I pull the comforters over my head, carving a small tunnel through the blankets for fresh air. I load the City—the pay-as-you-go’s much slower than the iLux contract-plan, so the Fort Pitt tunnel buffers and the City skyline breaks apart in a digitized blur, buffering, before the stream catches up and the City resolves. Greenfield loads, the Run, Saline Street to the vacant lot near Big Jim’s restaurant—I’m outside in winter, seeing my breath. I skirt the vacant lot and approach the Christ House from a side street, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. The house is smoke-charred from the fire, some sort of special effect still lingering here.
The porch smells like damp soot, the front door burned black. I use Kucenic’s override codes and brace myself for another bomb blast of heat, but it never comes—just a yawning, moist smell of rot as I step inside. The house is spare. Cold. No furniture in the living room, only soot streaks and blackened ceiling beams. There’s a fireplace in the corner that had been converted to an altar, a burned wooden crucifix intact except for the missing arms of Christ. A dining room, a cut-glass chandelier melted black. I kick through ash as I walk. A kitchen without appliances, just plugs and hookups, gas lines protruding from the floor. Between the dining room and kitchen, a stairway descends to the basement. The smell that rises is dank, but that’s just my imagination feeding this place, just impressions in the iLux—I flick the light switch, but it doesn’t work. Everything is darkness. Running the length of the wall is a pipe meant to be a railing. I hold on and descend the stairs, following through into impenetrable basement darkness until my foot touches concrete. I inch ahead—water running somewhere, a trickle sound somewhere nearby. My foot touches something and I reach out—porcelain. Wet porcelain, a leaking toilet at the bottom of the stairs. I feel along the wall, concrete blocks furry with mold. I find a utility sink and a drain. I hear sounds—breathing—from somewhere in the dark.
“Albion?”
The breathing’s coming from a root cellar, but when I open the door, the room is empty. The sound of breathing is silenced. I close the door and hear the breathing again. Whoever’s here in this basement room hasn’t been archived—just her breathing.
The rooms on the second floor haven’t been burned—bedrooms up here, the fleur-de-lis wallpaper I recognize from the watercolor is faded and peeled but intact. I find Albion in the second bedroom on the right. She and Peyton Hannover lie together in a queen-size bed, their bodies gaunt and white, naked together, wrists tied with twine to the bedposts, their ankles blistered and rubbed raw from twine binding their feet together. I work to untie their wrists, but this is not real, they’re not real, and just as I untie the knots, the Archive resets and the rope is retied.
Footsteps in the hallway—Timothy. His face is much younger than the face I know—gaunt, bearded. He unbuttons his shirt and undresses, he slides naked between the women, but the moment he touches them, their heads transmogrify into pigs’ heads. Maybe that’s why Mook was here, maybe that’s why this house is burned—maybe Mook mangled these archival scenes so no one could relive them. I look at Peyton’s and Albion’s eyes, and despite their pig faces, their eyes are still women’s eyes, terrified, wounded. Timothy gropes them, but they just stare—Albion at the ceiling, Peyton at the far wall. Timothy groans, barking almost as he licks their breasts, biting their nipples and caressing them. He kisses between Albion’s legs, then thrusts into her, using his hand on Peyton. The two women turn their eyes toward each other, almost willing each other to endure Timothy’s assault. Peyton whimpers. Jesus—what am I seeing? This is preserved in the Archive—which means Timothy must have filmed himself doing this. Albion clenches her teeth to keep from crying out. I kneel beside her and look up to the ceiling where she looks. I arch my head back just as she arches her head back, and I see out the window above the bed that she can see out of—the point of view is torqued, but I can see hints of trees. The watercolor of the interior depicts this view—the paintings of the house were made by Albion.
Albion disappearing from the Archive means she was alive when Timothy and Waverly thought she had died with Pittsburgh. Who is she? Waverly claimed she was his daughter—
Albion is Mook’s client—Albion hiring Mook to delete her from the Archive, to delete scenes like this from being eternally relived—
Waverly hiring me to distract me from Hannah Massey—
Waverly hiring me to find Albion and Mook—
Tie up their loose ends—
Albion, Peyton. The explicit violence of Timothy rutting women with pigs’ heads—I can’t figure out what I’ve seen. Albion and Peyton were lovers, but here they are with Timothy. Think through: Timothy’s history of abuse, of murder. Is Albion Timothy’s wife? Peyton? That doesn’t make much sense—but they’re his victims, like Hannah Massey was his victim, maybe, like other women he’s killed or tried to kill, or wanted to. Peyton’s documented as dying in the blast, but Albion—maybe she escaped from him somehow. Maybe she escaped, but Timothy thought she was dead until she hired Mook to delete her. Maybe the act of her disappearing was enough to signal she’d never disappeared. I need to find her—
I voice House of Fetherston studios, but no one’s ever heard of Albion Waverly. I explain to the receptionist that I’m looking for someone who works there, who’d have access to clothes that haven’t officially been released—I describe what Albion looks like. I’m bounced around, office to office—soon, someone asks who I am. I try to explain why I’m calling, who I’m looking for, but she says they’ve given too much of their time already and disconnect. I search the San Francisco white pages but no Albion Waverly—no hits for Albion at all.
Track the artwork: a Google search is useless—too many art galleries in the greater San Francisco metro region. Thousands of red flags pinned to Street View when I search “San Francisco AND art gallery.” I get a sense of which neighborhoods might have the most galleries—Lower Haight, gentrified parts of Hayes Valley, maybe around Haight-Ashbury, the Mission District, maybe the Castro. Two of the six paintings have smears or spots of Mook’s blood, so I leave them rolled in the hotel but I bring the other four paintings with me. I try art galleries almost at random, taking an AutoCab to a neighborhood and just walking wherever GPS points me. Some galleries are of obvious no help, dark holes foul with body odor and antagonistic scenesters on the streams that can’t be bothered to even acknowledge my presence. Other galleries are more professional, try to be helpful. Refurbished spaces with white walls and paintings hung with price sheets available. Chic young women who don’t recognize the paintings I brought with me, can’t identify the artist but show me other work about “the Pittsburgh theme,” as they call it, artists with no true discernible connection to the city, using the end of Pittsburgh as a metaphor for whatever pet cause they want to indulge in—governmental control, military culture, religious intolerance, capitalism, the spiritual death of the modern age—or using the Burn as nothing more than a pretext for depicting bodies and cities in flames, faux-visionary apocalypses. Artist Statements written entirely with mock-theoretical buzzwords, incomprehensible, about the deconstruction and defamiliarization of Place, the ambiguity of Identity, the Monologism of History, the Society of the Spectacle, the Articulation of Desire. Of artists co-opting our sorrow, of how artists “respond” to the oblivion of a city, as if their “response” was somehow profound or even necessary. No one I ask can identify the paintings I’ve brought to them.
4, 10—
I change hotels to an EconoLodge a few blocks away from where I’d been staying. There’s hardly any staff here, only a maintenance guy in charge of the sweepers that troll room to room. I check in under the name Wallace Stevens—no questions asked.
Mook’s death hit SF.net two and a half weeks after I’d found his body and the story goes viral—crime scene photographs stream for tabloids, blog posts memorialize the death of a rising street art star, Blu
m & Poe reports the price of Mook tags salvaged from billboards and mailboxes ballooning four hundred percent even though most people had never heard of “Mook” until now. User commentaries theorize Mook’s death was a CIA assassination. Zebra-striped face and hollowed-out eyes. Maxing out credit cards with my hotel room rate and AutoCab fares—I didn’t expect to stay in San Francisco this long. Whole Foods for groceries but I spend the days canvassing galleries. KRON4’s been reporting on Mook’s murder every evening newscast—the killers were caught on video, but their identity’s unknown. Plenty of HD footage of three men in police SWAT uniforms, their faces hidden by black visors. They seemed to know where every security camera in the Brocklebank was located. Their visors loom close to each lens before the cameras go dark—deactivating security camera to security camera all the way to Mook’s room. The news reports that these police officers are imposters and not members of the San Francisco PD, warns of imposter cops at traffic stops. The San Francisco People’s Org advertises their PD ID app to identify legitimate members of the SFPD by badge number and career profile. I download the app. The streams report the motive appears to have been simple robbery—the victim’s Adware was stolen, the Adware more than likely already hacked and wiped and impossible to trace.
SFMOMA praises Mook in press releases, announces a retrospective to be held in the spring of next year. The streams tell us he was a visionary artist, a genius of the modern age, but the general public yawns—nothing but a juvenile-minded vandal and the sale of his artwork should reimburse property owners he’d victimized. His name was Sherrod Faulkner but he’d gone by Mook since he was a teenager in Wichita. He moved to the West Coast to attend Harvey Mudd, majoring in VR environments and game design, but dropped out. He drifted to San Francisco and worked as the dayshift manager at a Denny’s on the corner of Mission and 4th for over fifteen years. I took myself to breakfast at his Denny’s a few days ago and ordered big but didn’t eat much. I asked my waitress about him, saying I was an old friend from school and was sorry to hear what had happened. She said, “Sherrod doesn’t work here anymore—”
The streams pull apart his life. His work as Mook is encrypted, hidden, but his IP addresses as “Sherrod Faulkner” and his search histories are hacked and broadcast. Right-wing and Fourth Amendment websites and a taste for hard-core porn—a thing for redheads, erotica, decadent art—links to the e-texts of Ayn Rand and Julian Assange, user accounts with the Anarchist Loose Collective and a fan club member of the band Eat Christ. Some of his personal papers were hacked and published—fanfic written in the form of epic poetry imagining graphic sexual encounters between John Galt and President Meecham, about their child slipping from her like a bolt of lightning. The tabloids uncover his family back in Kansas, upper-middle-class parents and a sister in Chicago. His father makes a statement about the death of his son, begging the news streams to let them mourn in private, to respect their privacy. Mook’s avatar as Sherrod Faulkner was a picture of Alfred E. Neuman that will chortle, “What, me worry?” in archived comment streams and chat rooms until the world goes dark.
Iced coffee at a Starbucks in the Mission, late afternoon. The baristas recognize me for being in here so much these past few days, taking breaks here in between art gallery inquiries—they tell me “see you tomorrow” when I slurp the last of my venti and trash the cup. Already four thirty in the afternoon, most places will be closed by the time I get there, but I have time to swing by a gallery called Cell. The front room’s a lounge with worn-in couches, a few paintings hanging on the walls of dollhouses inhabited by foxes. The attendant’s neon-pink bob’s like a pom-pom floating above her PVC bodysuit. Her lips are painted oxblood, and silver studs bullet her eyebrows and tongue. She tells me they’re closing in ten minutes but I show her the paintings anyway. She recognizes the images. When she brings out a portfolio from the flat files, I know I have her. The attendant slides out a stack of ink and watercolors, the paintings hand-stitched together in groups of six, each leaf separated from the one below by a sheet of acetate.
“She calls these her fascicles,” the attendant explains.
The attendant handles the paintings like she’s handling sheets of gold leaf. Images of gray wood, rotten, of architectural details out of context, several of the house’s front door, porch columns, the words of Christ painted in whitewash but folded in on themselves, a coal chute, the interior of stairs, hardwood floors, cracked paint, stripped light fixtures in inks and charcoal, the bed where Timothy kept her, several of the bed. Only a few paintings show the house beyond these few details. One painting’s of the root cellar door—and looking at the image I can almost hear the sound of breathing I’d heard in the Archive behind that door.
“Who did these?” I ask.
“A local artist,” says the attendant. “Dar Harris. She was part of one of our group shows two years ago—”
“Dar Harris?”
“Darwyn Harris,” she says. “She’s Pittsburgh—or had friends there. She works in fashion. One of the big houses, I think. Fetherston, maybe—”
Darwyn—that was Peyton’s hometown. Darwin, Minnesota.
“What’s she like?” I ask. “Who is she?”
“You notice when she walks into the room, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says.
“I’ve been searching every gallery in San Francisco, but no one’s heard of her—”
“It depends on who you’ve been asking. Dar keeps to a certain scene—she only participates in group shows with people she knows well. I approached her once about having a solo here, but she seemed uncomfortable with the idea. I let it drop—”
“Why?” I ask. “Her work’s incredible—”
“She keeps to herself,” she says. “She’s not a recluse, but I don’t know. I don’t think she wants too much publicity. I remember she refused to be photographed for the promotion we did for this group show, which is fine except she looks like a model. Would have brought more people to the gallery if they knew what the artist looked like. I don’t get it, but I respect the decision—”
“You know her well?”
“Well enough,” she says. “She sells each fascicle as a whole, but I see you have two separate works there. They should be kept together—”
“I have the others. I bought them already separated—”
“Where did you buy them?”
“From eBay,” I tell her. She’s interested in who was selling, but I beg off, vaguely worried that these paintings may have been reported stolen and she might be fishing for information. I tell her I’ll come back the next day, to look over the collection. A Spicy Chicken meal at Wendy’s before sat-connect at my hotel, scouring the streams for mentions of Darwyn Harris—she’s easy enough to find now that I have her name. She has a Facebook page, without a profile pic. Her About is brief, without a mention of Pittsburgh. Scroll through her site’s slideshow—image after image of the same ruined house, each bound together in fascicles of six. There’s another series of paintings as well, as obsessively detailed as her renderings of the house, but these are paintings of a blonde, the tone not unlike Wyeth’s Helga images if shattered and reformed by Picasso or Braque—the same muted colors she uses for the house, but lighter, hay-colored blonde, the cream of pale skin, darker hair in curly tufts and the pink of lips and nipples and interior folds, the blue of her eyes. I look at slideshows of several of the fascicles before I realize the woman she’s painting is Peyton. House and blonde. Some fascicles feature the woman and the architecture echoing each other, but most of her small books keep to their own unified themes.
Listings under Events. Group shows throughout the winter, into spring—she’s busy even if she’s trying to stay relatively anonymous. I check the dates—in a few weeks, for the “First Friday” Mission art crawl, a show opens called Paper Covers Rock, all works on paper at a space called the Glass Dome.
I talk with Gavril late into the night. He asks
when I’ll be through with this and I tell him I don’t know. “Soon, maybe—”
“I would love to see San Francisco,” he says. “I’ve always thought I would like to see the Redwoods. Drive a car through a hollowed-out tree trunk—”
5, 3—
An art crawl tonight, openings at thirty-three venues throughout the Mission, places like Artists’ Television Access, Project Artaud, the kind of grant-funded spaces Theresa and I used to visit during crawls back in Pittsburgh, the Xchange, Intersection for the Arts, the Mission Cultural Center and the Glass Dome—free downloads with walking tours, exhibition highlights, artist bios, the most hyped show a display of Day of the Dead masks made by the Latino Art League. I eat an omelet for dinner at a café called Kahlo and buy fresh-cut fries doused with vinegar and ketchup from a street vendor on Dolores. Mexican folk buskers and exhibitions of salsa dancing in the closed-off streets—gallery assistants cut among the crowds passing out handbills for after parties. The streets and sidewalks are already carpeted with their handbills and postcards, most augged with Day of the Dead death’s-heads, ornately painted skulls with crimson eyes and flashing grins that float illusory in 3-D and break apart as I step through them. Hesitant among the crowds, trying to figure my move—a gnawing doubt in my guts that I shouldn’t meet Albion at all, that I should let her be, let this all drop and run, but knowing Timothy and Waverly won’t ever let me disappear, knowing that Hannah Massey will disappear forever. A drag queen procession’s just getting started, a Tina Turner mash-up Sousa march—the pageant queen’s dressed like Meecham, a Stars and Stripes ball gown and a pig skull mask.
The Glass Dome’s street-front windows are lettered Paper Covers Rock: New San Francisco Works on Paper. Electro house emanates from inside, vintage Deadmau5, a riot vibe fueling the dance party erupting in the streets. I shoulder my way through the crowd at the door—an acute claustrophobia hits me, like instead of a narrow space crowded for an exhibition I’m in a cave packed tight with bodies. The Glass Dome’s a tapered space, like a hallway without doors—it reminds me of Pittsburgh galleries: reclaimed buildings left raw with exposed tubing and knotty braids of wiring. Pittsburgh was ringed with dead mill towns, ghost towns almost, ripe for art collectives and nonprofits to rent on the cheap, whole neighborhoods that would have died out and disappeared except for artists that wanted to rent a sense of authenticity and grit.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 21