The Readymade Thief
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VIKING
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Copyright © 2017 by Augustus Rose
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Frontispiece: “Typo / Topography of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass,” 2003, by Richard Hamilton (1922–2011). Purchased 2004. Artwork © R. Hamilton. All rights reserved, DACS and ARS 2017.
Photo: © Tate, London 2016.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Rose, Augustus, author.
Title: The readymade thief / Augustus Rose.
Description: New York : Viking, [2017] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016057139 (print) | LCCN 2017011575 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221857 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221833 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Homeless teenagers—Fiction. | Philadelphia (Pa.)—Fiction. | Suspense fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Suspense.
Classification: LCC PS3618.O782825 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.O782825 R43 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016057139
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Nami and Auggie, my illuminators
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
BOOK I: Dust Breeding CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
BOOK II: The Passage from Virgin to Bride CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
BOOK III: With Hidden Noise CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
BOOK IV: Nude Descending a Staircase CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
BOOK V: The Juggler of Gravity CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BOOK VI: The Bride Stripped Bare CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BOOK VII: The Bachelor Machine CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
BOOK VIII: In Advance of the Broken Arm CHAPTER TWENTY
BOOK IX: Portrait of a Young Woman CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
There is no solution, because there is no problem.
—MARCEL DUCHAMP
PROLOGUE
TO make your way to the DePaul Aquarium and Museum of Natural History, on Petty Island in the middle of the Delaware River, you can drive through New Jersey and over the only bridge. But then you’ll be confronted by a CITGO guard and will either have to social-engineer your way in (and good luck with that) or be forced to turn around and go back. Better to temporarily liberate a small boat from one of the old piers on the Philly side and row the half mile across the river. Once on the island, you’ll want to avoid the large shipping lot—busy with dockworkers in the daytime and prowled at night by a security cruiser—and instead cut through the wetlands to the southern end of the island. The aquarium stands nearly solitary amid a village of bulldozed foundations, one of two preserved relics from an aborted 1960s attempt to turn the island into some sort of tourist attraction. The other is the Blizzard, a rusting megalith of a roller coaster that silhouettes the night sky. The aquarium—a long, low-slung, single-story building—hunkers in its shadow.
Entry to the unguarded aquarium is straightforward. Although the front gate and the doors are chained shut, climbing the stone wall on the eastern side is not hard, and there is a loading dock around back whose steel door has been pried open at the bottom. Inside you’re free to shine your flashlight at will, letting it trail over the rows of empty tanks, some with bone-whitened coral and ersatz reef displays still intact. You can climb down into the alligator pit and crawl into old burrows or over rocks coated in a patina of dried algae. A row of life-sized plaster shark models still hangs above the entrance lobby, fins and tails cracked but otherwise complete. The fossils are gone from the Paleozoic Room, but one display remains intact: a Cambrian ocean diorama of faded plastic models—orange trilobites, green nautiluses, sea slugs, kelp, and anemones, a frozen, surreal arena of underwater plants and feverishly imagined bugs.
It is in this room that Lee has spent hours, losing herself in the diorama every time she visits the derelict aquarium. She imagines that this must be what scuba diving feels like: isolate in an alien seascape. Tomi, the other member of the Philadelphia Urbex Society (membership: two), is not with her tonight, because tonight she needs to be away from Tomi and his endless talk, his name-dropping arcane art movements—Fluxus and Lettrism, Pataphysics and Situationist Psychogeography—his insatiable craving for her attention.
Urban exploration is not the safest of recreations, especially not for a single female, especially a female as slight and—as Tomi once (but only once) put it—as elfin as Lee, but she feels safer here than at other sites. The sheer remoteness makes the aquarium uninhabitable by squatters, as testified by the dearth of graffiti or other vandalism. She supposes that one of the Petty Island guards could potentially come by, but it is unlikely: the aquarium is not part of CITGO property (the whole wetlands area of the island is under heavy dispute between environmentalists and local developers), and by nature security guards are incurious and lazy.
Now she sits on an old wooden office chair she’s commandeered from behind the cashier’s desk, staring past the pregnancy test stick in her hand at the little plastic seascape, the broken fronds and wilted arthropods, all now faded and cracked, and thinks about the tiny thing growing inside her. Lee knows who the father is, though she has no intention of telling him. The thing inhabits some subterranean cave of her body, floating in amniotic silence, just waiting to emerge and wreak havoc on Lee’s life. All her hopes and plans—a life made by her own choices, even a chance at college—snuffed before that life can take in its first breath. Unless she snuffs the thing inside her first. That is the real question hovering before her right now, occupying space in the diorama tank, somewhere between the Wiwaxia and the Hallucigenia.
The thing is thirty-three days old—she knows the exact moment of its conception—and so she doesn’t have long to decide what to do or the decision will be made for her. Lee stares into the glass tank a while longer, stares without seeing, until a single object begins to come into focus behind the field of molded prehistoric kelp: a rolled strip of paper, what can only be described as a tiny scroll, tied with a lock of what looks like human hair and propped up in the green plastic tentacles of a Cambrian anemone. Breaking one of the two cardinal rules of the Urbex Society—Take Nothing, Leave Nothing—Lee reaches in through the back of the tank and plucks
out the scroll. The hair, black and long, snaps when she pulls on it, and the paper unfurls in her fingers. Lee flattens it with her palms onto the glass top of the tank and stares at it for several seconds, trying to comprehend its intent. Because she understands immediately upon seeing the photograph that it has been left for her. Which means the Station Master has found her.
She’s seen the photograph before, hanging above the desk in his room, and Lee studies the woman in it closely now. The photo is very old; the brittle paper crumbles a bit in her hands. She brings it to the bathroom, holds it up beside her head as she stands in front of the cracked mirror, and shines her flashlight. It is like looking back in time to another version of herself, a visage that has changed only slightly as it echoed through the decades. She and the woman in the photo look nearly identical. Lee turns it over. Penciled along a top corner in a fluid European script is “A.T. Juli 1911.” Below that is the now-familiar cryptogram, still unsolved after nearly a century. And below the cryptogram is a short note in the crabbed handwriting of the Station Master:
Return what you have taken.
· BOOK I ·
Dust Breeding
ONE
LEE was just six the first time she stole something. Deposited by her mother at a birthday party to socialize with kids she barely knew and hardly liked, she secreted herself in the bedroom closet of the birthday girl’s parents during a game of hide-and-seek. Lee was a tiny child, mostly silent and near invisible anyway, so hiding was easy, and the game was a good chance to be alone. She stayed in the closet a very long time—lingering well after the other kids had moved on to other games—and, while there, she discovered a box covered in faded green velvet and tied with old twine. Something inside rattled when she shook the box. Lee didn’t intend to open it, but then her finger caught in the loop of the bow and the twine just kind of fell loose.
Inside the box was a stack of yellowing letters held together by more twine, a painted iron toy steamship, an old wooden pipe, and the source of the rattling: a small glass bottle with something trapped inside. Lee crouched there, listening to the shrieks of the other kids and holding the bottle up to what dim shafts of light came in through the slats, trying to guess what was inside. When she heard her mother calling her name, she panicked—stuffing the bottle in her pocket, then pushing the box back below the pile of sweaters where she’d found it. As Lee followed her mother through the house and out to the car, she realized it was late, well after dark, and all the other kids’ parents had come and gone. Her mother held the back door open as she climbed in, and Lee’s father turned to her from the front seat and gave her one of his smiles, the smile he used when he’d screwed up, and handed her a partially eaten chocolate bar. “Did you have a nice time, honey?” he asked her, but Lee’s answer was caught in the slam of her mother’s door. They were silent the whole ride home. That night Lee tented herself beneath her covers with a flashlight, then took the object out and examined it again. The bottle was blue glass clouded with age. Lee felt a twang of guilt at having taken something that was not hers. But when it rattled in her hand, a surge of pleasure ran down her spine. She had to hold the bottle up to the light to see the tiny silver die inside.
• • •
When Lee would come home after school, her mother would be at work, but her father was usually there. Sometimes he’d be in the driveway, working on his old Dodge Dart, its hood up, and he’d let her sit up on the fender, her feet dangling into the engine compartment as she’d hold the carburetor or distributor in her hands and he’d explain what all the parts were. When it was running, he’d sometimes take her out for a drive and even let her sit in his lap and steer on the byroad straightaways.
Often when she’d come home, the house would be full of her father’s friends, people from the local music scene and the occasional semifamous bassist or ex-drummer from this or that band passing through whom Lee was too young to recognize. Her father worked an irregular schedule, inspecting and repairing hospital x-ray machines, but really he was a singer-songwriter and musician. He put out a self-titled album with an indie label a year before Lee was born, and sometimes he was invited onstage to perform on a song during some band’s show, but he never made a living off of any of it. His friends all said he could have been another Elliott Smith, if only his life had gone a little differently.
Her father had a disarming smile that softened any room he entered, and people naturally gravitated to him, the center of some subtle magnetic force. Lee loved coming home to a crowded living room, where she could sit in a corner unnoticed and listen to the stories. She loved watching her father especially, seated in his usual spot at the end of the sofa, staring down at his socks as someone would be telling some tale of loss or excess. And she loved watching others watch him, as her father would inevitably look up, smile from the corner of his mouth, and deadpan some line that Lee rarely understood beyond the fact that it would set everyone else in the room off laughing.
As though through some unspoken understanding, the visitors always left a good half hour before her mother, a nurse, returned home. By which time her father would (with Lee’s help) have the errant glasses collected and washed and put away, and some semblance of dinner going. On one occasion they’d missed a few glasses that had been set down in a planter, and her mom had taken her aside and asked if anyone had been over. Seeing no reason to lie, Lee told her yes, a few of Dad’s friends were here.
“What were they doing?”
“Just hanging out and drinking grapefruit juice and talking.”
As soon as Lee said this, her mom’s jaw set, and she walked to the kitchen and placed the two glasses on the counter above the dishwasher. Lee understood that it was for her father to find—a simple, direct message that her mom knew.
They argued that night, Lee could hear it from her room, and she never understood what could have been so bad about drinking juice with your friends or why her mom was always so wound up and angry. Her father wasn’t around in the morning and didn’t come back for several days, but this brief vanishing act was something he did all the time, and Lee was used to it.
• • •
Lee was seven when her father left for good, disappearing without a word. She simply came home from school one day to a house that felt different. Lee looked around without landing on anything until she went into her parents’ bedroom and saw that all her father’s stuff was gone, emptied from the drawers and the closet and the top of the dresser. The bathroom was clear of his things as well.
He’d taken more than he usually did, but Lee still expected him to return after a few days. When five days passed, then a week, she asked her mom.
Her mom looked down at her dispassionately. “He might come back tomorrow, or he might never come back. I can’t tell you which. I think you’d better just get used to it.”
“Where did he go this time?”
“I wish I knew.”
Her mom said nothing more about it, though as the days, then weeks, and then months passed and it seemed finally clear that her father wasn’t coming home or even sending a letter, Lee could see her mother crumble, bit by bit, from the inside. Some nights Lee could hear crying behind the closed door of their bedroom, until she didn’t anymore; but by then her mother seemed emptied out entirely. Lee liked to listen to her father’s CD sometimes when she came home from school, before her mother got off work. It was sad and funny at the same time, scratchy and full of longing, and Lee liked the way she felt when she listened to it. One day she came home to find it gone.
• • •
At eight she stole a glossy black paintbrush from the desk drawer of Mrs. Choi, her pretty English teacher, who used it to keep her hair bunned. At nine Lee slipped things from the backpacks of her peers: pencil cases and charm bracelets and sticker books. At ten she made a game of trying to steal one thing from each of the kids in her class: pens and mittens and colored Nalgene drink
ing bottles, never anything of real value. She kept her swag in a box in her closet, and sometimes she would lay it all out on the floor of her room. It was the only way she used any of it. Lee didn’t consider any of the kids friends. It wasn’t that they teased her or ostracized her or thought her weird, but none of them seemed to see her, either. Holding these objects in her hands allowed her to imagine something like closeness.
Her mom became a palimpsest. She had erased herself a layer at a time, until only the dim outline of who she was remained. Every now and then the mom Lee knew would emerge to celebrate her daughter’s birthday or Christmas, and she made sure the bills were paid and that food was on the table, but mostly she was gone. Lee hated her for her slow retreat into herself, for leaving Lee behind. Her mom’s hours at the hospital kept Lee from seeing her much anyway, but even when she was around, Lee felt she could almost see through her.
So when she told Lee, now twelve, that she was bringing a friend home for dinner, Lee didn’t know what to think. Steve was the opposite of her father. He wore a white linen tunic and crisp linen pants and white canvas slip-on shoes. Around his neck was a leather cord tied around a pale crystal. His hands were soft when he shook Lee’s, and when he saw her looking at one of the half-dozen braided colored-leather bracelets he wore on his wrist, he took one off and gave it to her. Lee smiled thank you and put it in her pocket. Over dinner he asked her a few bland questions about school, wiping his hands and the corners of his mouth after every bite.
He came by more and more frequently and sometimes stayed over. Steve didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was often in whispers to Lee’s mom. He moved in so stealthily that Lee didn’t realize he had until she noticed he’d set up a small meditation area in the corner of the living room, with a floor pillow, a mandala on the wall, and a small bowl of incense. Lee would often come home to the smell of that incense, Steve facing the wall with his back to her. He asked her to join him one time, and she did, but Lee didn’t understand what he wanted her to do. How was she supposed to empty her mind when it was constantly filling back up?