Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  It took half the day for Erika to understand that Nevet Yitzhak was going to do a multimedia installation about The Thinker. Or maybe two installations. No one was certain about that yet, although Yitzhak had to be, right? She was the one designing it all.

  Only she was in Israel, supervising from afar.

  And right now, Erika had to handle the camera crew here. Nice people, here to film the annual conservation of the statute. The ladders, the scaffolding, the proper placement of the camera. Erika did none of that.

  Instead, she was in charge of snacks and bottled water. Mostly, she stood around, watching the conservators take their soft cloths and rub The Thinker’s damaged limbs. He hunched over as if he were protecting his own nakedness. Or maybe, he was pretending at practiced boredom, like that beautiful man she had been assigned to draw in that long ago life-drawing class, the class that the vet had interrupted.

  The vet was foremost on her mind. Did he use a soft cloth on his damaged legs, or did he accept help? And if he did, did he look down and away, like The Thinker, or did he just accept the ministrations as part of his every day life?

  She didn’t know; she couldn’t know. She didn’t even know who the vet had been. She supposed she could have asked her professor. She had a hunch he did that little bit of playacting every semester, shocking his first-year students with a bit of street theater.

  She wondered how many couldn’t get that moment out of their minds for years afterward.

  She sighed, made herself focus.

  She was just a gofer, an unpaid gofer, who was gaining experience.

  At watching someone else’s art develop—concept to exhibition—without a single hands-on moment. Without a single thought.

  1970

  Irv, trudging away, holding Leo. Leo, who was bleeding too much.

  Lisa glanced down the path. She couldn’t see them any more. They had disappeared into the darkness. Their footprints were hidden by the broken ice on the path, but she had no idea if there would be a blood trail for when the police got here.

  She also had no idea if there were sirens. She couldn’t trust what she heard, because her hearing was weird. Usually when her ears were plugged, her breathing sounded too loud, but she couldn’t hear her own breath. Just this strange ringing that sounded like a continual finger running around the surface of an expensive glass made of the finest crystal.

  Something dripped on her upper lip. She rubbed her hand under her nose, felt something viscous, looked. Blood. Her nose was bleeding.

  She was injured, but she had no idea how much. She knew nothing about concussive injuries. Nothing at all.

  At least she wasn’t dizzy—or that dizzy, anyway. She made herself walk up the stairs, because she didn’t want to slip on the ice, and fall again. She didn’t remember hitting her head, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t. She hit the ground pretty hard after the blast, and the pain hadn’t yet registered.

  She knew it would register soon.

  He had toppled backwards, the statue. Falling behind the base. Helen’s words stood out in stark contrast to the pale stone: Off the Ruling Class.

  Off The Thinker.

  Someone grabbed Lisa’s arm, and she screamed. The scream ripped her throat, but she couldn’t hear it, not really. She felt it, knew it had to be loud.

  She yanked herself away and turned at the same time.

  Helen stood beside her. Her face was smattered with something black or gray, as if she’d stood too close to a fire. The whites of her eyes looked astoundingly bright in the full moon. Her coat was tattered, and she was missing a boot.

  But she grinned. She looked too happy. Much too happy.

  “We have to go,” Lisa said.

  Helen tapped her ear. She couldn’t hear either.

  Lisa mouthed the words again, just like she had done for Irv.

  Helen nodded, then pointed at the words on the base, and pumped her fist, like Muhammad Ali in one of his interviews.

  Now, Lisa mouthed. She wanted to add that Leo was badly hurt but she didn’t. She knew that Helen couldn’t hear her.

  Helen didn’t seem to notice anything. Her bare foot was on the cold pavement, and one arm dangled at her side, not that she seemed to care. She looked inappropriately gleeful.

  She walked over to the statue, braced herself on her bare foot, and kicked the statue with her booted foot.

  Lisa grabbed at her, then pointed to the van.

  Helen made a show of sighing, but she squared her shoulders, winced a little, and started marching forward. She didn’t even look for the lost boot.

  Lisa followed, feeling like the only sane one left in the group. It made her wonder what, exactly, someone sane would notice about her. The blood on her face? The way she took stairs, as if she had never seen them before? The look in her eyes?

  She wasn’t sure what that look was. It wasn’t gleeful craziness like Helen’s, and it wasn’t fear, which Lisa had felt earlier. It was some kind of calm acceptance, some kind of weird feeling that she had stepped from a world she thought she understood into one so very different that she couldn’t quite process it.

  All she knew was that they had to leave. Maybe, if he had good sense, Irv had already driven Leo to a hospital.

  Helen’s mouth was moving. She was talking, but Lisa couldn’t hear her. Not that Lisa was trying.

  She put her hand on Helen’s back and shoved her forward. If Helen didn’t start moving faster, Lisa would leave her behind, tell Irv she couldn’t find her, let Helen take the rap for the whole thing.

  And, with that thought, anger flooded in. The group should have listened to her when Lisa mentioned the townhouse bombing. They should have given up this method of bringing the war home.

  She should have listened to herself. She should have walked away long before this.

  The statue wasn’t the only one looking into the gates of hell.

  She had descended into it, and she hadn’t even known how.

  2015

  They had moved Erika from the Yitzhak exhibit to the centennial. Her supervisor had said she would learn more from handling all the program items for 2016, since the Yitzhak exhibit was well in hand.

  Handling all the program items for the centennial year meant researching the museum’s history for the birthday party and the official celebrations. She wasn’t really handling any exhibits per se; she was planning a “birthday party” to commemorate the first day the museum’s doors had opened, in June of 1916.

  Lately, she had been inside the cool air-conditioning, sitting at the desk they had assigned her in the bowels of the museum, working on a computer that should have been upgraded five years ago.

  Usually she worked in silence, but today, someone down the hall had a door open, and she could hear voices, raised and angry.

  Angry voices were not normally part of the museum.

  Finally, Erika couldn’t take it any more. She picked up her mostly empty bottle of water, and walked toward the noise.

  The door to the office was half-closed. Erika wasn’t even sure whose office it was, because she had never been invited into the offices proper. The voices had lowered—or at least the speaking voice had.

  It belonged to a woman.

  “. . . materials are wrong and you must change them,” she was saying forcefully. “The bombing wasn’t an act of vandalism.”

  “Well.” The responding voice was male. “I’m afraid the statue was vandalized—”

  “Vandals spray graffiti,” the woman snapped. “They don’t bomb a statue. You’re trivializing the event.”

  Erika’s breath caught. They were talking about The Thinker. They were talking about the upcoming installation. There were two installations now. One was called The Antithinkers, and the other, Off the Ruling Class.

  “We’re not trivializing anything,” the man said. “When the final materials come out, you’ll see. Nevet did a fantastic interview in which she called the 1970 bombing cultural terrorism and linked it to the
destruction occurring all over the Mideast—”

  “Cultural terrorism tries to wipe out the culture,” the woman said, voice dripping with contempt. “That bombing was done by Weatherpeople. They didn’t care about culture. They were political—”

  “They were called the Weathermen,” the man said. “And I agree, they were a terrorist group—”

  “I didn’t say they were terrorists.” The woman lowered her voice. “You need to fix this. Give credit where . . .”

  “What are you doing?”

  It took a moment for that question to register. One of the volunteers stood in front of Erika, frowning. Clearly, she had been caught eavesdropping, but fortunately not by one of her bosses.

  “Stepped out of my cubby to get some water.” Erika lifted the mostly empty bottle. “What are they fighting about?”

  “Nothing important,” the woman said.

  Erika recognized her; she came every Thursday. But if Erika had to say what the woman did, she couldn’t. The woman was one of those mousy chubby types of indeterminate age, the kind everyone ignored.

  The only reason Erika even noticed her was because her eyes were sharper than they should have been. This woman seemed to miss nothing.

  “It sounds important,” Erika said.

  The woman gave her a condescending smile. “You’ll understand some day.”

  Erika hated it when people said that. “Understand what?”

  “Faulkner. ‘The past is never dead. It isn’t even past yet.’”

  Erika stared at the woman. Had she just quoted a dead white guy?

  Erika hated it when someone did that. It was so condescending.

  She let out a breath, then pushed past the woman, and headed to the Provenance. They didn’t like it when she came in and only bought a bottle of water, but she couldn’t afford to eat lunch there half the time. She was still on a student budget, because no one paid her to be here. Even the bottle of water was expensive.

  The past isn’t dead. How stupid was that? Those people in the office were fighting about the wording for the upcoming exhibit, not what happened in the past.

  Or maybe Erika was just feeling tired. Because all those articles she’d been reading—the ones from 1916—felt like they’d taken place thousands of years ago. The past truly did feel dead to her.

  She rubbed a hand over her face, not sure how anyone could feel so passionate about an exhibit or two or three. She had become jaded working here: no one seemed to care about the art itself. Tourists wandered through too fast; students complained when they had to make a study of an existing painting; and the curators themselves seemed pulled in a thousand directions.

  Even Erika wasn’t enjoying the art. She didn’t look at it anymore. And she couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched The Thinker. Probably since his annual maintenance, when he’d looked just a little too much like the man in her memory.

  Just a little too much like a living, breathing human being.

  1970

  The van was enveloped in its own exhaust, as if it was coated in the smoke of a recently extinguished fire.

  From hell, probably.

  Lisa shook her head at herself. About a block ago, she had gotten very, very cold, and even though she could see the van ahead, it looked very far away. Her limbs felt heavy.

  Shock setting in.

  She didn’t dare let it.

  Her ears hadn’t entirely unplugged, but she thought the ringing was different. Not quite as loud. And something else had wormed its way in.

  A siren?

  She wasn’t sure, but that would make sense.

  She turned to see if Helen was reacting to the new sirens, but Helen wasn’t reacting to much. She was limping now, and she had slowed down as well.

  Lisa finally grabbed Helen’s good arm and tugged her forward. The exterior of the van smelled like gasoline and carbon monoxide, a stench that normally made Lisa cough. She didn’t even mind this time.

  She just yanked down on the back-passenger door handle, and stepped into the back of the van, nearly kicking Leo.

  He was sprawled on the floor where Irv had clearly dumped him. And, if Lisa had to guess, she’d guess that Leo hadn’t moved since. The van’s thin carpet looked dark and blotchy in the overhead light, and Leo looked gray.

  Lisa had never seen anyone look gray before.

  She reached out of the van to help Helen in, but Helen was gone. Again. Jesus. What was with—

  And then the front-passenger door opened, where Leo had sat on their way here. Helen bounced in as if they were all going on a joy ride, the exhausted woman from the sidewalk gone.

  Lisa pulled her door closed, then stepped over Leo to get to some boxes piled behind the passenger seat.

  Leo didn’t move as she stepped over him. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t try to protect his face.

  He did nothing at all.

  She knelt beside him, rather than sit on the boxes. The carpet was squishy with blood.

  “We have to get him to a hospital,” she said. Her voice sounded normal now. Or normal with a cold. Sound was still far away, but not quite as bad. Her ears had started working again.

  “Screw that,” Helen said. “They’ll catch us if we go to a hospital.”

  “It’s not a bullet wound,” Lisa said. “It’s—”

  “Shrapnel.” Irv said, as if he was speaking underwater. “It’s shrapnel.”

  Bringing the war home, baby. Irv’s voice again. Laughing as they placed the bomb into its box, hours ago—what felt like days ago. Weeks ago.

  Years ago.

  “So what?” Lisa said. “We can’t help him ourselves.”

  “I’m thinking we go to Pittsburgh. No one will think twice about a guy like this in a hospital in Pittsburgh. They won’t even know about the bombing.” Irv had clearly been thinking about it while he waited.

  “That’s over two hours from here.” Lisa put her hand on Leo’s forehead. He didn’t flinch at the chill of her skin. His skin felt cold too. Clammy.

  His eyes were glazed.

  “We have to get him help, now,” Lisa said.

  “He knew the risks,” Helen said, using past tense.

  Lisa looked at her. And Helen, the bitch, grinned, then shrugged.

  “We agreed,” Helen said. “No hospitals. No pigs. No help.”

  “We know anyone who can help with this?” Lisa’s voice shook. Leo was still staring. He hadn’t stopped staring. And she wasn’t sure he was breathing. “No one in our group has this kind of medical training.”

  “It’s one of the risks,” Helen said. “And we agreed.”

  Sirens were growing closer.

  “Pittsburgh,” Irv said, and put the van in gear. It lurched forward, then he eased it away from the curb, like they’d been taught. Like Leo had taught them.

  How not to look suspicious. Drive like a normal person.

  But how did a normal person drive after a bomb exploded? How did a normal person drive when someone was dying in the back?

  “Take him to a goddamn hospital,” Lisa said.

  “Pittsburgh,” Irv repeated. “Pittsburgh.”

  It was clearly something he’d been saying to himself. A mantra.

  He knew.

  She knew too.

  Leo was dead.

  Friendly fire.

  Or was it? The statue got off one shot before it toppled off its base, rolling until it was facedown on the terrace, limbs lost. One shot to hurt the enemy.

  The statue wasn’t dead, but Leo was.

  And Lisa had no idea what to do about it.

  2015

  People still dressed up for this sort of thing. Or maybe the ruling class did.

  Erika smiled to herself at the thought. She stood near the makeshift bar, near the dark blue exhibit wall. Museum patrons, volunteers, and students wandered through, picking up bits of cheese with toothpicks and eating tiny sausages. A few had a veggie-filled plate, and almost everyone carried a fake plastic win
eglass.

  Mostly, people clung to their food as they stared at the installations. More people were looking at Off the Ruling Class than The Antithinkers, apparently caring less about the history and the curation than the way the statue “reacted” to its own history.

  Nevet Yitzhak had come up with something brilliant. The statue, animated, pondered his own destruction. Yitzhak made him real. He looked at a photo of his own body facedown on the terrace, and seemed stunned by it. Then he hid his face in his arms.

  Erika had only watched Off the Ruling Class once. It brought tears to her eyes. It also made her use a different entrance to the museum every day. The Thinker had been alive enough for her. She didn’t need to see him move in a piece of 3-D art. Now he seemed even more alive, judgmental, and just a little bit lost.

  She didn’t like to think of him as lost. His 3-D self had helped her find that spark again. She might not be able to draw to anyone’s satisfaction except her own, but she could do other things.

  She didn’t have to restrict herself to the old ways, not when there were a hundred new ways to create art, just like Nevet Yitzhak had done. Exciting ways.

  People were talking about this installation. Erika overheard bits and snatches of conversation all over the exhibit. Mostly, they talked about their emotional response, but she had overheard one of the directors talking to a local critic, heads bent together.

  “It makes me think of what ISIS did in Palmyra,” the critic had been saying as Erika passed, picking up stray programs.

  “It’s supposed to,” the director had replied.

  That stuck with her, primarily because she’d heard it before, and wasn’t sure she agreed. She understood the global nature of the exhibit, and the way the Cleveland Museum of Art, one of the best museums in the world, wanted to keep its hand on the global stage.

  But Erika found herself returning over and over again to the Antithinkers, the newspaper clippings, the decision to keep this casting of The Thinker damaged, to show what Sherman Lee, the director of the museum at the time, had said:

  No one can pass the shattered green man without asking himself what it tells us about the violent climate of the USA in the year 1970.

  Not Syria. Not the Middle East at all.