The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  The ladder was still where she and Tomi had left it. Lee climbed it awkwardly, then with some difficulty managed to pull herself into the ventilation shaft. At the end, where the shaft opened up into the next room, she grabbed hold of the water pipe running along the ceiling and hung there a moment before dropping to the floor. She landed awkwardly, favoring one leg and biting into her cheek.

  Lee let the coppery taste of blood slew around in her mouth before pushing to her feet. She felt around until she located the light switch. It all looked so commonplace now, like just another storage room. The big desk full of papers and open books, an old black vinyl typewriter cover lying flat like a deflated balloon. The stuffed bookshelves, the dusty old machines and lab equipment. Lee heard something from the other side of the door and moved close to listen. It was a single voice, too low and papery for her to make out the words.

  She had nothing to use as a weapon. What had she been planning to do, barge in and hope they would just stand by and let her destroy everything they’d worked for? She might be able to get to the door of the room before they heard her, but what if she couldn’t? Lee picked up an antique beaker and hefted its weight in her hand, but then she put it back.

  On the other side of the room was The Large Glass replica, hanging by hinges on the wall. All the parts that Duchamp had planned to put in but hadn’t were here, in place: The Spiral. The Boxing Match. The Juggler of Gravity. Lee tried to imagine the whole system in motion, the Bride all hopped up on love gasoline, dreaming her erotic dreams and calling down to her Bachelors in her singular, inscrutable language. The Bachelors below, that band of slapstick buffoons, bunch of cartoon wolves with lusty pop-out eyes farting out their gases and shooting their jiz up at the Bride in futile hope of winning her attention. Of undressing her.

  Lee mapped out the lattice of cracks on the glass until she saw a piece that approximated what she wanted. She took out her lockpick set and began scraping one of the finest picks back and forth along the crack, trying to wedge the pick in and pry the piece out. But she couldn’t get the pick in at all. She put the set away. Fuck it. She grabbed one end of The Large Glass panel and swung it carefully until it was flush with the wall. She hefted its weight in her arm and gave a few practice swings before heaving it forward with all her strength. The panel swung in a broad arc, then hit the wall with a crash and exploded in shards of glass that came raining across the room. The voice from the other room stopped. Lee scanned the space until she spotted it lying on the table: a thin, evil-looking shard about a foot long, a bit of the Bride still attached. She picked it up and slipped it into her sleeve, turning just as a man stumbled into the room.

  He stopped just inside the doorway, stood gaping at her. Lee recognized him immediately. He was dressed in the same old butler’s uniform he’d worn the day he had followed her and taken her picture, almost a year and a half ago.

  He came up to her, more curiosity in his face than malice, and put his hand out. She resisted the impulse to slice it open and let him take her down the hallway. More of the nine would be here, though Lee didn’t know how many. As they passed the door in the middle of the hall, the one she’d peeked into before, Lee eased the shard into her palm. If she could stab the man through the neck, she might have enough time to get into that room and destroy the thing inside. But then the man slowed and put an arm around her, gently easing her in front of him. Lee slipped the shard back. Through the open doorway at the end of the hallway, she could see a figure in a chair, sitting at a table in the room beyond.

  As she got closer, Lee could see that he was in a wheelchair, antique and made of lacquered wood gone golden with age. The wheels were cracked red rubber. He looked a thousand years old, his withered skin covered in spots.

  “Come in, my girl.” He wore a dark vestment of thick wool, with a line of buttons that ran up to the collar, tight around the fold of his neck. He was thin, his skin stretched across his bones. He held a brown cigarette in a short lacquer holder between two fingers. “My name is Richard Corless,” he said. “I’ve waited to meet you for a long time.”

  The room had a long wooden table at its center and eight chairs around it. Dark wood molding ran along the baseboards, and the walls not covered in tapestries had high shelves filled with books.

  The Priest offered Lee a seat. She remained standing. “We were just discussing your whereabouts,” he said. “You’ve left quite a mess behind. But now here you are, without either of us lifting a finger. Are we just so lucky?”

  The other man stood about awkwardly, not really knowing what to do with himself.

  “Does he always stare like that?” she said.

  “You’ll have to forgive Jonathan. It isn’t every day he comes face to face with . . . well. Your presence is electric for him.”

  “He’s dead, you know. Your Undertaker. I killed him.” Lee looked for a reaction but got none.

  “We had our differences, he and I. And he became a mad dog in the end. Someone had to put him down; I find it fitting that it was you. But I am truly sorry he won’t be here to witness the fruition of our efforts together.”

  Lee visualized slicing the glass shard across the wattle of his neck. “What differences?”

  “Philosophical, mainly. But in this case philosophical differences are everything.”

  The Priest was on the other side of the table now, his man standing just behind him. She thought of driving the shard through his larynx, imagined how his dying coughs would sound. She looked past him to a framed photo on the wall, a mannish-looking middle-aged woman holding a stole delicately around her neck, her head covered by an elaborately decorated hat, her mascaraed eyes staring obscurely back at Lee. She looked like someone Lee recognized, though Lee couldn’t place her.

  “Sit, please. We have much to talk about. I’m sure there is a lot you want to know.”

  Lee took a seat at the table across from him.

  “It’s important that you understand everything, so allow me to begin with a bit of context.

  “History is full of visionaries. Some were engineers, others scientists. Some were artists, others simply great thinkers. A very select few were all of these. We see Leonardo da Vinci as one of these few. Da Vinci was not only an artist but a great inventor. He made detailed designs of devices that he knew could not be realized with the technologies of his time—the airplane, the machine gun, the diving suit, the armored tank, the automobile. He was so far ahead of his time that his visions would not be fulfilled for hundreds of years after his death. Duchamp was such a visionary. But his visions were conceptual, theoretical—we barely have the vocabulary to conceive of them, even now, much less the technology to realize them.

  “Duchamp was not fully recognized until long after the world had thought he’d stopped making art, ostensibly to dedicate his life to chess, a constantly moving system of complex hypothetical geometries. But to think that he stopped his investigations to pursue what is ultimately little more than a game is absurd. He published a weekly chess column, competed in tournaments around the world. But this was only cover and diversion. Chess appealed to his nature. He was a player who always preferred the beautiful play to the winning one. But it was not his real interest.

  “No, what he had been doing this entire time was research. For twenty years he dedicated himself to research for his final work.”

  As the Priest went on, nearly lost in himself, Lee wondered if she could bridge the distance between them before the other man could stop her.

  “Duchamp made a blueprint of his vision early on. He called it The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. But he understood he simply did not have the knowledge to realize the promise of that blueprint. And so he decided to teach himself. He spent a lot of time in libraries in New York and in Washington, D.C. And he kept up correspondence with certain luminaries in their fields—Heisenberg, Max Born, Max Planck in physics, but mystics, too: Gur
djieff and Ouspensky. Even Aleister Crowley for a brief period, until he decided that Crowley was only a flimflam man.

  “Around 1945 he felt that he was nearly ready to begin. So he sent his great friend Walter Arensberg, the man who had most of Duchamp’s major works in his collection and the only man Duchamp trusted, into negotiations with the directors of the major art museums around the country. The Chicago Art Institute, the University of California, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and many others were vying to house Duchamp’s oeuvre. But it was the Philadelphia Museum of Art that intrigued Duchamp the most. Because what Duchamp was after was not simply a space to house his works.”

  The Priest smiled, and it was like watching a fish twitch. “In 1947 I was an assistant to Fiske Kimball, the director of the PMA. I was just out of college. An internship, you would call it today, though I received a small stipend. As a very young man I was essentially invisible, helping Mr. Kimball with such duties as cataloguing exhibitions and seeking out the locations of various works. And I remember meeting Mr. Duchamp briefly on several occasions.”

  Lee couldn’t help herself. “What was he like?”

  “The best way to describe him is to say he had a quiet luminosity. Duchamp was a gracious man, unfailingly polite, and he had a way about him that would put you at ease immediately. Even a young man of no consequence, such as myself. I was not allowed to be present during the negotiations, though I was once called in to bring Mr. Duchamp coffee, and I remember he stopped what he was saying to look me in the eye and thank me.”

  The man paused, as though in reverie, and Lee pitied him for a moment—how lost he looked in his devotion. Then she wondered what it would feel like to stab his eyes out.

  “Needless to say, Mr. Kimball acquired the collection, and many of my duties over the next few years involved cataloguing it and maintaining a correspondence with Mr. Arensberg. I always wondered how Mr. Kimball had been able to beat those other museums out. Initially I thought it had to do with his personality. Mr. Kimball was a quiet man, but his reputation was so solid that I watched people hand over priceless collections with the ease of someone loaning out their car. But in 1955, after Mr. Kimball had passed, I was going through his papers, and I discovered something that told a different story.”

  The other man kept his place beside the Priest, staring across the table down at Lee. He didn’t look too quick, but he was big, and Lee stood no chance against him.

  “Fiske Kimball was the director of the museum, but he was an architect by trade, and I happened to find some blueprints he had drawn of the subbasement of the museum. As his assistant I knew the museum well, very well. And here I saw that sometime in the late ’40s, sometime after his discussions with Duchamp, he’d had a series of rooms excavated. Rooms I never even knew existed.”

  A kettle whistled behind her, and Lee jumped. The other man moved to a small kitchen area to turn it off.

  “We are sitting in one of those rooms, of course. You see, this is what Mr. Duchamp stipulated as part of the agreement: that he be allowed a space within the museum itself, a space that none but a tiny handful of people could know about, in which he could work undisturbed. He still had his studio in New York, and he continued to work there as well, on Étant donnés, but he wanted to keep work on his other project separate from that. And so he commuted between the two cities a few times a week by train, though more and more he stayed here. They did a very nice job on the space. A small bedroom, running water, a toilet, even a kitchen and a bathtub.”

  She felt the man behind her again and tensed up as he reached around and placed a cup of tea in front of her. He moved around the table and placed one in front of the Priest as well. The old man blew on his cup, then took a sip. Lee didn’t touch hers.

  “Look around. It’s almost exactly as Duchamp left it. I’ve been living here for over forty years, and I haven’t changed a thing. His biographers all wrote about his Spartan existence. And it was. His New York studio was nearly bare. But down here was another story. He simply had too much material to live so sparely.

  “One night after the museum had closed its doors, I let myself in. Étant donnés wouldn’t be in place for over a decade, but the room that had been built to house it had a secret door. I believe you know the way. Mr. Duchamp was here when I came down, sitting at this very table. If he was surprised by my sudden intrusion, he didn’t show it. He just looked up, inhaled from his pipe, and exhaled very slowly. He gestured to his chess table, the very one you see here, then asked me if I played.

  “To this day I wonder if it had all been set up. If he and Mr. Kimball had somehow laid this trail of bread crumbs for me, knowing that I would follow it, knowing that I would agree to become Mr. Duchamp’s assistant. Mr. Kimball knew how loyal I was. He knew I could be trusted with such a secret.” The old man stared at something behind Lee, absorbed in the memory.

  “But he never did trust you with it, did he?” she asked.

  His eyes refocused on her. “What was that?”

  “His secret. If he had trusted you with it, you would have figured out his machine or whatever it is a long time ago,” she said. “What did he need you for? To get Chinese takeout for him? Return his library books?”

  He didn’t answer, and she knew she had touched a nerve. If she could just get a big enough rise out of him, she might get him over to her side of the table. She pulled her hand beneath her sleeve and gripped the shard.

  He stared at her for a long time, the other man looking nervous. But then the Priest laughed. “It is true. Duchamp took his secret with him to his grave. For over thirty years I tried to unravel it. I had at my disposal all his books. I had all his notes. His private journals. His correspondence. But Duchamp was nothing if not cryptic. A single line could carry layers of enfolded meaning, oftentimes contradictory meanings. A word could have three or four different interpretations: one a red herring, one a clever little private joke, one a path to illumination.

  “Still, over the years I made progress, began to piece things together. Duchamp was a man of astounding intellect and vision. To his death he could grasp the most complex and abstract scientific thinking of the day, as well as understand the layered metaphors behind the esoteric arts of the past. Duchamp was a kind of scientist as well as an artist, but he was an alchemist, too. When asked for an adjective to describe his work, he once said: ‘Metaphysical, if any.’ His true talent lay in his ability to bridge these seemingly incompatible disciplines. For him, the artist is ‘a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.’ Duchamp said that himself. And I think the same could be said about you, don’t you agree? Have you not found your own way, out of a maze and into this clearing? Have you not relied on some power, external to yourself and yet of yourself, to do so?”

  “You led me here. You’ve wanted me here this whole time. Why? Who am I?”

  “You are no one. And yet I can’t wait to tell you who you are, because you are at the center of all of it.”

  “All of what?”

  “Duchamp’s life’s work, of course. His work has influenced the landscape of art for the entire twentieth century, but what people do not understand is this: what Duchamp was working on has the potential to change the entire course of human consciousness, change our understanding of the universe in such a way as to make Einstein’s theory of relativity look like simple arithmetic.”

  “But you aren’t smart enough to figure it out. Even after decades of trying.”

  He laughed again, but it came out forced. She moved her arm, and the glass cut into her hand. Lee tried not to alter her expression, though she could feel herself wince.

  “No. Not the science of it, anyway. I was forced to seek outside assistance. In 1999 I began trawling scientific journals, looking for a physicist with vision and promise. I put a few of Duchamp’s findings into a dossier, enough to hint at the enormi
ty of its implications but not enough to give too much away, and mailed copies out. I only got one bite.” He smiled. “The man, a recent graduate of MIT named Lajos Bakó, was intrigued enough to write me back. We agreed to meet.

  “I brought a sheaf of transcribed notes designed to whet his curiosity. Again, they were carefully assembled, with the intent to give him a hint of the puzzle while leaving him wanting more. I even threw in a few of the more . . . esoteric, hermetic implications, to test his openness to such data within the system. He didn’t even blink. Lajos was on board immediately. I fed him notes bit by bit and watched his comprehension of the project swell to meet my own. His understanding of the science behind it was such that it took him a year to work out what it had taken me ten to realize. After that year I trusted him enough to allow him entrance into these rooms.

  “We spent another year in large part holed up together down here as we went over and over Duchamp’s archives. And we understood that even with the two of us together we could never achieve what Duchamp was attempting to do alone. And so was born the Société Anonyme. We recruited by word of mouth. Lajos brought in two other scientists he knew would understand the vision behind the project. I was curator of the modern wing by this time and recruited from the few people I knew who I thought could appreciate the work of a true visionary. And a few of them brought in people. In the end we had nine.”

  “Is that when you started playing dress-up?”

  “We hadn’t planned it that way. I was already in my sixties, but there was a lot of youth in our group. We had a Société; they wanted to throw parties, exhibitions. And there were nine of us, after all. It was just a coincidence, but one of them, I don’t remember who, made the connection—Nine Bachelors. We were setting up an exhibition in which we were going to perform Duchamp’s Erratum Musical, and someone said, ‘Why not take on the roles?’”

  “So you appointed yourself the Priest.”

  “We each naturally gravitated toward our true role, I suppose. I can only say that now, of course, with the benefit of hindsight.”