by JoeAnn Hart
“Where are the lobsters?” he asked.
“Set them free,” said Beaky. “That photo of your dad in your jacket pocket—I dried it off and put it on your desk. Needs new glass.”
Duncan turned to him. “How do you know that was my dad? You’ve met him?”
“Who else would you have with you on a day like this?”
Duncan ran his hands across his face. “You people aren’t supposed to have the keys to my office.”
Beaky took something out of his slicker pocket and handed it to Fingers, who came jingling over to Duncan with the goods. “Very funny,” Duncan said as he picked up the keys at his feet. They were not his keys; his keys were off somewhere with Syrie and her little dog. These were Annuncia’s keys. They were all there: one to her office, one to his, one to the storeroom, and one for the loading dock door. The one to the building itself wasn’t there. “Did Osbert give you the trash company’s key to get in the building?”
“The trash company,” said Beaky. “There’s an interesting subject.”
Duncan followed Beaky’s eyes to the far end of the room and saw someone move in the shadows. His waterlogged brain made out the figure of a man staring out the window, facing the storm head-on from the sea. He twisted slowly around, like a creature on the bottom of the ocean.
“Osbert?” said Duncan.
Using his walking stick, the man took a step out into the half-light of the room. “Don’t come any closer,” Duncan said. “If anything happens to me, they’ll know it was you.”
“But it’s not me. And it never was.” Osbert’s severe black suit made his body disappear in the darkness and cast his face in shadowy contrasts, making him look like an Old Masters portrait. It was the first time Duncan had ever seen him without his sunglasses. “Call me Adoniram.”
“Adoniram?” The roar of the storm accelerated, and Duncan felt his voice get suctioned out of the room. “Adoniram?” He tried to remember what the artist looked like in the old clips he’d seen on the New Adoniram Project website—the gangly, bearded young artist with a ponytail down his back. His hair had covered most of his face, so it was hard to tell. And yet. Thirty years, a shaved face, a wider girth, and a shorter ponytail—this was the same man who scratched words into the sand with a stick and called it art.
“I thought you were dead.”
“There are always two deaths,” said Beaky, without looking up from Fingers, who was executing some sort of a leaping war dance at his feet. “The one the world imagines, and the one you keep to yourself.”
“When you start to believe your own PR, it’s time to leave,” said Adoniram, the man formerly known as Osbert. “I grew sick and cynical with the world, and death seemed like the ultimate peace at the time. I was young. I should have been braver and just admitted what I thought of my art instead of running away from it.”
“I don’t understand,” said Duncan, shivering slightly under his blanket.
“I shouldn’t have filmed the happenings,” said Adoniram, studying the knobs on his stick. “The integrity of time-based art is inseparable from its transience and its embrace of loss. Record-keeping intellectualized the experience and made it a commodity, and it became part of the culture industry. But all negatives have some positives, and documentation kept the happenings alive all these years, and that I don’t regret. When the film clips surfaced on YouTube, they sparked a revival of my work by way of the New Adoniram Project, of which you became unknowingly, but significantly, involved.”
Duncan struggled to let this information sink in. The sight of Osbert being no longer Osbert threw him off, and he was still not sure if his life wasn’t in danger. “Why haven’t you revealed yourself? You’d be a huge hit.”
Adoniram looked up from his stick and smiled. “They would say I rose from the dead, and we all know where that leads to. Having said that, I am intrigued by the New Adoniram Project. It’s fascinating to see how theory evolves, and this whole business has helped move my new work forward. When I saw you and the factory on YouTube, I saw that Seacrest’s would have a significant role in it. The timing coincided with a breakthrough for me, and I could see what had to be done.”
“Done?” Duncan didn’t like the sound of that. He turned to Beaky, half-expecting to see a revolver trained on him, but he was tickling the ferret’s stomach with the tie. “What does Beaky have to do with all this? Is he your hired gun?”
“Beaky is my art dealer,” said Adoniram, and the two men exchanged a smile. “It was always tricky work, asking patrons to fund art that can’t be owned, and once I was dead, it made his job even harder. He went back to New York City to represent a new generation of artists.”
Beaky choked out a little laugh, and Fingers jumped sideways on the floor. Duncan looked at them all. “You’re not the mob? What about the trash company?”
“Rumor and fiction mixed with garbage. Although there’s really no reason why we couldn’t process municipal food waste along with the fish waste. Faster and cleaner than composting. Could be quite profitable. It’s something to consider.”
“Eight minutes to high tide,” said Beaky, studying his watch. “Another ten or so after that before it turns.”
“So what did you want Seacrest’s for if there’s no garbage?”
“Access to your equipment.” Adoniram held out his stick to a blue barrel in the corner. “Come closer, Duncan. Let us look out upon the great mystery while I tell you a story.”
The building shuddered from the force of the storm. There was no way out right now, no escape to Cora or Ten Bells, but if anything happened, at least it could be said he went down with his ship. He stepped around Beaky and the ferret and ducked under a conveyor belt to reach Adoniram. They stood side by side at the window, with the full power of the storm only inches from their faces on the other side of the glass. The sea had risen to right below the panes. The tight new energy-efficient windows were keeping even a drop of the waves from entering, but when the sea itself got past the sill, the glass could not possibly withstand the pressure. It would give.
“I think we should go upstairs to my office,” said Duncan. “It’ll be safer there.”
“Don’t think.” Adoniram touched his chest with the stick handle. “In art, the trick is to go directly from the eye to the heart, skipping the brain altogether. The words I used to write on the beach were merely forms, symbols of our culture—it was immaterial what the words meant. My goal was to bear witness to time and tide washing away the foul human stamp on nature.”
Duncan flinched when a wave slammed against the glass then disappeared into the night. “Were the words immaterial even in your last work, ‘God Help Us’?”
Adoniram looked out at the wild storm for a minute and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Those mattered. But they got washed away as easily as the words that didn’t. It is an unfeeling and undiscriminating force out there.”
“I wish I could be so unfeeling,” Duncan said, a bit stove in with emotion.
“No, you don’t. Feeling is the portal to experience. There can never be enough.” Adoniram raised his voice to be heard over the mounting wind. “After I rowed away from this very beach in 1977, I set out to stage my death. I was disgusted with art and I was disgusted with the world. New life comes to those who give it up, as my evangelist father used to say, so I made a leather coracle with my own two hands, stretching layers of goat leather over a wooden frame, whipping the skins together. I sewed the sails myself and cut down a small oak tree for a mast, then headed for the jagged cliffs of Western Ireland. I set the boat free to wash up on the rocks upon arrival and swam to shore with nothing but the hair on my head. I stayed there for close to twenty-five years, studying the Neolithic rock formations of a lost world, exploring the dolmens and the cromlechs, looking for answers. I lived in a stone hut I built myself in the abandoned hills. At night I read Churchill’s multi-volume account of his war, which I found in the village dump. By day I earned money caddying for rich Americ
ans at Ballynahinch, which is where Beaky found me.”
Duncan stared at Beaky in disbelief. “You play golf?”
He shrugged. “I do whatever it takes to win over clients.”
“He convinced me to move back,” said Adoniram. “It was time.”
“And it was time for me to leave New York,” said Beaky. “I bought the quarry.”
“As a cover, we encouraged rumors to the effect that we were refugees from the late-nineties Rhode Island mob breakup. Humans are always ready to believe the worst in others. Beaky in particular seemed to thrive in that persona.”
“It wasn’t all that different from the New York art scene,” said Beaky.
“The quarry made money, but not enough for all that I needed to do, so Beaky started an informal loan operation to tide us over. He gained a reputation as a bit of a thug, but it couldn’t be helped. Someone had to bail the boat while I rowed.”
“I do whatever I have to for my artists.” Beaky smiled at Adoniram.
“In the meantime, I found peace in the solidity and whiteness of the stone. This time I wasn’t just rearranging the material by drawing in the sand. Now I was actually mining the material—the very earth itself—discovering its secrets, changing slab to rock and rock to gravel, performing daily the miracle of transformation. Not unlike the way you turn fish scrap into fertilizer here, in this building. Both of us, Duncan, we smash delusions about permanence and beauty that we project upon the hogwash the rest of the world calls art.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Duncan, wrapping the blanket tighter around him as the waves got stronger and higher right outside the window. “I just process fish waste.”
“Don’t belittle your powers.” Adoniram rested his stick against the window and put both his hands on Duncan’s shoulders. His face held an expression of deep concern. “Or your capacity for love.”
“Love?” said Duncan, but Adoniram had already turned back to his subject.
“The quarry was my canvas,” he said, holding his arms wide apart as if describing a fish he’d caught. “I wanted to find a return to meaning and remembered everything I’d learned from Churchill. He wrote that ‘all the great things are simple and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.’ So for years, after the crew left for the day, I used a backhoe to arrange and rearrange the gravel into those words before the delivery trucks came to take it all away in the morning. I felt as if I was sending those sentiments out into the world. It was very satisfying. I was quite complete. I felt that it was possible for the world to be saved as long as at least one person learns something and acts on it. I called it my Churchill Series. But my education was not yet done. One day, as I was walking along a newly dynamited site, I fell into a natural split in the earth. I came very close to death, but there was a strong presence in that crevice that pulled me back to life. It pulsed with gravity. When I came to, I was a different man, transformed by my experience, the very experience I had sought but could not achieve by faking my death in 1977. It took days to crawl back up to the light, and I was dehydrated and half-mad, and I was covered in a dusty substance. Can you imagine what I found, Duncan, deep inside the earth?”
Duncan shook his head. It was hard taking in this story with the entire North Atlantic ocean banging against the building the way it was.
“An ancient ocean bed. A living ocean that had been transformed into a thick crust, as dried up as a dusty slab, but recognizable nonetheless. I saw the future.”
A wave rose from the ocean and filled the window before them. Duncan stepped back as it slammed into the building. “Do you have a dry cell phone?” he said. “I’d like to see if my wife is okay and let her know I’m alive.”
“Your wife is just fine.” Adoniram took Duncan by the blanket and brought him closer to the glass. “As it happens, I’d been playing around with micro-art at the time, doing installations that could only be seen under a microscope. I was feeling guilty about the diesel I was using for the backhoe, so I wanted to explore art that had a small carbon footprint. I scraped some of the dust on a slide, and lo!”
“Lo?”
“Yes, lo. That’s when I identified the dust molecules as diatoms, a type of phytoplankton which forms the basis for the entire marine food chain. A single-celled workaholic that sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, when it dies, sinks to the bottom of the ocean carrying that carbon with it, making the air fit for humans.”
“Kills pests, too,” said Beaky. “The cells have sharp edges that can slice through the soft underbelly of a slug.”
“Slice?” Duncan’s hand went to his throat.
“But like our friend the eel, this useful creature of the sea is dying off because of warming waters. What we’ve done to the ocean is enough, as Churchill would say, ‘to disgust a sow.’ But the more research I did, the more I realized I had something extraordinary on my hands. When I looked them up, I found out that they were mega-celled diatoms that hadn’t been seen in the oceans in millions of years. My particular diatoms were not just dead, they were extinct.”
Duncan looked outside and felt the ocean very close by. “Dead and extinct. Hmm.”
“The bigger the diatom, the more carbon it absorbs—a savior in the form of a single cell. The thing to do was to reintroduce the giant diatom to the oceans, execute a truly major art installation on a global scale. No filming, no websites.” He put his arms around Duncan’s shoulders.
“You can’t reintroduce a dead species,” said Duncan, removing his arm and almost losing his blanket in the process.
“In art you can. ‘Irrational judgment leads to new experience,’ as Sol LeWitt, my old comrade in conceptual art used to say. The diatom died so that we could live. In return, we will symbolically restore it back to the ocean.”
Duncan thought uneasily of the death clause. “What has this got to do with me and Seacrest’s?”
“Transformation and distribution. I needed both of those things to complete my vision. The vein of diatomaceous material was thick. It was laborious to even retrieve it from deep in the earth, but retrieve it we did. The quarried chunks were crushed and compressed, then, bit by bit, brought here at night, where Annuncia and Wade powdered it in the grinder and integrated it into your fish scrap and seaweed powder. Come spring, it will be distributed as fertilizer, shipped out to farms and gardens and parks around the world, where drain-off will take care of the rest. Everything flows to the sea in time. It’s the sea’s biggest asset, and its biggest liability. I’ve put Beaky in charge of global marketing.”
They both looked at Beaky, but he was looking at his watch as he stood up from the floor. Fingers was on his shoulder.
“Why go through all that trouble?” asked Duncan. “Just dump it in the sea.”
“‘Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically,’ said Sol. My concept is to integrate it in a substance that will be spread haphazardly and unsuspected in different environments around the earth, and that is the path that must be followed. But dumping is also a part of the plan. Because dumping in the sea has destroyed the sea, we are going to launch the new installation by tossing a symbolic barrel into the deep tonight.”
“High tide,” said Beaky.
There was a symphony of violence outside, a destructive cleansing and reordering of the world from top to bottom. Duncan did not understand how the building stood the force.
“We’d better get out of here,” he said, feeling his words get absorbed into the noise of weather outside. “My mother says this place is going to collapse at high tide.”
“My mother says,” mimicked Adoniram. “But who knows? Maybe the old gal is right. Water is always trying to get back to where it came from, and it once covered the earth. It is time, perhaps, to return to being an aquatic ape, as your friend Slocum suggests.”
“Not my friend,” said Duncan. “You’re the one he gave the jellyfish processing rights to.”
“
Jellyfish.” Adoniram shook his head and turned his attention back to the sea. “Brainless and spineless, and yet we’ve let them take over the ocean. They adapt and reproduce quickly—far better than we do, eh Duncan?”
Duncan bristled. Was this a dig about his own reproductive problems? “I don’t see how we’ve ‘let’ them do anything.”
“But we have. We’ve killed off so many marine species we’ve created the empty space for jellyfish to fill. We let them spin out of control, and now we must do something to control them. Slocum’s recipe is promising. The total amount of plastic trash in all the oceans is a hundred million tons. Sea turtles are eating plastic bags instead of jellyfish. If we could use jellyfish matter to replace even some of those plastics, it would create a delicious circle. While I was getting my stomach pumped at the hospital, I realized that it’s not enough to work in symbols, such as words in gravel or extinct diatoms in fertilizer. Lying in the emergency room, I wanted to recreate nature’s churn, restoring balance back to the universe. The Diatom Project is the artistic expression of the concept; the Jellyfish Project is the tangible application.”
“The universe notwithstanding, I could have held the rights to process the tangible jellyfish as well as you,” said Duncan. “You stole it out from under me.”
“Not stole—protected. Annuncia convinced me that you seemed too fragile to take it on right then, and it was too important to fail. However, having seen your determination to get here, I’d have to reassess. I wouldn’t have credited you with so much fire. ‘Difficulties mastered are opportunities won.’”