by Blake Butler
The musician exaggerates a gag move, mimes cutely puking. “Art is forever, bro. Your kid is going to die one day. So am I, too. The difference is, I’ve written codes that millions of Americans had sung into their heads in repetition for years and years, to the point they can sing it without hearing. And I’ve been paid accordingly for my sacrifices, my exploration; yes, of course. But in return, our fans have, through the insight of my labor, become new people, faced experiences of worlds they could not have ever touched without me, been blessed anew. Same goes, you know, for paintings. For instance, that super old but super famous one, with the brunette just sort of smirking like what up? I remember the first time I saw that jaw-dropping work of light on Earth. I was on a three-day leg in gay Paris during our Warriors of Witness tour, and I got the chance to go by and check that rad thing out. You know they had to put it behind bulletproof glass, right? Can you imagine? So many people love it so much they want it gone?”
Alice can’t blink, she finds, has not been blinking. Her heart, meanwhile, feels soft and strangled in her own chest; darker and thicker than it must just have been, pronounced with so many living layers of glaze it hardly still feels able to breathe. How many hours had it survived on its own dime, under the wear of why or where she was, immeasurably in pain, held under wraps. If she doesn’t think about her passing feelings outright, with her eyes closed and breath held, she has no beat in there at all, feels not actually alive beyond the ongoing faculties she can’t stop seeing, thinking, breathing under the thumb of, not a law but an inherent manifestation of human life that one day soon will cease to be, as where in any given instant there are so many knives and guns and ropes and pills, not to mention high story windows and long stairwells and bridges and canyons and cars to step out in front of and persons to piss off and wrong places to end up in at the right time. Perhaps that is the difference between a painting and a person, she thinks, that I can kill myself whenever, though once again, as felt so often, the voice seems not wholly hers, as if it too has been embedded and left pending, activated only upon the arrival of this exact emotional stimulus into her neural network and let to sprawl, its patient host.
Meanwhile, outside, unseen, the sun is razing down upon the open flatness.
* * *
—
Alice turns the machine off and stands. From here, the world is open wide; rooms as she recalls them now connect back into other rooms as long they should according to their architect’s intent, in no way attendant to the emotional interpretation of a suddenly hyper-suspicious Alice, at this point in her life smashed no longer on gin and water but on her impression of the present as ongoing event, suspended between the conflicting impressions of isolation and surveillance at the same time, espoused as much by her ongoing presence in the news as her renewed awareness of the unseen network of security cameras she herself had ordered installed so long ago she can’t remember when or even why, having never until the recent robbery seen a need: after years and years of tapes of uneventful footage fed into the upkeep of some corporate presence she’d hired to install and oversee, called with a name she can’t remember from any other brand, and yet to whom she’d supplied all the necessary access and permissions to her life, as it were, based on a single advertisement that had somehow appeared on her radar amid so many. As if all you had to do was dial a 1-800 and sign a contract and you were theirs to have and hold, to keep up with and place faith in for no meager startup fee and the ongoing monthly premium. At very least it helped her feel not so secluded, so empirically vulnerable, living all by herself in this huge house, even if, especially in the early phases, the awareness of forever being monitored, even remotely, had in some way only redoubled her potential for paranoia: What could they see that they should not? Where might they have put cameras she doesn’t know about, and what embarrassing proclivities might they somehow thereafter use against her? What did they know that she would never?
Under the thumb of such surveillance the whole shape of her every day was laced with a Schrödinger’s cat–like question—Am I Being Watched Right Now or Am I Not—resulting in a conscious sense of suspended deviation that never fully left her, no matter how well she might have been able to pretend it didn’t matter. She sometimes even found herself lurking longer amid known gray spots in the suggested setup of the cameras, remaining out of sight long enough that any conniving employee might move along, turn their sights to other clients, come back later, giving her rare precious time to act unseen. It became a game at times, hiding from nothing, a childish means of playing out the hours of a whole night, until at least she felt depleted enough to lie down and pretend to fall asleep, and eventually actually finally really nodding out, waking up the next day to begin all over again.
As for how much of any of this might or could be true, who really knew? Same as every joke had a hint of truth behind it, the second you stopped questioning the truth was when they really, fully had you. Better always to stay on top, to keep your mind peeled for infraction, for deceit. Perhaps it was the security company itself that had done the robbery, she’s considered; who better else knew all the ins and outs, maybe even more than she could, their firm’s contractors having kept certain susceptible dimensions about her home’s design in their back pockets, to themselves. She had, of course, been assured and reassured, by both reps and longstanding reputation, of the company’s core corporate philosophy, commitment to service, not to mention their continuously innovated and award-winning methods of encryption and confirmation, all of it so seamlessly incorporated into her daily life that the best that she could hope for in relief was to train herself to trust that if something was wrong she’d know about it, while still continuing to foot the bill and stay on board—because in the end, after all other apprehension, she simply wanted to feel safe in her own home, if not her flesh. How could a business have been around so long, after all, as Avoid Corp.—that was their name, yes, according to their site—if their service wasn’t at heart established in good faith, all shades of conspiracy and organized underhandedness nothing more than paranoia, perhaps even some deep sense of misplaced guilt. Moreover, how could it be stopped now, long after she’d granted them access, contracted their work? It was so much easier to let what was meant to happen happen, Alice tried to convince herself, to get on with living and let the chips fall as they must.
As for the recent breach, though, specifically the recordings made as the robbery took place—that is, the only direct evidence, as it remained—all of that had been handled for her, transferred under her approval to the authorities for their investigation: a cooperative gesture, ill-advised from a legal standpoint despite the fact that she maintains nothing to hide. Even now she can feel the eyes of the authorities reviewing the surveilled footage on their own time, poring over the timecode of her life as it was captured sight unseen, perhaps even mapping out the surrounding hours leading up to what they might consider more significant acts, all of it rendered unalterably in the past, somewhere between known and not quite known.
Which, in review, made Alice wonder: Were they still recording even now? Were the cameras even still necessary, following the break-in? Or was there no longer any need, some unspoken new sense of downgraded vulnerability, of Lightning won’t strike twice? What if the act of trespass was itself an inevitable product of the system’s installation, the laying of the bait that finally lures the vermin, where once the trap had been triggered, the purpose of each was rendered complete?
Or else, Alice imagines, what if the first robbery was merely the impetus to let one’s guard down, its certain trauma freeing the consumer to feel invincible, open to field? Perhaps it was actually her they were after, not her belongings, not that she could list a single reason why anyone would have designs on her uncertain life, beyond the apparently inherent thrill some derived in violation? Didn’t the true criminal ultimately want nothing more than to be anticipated, pursued? She knew she shouldn’t blame herself, and yet she couldn’t stop thumbing
the wound, wondering what was her surest way out of her apparent situation without fostering her own entanglement, legally or conceptually. How could she shut the whole rest of the world out, once and for all, without shutting her whole self down, giving in? Was there anywhere by now where the grid ended, any remaining mechanism of relief?
Either way, cameras or no cameras, Alice feels her every motion rendered fact, appended to the record in the slick mass of late evening, the air around her operating its condition in response to anywhere she lurked and breathed, and threading through in the unending sets of motions and emotions that line her hours, within which she finds herself newly inspired amid the apparent social tumult to return to the scene of the crime in her own house, if only to revel in its raw spot, feel it seethe. She’s already halfway down the stairs by now, she realizes, having moved in muscle memory while still consumed in her own thought, the passage between one intention and another at such times as faint as bubbles trapped in ice, all eventually meant to melt again to liquid, to assume whatever shape it’s asked to fill.
At least this is the only way down, as far as she knows, from ground level to the basement of the house, site of the vault she’d had installed by the same firm, in an effort to prevent the very acts that had eventually occurred. And the stairs come to an end, still, where they always had, on the white tile floor that spanned the space in full, blocked only by a wide steel door that spans the far end of the small landing alcove, still locked and armed post-breach despite its now-dubious effectiveness. There’s nowhere else to go down here, though, without the passcode, its digits so well inscribed in Alice’s memory she’s never had to reach to call them up—those of the dates of her birth as she recalls it, here entered doubled. She’d used some variation of that same string her whole life, for every bank account PIN and online password, with very little variation and no reset, despite the providers’ safety warnings. How else might you remember any of them, one and all, in such a glut? And what good could any key be if you couldn’t claim it; if you, the user, ended up locked out of your own life?
* * *
—
Inside, the vault is brightly lighted, all the walls the same blown white. Its newly naked layout seems less a safe than a singularity, Alice imagines, a condition around which the larger house said to contain it disappears. Its shape remains so still, so mute, that it might make an even better bedroom than an archive, rendered more neutral now with nothing on display.
Alice, though, can still make out exactly where the de Kooning once had hung—its absence now almost louder than any presence, a state only enabled by her understanding of what had once been. There are as well the vacant spaces where three other paintings in the first wing had previously appeared: Ellsworth Kelly’s Red Yellow Blue White and Black (1953), a series of seven distinctly colored panels that had always stood in stark contrast with the abstraction of the de Kooning in her mind; while, once stationed beside it, Yayoi Kusama’s No. 2 (1959) had embodied an even more nuanced and innervating scale of concept, comprised solely from a deceptively sallow field of tiny dots, which to Alice had simulated reptilian skin, and then resembled more and more a shriveled outline of our cosmos as from some god’s eye view the closer in you got; and, lastly, William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s The Nymphaeum (1878), a relatively sober presence, if still fantastic, depicting thirteen lily-white nudes languishing within a menacingly darkened wood, all of them unaware or unconcerned about the gaze of two suspicious lurkers easily overlooked along the right edge of the frame.
For years those four works had hung together in perpetual display, each acquired in the throes of some distinct emotional disposition that passed through her like the money that changed hands, the works together eventually lending the space a certain sacred fixity of vision and corresponding physicality so concrete that even with her eyes closed she can almost still feel them pulling at her attention—like mirages marred into her vision, if inherently ruined by her own biases and inner sprawl, and only further decayed in passage since. She can recall, too, how perversely thrilling it had been to stand in the presence of objects others could only look at in print or sites online, with no one around to stop her from doing to them as she wished; each further replication of the artifact only another window onto a creation that had become in acquisition solely hers, though eventually that impression too had lost some of its heft, slowly diminishing until by the time of the robbery she hardly ever went down to spend time among them. They’d begun then, in a way, to exist as much in her mind as anywhere else, like years of music after so many hours on repeat, an impression that, post-disappearance, revealed itself no longer so true: as suddenly—in the absence of any continuous impression to refresh by—the gap in her understanding feels that much more flimsy, lacking true definition: instead she finds only semblances, misplaced impressions, none of which ring right in the fact of what they’d really been, no ongoing sense of intent as designed by their creator, instead her own revision of a vision now only held preserved among the dead.
The result is a massively diminished sense of presence in the space, one that seems still falling out from underneath her, in a cold way, as she returns to that blank, despite her persistent furtive expectation that some hidden dam in her might one day break, at last disrupting the suspended feeling she’d carried her whole long life, supplanting its memory with some reaction: at least a sense of loss, remorse, regret. Though, if anything, she finds the lingering feeling of her house’s violation is like a revelation, a sense of something long unspoken now made known, as if the real crime had been ever deigning to own the artworks in the first place, a state made all that much more intoxicating and repentant now that they are gone.
That same feeling appears redoubled as she comes around the vault’s partition into its second flank, a space designed to match the first completely as if it were an optical illusion, the absence of display points underscoring the match. Here before had hung Anselm Kiefer’s Winter Landscape (Winterlandschaft) (1970), with its pink blood bursting from the neck of a disembodied head floating over a punctured landscape in silent pain, once seen in troubling juxtaposition alongside the face that spans the canvas in full of Jenny Saville’s Knead (1995–96), its sickly subject half-agog in coming to with breathing tube forced between her teeth, which on sight alone Alice had always felt she could feel deep in her own lungs, filling her innards with a queasy, leaking feeling, as if subjected to a virus passed by sight; and, last, Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Georgia Landscape (1889–90), its cooler colors no less abstruse, a world unto itself, devoid of life, into which the longer she stared the more there seemed nothing else left in the world, its simple, sagging sky the only sky there’d ever been.
Capping the far end of the vault, where in the prior space had been the door, the mirror left behind in place of the Rauschenberg now awaits, its initial presence made more certain in still appearing, no longer just a figment in her mind. Its reflection of the room around her appears to slip against its own impression as she moves, the interplay of angles of the blank walls deflecting any obvious sense of what shape the space maintains beyond a vortex, without subject, white on white, further emboldening in its illusion until, as if from out of nowhere, there she is, Alice, held in its grasp. The crown of her head appears first, along the low end of the object as she appears with its plane; followed then by face and shoulders, rising up cut-off within the scape of monochromatic dimensions spanning behind her, more and more nowhere.
She can think of no reaction, faced with the unbidden object once again, now at an even greater remove. The mirror’s surface seems different now, she realizes; she sees something odd there about her eyes, or at least a difference in how she would expect her eyes to look: a fuzzed-out phase to their pale green hue in reproduction, as if a mist has rolled up in her mirrored skull and come unfurled. Her pupils might be diseased, she thinks, struck with tangled lines as if from trauma, high without the pleasant reeling, only drift. The recognition makes her livi
ng body pang then, too, readjusting to incorporate the difference whose substance she can’t quite apprehend, in either origin or intent. She stands and stands there, seeing herself watching herself redoubled, until time as it passes feels less alive and more on pause; a draw with beginning or an ending, awaiting some form of consummation yet to come.
Alice raises her arm then and indeed sees the other of her raise its with her as to match. She grimaces and sees her grimace equally returned, each gesture lacking actual emotion, a performance interested only in reception, without fact—and still there seems something lost in the translation, Alice can’t help feeling, their shared expression somehow belonging to the glass’s image more than hers.
Closer still, wanting to see clearer, Alice sees the difference held between them continue to refine, not just in position, but in substance: the lines of age progressing in her face, growing more pronounced, deeper conditioned; the bones beneath the flesh slowly protruding, pores becoming paler and more patchy, as from bad upkeep and too long away from sun. Each time she begins to see herself again in her complexion it immediately corrects itself just slightly further, leaving no time for any central take upon which to lay claim; it is as if her face is molting away, bit by bit, in rapid aging, its condition influenced by each measure of intent, as if—were she to hold still and remain—nothing thereafter could be changed; she could live forever as she might be now, or now, or now, if only she would forgo any and all else in existence.
