—You stopped seeing these colors when you had your accident?
—Can we just say “lost my eye”? “Had an accident” makes me sound like a little kid. Not a guy who lost an eye. From his head.
—What you’re saying makes no sense. It’s the blind people who hallucinate colors and shapes and little creatures—I’m not kidding. Don’t laugh. My grandmother went through it with macular degeneration. What you’re saying is the exact opposite. It doesn’t make sense why you would stop seeing these colors after you lost your eye. I also don’t get why you’re upset about it.
—I’m not upset.
—So you’re talking about starting a fight at an art fair so you can, what, try to see the world again with some cool afterglow effects? Why don’t you just take drugs like a normal person?
Another idea like a slap to the cheek. She could be right. He could be picking a fight to bring back the Gods.
—I’ve never told anyone about this, except maybe a couple therapists when I was ten. I know I sound certifiable, but the colors had nothing to do with my injury. And I want you to know these things early on.
—Why tell me?
—I spent a lot of time envisioning the one person I could tell this to.
—And?
—And she was a redhead, but it looks like I’m going to have to make do.
Stevie jerked down on his hand, making his bad shoulder pop. She pulled down on the same arm with her other hand, climbed him, arms raised and hands outstretched on his collarbones. He bent like a bough in the wind.
For a second, their breathing braided. She pulled back.
—Remember that one time you told me you were crazy and saw gods as colors?
Owen picked up the ball even though Eva & Adele had made this dabbling in time travel seem far less original.
—That’s not how I remember it. It was a warm spring evening . . .
—I’m pretty sure it was summer, because Art Basel was on.
—That’s right. We were in Basel. Midsummer.
—June.
—And I didn’t say I was crazy. I said you would think I was crazy when I told you what I believed in, how I saw the world.
—What did I say after that whole color thing?
—You said preliminary results were ninety-four percent crazy, but that you were going to have to run some rigorous tests to confirm.
—I had to say something to keep you from kissing me. I was still convinced you were using me to get to Brigitte.
—Who? Oh, she was that girl you hung around who had the mustache, but no one told her?
—No, she was the girl you were with when I met you.
—I think you may be remembering that wrong. The kiss, I mean.
Stevie stopped in front of him. A rising moon bounced off the struts of the last bridge in Basel. She craned up to meet his lips and then fell back on her heels, leaving Owen with the open mouth and closed eyes of someone given fully to sleep. She smiled and looked down. With her head cradled in his hands, he kissed her again. She immediately picked up the conversation and dragged Owen along the riverbank.
—You were, what, twenty-four at the time?
—Twenty-one.
—You were twenty-one and . . .
—And I had just dropped out of college and was still trying to make it as an artist.
—That’s right. That was in Basel, just before we left for L’Hotel in Paris.
—You’re remembering that wrong. L’Hotel was in 2007. When I had some money. I’m talking about 2004, when I was making good on a promise.
—That’s right. You made a transparency of it for that laminalism thing you were into. The first one was in Berlin, and you felt it was too limited, so you mapped the next memory on all of Eastern Europe. First we went to Prague, then Budapest, and we stayed in Croatia until we found that villa in Trieste with the enormous ceilings.
—No. I’m pretty sure that was the night I ended Kurt Wagener’s career.
That broke the spell.
—Good solution, humiliate yourself some more. You should be more worried about your default machismo than having some photos hung up.
—That’s how I deal with things.
—Here’s how I deal with things. I don’t let people I care about get themselves in trouble. Whatever happened, happened. Let’s enjoy a few days together, because what you’re talking about is going to get you arrested, and even if it doesn’t, totally fucking sucks.
—Those pictures are going to hang in my head if I don’t do something about it. I’m not willing to see those images every day. If I can get them out, I may be worth your attention.
Owen thought there was truth there and hoped she wasn’t going to laugh at him.
She didn’t laugh. But she did walk away.
Owen collected his bag and told the computer scientists that he wouldn’t be staying the night after all. They gave back a twenty and kept the rest of his money.
Behind their building, a stream burbled over rocks and raked cement, eventually hitting the Rhine. He rambled in the dark through the tufts of grass and sat down on a riverside slope, closing his eyes to visualize the map of the fair’s floorplan.
The hall had only one entrance and exit, but emergency doors opened to what looked like a Hollywood back lot. The best way to get to Pfaff Galleries, Kurt’s booth, was to pass through Anisha Desai’s installation of children talking inside a pitch-black room, Projection (2004). Passing through this ink-black corridor, the viewer would face Kurt’s exploding flashbulbs and naked models strutting behind Plexiglas.
All Owen had discovered about Projection was that it would be dark, and viewers were asked to watch their step. It was easy to imagine Kurt cannibalizing Anisha Desai’s piece, explaining it away in the context of his own work. He had probably given a few dozen interviews in the past week, telling anyone who cared about how he’d requested a redesign of the layout so that a viewer would emerge from total darkness into flashbulbs, into the disorienting glare of his work, Exposure (2004), like a prisoner who suddenly has the hood ripped off his head and is forced to stare into interrogation lights.
To Kurt’s credit, it did appear that he was holding Art Basel hostage. Anyone who wanted to see Red Rhombus and the bulk of Hall 2.0 had to pass through Kurt’s booth. Until the flashbulbs ran out, everyone who mattered in the art world would be treated as a suspected terrorist.
Owen had seen Kurt enter enough rooms to know that he never stopped anywhere near an entrance. He always rolled to a back corner, which is where Owen would surely find him, surrounded by a triptych of life-size torture photographs.
Beyond the description Owen had read of cracking flashes and the replica lighting of the Wasserturm barroom, he had little idea what to expect in the way of art. He had no recollection of the Sheetrock sculpture or Keith Haring tribute that the art critic had mentioned. The work hanging could be anything, but it had to become nothing by the end of the night.
He estimated it would take less than a minute to walk from Kurt’s booth to the main exit. He imagined a big box store five minutes to closing. He could lose anyone trailing him in Desai’s pitch-black installation. No time for speeches. This was going to have to be fast and decisive and final.
With a sharp white eye he cut through the night and headed straight for the fair. Over the bridge, exhibition hall now in sight, he put on his coat and tried to look like someone who wasn’t about to do something horrible.
Surprisingly, hundreds of guests were filing in the main entrance when he arrived. Lady Percy had made it sound like an extension of her dinner party, and to be fair, half the people shuffling past security were wearing clothes that used to be white, should have been white, but now appeared rose quartz in the tamped light of sunset.
The crowd at Guest Services waiting for their access cards seemed puzzled by his appearance. The knots were Windsor. The shoulders padded. He was soiled corduroy and moccasins, and these people noticed shoes and cuffs. Whenever
the collectors looked in his direction, their conversations stopped. Even after giving him the benefit of the doubt of being a major young artist, they were visibly annoyed to be waiting in any line, let alone a line with people like Owen in it. The stares and edged silences came straight out of Fellini. This crowd would be at Kurt’s booth. The main hall closed in an hour, but no one crowded. They reminded him of opera patrons after the first xylophone tolled them to their seats.
—I see a lava waterfall, cooling into black glass.
—I see a turquoise butterfly, shimmering with gasoline wings.
—It’s like looking under a microscope. Little floaty things.
—I see an anglerfish snapping at her prey.
—Ooh. I’m seeing something now. A glowing jellyfish.
—It looks like a plastic bag.
—I see a lion’s mane.
—Are you guys really seeing things, or are you making it all up?
—I see a trumpet, but it’s a trumpet in the dark.
Owen stood in the middle of a room that was nothing-black, total darkness except for the phosphorescent blue bracelet on each viewer’s wrist and a glowing strip along the floor. Children spoke from seven or eight different speakers positioned throughout the room, relating what they saw in the blackness and spinning the viewers around to follow the conversation.
Rose had swollen to red. In the heavy dark of Anisha Desai’s installation, red fringed the blackness unexpectedly, like ink type lit by the summer sun. With open eyes, the red was uniform, dark, and not quite familiar. With closed eyes, he hovered over red waterfalls, red accelerating to white in the impact zone. The hue was too hot to be carmine and glowed brighter the closer he looked.
A minute tranced. Like standing over a pit of embers.
He gathered himself near the exit, clutching the hem of the thick velvet curtain that separated Kurt’s show. He stood high and flexed his broad back, muscles winging out then holding him together. He didn’t know this color. Most of his vision was smeared red, as if someone were pressing a finger over his closed eyelid. He smelled cigarettes, heard laughter and shouts of exclamation, and gritted until his molars nearly cracked. Arms strong and ready to tear.
Three loud exhales and then he threw open the curtain, wheeling into Kurt’s booth.
The artists seated at the replica barroom table, clad in lumberjack plaid to a man, erupted in a series of hoots at Owen striding from Desai’s black curtain to Kurt’s strobe and glare.
The women behind the glass dropped their Polaroids and momentarily watched. One of them shouted out, “He’s here!” Owen turned to see a six-foot model on a three-foot platform wearing nothing but red high heels and a double coat of baby oil.
Bang!
A flashbulb exploded in his face. Then white.
The afterimage settled, a thousand reds falling to the ground like raining ash. An ultramarine rose from the deposition. Blue shook red away like an unbelted robe. Athene stepping from the husks and lifting a blue film over the expectant scene. Owen stood in a misting blue light, everything lifted and saturated by a light he thought had passed.
Owen’s flash-eyed stumbles backed him into a blue sawhorse reading POLICE LINE—DO NOT CROSS. He focused on the props and photos from the staged torture in Berlin.
Hal leapt from the crowd of artists drinking at the makeshift bar and jammed the shutter of his digital camera, bursting at four frames per second and bouncing flash into the walls. One hand held the battery grip, the other finned the crowd clear. Then there were too many people for Hal to get a clear line of sight and he dropped to the floor and shot up through a collector’s legs.
A white pedestal, similar to the one in Todd Zeale’s gallery, held a slat of parquet flooring under an acrylic dome. Back in Berlin, Owen had scraped a deathbed message on that narrow piece of wood in some fever-dream language. He had carved the runes from pure pain, and now it was not only public but on the auction block.
His reaction was instant.
Cross-armed, Owen grabbed the flutes of the plinth and shouldered it like a club. He carried it around looking for a target. The wooden slat, with characters in some fever message etched on top, fluttered in the air and then fell like chopsticks. He swung the pedestal at the Sheetrock partition separating Kurt’s booth from the annex.
At the sound of a real collision, of something shattering in real time rather than art time, the crowd silenced. His heavy movements made it seem as if he was underwater, but everyone else was frozen. In this slower time, he knew this performance had been staged. He knew that he was meant to emulate Kurt at the Todd Zeale Gallery. They wanted him here to destroy everything and trusted that they could sell it as art. But interpreting the situation changed nothing. Some things are either faced or fatal. This all must come down.
Owen’s extraneous thoughts sucked back like water and the sand itself, all poised to detonate on the shore. The group at the bar was either standing on the table or on the stools to get a better view. The models were now clumped into one corner of their glass enclosure, craning their necks and pushing up on one another’s shoulders to see what would happen next. Two of the girls exited through the invisible door in the wall, racing around the perimeter to make it back for the climax.
Halogen spotlights were intended to cast an air of mystery over a dented-in cardboard refrigerator box. Owen thought Kurt might be inside, waiting to spring out like a jack-in-the-box. He kicked the box to the ground then stomped a corner. No Kurt.
Owen then saw his shadow imprinted on a Sheetrock panel. He didn’t remember making that imprint, but no one else could have left a six-eight trace. Kurt had spotlit the image and hung it upside down, so that it dominated the room like an anti-crucifix.
Owen took two steps and then jumped and gripped hard on either end. He swung with the piece, temporarily suspended by the framing wire, then jerked down, dropping his weight and snapping the suspension cables that held it aloft. He landed squarely on two feet and brought the panel down with him, cracking it in two over his knees. He threw the two halves to the side and turned around.
Kurt clapped. He sat in his wheelchair, twenty feet away, crowned by life-size gelatin-silver prints of Owen being wrenched: Owen naked with his arms to the side, electrodes wiring his fingers to a car battery; Owen flat on the ground, carving out the very splint of wood on display and wearing a nylon braided leash that ran from his red neck to Brigitte’s hand; and to complete the triptych, a full frontal shot of him on the spool with Saskia and Brigitte in wet clothes licking his leg, clawing his ribs, and offering him to the camera with cupped hands.
Hal circled around Kurt and Owen like a boxer working a heavy bag. The only noise was his shutter slicing in a continuous whirr. The two escaped models came sliding up in bathrobes. They nestled in next to Eva & Adele, who for the first time weren’t smiling. The models running through the halls of Basel had corralled half of the fair’s attendees. Billionaires with light-up LED bar coasters, Hal’s idea, continued to file in. The ring was closing. Altberg stood next to Zeale, calculating the cumulative net worth of the hemisphere. The white party was here, now washed ultramarine and shoaling together like glittering fish. Louise Bourgeois was the eye, whispering which way to move and what Lady Percy and her followers should be looking for in the performance.
The last echo of Kurt’s clap died in the rafters. Hal released the shutter and checked the exposure value on his camera. For a moment, there was total silence.
Kurt cracked his neck—two quick pops on the right side, three slow cracks on the left—locked the brakes of the wheelchair, and slapped a palm on each armrest. Hoisting himself like a gymnast on a pommel horse, he swung open his legs and then clapped them together in front of him as he leapt to the ground. He stuck the landing, rose to full height, and pumped his fists to the sky. He looked around, expecting a roomful of applause, but satisfied with shock, awe, and silence.
With three long strides Kurt closed half the distance between hims
elf and Owen. Those first steps were quick and decisive, Kurt still trusting that he was the biggest presence in Europe. But once he reached Owen’s shadow, he slowed, eventually to a stop.
The ring of spectators clamped shut. Each movement, however slight, annealed the three rows of tailored jackets, five-figure pantsuits, bathrobes, and all variety of uniform. The crowd, now malleable, expanded with Owen’s inhale, contracted in a tight flex with his exhale. All filtered blue and the crowd breathing through gritted teeth, wheezing like the blue jets of a flame. Though they were all prepared for violence, no one expected the suddenness and finality of the show.
—I stand for art. While the world stands idly by. The role of—
Owen’s white eye and fast approach truncated Kurt’s monologue. Kurt kept his arms to his side, squinted with every muscle of his face, and clenched his teeth in anticipation of Owen’s looping right fist. Hal, inches away, focused on Kurt’s jaw, shutter whirring to capture the punch.
Owen swung wide of Kurt’s ear then jerked him forward by the base of the neck. Kurt mouthed the air once, like a goldfish, in the quarter second it took Owen to hook the frayed cuff of his own left sleeve with two fingers of his right hand, locking the choke. Owen sliced his left forearm in front of Kurt’s trachea. Kurt could breathe well enough to sneer and spit out a few expletives, thinking he would be fine.
But this was a blood choke. Kurt’s victory of breath was meaningless. Like a gaping fish on a deck, he needed circulation, not air.
Owen compressed both carotid arteries and twisted his right wrist until Kurt went from flushed to thundercloud blue. The stitching on Owen’s left sleeve held. He hanged Kurt high, pinning him against the wall, jolted him up and then slammed him into the photo of Owen on the floor with a dog collar around his neck. Mere inches separated Owen’s ulnae. Kurt’s neck in between.
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall Page 23