Yes, Lee thought, yes. Her gut was speaking to her, and so Lee closed her eyes and plunged into the darkness of the empty aquarium. Tomi was there. She couldn’t see him, but she could feel his presence.
The girl was there, too. Lee heard her voice: “Where are we?”
Lee spoke without words, her thoughts traveling the darkness. She knew Xenia could hear her. In the aquarium. We have to go. It isn’t safe.
“What are you afraid of here?”
The Undertaker.
“What does he want?”
The hidden noise.
“Where is it?”
Lee wanted to tell the girl, but she didn’t want to bring her any danger.
“Lee. Where is the hidden noise?”
He’ll kill us for it.
“Unburden yourself. This is part of the clearing. Tell me where it is.”
Lee felt naked. Sick in her body, the thing inside—the baby? Oh God, is that the baby?—slithering around, flapping in her guts. It was moving through her, contracting her organs, its long tendrils fibrillating beneath her skin.
“Go ahead. It’s okay. Clear yourself and it will all go away.”
Lee began to see that the space of the aquarium was not completely dark. She could make out the outlines of glass tanks, and figures from old displays, everything invested with a pale silvery hue. She still couldn’t see Tomi, but she knew he was there with her. She heard his voice in her head. Competing with the voice of the girl. It was far away, a pale echo of a voice, tugging at her. She tried to follow it, but Xenia’s voice, stronger and more urgent, kept her rooted in place.
“Let go of it, Lee. Let me carry it. See it in your mind. Describe it.”
The light source, wherever it was, was expanding and the outlines around her were beginning to take shape. She smelled something familiar, milky and sweet. Sandalwood. Then she saw a human form begin to take shape with the rest of it. He was only a dark shape surrounded by a silvery aura, but she knew him. She opened her eyes.
He was standing behind the girl. He wore the same suit as before. Lee felt the black tendrils unfurling again.
He said, “Do you know the expression ‘A single spark can start a prairie fire’? The world is an arid field, Bride, and you hold the match.”
Lee felt bile rising again, and Xenia, as though reading her mind, brought her a steel bucket, which she held for her as Lee emptied the remainder of her stomach into it. Xenia handed Lee the water bottle, drinking from it first again without prodding. Lee drank in great, gulping swallows until she nearly felt sick again.
The Undertaker held one hand out to her. His other arm hung slack at his side, as though wires inside had been snipped. “I want to show you something.”
He took her hand. Xenia helped her to stand, and Lee stumbled after him across the room. His hand was moist, like something attached to a rock at low tide. She felt a hatred rising, but it had nowhere to go, and so it churned inside, some restless, raging animal. She pulled back, but her hand stayed within his.
The animal inside her clawed to get out, tear his eyes from their sockets. He just smiled down on her. “It’s too late for that,” he said, as though reading her thoughts. “Your moment of retribution has passed.”
He took one hand and raised his other arm, then let it flop back down to his side, as though to show her a fault in its constitution. No more useful than the arm of a marionette. “Your bullet shattered the humerus, snapped the biceps tendon, and destroyed the median nerve. When it broke apart, it left shards all up and down through the tissue. Little bits of lead are still finding their way up. Every now and then one comes, pushing through my skin like a tiny metal worm. The nerves are gone, too. I can’t feel a thing.” He put his good hand on her head. “If you feel the need to taste the bitter wine of retribution, have a look at my arm.”
Lee spat. “I’ll have more than your arm.”
He just laughed. “But look at you. You’re trembling, little girl. Believe me, there is an easier way.”
Lee was doing all she could to suppress the rage telling her to claw the man’s face away. The drug was gone, as suddenly as it had come; she could no longer feel it working through her. She maintained her thousand-yard stare.
The man nodded to Xenia, who left the room. He turned to the control panel and flicked a switch. The twelve monitors buzzed to life, little portals into places throughout the complex: two outside views, the dance floor, the costume room, and other spaces Lee hadn’t seen before. He scanned them one at a time, looking for something. “She’s here somewhere,” he said.
With the man’s back to her, Lee strained to maneuver her arm back into her costume, trying to reach her bag.
“I just wanted to show her to you,” he said, his eyes still on the monitors. “Your friend. To show you she’s all right.”
Lee saw her, dancing, now with a boy. The man did, too. He zoomed the camera in on Annie’s eyes. “A little dilated, to be sure, but she’ll be fine.” He turned. If he was surprised to see the gun in her hand, it didn’t show.
Lee thought she had gotten used to the feel of a gun, but now it was unwieldy again, her fingers like balloons. He was maybe six feet away, one hand out in some sort of gesture of absolution, the other, attached to the shattered arm, slack beside his body. He made no move toward her. She could finish this now.
“Well?” he said. “What are you waiting for?”
The gun felt too heavy in her hand. She could barely keep it up. “You deserve it.”
“Perhaps. In your system of justice and karma, I suppose I do. So why hesitate? Do you relish the moment so much?”
Then Lee saw something that made her stomach sink. One of the monitors was rotating through a series of nearly identical rooms, and Lee recognized in one of them a poster she had seen before: a black Deadmau5 head with glowing eyes. And, just before the monitor switched to a new room, a trash can beneath the desk overflowing with Big Gulp cups.
“He’s with you?” she said.
“Who?”
“DreamClown.”
“DreamClown.” He said the name as though it amused him. “Our Busboy. Yes.”
Lee thought back to the first time she’d spoken to Teutonik and DreamClown, in Annie’s basement. How could she have been so stupid? She had let them lead her here. She had played right into their hands. Mourning Tomi had made her sloppy.
“You are feeling betrayed right now. By someone you trusted.”
“You don’t know anything about betrayal.”
He moved toward her but stopped when Lee raised the gun to his head. “What would you say if I told you that your boyfriend, Tomas Cěrnák, that he, too, had betrayed you.”
Lee adjusted her aim toward the third button of his jacket and squeezed the trigger.
She saw him smile before she heard the crack from the gun, so loud in the little room. She stared, not comprehending. How could she have missed? The man stood not five feet from her, and yet she had missed the big black square of his chest. She brought the gun up by an inch and fired again. The man looked at her with pity. Lee aimed for his head this time and fired three shots in quick succession. He flinched, closing his eyes against the flash, but still he stood there.
Lee pulled the trigger again, which only clicked now, but she kept pulling it. Her ears rang. The room smelled of cordite. The Undertaker walked toward her until he was standing over her. “All done?”
Lee slumped to the floor. She was so fucking stupid. Of course they were not real bullets. The man wrapped his hand around the gun, removed it from hers, and put it in his pocket. He laid his good hand on her head, almost affectionately. All the fight suddenly drained out of her, and Lee felt her face go hot with shame and helplessness.
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” he said. “This world is so much bigger than any of us.” He was stroking her hair. S
he could feel his breath on her neck.
Lee thought about the cell phone that DreamClown had left for her. They must have been tracking her the whole way, known exactly where she was all this time.
“It’s just the two of us,” he said. “I thought we could talk, just you and me, wash away some of the nastiness between us. I think we understand each other better than you know.”
He helped her up and guided her to the couch.
“Let me help you out of this ridiculous thing,” he said, pulling the costume up over her head and laying it on the couch. “The bridal dress suited you so much better.” He took an old slide projector out of a cabinet and set it up on the end table by the couch, facing the big white wall by the door. “I’m sorry about Tomas. His death is not something I wanted on my hands. I hope you understand it was self-defense.” He popped the carousel in and plugged in the machine. It awoke with a dull hum. “And understand, I was defending not only myself but nearly a hundred years of work and planning. We have within our grasp the solution to the only problem that matters, and he was willing to throw that away. For what? For love?” He turned off the room lights, and there was only a swirling wash of dust motes in the light of the projector and an empty white rectangle on the wall.
He picked up the remote, and a slide came on with a click. The work was so familiar by now, the tall steel frame bisected horizontally along the center, the web of shattered glass, the menagerie of mechanical forms.
“I think you’re familiar with Duchamp’s Large Glass, are you not?”
The Undertaker clicked the projector to bring up another slide. It was The Large Glass again but with the missing elements, the Boxing Match, the Spiral, and the Juggler of Gravity, intact. He used the shadow of his finger to point them out. “We know that Duchamp left out certain key components from the final work. Components that his notes make clear he had planned to include. So we come to the question: why? Was it simply that he abandoned the work as unfinished? Out of boredom? I cannot believe this. Duchamp was a man who was never bored a moment of his life. Everything he did had a purpose. So why? As he conceived it, The Large Glass is what he called a ‘delay in glass,’ a static image of a dynamic system. What might this system look like if realized in its true form and put into motion in the world? What might it reveal? My belief is that he knew we weren’t ready for this knowledge, and so he was forced to leave certain key components out of the blueprint to keep us from realizing his vision until we were ready.”
“The Boxing Match. He left out the ignition coil.”
The Undertaker looked surprised but pleased to hear her speak, and Lee hated that she hadn’t stopped herself. “Indeed,” he said. “But the Boxing Match isn’t an ignition coil. Nothing so prosaic. The Boxing Match is a device to collapse space. This is how it moves the Bachelors’ spurts across the horizon to the Bride. By collapsing space-time itself.”
Lee felt the drug coming back on, the couch made of soft moss molding itself around her. She shook it away and the man’s voice came back.
“In 1912, as Duchamp was conceiving the work, the idea of a space-time continuum was just percolating to public consciousness. Duchamp himself was playing around with ideas of collapsed multidimensions. In the same way that objects held up against a light project a shadow in two dimensions”—he held his hand up against the light to demonstrate—“Duchamp believed that the everyday three-dimensional objects around us are but the shadows of a fourth dimension. That our entire universe is but a pale shadow of a deeper order. But what is the nature of that order? What lies beyond?”
The Undertaker seemed mesmerized as he spoke, and Lee felt the madness in him like a third presence in the room. “Why are you telling me this?” she said.
“It’s essential that you understand the importance of our work. Because like it or not, you are part of it. Why do you think it is you’ve been allowed to live as long as you have, while others have died? Did you ever ask yourself that?”
She still felt muzzy with the drug, and her head swum whenever she moved it. She could no longer define where she ended and the couch began.
“It’s more than just With Hidden Noise and the fact that you happened to have it. In fact, we hardly think it a coincidence that you came into possession of the thing in the first place. Can I explain to you what I mean?”
He took her silence as leave to continue. “Allow me to backtrack a little: Heisenberg suggested that at a quantum level, particles exist only when they are colliding with other particles. Think about that: matter exists only in those nanomoments when it is paired with other matter. Otherwise, it’s simply not there. The world does not consist of objects. The world consists of the relationships between them. Even Einstein could not initially get his head around this. It is two things coming together that create not only meaning in the world but existence.”
Lee had been alone her entire life. Invisible. It wasn’t until Tomi came into her life that she’d felt seen for the first time. It was as if she suddenly existed, in a way she never had before. After he was gone, she’d nearly disappeared again. Was this what life was? Long periods of invisibility followed by short bursts of existence?
“Einstein’s theories of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory—Duchamp referenced all of it before the world’s scientists had even fully conceived of such things. You can see it hinted in his work, going all the way back to 1913. But Duchamp was not simply a soothsayer, any more than was Einstein or Heisenberg. Duchamp was an engineer. An engineer not of the mechanical but of the unseen forces that exist all around us. The id, the ego, the anima, fate and chance, the unconscious, the collective unconscious, time itself. Just as there are forces that govern the physical structures of the universe, from planetary systems down to quantum particles, there are forces at work that govern human consciousness.”
Lee couldn’t stop thinking about Tomi, about the possibility that he really had been with them. It didn’t seem possible. She knew him. He had loved her, she was sure of that. “You’re a liar,” she told him.
The man turned to her, looking confused. “Just listen, try to see, then you will understand. For nearly a century people have been too close-minded to grasp the truth behind Duchamp’s greatest work. Allow me to put it this way: When Einstein conceived that space and time were all part of a single space-time continuum, it astounded the world. When the physicist David Bohm put forward the idea that human consciousness and the matter that makes up the universe are similarly of a single continuum, it caused barely a ripple. Was this because the idea was not as profound? On the contrary, the idea is so profound that no one is willing to even entertain it. Just think about it: all separation—between you and this wall, between you and me, between your consciousness and mine—is an illusion, a product of perception and the mutual unspoken agreement that things must have boundaries, they must remain separate.”
Lee shifted, trying to separate herself from the couch, but it moved with her. She felt the man inside of her, too, and tried to push him out, but his voice anchored him there.
“Remember that the observer effect tells us that the observer affects the thing observed. Bohm suggested that the observer is the observed. That on a quantum level there is no difference. He used a holographic model to illustrate this. In a hologram, each part contains within it the whole. In a holographic universe, every part of it, no matter how small, contains within it the entire universe. If we had the know-how, we could access a moon of Jupiter through the leaf of a tree. All time as well. We could see thousands of years into the past, simply by knowing how to look at a drop of water.”
Lee remembered what Tomi had said about the unified field theory, that solving it would be like reading the mind of God. Is that what had driven these men to kill three people, to empty out all those kids and traffic them as living sex dolls? “You pretend to want to see the mind of God,” she said. “But what do you think God sees in you?
”
The man stayed seated, focused on the image on the wall, but something in his posture changed, and she thought maybe she’d rattled him. “Let me answer it this way,” he said. “Duchamp saw not only that all matter and consciousness is part of the same continuum but that we are governed by certain laws—absurd laws, in his view—that make for the deterministic dance we all participate in. But what if we found a way to break these laws? To bypass them or manipulate them? The work in front of you is nothing less than a blueprint for a machine that, when set into motion, will do just that. A machine to transform human consciousness as we know it. So you see, I don’t want to see the mind of God. I want to change it.”
“But you have the machine,” she said. “That’s what I saw beneath the museum, isn’t it? Why not just set it into motion? What the fuck do you need me for?”
The Undertaker put the remote down and looked at her curiously. “Why, I thought it was obvious. Because you have the key.”
The key? Of course that’s what it was.
“Who knew we had been sitting on it for so many years? When Duchamp asked Walter Arensberg to put something into the center of a ball of string and seal it between two steel plates, he told the world that he had no idea what that object was. But if there’s one thing to know about Duchamp, it is that everything he says must be taken with some salt. He was a man who embraced contradictions. He was dedicated to chance, and yet he never did anything without maintaining control. There is no way he would have let anyone, even someone as close as Arensberg, determine such a vital part of a work. Of course he knew what the object was. The whole thing was pure obfuscation, all done so that no one would figure out that inside was a key. A key to a work, a device, that he wouldn’t build for decades. It became so clear when you stole it. A coincidence? Hardly. For Duchamp, there was no coincidence, only chance.
“And now here you are. Here both of us are. I was hoping that I might convince you of the importance of this project. That we could wash all the past misery behind us. I really am sorry about Tomas. All I can say is that he was armed as well. He drew first. And so it was a good old-fashioned duel. He died in as good a way as a man can. He died looking into the eyes of the one he loved.”
The Readymade Thief Page 29