by Blake Butler
Either way, the next picture, Alice discovers, moving along in heaving silence, unsure quite yet what to do, depicts the same woman but now as very pregnant. Here she’s photographed herself nude in a mirror hung in what Alice recognizes as her childhood bedroom, the walls all gray and lined with silver etchings of no clear pattern. The woman’s face seems unhappy, full of doubt, much as had Alice been through the same years of her life, a spitting image, though this could most definitely not be her here, she is certain; she had been declared infertile from a very early age, and had never concerned herself with sexual partners, as she remembers, much less even really ever friends. There was nothing in her mind of any person but her core family, as it stands, in both regards; if in a way no one but she would still remember, all others from that era by now long dead or moved along, her own resemblance even to herself subtle enough now with so much time passed, and so much damage, that someone else beside her looking on might not identify the link at all, or even note the similarities after having them pointed out; as such it remains a secret, between her and herself, she thinks, at once the only witness and the only victim.
The following image appears to be a more professionally styled portrait, like the one that had once hung in the front room of their house: mother, father, daughter, son, shown all together, whereas before Richard would have been omitted, replaced by backdrop. Here, though, the person she recognizes as a decade-younger version of who she is today has assumed the position of her mother, wearing the same black blouse and long gold earrings she still had on when she died, matching the gold band of the wedding ring still on her finger; and there beside her, Alice’s real father, not the un-version, his face seeming sunken but still there, behind thick glasses that glinted sharply in the flash. The children, clearly, as she sees them, are Richard and her younger self—that is, herself the way she remembers appearing at that age, a clear match in her mind at once with whatever fractured memories she retains, and also a seeming match for her twin brother, at last presented side by side. It’s hard to tell them apart, even to Alice, beyond the small aspects of their gender’s shaping, each wearing the same coy smile, staring ahead at something looming above them, out of frame. Overall, all four of them together seem healthy, hopeful, held together, in a way Alice can’t connect at all with how it felt to be alive during that time; the shock so sharp, rampant within her, that for once she has nothing else to say; her hands trembling so hard now it’s like they’re still.
A corresponding portrait, taken in the same studio it seems, depicts the same family some years later, maybe five, but by now so much has changed. The older Alice is still there, in her mother’s place, wearing a white blouse now, sweated clear through in massive ovals along the pits, her earrings removed; the man standing at her side is clearly not the same as in the prior image, this one wearing shaggy black hair and a week’s stubble, a ruddy complexion, like a drunk—the face of her unfather, exactly as Alice remembers him throughout, never aging regardless of how long his presence carried on and despite how hard she tried to forget anything palpable about his make, most of all his smoke-laden speaking voice, which she hears at once again on sight throughout her as at a distance, singing inside her head that stupid song he’d always sing, with the lyrics that kept changing each time it repeated, rolling its language, all now inside her turned to mush. Now, too, there are no longer the two kids, Alice and Richard, but only the latter, his aging face now glossy and disrupted with his acne, which would scar his features through adulthood; a flat blank in his eyes mirrored by braces newly affixed in his mouth, a dull, hard chrome hiding his teeth. Among the three, the unfather is the only one still smiling, his skin drained and pasty from not sleeping, his pupils dilated as if on drugs, wearing such a knowing look staring straight out into the viewer that it makes Alice’s stomach turn, as if she’s been punched—the same feeling that spanned all those early hours of his appearance, from which nothing ever would rebound.
The other two still in the picture—that is, her mother (clearly Alice as she is now, nearly identical to her present form) alongside Richard (bridging status as both her brother and her son)—look quite unwell, almost afraid, as if they wished they didn’t have to be photographed, to even be still in their own body. Alice notices, too, and remembers as accurate, how her mother’s wedding ring has changed—both in its placement, appearing now on her right hand instead of the left, and in design: a thick dark band absent of gemstone, costume jewelry—though her mother had sworn it had been the same through her whole life. The woman seems to bite her lips inside to hold them closed; her nostrils, shaped with heavy breathing, tunnel in. As well, for some reason, Richard is wearing a ring just like his mother’s, gleaming dully from a fist balled so tight in his lap it had to hurt, given his long nails; the nature of his rage seemed so much like what she had felt amid the sprawl of it, the desperation, yet now instead appearing crammed inside him, as his trauma, no longer hers, otherwise unreadable beyond the sense of itching the whole scene holds, some tension yet to be revealed, as if something would be ripped out from underneath them just after the camera’s shutters clicked.
Alice can only seem to think to want to laugh now, seeing her place invaded, turned on its head, shaken in place. She looks around the room as if verifying she is still in here, that she is seeing what she’s seeing, waiting for someone else to come running out of the wings, letting her in on the trick that’s being played here with her life: as if someone had come in behind her and switched skins around among her most known people, reprogrammed even the most basic facts of what she’s known. But the gallery is still all empty, so it appears, no other guests, coming or going; she is an audience of one, allowed within an otherwise completely passive landscape, the quietest of nights. She’s trembling so badly now it’s like her flesh is made of blur; the strained texture of her aged skin brittle, veiny, in some way now less her own, a question mark ending a sentence she can’t tell who’s asking.
The last image in the series, hung alone on the far end of the wall, appears to have been taken decades after all the others. In it, the older woman from the blown-up face she saw outside—which she can see now is what she herself might look like in another twenty years—stands at the center of a group of about a dozen people, some casually holding cameras, wires, booms, all dressed in identical stark white clothes, in dense sunlight on a wide field of blackened tarmac, standing inside the shadow of a large, monolithic structure looming behind them on the horizon, hazy and oblong: the largest building she’s ever seen.
Beside the woman, an aging, more obese version of who could only be Richard, his face still all cratered, hardened with sores, at an age unclear to Alice, before or after his arrest, stands with his arm around their mother. They both still have the matching metal rings on their right fingers, as do all the others. Among the range of faces, Alice sees, are ones she recognizes from today: some of them the reporters she had given her statements about the break-in, a few who might have showed up at her home as cops; even A. B. Smith himself, as she recalls him, though here pictured somehow older, wearing glasses that obscure the definition. Everyone in the image seems excited, triumphant even, except for the older Alice, whose eyes are closed as in mid-blink, arms limp at her sides, while all the rest of them are captured in the midst of waving to the camera.
* * *
—
There are no more pictures after that.
Beside the last, printed in gold ink directly on the wall, there is a signature, presumably the artist’s: Alice Novak, shown in a scrawl of jumbled lines and loops, not at all like the mark Alice herself had just made in the lobby’s open book, nor even how she remembers her mother making as her handwriting turned childish in those last months. The spastic marking hurts Alice’s eyes even to look at, bearing a kind of sting that seals her prior feelings of helplessness, disconnection, into something more fully overwhelming and complete; the christening demarcation of a narrative confirmed, on its own authority, a
s decisive as any other fact.
There’s so little certain left to understand then, she finds, turning back to face the space of the room she’d just moved through, its expanse remaining vacant beyond the hanging icons on the walls. It’s as if whole dimensions of her person, passed through decades, even withered and undependable as they had been, stand now at risk by mere suggestion, under defeat. It isn’t right, Alice feels sure; this narrative is not at all like what had happened; in fact, it’s a willful degradation of her truth, so it appears, designed to pull the world out from beneath her, all explanation held behind some curtain she can’t see. Who had set this up, and from whom did they gain access? How to explain all these fragmented memories of her life? What has happened off the record, between what she felt she knew and what appears apparent to the public, to every other passing eye? The questions throttle through her one after another, all unanswerable, their absent logic clogging her ability to even think straight, to assume anything.
Forgoing further commentary, Alice calmly turns and stalks back past the display, coming to stand again before the image of the four of them, all happy, hopeful for some version of the future. Without a thought, she slams her fist into the image, punching it square and center at no specific face, but the whole sham. The pulpy surface of the print buckles and puckers against her knuckles as she repeats the blow again, again, each hit in equal measure, furious but focused, all a scrawl. The harder she hits, the less she feels the impact, each bud of stunning pain suffusing up along her arm, lost to the cold numb of the rest of her body, disconnected; until the blood covers her whole hand; until it sprays on the museum floor in shining spots as on a map. Only then does she notice how the picture’s pigment is coming off, too, more with each impact, the substance beneath its surface giving way unto the pulpy whiteness of its foundation’s layers as the image comes apart.
It’s not even a photo, she realizes. It’s a painting, if one so meticulously composed they would be impossible to tell apart, until now. The paint is fresh, too, she finds, still moist beneath its outer layer as it smears across her runny wounds; the canvas punctured in small places that reveal the wide white wall behind its frame where she’s bashed through. She finds that she can scratch the details away under her nails, digging in at once in curiosity against the depiction of Richard’s face, leaving behind only a muddy smear there, blending together under duress. She finds the same is true of the subsequent image of their family in obvious emotional disarray, hung just beside, also a painting; and therein all of the photos now rendered suspect, of the same make—must they not be?—if still demanding a slew of different looming questions just the same.
And still she’s not sure she feels any better, surveying the damage in her wake, photos or not. There’s still something there in what the series of images intend to represent, it seems, something filched from her memory, conjured into some aesthetic projection left unclear, flooding her psyche in waves of mixed emotion, till she feels suddenly more alive than she has in quite some time, there in the room’s resounding stillness. Somehow in all her furor she has triggered no alarms, she realizes, or at least none audible above her heavy breathing through her teeth; no one comes running out to calm her down or make her stop; no grand reveal of the nature of the game, as it might be, nor the face of the creator.
She can think of nothing else then but to lift the damaged painting off the wall, a task she finds even simpler than imagined; it weighs almost nothing, bears no firmer fixture, and reveals nothing there behind. She holds it against her chest there for a moment, feeling the loose weight of its smearing body pressed against her sweaty flesh, pore upon grain. She grips and squeezes the thing so hard that it bends, till she is hardly able to hold the remnants still; in the end she heaves it away, but it merely claps and skitters, landing facedown on the floor, its damaged image hidden against the looming darkness caught between where any two surfaces might touch.
It doesn’t take her long to repeat the act for each other image, winging them aside as one might cards from a deck, until there’s nothing left to see about the display but the withstanding wall itself, its blank white the same no matter where something had once hung or something hadn’t.
The gallery’s next room, beyond the first two, appears even emptier than those before: no featured objects, no specs for reception, not even windows, ventwork; only walls. The space appears to hold itself in place around the absence of what it could include at any moment, on display; beyond the nature of the light, the vertices and ongoing flat expanse, there is nothing there to see. The air feels stagnant, even dusty; warmer and warmer by the length, as if the air of the outside world could never touch it. She’s already sweating so much she might come apart, she thinks, turn into goo, a pile of blood and muscle on the floor to be swept up and done away with, or otherwise absorbed into the space.
But there always seems to be another chamber just ahead, further empty space linked by lone archways wide enough to let a horde through, space that from outside the structure hadn’t appeared large enough to house. Perhaps this is the intent of the installation, she imagines. The artist’s final statement being no statement at all, a massive blank, though this seems less than inventive. Even the patterned floor has lost its color now, she finds, all pure mute, each tile by now the width of her chest. Her hand is soft and brittle against the texture of the guiding wall when brushed against it, as if to confirm it’s really there, absent of any evidence of whatever else might once have hung there.
It’s almost strange how well the space is made to keep you moving, she thinks. Around each corner she keeps expecting to come upon some display, some marker of tribute, for instance, or other obvious artwork, symbols or signs—and yet around each corner there’s only more of the same: intersecting vertices that form small dead ends, blank displays, each at once alike and not the same. Soon she can’t even tell for certain which would be the way back whence she came and which the way forward, she realizes, as she stands in a room bound by identical spaces on either side, as if it might only go on like this forever.
Then, like that, as if to correct her, the space’s radiance divides. Where the edge of the present display room opens into the next, Alice sees no light filling the space, but only solid black, its interior imperceptible half a dozen feet beyond, full as all night. The darkness ahead, she feels in pressing on along it, is markedly cooler than prior space. The further she allows herself to edge into the dark, the easier it is to breathe again, to format her thinking within the linking calmness of the dark, away from all past suffering. She realizes she can no longer tell how it had ever been another way than it is now; no edge of light even where she’d last been, she finds, nothing left but more and more of the seamless and shapeless fund of dark, eclipsing her ability to assess or render anything at all. Every inch ahead could be the end of where she is, or the beginning of where she had last been, looped around again, no definition; and she already can’t remember how far she’s moved from any point. She should feel panic, she understands, even dread, but the acknowledged sensation won’t take hold; no verve there where she might call for help, no means to sense who or what might already be there just beside her or behind her. She’s not sure she wants to move further, as such, in expectation of what will emerge from out of nowhere; though when she does, the resolution is right there: another wall, so close it’s almost touching, side by side. This surface’s face feels slicker than had prior surfaces behind her—at the same time thicker, deeper, like heavy stone. The long line of its expanse’s breadth continues, allowing her further forward, pressed against it, each space connecting on to further walls. Their height seems to tend down, now, leading further into depth, into space that narrows as she presses on, until she finds herself quickly shoulder to shoulder with what spaces remain, and no option to go back behind her, where the passage seems to have sealed itself, only down through deeper dark.
The floor itself has begun to slope, she notices, her skin so slick with sweat
now it’s like she’s slipping, only barely under her own guide, as if the ground might split apart and open up unless she keeps moving, still taking care to keep her center of gravity underneath her as the plane of space extends onward, further down, growing steeper with her unintended cooperation, until suddenly she’s struggling to stand. The walls on either side are at once no longer there, dissolved into a feeling much like falling, if without wind or friction, through the ongoing resolution of the opaque. It’s as if the surrounding world is moving for her, drawing her forward into exactly what it wants. Like all the hours between seeing and believing, someone in her is saying, the gap in who I am and what I was—her thoughts so clear, at last, so all her own—until, when she tries again to move her head, to see another form of way, she finds she no longer still can; the ceiling by now is right above her, walls on each side, none below. It is as if suddenly the air were made to enclose her size and shape precisely, her and her alone, like someone’s God in their own mind, with nowhere to move, no opening or passage to appear, only more and more nothing filled in around her, calm, as if it’d never been another way—the kind of place she’d always wished for, really, made for her and her alone.
* * *
—
Alice finds the ground beneath her now is soft again, more so than ever, made of loose muck. Its texture gently vibrates against her palms, a monotonic hum at once sedating and stimulating, like the feeling of being near one’s mother from very young, knowing for once there was someone there to hold her safe. She hasn’t had that feeling in so long, and now she finds herself craving it, even so uncertain in its source; to feel it closer, to find its heart.
