by Blake Butler
The virtual reach of the second destruction video surpasses the previous in record time, shared and reshared in insane proliferation across all platforms left to sprawl; and in its renewed wake comes a further propagation of publicly destructive acts, however connected or unconnected in their adherent mania, as reported by the sets of talking heads behind the glass.
Within hours, for instance, a collection of eighteen paintings by the classical French Baroque master Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) is noted missing from their temporary display in the Hall Napoléon under the Pyramid at the Louvre; where once again no alarms had been triggered in the process, nor is any evidence of tampering evident beyond the removal of the work itself, including the same blanked-out security footage of the area within the time of the occurrence, just as in Alice’s home’s robbery. The total take, it must be incessantly repeated, remains “literally invaluable,” with various official estimates assessing the net worth lost around $2.2 billion. “And perhaps more, even as we speak,” says one pundit, “as now the price is going up. Everybody wants their own piece of Poussin now; he’s the absolute hottest.”
The museum’s security provider, an entity as highly reputable as the one hired by Alice, is placed under investigation, as are all current employees of the facilities, rendering all public access for the time being on hold; in other words, as the unpopular news anchor puts it: The museum will be indefinitely closed. Rumors about potential internal sabotage, given the entity’s alleged dire financial status, as well as more outlandish conspiracies regarding the questionable authenticity of the museum’s collection, begin to circulate, never so beyond possibility that even those most in the know find their dreams haunted, their sleep devoid of rest, the night alive.
Who else is out here among the world with us, we wonder, studying our behaviors, keeping their masks clean, biding time? Everyone at once so all on edge we sleep with automatic weapons, bark at our loved ones over parking, have another drink, another drink. It’s business as usual, really, and business is booming; it’s what we were born for: to partake, and to respond; to find our voice among the rest. Meanwhile, even nature’s in on the prank now, up to its neck in human drift: as in masses, trees all over the world begin dropping, from out of nowhere, their roots discovered stunted, wrung with worms; flocks of disoriented birds disrupt a major air traffic control center, interrupting long enough to lose two jumbo flights en route to a major vacation destination, killing dozens; their blood will sink into the seas; it will wash up in swathes of gray foam with massive schools of fishes already rotting as they cover the white sands of a calm shore, a child not yet old enough to know a language awestruck by their fetid color as she hangs strapped to her mother’s chest during their morning walk searching for shells, the first memory she will remember having all these years later. After all, it is our memories we want; more than expression, even, more than information; please leave me be with what was mine.
Meanwhile, overseas, the feed reports, at Centre Pompidou in Paris, a screen displaying an early print of Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1973) is head-butted by a fourteen-year-old, shattering the glass and causing profuse bleeding from his face. The family’s legal representation will later sue the museum for emotional and physical damages, eventually resulting in an out-of-court settlement. Versions of the video remain available online. Now who is watching?
Hours later, at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, a young man dressed all in blue takes a pocket lighter to the face of the angel in Albrecht Dürer’s The Dream of the Doctor (c. 1498), scorching the skin of the face of the image, directly mimicking the original viral video, before being tackled by a local bystander, taken down. The culprit, during his arrest, will reveal tattoos marking the flesh over his left shoulder blade of what appears to be an illustration of the sun exploding. And underneath the point of impact, an inscription:
dream
dreXm
dreXX
XreXX
XXeXX
XXXXX
“I woke up one morning and I had this burned into me,” the young man explains, speaking with his eyes forced closed on camera. “It has throbbed every single hour since. Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I knew what it wanted, what I was meant to do.” In coming weeks, he will be worshipped by fashion and fan-fic blogs alike, pursuing a modeling career while simultaneously, unknown to most, establishing a new religion, XXXXX, in his name. By the end of the year, all members of the group will commit suicide by intentionally botched lobotomy.
And, at the Vatican Museum in Rome, Marc Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938) has a nail driven through it in the center of Christ’s chest by a mute woman, who then uses the same hammer to attack all who try to touch her, shrieking at the top of her lungs the chorus to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in a deformed register over and over: “No one’s going to save you from the beast about to strike.” All charges against her will later be dropped in recognition of her recent diagnosis of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, one among many the world over, as in a wave.
And at the Tokyo National Museum, Suzuki Harunobu’s Woman Visiting the Shrine in the Night (Edo period, 18th century) takes three gunshots to the center of the forehead of its subject before the high-school debate star wielding the gun turns the same weapon on herself, splattering her blood across the image, a gaudy mismatch for the composition.
And, at the National Gallery in London, still in the same day, Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh (1888) is spray-painted over in neon pink with the words THE SHIT OF LORD, injecting the phrase into the public lexicon as it replicates uncensored through our screens, destined to become trivia.
And at the SFMOMA, Agnes Martin’s Falling Blue (1963) is beaten with the long lens of a camera attached to a vintage device loaded with an exposed roll of black-and-white film, which when developed reveals a series of pictures of the attacker smiling and happy, with their family, waist-deep in the darkened water of a manmade lake as once again the world approaches dusk.
And at the Ludorff in Düsseldorf, Gerhard Richter’s Fuji (1996) is taken off the wall and flung like a discus by a civil engineering major visiting from abroad, breaking the nose of a nearby bystander, herself in the midst of writing a personal email on her phone to her father concerning her future, about which she is quite afraid, having been waking up each morning finding herself in an unfamiliar location, far from home. She will go on to have a successful career as a spokesperson for a dementia medication corporation—which must remain nameless here, for your protection—during the coming era where it becomes the most prescribed drug in the world.
And again in Miami so as in Johannesburg, and in Mexico City, and Detroit, so as in Barcelona as in Sicily and Montreal and Tokyo and Dublin, so on, the names of cities cited as hosts of local crimes against creation brought about by persons whose names we won’t remember after all, only their urges, passed by mouths from mind to mind like mental tiles lining some lost floor locked and gleaming in the dirt beneath our feet, the tally of our steps together passing without clear marking no matter where we imagine we might go, thereafter only remembered as emotions, so much weather, clogged in our secret longing for dreams of death of our ideas.
Even the concept of the Idea itself now feels like a plague of its own making, the loose ends of what could be done and has not yet been all flailing and flapping in the breeze of our communal desperation, as the shapes of faces of the arrested and the suspected through our TVs feed together back to back, as the list of affected works aggregates with increasing rapidity, the incurred damages tallied in moments of segue between acts of more ongoing social harm: the crashing of the planes into the ocean or the menace of global warning or the criminal acts of candidates for local office in the throes of their campaigns or the newly discovered sex tape of the surgeon general or the dark object newly rumored to be growing on the dark side of the moon or the reign of Alzheimer’s or of Parkinson’s or of whatever else we absorb between the colors of the com
mercials and the LCD glow of our laptops and on the airwaves flowing through us whether we tune in to hear them now or not.
Regardless, the surrounding context of other damage blends seamlessly within the voice of the news anchor, the local op-ed, as if there is already more to the story than we might know, which will be presented to the viewing audience as it is allowed, mandated by some civil architect behind the psychic curtain, veiled away, and yet whose pulse we can hear beating in our bodies, tuned just a hair off of our own. It is already hard to remember almost anything for even minutes, and it is only getting harder as such violent fauna fills our brains, seeking out the holes in us that most need fodder and taking hold.
“Our art has become completely penetrable,” one rapidly emerging conceptual artist tells another, as an aside in conversation at the opening of her latest exhibition, dubbed by big names in the art world as the future: a series of one million blank and unlabeled videotapes onto which she’s bootlegged her one-woman remake of Rambo, to be burned all together in the parking lot of the Mall of America on a significant anniversary of September 11, a live video presentation of which is already available for streaming preorder, while the destroyed remake itself remains unseen. “And so why should it not be penetrated, over and over and again? The joke turns on itself at last, revealing no actual comedy; a mark forever on the face not only of the culprit, but all of man, its cost carried in the creases of our total legacy, binding us together in what is yet to ever be.”
* * *
—
Alice sees the frenzy unfold as from a daze, afflicted in her own right with what seems a burgeoning condition of mortal confusion she has been victimized into feeling part of, as if the story onscreen is not some coincidental catastrophe but the next page in her life. It all feels at once too real and unreal in the same breath, apparently actually happening but not in a way that affects the strong, warm light that fills the house, the sense of something still needing to be done. She knows she should feel trepidation, maybe even panic, at how the ongoing vandalism might somehow be asserted back to her; all the faces flashing in the newscast feel like actors, employed in dramatic reenactments of some terrible event offered up to most would-be onlookers as theater, nothing that would ever rear its head in their real life—in much the same way a younger Alice had come to think of God, after years of finding nothing yet to count on, nothing that would not dissolve right out from underneath her given the chance. There was so little anyone could prove of anything, wasn’t there, even in the context of their own living, much less the larger story of the world, so why believe in any one form of nightmare over another? Why expect anything but that which could never be expected?
Alice knows she is still awake now because the TV’s gross glow insists so, the way it burns and burns on through her eyes, not in actual pain but more a reinforcing feeling that lines her waking hours with a sense of never quite being fully there, and that it could at any moment stick that way forever, confining her perpetual existence to endless sprawl. How else left to live but in between the lines, then? From where Alice sits, after all, nothing has changed: the walls are still walls; the reach of daylight stands moored in the same station as the day before and so probably tomorrow; no one and nothing but her inside herself again, alone, laced only with the snaking suspicion that time isn’t actually passing, nor has it ever—there has only ever been this instant, now, and now—a seeming falsehood that could only ever be negated once it’s too late, which is always, which is how we stay alive. Hell, if they did come to arrest her, brandishing some further culmination of the fragmentary evidence as yet supplied, would it even feel so bad? How much further could someone else’s failing information take her? Alice can’t remember even moving in what seems months, despite the still-warm remembrance of feeling burned up herself, feeling in midst of some slow continual inferno as she passed from room to room today or any other—all of which feels more like a recording than a live event, becoming simply another part of who she once was, an active grime that floats on her surface but won’t stick.
“No, we still do not have any idea who made the films,” someone is saying, as Alice tunes half back in from some time staring at the ceiling. The voice seems to wash over her, as if lapping at her brain. “Yes, we are still looking, and yes, of course, we want to stop them, whoever they are; because yes, we believe in the value and beauty of art in the lives of our people overall; and no, we don’t have any leads; no, we do not understand what any one work of art itself was trying to say or even represent exactly before it was violated, nor do we have any idea why someone would want to violate it despite that lack of understanding; yes, I believe my child could probably do that too; both the art and the destruction of it; absolutely, we thought that was a pretty picture, though no we can’t understand why anyone would pay so much to take it home when they could have owned a yacht instead, or a small island, really, or part of a sports team; yes, we do love to watch our sports, though we are aware of the many other ways time spent viewing could be spent; yes, we believe every citizen should respect the flag, regardless of personal experience or specious feel.”
The man looks so much like one of the cops Alice remembers from that same morning, she imagines, peeking out through half-closed lashes, near adrift. His bloated body, even in blur, seems too large to fit onscreen so well, close as they’ve zoomed in. “Yes, I believe we prevail,” he carries on, “regardless of the various statutes and procedural red tape keeping our mechanisms of public investigation from ever reaching full potential. No, we have not received any reports of threats on human lives, unless you count the hardworking children in our schools, who we are at this point no longer sure about and can’t expect not to assault themselves; we truly hope the youth might take this rash of events as an opportunity to tend toward a career in something more practical than art; and yes we are standing by, at all times, locked and loaded, ready to react to anything that’s thrown before us, without a moment’s hesitation, as when forced to guess we must expect the worst, for our own safety, must we not? If only we could read criminals’ minds finally, if we could be allowed to prosecute on the grounds of our suspicions, to cut the violent urges off at their own possible pass; think of how much trauma might be saved, for instance, if the kid wearing the hat with the marijuana leaf on it could be detained, preventing what worse fates for him might yet be to come; yes, of course, ma’am, artists are people too, and so are addicts; yes, I believe I saw that recent major motion picture, based on real events, or so they claimed, though no I did not enjoy it as entertainment nor do I understand the fuss and the awards, nor did it improve my experience of life on planet Earth as a known human, in revelation, and as such I would prefer not to have to hear about it all the time, thanks; yes, I do fancy myself a sort of armchair critic, if you must ask; actually, I’m a writer, too, myself, though I’m waiting until I retire to get started; after nearly thirty years here on the force, I have so many stories you wouldn’t believe, though for now my wife and kids will have to suffice as my best fans; yes, I think experience is more important than imagination, what do I look like? No, sir, I do not share the desire to destroy art, though I can’t say the thought had never crossed my mind sometimes when people act like a pile of sand is the second coming; yes, I believe humans are inherently evil, if I may; yes, that includes me, if not my children, who are true angels, all seven of them, each bearing my same name; so at least we have the children, which is the only reason I show up and do my job. Yes, I am aware of the compromised state of mind of many of the offenders, as well as the general rise of cognitive impairment in our times, which some have suggested as a contributing factor to the events; my own mother and father both passed of mental complications in their own right, and I saw firsthand the conditions they were forced to live in when I shipped them off to the same assisted living facilities where their own parents passed in the same way, despite my suspicions of what goes on behind closed doors in places like that; me myself, I’d r
ather die; no, I did not mean that as a threat or even a possibility; no, I am not terrified for the future of our time and country, but yes, I am generally on edge now more than usual, you might say, both as a father and a husband and just basically an all-around happy-natured guy who wants to see his team do well and his best interests protected by the representatives who I’ve in no small way helped to elect.”
No matter which channel Alice changes to, among hundreds, what they broadcast is the same, picking up the same thread where the last had just left off, like spinning plates; no choice but to listen, absorb.
“Yes, we have discussed the possibility of restricting public access to all nationally owned museums, at the very least, for a brief time, to limit access to those who might be inspired to contribute their own act of vandalism during this time of heightened visibility until we know more; no, we do not wish to have to resort to that, but yes, we carry active weapons and know how to use them, or have been trained to at some point in the past; yes, I am in favor of the bill to put guns in the hands of every human, because yes, I must admit, I don’t always feel safe in my own home, much less my skin, despite my longstanding, nearly spotless record as a lawman; yes, I realize not everybody has it as good as everybody else, and I am thankful to the lord above who blessed me with my power and influence, not to mention my good looks, and yeah my kids; yes, I understand some people are very desperate, now more than ever; suckers; yes, we are seeking a speedy end to these events, despite our lack of clear direction as it stands; yes, we are diligently at work despite our necessary periods of rest, as even God took the day off, didn’t he, so says the holy record, penned by his hand; yes, I believe in one true God, and yes I have a personal relationship with him and several of his family members, including his son, who we destroyed too, and so much else, though no I don’t let it come between me and my work; yes, I still sort of see my job as holy, or else I wouldn’t do it, though I would prefer not to use the term ‘holy war’; yes, we want things to go back to the way they were before everything bad started happening day in and day out; no, we can’t remember how that felt either, to live so much less encumbered by our conscience, allowing that those of families less fortunate than, for instance, mine must foot the bill, but yes I am thankful for their ongoing service as unskilled workers, even if sometimes seeing them coming, I’ll admit it, I told my kids to cross the street; yes, I believe in right and wrong and feel equipped to tell the difference, even when others don’t agree; yes, I believe sometimes people deserve to die, if only to provide better conditions for those remaining; yes, I am a student of our nation’s history, including the bad parts, though I prefer to think of kinder times; yes, we hope we one day will feel better than we do now, or that our children will, at least, or their children or someone else’s, any second now. Any more questions?”