by Natasha Bell
Marc stares at his lap as the man passes through the carriage, his pulse pounding in his ears. The woman next to him places a folded five-dollar bill in the guy’s hat. “Thank you, thank you,” beams the student. Marc clenches his fists, his grazed knuckles throb. They reach his stop. He tumbles through the carriage, through the turnstile, through the gray corridors, out from the concrete hole and up the stairs into the real world. To his left is the park, the green, the trees, the dog walkers. The blue sky makes his eyes sting. A piece of newspaper hits his foot. He runs up the last two steps gasping for air, wondering if he might be sick. There are no rainbows and no bluebirds and I am not out there to be found.
“Which way is Ninety-first Street?” asks an overweight man with a camera.
“I don’t know, I’m English,” Marc says, as if it’s a defense. How should I know? I don’t belong here. He turns his back on the park and paces toward his hotel. I shouldn’t even be here.
* * *
He falls asleep in the middle of the afternoon, entering a suffocating dream world until 2 a.m. He reads while the sun rises through the hotel window. Finally 7 a.m. arrives and he hurries, wide awake and freshly shaved, down the stairs to consult the yawning receptionist.
“Good morning,” he says. “How are you?”
“Are there any messages?” Marc asks. “Room two-one-two.”
“Lemme check.” The receptionist turns to the desk behind him. “Two-one-two? Yeah, someone called for you yesterday afternoon. We knocked but there was no answer.”
“Did they leave a message?”
“Um, no, looks like they didn’t—”
Marc’s excitement plummets.
“There’s a number, though.” The receptionist begins to pass him a scrap of paper and Marc snatches it out of his hand. The guy nods toward a wall-mounted receiver next to a tattered leather chair in the corner.
“Thanks,” Marc says, already halfway to the phone.
It’s not until after he’s dialed the ten digits that he remembers it’s rather early to be phoning strangers. His finger hovers, ready to hang up, but halfway through the second ring a groggy male voice answers, “Hello?”
Marc’s throat feels suddenly dry. He swallows.
“Who is this?” muffled by a yawn.
“Hi, I’m Marc Southwood. You rang me yesterday. I left a note—”
“Oh Christ, man,” the voice says and it sounds as if its owner has flopped back into bed. “What time is it?”
“I’m sorry. Did I wake you? I’ve only been here a couple of days, I’m still getting used to the time difference.”
“S’okay, man,” is offered as an aural shrug and Marc imagines this guy, whoever he is, sitting up again and trying to tap the sleep from his brain. “Your note sounded urgent, so I guess I’ll let you off. How can I help?”
“I’m looking for Amelia Heldt. I’d like to talk to her.”
The voice chuckles. “Ah, Amelia.”
“You know her?”
“Sort of, I guess,” the stranger says, his words traveling at an excruciating snail’s pace to Marc’s ears. “But you don’t just get to talk to Amelia whenever you want, you know? Only when she wants.”
“Whatdoyoumean?” Marc asks, desperate to extract the information he needs.
“She’s a free spirit,” the voice says in a higher register, a smile playing on its owner’s lips. “A fucking genius but, you know, a bit whack too.”
“But you do know her?”
“Kind of,” the guy says.
“Kind of?”
“Well, we—I mean, the gallery—we represented her sometimes. She contacted us years ago to ask if we were interested in arranging some of her shows.” He pauses, then adds, “I think she probably had a similar setup with a couple of other places, but she paid us well and it was good publicity for the gallery.”
“Was?”
“Yeah, well, there was a bit of an issue between her and my boss. I guess Amelia kinda used their friendship and some pretty personal stuff in one of her pieces and my boss didn’t really like that so much.”
“Oh,” Marc says, his mind groping to match the detail to the descriptions in Amelia’s letters. “Wait, Alison Graves Gallery—is your boss related to Serena Graves, Amelia’s agent?”
“You could say that. Alison’s her middle name. She changed the name of the gallery after the scandal. It was a total nightmare, to be honest. I almost quit.”
Marc scratches his temple. He may not have found Amelia, but he’s relieved to find her world slotting into place. “Do you know how to contact Amelia?”
“Well, no,” the guy says. “They haven’t spoken for a few years now, but even if that wasn’t the case, I probably couldn’t help you. I’m telling you, man, Amelia’s a bit of a fruit loop. She never actually came to the gallery. I never met her and neither did anyone who worked there except my boss. And it was pretty unclear how close they ever were, especially after her so-called Friendship piece. She called us, that was all. We arranged everything by phone and she never gave us a number or address to contact her on. It was all a bit mysterious. Why are you trying to find her? Are you a reporter or something?”
“No. My wife went to art school with her,” Marc says a little angrily.
“No way!”
Marc winces from the receiver.
“That’s awesome. I mean, my boss says she’s certifiably insane, but that’s kinda cool. Your wife must have some stories.”
“So you don’t have any contact details for Amelia?”
“Sorry dude, no.”
“What about your boss? Would she talk to me?”
“No way. Man, she’d go postal on you if you even mentioned Amelia’s name. Trust me, she has no links to the woman anymore and it’s not worth your life to try. You’re lucky I found your note and not her. She’d fucking kill me if she knew I was even talking to you.”
Marc has one final idea. “Do you at least know where Amelia’s last show was?”
“Oh yeah, I can totally help you with that,” the guy says. “I didn’t tell my boss, obviously, but I went to it last month. It’s still running, got another week or two left if you want to check it out.”
“Really? Do you think Amelia might be there?”
“Unlikely. She’s not exactly the meet-and-greet type.”
“Oh.”
“It’s at Space38, anyway. On Greene Street, third floor. It’s a cool piece, I took my girlfriend.”
“Right, thanks,” Marc says, his interest in the individual on the end of the line dwindling rapidly now he has his next destination.
Hanging up, he tries to quash the feeling in his gut that this whole trip is turning into a wild goose chase. He’s reached his third day in New York and all he’s learned is Amelia’s some kind of kooky recluse. He has an address, a direction in which to take the subway, but will it reveal any more than a gallery of her work? Still, despite his frustration, he’s curious to see Amelia’s show. He climbs the stairs back to his room, throws his wallet and notebook into a rucksack, locks the door and hurries out into the morning. He switches to the A and rides the five stops to Canal Street. The gallery proves simple to find, but a paper taped to the inside of the window tells him it doesn’t open for another hour. Impatience rises in his stomach, but he feels strangely calm. He’s here, at least. At some point today these doors will open and he’ll learn something about the woman I betrayed him for.
At two minutes to the hour the gallery finally opens. As the thick doors swing outward, Marc leaps from the step and stands to attention. A skinny white boy with pockmarked cheeks and floppy hair gives him a quizzical look. “We don’t usually have people so eager,” he says as he leads Marc into the elevator. At the top, he holds a door open and Marc steps into an enormous white room.
“You c
an leave your bag here,” the boy says, pointing to his left. “Phones and cameras and any recording equipment need to go in the lockers.”
Marc does as he’s told, then turns to the space. Occupying the whole corner of the building, the room features rows of large sash windows and a dozen or so vertical pillars holding up the ceiling. That ceiling is crisscrossed with an intricate pattern of pipes and sprinkler systems. Long horizontal radiators run at knee-height around the entire circumference of the room.
“Lemme know if you need anything,” the boy says as he heads to a desk in the corner.
Marc steps farther inside, twisting his head to look at the pristine walls. He’s reminded of the room full of blank paper at my mother’s house and experiences the same eerie feeling of something having been erased. He walks away from the docent’s desk, crossing to the other side of the wooden floor, wanting privacy. As Marc moves, the sunlight through the windows shimmers over something on the opposite wall. When he approaches, though, whatever it is disappears. He steps back again, moving his head to catch the right angle and realizes it isn’t just the window causing the effect. A series of palm-sized mirrors are arranged at angles on the ceiling and baseboard. They bounce the light at multiple angles, reflecting off what might be as simple as gloss on matte paint so that as he moves he catches writing on the wall. He dances daftly around the room trying to pick out whole sentences, recognizing snippets of lines and rising on tiptoes to glimpse their authors’ names, elaborately scrawled in parentheses beneath their Helvetica statements. A mixture of theorists, writers and celebrities neatly graffiti-ing the walls seemingly at random, sentences running into each other or curling around images of cavemen wielding spears. The words make up lines or part-lines, some taken entirely out of context or with little relevance to their original purpose, but a common theme connects them all:
“A people must have dignity and identity…” (Andrew Goodman) “Identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results…” (Judith Butler) “A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong…” (Djuna Barnes) “My name is my identity and must not be lost…” (Lucy Stone) “I lost my identity and balance…” (Mathias Rust) “Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth…” (Jean Baudrillard) “An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience…” (James Baldwin) “Each time this identity announces itself, someone or something cries…” (Jacques Derrida) “Human identity is the most fragile thing that we have…” (Alan Rudolph) “All types of identities, ethnic, national, religious, sexual or whatever else, can become your prison after a while…” (Murathan Mungan) “The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces…” (Michel Foucault) “This strong, brutal rapist, whatever, identity is my true self…” (Slavoj Žižek) “Like Popeye says, I yam what I yam…” (Tony Soprano)
“Cool, huh?” The pockmarked boy has crept up behind him. “It’s like those invisible letters you used to write with lemon juice when you were a kid.”
“Uh-huh,” Marc says.
“You look confused.”
Marc clears his throat. “Modern art isn’t exactly my forte.”
“Oh man, you’re missing out,” the boy says, bobbing on his sneakered heels. “I love this artist. She looks at the world in a different way.”
“Through lemon juice?” Marc says, only half joking. He’s thinking about my paper. Did I send Amelia the Tony Soprano quote?
Ignoring Marc’s attempt at humor, the boy continues, “It’s meant to be about how, like, the physical fact of the world makes everything pale in comparison, however, like, hard we try to make that not true. Even art and literature and theory and fame, they all mean, like, nothing compared to the ground beneath our feet, the sun in the sky. Our identities feel like everything, but what do they actually mean? What do we have to show for them? If you keep kinda thinking along those lines, you start, like, imagining we’re all just stupid little puppy dogs howling to an invisible moon.”
“Or shuffling around an empty room to see something that’s not there?” Marc says, wincing at the boy’s stumbling syntax, but catching on. He frowns, skeptical that all this can truly exist in some quotes scribbled on a wall. Suddenly my pop-culture thesis seems surprisingly academic. What would Paula make of this piece?
“Right,” says the boy. “Exactly! So, here, like, the performance becomes the person looking for the art, searching for a meaning that’s maybe not there. It’s hilarious really.” His grin drops. “Not that I was, like, laughing at you, you understand. It’s just a cool piece to docent for.”
“It’s okay,” Marc says.
“I get really, you know, pumped about this piece. And the artist, like, I’ve sort of been following her work for my final-year project. She’s really hot right now. Everyone wants a piece of her, but she’s like, ‘Fuck you all, I’m gonna live this hermit life and you’ll never find me.’ I was so pumped to meet her at the opening, she like never usually goes.”
“Hold on, you’ve met Amelia?” Marc says, sounding almost as desperately excited as the boy before him.
“Yeah, I know, it’s hard to believe, right?”
“Do you have a way to contact her?”
“Are you kidding? Nobody knows how to contact her, that’s like her thing. She didn’t even tell us she was like coming to the opening, so we weren’t prepared. It was just us and a few of the gallery supporters, a couple of reviewers, though press night was the next night. And then, like, around eight thirty, this woman walks in in this A-mazing cocktail dress and asks the room how it’s enjoying her latest baby. We’re all shell-shocked and kinda rush toward her, everyone crying, ‘Are you Amelia Heldt?’ like, in total disbelief. I mean, like, none of us knew what she looked like, how old she was, anything at all, and I guess we all must have painted our own pictures based on our interpretations of her work and our own biases, but I reckon there was not one person in that room who wasn’t surprised when we found out who she actually was. Anyway, she’s like totally unfazed and kind of shrugs us off and gives an impromptu talk about her influences for the piece. She’s so eloquent. Then she claps her hands, gives a kind of giggle, and declares we should all drink more. It became a regular party after that. Even Amelia got wasted. She was like wandering the room, chatting to everyone and then kissing people like full-on on the mouth. I heard she was from Louisiana, but it seemed pretty European to me. But then I was talking to my boss the next day and he had a theory that it was all intentional. Like, when she turned up and started kissing everyone, nobody paid any attention to the art on the walls, we were all like, ‘WTF! Is she bi or something? Or on drugs?’ And, like, the twenty of us that were in the room that night are, like, the only ones who know what Amelia Heldt looks like maybe in the whole of Manhattan. Pretty cool, huh? Although, one of the critics tried to write about it afterward in The New York Times and the next day every other paper was saying he made the whole thing up. So it’s like nobody believes us, we’re this little club that can never share our experience with anyone outside the club. Like Fight Club, only cooler.”
The boy is practically panting by the time he comes to a stop, his dewy eyes focused wide on Marc’s face, willing him to share in his excitement.
“You really have no way of contacting her?” Marc says.
“Sorry, man, if I did it’d be worth a fortune. Not just to you, you know?” His features soften into a putty frown as he registers Marc’s disappointment. “Hey, I’m really sorry. Why do you need it so bad anyway? Are you a fan? I could fish out some of the brochures for the opening, I think she signed a couple, if you like.”
Marc opens his mouth to say that’s unnecessary, but the boy’s already darted to his desk and begun rummaging in a drawer. Marc steps over t
o join him.
“Here we go.” The boy pulls out a bundle of inexpensively photocopied leaflets. He picks one up to investigate the inside cover, then drops it back on the desk. “Not that one.” He picks another, then another, discarding them both. As he selects a fourth, a square Polaroid slips from the pages and floats to the top of the pile below, landing facedown.
“This one’s signed, look,” says the boy as Marc reaches for the picture. He turns it over in his hand and sees a gloomy image of a young woman with long, straight hair pressing her mouth to the crimson lips of a blond woman. Only half in the shot, the blonde looks stunned, as if she’s in the process of backing away, while the other woman seems passionately in the moment, her slanted eyes closed to reveal a thick line of kohl and spidery lashes splaying toward the freckles on her prominent cheekbones.
“Oh wow,” the boy says, leaning over the desk to peer upside down at the photograph. “I didn’t know anyone had a camera. Fuck, that’s proof, that’s worth a fortune.”
“Is—is this Amelia?” Marc asks, confused.
“Yeah, that’s her. See what I mean, she’s stunning.”