by Blake Butler
Best known for her reality-bending performances and interactive landscapes, including the landmark Telecommunication series, Novak had not shown or discussed work in more than twenty years, though it is believed this period had been an effort toward what she referred to as her “most crucial human work as yet.”
Each image beyond the first few passes too fast for Alice to acknowledge its variation, the montage blurring, cell to cell, packed fat with faces and locations spanning a supposed lifetime; and yet she can’t shake a feeling of private attraction to such a display, the way one might feel a painting by a stranger touched them in a way no one else could understand, a song written just for them, despite how the whole world can still hear it, if never the same way.
Novak’s death has been ruled a suicide, and is believed to represent the first of a series of conceptual works—previously assumed to be theoretical—collectively titled Devoid, alluded to in a lengthy, leather-bound suicide note she’d left behind; the note has since gone missing; any info as to its present whereabouts should be immediately reported.
Alice waits for them to show the woman’s final face again, as it was last captured before she died, some curtain in her heart pulled back to show only another curtain there behind it. Instead the broadcast returns only to an anchorwoman at her desk, apparently the owner of the narrating voice, though the texture doesn’t seem to match, her mouth barely moving as she continues the dictation.
Devoid: A Memorial Exhibition, introducing the artist’s final work, in adherence to her will, alongside a selected retrospective of her career, will be held in her hometown of A. tonight at six o’clock, and is free and open to the public.
Alice repeats the event’s subsequently displayed address and phone number aloud over and over, rushing to transcribe it, its characters rolling over one another in the unfurling landscape of her mind, such that by the time she gets it down on paper she’s no longer certain the information is correct. Still, she finds herself dialing the digits at once into her handheld either way. The line at once starts ringing as it should, loud enough against her face to fill her whole head with the sound, followed by a quick click and the dull hum of an open line thereafter, not a word.
“Hello?” Alice whispers into the receiver, cupping her mouth to shield it from the room. “Anyone there?” Her voice sounds funny on the line, like she’s talking through a filter that makes her sound older, lower pitched; more like her mother, she imagines, whose voice had all but turned to gravel through her last months, eventually so low it was unintelligible from groaning. Either way, no one responds; there’s only hanging air, and perhaps somewhere far on in there, Alice imagines, the sound of her own breathing there reflected, as if the line itself only connects to a recording of itself.
Alice spends a minute studying the silence, waiting for reception, and is on the verge of hanging up when suddenly she hears a scrambled sound, like language played back at high speed, followed by a sudden, earsplitting bleep, its shrillness spreading cold and hard between her teeth, jarring her fillings. The beep repeats immediately, this time less jarringly so, delivering her into a much different sort of stillness. She doesn’t want to be the one to speak up first, for some reason, diminishing her power. Instead she sits holding her breath, waiting them out, eventually moving the receiver to rest against her jaw, her neck, her chest, until she gradually nods off altogether. It’s been so long since she’s had good rest, hasn’t it? Longer than she can remember, maybe never. Something about the drift between her and the phone feels so complete, as if she should always do it like this, every evening, all her life.
Later, when she stands again, lightheaded from some cold draft sent through the space like a lost breeze, she lays the receiver on the ground still connected, already forgotten, its open channel holding steady as she moves amid the TV’s fluctuating glow across the room, toward the only window, parting the heavy gray curtains by slipping among them, winding its cloth around her flesh, same as she had spent so many hours in childhood hiding from everybody, the cloth soon rough and tight around her bones, a second skin. Peeking out beyond the flat, cool pane, she finds a heavy, intense sunlight spanning all as far as she can see, with no visible motion even so small as a breeze or cloud there within it, a day so much like every other she remembers how could it not be.
It was only in the years following her mother’s and unfather’s deaths that Alice felt Richard’s influence come alive inside the house, in a far more affecting way than she had felt him when he was said to live right there in the room beside her own. Now that both his belongings and their supposed mutual parents had been removed, she began to sense not only that he was still in there with her, sight unseen, but that he had just been in any room she entered, as if he’d been adjusting a would-be set for her appearance, lining her path, yet always remaining just out of eyeshot, as if he were watching her through holes in the walls or from behind two-way mirrors, more there than ever now that, at least theoretically, he had moved on.
Alice would spend whole days, then, repeating the same small serial behaviors over and over in little loops, waiting for Richard to slip and appear there where he had not intended to, at last revealed; and yet no matter what methods she employed, how many permutations, she could not catch him in the act, make him appear; and so she had little choice but to continue trying, as she saw it, always on the cusp but never clear—to the point where she began to move without actual belief that the present condition would ever end; that soon enough, if she couldn’t break through, she would become so ingrained in her own patterns of behavior, like a phantom, that she would soon no longer recognize an exit, become locked in amid the haunt, the same way her mother had lost her mind—and still nothing, not a knock of Richard, beyond some ineluctable trace of pressing presence, the nights all growing over into one another, drowned in time, each act finding her only that much older, slower, further gone.
All of this corresponded with the initiation of Alice’s drinking so heavily she would be hospitalized half a dozen times in half as many years—a fact that suggested itself as sufficient explanation of her mind-state at the time, the ongoing substance abuse a front they never failed to hang upon her as the only answer, shooing all sense of other disturbance aside, though Alice insisted that the drinking was the only thing that had kept her sane throughout; without it, as she saw it, she would have suffered even more; would not have had the will to get out of bed or want to eat, much less quest after answers.
And while she did not fully associate the cause of her self-harm with all that had happened to her, nor with Richard as a person—she felt essentially no emotion for him beyond a sense of inarticulable wonder, as in religion, her only source of trepidation being her inability to connect the dots between what could be felt and what was seen—there was no mistaking that the coincidence of such events marked her persona with a flattened, folded feeling, as if there were a second flesh beneath her flesh, and there within it a second set of attributes and memories in constant friction with her central person, never to settle. She felt herself totally exposed to misinterpretation, given her wont for passing out in public, the sudden seizures from not eating, the constant pain that pushed her to walk around glowering, grumbling, beyond clear mind; yet this was simply how it felt to be a human, Alice believed, in her most sober moments, the same trepidations pressing down on each decision she had to make to leave the house, much less to ever get help to move along and find a different way of life; though, then again, she knew for sure that the drinking made her nightmares worse than ever, filling her mind with visions of endless fire each night as soon as she closed her eyes; with endless depictions of her own beheading, of drowning at the hands of unseen forces holding her under black water, of being beaten to a pulp by screaming children in the streets; every inch of any rest packed full of brutal sounds and aching color that made the waking world feel small and wrong and far away. One way or another, she’d learned to tell herself, hardly in jest though it never fa
iled to make her snort, you had to become obliterated enough in daily going that in the end you could no longer tell the difference between life and death, between seeing and feeling, where and nowhere. And still, no matter how identical the days between seemed, no matter how each time she lay down she imagined it would be the last, still she woke again into another day still unforgiven, seamed in with enough corresponding personal memory to assure her that she was still who she believed she had last been, regardless of what might have gone on outside her attention, while she was under, in the hands of anybody else, and what they now knew about her and her world that she would never.
* * *
—
And even now the room seems to be turning over underneath her, Alice imagines, a feeling of vertigo she’d long carried on with, only intensified by living in a space simultaneously so stolid and so pregnable to change; a place where, if she thought too long about it, the floor might at any minute collapse by sheer weight of premonition, underlined by a shameless anxiety that even recognizing its implausibility only strengthens. The screen of the TV still glows long across the room, as if to mirror back the shade of open sunlight all around her, its brightest pixels overwritten with the residue of time spent absorbing past and future entertainments, each slowly sculpting the nature of her life in their design, forcing information into us day in, day out, until we are starved for escape into the pending night.
Stronger than even that, though, is the slurred sound like winding gears Alice can now hear bearing down around the edges of her vision, replacing the space where the voice of the media had spread its hold with a new feeling: an ongoing sense that her every act was being not only recorded but witnessed by a live audience looking back at her through the screen of her conception, however motionless her life remained. Her ears seem stuffed beyond capacity, overloaded by the void of every hidden signal that might be parsed by other animals with sharper sense, or so she feels; placing every action under the impression that it’s missing nothing but also never solely hers, just out of range.
Suddenly the room seems slightly smaller too, and again smaller upon such confirmation, followed by the feeling that she can’t remember a time when it had not been shrinking ever toward its present size and on from there. It is the present and the past at once, she thinks, somehow coexisting in the same mount, forced by the different kinds of light straining her eyes, from the TV and the windows and the light within. Stronger still is the feeling that the larger world beyond her house is shrinking too, its landscape unseen behind the unending curtains, only the sheen of her imagination placed between them to defer the shifting logic: every waking second another line etched in the ongoing creation of the yet to come, like keys somewhere being pushed, changing her intention without warning, all of it part of the shapeless history of all that has gone on just out of sight.
Alice no longer wants to move or even see, much less to think; she doesn’t want her hands to be connected to her body, to her brain; even the flow of thought feels like a structure placed upon her, printed out like subtitles, framing where she stands for all but her to see. How many people had experienced this same thought before, for instance, whether in assessing hers or having felt it as their own? How many versions of a person would be allowed to abuse the same array of evidence, emotion, language? How many hours left to watch?
The walls are banging then, Alice imagines, somewhere beyond her, so hard it seems to shake the house. Between each point of impact the surrounding silence mutates in anticipation, a space awaiting interpolation, further graft. It takes another several bouts of banging before her brain clicks loose and she remembers where she is and what could be: someone is at her door, it seems, though which door and who? She can’t remember why someone would want to be here, when she herself would give so much not to; she can’t imagine what more of her could anybody want. Eventually, she imagines, whoever knocks will go away, will grow old and die, will turn again to dust and blow away, whatever motive had once spurred them now grown inconsequential, numb.
And yet with each knock she blinks, then finally stands to cross the room, her body moving as if without approval. She presses her face against a peephole, seeing through the tiny eye in the face of the door she can tell by feel is the only one left in the house that allowed a person in or out, the others having been revised out of her memory amid the ever-changing proliferation of doors that led to other doors and hallways, void of firm direction. Through the narrow haze of the eyeglass, she can see another body standing on the far side: a human, for certain, oblong and boxy, its finer form compromised as if in mist, preventing further identity beyond the idea that someone is there, having shown up on her front step for some reason they must know and she does not.
Perhaps it is her own future self at the door, she thinks. She wouldn’t rule herself out from acting better on someone else’s behalf than her own. And even if it’s just the cops, she feels, she’d love to give them another piece of her mind, demand to know why they haven’t found the felon yet, recovered her belongings. Or had they? Had something else come down she can’t recall, an answer she’s already been granted but allowed to wear away? She hears her voice speak into the glass to seek an answer, but whoever’s there either can’t hear her or she can’t hear them or otherwise there’s no response; no shift even in posture or position, judging by the person’s outline through the glass. Which should mean she shouldn’t open the door, correct? It could be another burglar out there wanting in, come to claim all that remains; or perhaps something more—a murderer, for instance, having selected her at random to die today, depending only on the willingness of their next victim to assume I am not the one to whom this could ever happen, though if so, with her, they’ve got it all wrong: she feels she knows very well what yet awaits. And yet she undoes the latch—in fact, she’s glad to—her hands and arms moving as if they’ve already performed the necessary action, the muscled meat lining her body already performing its own work, afraid of nothing; come what may; or rather, more correctly, come what does.
* * *
—
Behind the door, now open, stands a body. Long brownish hair, spectacles, old sun damage in its face; an older man, it seems, or at least as old as she feels. Wearing some kind of military garb, or at least a uniform espousing order—though he is clearly not a cop, his glinting insignia of a different code. He’s speaking something, or at least his mouth is moving, though no language is coming out, so she can hear, or nothing substantive enough to register beyond the long low hum of the outdoors, its heat exploitive, crammed with damp.
Alice regards the man for several moments, waiting for traction, though the longer it continues, the more the thinner air there feels suspended inside of her head: like spinning gyres inside an overheating hard drive, she thinks, a web address that won’t connect. The wide world’s colors well up around the edges of her vision, burning at her eyes to try to see the world beyond, burning her brain to try to want to understand; instead she waits and looks and strains as the man whose voice she cannot hear explains himself unheeded, as if unaware of her distention, the cognitive gap held on between.
The man reaches into his pocket, then, fumbling for something; a knife, she thinks, a gun, brass knuckles, though even such idea can’t shake her free; if anything she goes even stiller, expecting something worse than simple drift.
Instead of any weapon, though, the man’s hand presents a business card, handed over with a wry wink. Printed shrill against the dull-blown field of cardstock, in silver letters, Alice reads his identifying language, word by word, aloud:
A. B. Smith—Senior Adjuster
AVOID CORP., INC.
Your first and last line of defense since 1901
Of course: Smith. The name had always struck her strange, no matter how often she met someone who used it; it shook free again the lacing feeling of both her unfather and unbrother’s would-be lineage, none of which she had any context for beyond the pair delivered
to her life, two from out of millions named the same way. So what sort of Smith was this Smith then? How could she ever know which Smith was one of theirs, of her unfamily’s, comprised from some supposing fork off her own blood, and which was not, all someone else’s? Biblical logic—far as she remembered being lambasted with it as a child, before the serial show filled in all such inlet of her life—suggested we were all descended from one person, tying our lives together by its lore; every pending person a possible Smith, then, all driven onward through the temporary lunge of birth and death, each living id moored to their own version of center stage.
Beyond that, Alice feels she already should know why this one A. B. Smith is here, what his directive must be in showing up on behalf of her security after the recent losses, though she can’t make the words stutter out. The air flooding in from outside at her through the door is as warm as infant’s milk, no feeling logged within her brain beyond its flailing blankness, like how an astronaut might feel after being cut free into outer space.
Smith starts speaking again, still incoherent to her, a wall of unknown sound. Once he has paused, she hears her own voice come out oddly loudly in reply, yet also muffled, as if rebounding after passing through several layers, deep within. She’s already unsure what she is saying as she says it, the actual words obscured both in intent and receipt, her hands splayed out before her as in prayer.