“Are you okay?”
“Who are you?” Lee said.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Why were you dressed that way?”
The boy raised an eyebrow at her, and Lee realized that of course she, too, was in costume. Everyone there was. “Can I give you a ride?” he asked.
She turned to see the boy holding open the passenger door of a boxy old black sedan. Her bike, she remembered now, was back by the entrance.
The black frames of the kid’s glasses sat above a squashed-looking nose and seemed to hold his features in place, his flat, wide mouth and too-high forehead and his round, stubbly cheeks. Could he be one of them? Her gut told her otherwise, but her gut had been wrong before. She heard voices back by the front gate and the creak of the door opening. Lee got in the car.
She watched the boy as he drove. “Who are they?”
“What do you mean?”
“Those people. Who are they?”
“I don’t know who you mean.”
“You helped me escape. Why would you do that unless you know something about them?”
He looked at her, confused. “You were about to have a panic attack. My sister used to have them, so I know. You obviously needed air.”
“So you weren’t helping me escape.”
“From what?”
“Those men. The Station Master.”
“Which one was he?” When Lee didn’t reply, the boy shrugged and turned to her. “Hey, you looked like you were having trouble breathing. I took you out the most direct route I know.”
“You go to a lot of these?”
“Nah. A friend gave me the ticket. I was supposed to meet him there but he never showed. Who’s the Station Master?”
Lee stared out the window. She didn’t recognize anything about the neighborhood. “Where are we going?”
He smiled. “We are driving. Talking. I thought you might need to calm down. I can take you wherever. Or you want to come back to my place? I can introduce you to my crew.”
He had the slightest hint of an accent, as well as a near formality that shadowed his diction. Like he wasn’t born here but had lived here long enough to erase most of his past. Lee thought about her van in the salvage yard. The twitchy loneliness of it felt crushing.
“Fine,” she said.
“Good,” he said, pulling over to the curb. “Because we are here.”
• • •
The boy’s place was a four-story walk-up in Fishtown. He unlocked the door to an apartment, and Lee took a moment before she followed him in. “You want a beer?” he asked.
“Where are your housemates?”
The boy shrugged. “Out. Stay awhile. They will be back and you can meet them.” He handed her a beer and flopped down on the couch. He took his phone from his pocket and tapped on its screen until a Sigur Rós album came on.
Lee stood awkwardly, thinking: this is a bad idea.
But several hours and three beers later, she was feeling relaxed. At some point the boy disappeared into his room and came out with a lit joint, which he extended to her. Lee hadn’t smoked pot in over a year, and nothing good ever happened when she mixed it with alcohol. But she took a hit anyway, and then another before handing it back. The boy talked nonstop, a nervous, rolling chatter that Lee found herself coming in and out of. She’d tune in and he’d be telling her about the history behind some obscure European art movement, then she’d tune out and come back in a bit later to find him describing a childhood memory of fishing for eels using a horse’s head. Soon she felt herself nodding, struggling to keep her eyes open.
· BOOK III ·
With Hidden Noise
FIVE
LEE awoke with her head buried in the cushion of a strange couch, someone’s coat draped over her. Beneath it she still had on the vintage wedding dress.
The shades were drawn and the room was dark. She heard the flutter of fingers on a keyboard and turned to see someone at a laptop on the table behind her. The screen reflected two blue squares onto the lenses of a pair of glasses. It took a moment for the boy’s face to unblur. “What time is it?” she asked.
“Almost five,” he answered, without looking up. “P.M.”
Lee rubbed sleep from her eyes. How was that possible? “How long have I been . . .” She trailed off, remembering now coming home with the boy, talking on the couch until she’d nodded off, and then half-waking at some point to meet a blurry cadre of housemates. There was a handsome shirtless guy in black leather pants and dark primped hair and mascara who’d introduced himself as Derrick before putting out his hand in an oddly formal gesture. And there was a couple, whose names she’d forgotten, an oxlike farm girl from upstate and her boyfriend, who resembled a high school shop teacher with his cropped hair, his Buddy Holly glasses and sweater vest.
“A long time. You must have been tired.”
Lee blinked at him.
He got up and put out a hand. “I’m Tomi.”
She shook it and let him pull her upright. “Where is that from?”
He smiled a little and went back to his keyboard. “From my mother, of course.”
“No, the name. I mean, where did you . . .”
“I know what you mean. I am from the Czech Republic. Have you ever been?”
Lee felt stupid and hardly awake. She shook her head.
“It is beautiful. And some of it is ugly. But most of it is beautiful. My hometown is a fairy tale. Perhaps I will take you there sometime. It is where my mother waits, fat as a dumpling and missing me terribly.” He smiled to himself, his glasses flashing dim blue against the screen.
She felt a twang of pain in her chest. “I’m Lee,” she said dumbly.
He shut the laptop and his smile opened to her. “Can I take you somewhere, Lee? I would like to show you something.”
• • •
By the time he pulled the car over beside a gray stone building blackened by years of soot and exhaust, it was nearing dusk. They were in an abandoned-looking industrial area by the river. Lee got out of the car after him and craned her neck up at the tumbledown three-story structure, surrounded by cyclone fencing and spotted with graffiti. It must have been grand once, with big granite columns flanking a huge steel door, the crumbling stone arch above it held up now by weathered four-by-fours.
“What do you think?” Tomi said.
It was just an old deserted building. There were hundreds like it all over Philly. She thought of the Crystal Castle, not nearly so grand but just as deserted in the end, and the thought of it spooked her.
“Come on,” he said, holding open a section of broken fence.
Beyond the fence the ground was littered with trash—broken bottles and crushed fast-food containers and cans, a pile of old clothes.
“Hurry up. This is not the best neighborhood.”
“It looks pretty sketchy in there, too.”
“You won’t regret it. But it is up to you.” He didn’t wait for her, climbing through the fence and, with two long strides, launching himself a few feet up a rusted gutter drain that ran up the side of the building. He shimmied up until he was near the top, then let go with one hand and grinned down at her before disappearing onto the roof.
Lee stood watching the top of the building, but he didn’t show his face again. The street was quiet and deserted. Suddenly shadows all up and down the street seemed to be moving, disappearing when she’d look at them. Lee heard voices from down the block, then three dark forms took shape, loping toward her, their drunken laughter growing louder. She could either follow this boy she’d just met or take her chances out here. Lee looked once more up the street before climbing through the fence, then testing the pipe with her hand. When she pulled herself up, it was surprisingly easy, and before she knew it, Lee was standing on the roof. A black ventilation pipe
turned in the wind. A series of broken skylights ran down the center. One of them was open. Lee stuck her head in.
The space below was obscured by the top of a large steel machine. Lee lowered herself onto it, catching her dress on a shard of glass. Silvery light filtered through the skylights, throwing a watery gleam over a huge room. The place had obviously been abandoned for decades. Most of it was brick and steel, great rusted turbines and valves that looked ancient, like something raised up from the bottom of the sea. Lee let her eyes adjust to the dim light, then climbed down a steel ladder to the floor.
Tomi was waiting for her at the bottom, but she ignored him. She ran a hand down the cracked gauges of one blocky machine the size of a refrigerator, feeling the old paint chip away beneath her fingers. A set of gears as tall as she was leaned against one wall. The remains of an old water mill were collapsed at the bottom of a long concrete trench. The room was filled with old machinery like this, and Lee got close to each of them, fascinated by their decay. She didn’t care that her dress was now smudged in rust and dirt, and torn beneath one arm. This was the most beautiful place she had ever seen.
“The Schuylkill Water Works. In its heyday this place pumped water for the entire city.” He followed her as she walked through the space, gazing up at the huge rusting machines. “This turbine used to pump two million gallons a day. These generators created enough electricity to power half of Philadelphia. Of course, the city was smaller back then.”
The turbine was a hulking steel tube with rivets wider than the span of her hand, and the generator consisted of four steel rings that dwarfed them both. He took her hand and she let him lead her through the debris and fallen angled pipes and up a steel staircase that seemed to be hanging together by bits of rust.
“Across here,” he said, taking them down a narrow walkway.
She followed him through a door and into a long room with brick walls and raw wood floor planks, empty except for several brutish metal tables with benches standing end to end. She could see only by what faint light came through the soot-covered windows.
“Wait here,” he told her.
He disappeared into the darkness at the other end of the room. She could hear him feeling about, rustling and clanking something together. Then a low, subterranean hum filled the room, and something at the other end began to faintly glow. It was as though some sort of moss, covering the tables at this end of the room, had been stimulated into bioluminescence. As she edged closer, she made out hints of waving tendrils, vibrating like a field of white grass on a breezy day.
He bent down to insert a plug in an orange extension cord that ran out one of the windows, and the wall beside her began to glow with the same pale light. A long, narrow canvas spanned nearly the entire wall, a tableau painted in earthy, mulchy colors, the paint peeling and bubbling on the canvas. The skin of something dark and oily dredged up from a bog. Glued to the surface of this skin were archipelagoes of amoebic islands—each one a clear lacquer base with a field of white vibrating tendrils embedded within.
“You made this?” she said.
“You are the first to see it.”
Standing next to it gave her goose bumps. “You haven’t shown it to anyone else?”
“A man I respect very much once said that ‘the great artist of tomorrow will go underground.’” His accent was slight, just a softening of the consonants and an elongation of the “s” sounds, but it gave everything he said an air of earnest delight.
Lee thought about being underground. Disappearing. Something about the idea appealed to her. She’d ghosted through her entire life unnoticed and had hated it, wanting only to be seen. But now she wondered whether that wasn’t her natural state, something to be embraced.
Tomi reached down and unplugged the work, and the room went dim again. Lee could just make out the boggy shapes he’d painted on the canvas. “The same man said that when a million people look at a painting, they change it. Just by looking. I guess I just want to keep my work as it is. It’s perfect, no?”
“It is.”
“Do you know what aura is?” he asked.
Steve used to talk about auras all the time. Auras and chakras and dharmas and tantras. One morning while they waited for her mother to finish making breakfast, he squinted at her, then leaned across the table and told her quietly that her aura was as gray as old fish, almost as if there were nothing there.
“You know how when you are in a museum, standing in front of a Picasso, it feels different than when you see it in a book?” he said. “This comes from being in the presence of the original. That’s aura.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said.
“You’ve never seen a real Picasso? Seriously?”
He waited for her to respond, but she gave him nothing. She had known kids like this in school, wearing their arcane knowledge like a collection of medals. She wasn’t going to let him make her feel stupid.
But he was smiling, a little sheepishly, more embarrassed by sharing his passions than she was by not sharing them. And suddenly she liked him. He wasn’t wearing any medals after all, and he wasn’t judging her for not getting what he was talking about.
“Can I show you what I mean?” he said.
• • •
Lee had been inside the Philadelphia Museum of Art before, but only as a child with her father, and the vast, high-ceilinged entryway, with its stone columns and statue of Diana, brought back the feel of his body next to hers. Tomi had lent Lee a gray hoodie, which she wore over the dress. When he paid for the two tickets, bouncing back and forth off the balls of his feet as he pressed himself up against the desk, the cashier informed them that the museum would be closing in thirty minutes.
“We won’t be long,” he told the man and grabbed Lee’s hand.
She followed Tomi up the stairs and through several galleries until they stood before a portrait of a woman seated by a vase of flowers. She wore a long leopard-fur coat, and her features were Asian and her hands were large and misshapen, the fingers flabby noodles across her thigh. Everything about the painting was flat, and the colors were out of a child’s paint box.
“Matisse,” he said, watching her take it in.
“All right,” he said finally. “You’re not feeling it. I get it.”
He took her to another painting, a boat sailing beneath a bridge, and to another, a long-necked woman with sleepy eyes, and to an Impressionist field in the rain. They stood in front of several sculptures. He didn’t say much, allowing her the space to experience whatever it was she was supposed to be experiencing. And it was sweet. But she wasn’t going to pretend to feel something she didn’t.
A bell went off, and a man’s voice came over the PA to inform them the museum was closing in fifteen minutes. As the guards began herding the people out of the room, Lee started to follow the crowd, but Tomi took her arm and led her the opposite way, skirting behind a sculpture to avoid a guard, and then into a room where they were alone. There was a door at the far end. Tomi led her to it and then took a key from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He unlocked the door and led her into a dark room. A single red light from some sort of meter gave off enough light for her to see that they were in a utility closet. They huddled there for over an hour, surrounded by the fumes of cleaning agents. She tried to ask him questions—Where had he gotten the key? What were they doing? How long were they going to wait there?—but he brought a finger up to shush her each time. Lee began to wonder why she had let him bring her in here in the first place, and why she had stayed. It was too late now. Now she was forced to trust him.
She was stiff and cramping when Tomi finally stood, listened at the door, then opened it and ushered her out. After hours, the museum was lit only by low-wattage bulbs set near the floors, giving the place a monasterial solemnity. How had she gotten herself here? Had the thrill of it
simply turned off something in her brain?
“There are two guards on this floor,” he whispered to her. “We have to time it right, but we can stay between them.”
They passed through an exhibition of Japanese prints, another that was all tapestries, and several rooms of an exhibition called “Investigating the Insignificant,” a curation of works whose value seemed to be based on the amount of time they took to complete. There was a life-sized model of a 1961 Lincoln Continental Limousine made entirely of toothpicks (3,762 hours, according to the wall text); a huge fish tank containing exactly 821,309 grains of black sand (a number corresponding to one estimate of the deaths in the Armenian genocide) and a single grain of white sand (significance unexplained), all counted and added to the tank grain by grain by the artist (4,699 hours); and a 3:1 scale portrait of Pauly Shore constructed completely from coat hangers (1,775 hours). Lee tried to imagine spending that much of her life dedicated to something so inconsequential. Then she thought of what she had spent time on in her life, and what it had amounted to.
After a few rooms Tomi started in on a steady, whispered patter about the art surrounding them. He talked her through the evolution of the movements whose representatives they passed, from Impressionism to Art Nouveau, Fauvism to Futurism, Expressionism to Cubism to Dada and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art to Photorealism. Lee found herself unable to concentrate, afraid that someone would hear him, despite the fact that he was whispering so close she could feel his breath in her ear. She got distracted by a photograph so big it took up nearly the entire wall, and stopped to gaze up at it. It was just an old red barn, falling to pieces in the middle of an overgrown field, but Lee couldn’t help but be drawn to it. Wherever it was, she wanted to be there, feeling the speckled sunlight on her shoulders. Tomi grabbed her arm and pulled her away. “That’s just a photograph,” he said. “By definition, it has no original and so can have no aura. Come on.”
She didn’t care about aura, but she followed him anyway. “Paintings have aura, because they are one of a kind,” he went on. “To go and see a painting is a kind of pilgrimage, a ritual.”
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