The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  She went to the fridge but it was as empty as before. “Did you find anything?”

  “No. I suppose I’m just amusing myself with it. Some of it is in English; some of it is in French. Do you speak French?”

  “I took a little in high school. Not enough.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Plenty of others smarter than me have had a go at it. There’s a professor in California who wrote a 350,000-word treatise on it. He considers the work a kind of sculptural cosmogram.”

  “A what?”

  “A cosmogram. A representation of the origins and the fate of the universe.”

  Lee picked the object up, turned it over in her hands. Once again its meaning remained mute to her.

  “It’s just the theory of some academic,” he said. “But many cosmograms feature a circle and a square, just as this does.”

  Lee looked at the mess of papers on the table. “That seems a stretch.”

  “Okay, but look at this . . .” Tomi typed something into his browser and brought up an image of a flat grid. “This is a two-dimensional representation of space. Basically how we envisioned space until Einstein came along. An endless plane. But what happens if we add a bit of matter, say a massive star, into the mix? Before Einstein, we would have said nothing happened. But Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells us that the gravity generated by the mass of the star causes the space around it to warp. Like placing a bowling ball in the middle of a big rubber membrane. It distorts the very fabric of space surrounding it.” Tomi picked up the object again. “Now look closely at this thing. The two metal plates—you see?”

  Lee looked. The four screws holding the metal plates against the ball of twine pulled the corners in, if only slightly. “The plates are curved,” she said.

  “Because they represent space. The ball of twine is a star or a planet or something. Some massive gravitational object.”

  “And what about the noise? When you shake it.”

  Tomi stared at it blankly. “Maybe something to do with time? In Einstein’s conception, space and time are interwoven. Space-time. So really, it’s not only space that’s warped by the mass of an object; it’s time as well. Duchamp once said that art is a path toward regions not ruled by space and time. But you want to know the weirdest thing about all this?”

  “What?”

  “Einstein first presented his theory of general relativity on November 25, 1915. Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise was made a few months later, in April of 1916. But I found Duchamp’s notes on the piece, dated September 1915—almost three months before Einstein let his theory into the wild.”

  • • •

  They slalomed their bicycles through empty, wet city streets. Lee liked to feel the damp night air against her face. As she rode past, she could see two men through the windows of a bar stacking chairs. It was nearly 3 a.m. by the time they reached the museum grounds, and they kept to the shadows as they timed the patrolling security cruiser. After the cruiser passed a third time, they jogged to the rear of the building. When they reached four metal grates in the ground that ran along the wall of the museum, Tomi slowed and Lee crouched down with him.

  Tomi pulled a folded sheet of paper and a small tool from his backpack. “I got this blueprint from the Subnet. It won’t help us get through the drainage tunnels, but once we find our way into the museum subbasement, we’re golden.”

  He inserted the tool around the bolt and turned it easily. Lee helped him lift the grate. They stood looking down a large rectangular shaft. Lee descended first and Tomi followed, pulling the grate back behind him.

  Not far down they hit a horizontal tunnel so narrow they had to wriggle along using their elbows and hips. Pushing through a thin slew of muddy water, Lee kept the flashlight in her mouth and had to stop every few feet to clear cobwebs from their path. It was slow going, and Lee was covered in a layer of mud and dust that she felt in the folds of her skin, in her pores, and in her lungs by the time the pipe opened up into a small concrete room. She had to do some maneuvering to turn around and drop to the floor with a splash.

  The drainage tunnel they’d come through was about eight feet above them now, dripping a steady stream of dark, viscous water, several inches of which they were standing in.

  Tomi shined his light over her. “You look like a muskrat.”

  “And you look like a big Bohemian turd,” she said. It felt good to be creeping with Tomi again, the world right once again. But creeps were all about discovery, they had no goal beyond that, and Lee had to remind herself that they had an actual mission tonight.

  Behind him was a rebar ladder leading up. They’d both been on enough creeps to know that this was what they were looking for: an access into the building proper, built so that city workers could have a way into a building’s gas, water, and sewage systems. At the top was a rectangular iron cover heavy enough that it took both of them to push it up. Lee pulled herself up into an enormous room.

  Tomi came up beside her, shining his light along with hers over the vast space. “Talk about your motherfucking aura,” he said.

  An enormous marble statue loomed over them, a nude man straining against some unseen force. Milk-blue in the beam of the flashlights, he stood on a wooden pallet a few inches off the ground on a forklift. Other statues lined the space behind him: centuries-old stone deities, black granite Egyptian kings’ heads, a squat Indian Buddha. Some were covered in heavy canvas cloths.

  A shelving unit on a scaffold held dozens of busts in stone and plaster and bronze, each with a number hanging from its neck. Across the room were rows of steel floor-to-ceiling shelves, set into a track. Paintings were stacked five or six deep and three levels high on each unit. She grabbed hold of a hand crank and parted two of the shelves enough to walk between them, flanked by works that had been painted a hundred years ago, two hundred, five hundred.

  She pulled out a long map drawer, revealing dozens of small stone figurines nestled in tissue paper and laid out like eggs. Tomi unfolded the blueprint and spread it out on top. He pulled a tiny compass from his pocket, checked it, and shined his light up at the ceiling. His beam landed on the slats of a ventilation cover. “There,” he said.

  They wheeled a ladder over, and Lee climbed up to get to work on the screws. When the cover came off, she shined her light inside. “The entry’s pretty tight, but it opens up inside.”

  They’d gone ten feet when the vent spit them out above another room. Lee grabbed hold of an exposed pipe that ran along the ceiling, shimmied until she was over a table, and dropped. Tomi was right behind. They were in a large, square room with a single door at one end. She shined her light over walls painted in layers of thick green paint that dripped in hardened pools around a concrete floor covered in a patchwork of Oriental rugs, frayed, full of holes, piled three high in places. Lee walked slowly across the room, feeling the rugs sink beneath her, deep and boggy in spots. “What is this place?”

  She turned to a bookshelf. They were all science titles, books that looked to be anywhere from a hundred years old to recent. Titles on physics, chemistry, quantum mechanics. Neural mapping. They didn’t look like layman’s books at all. Lee pulled one down at random. Helium Cryogenics. She opened it, flipping through pages of equations as meaningful as crop circles.

  “Maybe it’s just some kind of library for the museum,” Tomi said.

  Lee moved to a bank of laboratory equipment, shining her light over glass jars and beakers and flasks of different colored liquids. She picked up a large glass ampoule milky with age, and shined her light into it. Inside was nothing but air. A few bulky and complicated-looking machines connected to an old computer stood idle in the corner. Behind it a huge chunk was gouged from the wall, and the paint around it was charred, as though there had been an explosion at one time. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  Tomi pulled out the blueprint and shined his light over it
. “This place isn’t even on here. It’s some sort of hidden room. But we should be right below where we need to be.”

  Something flashed in the corner of Lee’s vision, and she found herself staring up at a large glass panel framed in steel and bisected at the middle. Etched into the glass were forms that cast oblong shadows across the wall. The whole panel had been hung on a hinge so that it could be swung back and forth.

  “I recognize this. I saw it upstairs, in the Duchamp room.”

  “It’s The Bride Stripped Bare,” he said. “It must be a replica.”

  “It has the same cracks. I thought the cracks happened by accident—why reproduce them?”

  “I don’t know. But to Duchamp, chance was integral to the work. Cultivated chance. Domesticated chance, he called it. When The Bride Stripped Bare shattered in transit back from its first exhibition, Duchamp spent a year piecing it back together, shard by shard, gluing each piece back in place, like a jigsaw puzzle. When he was done, he declared it finally finished. The cracks became part of the work.”

  “Something’s different about this one.”

  Tomi looked up at it, turning it back and forth on its hinge. “Could be.”

  Lee took a photo, the flash illuminating the room in stark relief. As Tomi returned a book to the shelf and began sorting through a pile of detritus on the table, Lee looked over a second bookshelf. Five Treatises of the Philosophers Stone. Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus. The Hermetic Arcanum. Corpus Hermeticum. She’d seen some of these titles before, in the Station Master’s room. “This place is connected,” she said. The room seemed suddenly very small.

  Tomi was sifting through papers on the desk. “Connected to what?”

  Books on alchemy and cryogenics. “Cryogenics—that’s freezing people, right?”

  “The theory goes that the body can be revived sometime in the future. When we have cures for things we don’t have now.”

  “Is anyone doing that?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think it’s mostly hypothetical.”

  She thought about what she’d read about alchemy. “A way of becoming immortal?”

  Tomi didn’t answer. He was flipping through a sheaf of papers. His face looked stricken.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” he said, replacing the papers on the desk.

  She stood beside him. “What?”

  “Don’t freak out,” he said.

  There were six or seven stapled pages. On the first was a photograph of her, caught midstep emerging from a subway entrance. She had longer hair than now, a surprised expression on her face. Lee turned to the next page, a printout containing her name, her date and place of birth, her mother’s address, her high school. Her phone number. Her father’s address was there, an apartment in Albuquerque, New Mexico—she didn’t even know where her father lived. Her height, eye and hair colors. The next page was her arrest record, followed by a copy of her arrest warrant, issued by the State of Pennsylvania, a week after her escape. Her file from the JDC, stating that she was considered “psychologically unstable and potentially dangerous.” And then, on the final page, another photo, black-and-white: Lee, in the old wedding dress, looking off past some hidden camera. The pages had several staples, as though they’d been added to, and date stamps along the bottom. Lee turned back to the first page. It was dated September 3, over a year ago. Before the Crystal Castle. Before the JDC. Her birthday. The day that big, childlike man with the antique camera had accosted her in the street.

  She felt a wave of anger and humiliation run through her. “Who are these people,” she said blankly. Her eyes fell on the door across the room, and she went to it. Tomi reached for her, but she shook him off. “How are they down here, beneath the museum?” Lee remembered what the man had said to the Station Master when he’d delivered the object to him: that the Priest was just an old man, trapped in a room. Was it here? She tried the knob. It turned. She pushed the door open and shined her light down a long hallway with a door halfway down and another at the far end.

  Tomi grabbed her arm. “I don’t feel good about this. Let’s just leave the thing here and go back out the way we came.”

  Lee ignored him. Halfway down the hall was an old wood-slatted double door, surrounded by a brick threshold. Exactly like the one upstairs, the one that housed Duchamp’s last work. And like the one upstairs it had two small holes at eye level. Lee pressed her eye to one, her flashlight into the other.

  She got only a glimpse inside before she heard voices at the far end of the hall, behind another door. In that brief flash she saw something she didn’t know how to describe. A large metal contraption, enshrouded in shadow, seemed to be hovering in midair. She clicked off her flashlight. Tomi was hissing at her to come back.

  As the door at the end of the hall opened and a large dark figure stepped out, Lee managed to just make it back into the room and shut the door. Whatever had gripped her to confront these people was gone now. Voices came from the hall, growing louder.

  “Look.” Tomi pointed.

  A ladder she hadn’t noticed before. Built into the wall and leading to a small square door near the ceiling. She was up it quickly, unlatching the door and crawling through. She turned to help Tomi up. They shut the door just as the light in the room below came on.

  They were in a tiny room, a dim, flickering artificial glow emanating from the old gas lamp, held aloft in the hand of a nude female mannequin, casting a bluish luminescence over the waterfall behind her, the crinkled tinsel and the bushy pastel trees of the backdrop.

  “Holy shit,” Tomi whispered. “This is Étant donnés. We’re inside it.”

  She could hear below the low voices of two men. Lee couldn’t make out words, but she knew it wouldn’t be long before they were found. There wasn’t room enough to stand, and she had to stoop as she picked gingerly around the body of the mannequin, which, Lee could see now, had no face, no head at all, only a wig of coarse blond hair wrapped around the empty space where her face should be. Blocking the wood double doors was a brick wall with a hole in the middle, too small to crawl through. But when Lee grabbed hold of it, she found that it swung outward. The door itself was more difficult, but Tomi ran his hands around it until he found a hidden catch. The doors swung open.

  She was about to step out when Tomi grabbed her shoulder. “The guards could be anywhere. We’re going to have to just make a run for it. I’ll go ahead and make sure it’s clear. Remember what we came for: just take the thing out and leave it in the room somewhere.”

  Tomi pushed the doors outward. He crept into the room and then into the next, leaving her behind. Lee approached the empty Lucite box on the pedestal. She took With Hidden Noise from her bag. The thing inside rattled. They were here, beneath the museum, and they’d been after her before she’d even been in possession of the thing. She thought back to the uniformed man in the café, how he’d told her she looked like someone and then given her and Edie tickets to the Silo party. It had gone back that far at least. Giving the thing back wasn’t going to end anything. They wanted her for something else. She remembered standing in the old wedding dress as the tall man looked her over. There must have been a camera somewhere. Peering into every secret corner of her life. Fuck them, she thought, stuffing the object back in her bag. I’m not giving them shit.

  ELEVEN

  EVERY book was on the floor, spines bent, bindings torn out. Shelves were upended. The little refrigerator was on its side, some fluid pooling out from its cracked door. The dresser drawers were all overturned, clothes strewn everywhere, the bed and sofa gutted, tufts of stuffing littering the small room. Tomi picked up an old glass-fronted box from the counter. It was smashed and its contents—a nest of tiny mechanical circus figures—were strewn across the floor.

  Tomi tried to collect the little figures and bend them back into shape. “My sister made this for me
.” Then he dropped it all back onto the counter with a crash. “Fuck it.”

  They picked through the carnage in silence for a while, until Lee gave up and sat on what was left of his couch. “I’m sorry, Tomi. This is all my fault.”

  Tomi tried to smile as he shook his head, but Lee could see the heartbreak in it. “Well, you returned the thing. Maybe now they’ll leave us alone.”

  Lee looked down at the floor.

  “You left it there, right?”

  Lee shook her head.

  Tomi let the books he was holding drop. “Isn’t that the whole reason we went down there?”

  She got up and looked out the window, onto the street below. One of them was probably down there now, staring up at her from the shadows somewhere. “Why do they know so much about me? Why do they know where I was born?”

  Tomi picked a book up from the puddle and wiped it against his jeans. “I don’t know.” He propped the fridge back up. “Are you sure that gun is loaded?”

  Lee took it from her bag, popped open the cylinder, and showed him.

  “You know how to use it?”

  “No.” She picked his laptop up from the floor and placed it carefully on the desk. “They didn’t take your laptop.”

  “It’s not what they were after.” Tomi knelt under his desk and untangled a little bronze statuette from a rat king of loose cables. “Goddammit,” he said.

  “We have to go,” Lee said, wanting to cry at what she’d brought down on them but holding it together. “They might be watching us.” He stopped, as though considering this for the first time, and dropped the statuette to the floor.

  • • •

  The house was one of the last on Lee’s list. Its residents, George and Patricia Caldwell, a childless couple in their midfifties, judging by the photographs along the stairs, were booked for a solid three weeks at a resort along the Mayan Riviera. They decorated their home like a beachfront time-share, full of macramé-framed photos of marinas and seaside villas, goofy little figurines made from seashells, nautical ephemera all over the place, and a glass coffee table over a beach tableau of sand and shells.