The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  The Caldwells must have left in a hurry, because the fridge was full of milk and cheese and yogurt and berries, eggs and tortillas and bacon. Tomi called in to work and rasped into the phone that he’d come down with the flu and would be out for a few days at least.

  “Why couldn’t you just leave it there, like we talked about?” It was the first time she’d seen him look angry with her. They were sitting at the kitchen table, eating leftover chicken from the fridge. “It could have ended this.”

  She put the chicken down, her appetite gone. “Did you see that photo of me? Do you know when that was taken? Over a year ago. These people have been following me for over a year, and it has nothing to do with the Duchamp thing, whatever it is.”

  “Maybe not, but they want it back,” he said. “Let’s just give it to them and maybe their incentive goes away. We’ll go somewhere they can’t find us.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Let me think about it. I’ll come up with something.”

  They took separate rooms. That night as Lee tried to sleep, she kept seeing the girl upstairs at the Crystal Castle, staring at her. Lee knew that there was nothing behind those eyes but blissed-out emptiness, but she couldn’t help seeing something else. Don’t leave me, they kept pleading.

  Lee couldn’t sleep without seeing the girl, so she paced silently through the dark house. Finally she opened the back door and cut between the houses to the street, where she walked beneath a clear night sky filled with stars. How had she become so trapped? She kept walking.

  • • •

  The next morning Lee came downstairs to find Tomi in an apron, wielding a spatula over the stove. There were two plates, two mugs, two place settings laid out.

  “I saw you go out last night,” he said. “I won’t ask where.”

  “Good.”

  He pushed a mound of scrambled eggs onto each plate. “I didn’t know if you were coming back.”

  “What made you think I was?”

  “Nothing but hope,” he said. “There is a saying where I’m from: Hope is fuel for life; despair only gums up the engine.”

  She scanned his face, trying to tell if he was putting her on.

  “It sounds much better in Czech.”

  “Say it.”

  “In Czech?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked into her eyes long enough to make her feel uncomfortable. “Celý můj život moje srdce toužilo po nēcěm, co jsem nedokázal pojmenovat. Ted’ to má jméno, a to jméno jsi ty. Slibuji, že Ti budu vždy nablizku.”

  Lee sat, taking a fork and staring down at the eggs. “You’re right, it’s very pretty.”

  “Told you.”

  • • •

  Tomi took to the life quickly; he seemed to be enjoying going underground with her. They were trapped inside, but it never felt that way. He took it upon himself to entertain them, and it wasn’t long before he had them both putting on clothes ransacked from the closets, Tomi in Mr. Caldwell’s golf pants, his short-sleeved polyester shirts, his double-breasted naval jacket and sometimes his suits, sleeves and cuffs rolled up. Patricia Caldwell was big as well, and Lee found herself engulfed in her flower-print evening dresses, her flowing pantsuits. Tomi would make up occasions of various degrees of formality—birthday parties and pool parties and cocktail parties and dinners—for the Caldwells to attend, and he and Lee would dress for that occasion and mimic the Caldwells in their natural habitat, Tomi getting fuzzy on ill-measured concoctions from the liquor cabinet, Lee pretending to.

  Lee liked it most when she would wake and come downstairs to find that Tomi had made a breakfast of coffee and eggs and defrosted bagels and he’d let her sit and eat in silence, lost not so much in thought but in a feeling that this moment might somehow be sustainable.

  But silence with Tomi was rare. He liked to talk about their future, the places they would travel to, the places they would live when the curtain went down on all of this. Sometimes they lived on the coast of Ireland, in a cottage on a cliff; sometimes they managed a little music store together in Oslo; sometimes they ran a tourist shop out of some beach village in Thailand. More than once they lived in a little farmhouse by a lake in the Czech Republic. Lee avoided playing along; his fantasies were so naked they embarrassed her. Still, the idea that they might carve out some sort of life worth living gave her something close to hope. But then Lee thought about the thing growing inside her, about how much it would need, and about how impossible it made the future, any future, even one fashioned on wishes and twine.

  When she was alone, she’d sit in the den at the Caldwells’ ancient computer and pore over everything she could find online on Duchamp, trying to find something, anything, she could use. There must be some way to get to them, but Lee had no idea what she was looking for. She’d put the old photo of the woman up next to the screen and look for women connected to Duchamp, or Google “Duchamp A.T.” and sift through images until her eyes hurt.

  Tomi kept at it, too, focusing on Duchamp’s works and on the notes to his works, which Tomi found archived online. “I’m not sure,” he told her one night, “but I may have found something.” He had that excited look he’d get when he was about to show her something. “I think we’ve been looking at the wrong work. It’s not With Hidden Noise we should be focusing on at all.”

  Lee pushed a chair up next to his and stared at the now-familiar image he had up on the screen, the vertical steel frame bisected horizontally across the center, the webs of shattered glass over sepia forms.

  “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, aka The Large Glass. Duchamp conceived it in 1913, began constructing it in 1915, and more or less completed it in 1923. But he never finished it as planned. He says he simply grew bored, but I think there’s more to it than that. If there is anything we know about the man, it’s to never take anything he says at face value.”

  “Did you find something new?”

  “I’ve read Duchamp’s notes on the work. They are typically inscrutable, but they helped me figure something out.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Okay. The entire work is a system. A machine. Caught in a moment in time near the end of its run. Duchamp called it a ‘delay in glass.’ We’re supposed to imagine all its elements moving.”

  Lee looked closer at it, tried to envision the whole thing in motion, but it just existed there on the screen, inert. “I don’t see it.”

  “That’s okay, just follow along for now. The upper half is the Bride’s domain.” Tomi pointed to a figure hovering in the top left of the frame. She looked like some sort of mechanical insect. “The Bride is a motor; she runs on what Duchamp called love gasoline. It is the blood of her desire, and it powers the whole machine.”

  “The man at the Silo, when he had me put on that old wedding dress. He called me ‘Bride.’”

  “I told you, these people see connections everywhere.”

  “The woman in the photo—she’s the connection. But I can’t find out anything about her. She looks so much like me I thought at first it was Photoshopped, but it’s not.”

  “Just think of how many people have been born throughout all of history. We must all have doppelgängers, if you go back far enough. We just rarely get the opportunity to see them.”

  Lee supposed that must be true. “So you’re saying it could just be a coincidence.”

  “Yes. What else?”

  She remembered something that the Station Master had said to her, about there being meaning, even destiny in coincidence. For them, there were no coincidences. Everything had meaning. It seemed dangerous to her in a way she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Her eyes went to the top of the glass, where a cloudlike formation with three square cutouts drifted out from the Bride’s head. She recognized it from one of the S.A. fliers. “What’s that?”

  “That’s
the Bride’s Cinematic Blossoming. Essentially, it is her libido. Imagine erotic images projected in the three empty squares.”

  “Like what, porn?”

  Tomi laughed. “Sure.”

  “Okay, so the Bride is floating there, lost in her sexy thoughts. Then what?”

  “Her pornographic fantasies are projected onto these three screens for the benefit of the Bachelors. The whole region down here,” he said, touching the bottom half of the work, “this is their domain.” Tomi pointed to a ring of forms at the bottom left of the frame. “These are the nine Bachelors. The Delivery Boy, the Gendarme, the Cavalry Soldier, the Policeman, the Undertaker, the Busboy, the Flunky, the Station Master, and the Priest. They exist purely to follow the Bride and live only in hopes of seeing her undressed. They are her servants.”

  Lee wondered which one was the tall man. She refocused on the whole work, squeezing her eyes shut, then opening them, trying to see the thing as something recognizable. It was all so abstract. “It doesn’t look like anything to me.”

  “That’s because the world of The Bride Stripped Bare is all invisible forces in flux. The top half represents the forces of Desire. The bottom half is the physics of Chance and Fate. And remember, the whole thing is a machine in constant motion. We are seeing it in a single frozen moment.”

  Lee thought about what she’d read on alchemy. That it saw the universe as made up of opposing forces. The marriage of opposites. The Bride and the Bachelors. Above and below. Lee looked at the work closely again, trying to see in it whatever it was those men saw. Then it occurred to her: “Maybe it’s some kind of map.”

  Tomi perked up. He seemed to see it, too. Then his face scrunched up in confusion. “Er . . . how do you mean?”

  “Everything you’re telling me is an abstraction,” she said. “But these men must be looking for something concrete. Is there some way that this could be pointing the way to whatever that is? Or maybe it’s not a map itself, but . . . It’s all glass, right? Maybe you put a map behind it and it shows the location of a hidden treasure or something.”

  “I like the way you’re thinking; it seems like the kind of trick Duchamp might play.”

  Lee stared at each element, trying to piece them together, but the work wasn’t giving her anything more. “Okay, take me through the rest of it.”

  “Okay. So while the Bachelors are getting all aroused, the Bride starts stripping.”

  “Getting undressed?”

  “A striptease, yes. Which gets them all riled up to consummate with her. Something they’ll never do, because she’s just a tease, and she knows the power she wields.”

  “So basically she strips down and gives each of these guys a look at her beaver, knowing full well none of them are getting any. It all sounds very erotic.” Lee recalled herself standing naked in front of the tall man. She remembered what he’d told her after he’d put her in that dress: the party is full of bachelors. There had been a camera in that room. Lee thought of the men she’d seen at that party, how they had all been staring at her. She felt a wave of disgust.

  “The Bride simply wants to be seen. She saturates the Bachelors with her pheromones, and they get all hopped up on desire.”

  Lee wanted to be seen, but not like that. She focused away from the image, and onto a point on the wall just above the screen. Lee reimagined the work onto this blank space, and tried to see it in motion again. This time the Bride began to move, slowly at first, as a piston rocking awake, then faster, spewing a rain of love gasoline down on the Bachelors, who began to lurch and spin below her like a ramshackle carousel.

  “The Bachelors respond by emitting an illuminating gas, which flows through these tubes, where it becomes a fluid. Meanwhile, all this stuff down here”—Tomi pointed to a corral of rickety-looking contraptions—“represents the forces of Chance and Fate, and they operate the Scissors, up here, which snips the emerging fluid into distinct spurts, and each spurt travels upward, through the Eyewitnesses, here”—Tomi indicated a series of rings—“past the threshold and into the Bride’s domain. Their aim is for the windows of the Bride’s Cinematic Blossoming, because if they can hit one, they can consummate their desires. But they always miss and end up spattered into the ether.”

  “The money shot,” said Lee.

  “And so it goes, repeated again and again.”

  “I guess I can see it now,” Lee said, and she thought she could.

  “So this is where it gets interesting. When we were in that room beneath the museum, remember the reproduction you found? You said you thought there was something different about it.”

  “I remember.”

  Tomi popped his zip drive in the Caldwells’ computer and brought an image up on the screen. “Here’s the photo you took. Notice anything?”

  It took her only a moment to see: the reproduction contained several new forms not in the original. On the bottom right of the Bachelors’ domain, below the Eyewitnesses, was a long, winding spiral thing; and above the Eyewitnesses was something that looked like it could have been a diagram from geometry class. Just above that, in the Bride’s domain, was a mechanical-looking figure standing on four spindly legs that sent a spiraled appendage up toward the Bride.

  “The story is that Duchamp got bored with it and left it ‘definitively unfinished.’ He even claimed to have abandoned art for good after that. We know now that isn’t true: he was working on Étant donnés for over twenty years, in secret. But what if in fact Duchamp didn’t stop work on The Large Glass because he grew bored but, instead, purposefully left out some key elements?”

  “You’re saying this was how he saw the final work.”

  “Exactly. This thing here”—he pointed to the geometry problem—“Duchamp called the Boxing Match, and it functions as a kind of electrical coil. Without it the machine can’t even start. And this”—pointing to the spindly-legged figure—“Duchamp called the Juggler of Gravity. His job is to catch and deflect the spurts of the Bachelors.”

  “So the reproduction beneath the museum shows how the whole system, when complete, was supposed to look.” Lee got up and paced the room. When she closed her eyes, she could see it, the whole system in motion all around her. “You said that without the Boxing Match, the machine can’t even start . . . ”

  “That’s what I understand from his notes. Like I said, they were pretty—”

  “I was wrong. The Bride Stripped Bare isn’t a map. It’s a blueprint.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But Lee could see that Tomi was getting it. “He left out the Boxing Match, and the Juggler and the rest,” she said, “because without them the system can’t work. It’s as though I gave you the schematics of a car but left out the ignition coil. You could build the car, but it wouldn’t run. It would just sit there. But why leave these elements out of the final piece? After working on it for so long—it seems like he was almost there.”

  “I don’t know. But it’s all starting to make sense.” Tomi got up and began to pace the room, the way he did when he was either agitated or excited. “Remember how I said that With Hidden Noise might have been a cosmogram that predicted Einstein’s general theory of relativity? There have been dozens of attempts to decipher The Large Glass. Most interpret it as a theater of frustrated desire. But Duchamp was more scientist than humanist.” He put one hand to his head, as if he couldn’t believe what he was thinking.

  “What? What is it?”

  “The Juggler of Gravity. Of course. It makes so much sense now.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Tomi stopped pacing. He removed his glasses and faced her. Lee had to suppress an unbidden urge kiss him. Where had that come from?

  “Gravity. General relativity is all about gravity.”

  “And?”

  “What if this work contained within it the answer to something world-changi
ng, something not even discovered to this day?”

  “Like what?”

  “Have you ever heard of the unified field theory?”

  Lee shook her head.

  “There’s a contradiction in physics that no one has yet been able to solve. Einstein’s theory of general relativity precisely explains the workings of the large-scale universe—from solar systems to planetary bodies to objects as small as a grain of sand. And quantum theory explains with equal precision the workings of the subatomic universe—photons and neutrons and quarks and all the rest. The problem is that these two theories are incompatible. They can’t be reconciled. What works to explain the macro-universe goes contrary to what works to explain the subatomic universe, and vice versa. Both can’t be correct, and yet somehow both are.” He paused, waiting for her excitement to catch up to his. “For both to be valid, there must be a theory that ties them together. A unified field theory. It’s only hypothetical, but it’s the Holy Grail of physics. There are those who say that solving it would be akin to reading the mind of God.”

  • • •

  He had put a blanket over her. The computer was shut down, and all his notes were stacked neatly beside it. She must have fallen asleep while he’d stayed up working. She looked through the notes briefly, though it didn’t appear that he’d made much more progress. He’d written “BLUEPRINT??” on the page and then an arrow to a circled “UFT.”

  Lee went into the bathroom and stood naked in front of the full-length mirror. She would be about twelve weeks now. She wasn’t showing, not as she thought she’d be. She remembered stories of girls who’d carried their babies to term without anyone knowing they were pregnant. Still, she felt bloated and heavy, as if someone had pumped her full of water, and her breasts were full and sore.

  She could smell food cooking as she came downstairs, but the kitchen door was locked. She knocked.

  “Go away!” Tomi shouted.

  Lee pressed her eye to the keyhole but couldn’t see much. “What are you doing in there?”