The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  He stopped her in front of another painting. It was one they’d stood in front of before, when the museum was open. The rainy field. “You feel it now?”

  It was a dark Impressionist landscape painted in thrusting vertical lines. If it was supposed to look different to her now, it didn’t.

  “I know you do. You’re not as cold as you pretend. Walter Benjamin would say this painting has aura because it’s an original, not a reproduction. Painted over a century ago with Van Gogh’s own hand. But I think aura is more than that. I think that aura exists somewhere in the space between this painting and us.” He waved at the air in front of the painting, as though wafting smoke away. “Aura is not in the thing but in the relationship between the viewer and the thing. Think about it: when we were here before, standing with a dozen other people crowded around, how different the experience was.”

  “It’s different because if we get caught here now we’re going to jail,” she said. The thrill of trespassing had faded, and in its place came not fear but anger. That he was risking everything without even asking. For what?

  “No,” he insisted. “It’s not about that. Risk has nothing to do with it.”

  “But I’m not feeling anything. What is it? A child’s view of a field. I don’t care that it’s a Van Gogh.”

  Tomi was grinning. “I know you feel it.”

  He was still holding her hand, and she pulled it away, annoyed. He had tricked her into this, and now she had no choice but to go along. Lee hadn’t told Tomi this, but today was her birthday. She was eighteen now. What would she have been doing tonight if none of this had ever happened? She’d be somewhere else, for one thing. At college, with Edie. Edie would have done something special. In the end, Edie cared only about herself, but when you were part of her world, you felt singular, chosen. Lee had felt that way in the presence of the Station Master, too, and the thought of that made her sick. Was she that easily manipulated? Is that what this boy was doing now? Lee didn’t think so; Tomi was trying too hard to impress her. With Edie and the Station Master, it was always Lee trying to impress them. Eighteen, though. Edie would have thrown a hell of a party. Then Lee had the sudden realization: if they got caught, she wasn’t going back to the JDC. She’d be headed to an adult prison this time.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  “But we just got started.”

  “Please.” She turned and looked at him with pleading eyes. “Please just take me out of here.”

  He must have seen something in her face, because his tone changed. “It’s okay. I’ve done this before. Stick with me, you will be okay. I promise. Okay? Come on,” he told her. “I just want to show you one last thing.”

  She didn’t move.

  “One of the guards is behind us,” he said. “If we stay too long, he’ll catch us. I know the route, and I know the timing. But if we stay here or go off course, it fucks up all of it.”

  She let him lead her into a new room and then into another room and another beyond that. Lee was staring up at a spiky, medieval-looking thing hanging from the ceiling when she nearly walked into a towering double-glass panel mounted in the room’s center. She stopped and gazed up at it.

  The sculpture came up vertically from the floor, at least ten feet, framed in steel and bisected horizontally at the center. A lattice of cracks in the glass webbed down from the top right corner to the bottom left of the upper plane, then from there to the lower right of the bottom plane. Between the glass panes were a coterie of sepia forms that seemed engaged in a kind of mechanical ballet. A circle of abstract figures, like alien chess pieces, took up the bottom left corner of the work.

  She didn’t remember ever seeing the work before, though there was something familiar about it. Lee couldn’t figure it out. The whole thing left her feeling strangely agitated, and she wondered for a moment if that was its aura.

  “Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Probably his greatest work. But not the one I wanted to show you.”

  As she kept gazing up at it, she felt him take her hand, and she turned away to follow him to a dark alcove just a few feet away. At the far side of the alcove was an ancient-looking wood-slatted door recessed into a brick threshold.

  “Go up. Press yourself against it,” he told her.

  “The door?”

  “Go on.”

  She walked up to it and pressed herself against the door as he said but felt nothing. She tried to turn around, but his hand was on the small of her back, keeping her there. She felt a brief panic, the man behind the Dumpster coming back. But Tomi’s touch lightened.

  “Stay there. Now close your eyes.”

  “Why?”

  “Trust me.”

  Lee didn’t know that she did, but she closed her eyes anyway, feeling the cool grain of the wood against her cheek, the iron bar that ran through the door’s center pressing into her belly. Somewhere she could hear the footsteps of one of the guards. Lee held her breath.

  When she felt Tomi’s hands move to the back of her head, a tingling ran through her. He maneuvered her head down, then a little to the left, and held it there. “Now open them,” he said.

  She heard the guard’s footsteps recede into the next room and exhaled. When Lee opened her eyes, she saw the strangest thing. Her eye was pressed against a hole in the door. And through that hole was another room.

  Inside this room, lying supine on a dense thicket of dried brush, was a woman, naked, her legs open, skin as white as plaster. The angle of the peephole didn’t let Lee see the woman’s head, only a few wisps of blond hair wrapping down around her shoulder. Lee would have thought her a corpse left in a field if not for the antique lamp she held aloft in her left hand. Beyond her was a vista that seemed ethereal in its artificiality: a pale blue sky spongy with clouds, a range of trees in reds, oranges, and greens, and a glittering waterfall. Except for the fact that the woman was completely nude, the landscape reminded Lee, in its pure shimmering plasticity, of a beer advertisement hanging from the wall of a dive bar.

  “It’s called Étant donnés.”

  Lee jumped. She’d somehow forgotten that Tomi was there.

  “Duchamp’s final work. He worked on it in secret for the last twenty years of his life. The most influential artist of the twentieth century, and everyone thought he’d retired to play chess.”

  “What’s it supposed to be?”

  Tomi shrugged. “Duchamp thought that the viewer completed a work of art. That something sparks between the viewer and the work, giving it its meaning. So whatever it is for you is what it is. In your universe. In my universe it might be something different. So in a sense we’re looking at two different works right now. As far as what he meant it to be, Duchamp was never very forthcoming about his intent.”

  Lee was still tingling. “It looks like a crime scene.”

  Tomi leaned in and pressed his eye to the hole. “My universe is more romantic than that. In my universe she is the same figure from his work in the other room. The Bride Stripped Bare. Only in that work she is a seductress. Here she is sleeping off a good roll in the hay. Everything Duchamp ever did is a continuation of previous work. And everything he ever did is erotic.”

  It sounded like nonsense, but she couldn’t help but feel the sex of the thing, like a warm glow pushing through the cracks of the door and suffusing the room. The old wedding dress was clinging to her, and she realized she was sweating. She’d never felt aroused by an artwork before, but it was happening now. She tried to shut it down. “So he was just a pornographer?”

  “Well . . .”

  Suddenly she wanted Tomi’s mouth against hers. She didn’t know why, but she was trembling.

  Tomi pulled away from the hole to eye her with suspicion. Before he could speak, she pushed him up against the door and kissed him.

  He pulled back. “Wait. There’s someth
ing I want to tell you. I brought you here for a reason.”

  Lee bit him on the lip. She couldn’t have him talking right now. Pushing him up against the door, with her other hand she got his pants down.

  As they fucked against the old wooden door, she felt a splinter go into her back, but the pain of it was subsumed in the moment. There was nothing else. The guards, the paintings and sculptures, the adrenaline of the trespass, the aura, whatever the hell that was—all of it was subsumed. She’d never disappeared so completely.

  • • •

  Afterward, as they lay on the stiff-carpeted floor of the alcove, Tomi nuzzled into her neck, but she pulled away. The moment was gone. Her torn dress was bunched up around her ankles. She got to her feet and pulled it up, then looked around for her other shoe. It was lying against the far wall.

  “Lee—”

  “If you say another word about aura—”

  “I was just going to say that that was fun but we better get the fuck out of here. I did not plan on this. We have been here too long. I’ve lost track of where the guards are.” Tomi dressed quickly and stopped by the doorway. “I will go ahead to scout.”

  His sudden pragmatism caught her off guard, and she felt inexplicably hurt. She pulled her shoe on.

  As Lee left the alcove for the next room, she passed a rectangular white pedestal with a clear Lucite box on top. It was empty, except for a sheet of paper taped to the top. On the paper was a photograph of a familiar object and a note stating that it had been stolen on August 20 and offering a reward for information leading to its return. She grew a little dizzy as she tried to make sense of what she was looking at: it was the thing she’d taken from the Station Master’s room, the ball of twine sandwiched between two metal plates. The thing she now had in the van.

  Tomi poked his head back into the room and gestured to her. She felt numb, confused by the coincidence of it all, but she followed him through the halls. He seemed to know exactly where to go, when to stop and hide to avoid the guards. When they got to a door, he stopped her. “The alarm will go off as soon as we open it. But we don’t have a choice. Just follow me, okay?” He pushed on the door without waiting for her response.

  They ran like hell.

  • • •

  It was one in the morning when Tomi dropped her off at a corner that was near the salvage yard. He’d asked when he would see her again, but Lee just smiled as she shut the door. “I know where you live,” she told him. “I’ll drop by.” She had no intention of seeing him again and felt a sense of relief as she watched his car slowly drive away. Lee went straight to the van, grabbed the Station Master’s bag, then headed through Fishtown to the river. At the river she sat on a rock and watched lights flicker off the water. What did it mean to stumble upon a wanted sign for the very stolen art piece that she now had in her possession? Was the universe just trying to fuck with her? The universe, she thought, could fuck itself.

  Lee took the object out of the bag. Turning it over and over, she liked the feel of it in her hand, the sharp edges against her skin, the obvious age of it. Maybe this was aura. Because the object itself was nothing more than a whimsical curio she might have picked up from a table and held with only momentary intrigue. And she’d had little interest in it before. But now this thing contained a kind of energy that seemed to vibrate in her hands.

  Why had she taken it in the first place? It didn’t matter now; she didn’t want the thing. This wasn’t a sweater from a department store; it could be worth millions, for all she knew. It would mean serious prison time if she was caught with it. Adult prison, she reminded herself. She’d just chuck the thing into the river. Lee weighed it in her hand and swung her arm back. The water looked cold and depthless.

  Her arm slumped down by her side. She couldn’t do it. The thing, whatever it was, had sat in a museum. Who was she to destroy it?

  She dug around in a trash can until she found two bags, one paper and one plastic. She sealed the object in the plastic one, then wrapped that in the paper one. She went back to the rocks along the river until she found a crevice big enough to stuff it into.

  It was a long walk back to the salvage yard. By the time she got there, the yard was just opening up, and she wanted only to crawl inside the shitty old van and sleep. But when she got into the yard, she found that the van was gone. Lee looked around, as though it had only been misplaced; but then she saw it, compacted into a cuboid of steel and crushed plastic the size of two mattresses. All her belongings in the world—her sleeping bag, her clothes—compacted inside it.

  SIX

  DERRICK didn’t look surprised to see her at their door, but he didn’t look happy, either. He didn’t look much of anything, not even awake, as he stepped aside for her to come in. Then he slouched back off to bed without a word, leaving her alone in the living room. She heard his door shut and then lock. Lee sat on the sofa, thinking about the destroyed van with all her stuff, about the stolen museum piece, and about the fact that she was about to put herself at the mercy of a guy she hardly knew.

  A clock above the TV read just half past seven, and it was another hour before the girl housemate shuffled past to make herself coffee. She smiled blearily at Lee and disappeared into the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later she appeared with a mug for herself and one for Lee.

  “I’m Allison,” she said.

  “We met last night.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’m barely awake. What’s your name again?”

  “Lee.”

  “That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  Allison shrugged, took a sip, and grimaced. “Jesus, I make terrible coffee. Can you make good coffee?”

  “I don’t drink much coffee,” Lee said. “So I guess I don’t know the difference. It tastes fine to me.”

  Allison smiled. “I like you. Will? My boyfriend? He wouldn’t drink this. He’d pour it out and then spend half an hour hand grinding the beans, boiling water to a precise temperature, blooming the grounds, pouring a bit at a time with that precious little swirling motion . . . I swear I’m usually asleep by the time he’s finished. I mean, I get it, he wants to be a chef, and that’s his thing, but sometimes I just want to have a fucking sandwich, you know?”

  Lee was trying to follow, with mixed results, but it didn’t seem to matter. Allison just seemed to like to talk.

  “Is that vintage?” Allison asked.

  Lee looked down at the wedding dress, now soiled and torn. She wanted to cover it up.

  “You’re rocking it,” Allison said. “I couldn’t get away with that, but I get what you’re doing. It’s, like, Riot Grrrl redux. So how do you know Tomi?”

  “We just kind of met.”

  “You guys just friends? Because Tomi doesn’t bring a lot of ladies home.”

  “Just friends.”

  “Well, don’t hurt him, is all I’ll say. Or I’ll have to murder you.”

  Lee was deciding how to respond when she saw Allison looking over her shoulder.

  “Speak of the devil,” Allison said. “You could have at least given her a blanket.”

  Lee turned to see Tomi, his confused expression turning to delight. “When did you get here?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I . . .”

  “Is everything all right? You need a place to stay or something?”

  Lee was glad she didn’t have to ask. She didn’t even have to respond. She watched Tomi look at Allison, and Allison’s shrug seemed to settle it.

  “As long as you need, honey,” she said. “And if you ever need anyone to talk to, I’m a freaking vault.”

  “Is there more?” Tomi asked, nodding at Allison’s coffee. He went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

  “Tomi is the only one who can stomach my coffee,” she said. “But he’s Czech. He makes it worse than I do.”r />
  • • •

  Lee stayed on the couch again that night, beneath a blanket that Allison gave her that smelled of old milk. Over the next several days she tried to keep herself inconspicuous within the small apartment. She read novels she found around the house and watched cooking shows with Will on TV. She learned that Will and Allison had a silent channel of communication running between them, that they seemed to read each other’s minds in a way that was spooky. Lee hated the idea of someone else inside her mind, but their closeness tugged at her. Allison liked her, Lee could tell, but she also had a jealous streak. Lee learned to avoid getting too close to Will and not to borrow his clothes, which fit her better, and to accept Allison’s instead, which left Lee in overlarge gingham prairie dresses and lumpy sweaters. Lee stuck with Tomi’s thick gray hoodie, and after a while it was understood to be hers.

  She found herself spending most of her time with Tomi, too. He liked having her around as he worked at his laptop, pressing his face to the screen and typing clumsily while he’d spin stories to her of his childhood in a small southern Bohemian town, of his sister’s Doolittle-like rapport with animals, or of his crazy uncle Sasha, who seemed always at the end of these stories to be covered in shit. And sometimes after his work she’d meet him down at the Water Works and hang out in his studio while he’d work on his paintings.

  • • •

  They all had occupations that brought them in and out of the apartment at various times—Tomi had a day job at a data recovery firm, Allison was studying architecture at Philadelphia University, Will worked in the kitchen of a Whole Foods, and Derrick was supposedly a barista, though he spent much of his time in his room with his door closed—and Lee found herself alone in the apartment for long stretches. She liked to clean the place when they were out; it made her feel like she was contributing.

  Dinners were communal, and Will, the aspiring chef, cooked most of them. Lee couldn’t cook a thing, but she liked to help him prep and happily washed the dishes afterward. When she asked Allison if she could borrow a shirt, Allison told her she didn’t have to ask, to just go help herself, which made Lee unexpectedly happy. By the end of the week everyone but Derrick seemed to have warmed to her.