by Dana Czapnik
Lauren’s tiny scar, now so pale and white against the molten material of her lips—knowing it was just pressed against Percy’s face is more than I can bear. If only the book in my hand were something less blunt. A real instrument of violence. But it isn’t. It’s just a collection of words bound together with cloth and cardboard and string and glue. I put it back on the shelf and race down the stairs and back out onto the street. I suppose there are some people in the world for whom love comes easier.
* * *
When Violet finally emerges from the store, she’s holding a green plastic bag with a white block-print outline of Shakespeare’s face. Screw Shakespeare and his stupid sonnets.
“I lost you. Where did you go?”
“Percy was in there, with Lauren Moon.”
“The girl who fell off her bike?”
“Yep. Can I get one of those cigarettes?”
“But you don’t smoke.”
“Just gimme one.” I hold out my hand.
“Okay, okay. So dramatic. You don’t have to cry over it.”
“I’m not crying.”
“You are crying—you’re on the verge of sobs. Your face is all splotchy.”
“This isn’t crying. This is my body in revolt.” She passes me a smoke and holds a lighter for me while I inhale. And even though I’ve smoked so much pot, I find myself choking and coughing on this awful Marlboro.
“Just don’t ask me for another one. I’m not going to be the source of your addiction.”
“Don’t worry. I care too much about basketball to be a smoker. Can we get outta here already? I gotta go somewhere I won’t run into them.”
“I know just the place.”
* * *
In the vestibule are buzzers for several studios and individual names for residences. Violet presses the button next to the one labeled “The Earth Room.” The door buzzes, and we walk up a narrow flight of uneven stairs with a single light bulb on the wall. When we reach the landing for the Earth Room, a part of me expects to find a secret gateway to another dimension. Or some kind of installation that makes you feel like you’re on the moon, watching the Earth rise.
We open the door and walk into a huge white room filled with dirt. That’s all it is. A room of dirt. Whatever this is has been poorly named. It should have been called the Dirt Room.
This seems to be one of the undiscovered corners of the city. Aside from me and Violet, it is empty. There’s a placard on the wall with the artist’s name: Walter De Maria.
“His Lightning Field is like Mecca for modern artists,” Violet says. “Max and I went during a summer break at school. I borrowed my dad’s Oldsmobile, and we drove all the way to New Mexico and back. There’s a romantic bleakness to the American desert. New York City may be many things—broken, ravaged, endless—but bleak would never be the word I’d use to describe it. The thing about America no one really understands is that it’s actually completely empty.”
“Like a wasteland.” I snort.
“No . . . like a paradise. I come here when I need to be reminded of that. And to quiet the whistling engine in my head. All right, I’m gonna go grab a smoke. You stay here for a few minutes. Come down when you’re ready.”
“I’m ready now. I’ve seen it. It’s a room full of dirt.”
“Just . . . give it a minute.”
Violet leaves, and at first I don’t know what to do. The room smells musty, mildewy. I’d think all the dirt would somehow muffle the sounds coming from the street, but it doesn’t. Outside a siren wails, and a dog howls for an unbearably long time in response, I suppose confusing the ambulance for one of his own melancholy canine brethren. I feel for that dog, man. The entire ambience of New York is summed up in the siren of an ambulance—the whole town is an emergency—and he has to spend his entire life thinking that it’s some other dog howling in distress. What an existence.
The wailing and howling fills the room, and I’m reminded of how I once absent-mindedly pointed my TV clicker at my living-room window during a particularly loud chorus of traffic while I was watching a Knicks game and pressed the Mute button repeatedly until I realized what I was doing. There is no Mute button for the New York outside the window.
Eventually, the usual quiet of Wooster Street settles over the dirt, which is surprisingly not uniform. It’s made up of all different-sized clumps. Interspersed are rocks of varying sizes and shapes and colors. And sprouted in sections are some small, yellowish mushrooms. There’s something really beautiful about the fact that a random crop of mushrooms has sprouted here in a room full of dirt, with very little sunlight, in the middle of SoHo. I feel something similar when I see rats in the subway. Yes, they carry the black plague and they’re dirty and disgusting . . . but they’re also alive in the New York City subway. A place without sunlight, clean water, air. And there they are, surviving. Flowers in the pavement cracks and all that.
There’s a big sign that forbids touching the exhibit, but since there’s no one here, I ignore it. I’ve always enjoyed tactile sensations, and so I grab a handful of dirt and squeeze it into my fists. I close my eyes. An image of Percy pops into my head. But it’s not clear. Funny how you think you have a person’s face memorized, but when you’re forced to really think about it, it’s hard to create an exact replica in your head. As I stand alone in this empty gallery full of earth on this tiny island of Manhattan where almost all the landmass is vertical and where the actual ground it’s been built on has been hollowed out to make room for infrastructure, in this room full of earth on a hollow island, these thoughts about loneliness start manifesting. That maybe I shouldn’t sell it short. It has its dignity. It’s good to be a little lonely. It reminds you of the importance of other people. A person too comfortable in loneliness loses touch with the wonderful things. Laughing alone in a room should always be tinged with a bit of sadness. But a little bit of loneliness serves another purpose too. It’s a good reminder of the small piece of land that is your self.
I open my eyes.
It turns out I’m not alone. At least not here, in the Earth Room on the second floor of 141 Wooster Street. There’s also a man walking on the earth, which is behind a waist-high Plexiglas wall. He is watering a quadrant of dirt, part of which is hidden in a corner outside my field of vision, which must be why I hadn’t noticed him earlier. He is methodical, walking north to the wall, then turning and walking south until the entire section of dirt is well hydrated. Then he puts down his watering can and gets a rake. Again, he goes back and forth over the dirt so that the moisture is evenly distributed. He does not make a sound. He does not play music. He does not look up to see who is here. He just goes about his job tending to the earth. Rake north. Rake south.
There is something monklike about him. Has he taken a vow of silence too? I’ve always been fascinated by the people who choose to do that. A vow of silence is an attempt to tamp down the wild parts. Maybe some people can’t handle the disorder of the universe and so they have to impose some kind of order on a random segment of their lives to make the chaos more bearable. That’s what I think whenever someone describes themselves as “type A.” Making lists just to cross items off. So silly. I may spend a lot of time white-knuckling my way through human existence, but I prefer the chaos.
I watch him for a little while longer and then leave. On my way out, I consider the work. Its purpose. Is it there because in New York we’re so removed from nature, the artist wants us to reconnect to the earth we’ve all come from and eventually will all go back to? Is it some sort of statement about the environment—that one day, if we’re not careful, the entirety of Earth’s beauty will be turned into small exhibits supported by wealthy patrons because that will be all that’s left of it? Shards of Planet Earth behind glass? I have no idea. I’m not sure I really get it or why it’s so important that someone has donated millions to keep it around, but at the same time, I’m glad it exists. Sometimes people need to spend a moment alone in a big white room full of dirt in a lo
ft in the middle of Manhattan.
* * *
“So what do you think?” Violet asks me when I get downstairs.
“Did you know there’s a man up there who just waters and rakes the room?”
“Yeah, that’s the curator.”
“And that’s all he does?”
“Yep. And he buzzes people in, obviously.”
“I didn’t know a job like that could exist. If I told my college counselor I wanted the kind of job where I could be in a three-thousand-square-foot room full of dirt and tend to it all day, every day, she’d think I was losing focus on my own success.”
“I’m sure that guy has a master’s in the arts of some sort. I don’t think he’s just a handyman with a rake. He’s got credentials.”
“But that sounds so boring—just doing the same thing every day, walking the same path every day. Back and forth. I’d lose my mind.”
“I bet if you interviewed all the people you most admire, Sally Ride and Michael Jordan, or whoever that guy is you love on the Knicks—”
“John Starks.”
“I bet they’d all say their days are repetitive. That’s what a job is: raking a room full of dirt. Sometimes a famous person shows up or you’re featured in an article and it gets interesting for a moment. But mostly it’s just going back and forth, back and forth. Generally, not much happens. If I ever write a book, I’m going to call it Not Much Happens in This Book.”
“God, Violet, you can be so cynical.”
“Every cynic is just a disappointed dreamer. Idealism is no longer affordable. You’ll see soon enough.” She hands me the green bag from Shakespeare & Co. “This is for you, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.” I reach in to find two books by Simone de Beauvoir. One is a slim paperback with a black-and-white photo of a woman in profile and the words The Ethics of Ambiguity underneath. “Have you read her yet?”
“No.”
“Amazing—they teach you Sartre and Camus in school but they leave off Simone. You know I had to find her in the Women’s Studies section? One of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and because she’s a woman, she ends up in the Women’s Studies section.” She puts her hand on the book. “This is a humanist bible. This tells you everything you need to know about how to live a moral life without God or eternal consequences. How to create your own meaning and idea of right and wrong. How we’re responsible for our own fate. Not just as individuals, but mankind as a whole.”
“And what about this one?” I hold up the thick edition of The Second Sex, which I know of because my parents have a worn-out copy on their bookshelf but, for some reason, I’ve never thought to pick up.
“That’s about how a person like Simone de Beauvoir ends up in the tiny, ignored Women’s Studies section in the back of a bookstore.”
I put the books back in the bag. “Thanks, Violet.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Do you think there are so few female philosophers because they spent too much of their adult lives trying not to get raped or pregnant or having to take care of babies to think about all that stuff?”
“No. There are so few female philosophers because men didn’t want to publish them or care what they thought. It’s a fallacy of history that women didn’t think about whether their lives had meaning and how to live in a world full of misery and death. You think an eighteenth-century mother of twelve, whose kids kept dying of dysentery, which she had to clean up all on her own using flimsy cloth diapers before Pampers and birth control, never thought ‘Life is nasty, brutish, and short’? I’m sure she thought it every day of her crappy life. For every Hobbes or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, there was a woman somewhere out there who thought the same things, but no one would let her write it down for posterity. Think about it: Women artists were banned from working with nude models until the 1900s. Thank goodness Michelangelo was gay or we never would have seen a beautiful male form. That’s why all the women in the Louvre or the Met look as they do. It’s all the male perspective on the woman’s body, what she must be feeling. That’s why our moment in history is so important. We can finally choose whether we want to marry or not. We even get to choose who we want to marry and if and when to have kids. We get to go to school and pick a real profession. We’re the first women since primordial sludge morphed into single-celled organisms who can really control our own fate. We can’t fuck it up.”
“How do we do that—not fuck it up?”
“I think the answer is probably something like: don’t leave your job after you have kids, make sure you only sleep with men who are good people, don’t just accept the shit the man serves you, don’t add to the world’s injustice, do everything you can to help other women out—but the truth is that I’m wearing socks with holes in them because I can barely afford new ones and I’m just trying to survive, so I don’t know how to not fuck it up in practical terms. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m fucking it all up on a daily basis.”
“Oh.”
“Listen, we should head back to the gallery and earn our stupid paychecks. You okay now?”
“Yeah, let’s go.”
“If it makes you feel any better, she looks like a silly girl.”
“Who?”
“That girl Percy was with. I saw them canoodling while I was looking for Simone.”
“Actually, she’s not. She’s probably the first girl Percy’s ever dated who’s out of his league.”
“Trust me, that girl has ‘future stay-at-home mom to her financier husband’s spawn’ written all over her face. She’s pretty, but she’s silly.”
“Do you think my mother is a silly woman? She quit her job after she had me.”
“Your mother is not a silly woman. Silly women don’t wear comfortable shoes. No, your mother is a mommy martyr. She gave up everything she found important about herself for her husband and kid.”
* * *
Back at the gallery, a reporter has a mini tape recorder pointed at Max’s face. With about two extra feet on her, he is hovering over her in a vaguely aggressive way. She’s gesticulating wildly and flexing her tiny, striated biceps, claiming the space around her body for herself and letting him know he’s not welcome there.
I take the time to walk around the gallery and look at the work we’ve hung and installed in the space.
Aside from Old Glory Hole and A Bismol Barbie, there’s a wall of television sets all looping the same video of a close-up on Max’s face looking directly at the camera saying, “I don’t smile if I don’t feel like it.” They’re not playing simultaneously, so there’s a jagged chorus of “I don’t smile if I don’t feel like it” that takes over the room.
On another wall are six evenly spaced large color photographs of women’s hands with henna tattoos of various positions from the Kama Sutra. They’re all giving the viewer the finger.
In the corner is a neon-green sign that looks handwritten, flickering the words “Gross Domestic Product.” Beneath it is a device Max meticulously re-created called a beauty micrometer, which was used by makeup artists in the 1930s to determine defects in women’s faces. It’s a metal helmet of sorts with adjustable nails around the face—a reverse Hellraiser where the nails of horror are pointed inward, not out. Max has placed the head of a life-sized Barbie doll inside and extended the nails so that they are piercing the doll’s skin, eyes, and tongue, which hangs limply outside her mouth like the dead.
One of the most striking pieces in the place is an enormous rhinestone mosaic of an off-center close-up of Lady Liberty’s face. But the closer you get to the piece, the more the image starts to break down until finally, when you get close enough, you realize it’s comprised entirely of thousands and thousands of pairs of perky plastic Barbie breasts wearing various-colored rhinestones as pasties.
My eye is drawn to a stunning painting of a pear hanging on the far right wall that I haven’t previously seen. It’s the only painting in the gallery and the only one that has any traditional a
rtistic beauty. The pear is perfectly rendered, like in a photo. But on its left side—where the bulge is just beginning—is a brown-and-purple bruise. The rest of the canvas is white, and there are no shadows. It’s a three-dimensional photorealistic painting of a pear suspended in the middle of a blank space. Above the pear, in dark, thick graphite, are the words:
Just eat around the ruined part. The ruined part is mine.
It’s very obvious that the words were written by Max, but the pear was painted by Violet. Violet has the technical skill but not the ideas. And Max has the ideas but none of the skill. In the world economy, the ideas are the commodity. Perhaps they could have a collaborative partnership, but people have a hard-on for genius, and for genius to be celebrated it has to come from an individual. So it’s only Max’s name on the bottom of the painting.
On a blank wall, Violet is using a stencil to paint the words “Laugh, cunt” in a bright, cutting blue.
I watch her paint for a moment while straining to hear Max’s interview with the reporter.
“No, no,” she says in frustration. “It’s not about selling out. It’s that there is no counterculture anymore. Punk is pop now.” The reporter says something back to her, but I can’t make it out. They have a back-and-forth, and then her voice rises again. “You’re a man, do you feel alienated?” She sounds agitated. He responds in some way, but she cuts him off. “Everyone should feel alienated by my work. Art’s purpose isn’t to confirm your world view. It’s to challenge it.”