The subWiki page included a mention of the original Société Anonyme, but most of it was dedicated to the regenerated S.A. According to the site, the group was begun in 2001 by a man referred to only as the Priest.
“I heard the Station Master use that name,” Lee said. “When he was talking to the man who delivered the Duchamp piece.”
“What did he say exactly?”
“Something about the Priest being an old man.”
“Anything else?”
“How the Priest was trapped in a room somewhere? And how what the guy was delivering would change everything. I don’t know, it’s hard to remember.” She sat back on the bed. “But now that I look back on it, it sounded like there was a split within them. I think they were working against each other. Maybe we can use that?”
Tomi considered this. “Maybe, but we’ll need more than that.” He looked like he was considering something.
“What is it?” she said.
“Do you remember The Bride Stripped Bare, the Duchamp work from the museum, the tall glass panel?”
“Yeah.”
“Near the bottom of the work is a circle of nine figures. Duchamp called them the Bachelors. They were all typical male roles of the early twentieth century. There’s the Delivery Boy, the Gendarme, the Cavalry Soldier, the Policeman, the Undertaker, the Busboy, the Flunky, and get this: the Station Master and the Priest.”
“Does everything lead back to Duchamp?”
“From what I can tell, he is like a patron saint to them.”
She thought about the men in old uniforms she’d seen at the Silo. “So maybe there are nine of them in the S.A. That’s something.” Lee’s eyes were tired. She sat on the sofa, behind him. “What else?”
Tomi turned back to the screen, paraphrasing for her. “The Société Anonyme started out throwing salons and exhibitions around modernist avant-garde art. They dressed in early-twentieth-century clothes and reenacted exhibitions and performances of the time. Like a performance of a Duchamp musical composition with notes chosen by chance. Or a production of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi. They reenacted Dada sound poems from the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich; they did a Futurist symphony using industrial machines as instruments.”
Tomi clicked to bring up a page full of blurry pics of fliers from these events and others. Lee’s thoughts were still on men in old uniforms. The Station Master, she’d seen a uniform in his armoire. The man who brought him the Duchamp work, he had on a funny-looking old uniform as well. Maybe he was the Delivery Boy? The tall man in the antiquated dark wool suit—which one was he? She remembered a policeman, and a few men in old military uniforms. Lee had had an uncle on her mother’s side, and every June he and his friends used to dress in period clothing and reenact the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Her uncle and the other men (they were all men) in his little club had all been earnest and harmless. But the S.A. was something else. She thought about those kids upstairs.
Tomi was scrolling through pages, looking for anything that might be relevant. He stopped on something.
She got up to read over his shoulder: “‘Members of the Société Anonyme are rumored to include scientists and engineers, but they are also said to be involved in more esoteric areas, such as consciousness exploration, metaphysics, alchemy, and technological singularity.’”
“They have their fingers in a lot of pies,” Tomi said.
“What’s technological singularity?”
“It’s the idea that one day artificial intelligence will make a super-leap forward and will become of such a higher order it will make us look like insects in comparison.”
“Are they just a bunch of cranks? There’s got to be something here. Who is the Priest?”
Tomi shook his head.
“When they took me in at the Crystal Castle, the Station Master treated me . . . I don’t know, as if he knew me somehow. Like he’d been waiting for me. And that man in the Silo, the way he acted, too. Like he’d been expecting me.”
“You must mean something to them.”
“It’s got something to do with that woman,” she said. “They think we’re connected.”
“These people are not . . . they don’t seem to look at the world like the rest of us.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t do anything. Just lie low. Let me ask around, see what I can find out. The Subnet has long arms. Maybe there’s someone who can help.” Tomi got up and put his jacket on.
“Where are you going?”
“Home. I’ve got to go to work tomorrow morning, and it will be better for me to leave now, while it’s dark.”
She was so grateful to have him back, more than she’d realized, and the need for him to stay the night came unexpectedly.
He saw her face and added, “I’ll be back tomorrow night.”
She nearly told him then of the thing growing inside her, the thing that might have his eyes or his squat nose, the cleft in his chin. But she didn’t know if she’d be telling him because he had a right to know or because she knew it would make him stay. So she said nothing.
He wrote his number on a slip of paper. “I know you don’t have a cell, and you can’t use the landline here to call anyone, so this is just for an emergency. If you need to call me, find a pay phone.”
Tomi left the way they had come in, and Lee cracked the curtain to watch him disappear down the street. When she could no longer see him, she stood in the middle of her new home and listened to the clicking of the empty house.
Lee couldn’t sleep that night, and so she stayed up watching TV, flipping channels until she began to feel the loneliness gnaw at her insides. She browsed the single bookshelf, but the Lunskes weren’t much in the way of casual readers. Most of it was devoted to law texts. There was a lone book on chemistry, and she remembered the bookshelf in the Station Master’s room. All those books on chemistry, but also a whole shelf devoted to alchemy. She went back online.
Alchemy, according to the Internet, was a kind of proto-chemistry, going back to before the twelfth century. It was, so far as Lee could interpret, a garbled mess of religion, magic, and coded mystical jargon. Its aim seemed to be either to turn base metals into gold or to achieve a means toward immortality. Alchemists saw the universe as made up of opposing forces and elements, and alchemy was an art that focused on the marriage of these paired opposites. The key to all of it was something called the philosopher’s stone. Nobody knew exactly what it was, but it was the thing they were all after. It just seemed like magic tricks to her. Were the S.A. nothing more than a bunch of cheap magicians?
Lee opened a new private browser and typed in “Marcel Duchamp alchemy.” There were people who found encoded alchemical symbolisms in his work, especially The Bride Stripped Bare. But Lee was only able to locate one quote on the subject from Duchamp himself: “If I have ever practiced alchemy, it was in the only way it can be done now, that is to say, without knowing it.”
Lee sank back in the chair. None of this was telling her anything. She closed her eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come. She wished Tomi hadn’t gone. She wished she’d been able to ask him to stay. Lee did the math in her head and then typed “fetus 7 weeks” into the search engine. She deleted it, shut the laptop, then opened it and typed it again. She hit return. A click on “images” brought up a page of pink tadpoles. Lee opened one, fitting it to the screen. It had a big, misshapen head with dark eyes and tiny flippers. About half an inch, according to the Web site. She lifted her shirt and looked down at her belly. The thing was in there, floating in its little sac. Lee went to the living room and found the liquor cabinet. She opened a bottle of gin, tipped it back and chugged for a good three seconds. Then she went into the bathroom to throw up.
• • •
In the morning she made herself eggs and toast. Everything in the house seemed harsher in the daylight,
and she walked through it picking up random things—a blue glass vase, a faux deco lighter, a tiny copper lamp—and trying to get a sense of the place. At the Orbisons, everything in the house felt like something they had all touched; the whole house was infused with the presence of the family. Walking through the Lunskes’ was like walking through a furniture showroom.
That afternoon someone let himself into the house, waking her into a state of animal panic. Lee hid in an upstairs closet, praying the person wouldn’t come up to find the tangle of unmade bedding and the dirty dishes she’d left on the nightstand. Eventually, after rattling around downstairs for what seemed like forever, the person left.
Lee gathered her things, made sure she had left no traces behind, and went out the way she and Tomi had come in. She had no money, but she had Tomi’s list.
The next house was a yellow, aluminum-sided single-family home behind a picket fence. Lee let herself in through a second-floor window. No alarm went off, but Lee was sitting at the kitchen counter, eating a package of deli meat from the fridge, when the family’s teenage son came home. He walked right past the kitchen and into the living room, where he turned on the TV and began calling friends to set up a party while his parents were out of town. Lee slipped out the kitchen door and through the yard of the house behind. It was dark out. She walked quickly, zigzagging streets until she hit a main boulevard and found a gas station restroom. She splashed water over her face until her shakes subsided. Lee dried herself off on her sweatshirt, went into one of the stalls, and sat on the toilet seat.
“Are you all right?” The voice outside of the stall sounded hesitant, as though the woman had been debating with herself whether to get involved.
Lee hadn’t realized she’d been crying, little hiccups that must have sounded like someone choking. She could see the woman’s shoes, brown leather pumps, and white stockings. She imagined a woman her mother’s age, in a scarf and cardigan. If she opened the door and the woman saw her, the woman might take pity, invite her to stay at her home for the night, or even a few. Lee would eat French toast in the woman’s kitchen and answer her questions politely, lying to her with carefully chosen words.
But when Lee opened the door the woman was already gone.
Outside Lee stood at a pay phone, holding the receiver but unable to dial Tomi’s number. He would be sick with worry—for that alone she owed him a phone call. And she missed him already, missed his stories, missed their late-night creeps and their long walks home, missed wanting him to stop talking. But the encounter with the woman in the restroom had made her feel so needy and weak she disgusted herself. She remembered her rising panic when Tomi had told her he was leaving, and her visceral desire for him to stay. She refused to need anyone like that.
• • •
The next house proved to be a winner. She spent three days there skimming novels whose titles all seemed to reference someone’s daughter, and eating steadily through the contents of the refrigerator. Every day it became easier to be alone, and every day the prospect of calling Tomi seemed more remote. He would be better off without her, in the end, and she stood a better chance of disappearing on her own. She knew how to be invisible, it was in her blood. But she couldn’t be invisible with someone else. On the fourth day, she went out again and scouted her next residence, came back and erased every trace of her presence. She left that night, dropping a bag of her trash into a neighbor’s bin.
By her third residence, Lee had worked out a system of rules. One: leave as small a footprint as possible. This meant cleaning up after herself constantly, washing and drying her dishes and putting them away as soon as she’d finished. It meant making the bed every morning and doing a run-through every night. Two: draw the shades and leave the place in darkness. Usually the homeowners would leave on a light or two anyway, which gave enough illumination for her to get by. Sometimes she allowed herself a dim reading lamp in a back room if the shades could be drawn tightly enough. Three: always have an escape route mapped out, with her things in a bag and ready to go. And four (the hardest): never take anything from the homes that she didn’t bring in.
She was beginning to feel nauseated, close to vomiting, several times a day, and sometimes she’d sit with her cheek against the cool porcelain of the toilet and wait for it to come, but nothing ever came up. Once she came close to finding a clinic and getting it over with, but then she imagined herself walking in and the questions they would ask. She had no money, and even if they gave her the procedure for free, she had no ID and no way to prove she was over eighteen. She knew how young she looked. She would have to figure out a way, at some point, but she still had time.
NINE
LEE perpetrated her first burglary on a November night around 1 a.m. She had intended to squat the house, a columned colonial mansion that was tonier than her prior residences. After drifting from room to room to let the feel of the place sink in, Lee had settled down in the kitchen with a bowl of cereal when she saw the note for the cleaning woman on the counter. It didn’t say when she was expected, but Lee knew she couldn’t stay.
The list was shrinking fast. It would take her through another month, if she was lucky. Lee began to think about what she would do when it ran dry. Philadelphia was no longer safe. There were too many people looking for her.
There were cities she’d always wanted to see: New York, Miami, New Orleans, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle. If she could scrape together enough for bus fare, she could have her pick. Lee imagined herself stepping off a bus in New York, saw the crowds rushing around her as she stood under the fluorescent lamps of a downtown Greyhound station. But then what? She’d still need money for food, an apartment, at least until she could get some kind of job. She saw herself behind the counter of a bookstore or washing dishes at a restaurant.
Maybe there was something valuable in the house. If she wasn’t staying here, then her no-stealing rule didn’t apply, did it?
She returned to the bedroom where she remembered seeing a black lacquer box on the dresser. The box was filled with necklaces and earrings and rings, and she picked through it for anything that looked valuable, careful not to take too many pieces. The longer it took these people to realize they’d been robbed, the better. Lee left with a gold bracelet, a set of earrings inlaid with large blue stones, a ring, and an old brooch, because she liked the image carved into the ivory inlay—the profile of a young woman.
After settling in at another home from the list, she went out the next night and found a house whose lights were on at three in the morning. No one left their lights on that late unless they were awake or away. Lee peered through the windows until she was certain no one was home, then broke in through the garage. Two nights later she broke into a third house. Each time she went straight for the jewelry, taking only a few pieces—the ones that looked the most valuable.
That night she lay all the jewelry out on the bed of the home she was squatting and held each one, gauging its weight. There was good money here—there had to be—but only if she could find someone to buy them. Lee had never had a fence in high school, when her fingers had been the stickiest. She’d never needed one, always selling her stolen goods directly. But now she thought of Maria from the JDC. She was a thief, like Lee, but unlike Lee, Maria took no pleasure in stealing; she did it because she had younger siblings to help support but couldn’t hold a job for more than a few weeks. And because her uncle Vasco, who ran a pawnshop, knew what to do with stolen property. Lee wondered how Maria was doing inside. She wished she could visit her, even write her a letter, let her know that she wasn’t forgotten. And thank her for her connections. But Maria knew she wasn’t forgotten; she was always getting visits from family and friends, including, on at least one occasion, her uncle.
• • •
Lee took a bus out to Fairhill. It was a neighborhood of Mexican bakeries and tire stores and shops that seemed to cater exclusively to proms and quin
ceañeras, and Lee asked store to store for nearly an hour before someone finally directed her to an old converted garage in the middle of an alley.
The man at the counter looked to be anywhere from forty to sixty, either old or young for his age. Beneath his thin, pressed white shirt, she could see a ropy torso patchworked in faded tattoos. He was rubbing carefully at a pocket watch with a clean white rag and didn’t look up when she came in. His shop was not a shop at all, just a counter behind which leaned shelves made from unfinished boards stacked on old TVs and holding a slew of things Lee could never imagine anyone buying: old tape decks and clock radios, a scorched hot plate and a torn beach umbrella and a black-bottomed stockpot filled with old kitchenware. Boxes of laundry detergent, diapers, instant coffee, Similac. A stack of school notebooks and a few boxes of pens.
“Are you Mr. Velasquez?” she asked.
He didn’t look up when he spoke. “¿Estas muy lejos de tu hogar, verdad?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, taking an uncomfortable moment to register this other language. “I don’t speak Spanish.”
“¿Tu crees que este barrio invita gringas perdidas?”
Hoping gold might be a common language, she came to the counter, upended her bag, and spilled the small pile of jewelry—three bracelets, six rings, three pairs of earrings, three necklaces, and a brooch—onto the space in front of him. The man put down the watch and looked at the jewelry. He spat out something else in Spanish and picked up the entire pile in one fist. Then he pulled her bag across the counter and dumped it all back in. The man nodded at the door, picked up his watch, and returned to polishing it.
“I’m sorry, I just thought . . .” Lee turned to leave, feeling stupid. “Never mind.”
“You thought what?”
She turned back. “You speak English?”
“I’ve lived here over forty years. Of course I speak English. Now what are you doing here?”
The Readymade Thief Page 16
