The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  “Good afternoon, Bride,” Teutonik said.

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “I have something for you. I told you the Subnet takes care of its own, and we have.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Forgive me, but we did some digging and we know your situation. On August twelfth you escaped from the Queensbrook Juvenile Detention Center. Currently you are wanted for questioning in the murder of Derrick James.”

  “I didn’t do that. I mean, I escaped that juvenile shitbox, but I didn’t kill Derrick.”

  “The authorities think you did. Can you prove otherwise?”

  Lee thought about it. “No.”

  “No matter. We have already begun the process: Birth certificate, passport, driver’s license, social security number. High school diploma—graduated with honors? You’re smart enough, why not? Valedictorian? Perhaps that is too much, I don’t know. But with a clean slate, why not give it all to yourself?”

  Lee didn’t know what to say.

  “Just come up with a history of the person you want to be—name, birth date, education, jobs . . . a foundation, something to build on. What follows will be up to you. We have some very resourceful people in our network. Take your time and give me the details when you’re ready; we’ll take care of the rest.”

  Lee told herself not to believe him. Trust had gotten her betrayed too many times. But she didn’t regret trusting Tomi. And if the universe was throwing her another betrayal, the universe could fuck itself.

  Lee left the café with one more thing she needed to do. Something the Priest had said, combined with something she had seen, that had been worming around in her head, and she couldn’t shut it down. She had to see for herself.

  • • •

  It must have been thirty-five degrees out, but she was sweating by the time she got to the Silo. The way was mostly uphill, and riding one-handed had assaulted her shoulders. She parked the bike in the woods before the first hill and made her way by foot around the back. Crime scene tape marked the perimeter, but there were no police cars to be seen. Four days had passed since the fire, and the place was deserted. Lee ducked beneath the tape surrounding the entrance. The fire had spread to the generator shack and to the dry brush, and the ground was all black ash. The brick outlet vent stacks came up through the ground, and Lee peered down one into the darkness below.

  The big steel front door had on it a condemned notice from the city, warning of dangerous internal instability. She let herself in, coughing as she descended the stairs. The air smelled of old smoke and something chemical. She turned on her flashlight when she got to the bottom and headed to the central stairwell and into what had been the dance hall. The floor was sticky black tar. She opened the door in the middle of the floor and went down.

  The concrete walls of the room where she’d found Annie were scorched black, all the wires and light fixtures melted. Even the steel duct housing was melted and warped and falling in places. The carpeting had melted into a thin black crust that cracked when she stepped on it. She went down two more levels, each one with more soot and more lingering smoke. When she opened the door to the Undertaker’s room, she had to pull her shirt up over her face to breathe. Everything that had been wood was burned to charcoal, and shining her light through it was like looking at the wreck of a ship uncovered on the bottom of the ocean after hundreds of years. The brass fixtures were intact, as was the old iron bed frame. The wood paneling had burned away. It was just a concrete-and-rebar bunker again. Marble chess pieces lay scattered about the floor. Lee picked up a knight and blew on it. When her light washed over what used to be his bed, she saw the gun, its melted grip fusing it to the frame. Something was off about the bed, some trick of perspective that made staring at it impossible, and she sat on the ground, suddenly feeling dizzy. The place must be noxious with chemical fumes.

  She went down two more floors, stepped over a collapsed vent housing, and entered the lab—or what was left of it. She couldn’t imagine the temperatures that must have been reached in this room. What once was a wall of stacked plastic chemical drums had melted into a black mass on the floor, like a frozen tar pit that had half-engulfed bits of steel and glass that had fallen into it while it was still liquid. A few of the steel frames that had housed the larger machines were intact, but otherwise everything had been destroyed. All the glass jars and beakers had melted as well, pooling where they sat into igneous blobs of soot-encrusted crystal. She shined her light over the blackened concrete. The lingering chemical smell was so dense down here Lee could not stand it, but she walked to the wall on the opposite side, behind what had been the massive fan enclosure. Now the fan blades lay in a heap of twisted metal on the floor, and the enclosure itself was pretty much burned to the ground. Lee picked her way through it gingerly until she reached the far wall. She walked back to the other end carefully, measuring her paces.

  She went up to the Undertaker’s study. Each of the levels should be the same diameter, and yet she’d sensed when she was here before that this one was smaller than it should be. She paced the room and confirmed it. Lee turned to The Large Glass replica, still hanging there on the wall. It was singed, the glass warped, but otherwise intact. She ran her fingers along its sides until she found a tiny latch. She pressed and with a click the whole panel swung outward from a hinge on the other side. Lee let it swing past her, then shined her light on the wall. There, behind where the circle of Bachelors would have been, was a safe dial and a latch. Lee ran her light over the whole wall and saw now the steel door laid into the concrete.

  Lee spun the dial. Mr. Velasquez had taught her rudimentary safe-cracking skills, but those applied to cheap home safes, and she wasn’t sure about this one. It must have been fifty years old at least, but it looked formidable. She reached into her bag and took out the small amp she had from her burgling days. She plugged in the earbuds, then pressed the amp to the steel door and turned the dial slowly, listening for the soft click of a tumbler clicking into place. She turned the dial a full revolution, then another, and another. She heard a whisper of gears, and that was all. She just wasn’t skilled enough.

  Mr. Velasquez had taught her that, before even attempting to crack a safe, she should try the easier route and look in desk drawers for the combination, which was sometimes taped along the bottom. Or to try to find the birth date of the owner, always a good bet. Lee had no way of finding the birth date of the Undertaker, but maybe . . . She went back upstairs, into the control room. Everything had been blackened and smoke damaged, but the room was set apart from the burned floors below and mostly it was intact. She went to the bookshelf and pulled out a smoke-blackened biography of Duchamp. His birth date took some finding, it was buried in the text, but she finally located it. July 28, 1887. She tore out the page and brought it downstairs.

  Lee spun the dial several times clockwise, stopping on the seven. Then counterclockwise, past the seven, to twenty-eight. Clockwise again to eighty-seven. She gingerly took her hand from the dial, placed it on the lever, and pulled. It swung down without a click. Nothing. It had just been a shot in the dark anyway. Then she thought of something. Europeans wrote the date in reverse, didn’t they? She tried it again: clockwise to twenty-eight, counterclockwise to seven, clockwise to eighty-seven. The click of the lever was the sweetest sound she’d heard in a long time. She swung open the door and shined her light in. Inside were stacks upon stacks of brick-sized bundles of bills, the columns in back reaching nearly to the ceiling.

  She picked one up, flipping through it. It was all twenties. She tore off the rubber band and counted. A thousand dollars, exactly. Then she saw another stack near the door that was all bricks of hundreds. Five thousand a brick. Lee emptied the duffel bag and stuffed bricks in instead: five thousand, then fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, as she did the math in her head.

  Four years of school at forty thousand a year, plus liv
ing expenses for her and a kid. Tomi had always imagined it a girl, and that’s how Lee saw the child, too. She’d be a little girl by the time Lee graduated. No more shit holes. Seventy a year times four equals two hundred eighty thousand. Lee added a bit extra for emergencies, then doubled what she had—something to leave for Mrs. Velasquez. By the time she had six hundred thousand dollars in her bag, it was bulging and so heavy she had to get under it to get it on her back. Her bad arm screamed at her. Lee took a last look. She had hardly made a dent in it; piles of cash still approached the ceiling.

  She was backing out when she saw something wrapped in plastic jutting out behind one of the piles. It leaned to one side of the safe and was pushed to the back. Lee set the bag down and pulled it out. It was large and rectangular and wrapped in duct tape and Hefty bags. She tore it open and could see the edges of half a dozen frames. Lee worked two fingers under the plastic and pulled down along the front, the tear opening onto a painting of two peasants in a wheat field. Lee tore the wrapping off and looked through the paintings. They were the kind she’d seen hanging in the museum: impressionist and cubist and fauvist works that did little for her at the time and still did little for her. They seemed old and drab here under the beam of her flashlight. If they were real they were probably worth more than all the cash in the room, but that knowledge did nothing to raise her appreciation of them. A smaller painting, sandwiched between two larger ones, caught Lee’s attention and she pulled it out.

  It was a small study in oil of a young woman with a long face, red lips, and large black depthless eyes. They weren’t the eyes of a Thrumm kid; they were just sad and inward-looking. She had wild, dark brown hair, a long neck, and skin like churned butter. The work was done in loose, expressive brushstrokes that gave a kind of impenetrable depth to its subject. It was the kind of work, Lee knew, that Duchamp would have dismissed as retinal. But she didn’t care; she thought painting was beautiful. It was small enough that it fit in her bag.

  Lee retouched the safe door and relatched The Large Glass over it. She climbed back up the stairs with difficulty, resting at each flight and trying not to breathe too much of the chemical air but nearly out of breath by the time she got to the top.

  It was dusk when she reached the motel. She paid in cash, doubling the rate in lieu of an ID. In the room she dropped the bag on the floor and took a shower. When she climbed out, feeling truly clean for the first time in memory, she pulled her dirty clothes back on and took a blank piece of paper from the desk. She thought about the questions Teutonik had asked her, the new bio she was supposed to come up with. Lee supposed she should start with a name.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE people to whom I owe gratitude for helping me with this book are legion. Here are a few from the top:

  I am deeply indebted to the tenacity and wisdom of my agent Julie Barer, who stuck with me way beyond the point of reason and kept making me go back at it. And to my editor, the wonderful Laura Tisdel, for her sharp eye and unforgiving bullshit detector, and for helping me realize the novel this came to be. I am not too proud to say that this book would still be an inchoate mess without the two of them behind it.

  To the whole brilliant team at Viking Penguin, whose unwavering support has meant everything to me.

  To Steve Dunn and the Eastern Frontier Foundation in Maine for their enormous support and inspiration. I also want to thank the Hermitage Foundation in Englewood, Florida, which allowed me the time and space to research and write a good chunk of the book.

  To my ridiculously generous friends Julia and Shane Stratton for being my Philadelphia tour guides. To Oldrĭška Baloušková for her wisdom on alchemy and her translation help into Czech. To Tom Bissell and D. Foy for their encouragement at the right times.

  To the generosity of those who slogged through early versions of this book, and whose insight helped to make it better draft by draft: Marco Morrone, Chris Hebert, Samuel Park, Jenn Stroud-Rossmann, Michelle Falkoff, Anderson Berry, Eugene Cross, Shauna Seliy, Brett Stithem, Zayd Dohrn, and Rachel DeWoskin. And to John (Marcello!) Beckman for that and so much more.

  To Ellen McClure and Dr. Raquel Cross for their help translating into French and Spanish, respectively.

  To Andrew Stafford, for his insights into The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, generally, and his thoughts on “The Boxing Match,” specifically.

  To Teri Boyd and Saša Hemon for love and cabbage.

  And to my parents, Mitchell and Lucia Rose, for everything.

  Most of all, my love and gratitude goes to my wife, Nami Mun, for persevering with me, and to our son, Auggie, for changing the way I see.

  Additionally, I’d like to acknowledge the following sources in assisting with research and inspiration:

  On Marcel Duchamp: Duchamp: A Biography (Calvin Tompkins, 1996) and Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Calvin Tompkins, 2013); Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp (Francis M. Naumann and Hector Obalk, eds., 2000); The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, eds., 1989); Marcel Duchamp, Notes (Marcel Duchamp, 1983); Marcel Duchamp, In the Infinitive (Richard Hamilton and Ecke Bonk, 1999); Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Linda Henderson, 2005); Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp (John F. Moffitt, 2003); Marcel Duchamp: The Bachelor Stripped Bare (Alice Goldfarb Marquis, 2002); The Duchamp Dictionary (Thomas Girst, 2014); Three New York Dadas and The Blind Man: Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood (Chris Allen and Dawn Ades, eds., 2014); Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (Pierre Cabanne, 1987); Marcel Duchamp: Manual of Instructions: Étant donnés (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987); Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés (Michael R. Taylor, 2009); and Marcel Duchamp: The Box in a Valise (Ecke Bonk, 1989). And to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the guards at which must have wondered about the suspicious guy spending so many hours in the Duchamp Room.

  On physics: The Elegant Universe (Brian Green, 2010); The Holographic Universe (Michael Talbot, 1991); Quantum (Manjit Kumar, 2011); and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (Carlo Rovelli, 2016).

  Like much of the book, the defunct Atlas missile silo turned drug lab/rave center has a basis in reality. I first read the story here: www.vice.com/read/life-is-a-cosmic-giggle-803-v18n5.

  Even off the Darknet, Duchamp has a large Web presence. I encourage a lot of free exploration, but found the following Web sites especially fruitful:

  For the definitive Web site on all things Duchamp, visit the Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal Tout-Fait: toutfait.com.

  The Marcel Duchamp World Community is also worth checking out: www.marcelduchamp.net.

  For a look at the 350K-word treatise on With Hidden Noise (yes, this actually exists!) by California State University Sacramento art department professor emeritus Kurt von Meier, “A Ball of Twine: Marcel Duchamp’s ‘With Hidden Noise,’” visit: www.csus.edu/indiv/v/vonmeierk/noise.html.

  Because Duchamp’s masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even is meant to be, in Duchamp’s words, a “delay in glass”—that is, a frozen moment in time of a system that is supposed to be imagined in motion—it can be difficult to wrap one’s head around. The best and most lucid explanation I have seen of the work is on Andrew Stafford’s Web site Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, which visually demonstrates what the system would look like if viewed in motion. His Web site looks insightfully at most of Duchamp’s work, but to get to the animation (and explanation) of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, visit the site and scroll horizontally along the time line to 1923: www.understandingduchamp.com.

  AUGUSTUS ROSE is a novelist and screenwriter. He was born in the northern California coastal town of Bolinas, and grew up there and in San Francisco. He lives in Chicago with his wife, the novelist Nami Mun, and their son, and he teaches fiction writing at the University of Chicago.

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