Alice Knott

by Blake Butler

  Alice herself is standing before a particular display, in the same location as the one she recalls she had attacked, though she can no longer remember why. Instead of the portrait of her family there is a large dark object, the size and shape of the mirror left behind in her own home, or at least close; this one, though, is wholly blackened, caked with soot so thick no reflection might appear, nor any sign it’s really a mirror there at all—beneath the resin could be anything. A tiny placard underneath it appears to bear its title, its creator, though Alice can’t read the fine print so far away, the printed words there remaining any words at all.

  On the video, Alice is shown standing immobile and unblinking, as if mesmerized by what she sees there in the black. No matter what comes on either side, she doesn’t move, staying stock still as hundreds of other bodies pass along, crowding in around her, most hardly even glancing at the object as much as taking notice of her awkward gape. Her arms lie flat at her sides, her expression almost unchanging with the time, marked by the code at the bottom right of the screen, sped up to cram many seconds into each, playing out now for the present Alice to suffer through anew, watching herself stuck in a scene she can’t recall, wondering what might be yet to come despite her lack of recognition.

  The film goes on like that for quite some time. It seems more and more as if nothing else is going to happen, slowly loosing Alice’s expectation into not boredom but increasing anxiety, until just after the film’s code marks the passing of its seventh hour, when—without a sound above the muted aspect of its playback—the blackened object bursts; that is, its surface shatters, unprompted by obvious contact, showering debris and shards all over the museum floor. It’s unclear what could have caused the event, as nothing seems abnormal within the space outside Alice’s prolonged attention, which she has never shifted, although the subtext of the film itself suggests some form of connection; at the very least, it seems, she had known the incident was coming, if not also that her prolonged focus itself had caused or helped it to occur. This culpability is reinforced when, immediately after the demolition, the long-lingering Alice in the recording turns her back and moves away—not to exit the space, we find, but to go on casually observing other work, as if she hasn’t even realized what has happened.

  But the destruction of the object, as it remains thereafter in its fragments, suddenly an attraction for the nearby patrons as they begin to gather around it like maggots onto meat, reveals the innate structure of its manufacture. Underneath the char had really been a mirror, we can see, its face now fractured into a finite set of glassy shards, none of them alike, spilled from the compromised object’s body as if they’ve been bashed out from behind it, revealing a previously unobservable cavity of colored gel, black as oil but tinged with fuchsia rust, a mass apparently still wet and gleaming in the gallery’s contained light, appearing something like alive. One might even wonder if the event has been set up by the creator, as strangely compelling an image as it is—some immersive performance meant to comment and undo the very decorum of being viewed. But the reaction of those surrounding quickly makes it clear that this is not the case.

  It soon becomes clear that the focus of the recording thereafter is not the ruptured object, despite its spectacle; rather, the camera follows Alice, who has yet to even appear to realize what’s going on. She continues on calmly moving through the exhibit work to work, passive in posture, arms limp, by herself, while various bystanders now begin to fill out the edges of the video from rooms beyond, several of them already pointing and jawing at her unseen, holding their kids back. Others are already taking their own videos and pictures with their devices, as if in parallel to the central recording from overhead, immediately disseminating replications of the moment into the world beyond, on to loved ones and strangers alike online.

  Even when two security officers appear and approach her at the room’s far end, Alice remains composed, passive and still. She does not appear to respond to their inquiries by so much as nodding, even when her forward progress becomes blocked, until at last the cops take her by the arms, produce their handcuffs, bind her wrists, and pat her down. She watches blankly, both onscreen and in real time, as they remove from pockets on her person several prescription bottles, a flask, a fillet knife, and a handgun. No matter what they do or say, her recorded image won’t respond, a helpless blankness in her eyes as if what is meant to happen is all that could ever happen, as if she’s already lived through this countless times. She makes no recognizable attempt to cover her face or speak or struggle, even as they begin to lead her out of the screen and into custody; it is only just before she clears the frame and the scene cuts that she looks suddenly straight up into the recording’s POV, staring head-on into the lens of the security camera, as if she’d known exactly who was watching all along.

  Within thirty-six hours, the surveillance video—described by many in media as depicting Alice shattering the mirror with her mind—goes viral as well, shared at a rate not quite as rapid and widespread as the prior acts of destruction, but now accompanied by a host of further allegations over the supposed culprit, already a cult figure in many eyes, and thus subsequently generating renewed attention to the related prior videos in its wake—even more so then as what at first seems circumstantial soon appears more certain, as a thumb drive in Alice’s bag is discovered to hold a bank of dozens of other previously unseen videos, saved with sequentially numbered filenames in an untitled folder on a disk otherwise blank.

  Among the videos are recordings documenting the destruction of the eight major artworks she’d been known previously to own, including new footage from the originally leaked videos of the sandblasted de Kooning, and firsthand footage of the undoing of the other seven, including five by similar acts of fire, two by razor scraping, one by repeated immersion in an acid bath, and one compressed in a compactor down to the size of a remote control, which is then deposited in a public receptacle designated for common trash. Various other videos include evidence of destruction of a number of other missing works, many of them already reported stolen, others newly marked. There are as well several videos in which the works being destroyed cannot be identified by hired experts as noteworthy—that is, famous—which raises some question over the intent of the sum total of the acts: Who is deciding which should be demolished, and which not? Is a work left previously unknown, ruined in the same way as those of so many major artists, suddenly more valuable, more real?

  Though Alice herself does not appear in any portion of the films—the faces of those involved in the destruction remaining either in costume, off screen, or otherwise scrambled—possession of the evidence is deemed sufficient to detain Alice as the primary suspect in more than one hundred counts of larceny, fraud, destruction of private property, and, in the mass wake of mimicked acts, incitement to riot. Her location in custody remains unpublished, another form of privileged knowledge.

  * * *

  —

  By the end of the first week after the initial broadcast of Alice’s arrest, the blackened mirror-object she had allegedly attacked on the most recent recording, titled The High Cost of Existing (Under a Silver Sky), is sold in its current, damaged condition, shards and all, at private auction to a buyer who ceases to be named, for a higher price than any artwork in the contemporary era.

  The following morning, depictions of the blackened screen—the newly infamous work—appear on the front cover of more than three dozen major magazines, spanning worldwide. It is now essentially nothing more than a large black square, far as most can see, dressed around its edges with slivered reflecting fragments, trails of dust: an entity impossible to recombine, but equally impossible to re-create, given the hysterical event causing its becoming. But its import, from there, is taken no less seriously; if anything, it acquires status it otherwise likely never would have. “Its fragments are a solar system of itself,” one media critic writes of the work, “a mini-model of our confounded universe as yet to come.”

&nbs
p; Fifteen hours later, the purported buyer, an “antisocial,” bad boy billionaire also known for his eye as a collector, is discovered to have killed himself not long after receipt of the transaction, by throwing himself off the roof of one of his many tropical properties. His blood is found toxicologically confounded with substances whose nature remains excluded from reports.

  That blood has barely begun to dry when the now-notorious artwork again changes hands at public auction on behalf of the new executor of the dead’s estate, this time fetching nearly twice the previous record upon its sale to a young hedge fund manager whose purchase is deemed to occur for no reason other than that its value in creating new fame, as this last sale resets the record not only for the highest valued artwork in our era, but of all time.

  The name of the agency representing both the buyer and the seller in each of these transactions, it is reported, is Void Corporation.

  Public repercussion of such exposure in coming days proceeds apace. Soon each act is just another icon in a conflagration without border.

  At New York’s MoMA, Henri Rousseau’s The Dream (1910) is attacked with a straight razor by a local college professor of physics, who after screaming “I am the fuck of your reality” stabs the image of a full moon in the painting’s upper right-hand corner eleven times before restraint. A video, less viral than prior efforts, circulates briefly, showing police beating the man into submission as he attempts to struggle free, screaming over and over for his mother by her first name.

  And on the same floor, in the same afternoon, Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913) survives attack in the form of a recently laid-off nanny’s attempts to pry the painting from its frame, resorting then to punching the face of the image with her fists so hard the pigment would be forever dented, if in a way almost not visible to the passing eye. In her purse, they find nearly a week’s worth of leaking frozen meatloaf dinners crammed into an otherwise empty vessel, with a handwritten note that says, You may not eat me.

  Later that afternoon, downtown at the New Museum, a set of twins left briefly unsupervised by their young parents climb over the dividing rail around Chris Burden’s A Tale of Two Cities (1981), where they are then able to run and roll in gleeful hysteria across a significant stretch of the installation’s meticulously arranged landscape before their detention. It is, of course, the parents who will be charged, resulting in a month-long exposé in which the mother attempts to out the father, an accountant, as a secret correspondent for the CIA, claiming he had triggered the children to act out by placing his finger in their ears and administering a serum concocted and administered by the government for centuries in the manufacturing of the exact timeline of our history as it had already been conceived. In the end, only the mother will serve time.

  And the next morning, across the country at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Katie Grinnan’s Mirage (2011) is assaulted by a security attendant who had been assigned that day to watch the very room in which the work had been displayed, a violent outburst that then continues onto nearby bystanders, leaving four wounded and one dead. “I could no longer stand to let it go on like this,” the guard is quoted as saying upon arrest. “It isn’t right. It isn’t the way I am, we are, we have been. This disease. This eye within the eye. I am become overcome, my bones. No new future.”

  And across the ocean, at almost the same time, a recently married architect is arrested for trying to masturbate onto the face of Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893), succeeding only in exposing himself to dozens from a visiting middle school, amid their actual audible replications of the target’s representative act. While imprisoned, the culprit will attempt to sever his genitalia with the bent edge of the leg of a metal bedframe and die from blood loss.

  And a substitute teacher removes the section of mirror from Joan Miró’s sculpture Object (1932), allowing it to fall free on the ground, as if the mirror had been scalding to the touch once broken free, shrieking in high-pitched furor as they come to stop her, unable thereafter to make any kind of human speech, only more shrieking.

  And a Boy Scout with a pocket knife manages to stab Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1982–83) twenty-two times without triggering attention of the guards before he stops and lies facedown by his own will on the floor and goes at once into a coma; only later will it be discovered that he had been blind from birth, with no clear explanation for how he’d delivered himself from the home of his also blind legal guardian, his grandmother, her home more than one hundred miles away.

  And somewhere else an elderly woman throws her body into Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), so hard that it shatters the glass and spills formaldehyde into the gallery, pooling out into the nearby rooms like a sick tide; the woman later tells the press she “wanted to take the place of the shark and let the shark live in sunlight forever instead of what I am because soon there will be nothing.”

  What is wrong with all these people’s minds? people keep asking. Why did it have to come this far, and what will be enough to make it stop? Many have their own opinions on the outcome, the exposure, though in the end none will be true, never exactly as it happened; and neither, then, will be the story of whoever’s left in years thereafter to pass it on.

  Regardless, two different kinds of neon blue paint are sprayed simultaneously onto Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath (1893) by the left and right hand of a young mother, who has left her sixteen-month-old child at home alone to fend for herself so that she might go and make the pattern of an upside-down cross over the famous image. In her absence, the child will be found having ripped all the pages out of a copy of the Bible passed down through their family for more generations than anyone might like to recall, her first work as a living artist.

  And that same day Antoine Bourdelle’s Head of Apollo (1900) is lifted up by a young violin prodigy and carried across the exhibition chamber at a run before being dunked like a basketball into the back of the head of an unwitting patron, inflicting physical damage that will eventually prove critical.

  And a tired housewife produces a steel baton from underneath her dress and attacks Glenn Ligon’s neon-bulb sculpture, Untitled (America) (2018), then fends off security by cutting her arms with fragments from the wreckage, spraying blood she screams is “hell blood” at them until she is eventually restrained using plastic sheeting and a Taser.

  And another and again and so on, all like this; the hour in the hour rendered full, as if to splitting, each act made done in separate rooms touched by the same air, hemispheres and days apart.

  Each occurrence, once it is committed, has been committed. It cannot thereafter be unwritten from the replicating pages of organs of the media that continue to carry it forward by mouth and eye, regardless of how quickly we must continue to move on, accumulating more and more preposterous occasions into mass memory until eventually it’s no longer possible to properly attend to any one.

  And meanwhile, in the news of local politics and weather, birds keep falling from the sky in flocks, their pupils overrun with scads of parasite; six different elementary schools in the same district all burn down on the same day, a serial accident cited in connection to faulty work done by a major contractor, now running for mayor; a bag boy kills eighteen by slipping arsenic into each box of doughnuts that he is forced to touch by way of work; sales of Aricept reach another all-time high; Stonehenge collapses; a long wing of the Mall of America collapses; the president’s twin brother appears on the nightly news to ask that we bow our heads with him and pray. It is unclear what any of these events have to do with what’s being done elsewhere, how it connects; how it might have gone differently or could never have gone differently. Soon, one might imagine, there will be more instances of damage than can be accounted for, so much so we won’t even be able to recognize the real from the unreal; a mass of incorporated acts eventually surpassing our mental bandwidth, lost in the gape.

  It is, after all, just another day he
ld over in our remaining hours, as some of us struggle just to stand; the light in the room of the ongoing reportage, tuned into by millions, maintains the same conductive quality as ever, at once neurotic and antiseptic, biding its lines, beneath the whites of the eyes of the news anchors in every local hemisphere as soft as something bled to death, too primed; against all of which the ongoing ambient buzzing of the production, the heavy lights, the operators, their flawless makeup, obscures the soundtrack just enough to make any one word seem off from what it meant.

  The strangest thing, to Alice, in the midst of the world as it unfolds, both by word of mouth and in her heart, is how none of it seems actually strange at all, despite its lack of precedent. Not that it had already happened before, in another life even, but that she’d felt it coming her whole life. From her incarcerated state, each aspect of the present seems in its reception like something that could have been in one of her father’s books or a plotline in the show they’d watched together as a family, neither of which she remembered as her own memory beforehand; at least, an echo of those, embodied by their air. The present’s occurrence effectively affects her as any newly unveiled episode would have, even knowing that, even days later, often only one small scene or minor aspect of the production is all that will still stick—the way a character said something more than what was said, even; the stunning color of a walk-on’s leggings or lips, perhaps, as seen moving through the background of a shot, elements not meant to have specific purpose, it seems, but somehow therein occluding the more formal aspects of the entertainment, larger than life. Though the walls of her cell are real, clearly—she can bang her head against them and feel no bend—the words within her don’t feel like hers, seem to have no defining explanation beyond her own mind, their meanings fitting in her like a floodplain, one upon which the rushing waters have long already come and worn down the land to its barest. There could be nothing more there underneath, beyond a burning, the molten core around which churns the mutating crust of Earth.