Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  The resulting effect colored their open hours as a family unit with morbid weight. The days carried on, slow as silence, through whatever routines would make the seconds pass, until the mandatory family dinners through which the three able-bodied units hardly even spoke, allowing the world to go on around them gnawing in reflection, forced in the range of Alice’s glare for only so long as they forced her to sit there, eating nothing, waiting once again to be released, which even then would be allowed only after Alice agreed to go and kiss the unfather on the cheek, his skin as slick and cold as a wax figure, full of loose fiber.

  Throughout the night, though, alone and sleepless in her own room, Alice would swear she could hear the unbrother’s breathing through the walls, a slow and paceless shrift that seemed to struggle to get a grip on any air. Such sound would permeate the edges of her shallow rest when it did happen, often enabled only by continued swallows from whatever bottle she had stolen from her parents, learning to understand and then to covet the thrumming of it, the measured burn. Sometimes she could even hear the child speaking aloud to himself in indistinguishable syntax, language that did not sound like hers, but full of words all sick themselves; syllables with which he’d never answer when she spoke back through the venting, or even when she went around the wall construed between them and knocked or banged; instead he would seem to go still, as if pretending not to be there, to wait for her to go away again and leave him be. It wasn’t even that she wanted to see him in the flesh—she’d only tried the first time after deciding it was he who’d been coming into her room during the night, to stand above her in her sleep, to rummage through her stuff—though then the fact that he wouldn’t answer made her want an answer even more, a burning question that grew more elongated with lack of pressure, wider, less impossible to phrase.

  After a while, it became easier to allow the unquantifiable aspects of any given night to go on simply being, to act precisely as they wished; nor eventually did Alice even really feel the need to fight against such looming misrepresentations, an avoidant tendency that grew even truer with drink. It took not long at all before she slipped into a continuously developing resignation, feeling just lost enough inside the world to concern herself with only what she could discern directly through her own senses, however uncertain or predisposed anything seemed under the continuous smudging of her existence as it was, while at the same time, in her foremost mind, to more and more distinctly never accept anything in full, no matter how clear, for what it might purport itself to be.

  * * *

  —

  What Alice began to experience then, around the base amendment of the configured people in her life, was a concurrent reshaping of the physical condition of their quarters. Where in her earliest memories the home they shared had been barely large enough for the three of them (her real father, her mother, and herself), now there always seemed to be new rooms, and different dimensions to the past ones: higher ceilings, wider walls, different colors to the trim or furniture, and so on. Even familiar doors at times seemed not to lead to where they’d previously led, while others led to spaces that did not even seem part of their house.

  For instance, where had this all-white sunroom come from, with the matching white grand piano in its corner facing a windowless wall? Since when did they have a greenhouse, full of so many vibrant plants it was difficult even to breathe, of hues she didn’t know plants could turn, an overrun bouquet so rich it nearly knocked her out? Or how, parallel to her mother’s prior bedroom, through a lockless door inside her closet you could only see while on your knees, a long, narrow archive full of videotapes—along which she had barely room to sidle along front to back, peering up at shelves that extended out of vision, all the spines unmarked or in a language she couldn’t read—which would not be there when she came back.

  Even the world beyond the house could not be trusted as such, she remembers, though mostly all she saw about the outside came by peering through the small diamond-shaped port-eye just low enough above her bed that she could stand on tiptoe and peek out. No matter when she’d looked through it back then, day or night, she could never see what she knew logically should be there, given her understanding of the layout of their property—the grass and trees of their own yard, the little woodshed with the weathervane on top that’d had the directions ripped off, now just a point. The shed had no windows of its own, and no key to its thick lock, though with her ear pressed against the door she could sometimes hear machinery: hammering or grinding, metal on metal; someone typing; even sometimes the sounds of people having sex. Yet when she looked through the window the woodshed was never there; nor was the forest framed behind it, obscuring all other land beyond. Most all she ever saw, then, beyond the glass from in her bedroom, was paved concrete far as the eye could see, unobstructed, and often covered up in massive darkness, even during daytime, a wide sky void of even stars, only sometimes a low, glowing moon that seemed so much larger through the window than in the world, its bright face burned into her vision long thereafter, floating front and center behind her eyes once closed for sleep, waiting to nod off again amid repeating prayers that one day when I wake, the world will be so different I won’t even recognize the past, and all of what’s wrong will suddenly seem right again and always have been, a wound healed without a mark.

  Alice knew the unfather was very wealthy, or so he’d claimed; he was always wearing heavy jewelry and talking about plots of far-off commercial land, bizarre transactions handled by shady men who might appear inside the house at any given time—though in her prior understanding of how the family worked, it was her mother who’d been wealthy, heir to a vast estate passed down through generations, destined one day to be passed along to Alice. She didn’t know what it was the unfather did, or how that credit for their fortune had become transferred into him as if it’d always been that way, all of this concurrent with how the house itself would not stop reassessing itself during her unconscious hours, appending and recompiling old partitions with prickly new ones, nearly right beneath her feet. Some days she couldn’t even find where her mother or the unfather had gone, though she could hear them through the vents somehow still, laughing—at least it seemed like laughing—sometimes taking hours to figure out what space connected back to where. Alice never bothered to ask what on Earth was going on, even when their paths again did cross; she already knew they would in some way say nothing had changed; how, god, the jokes were getting old now, weren’t they? Could she grow up, please, and be a person, embrace life as it must be?

  And still some days the house was all that Alice had, difference be damned; at least even as the walls were white, then yellow, then a paisley font that shifted as she moved; she could still reach out and touch them, feel their face. Many sections of the house now seemed derived from different eras, she began to notice: there would be a bedroom done up in Victorian decor, with fainting couches and ornate carving in the dressers, lace and diamonds every inch; then, adjoining, a room of brutal concrete, with only a dresser and a bed, of Depression-era manufacture; another still might have bright, thick plush blood-colored carpet and plaid wallpaper, neon lamps lining the ceiling around glinting lamps and pop-style prints. She had never been in this room in her whole life, she knew, nor again the next one, as the drift of consistency hurt her eyes, made her have to blink frequently to keep from blinding, her body moving faster even than her mind wished to allow. Whoever had selected the furnishings from room to room seemed to have paid no mind, it seemed, such that the house seemed hardly to understand itself, each range of influence flowing over and becoming eaten up by what came after. This feel, at least, in some way, fit with Alice’s own internal discontinuity, making finally one aspect of the architecture seem spot-on; perhaps one day, she imagined, its evolution would land her somewhere else entirely, somewhere she could really feel herself inside herself, alive again.

  Sometimes, within that paltry bud of future hope, having wandered hours alone from room to room in hush,
she would get the sense that her untwin had been there with her for some time, just out of sight; he was behind her, perhaps, or even beside her, having at last appeared at some point out of his locked bedroom unannounced. She could sometimes even parse out how he looked in her periphery, before her head turned, beyond the pictures hung in so many of the rooms both new and old—how in person he seemed much different: short, stocky, nearly white-haired even as a preteen; deep marks in his face as if from acne, though he was never old enough; glinting braces; the strange, blank eyes. Each time, though, when she tried to move to look at him directly, there’d be nothing there—only the open room—yet this did not preclude the feeling of having interacted with him, if not fully face to face; at least as though at last they might exist in shared air, she thought, like actual people, not yet erased.

  She even began to feel, in those moments of his presence, as she felt them open, and held on, that she could hear him speaking to her from inside her, as if his thoughts were in her thoughts—dim lobes like ideas split and flattened into sense, made up of fragments of a logic fleshed between the timelines, asking countless questions like her own: What had become of the prior household, for instance, and What has been done to our real father, in whose name; though rather than simply confirming her suspicions, projecting solace through shared belief, his suggestions always seemed to turn back quickly against her, framing himself as the real victim, resulting only in more grief: How Alice had allowed this all to happen, all the changing—how she was as much complicit in their mutual loss as any else—and worse, how now he could see her resistance caving in, accepting the myth of their deformed reality as her own, which then made him wonder what else as a result might yet be dissolved, what other facts could insert themselves into the record, as fate subsumed them. It was as if he could see straight through all the ways she’d learned to think about her world, now made his too, relentlessly reviving the codes of questions she’d already taught herself to bury in the name of staying sane, likewise accepting their corruption, the resulting damage his and hers alike, and thereafter only further enabling its belief, unto a fate already allowed so long unchecked there would soon be no going back. It may have seemed a long time coming, where we’re headed, he would tell her, as in her own voice carried on, but it won’t be so much longer now.

  The morning after Alice’s media debut, according to subsequent reports, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, a middle-aged man lifts up a screen displaying a looping presentation of Ann Hamilton’s video aleph (1992–93) and throws it as hard as he can into Richard Tuttle’s Purple Octagonal (1967), causing a large dent in the painting’s pale pink canvas, while leaving the display screen relatively unharmed. The TV is reinstated by day’s end, while Tuttle’s piece, though capable of repair at a fully insured cost of $1.45 million, is reclaimed by the painting’s donor and returned to private storage; it will never be the same. “Nor will the landscape of its milieu be spared, regardless of what methodical caregiving,” some local critic writes, “as once compromised, stabbed in its face, and though it may be healed by all accounts, we still will know; and so will it.”

  Within the hour, it is reported, on the same floor, a local dentist, visiting some local art during her day off, will try to wrap her body in Jim Hodges’s coal-black curtain sculpture, The end from where you are (1998), ripping the material down off its dowel; ruptures sustained in the fabric will require $520,000 worth of stitching, allowing new thread to be incorporated into the prior mass, inherently compromising the structure of the object, despite its relatively identical visage to any viewer.

  And at the Menil in Houston, a high school senior, visiting to fulfill a class assignment, spends more than three unbroken hours standing before René Magritte’s An End to Contemplation (1927), scribbling notes from which there will be derived no sense, before suddenly attacking it in silent frenzy, with her fingernails and fists, causing several long rips in the exterior layers and canvas, as well as a significant denting and flaking; later, the young lady will claim not even to remember her behavior, nor what had come over her, nor the art. She will plead guilty.

  They will all plead guilty, and they will be found guilty.

  “I can’t say what it was,” states Dina Horst, mother of two, who throws her body through an installation of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23). “I don’t even know why I decided to go to the museum today, except it was like there was this silence within me, coating my insides, in a way that made me want to do anything but be exactly what I am. It was as if my whole life had passed right underneath my nose, and it was blank.” The glint of guilt in her eyes bears a mistakable correlation with what had in other walks been called a passion.

  “Breaking shit is cool,” says her teen son with a military crewcut, his cursing bleeped before it hits the air. “I don’t like art, but I like shit that’s been broken or might be broken later.”

  “I didn’t do anything; I was just standing there,” another middle-aged man insists, in the next segment, having taken down his pants and pissed directly into the mouth of the second largest figure in Louise Bourgeois’s Three Horizontals (1998), thereafter kicking the entire display over, fragmenting the larger figure’s skull. “Nothing actually ever even happened,” the man says calmly. “I’m not here, and you aren’t either.”

  Each and every station reports the unfolding actions and their subsequent social furor, one after another—casually termed copycat damage by the anchor on the screen in Alice’s own home—and eventually replays a shortened video of the burning of the Rauschenberg over and over, citing its existence, and therefore Alice herself, as stimulus and central ember for the ongoing trauma, while at the same time reinforcing its web traffic with fresh vigor, a thriving network shared and reshared as if to cull all mortal eyes, so that what once had been might be again, construed in forced collaboration with a rising local pattern in our lives. Where at first had been one act of violence against an inert object, now there are many, and soon again more time has passed than we might claim, simultaneously filling out the burgeoning outline of our history at its loose end and provoking each subsequent future second’s nature as only some form of ongoing response, unable to see itself, or yet to settle.

  “I guess I just don’t understand” [air quotes] “‘art,’” the head of some ex-senator projects, part of an impromptu panel conducted live, “because when I first saw some of the pictures of the” [air quotes] “‘masterpieces’ under attack, I honestly couldn’t really feel the fuss. You’re telling me I have to believe this orange and red thing that looks like someone could have made it with their eyes closed is worth as much as all the cash my grandfather made for our family buying and selling oil for his whole life? What, can you take shelter inside it? Does it feed you? Can it mandate our country’s laws? Of course I’m all in favor of eternal beauty and the like, but if it’s all going to come off looking so, can I say, arbitrary, then what really is at stake?”

  Alice holds her hands clasped in her lap in the corralled glow. She can’t remember moving.

  “I would say you certainly don’t understand,” says another face inlaid beside the first, the frontman of a once successful Top 40 band, whose current single—“When You Were in Me,” the pundit pauses, then cites—has found new traction in the mass mind as the soundtrack to a contentious recent men’s underwear commercial featuring chrome-plated AR-17s. He is wearing a beret and quite a bit more pancake makeup than any of the others. “But really, how could anyone expect you to?” the singer says. “You’re a gifted man in your own right, bro, sir, to be sure, someone upon whose visionary morals and, like, vision of society, our entire nation—no, the whole world—has little choice but to depend on. But it is the mark of someone like myself, as bard, as shaman, one might even say, to plunge the depths of longing, actual human pain, bro, and excavate from there the, um, inexplicable trueness we all feel, as living people. . . . Well, like, I mean without my
music, all of music I mean, and like all of art too, what good is legal living? Without beauty, man? How long can we keep getting out of bed and going to work and eating and crying and having fun, in like, an ineluctable,” [grins, straining to see the teleprompter] “infinite cycle, without expression, such as in song? Consider my, our, next upcoming single, for instance—‘Untitled (Beyond the Valley of Lust)’—in this work, we explore human anatomy through the metaphor of contemporary sensuality, but like, seriously this time, in search of, um, a finer understanding of, well, the continuous reseeding of our personal brands, which upon commingling, as flesh, and as creators too, we might recover our fleeting glory, not to mention our ongoing purpose, bro, to even exist. So for instance . . .”

  “‘Valley of Lust’?” the once-senator interrupts, his ruddy 4K face pushed up larger, louder in his confined quadrant of the screen. “You think glorifying sexual intimacy without shame, before God and country, is some kind of valuable service outside of those who’d seek to profit from mass fornication? The condom makers and vodka bottlers? Why, you’re as corporate a shill as any of my past and future lawmakers, my friend; heck, you might be even worse, considering the package you’ve tamped yourself into as some kind of” [also straining now to read the lines] “grandiloquent bard. Tell me, Audio Rembrandt, what kind of spiritual message can be gained from taking in your work? What can your gift from God reveal to any of the rest of us about our own gifts, in our own living walks? And what the heck does that have to do, in the meantime, with some abstract painting that looks like my kid got sick on her shirt on the ride home from the all-you-care-to-eat buffet?”