The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  • • •

  Lee bounced from residence to residence. Still keeping to Tomi’s list, she ventured out of the suburbs and learned how to access apartment buildings in the city, posing as a bike messenger to get into the building, then picking the lock of the apartment door. She spent her time indoors, watching TV and reading books but also online. She didn’t have access to the Subnet browser that Tomi kept on his USB drive, so her information was limited, but there was plenty to learn about Duchamp. As for what he might mean for the S.A., Lee could find nothing of any help. Nor could she find anything about the woman in the photo.

  Outside in the world she imagined signs of the Société Anonyme everywhere: a man in an old-fashioned suit reading on the bus, a vintage doctor’s satchel at his feet; a group of panhandling kids, one of them watching her intently, then breaking away and seeming to follow her as she passed; even an old cracked urinal sitting on the curb in front of a ramshackle bar seemed like some sort of sign left for her. One night downtown a group of people emerged from a hotel, all wearing animal costumes—coyotes and pumas and raccoons. One of them, a fat brown squirrel, ran up to her and hugged her tightly, clicking playfully behind his mask. Lee looked into its big cartoon eyes and vomited on the sidewalk.

  Lee tried to ignore the baby metastasizing in her belly, but it reminded her of its presence every time she felt so stomach-sick she’d have to hang over the toilet, metallic-tasting saliva strands dripping from her mouth. Her breasts were bigger now, too, stretching at her bra in a way that made it hard to breathe sometimes.

  • • •

  One evening as she was straightening up Mr. Velasquez’s shop before leaving for the day, he came in and looked at her funny. “You all right?”

  Lee followed his eyes to her stomach, which she was holding with one hand. It was something she’d been doing lately, unconsciously putting a hand beneath the slight swell of her belly, and she took it away and smiled at him weakly. “Something I ate,” she said.

  He seemed to regard her for a moment. “Tomorrow,” he said, “when you come back, bring in what you have.”

  Lee took a moment to decide if he was saying what she thought he was saying.

  “I know you have been going out on your own. Show me what you have taken. I will tell you what you have.”

  The next day she brought in her backpack, which had the weight of a bowling ball and which she carried by hugging it to her chest. She dropped it onto the counter with a dull thud. Mr. Velasquez opened it and dumped the contents in front of them, a great pile of gold chains and rings and watches, necklaces, earrings, prescription drug bottles, and a few loose stones. He picked through it quickly, his fingers pecking in and out of the pile like two chickens over a bag of seeds, until there were two heaps, one much smaller than the other. It only took Lee a moment to know which was which, but she took comfort knowing that most of the things in the larger, worthless pile came from the early days of his tutelage.

  He dumped this pile back into her bag and told her to dispose of it. The rest he went back over more carefully, examining each piece and then punching a number into his old adding machine. When he’d gotten through all of it, he hit Return on his machine, peered at a number on the tape, then reached into a drawer and counted out some money for her onto the counter. Six hundred and eighty dollars. Lee felt the same giddy rush of pleasure she’d felt when Edie had invited her over to her house the first time. She took eighty and gave Mr. Velasquez the rest back. “Will you hold onto it for me?” she asked.

  He only shrugged and placed the money in an old envelope, which he put back in the drawer.

  Again Lee began to imagine the things she would do once she’d made enough to leave. She no longer saw herself settling in one place. She wanted to see the coast of Northern California, where she’d once seen a photo of a forest of redwoods that ran right down to the ocean. She’d go camping in Yellowstone, visit the Carlsbad Caverns, see Hollywood, the Golden Gate Bridge. She could travel to Mexico, South America. Even Asia or Africa. But she’d start with Europe. Tomi always told her that Cěský Krumlov, his hometown, was the most beautiful city in the world and that to wander its streets at night was to walk through a fairy tale. She felt a pang of sadness when she thought of this place. She missed Tomi so much. She wondered what he felt when he thought about her. Was he worried? He had every right to be. Angry? He had a right to be that, too. While she had no right to feel anything but guilt and loss.

  • • •

  As more days passed, the Crystal Castle began to seem like more and more of a dream. She stopped seeing signs of their presence everywhere she went. Once she saw a man on a vintage bicycle ride past and Lee felt herself freeze up inside, all that fear rushing back, but he never spared Lee a glance.

  It was past 4 a.m. when Lee climbed through a rear second-floor window of her current residence, the apartment of Wally Flemish, insurance executive, his wife, Joy, and their two young children. She could tell immediately upon stepping inside that something was wrong. She waited in the room, completely still. When she could be sure of the silence, she crept down the hall, checking room by room. Everything seemed in place. Then she saw a light on downstairs. She was certain she hadn’t left any lights on.

  Lee went straight for the closet, where, while excavating the life of the Flemishes, she’d found a nickel-plated revolver with a black rubber grip. Sometimes she’d take it out and hold it in her hand, marveling at the feel of it. She’d never felt anything so perfectly weighted in her life, so exquisitely molded to the hand. The gun was in a box pushed to the back of the top shelf of the closet, and Lee had to pull a chair up to reach it. It was loaded.

  The gun felt clumsy, now that she might have to use it. Still, it seemed simple enough—just point the thing and pull the trigger. She headed back into the hallway and took the stairs quietly, avoiding where she knew the creaks to be. The light was coming from the living room.

  When she poked her head around the wall, the gun at her side, she nearly pulled the trigger in her surprise. No one was in the room. But someone had leaned the lamp from the end table onto its side, sending a spotlight along the floor. In the center of that spotlight something had been laid out on the carpet. She got closer. Lee couldn’t decipher what it was meant to be, only its simple, implicit threat: we found you.

  · BOOK V ·

  The Juggler of Gravity

  TEN

  TOMI’S new place was tiny, a studio in Fishtown with an actual Murphy bed and a kitchen consisting of a little gas stove and a little fridge and a little counter and a little sink by the window. A lot had happened in the five weeks since she’d last seen him. Allison had gone home to take care of her mother, who had cancer, and Will had gone with her. And then Tomi had had a falling-out with Derrick.

  When she’d called from a pay phone in the middle of the night, he’d been silent for a while. “I’m so mad at you” was the first thing he’d said. Tomi then told her that he’d let himself into the Lunskes’ home while they were in their living room, watching TV. They’d just stared at him in mute horror as he backed away. “I didn’t know what happened to you. I thought you’d been arrested. I tried other houses on the list, but I couldn’t find you. You just disappeared.”

  Lee hadn’t considered what might happen when he came back to the Lunskes’. “I’m sorry,” she said. She hadn’t wanted to call at all. She felt horrible bringing him back into this. But they seemed to find her wherever she went, and Tomi was the only one who knew enough to help her.

  When he first saw her at the door, he hugged her so hard she couldn’t breathe. She thought he might cry, and then for a moment she thought she might, too. All she knew was that she felt safe now, with him. Tomi’s relief at having her back was all around her. It felt like sitting in a warm tide pool. She told him nothing of Mr. Velasquez, only that she’d been hopping from residence to residence, until she realized they�
�d found her again. “I left right away,” she said. “I didn’t have anyone else to call.”

  “Did you leave anything behind, anything they could trace back to you?” he asked.

  Lee was on his sofa, pulling bits of stuffing from the cushion and rolling them between her fingers. She had a little pile of balls by her feet. It helped her keep her hand from her belly. “I didn’t leave anything behind.” She got up to pace the small room. He owned more books than he had room for, and they were piled everywhere.

  “Did you take anything?”

  “Just this.”

  “Jesus, put that back. Is that thing loaded?”

  “Of course it’s loaded.” Lee tossed the gun onto Tomi’s couch.

  She opened his fridge and helped herself to a carton of milk. It felt good to be back with him again. She dropped back to the couch and drank thirstily.

  “Three pieces of string on the floor?” he said. “That’s it? How do you know it’s from them?”

  “Because I recognized it.” Lee opened his laptop and did an image search. She brought up a page and turned the laptop around. The image showed three vertical strings on a blue backdrop, roughly parallel, each in its own white frame.

  “I know that work,” he said. “That’s Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages.”

  “What’s it supposed to be?”

  “Duchamp dropped three meter-long pieces of string from the same height onto a canvas, then glued them down. He used these to create a new length of measurement based on chance.”

  “But what’s the message? Their message.”

  Tomi shook his head.

  “The object that I took from the Station Master had a ball of string in it,” she said.

  “That’s true.”

  “Do you think that’s significant?”

  “I think everything is significant to these people.”

  “I’ll just give it to them. I should have done it a long time ago. Do you think that will end this?”

  Tomi looked up from the computer. “You still have it?”

  “No.” Lee finished the milk. “I mean I have it, it’s safe, but—”

  “Where is it?”

  She put the carton to her mouth again, realized it was empty, and threw the carton aside. “Maybe it’s time for me to go get it.”

  • • •

  Lee returned to the riverfront to retrieve the thing herself. She half expected the object to be gone, or waterlogged, but after searching for less than five minutes, she found it, right where she’d left it, dry and intact.

  It was the middle of the night, and Lee hadn’t slept going on twenty-six hours now. As she sat on the near-empty train back to Fishtown, alternately nodding and starting awake to the car’s gentle rocking, she half watched a young man sitting across from her. He stared down the whole time, looking forlorn. Lee tried to imagine the boy’s sadness—a breakup maybe, an unrequited love—wishing that these were the kinds of problems she had. Then the boy looked up and met her eyes, and she found herself staring into two floating blue jellies.

  • • •

  Lee was so exhausted by the time she got back to Tomi’s that all she wanted was sleep, but Tomi was fired up. “Did you get it?”

  She pulled the old object from her bag. “Why is this thing so important to them? I guess it must be worth a lot of money.”

  He reached for it, but she held on to it, feeling the sharp corners against her fingertips. “Not compared to some of the other things they could have stolen,” he said. “That museum is full of Picassos, Van Goghs, Gauguins, you name it. There are little Chinese jade dragons in there that would buy you a house in the suburbs. Comparatively, the Duchamp piece is peanuts.”

  “So it must be something else. What do you know about it?”

  “It’s one of his readymades,” Tomi said. “Basically the idea was that anything could be a work of art if an artist named it as such. In the early twentieth century, art was still all about beauty, and the tastemakers were the ones who decided what was beautiful. Duchamp called it retinal art, art that was only meant to be taken in with the eye, and he despised it. Readymades were a big fuck-you to the arbiters of taste at the time. This isn’t a pure readymade, like the urinal or the bottle rack; it’s what he called an assisted readymade. Which just means he had a hand in making it.”

  She set the object down on the desk, and it just sat there on its four brass legs, an old ball of twine sandwiched between two metal plates. How could this thing be anything more than a curiosity? “Tell me what’s special about this. I mean now, not a hundred years ago.”

  “Duchamp wasn’t all that well recognized in his time. It wasn’t until near the end of his life that people saw him as a visionary.”

  “You’re still not telling me anything. Why do these people want it?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You seem to know a lot of stuff.”

  He looked up at her. “You still think I’m involved with them?”

  “You just happen to know a lot about the man the people after me seem to consider some kind of—what did you call him?—patron saint?”

  Tomi bristled. “I don’t just happen to know anything. Duchamp was the most important and influential artist of the twentieth century. I’m an artist, too, and like any artist I work in his shadow.” He seemed to consider something. “Shadows. These people keep to the shadows, but not any shadow—Duchamp’s shadow. They don’t want to be seen. They’re so deep underground there’s not even a mention of them on the Internet. Why?”

  “You told me something a while back,” she said, “about the artist of the future living underground. Was it Duchamp who said that?”

  “It was.”

  “Don’t you see?” she said. “That’s what these people think they are. Artists of the future. Working underground in Duchamp’s name. Only they’ve twisted everything he stood for into something else. But I think the real question is, they have a component that’s aboveground, the Silo parties—why?”

  He considered this. “They must need to be seen for some reason.”

  “And why? Why do we need to be seen?”

  Tomi shook his head. “An audience? Recognition?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But what about advertising?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe they need to bring people in.”

  “Why?”

  Lee thought about what Lois had said about recruiting. “I don’t know.” She turned her attention back to the thing on the desk. “So what’s this thing called?”

  “With Hidden Noise. Duchamp made it in 1916. Everything had a double meaning for him.” Tomi picked the piece up. “Before he screwed it all together, he gave it to a friend, with instructions to deposit something inside the ball of twine.”

  “When I held it, something rattled inside!” Lee took it from him and shook it next to her ear. She felt like she did when cracking a safe and hearing a tumbler click. “What’s in it?”

  “Nobody knows. The friend never said, and Duchamp claims not to have known.” Tomi took it back and shook it as well. “Maybe it’s Schrödinger’s cat.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just . . . for all we know it could be another of Duchamp’s jokes. Everything Duchamp did was both serious and one big gag at the expense of anyone who took him too seriously. Whatever it is, the S.A. thinks it’s important.”

  “Why don’t we open it and find out?”

  Tomi looked pained.

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Of course I’m curious. But we would be destroying it.” He stared at her. “I couldn’t live with myself. Could you?”

  Lee put it back on the desk. “I just want to know why these people are following me. I want it all to go away.”

  “You can’t destroy it
. Duchamp might be the most influential artist since da Vinci. It’s one of a kind. It would be like you somehow destroyed a color. Orange. No one will ever see the color orange again, because you destroyed it. Gone forever. You want that on your head?”

  “I don’t care. I’ll just give them the damn thing and maybe they’ll leave me alone.”

  Tomi picked it up. Holding it seemed to transport him, and he very gently placed it back. “It doesn’t belong to them. How about we put it back?”

  “What? Just waltz into the museum and put it back where it was stolen from?”

  “Why not? I’ll take care of it.”

  “No,” Lee said. “It’s my responsibility. I’ll do it.”

  Tomi sighed. “Fine. Get some sleep; we’ll return it tonight,” he said. “Together.”

  “How?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  • • •

  When Lee woke, Tomi was at his computer, the object on the table in front of him, a bunch of notes strewn around it. Lee peered over his shoulder.

  P . G . . ECIDES DÉBARRASSE .

  LE . D . SERT . F . URNIS . ENT

  AS HOW . V . R COR . ESPONDS

  . IR . . CAR . É LONGSEA –›

  F . NE , HEA . , . O . SQUE –›

  TE . U S . ARP BAR AIN –›

  He’d been trying to decipher Duchamp’s cryptogram, with letters filled in, attempts at sentences, others crossed out.