Velocities

by Kathe Koja

  You just rolled your glass eyes at me and didn’t make a sound. All sad and cold and stiff, like—like beef jerky or something, you were nasty. So I stuffed you into the old backpack, I threw you into the back of the closet, and I almost didn’t let you out. Almost. Except I finally did, and I let you fasten on, too. And you were happy, Baby, I could tell, that night it was like both of us were flying. After that, no matter what I did or who I hooked up with, or even if I didn’t come home all night, you never ran away again. I knew you needed me, then, more than I needed you. And I realized that I didn’t really need you much at all.

  But that was going to happen anyway, right? because really, the older I get, the more I can do for myself, and the less I need the things that you can do—and the things I can’t get, you can’t either, I mean I’m not going to send you into the liquor store, right? Crawl up into the cold case, get me a six-pack of Tecate, Baby! And even the fastening-on—even though we still do it, and I still like it, I can get to that place without you, now. Driving really fast, smoking up and then drinking—it’s mostly the same feeling, not as pure or as . . . as good as with you, but I can be with other people when I get it. People like Bobby, or Justin, or Colin. Or Rico. Especially Rico.

  I told Rico about you, Baby. I didn’t plan to beforehand, but I did. We were in the storage room—Rob said to go unpack the napkins, there must have been like fifty boxes—but instead we were joking around, and flirting, and I was trying to think of ways to keep him talking; I wanted to stay that way, the two of us alone together, for as long as I could. I wanted to show him that I’m—different, from Carmen, and Kayla, and those other girls, those pervy night shift girls, I wanted him to know something about me. To be—familiar with me. So I told him about you.

  At first it seemed like he was impressed: Whoa, that’s some crazy shit. How’d your grandma get something like that?

  She was like in a war, or something. “Her Nazi dancehall stuff”—that’s creepy to think of, actually, because I’d never really thought about where you came from, or how Grampy got you. Or who might have—made you, or whatever. You weren’t born like normal, that’s for sure.

  You saying the doll’s, like, alive, Jani? For real?

  Not alive-alive. But he moves around and everything. You should see him when he eats!

  Rico was smiling—That’s so crazy—but I couldn’t tell if he thought it was cool-crazy or weird-crazy; I couldn’t tell if I’d just made a big mistake. And then Rob came looking for the napkins, and bitched us both out for taking so long: What were you guys doing in there anyway? Everyone laughed, Rico, too. Later on, I asked Rico if he wanted to come over and use the hot tub, but he said he was busy, and maybe we could just hang out at work instead. So I guess you can’t help me with Rico, Baby, after all.

  And even if I wanted to ask Grammy about you, or give you back, I can’t: because she’s gone, right, she finally died in that hospice in Ohio. Mommy said she found out too late to be able to go to the funeral, but she sure got there fast enough for the will, she must have taken half the furniture from that house. I wonder what happened to all of that other stuff, those old clothes, and the medical books . . . Maybe I should have asked Flaco about you, back when I had the chance.

  The thing is, Rico finally said yes, Baby, when we were up on the roof last night, I was leaning over the railing and he was standing next to me, and I told him that Friday was my last night at Rob’s Ribs, that I was quitting to go back to school; it’s online school, but still, Mommy said I could quit working if I take at least one class, and anyway I didn’t tell him that part. I’d like to, like, be with you, I said to Rico. Before I go.

  And he smiled so you could see all his dimples, god he is so hot. And then he said, OK, wild child, how about I come over tomorrow? I have to drive up to Northfield, but I can be over by midnight. Mommy might be home, but Mommy doesn’t bother me, she doesn’t care what I do. So I said, Absolutely, I said, Come over whenever you want.

  But the thing is, you can’t be there, Baby, I don’t want you to be there, I don’t want Rico to ask, Hey where’s that crazy doll? And if he does, I want to be able to say Oh that? Oh, I don’t have that any more.

  But I don’t want to—to bury you alive in some old clothes box, you didn’t like it the first time, right, when Grammy or Grampy stuck you in there? I know you didn’t. Just like you don’t like living in my old backpack with the April-May-Magic stickers and the black plaid bows, stuffed way down in the very back of my closet, behind the Princess Jasmine bedspread. When I take you out to feed you, now, you just—look at me. I hate the way you looking at me feels . . . I’m just too old to play with dolls.

  It really does smell like incense in here, like hot, sweet wood burning. No one’s supposed to mess with the smokers—Rob does that himself, all the cleaning—but Andy helps the cooks load, and he says it’s not that hard; he’s going to help me, too. He doesn’t know what’s in the backpack, when he asked I just said Memories, and he nodded. Andy will do what I want him to do; like you, Baby. They keep the smokers at, like, 250 degrees, but it can go a lot higher, a lot hotter, I bet it won’t even hurt. Not like falling off the roof, right? No Tuesday night special, just ash, and gone . . . I’m going to throw in that stupid “Smokin’ Specialist” hat, too.

  I wonder if you knew that’s why I let you fasten on, last night, for one last time? You seemed so happy to get out of the closet, and the backpack, to be close to me again. I’d take you out again to say goodbye, right here behind the shelves, but if I look at you, your sad glass eyes, then I won’t do it, maybe. Maybe. But I can’t keep you forever anyway, and Rico will be over tonight.

  The smoke smell is everywhere in here, digging a barbed-wire itch in my throat, in my chest, it makes me cough. Afterward, when Andy’s done, I’m going to go up onto the roof and lean over the railing, let my feet dangle and feel like I’m flying. Flying and crying, for you and for me: because I am crying, Baby, just a little, because I’m going to miss you a lot.

  VELOCITY

  Linden; aspen; maple; ash. A postcard setting, slant light and falling leaves, gravel switchback leading to a KEEP OUT gate, more sentry trees, a clustering clot of outbuildings—spare metal sheds, an emptied four-car garage. At the heart of the property, alone in bloody maple drift, stands an incongruous house, a hard-edged, sumptuous folly that at first glance seems neglected: dusty windows, drawn blinds, heavy bicycle chain hung across the door, front door. The chain is old; the locks—two locks—are bright and new.

  Everywhere, broken bicycles.

  • • •

  Q:So what you’re saying is that the process is equal to the art produced? That how is, essentially, why?

  A:No, I—no. I’m saying the way I make my art can’t be separated out from what I make, like a, like an egg white, OK? Christ, where do they find you people? I’m saying that when I aim a bike at a tree and crash it, that that’s part of what the piece is about. The velocity, where it hits, how it fragments—every time it’s different, none of them end up the same—

  Q:Yet the process is identical. Are you willing to discuss what informs the process itself?

  A:Give me a hand here. [His right arm is in a sling. He needs help to light another cigarette.] I have no idea what you just said.

  Q:More simply, then: why do you make art by running bicycles into trees? What . . . drives your particular mode of self-expression?

  [No answer.]

  Q:Are you at all willing to discuss—

  A:I thought you wanted to talk about my work. I thought this was—

  Q:But art is a product of a human imagination, a human mind, a human body; especially your art, Mr. Vukovich. You shattered your arm while making this latest sculpture, you—

  A:I don’t have to listen to this shit.

  [Break.]

  • • •

  The house was built in the early 197
0s, an austere and “modern” fantasia of brushed metal and glass block. It has eight rooms, three of them very large: the living or reception room, which takes up most of the first floor; the dining room, and the master bedroom; the rest are markedly, almost painfully, small. All are spare, as in a monastery or zendo: low teak tables, white futons, stainless steel appliances. All the windows have identical white paper blinds. All the walls are red. The dining table is laid with service for nine.

  • • •

  Q:Were you pleased with the Ortega installation?

  A:Sure. Mary was great, she always does a great job.

  Q:She’s been your dealer for quite some time now, correct? Since you—returned from Arizona?

  [No answer.]

  Q:Mary Ortega is well-known—almost notorious—for her attraction to, let’s say, a certain type of painful art. Art that expresses hurtful or violent emotions, art that specifically—

  A:Jesus Christ, you’re not going to get off it, are you? You didn’t come here to talk about my work at all, all you want is to talk about my goddamned father, isn’t that right? [His uninjured arm is trembling badly, almost theatrically.] There are plenty of articles about him, why don’t you go read them? Why don’t you do a search? You’ll be fucking buried in—

  Q:Your father was a famous man. And since his death—

  A:He didn’t die, he killed himself.

  Q:—forgive me, since his suicide, you’ve lived here alone in the house that he designed and commissioned, making art that graphically recalls the manner of his death. Mr. Vukovich, I don’t mean to be unkind or impertinent, but when a father commits suicide by driving into a tree, and his son’s art does nothing but recreate that moment, one cannot help but speculate that these things are intimately related. One cannot—

  A:You think it’s some kind of, of tribute, is that it? Jesus! You think that I—

  Q:What I think is unimportant. What matters are your thoughts, your ideas about the—

  A:I think you better pack up your little briefcase and go. That’s what I think.

  • • •

  The Red House, as it is called, is a kind of singularity, and as such there was for a time a great demand for tours: from architecture and design professionals, professors and students, historians interested in its provenance, cultural anthropologists, as well as all the lesser hordes that treasure celebrity and wealth. After the owner’s spectacular and graphic suicide, the estate fell hostage to legal squabbles between his first wife and current partner; the dispute was eventually resolved in the wife’s favor, but by that time she herself had died, in a fire at her horse farm in Truro. The couple’s only surviving relative, a son, himself an artist, came into possession of the house and immediately discontinued all public tours. It was believed that he was living on the property, but his attorney’s office would not confirm that this was true.

  • • •

  Q:Perhaps it would—perhaps we might talk a little about your early work. In Switzerland, you—

  A:If you want to talk about him, I don’t care. No, really. Let’s do it. I don’t give a fuck. [Speech today is slurred. He seems to have difficulty sitting upright. The cast has been removed, but he is still wearing a sling.]

  Q:You’re sure? I don’t want to—All right, then. Your father, Edwin Vukovich—

  A:The Prince of Darkness. Ed, to his friends. Of which he had none. Not even my mother. My mother used to warn me not to tell him anything: where I lived, what I was doing. If you tell him, he can use it, she always said. Don’t give him anything he can use.

  Q:He was an architect—

  A:Architect manqué. Everyone thinks he designed the Red House, you know, but that’s not true. He got this kid from RISD to make some drawings, and then he— Anyway when I was at school, everyone thought he was like some big influence on me. Influence! He never even saw one of my installations, not one.

  Q:And yet perhaps his influence was felt in other ways—?

  A:Yeah. Like cancer. When I was in Berlin—fuck Berlin, when I was in Sedona, these people would show up out of the blue, these—sideshow freaks— Once, at one of my openings, this woman came up to me, she had all these pictures she wanted me to look at. Pictures of him, you know, him and her and— He was like an insect, you know? a praying mantis or a scorpion or something. He had no idea what it was like to be human and he didn’t care.

  Q:Yet he was quoted more than once as saying how proud he was of your work. He even tried to purchase one of your—

  A:Right. Heresy, it was one of the first things I did at Mary’s. It was like a ski run, with these little— You’ve seen it, right?

  Q:Photographs of it, yes. It was an extraordinary installation. The almost insane sense of speed, of uncontrolled velocity—

  A:Yeah. A good piece. But Mary’s smart, you know. She gave him a lot of sweet talk, but she wouldn’t let him have the piece. Just like my mother said. Like voodoo. Skin cells, little bits of bone . . . They didn’t tell you how he used to beat my mother, did they? He’d go through her closet, take out one of her little chain belts, Gucci, whatever, and just go to town. I used to try to get between them, make him stop . . . When I got older, I bought a gun. I actually thought it would help! But I didn’t need a gun, what I needed was, was silver bullets—

  Q:Mr. Vukovich—

  A:—or a stake through his heart. Right? Isn’t that how you kill the devil? But that’s the thing, you know? That’s the whole fucking problem, because you can’t kill the devil, not ever. Not with stakes or crosses or lawyers or—

  Q:Mr. Vukovich, if this is distressing you, we—

  A:Christ, my arm hurts.

  [Break.]

  • • •

  In the room that was formerly used as the laundry, the appliances have been removed, and a small living space constructed, a scruffy human patch on the glass and steel. The items inside—a blue down sleeping bag, worn and leaking feathers; a Coleman stove; a bed tray; a scuffed plastic washtub—suggest an extended habitation. A shelf has been affixed three feet from the floor, just above the bundled sleeping bag, in easy reach of anyone lying below. On this shelf is a pink drugstore flashlight, an inhaler, an ashtray, a Remington automatic shotgun, its barrel sheared almost to the nub, and a copy of Art in America. Above the shelf is a crucifix, olivewood, immensely old. The corpus has been replaced with two bent roofing nails.

  • • •

  A:When I was working on Acrimony, I kept getting these phone calls. At first I thought it was just crank stuff, some dumbshit breathing on the phone, once or twice I even talked to him. Just, you know, are you having fun, asshole? Mary said it was creepy and that I ought to call the cops, or something, but I didn’t. I thought it was kind of funny . . . But then he started calling me at home.

  Q:You were staying—?

  A:At home. At the Red House.

  Q:I don’t— The number is unlisted?

  A:There’re no phones in the house. No phone jacks, even. But I’d hear it ring, and ring, and ring, it’d go on for fucking hours. Sometimes I’d go sit outside just to get away from the sound. Sometimes I’d sleep outside . . . Then I started sleeping at the gallery, in Mary’s office. Which helped— You should see your face. You look like the cat that just ate shit.

  Q:[Silence.]

  A:When I finally got the show up, the calls stopped. Like he was trying to fuck me over, right? Get me to stop working—

  A:Who?

  Q:Who do you think? Mary said I was working too hard, you know, or taking too much speed— Wait, erase that. But if it was the speed then how come I never heard it unless I was working? The phone, and the knocking on the windows—I had them come and trim the branches, just hack them away from the house—I mean I knew what it was but I wanted to be sure, right? And I was right. It wasn’t trees or shrubs or branches, it was goddamn kno
cking and it was him. Just like the phone was him. Just like the guy at the bike shop, the one I always use, right? Now he won’t sell me any more bikes, he says it’s too dangerous. Dangerous! To him, he means. Because he knows. Because he gets into people’s heads, like poison gas, or something—like he did to my mother, I watched him do it. She used to be, she was so . . . And then he killed her. I know it was him, there’s no way that barn burned by itself. And he got Teo, too—

  Q:Teo?

  A:Her horse. They found them together, she was all— And then he tried to do it to me. In Sedona, Berlin, where-the-fuck-ever, doesn’t matter, never did. You think being dead is a problem for him? Hell no! It just makes it easier, you know? It just makes everything easier.

  Q:Mr. Vukovich—Mr. Vukovich, when you were working on Calefaction, Mary Ortega was quoted as—

  A:Don’t change the subject! Don’t change the subject! You said you wanted to talk about him, well that’s what we’re talking about! Are you afraid? Is that it? “Speak of the devil and the devil appears”? But he’s already here. He’s already right—

  Q:Mr. Vukovich—

  A:Stop saying that.

  [Break.]

  • • •

  As per the trust, the Red House and its grounds are serviced on a seasonal schedule. Mowing, raking, bundling brush, blowing snow; repairing the depredations of weather; replacing the furnace filter, caulking the cracks; there is a lavish budget set aside for these things and they are always faithfully performed.

  The former laundry room is rigorously avoided, unless there is actual damage within it needing repair. When the lawn crews arrive the broken and discarded bicycles are carefully removed to the garage; before the crews leave, the parts are restored to their earlier approximate positions. This is not part of the trust’s directions but there is a sizable rider to the maintenance contract to insure that these things are done, or not done. Money, as always, is neutral, and efficient in its demands.