by Rick Moody
“People get stupid in front of the camera,” Vanessa says. “People begin to grovel. People begin to lie. People begin to pander. That’s the big festering paradox of reality programming.”
Madison rallies briefly. “Reality programming. I mean, I think it’s just the programming of sluts. If you met any of these girls who are on those shows, they’re all sluts. And I’m betting the guys in the creative departments at the networks, they’re just trying to find ways to meet girls who are sluts. We don’t really have any sluts here, right? So I figure we don’t really have anyone who understands the programming for sluts. So can we please not work on those shows? Because I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror and think I could have worked on getting distribution for that new Iranian film, but instead I worked on a show about the world record holder for hooking up with guys.”
“Thanks for waking up, Madison.”
Then, when everyone is filing out, looking as if they won’t be able to work another day at Means of Production, Ranjeet stops Jeanine in front of his empty office. His face glows with the look of a man who has a complicated future. “I have a son, and he is the most extraordinary boy, and I would like very much for you to meet my son. Perhaps you would come to dinner with my family?”
9
Preliminary reports, according to detectives, indicate that the victim is an employee of an art gallery in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. Specifically, the victim works at the gallery called 905 on West Twenty-fourth, a gallery known primarily for mixed-media work. The detectives have called the gallery and they have spoken to the owner. This owner remarked that the victim left work early on Thursday for a doctor’s appointment and was not seen in the office after 4:00PM. The victim, according to the employer and others, is Asian and is described as of slight build, attractive, with brown hair and chestnut highlights. The victim is described as wearing, at the time of the attack, clothes dark in color: black tights, black skirt, midthigh, black leather jacket. Age: twenty-six. The victim was educated at a private college in Pennsylvania. The victim’s employer also indicated that the victim has been embarked for some months on gathering material for an exhibition of contemporary African American mixed-media work. The victim, according to interviews, has a considerable critical reputation. She is admired both in the office and in the field generally.
The parents of the victim were notified as soon as was feasible, after contact information was located among the personal effects of the victim. These calls were placed by detectives after notification by personnel at the hospital. The parents are currently staying in a hotel in midtown and are visiting their daughter during visiting hours. They have given detectives permission to read the address book and other effects of the victim found in a shoulder bag at the crime scene. This address book contains seven numbers for local doctors. The parents have indicated that their daughter was recently under the care of a clinical social worker. Calls to the social worker were inconclusive. However, a call to the victim’s orthopedist has apparently confirmed a visit earlier in the day. The office of the orthopedist is located in the Murray Hill district of Manhattan, on Thirty-third Street between Second and Third Avenues. The victim suffers from a repetitive stress complaint and was fitted for a wrist brace.
Detectives believe that the victim was making her way to the library. Records show that she has been a frequent user of the resources of the Mid-Manhattan branch library in recent months. The victim may have been doing research relevant to the curatorial project described above. According to detectives, the point of origin for this trip was the Murray Hill office of the orthopedist. The victim was admitted to Bellevue Hospital at 6:13PM on Thursday evening, so the time of attack would fall between 5:00 and 5:30, when midtown swells with pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Thus, the volume of eyewitness accounts.
The construction site where the incident took place is on the corner of Third Avenue and Fortieth Street. Under normal circumstances, a construction site is secure. Permits for construction at this address were up to date. However, there were reports that early in the construction process, the Third Avenue site was in dereliction of union agreements, such that a large rubber rodent was deposited at the site, indicating an ongoing union action. In recent weeks, disputes with unions were apparently resolved amicably. It follows that the site could not be easily burgled for the purposes of obtaining a weapon, and yet, according to eyewitnesses, this is exactly what happened.
Eyewitnesses describe the perpetrator as male, African American, riding a bicycle. Most witnesses believe that the suspect is a bicycle messenger because he was apparently wearing bicycle racing apparel, that is, nylon shorts. This clothing, according to witnesses, was dark in color, except for a red bandanna worn around the neck. The bicycle itself had few distinguishing marks. It may have been stolen. The bicycle messenger was riding quickly, perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, when he came upon the victim and used his weapon, a brick or cinder block, on the back of the head of the victim as he passed her, knocking her to the ground. The brick or cinder block was carried away from the scene. The assault is therefore described as blunt force trauma, probably with a conventionally sized brick. Witnesses report the suspect then going east on Forty-first Street, against traffic, leaving the scene. The victim rolled to one side, with her brace parallel to the curb, as shown in the drawing. She was bleeding heavily. In no account was there verbal exchange between suspect and victim. The victim, who fell into unconsciousness almost instantly, did not have time to register surprise.
Pedestrians notified 911, which dispatched the ambulance. The paramedics arrived within three minutes, from Bellevue. They do not report any recollection of passing a bicycle messenger on their way to the scene. Nor are there reports of a man on a bicycle, in that area or otherwise, carrying a brick. In all likelihood, the perpetrator fled the immediate environs of the attack, perhaps into East River Park or even onto the subway.
The victim was unconscious when paramedics arrived. As of Friday morning, the victim is stabilized. The prognosis for recovery, according to physicians at the hospital, is guarded but positive. Full recovery of memory and brain function is possible but not certain at this time. At present, the victim, when conscious, which is only occasionally, is suffering from long-term and short-term memory lapses.
There is no evidence of rape or sexual trauma at the time of the attack. Indeed, if the accounts of witnesses are credible, there could not have been time for sexual battery. Parents report that the victim was known to date young men but is not at present involved with any male romantic or sexual partner on an ongoing basis. Her last significant romantic attachment occurred with a male, aged thirty-nine, but he and the victim separated about six months prior to the attack. This particular romantic partner is described as a painter of Caucasian ethnicity, living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Detectives are investigating the painter to rule out conspiracy and have made contact. This romantic partner works in galleries in Manhattan (including the 905 Gallery) as a transporter and hanger of artworks prior to openings and exhibitions in local galleries, so it is unlikely that he was in the neighborhood in question at the time of the attack. He works afternoons and evenings. Parents of the victim describe her as basically a “normal young woman” in matters of romance. She had boyfriends in college and was serially attached to men in her early twenties. In some of these cases, according to the parents, she was hoping the relationships would “go on longer” than they did. Other inquiries into the personal life of the victim are pending. The possibility of an attack by a disgruntled lover is not ruled out but at the present moment seems unlikely.
Police officers and detectives thereafter inquired of the parents whether the victim was a known frequenter of drug locations or a user of illegal drugs. The mother of the victim, to the marked discontent of her husband, indicated that the victim had occasionally smoked marijuana in college and that on at least one occasion the victim had marijuana-related anxiety, including feelings of depersonalizati
on and alienation. Her experiments in this direction were short-lived. No other illegal drugs were known to be used by the victim. Acquaintances from the victim’s workplace also professed no knowledge whatever of any drug problems. Nor were any prescription medications—OxyContin, Vicodin—obtained illegally by the victim. It’s therefore possible to rule out an attack related to a drug deal or an assault otherwise perpetrated by a drug dealer of any kind. In fact, the general demeanor and biography of the victim do not suggest fraternizing with dealers or crime syndicates or known criminal elements.
It’s worth noting, however, that among the doctors listed in the address book of the victim is a psychopharmacologist. The detectives assigned to the case do indicate that the victim was being prescribed a “cocktail” of medications, including an antidepressant, a sleep aid, and an antianxiety medication, BuSpar. Some of these substances were found in the shoulder bag of the victim. All the prescriptions were legally obtained. Preliminary observation indicates that the victim is now and always has been “very thin,” her weight being just over a hundred pounds. Whether this information bears upon the attack is doubtful.
According to the above information, any public attack by the most likely constituencies—lovers or dealers of controlled substances or employees of organized crime syndicates, et cetera—is unlikely. The most credible theory, therefore, would suggest random attack. The perpetrator, according to this theory, was unknown to the victim at the time of the attack. Random attacks, exclusive of sexual assaults, where they have occurred in the past (as in the Eighty-eighth Street attacks or the recent Fort Greene assaults), are usually tied to the homeless population or to other persons disenfranchised from the workforce.
Detectives have also spent some time studying an important piece of evidence among the effects of the victim, namely the victim’s diary of the last few months, which is described as a book of unlined paper with a black leather binding, such as would be available in any number of high-end stationery stores downtown. Obviously, obtaining this information from a person who is likely to recover either partially or entirely is a sensitive matter. At the prompting of the father, however, who is described as extremely emotional about his desire to bring to justice the perpetrator of the crime, the diary was made available in this developing case.
The victim’s handwriting is small and precise, cursive, bending slightly to the right. Some letters are tall and willowy, as if blown across the page by a gust from the margin.
Some of the victim’s remarks concern the weather and the pleasantness of temperatures still in the sixties in the first week of November. Some remarks concern films currently in release, including what is described as a tirade on the subject of the film known as Pay It Forward. The film, it should be noted, is not without favor among detectives. The victim, however, is apparently disappointed with the career choices of the lead actor in the film. To continue, the victim can’t believe that she agreed to go to this movie entitled Pay It Forward. The people who made the film “should be towed out to sea on a barge,” according to the diary. The victim writes favorably about other film releases.
One section of the diary, it should be said, was for the detectives kind of a page-turner. This portion of the diary particularly concerns the untimely death of an acquaintance of the victim. This acquaintance, notwithstanding the efforts of many in the peer group of the victim, drifted off into the “demimonde” of addiction, traveling in fast and more dangerous crowds in Manhattan, later adventuring in the crack houses of the outer boroughs, where a young gay man is likely to get into a lot of trouble. The victim describes the addicted young man in affectionate terminology, despite her exasperation at his relapses and his inability to show up for work at a competing gallery. He was, according to the diarist, “the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen,” and he was given to thrift store clothes that impeccably mimicked the current designers. Still, he “drifted away like a helium balloon drifts away,” prompting some of the best writing in the diary. Who can understand why the scourge of relapse happens? asks the diarist. Who can understand self-destruction? For a time, an addict will seem as if he or she might make a go of life and then, inexplicably, just when things seem to be going better, just when “his boyfriend starts to like him again, then wham,” the addict relapses. Which is something that the detectives have encountered many times themselves. It is a routine part of their job, and they are all but inured to it, this treachery and self-destruction. This inexplicable nature of relapse occurs to the diarist when the body of her friend is found in the Bronx, and his parents come from Durham, North Carolina, to his funeral, his parents, of whom the diarist observes that they “would never accept him for who he is.” Oddly, this body, too, was subjected to blunt force trauma, according to pathologists, and perhaps sexually violated. All of this is not “something to be learned,” reports the diarist. This is something to “accept the way you accept that winter will come.”
It’s interesting to the detectives, combing the diary for clues about the victim’s own assault, that the death of the friend in the Bronx was not recent. In fact, the death in the Bronx dates back almost eight months.
Other entries in the diary amount to notes about art that the victim was considering for her group show of work by contemporary African American artists. It is likely that some of these notes were in fact taken on the day of the attack, when the victim was visiting the library. The victim feels great solidarity with persons of color, perhaps owing to the fact that the victim’s parents are second-generation Chinese American. The victim observes that her interest in this art by African American artists is not “ghetto exotica,” as in the cases of graffiti artists invited into the art establishment through tokenism. Of African American artists attempting work inside the traditions of art history, the diarist writes that “pretty much no one gives a shit about them or their work, unless they are putting slave imagery into their paintings or something obvious that will reassure an elite white audience.” For the show planned by the diarist, she has assembled work by painters and sculptors and mixed-media artists who simply “happen to be African American”—artists who don’t shy from “symbology about African American experience” but who are also about “paint handling, texture, and luminosity.” She would include these painters, the diarist remarks, “because they’re good, because they’re moving, because they’re important, because they’re vital, energized, beautiful, lasting.”
A list of such painters and photographers and multimedia artists follows, none of whose names mean anything to the detectives on the case, who, at any rate, are reading through the diary in one sitting and are eating doughnuts at the same time, while also talking about the trade that sent Patrick Ewing to Seattle.
One of these artists, however, did come in for more attention than others. The name of the artist in question is Tyrone Duffy. Duffy, according to highlights from a curriculum vitae included in the journals, is known, to the extent he is known at all, for shows and artwork from the early 1980s. Shows at galleries associated with what the victim describes as the East Village gallery movement. After some brief success in this East Village environment, a success that the artist didn’t parlay into wider recognition, Tyrone Duffy, according to the diarist, decided to attempt to get an advanced degree in philosophy from the University of Minnesota, a degree he never completed, dropping out of the program in 1987, after which he moved to Hoboken. According to the diarist, Tyrone Duffy “falls off the edge of the world” in 1993.
What the victim likes about the early work of Duffy, which she first saw at the apartments of some friends, is that it manifests the “d.i.y. energy” of the work of the early 1980s, the violence, smarts, and sincerity of that time. What she likes is the desperation of the work, the sloppiness. What she likes, it seems, is the idea of Tyrone Duffy, an artist of some modest success who completely disappears, an artist who knew the art world legends of a certain period but who then vanished entirely. The idea only improves when the victim finds som
eone, a mutual friend, still in contact with Duffy. This friend reports that Duffy was diagnosed with bipolar disorder or some similar complaint. He was institutionalized on one occasion. He was not close with his family, who apparently lived in New England.
In late September, the diarist began to attempt to contact Duffy, having learned that he was now working in midtown as a bicycle messenger. The detectives take note of this sudden appearance in the diary of the apparent or alleged profession of the victim’s attacker, but they decide to continue to read into the diary before presuming that the two bicycle messengers are one and the same.
What they learn about next is so-called outsider art, very popular in some circles. And what outsider art is not, according to the diarist, “is art.” It is not like Michelangelos and Titians with their assistants and their papal commissions. Because art is a “discretionary choice” where “mimetic skill and distortions of mimetic skill” serve a higher purpose, that is, artistic vision. And outsider art, made largely by people in institutions and by shut-ins with paraphiliac inclinations, does not manifest “discretionary choice,” in part because the artists do not have “mimetic skill” in the first place and also because they can often be disabled in the perception of reality.
Much of this material seems to come from a book on imagery in the artwork of disturbed adolescents by Deborah Weller, PhD, for which the victim submitted call forms at local libraries on several occasions.
“Painting by bipolar patients in an inpatient environment,” according to Weller, as quoted by the victim:
is noteworthy for wildness of color, for flamboyance. But it is also restless and reflective of disordered thinking, more so than in the work of other adolescents, and as such it has a compensatory aspect, a reifying and ordering disorder, enough so that it’s hard, in all cases, to look at this work simply as art, as a commodity for aesthetic consumers. It is, therefore, devoid of aesthetic choice. The aesthetic strategies indicated in this work are, on the contrary, reflexive. Can art that is made reflexively still reside in the same category with art made according to discretionary choice?