imperfections into attractive characteristics—knobby elbows, elongated torso, crooked teeth—though he dresses in faded cotton tees and loose, ripped jeans. Style versus comfort: an artist-technician conundrum. I’ve known Robby since my birth, he and my father having attended Stanford together, and both part of some elite intellectual boys club that met once a month over drinks and cigars to discuss critical theory and the state of postmodernism. My father, a budding dramatist, and Robby, then, a painter, both now living out the aftermaths of academic idealism with working class jobs and cirrhotic livers.

“As you can probably tell, there is no way in fuck that thing’s coming in here in one piece. There will be a series of loading trucks carrying sections we’ll unload into the lower atrium through the two forty-foot garage doors, each piece weighing about twenty tons total.” Robby pauses the video and points to a loose map of the building drawn onto a dry-erase board, his beady blue eyes lit and bulging from some portion of his daily ten cups of gunpowder green tea. He traces the path of assembly with his finger.

“There is, unfortunately, always an issue setting up Serra’s sculptures.” Robby crosses his arms. “One that I wanted to discuss in the sculptural curator’s presence, but considering she’s running a little late,” he studies his watch again for obvious effect, “I might as well go ahead and start.”

Legs shake. Fingers tap. Somebody sneezes.

“Richard Serra,” Robby says, slowly weaving his fingers together, “is a dick.”

A tired communal chuckle erupts from the half of us who know this spiel already—one of Robby’s infamous “insert notorious artist” cautionary tales.

“And I’ll tell you why,” Robby says, sitting down and crossing his legs. “A few years back at the Legion of Honor, my close buddy Phil, one of the ranking techs at Atthowe Fine Art Services, was hired to rig and install Serra’s House of Cards, which if you don’t know already, but should, is a balancing box-structure of four very heavy, lead antimony plates.” He crosses his legs and leans back, places his hands atop his belly. The chair croons. “Now, after analyzing the situation, Phil decided that for safety reasons, the piece needed invisible spot welds tacked in the upper corners of the plates. However, this apparently incensed the collector, who demanded that Phil remove them immediately. And Phil, being a hard-working and highly intelligent technician told the fucker absolutely not, and excused himself from the project. The deputy director then ordered a bunch of interns to remove the bracing, and can you guess what happened?”

“Human sandwich,” I say.

“Try human vegetable,” says Robby, and my chest tightens. “Of course, one of the plates isn’t balanced correctly and falls on the poor kid, who hits his head on the floor and is in a coma for three months before the parents pull the fucking plug.”

“Spoken quite candidly,” a woman scoffs behind me.

Robby holds out his hands, shrugs comically. “The man is a psychopath. But fuck, is his art brilliant.” He then passes out contracts that depict an agreement between us and the collector that we can abide by all the safety procedures that Robby and Derek, the head tech for Atthowe they’re bringing in to help set up, tell us to perform. We all sign amidst buzzing, restless bodies preparing to disperse.

After the meeting, Robby and I walk to the break room in search of free pastries he’d heard rumored earlier that day. He asks how I’m doing. He attended the funeral, which is where I’d asked him with sudden desperation about a job. He’d talked HR into letting me return as a preparator, but with some extra roles only if I want them—some kind of optional managerial status. Job descriptions in the art world are always sort of vague. He’d kept in touch with my mother even after the divorce. I tell him that I’m fine, considering that he knows nothing about the house, and I want it to stay that way.

“I talked to your father over the weekend—he asked after you. I told him you were my right-hand lady. How good it is to have you back.” He pats me lightly on the shoulder. We stand in the sunlight holding paper plates piled with pastry remnants.

I nod. I tell him I haven’t even seen my dad since the funeral. And he’s never been much of a phone talker. He did send me a used copy of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in the mail—what I took as a thoughtful gesture, but of course wholly missing the point. Living on that sailboat has brought his isolation to a new level.

Robby sighs. He isn’t naive about my dad’s reclusive tendencies. “You know I’m here if you ever need anyone to talk to.” I smile and nod. We munch the overly sweetened bread in silence.

The television show was called Impossible Joe. It aired on NBC in 1959 and ran only one season. My dad played “Impossible Joe,” the sitcom’s protagonist, a troublemaking nine-year-old in rural California who, in each episode, was faced with solving a mystery in his town all by himself, since no adult would take him seriously. Each black and white episode ranged from twenty to thirty minutes, and always ended with the phrase, “Oh, Joe—you’re impossible!” which was then followed by my father’s signature smirk at the camera, forever binding his secret honor with the audience. There were thirty-six episodes in total, all of which Caleb and I watched dozens of times as kids, reciting lines to each other, telling all our friends. When the show’s contract failed to renew, my dad took a few commercial gigs and a brief role as the voice of a talking gazelle in a popular children’s cartoon, but soon he—in his own words—grew bored with the limitations of intellect as an actor, and decided to pursue playwriting instead, a decision that my grandfather (a big name in radio, who’d gotten my father into the movie business as early as possible, and who, before he died, lectured me on the stupidity of my father’s backwards career move and told me I was following in his footsteps with a fine art degree), never fully got over.

Growing up, I always had my father’s support for my pursuit of art, though it was inversely shown through either personal criticism, or lack of interest. Regularly he would criticize me for having thin walls. I’ve always been sensitive to places. I can feel energies, charges, blockages, commotion. I can only be in public gatherings for so long, until the intense emotional exhaustion hits, abruptly like a kind of violence. Though I’ve never quite figured out how to navigate it. I always went home after school to unwind; having time and space to myself was essential, a block in the day for my body to process. And I was a very emotional child—always reacting with high ups and downs. Rarely did I ever feel peaceful—always heightened with a forceful, manic energy, or deeply filled with doubt and unrest, lost in massive questions about life’s meaning, feeling alien and isolated from others in my vast inability to be in life. Perhaps this is why I still cling to the camera; I’ve always been watching myself from afar.

Emotions from others would just bleed into me; especially my mother’s—when she was upset, I’d feel it. And she was often upset. The most trivial disturbances in life horrified her to points of near madness. My father called it “Deirdre Syndrome”—this emotional upheaval, her apparent biological state of becoming lost in seconds. Her instantaneous reaction to the realization that she, ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, had no control. It’s like she always felt crowded. She constantly needed space and yet, in that space she’d distract herself with technology. Soap operas and sitcoms and detective shows, computer Scrabble, Minesweeper, and other thought-numbing games. Her modes of distraction advanced when my father left, and reached a whole new level once Caleb and I left home. The whole house became appalling. Its necessary upkeep dwindled; various rooms were consistently in the midst of construction, picked up and dropped by either her or various Internet boyfriends; you felt like you were walking into a ruin. Wallpaper that had begun tearing fifteen years ago ripped off into strips and peeled from the walls like hanging flaps of colored skin. Throughout the years she’d acquired cats she rescued from the local shelter (upon cleaning out the house I’d discovered five, and quickly gave them away to neighbors), which clawed up the backs of chairs and furniture to frayed messes. A layer of cat hair coated all objects. Cat beds, cat toys, cat scratchers, empty cardboard boxes and bags for the cats to play in. A stranger upon walking inside might think it was a house for cats, with a person inside of it walking from screen to screen. The television and computer screens got bigger and bigger, and each visit it seemed like she sat closer and closer. By the end they were colossal. Tabletops stacked high with murder mystery and romance novels, local newspapers, popular women’s magazines. It’s as if the material world became secondary to the methods of distraction. The inhabitant moved from one station to the next. The in-between time proved a highly uncomfortable period, bearable only with prescribed marijuana and sparkling white wine on ice. All the furniture was pushed out from the wall in order to not touch the cords that ran behind it—trained by the hypochondriac of the family, my father, who would spend hours checking the house for possible fire hazards before we left for vacation, who once turned us around and backtracked two hours because he thought he left the toaster oven plugged in. The house, for him, seemed more like a responsibility than a refuge. The chaos of possible problems that existed outside of his study, where he’d spend hours reading Aristotle and Bataille into late hours of the night, lost in his own critique, the ice chinking in his tumbler that I heard from my bedroom while trying to fall asleep. The white noise from the television. My father would unwind from a semester by taking a few days to himself, in which he’d unplug and drive up the Northern coast with nothing but a pocketknife and a few other bare essentials, disappearing into the wilderness. This kind of “losing” of one’s self terrified my mother; in the beginning I think she found his sovereignty attractive—probably kept him close to have that kind of power near—but in the end, couldn’t break her fear of living, raised herself by working class parents in New York who lived through the Great Depression—I have early memories of my grandmother at restaurants shoving empty water glasses and ketchup packets into her purse—my mother never being able to release herself from her own holding onto the stable fixtures in her ideas about safety, duty. Mostly she was a private person; she rarely liked to talk about the past. Humor was a way to break her rigidity; never was she afraid to laugh. Often I find myself imagining how life would be if she had told us; composing sitcom-ish dialogues in my head between us. So now that I have a tumor, I have to be babysat? As helpless as she’d feel inside, she’d never want my brother or I to leave our respective lives—some guilt complex she developed from years of suffering from a depression she never confronted. Her body trapping thousands of emotions, writhing and constricting like imprisoned reptiles in the container of skin and bones and blood. This power of the body—its ability to create a foreign object that didn’t come from outside—how the killer entered and possibly changed her brain, corrupted the frontal cortex until there was no compassion left. A gun, the prop, she and my father had bought for protection years ago, kept in a shoebox in the back of a closet, knowledge neither Caleb nor I had until later. Mrs. Ackerman in the Foyer with the Gun in her hand. The players around the table throw down their cards. The game is now over. The truth has been discovered.

At home, I check the live deconstruction cam and watch Jesse pulling drywall with two shirtless, perspiring Mexican men. We’ve planned another rendezvous for later this evening—I’ll bring over a fancy pizza from Mal’s restaurant, and he’ll supply the beer.

With a couple hours of daylight left, I decide to take a short walk to the bustling part of the Mission to the restaurant, to have an early drink at the bar. The air outside is cool and brisk, but tolerable without a jacket. Clouds move swiftly above buildings, the sun appearing and disappearing like lightening, a false threat of rain. I arrive around five, just as they’re opening up. Inside, Mal’s behind the counter pressing her uterus against the pizza warmer. She spots me out of the corner of her eye.