“You can see,” he says, “Percy’s feelings of contentment. Look here, on this schematic representation of the affective circumplex…”
“Oh wonderful, wonderful!” the Mysterious Woman responds.
Thankfully, a few minutes later a bell is rung and a new set of fellows are brought in to admire the painter’s work and we leave to resume our own.
Out in the hallway, thinking to seize this rare opportunity, I look for the Mysterious Woman, only to find her walking away with an admin I don’t know. They seem very friendly. Intimate, perhaps. They are laughing about something. (Me?)
(“I see it!” I had said. But I didn’t “see it.”)
It was a lie. God, that wasn’t me, I think, as I wait for the elevator back to the ground level. Nothing about that picture was me. And I’m steaming mad by the time I exit—especially mad that I’ve misused this opportunity to speak more with the Mysterious Woman. I’ve only embarrassed myself. And so I commence my sulk back toward my flat. Except I’ve gotten off two floors too soon, and so double back.
(SUDDEN ENLIGHTENMENT)
Admin Miss Fairfax has come to my rooms again now, where she finds me prone, staring into the middle distance, replaying my conversation with the Mysterious Woman over and over in my mind.
Hello, Percy. Which one is yours? (she said.)
My—? (I said.)
Your portrait (she said…)
Miss Fairfax, oblivious, walks over to the vanity and removes a hairbrush, then walks us both to the mirror, sits me down in a chair, and stands behind me. She stays still for the longest time, looking at the mirror, taking me, and herself, in. Comparing, I suppose, this picture in front of her with the one she herself has formulated of us as a productive team. She reaches up and pulls off her glasses, places them on the vanity. Then she raises the brush, and puts it to the crown of my head, my scalp, and then slowly, slowly pulls it down through the thinning thread of my hair, down the right side of my face, never looking anywhere but at our reflection, her head tilting, almost imperceptibly, into a classical assessment pose. The brush is given a little jerk and is lifted, and goes back up, and then back down again, her wrist languorous, like she’s bowing an instrument. This goes on for a while. I can’t look away either. What does she see there? Why is she so captivated? Then her eyes shift, just a tiny degree, to one side, barely a millimeter, and abruptly, she’s looking at me—looking at her—in the glass. In this shift, in the abrupt change that takes place, I feel the brush scrape along my scalp, for the first time, but can’t remember having felt this, or any other sensation, while she was grooming me. Though my head now tingles as if mildly and pleasantly burned. Staff-lines of prickles along my crown. This touching makes our interactions substantially different from my interactions with the Mysterious Woman. When someone touches you, a boundary is crossed. On one side of this boundary, there is no touching, and then, suddenly there is a moment, perhaps indistinguishable in every other way from all previous moments, except that now there is touching. Touching is off or on. Whether it is lovers, combatants, or some inane manner of therapeutic contact. Touching is on, or it is off.
You learn things about people from touching. And, once again, I’m not referring to sexual things. What you learn is something regarding their ineffable, secret self. Without touching, you can only guess at the touched self. What is transferred through touch? I’m not sure. Maybe selfhood is like a virus, a species or combination of molecules which, once sloughed off, transmit little bundles of information. Who knows. Idk. What I do know is that Miss Fairfax is less enigmatic to me now, thanks to this transferal, through this, our material connection.
Meanwhile, her mirror eyes are now locked upon my mirror eyes, and the hairbrush is moving back and forth, as if sculpting my head out of clay…and I shiver, and come to.
Enough, I think.
Enough of having my hair brushed. (I am not, after all, a child.)
She knows why I have to leave her now—knows as well as I do.
“I have Group.”
And, as if it were only for her benefit, I add, “I must be single-minded about my project. Totally ruthless.
“Ruthless,” I repeat.
Then I knock the brush from her hand, and rise toward the door.
Openmouthed, she hurries to follow.
And when I open the door to my flat, there’s a piece of white paper slumped up against it as if exhausted. I look down at it, then look over to Miss Fairfax, who looks at me as if awaiting the answer to a minor question.
(CHOLER AND WORSE)
Paper, paper, everywhere
and all the fellows stink.
Paper, paper, everywhere
and I am stained with ink.
(THE CONCIERGE)
Later after the Group session is out, it is evening of course, and so we spill from the Annex. There’s paper all over, its whiteness instilling the grounds with a generalized luminosity, a dim fluorescence, a glow that is, as if the sheets of paper were magic lanterns, reflectors, strewn there to collect and redouble the attenuated moonlight. The actual moon presides, far off in the sky, foggy and fuzzed at the edges like a tennis ball (and practically the same color), and I think I can see a few stars as well albeit barely. It has been a while since I’ve seen stars, but there they are, Rn.
Gemini, right above me? Upside down (antipodes, etc.).
On my way up to my flat before heading to the refectory to meet with the others, persistent sheet of paper stuck to the bottom of a
the my shoe,
the concierge of the Residential Enclave jack-in-the-boxes out of an alcove, just as I walk past, as if she were waiting for my arrival and had nothing better to do than eject herself out from the darkness at an unsuitable time, as if she has, herself, only exploded into being at the moment that our paths intersect, like a thought experiment in solipsism.
(THE PACKAGE)
The Enclave’s ever-vigilant sentinel explains that someone has left me another package.
Left it for me in my flat, on the table in the middle of the living room.
And having conveyed this information, she nods to indicate to me that her part is now played. Though she clearly is fending off follow-up questions, I ask them anyway.
“Who dropped it off?” I ask.
A man.
“Someone from the Institute?”
No. Just a man.
“What was he wearing?”
Just clothes.
“Normal?”
Normal-like.
And she begins to walk slowly backward into the shadows.
I stride the stairs, click open the door. Whisper up the lights.
There it is.
The package.
My device is back.
29
(DRAWING THE VEIL)
There are many rows of folding chairs, set up on flooring panels in the desert. The hum of diesel generators. Smell of gasoline. By the time we arrive—and we are among the last to—the sun is sunk beneath the rim of the world and everything is set with a bluish cast. The world of the desert, cooling for the evening. Another fucking sunset. Another Discourse™.
This one is different though, as it is Ousman Al’Hatif’s, and it is to be delivered out here in the sand. Off-campus and on-site. Might as well be off-world. I’m allowed to attend, but barely. Still on probation, obviously, and I’ve been told by Miss Fairfax that I’m on a short leash.
What I say back to her is: “No worries. I’m a good boy. Model citizen.”
Miss Fairfax returns my smile with a look full of fatigue. When she looks away, out the window of the bus, I hold my hand in front of me experimentally, and it trembles.
Our bus, the last tonight, and thus half-empty, pulls up into a car park, which is little more than
a series of cordons at the edge of the sand. Miss Fairfax and a few stragglers and I debark and walk between the other cars and the lorries, down a long runway into the dunes, toward the lights, toward the festivities, and I experience that familiar surge of pitiful emptiness which comes from being out on the perimeter of an occasion at dusk.
The rest of the Institute is already seated, ringed around a sandstone platform—the plinth upon which Mr. Al’Hatif’s statue used to stand before it was uncermemoniously detonated. There, hiding something large and unmistakably statue-shaped, is a large white covering, a canvas shroud.
We are to witness an unveiling. The reconstruction, one presumes. It looks to me as if we are congregants, gathered to bow down to a gigantic, stylized, cartoon ghost.
Around the plinth and shroud are a series of skyjack hydraulic platforms, each one carrying lighting arrays and speakers. There is the general low murmuring of a crowd held in abeyance. Excusing myself, I edge through the aisles and I take the only chair I can find unoccupied, in the back row, splitting off from Miss Fairfax, who has squeezed up front into a reserved seat between some other admins. There are so many people here; who are they all? They can’t all be from the Institute. I now see a party of local officials, sat in a roped-off area toward the front. There is also a group of Institute bigwigs and admins, including the Director of course, who cannot be missed, sitting, as usual, in his two chairs, both ready to buckle like overburdened pack mules beneath him.
Behind the shrouded statue, I can see the Institute’s banner, with its crossed motif, being unfurled by workers, spots being trained upon it. Mr. Al’Hatif is atop one of the platforms now, like a conductor on a podium, directing helpers in hard hats. At one point, he turns and looks out behind him, over the crowds, and I think for a moment that he sees me, but he is only looking out toward the distant red glow of lights in the ad hoc parking perimeter, out into the desert, and I suppose he is feeling another form of pitiful emptiness: the emptiness of the partygoer in the thick of things, looking out into the night sky. (The sky waits, but invariably, sensing its moment, it will encroach and extinguish every party, put it right out with a hiss.)
Now, there is the nothing-moan of microphone feedback, and Mr. Al’Hatif turns toward his equipment. The Director stands up and addresses the crowd, introduces a rumpled-looking bureaucrat, who, after contextualizing the statue for us—its historical, spiritual, and artistic importance—introduces the man of the hour, Mr. Ousman Al’Hatif. A hot wind blows and briefly delays the heavily choreographed sequence of events. We all shield our faces for a moment until it dies down. Rn there is the familiar lead-in music, applause, and Mr. Al’Hatif strides onto the center of the stage, uniform crisp, headphone mic in place, looking as donnish as ever, but also weirdly assured under the high beams of our collective gaze.
* * *
—
“And at long length did we stand at the end of the col, in the dunes, and look out over the immensity of the Freehold’s Great Bodhisattva, and did we readily wonder if anywhere under the firmament was there a more singular artifact…”
* * *
—
These words come booming out from the black speaker stacks behind the platform, taking us all by surprise. The volume is adjusted, duly, downward, and Mr. Al’Hatif, readjusting his headset, continues:
Mr. Ousman Al’Hatif’s Discourse™ concerning this statue’s destruction and reconstruction to be indicated by another text altogether—this particular text having been lifted from a middle chapter of the book I’ve been reading, the book which rests currently, heavy on my lap, the text of which has begun, without my noticing, to interpenetrate the words of the very speech unfolding before me now, and which will do just fine as a substitute for the thing itself; or, rather, as a substitute for my impressions of the Discourse™ (or of any other Discourse™ for that matter).
“And what was (he) talking about? What train of thought was he pursuing? I gathered my wits to try to catch up, but did not succeed right away….It was indeed rather odd. (He) adopted a hybrid terminology, a blend of poetic and academic styles; all of it uncompromisingly scientific, but in an ornate, lilting tone…which may have accounted for the flush on the ladies’ cheeks, and the way the gentlemen kept flicking their ears. In particular (he) constantly used…a gently irresolute sense, so that one was never quite sure whether he referred to sanctified, or more passionate and fleshly forms—leaving one feeling slightly nauseated and seasick…He destroyed illusions, he was merciless in giving knowledge the honor it was due, he left no room for tender faith…and he…gave the impression of some fundamental idealism…his look…rather startling…He supported his arguments with all kinds of examples and anecdotes from the books and loose pages that lay before him; even reciting poetry. (He) discussed…frightening forms…bizarre, agonized, eerie mutations…logic…looked up and down the rows as he asked his questions, as if seriously expecting an answer from his listeners. But no, he would have to provide the answers himself, though he had already provided so many. No one else knew…but he would be sure to know this too…(with) his glowing eyes, his waxen pallor, his black beard…barely breathing…his voice rising noticeably…A sigh passed through the assemblage…he set his head erect again…then he let his arms fall….”
As Mr. Al’Hatif makes this esoteric gesture, there’s a billow, and a loud luffing, and a game-show gasp from the crowd (ooowaaaaaahhh), and the shroud drops to the stage floor. It is difficult at first to make out what is underneath it, and our eyes need to adjust to the sudden loss of the white sheet, but when we do we see that there is nothing beneath it at all but the platform itself.
Empty. There is nothing there.
A general murmuring.
(What is Mr. Al’Hatif up to?)
Now the Disputants, who are seated directly behind me, go at it:
Disputant 1: (A humanist interpretation.)
Disputant 2: (A fanatically nihilist one.)
Just about everyone begins talking now, all at once—but imagine these voices all overlaid atop one another, stacked as it were in a kind of imitative counterpoint.
Things are getting heated.
At which point, there is a large clicking sound and the projectors, suddenly, all turn on at once, everything goes quiet, and there it is.
Wait, what?
Oh.
Glowing in the night, in twinkling reds and impossible golds: the statue.
The statue!
The precise size of the original, which means just looming.
An exquisite hologram. A man, perhaps, though a protean man, with breasts, sure, and other indicators of gender fluidity, not to mention the head of a manga kitten, eyes half-lidded beatifically. A glowing saffron robe, decked out in colorful, vivid emblems adorning its surface, swimming on it like cilia in solution—corporate identities of every stripe, from logos to word-marks to slogans and spokespeople and spokes-creatures, for mobile phone companies, professional sports clubs, fast-food chains, various hieroglyphs delineating political affiliation, a taxonomy of religious symbols, children’s book characters, superheroes, fetishistic sexual depictions of outré specificity, the iconography, signifiers, the dog whistles and catchphrase-ology of a hundred forms of mass consumption. One of the Buddha’s hands is upright against its breast in a gesture of half prayer; the other is stuck out in front of him/her/it, and it is holding an erect spear which ends in a rudely phallic bulb. The statue wears, on one foot, like a shoe, a gilt SUV; the other foot, bare, is resting upon ten small, straining bright blue dwarves in red, flaccid caps, who collectively hold the foot and leg aloft like Atlas does the world. Meanwhile, the statue’s cape flows all around it in a diaphanous tide, silently washing over the stage and over the heads of the audience like runny watercolors. On the back of this out-rushing cape is an all-capped motto I cannot yet make out.
He is a towering
god; constituted of naming rights and overlapping consensus polls. An answer to a series of aesthetic-preference research surveys; a perfect being, as arrived at through the application of clickbait questionnaires; a god of the comments section; a god of trolls; extrapolated through data collection using deep learning, statistical algorithms; a god, carefully honed and modulated at the hands of self-correcting analytics, and primed by corporate consultants, a god of on-brand integration and reliable marketability. A god of outrage-fatigue, a god of indolence and ceded agency. A recognizable, commoditized god; scalable; cross-platform. Vertical. Fractal. Nested. Aura-less, yet awash in a new species of the auratic: emanating flatness like a force. A god of now; a now-god for a now-time.
Now God. Our god.
And now I can see, through it all, despite the throbbing lights of the Black Mass, with uproar, its horror vacui, its decadence, its neon contaminates, its grandeur, its barbarism, I see the motto, its back end, just the last letters, and its motto reads “olo,” the palindrome which I take to be, actually, “yolo,” but might, upon reflection, be a binary code of two noughts and a one, or may be the name “Golo,” or a percentage sign, that is a %, or is it perhaps just a blank-eyed face emoji, dead of pupil and unencumbered of affect and appetite.
(What the statue resembles, Imho, more than anything, is the Director. The Director, who is on his feet, hooting and applauding vigorously.)
Mr. Al’Hatif steps back in order to look up and admire his work.
A series of lights begin to flame on in the desert night, as if solitary night-walkers were lighting candles far off on the dunes. It is a constellation of holographic Buddhas. They are all around us. How many are there? Now music swells up from the sound system. A swirl of post-ethnic trance. A kind of Ives-ian collision of gamelan, bouzoukis, bagpipes, and sitars. The audience leans forward, blinking. The work is pretty beautiful. Mr. Al’Hatif’s project. Much better than the original statue; an encrusted, grimy, overexposed and irrelevant tchotchke.
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