The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

Lee didn’t see why she had to prove a thing to these idiots. But something about their thinking that Tomi was incapable of having a girlfriend irked her.

  Show me yours first.

  [DreamClown]: Show me yours and I’ll show you mine?

  There was a watery bloop, and the chat boxes turned to video screens. In one was a man, in his forties maybe, balding on top but with long blond dreadlocks. She counted four cats in the room, one of which was attached to his lap like a furry gray fungus. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses were the eyes of someone who had taken a good deal of psychedelic drugs in his lifetime. DreamClown, in the other box, couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with black, heavy-framed glasses. A Deadmau5 poster with glowing green eyes loomed behind him, and above that was a Toronto Maple Leafs banner. He sucked from a Big Gulp.

  “Hello,” said Teutonik23. His thick German accent was unmodulated.

  “Now you,” DreamClown said.

  Lee sucked in her breath, clicked on the webcam icon, and stared directly into the lens. Her own image came up in a box on the screen. It had been a while since she’d looked in a mirror. All her baby fat was gone, and her cheeks were sunken. Her whole face, as pale as bone, had taken on a sculpted gauntness, all but her mouth, which seemed fuller with so much of the flesh around it taken away. Her eyes looked caved in and dark around the edges, though she had no makeup on, and her hair, grown out but patchy in spots, was so black against the white of her face that it looked dyed.

  Lee heard DreamClown clear his throat. “Okay, so you’re real. But no way you’re Hermes’s girlfriend.”

  “What were you expecting?” Lee said.

  “Something more . . .” Teutonik23 pushed his face toward the monitor and squinted. He shook his head and gave up.

  “Poodle-haired? Meaty? Like a booth worker at a Ren Faire?” DreamClown chimed in. In his striped T-shirt and with his mossy red hair, he looked like any anonymous boy from the back of her high school cafeteria. He would have sat there every day with a few friends, and maybe he would have shyly approached her one day to ask her to steal him a necklace he could give to another girl.

  “So what now?” Lee said.

  “Now?” Teutonik23 adjusted something on his screen, and Lee caught a brief glimpse of a terrarium in the background.

  Lee heard a door shut, then the sound of Annie’s footsteps coming down the stairs.

  “Now you show us your tits,” said DreamClown.

  Lee brought both hands up to the camera and gave each guy a middle finger. She closed the laptop just as Annie opened the door and popped her head in.

  “Hey,” she said, a little out of breath. “Who were you talking to?”

  Lee stared at a point past Annie’s head. “Who would I be talking to?” she snapped. Then, “I’m sorry. Sometimes I talk to myself.”

  “I guess you must be getting pretty stir-crazy in here, huh?”

  “I’ve hardly left this room in weeks. I feel like I’m made of wood.”

  Annie smiled, but there was pity in it, and Lee turned away.

  “I need to sleep,” Lee said.

  “But that’s all you do,” Annie said.

  All this talk about Tomi had left Lee agitated. The frustration of weeks being cooped up inside a box came flooding through her. “It’s all I can do. You’re just mad because your little playdoll has a mind of its own and doesn’t want to amuse you right now.”

  Lee could see how hurt Annie was, but then Annie’s eyes narrowed. “I fucking saved you. Without me you’d be dead. Literally dead. You wouldn’t have even gotten Christmas,” she added, ridiculously. “If it was me, I’d be fucking grateful.”

  She was right, and Lee felt terrible, but no words came. Lee turned away, then heard the door click. Annie was gone. She went to sleep holding Annie’s bear, wishing she had found the right words.

  • • •

  But when Annie returned the next day after school, she was excited, all the unpleasantness of the day before erased by whatever it was she had buzzing around in her head. She scooted into the little room and shut the door. “I got you, ladyfriend.”

  “You got me?”

  “I’m taking you out.”

  “Where?”

  “Dancing.”

  When Annie pulled and unfolded the thick card stock from her back pocket, Lee felt a swell of nausea wash through her.

  Annie scrunched her face up. “Are you all right?”

  The text on the flier read “L.CUN.E FUTUR.” above a turn-of-the-century-looking lithograph of a suited man in a bowler hat holding on to a rope dangling from a streamlined silver Zeppelin. The Zeppelin had a dozen old-fashioned phonograph horns erupting from its tail, and a group of dandyish revelers in the gondola were looking down and laughing at the man with the rope. A little “S.A.” was imprinted on the bottom corner. “Where did you get this?”

  “I was at the Java Hut with Oona. This weird dude gave them to us. It’s a New Year’s rave. It’s like the universe is telling us to go out and have a good time.”

  “You can’t go to that.”

  “What do you mean? I’m taking you. We’re going to it. And Oona will be there—you’ll get to meet each other.”

  “No.”

  “Seriously, don’t worry. I’ve got it all planned out. I’m going to tell my parents—”

  “Listen to me. You can’t—”

  Annie snatched the flier back. “So you’re my mom all of a sudden? I thought we could have some fun. You said yourself you’re going crazy in here.”

  “We’ll go someplace else. I’ll take you on a creep. There’s an abandoned foundry on the south side that used to make ship’s propellers.”

  “I don’t want to go to any of your nasty old factories or hospitals or sewage plants or whatever. I don’t want to do any of that homeless shit. I want to go someplace where there are people our age. People like us, not like the stuck-up kids from my school. You owe me something, Lee. This, at least. The only way I could get Oona to agree to go was if she could meet you. I can’t go alone.”

  “You told her about me? Who else have you told about me?”

  “What does it matter?”

  Lee didn’t like that at all, but knew she’d better drop it. “Well, I won’t go, and if you won’t go alone, then I guess it’s settled.”

  “Fine,” she said. But it wasn’t settled at all, Lee could tell.

  “Annie, you have to trust me on this.” Lee saw she was squeezing Annie’s shoulders and released her grip. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. “Just don’t go to that thing,” she said.

  “Then tell me why not.”

  Lee debated whether to tell her anything, but how could she and not tell her everything? And that just wasn’t possible. “I’ve been to it,” she said finally. “All I can say is, it’s not what it seems.”

  “What is it?”

  Lee had no idea how to explain it or even where to begin. “It’s like . . . a cult thing or something. Gross old men hitting on young kids.”

  “Eew, really?”

  “Really. You have to tell Oona, too.”

  “Okay. Fine.”

  “Look me in the eyes and promise me.”

  Annie leaned forward and narrowed her eyes. “I promise, whatever. It sounds really gross.”

  “We’ll do something else. I promise.”

  “I know. And Lee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry about what I said about your homeless shit.”

  Lee just laughed. The girl had no idea.

  SIXTEEN

  LEE recounted the events of Tomi’s death along a tortuous path full of gaps she had to double back on to fill in. Trying to explain the S.A. and who they were made it all sound so fucking crazy, but she told it anyway. It took her a long time to get to the moment
of his death, though that feeling of Tomi’s weight changing in her arms kept rising up inside her. No matter how many routes she used to get there, the story would end the same way. Lee knew she shouldn’t be telling a couple of strangers on the Internet; she didn’t know if she could trust them. But they had proven they were friends of Tomi’s, and she wanted them to know.

  When she was finished, neither Teutonik nor DreamClown said anything for a while. Neither of them would even look at her.

  “We will have a memorial,” Teutonik said finally. “Over the Subnet. I’ll take care of it.”

  Lee thought of Tomi’s body, abandoned in an empty aquarium. “Does anyone know anything about his family?” she asked. Tomi had told her a million and one stories about his family, but as Lee tried to bring up the details, the only thing she could bring back was the image of him as a teenager in a library, one eye on a book, the other on a blond, statuesque librarian. “I think they are in the Czech Republic.”

  Teutonik was still staring at his keyboard. “None of us talk about our families much. It is the nature of online anonymity. Hermes used to talk about you, but that was an anomaly.”

  “Why were they after you?” asked DreamClown.

  “They wanted something I had. We were trying to give it back. And then that man shot him.” She thought about what it would feel like to plunge a knife into the Undertaker. To watch the light go out of his eyes. She wanted to burn the S.A. and everything they’d worked for to the ground.

  “What were they after?” said DreamClown.

  “An artwork.” She hadn’t meant to bring it up, but there was no way of explaining Tomi’s death without it. She’d destroyed it, but still it wouldn’t go away.

  “Like a painting?”

  “Not a painting. A thing. An object.”

  “What did they want with it? Was it worth a lot of money?”

  “It was a hundred years old. Maybe it was worth money,” Lee said. “But it didn’t look like anything.” It felt like something, though. Lee remembered when she first picked it up, how she thought maybe she understood aura for the first time. “I just wanted it gone. The thing was cursed. It’s fucked my life since the moment I took it.”

  “So they have it now?” DreamClown asked.

  “No. I smashed it to pieces.” Something bit into her hand, and Lee looked down to see she was crushing a Coke can, hard enough to break the skin.

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Why? What do you care?”

  “You said you want to get back at them,” DreamClown said. “It’ll be easier if you still have something they want.”

  “Most of it is at the bottom of the Delaware,” she said. “But there was a piece inside.”

  Lee rifled around the bottom of the bag until she found it: a little brown ball not more than an inch across, made from some hardened resinlike material. She laid it in the palm of her hand and held it up in front of the monitor.

  “It looks like a turd,” said DreamClown. “Are you sure it’s not a petrified dog turd? Put some light on it.”

  Lee angled the light onto it and watched Teutonik lean forward into his monitor, his eyes growing big on the screen. “Could you hold it closer, between your fingers?”

  Lee did as she was told, waiting for the webcam to focus, then rolling it a bit between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Do you know what that looks like?” Teutonik said, leaning back in his chair again.

  “I still think it’s a dog turd,” DreamClown said.

  “It looks almost like a Calabi-Yau space.”

  Lee held the thing up to the light, examined it again with this new name attached. She’d never looked at it very closely before. It wasn’t a perfect sphere; it was lumpier than that, with a ridged surface full of pockets and folds. It was as though a flat ribbon had been folded again and again until it was a ball of planes and ridges with small cavities running through. She rolled it in her palm. “Is that something?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  DreamClown sucked on his Big Gulp, unimpressed. “Enlighten us.”

  “A Calabi-Yau space is a physical representation of multidimensionality.”

  “Fuck you.” DreamClown opened his drink and tipped back an ice cube, which he crunched as he talked. “English, you ancient German bastard.”

  “If you want to represent a single dimension, you do so with a single dot on a piece of paper. Two dimensions can be represented by the piece of paper itself, pretending for a moment that the paper is of infinite thinness. Three dimensions might be represented by folding the paper into an origami cube. The fourth dimension is time, and so four dimensions might be represented by throwing the cube through the air to show the passing of time. But what if you want to represent more than four dimensions?”

  “I didn’t know there were more than four,” Lee said.

  “String theory proposes that the universe exists in eleven.”

  “I don’t even know how to process that,” Lee said.

  “Exactly. Which is where a Calabi-Yau space comes in.”

  Typing, DreamClown giggled to himself. “So this one goes to eleven?”

  “Spare us your vacuous pop-cultural references, you homunculus. You do not see many three-dimensional representations of a Calabi-Yau space as small as this one. The task must have been painstaking. Carving out all those folded dimensions by hand, I can’t imagine. Usually they are larger, or two-dimensional renderings of a computer program.” Teutonik typed something into his keyboard and another window popped up on Lee’s screen, showing an image of something that looked a lot like the little object she held in her hand.

  “When did you say this piece was made?” Teutonik said.

  “Nineteen sixteen,” Lee said. “Duchamp supposedly never knew what was inside it. He had a friend put something in it and seal it up.”

  “Well, it can’t be a Calabi-Yau, then. The Calabi-Yau space was not even conceived of until many decades later.” Teutonik picked the cat up off his lap and set it on the floor. “It is interesting, though, that this little object was wrapped in a ball of string . . .”

  “Why?”

  “Well, string theory would be the obvious reference. Have you heard of the unified field theory?”

  Lee remembered what Tomi had told her. “The attempt to solve the contradiction between the laws of the macro-universe and the laws of the subatomic universe.”

  Teutonik looked impressed and Lee tried not to let her pride show.

  “String theory is the closest we’ve come to solving it. But string theory wasn’t even conceived of for decades after this work of Duchamp’s.”

  Lee thought of Three Standard Stoppages, its three parallel strings. Was it all coincidence? Her heart quickened. She was close to figuring something out, she knew it. She wished Tomi was here.

  DreamClown still seemed unimpressed. “For old conspiracy-theorist farts like you, the world is nothing but dots waiting to be connected.”

  “So what does it do?” Lee said.

  “What do?” Teutonik said. “A Calabi-Yau space doesn’t do anything. It represents.”

  “Then why do these people want this thing so badly?” Lee said.

  “That would be the question. But if this were in some way related to string theory, it could be huge.”

  “Huge how?” she asked.

  “Nobody knows, not really. String theory posits that all matter, at the most fundamental subatomic level, is made up of strings. These strings are smaller than the smallest known particles, and they all vibrate at different, specific frequencies. The frequency of their vibration determines the behavior of the particles that form mass. So in a sense, these frequencies determine the nature of reality itself. If one were able to prove the fundamental principles behind string theory, then that means one could conceivably manipulate those principles. To
play those strings, as it were. It could usher in a new era of scientific breakthrough. Quantum computing, leaps in artificial intelligence that would be positively hyperevolutionary.”

  “Technological singularity,” she said.

  “Yes! Exactly.”

  “To what end?”

  Teutonik frowned. “It’s all hypothetical. The possibilities are not only endless but beyond our current comprehension. But whoever discovered it would certainly stand to gain billions.”

  Lee remembered the bookshelf in the room beneath the museum. The books on neural mapping. “With that kind of computing power, could a person map a human brain?”

  “Hypothetically, yes. You could copy it as you would information on a computer hard drive.”

  Gold and immortality, she thought. Modern alchemy. Is that what all this was about—piles of money and an eternal life in which to play with it?

  “Some say that solving it could allow us to alter space-time itself.”

  “Don’t listen to Teutonik,” said DreamClown. “Too much LSD has expanded his poor brain past the point of usefulness. We need to remember what we are doing here. You want to get back at these people or what?”

  “Why don’t you do something useful, homunculus?”

  DreamClown stopped typing and looked at the monitor. “While you’ve been connecting imaginary dots and lecturing us on abstractions, I have been doing something useful. You know what I just acquired?” He put a diagram up on the screen that looked like something out of a science fiction film. “These are the blueprints of the Atlas missile silo purchased in 2004. You want to get back at these people? Here’s your way in.”

  Teutonik removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with his shirt. Without the glasses he had the small moist eyes of a forest animal. “I’ve done some research of my own.”

  “Do tell,” DreamClown said.

  “Something was discovered beneath the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In a secret room. Some say in the 1980s, some say the ’90s, some say much earlier.”

  Lee thought back to the machine she’d glimpsed through the peepholes of that door. “What was it?”

  Teutonik was staring at another screen. He shook his head. “Nobody seems to know. But the Société Anonyme appears to have been founded on that discovery.”