by Blake Butler
As such, it had been difficult at first to tell if the painting was really even missing, given how precisely the monotone shade of the piece matched the walls, embodying the same absence of all color, the studied silence. It was just a blank white canvas, after all, a work of concept over form, not remarkable unless the thought of nothing was, or perhaps the continuous nonpresence of the possibility of nothing; how the blank was never really blank.
But as she’d come to stand before the object that long morning, Alice noticed how now the surface of the image continued to coincide with her perspective as she moved: its empty texture shifting against the incandescent light between them, its coordinates intermingling before her eyes. The object appeared to recalculate and correct itself continuously in relation to where she was, or how she saw it, altering the intention of its refraction as she continued in approach, as if its surface were still wet from being painted; or as if it were not flat at all, but somehow open.
And then, there in the image, Alice was: her present living body, as she’d seen it, contained within the shining glare as it amassed. She could resolve herself there in its grain, seeing herself rendered standing in the white field as a reflection, of living flesh. The thieves had taken White Painting after all, she knew then, leaving in its place an unlike replication, one for one. The effect, to Alice, in the otherwise bare room, felt demonic; an object made even more aware in its replacement, given new purpose; dare she say it even felt somehow alive? If nothing else, that much more near to what it really wished to be, if not as well what it always was?
For some reason, one she could not decrypt to herself even now, she had not mentioned the mirror or the missing Rauschenberg to the authorities, who themselves had no record of what might be lost or gained beyond her word, the receipts she could submit to prove what she was worth. Instead she’d kept the detail private, a secret left to linger between her and the culprit, whoever it was, and how, and why; and anyway no one had asked. The police performed their responsibilities according to their contracted obligations alone, deferential only to what could be said for certain, in the present, just the facts. They seemed somehow not even to have been able to see the unfamiliar mirror hanging there amid the scene as they’d performed their investigation of what was lost, to the point that Alice had begun to wonder what else might be missing that she could not remember.
* * *
—
Alice watches herself from inside herself perform for the police and the reporters, the cameras, the vortex represented in each eye. She gives them exactly what they wish for—content—even if every question they offer, for once, has a clear answer: “I don’t know.” She could make it up, she thinks; then there’d actually be something to submit, though in the end there could only be more questions, more thirst for bandwidth. They were there not for evidence, not for information, but to be there being there, wielding their mics. They had to know that she knew only as much as they did, all on-the-record information already being filtered through their feeds. She’d seen the video of the erasure of the de Kooning only along with other millions, as much a spectator now herself as any, in effect, any claim to ownership separated from her own fate and into some other historical status entirely. Seeing a work with such personal resonance that way, and for the last time ever, apparently, even on a screen shared with so many, did at least push her toward a new sort of feeling, one not of fury or even wonder, but simply: who? Whose blurred faces were those seated as spectators to the destruction? Whose eye peered through the lens that led the camera, and who worked the blowtorch? Those people seemed to matter more than even whoever had come into her home, if they weren’t in fact the same. What really was at stake here, and for whom?
She knew, simply from speaking to the two badge-bearing dolts who’d come looking for a way to paint her as more than just a victim, that local authorities weren’t really interested in truth. They cared enough to act alongside one another, in a performance of protection, long enough that when they were done they could go home and drink beer splayed on the sofa to watch dickheads with strange equipment compete onscreen in the good name of their hometown. That was where the real cachet of culture lived and breathed, of course: in the veins of the athletes, each drawing salaries in the same register as many collectors paid for priceless art. All this blather about a painting blown to dust mattered to Joe J. Jones nowhere near as much as whether Joe J. Jones Jr. caught the orb and won his squad the title, as the crowds lurched around and scarfed the hot dogs and donned the copy jerseys and made applause.
“Anyway, it was really, in the scheme of everything, a minor work,” Alice finds herself explaining to the cameras, off the cuff. “The goddamned de Kooning, I mean, in my opinion. It could have been more powerful, more unspeakable; could have worked harder to be nothing other than itself, to exist beyond the confines of its conditions; at the very least it could have been more beautiful. And the same goes for you and me. Minor works, each and every one of us, shits in a blender. Get it?”
Nobody seems to want the jokes, no matter how she shucks around or hams it up. She’s only talking now to keep filling air, right? To get the sound out of her head. The heads bearing the microphones and booms and lights are staring openly at her now, as if at some other abstract gob they refuse to try to understand; and yet their perceived distance only further spurs her on. She’s positively beaming by now, eating up the opportunity between spectacle and spectator, really flushing.
“Would you just get a load of your-all’s face?” she scoffs, holding her glass like a weapon. “Like this is news now, actual news? Like you aren’t all up all night every night trying to forget how you spent your day, all those sad hours chasing someone else’s dreams?” At least two of those assembled are writing down her every word, she sees, or at least writing something, transcribing every passing moment into false form. Alice is no longer sure which of them are cops and which are pundits, or lackeys of pundits, or lackeys of other lackeys, and in the end it doesn’t matter because none of them can really hear her for what she means. “I mean, they might as well have sawed my limbs off, mightn’t they, whoever did the crime? Not that I really even need my arms that much at this point anyway—not as much as a quarterback or a seamstress or whatever important people do these days—nor do I even go on much in the pursuit of human pleasure. To all of you it would have felt only the same to see me murdered, no big shake between my flesh and some dickhead’s imagination.”
By now some of the camera people have started packing up, she sees, having vacuumed up enough sound to fill fifteen segments with the local color for what they imagine has occurred. The only people left now are the real rats, the fucking lesser web media maybe, onlookers wandered over from unknown corners to watch the roast. The whole of it has her by now a little lightheaded at the edges, disoriented after the mass of questions meant only to lead her on, to entrap her into answers that would remake her as spectacle in place of person; like a second shadow, taught to split.
“Either way, of course, I’ll end up cold in the earth all on my own. Alone—you remember that word, right? You still get that feeling sometimes, when you’re all done pumping at your pissholes? Not that there’s anything to understand about it but the dark. Anyway, I plan to be cremated, same as the painting, same as, eventually, the ground beneath our feet. Which, by the way, aren’t they still mine? I mean the painting’s ashes? Once whichever of you are out there working to recover what was lost has done their job? I’ll bet you’ve already locked down the rights to every square inch of future cinder, haven’t you? Waiting to snort it like boutique blow. Well, that’s fine. You all can have it. Just save a line or two to rub on the gums of my corpse.”
Alice takes a big swill of her soda water, sucks her teeth. She’s suddenly unsure of what she’s said, all of it already on film. She can feel all through her skin and blood and bones how their devices have come in and taken possession of her person, filling out her visage with spectral residue of pu
blic sight, some numbing agent drawn up in preparation for pending broadcast to further masses, and for the future of her person, as she must be, in death and beyond before all the rest of us burn up, before the silent cells of all we’ve lost are no more than vibrant dirt over our heads, submerging under rubble everything there ever was and ever might be, every precinct and every soundstage in the same grist as our graves.
* * *
—
that same poached feeling will spread beneath her through the remaining hours of the evening: in ghostly bloat of excess memories being worn away within the aging minds of every life, as if what Alice perceives is not actually there and never was and could not ever; as if she no longer owns all of herself; such that by the time she finds her body collapsed in front of the TV, already watching recaps of hours before, she can’t remember having been there, can hardly recognize her flesh. Her depiction seems too overrun, her skin aggravated and inflamed, as if she had been pressed against a baking surface in her sleep. That couldn’t be what she actually looks like to other people, could it? And yet there she is, clearly standing on the lawn of her own house, identified in strong font with what she believes to be her name and whatever implicating info: Local heiress Alice Knott suspected of destroying multiple works of invaluable art. So there she must be, yes; who else could so appear, wearing the same teeth and tongue still in her live mouth, though even still her voice on the recording doesn’t sound like her voice as she knows it, nor are her answers to their questions words she remembers having said. They edit these things so completely, I could have mumbled anything and it would still say I am fucked, she thinks aloud, still in the performing voice she’d used onscreen, though by now she is well outside the sphere of influence on her own portrayal. Who she is or will be remains at the mercy of the public eye, pushed along its soft trajectory within the record as it stands.
For instance, this act of terror with which she is associated—the term now being applied to the destruction of her property as the story reaches wider scale—is presented tonight alongside advertisements, scores, and weather, all of them wearing our attention down, molding our position of confusion into a feed that we can nurse through our adult lives. And once one station has taken up the broadcast, unto tumult, every other channel in collaboration then also must, clustering dozens or hundreds of public personalities each bearing little to no actual interpretation around the single supposition of what had actually occurred, another thread in an immeasurable bulk prescribed to correspond with our reality as they’ve described, and thereby stitch by stitch becoming woven into the ongoing sprawl of all personae, who we are.
As it stands on record, regarding whether or not it is actually Alice there appearing as herself—it absolutely must be. It is in fact, in some ways, all she is, at least to most: a recent fragment of a life available to mostly no one beyond every long façade she never even recognized she carried on, the ground floor of a series of experiences so obscured she can’t remember feeling the certain feeling she just felt, likely in immediate revulsion for her own aura, already loathing every other of her even from inside its pending shell—clear now onscreen as the distinctly lighted side of any moon, its other half there lurking just beside, flush in darkness, sharing her breathing, feeding her mind; and yet it is only she, who she is right now, who can choose to open or close her own eyes.
As if to contradict her introspection, then, her image there alone on the screen splits in half; or, rather, it is replaced by a side-by-side portrayal of two faces: a straight-on headshot of a younger version of herself, beside another person so much like her in complexion, a spitting image, the depiction of which she has no idea how they’ve procured; the image had long been buried amid her home’s begotten junk as in her working memory. It’s an image she has held in her own hands many times, though she remembers nothing of its moment of capture outside what the picture itself carried on, sourcing all extant perceptions not from real time, but from its rendition; much less how it could have become accessible within any kind of public network, never having been uploaded anywhere she knows of, or even scanned; and yet now here appear their faces, names together, in the same breath: she and her supposed sibling, Former death row inmate Richard Smith.
At once, in examining the original childhood image again, without the nametags, it would be hard to tell which child might actually be which, as if either could have been labeled with the name of the other; Alice herself can hardly even tell their heads apart beyond the sudden sinking feeling that gains hold of her on sight of him, his face so much like her own, both then and now, at least to her, despite the way the years had pushed them each through different change, nose, forehead, mouth, cheeks, though time had not been kind to either. The longer she looks from one back to the other, in the blink before the screen shifts, the more she can discern the minor differences that had at some point singled them out: the way Richard clamped his lips closed tightly, covering his bad teeth; the way her eyelids in almost any picture went half closed; each only further distinguished then by the insert of an overlaying image, nearer the present, of each of the children as adults, Alice’s visage paler, tighter, made of angles, while his is grizzled, bloated, sun-damaged; and in his eyes a kind of dead adrenaline, as from having nearly fallen from great height; though really, seen in just the right way, they still looked so much just the same.
What was the point of fleshing this out now, Alice wonders? What did their impression mean to say? Richard hadn’t even come up with the cops, despite his not-so-unrecent appearance in the same news streams she finds herself conveyed within now, his from the proceedings that had surrounded his heavily divisive release just days prior to his scheduled execution, after which she’d hardly seen his name in print ever again. Alice had never understood by what means his return to freedom had been secured, how he could have been cleared after what seemed such definitive proof, even his own hellishly explicit testimony of his crimes. Back then she hadn’t been able to bring herself to dwell upon it, what such a sudden shift in fate might mean; instead, she’d simply gone on as if he did not exist and never could have, as if he were no more significant to her ongoing life than any other stranger. They no longer shared even a last name; Alice had changed hers back to her birth father’s as soon as she was able, as well as any other apparent legal linking or means of communication within her power, her relentless, recurring nightmares—even after she finally stopped drinking to drown them out—notwithstanding. She had simply no space for him inside her heart, her head, nor had she ever really, and yet through the years he’d remained somehow always just on the cusp of out of mind, sometimes even more so in her unwillingness to actually admit him.
Despite however long it had been between then and now, just to hear his name alongside hers in someone else’s mouth made her feel as if he were somewhere behind her in the room, sharing her air, if always still hidden even in periphery regardless of how fast she moved her head. Suddenly everywhere she touched and had been touching felt inscribed with traces of him, his corporeal aura transmitted into not only her home but countless others, hub to hub, at once smothering out any sense of earned respite within the trauma, the code by which she’d learned to carry on, and therein finding little formal difference to the feeling beyond what might yet more definitively rise unseen, whether beyond her or within.
In truth, as she recalled it, Alice had existed in the span of her would-be brother’s association for what felt like only half a life, though as she grew older her understanding of how it might once have been grew only fractionally more clear. The total time she’d spent in his actual physical presence once he’d been established, according to how she understood it now, had only really spanned several months, and even those mostly semantically: through walls, in pictures, by association of name. There were very few actual moments within their era when she could actually recall witnessing Richard’s living, breathing body, alongside which she’d supposedly been born, not even counting the more r
ecent spread of years she’d for the most part all blacked over. Thinking of it in the present, pushed by the mere indication of connection, Alice could hardly explicate how or when their then had ended—that is, the time she’d always thought of as the prior era of her being; childhood, some would call it, though by now it was more like a partition clipped from the mind of someone else; all auras and emotions more than anything concrete, beyond what others of her lineage had at some point determined as defining how it was.
She knew, at least, that she’d had a mother and father once, as must any person, though as the years passed she found more and more often that she could not recall so much about the way they were, as if she had intentionally forgone the context amid the many modes of open torment she associated with their presence. In the beginning, though, as she clearly recalled it, they were but three—mother, father, daughter—no pets or tenants and certainly no sibling, not even an imaginary friend, much less an actual friend whose shape withstood the imagination’s long decay. The framework around their original nuclear unit obscured any world outside it to Alice as a child, as if they alone had been selected to exist as human life not only inside their home but amid the mass expanse of night, the rest of the world nothing more than a fantasy to young Alice, an expanse taking the form almost in full as one unknown. She had perhaps been much older than most kids before she went very far beyond their house’s many walls, to see what else was or might be out there on all that land; and older still before she began to learn how there was no real center to even that world, much less her person. Once she’d begun to understand that, felt its insistence situate its face forever between her and who she ever felt that she could be, there began to come more potent interpolations in definition.
