The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  Lee looked directly at the man beside the Priest. “Who’d want to be the Flunky?”

  “Yes, well, Jonathan was the most . . . agreeable among us, he didn’t seem to mind.” He turned and gave the man an avuncular look. The Flunky looked down at the table.

  “Jonathan doesn’t talk?”

  “Not anymore. He used to be quite articulate. A rather ingenious electrical engineer.”

  “What happened to him?”

  The Priest shook his head sadly. “An early casualty of some unfortunate experiments in consciousness expansion. Jonathan took the drug quite willingly, but still, I always disapproved. I blame Lajos for it.”

  “Lajos was the Undertaker?”

  “Lajos became the Undertaker, yes. It was all in good fun, of course. The sense of play in our little group was something that Duchamp would have appreciated. It was in 2004 that things began to turn in a different direction. An unsavory direction, if you ask me, but then I am an old man and my ways are set. By then technology was catching up to Duchamp’s imagination, but the equipment was expensive, and we needed money to afford it. It was Josef, the Station Master, who put forth the idea. He was a friend and colleague of Lajos’s from graduate school. A chemist. He showed us how we could manufacture drugs from this very location, then sell them at the events we threw. I was against it, as were several others, but we were outvoted.”

  “The drugs are made at the Silo. I saw the lab.”

  “The Silo came later, after an explosion in our lab down here—an explosion that could easily have been avoided—left me without the use of my legs. I have not always been like this. Only the past eight years.”

  “You lost your legs down here?”

  “I lost the use of my legs, and we lost one of our own. We lost our Busboy.”

  “I thought DreamClown was your Busboy.”

  “You know more than I had given you credit for. Roland was our original. Kyle—DreamClown, as you call him—is the boy who replaced him.”

  “So one of you dies and you replace him. It’s that easy?”

  His face changed, and again Lee thought she had gotten to him. But then his expression softened, which scared her more than if he had become angry. “It is never that easy. How easy will it be to replace the father of the child inside you?”

  Lee bit down on her cheek so hard she could taste her own blood once more. It took everything she had not to jump over the table.

  “I’m sorry, that struck a nerve. It was uncalled for. You lash out at me, I lash back out at you. You see where it gets us? Only a wake of dead bodies. I was not behind any of that, I want you to understand. And your boyfriend, he was one of us, you know. We all grieve his loss.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Tomas was one of the original nine. He was just a lad, maybe sixteen at the time he took the role of Delivery Boy. Perhaps not the most glamorous title, but his role was integral.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The Priest smiled tenderly at her, with pity, as he wheeled back and pulled a photograph from the wall. He slid it across the table. The photo was black-and-white: nine men costumed in the old suits and uniforms she recognized by now, arrayed on the steps of the museum. The Undertaker and the Priest stood in the front, the Undertaker looking exactly the same, as though he were ageless; but the Priest looked much younger, though the photo couldn’t have been more than ten years old. And there, in the second row, Lee recognized Tomi. He wore a too-big jacket with stripes on the sleeves and epaulets and brass buttons running up the front, and a pillbox cap. He had a leather messenger bag slung over one shoulder, and he looked like just a boy, his big brown eyes and his puffy face expansive with glee. He was the only one smiling, like he just couldn’t help himself. Hermes, messenger of the gods, Lee thought to herself. The Delivery Boy. She should have known.

  “He was so sincere, so naked in his intentions . . . it was hard not to believe in him. And he was nothing if not persistent, as I’m sure you are aware.”

  “The night we met, at the Silo, that wasn’t a coincidence, was it?”

  The Priest shook his head. “I sent him there. To rescue you.”

  Lee’s mind was stumbling. She tried to recall all her interactions with Tomi in this new light, but it didn’t make any sense. “Rescue me? Why?”

  “The Société Anonyme had split. We no longer had the same goals, and you were at the center of those goals. In fact, you were the reason for our split. The fissures were there, even before, but it was our discovery of you that broke us completely. I saw your true role, and I feared what would happen if Lajos or Josef got ahold of you. They had both become so unpredictable. The night that Tomi brought you to the museum, he was meant to bring you to me. But then you and he, well . . . he had a moment of libidinal weakness and didn’t follow through. Shortly after that we discovered a mole in our midst. We decided you would be safer if he just kept an eye on you himself.”

  “So he was spying on me for you the whole time.”

  “If it hurts any less, know that by the end we were no longer sure of his allegiances. I asked him to simply take With Hidden Noise from you, but he wouldn’t. He dropped contact after that, and we could no longer protect him.”

  “You didn’t protect him. You killed him because you thought he wasn’t loyal.”

  “We did not kill him. Lajos killed him.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “If things had gone as planned, Tomas would have brought you here months ago, and none of this ugliness would have to have happened.”

  Lee turned the photo over. She didn’t want to look at it anymore. “What do you want with me?”

  The Priest smiled thinly. “Do you believe in destiny?” he asked.

  The question wasn’t worth her response.

  “I believe you’ve seen her photo, no? You must admit, the resemblance is remarkable.”

  “Who was she?”

  The Priest held out another photo. It was her. But a different photo than the one she had first seen in the Station Master’s room. In this photo she was nude, stretched out in a field of dry reeds and holding a chess piece aloft in one hand.

  “Áille Trivett. Duchamp met her in the summer of 1912—one hundred years ago exactly, as it so happens—in Paris, where she was studying painting. She was a beautiful woman, her mother Irish and her father French. She was married, but over about a year they had a quiet but passionate affair. He was determined that she would leave her husband for him. But when the war broke out and her husband joined the Allied cause, she returned home to Normandy to look after the household, as was her duty. Duchamp was heartbroken. I know this because he wrote about her in a journal I found buried among his papers. And in it were two photos of Trivett: this one and the other one you saw.

  “Most art historians say that Duchamp left Paris for New York because America was more receptive to his avant-garde ideas. But his journals state otherwise. He was too despondent to remain in Paris; the city had too much heartache for him. But she never left his thoughts. And years later he tracked her down, living in Switzerland, a widow, her husband having died in the Second World War. Duchamp traveled there in 1946, but he was too late: she had passed away, had in fact taken her own life, only a week before he arrived. He stayed at a hotel and took pictures of the waterfalls nearby. They became the backdrop of Étant donnés, which was first conceived there. It is known that Duchamp used his girlfriend at the time as the model for the woman in the work. For the woman’s body. What nobody knows is that he used Áille Trivett as the model for the woman’s face. She was his Rosebud.”

  Lee had seen inside the room that was Étant donnés. She had seen the figure up close. “She has no face. It’s just a headless mannequin in there.”

  “Yes. That is what ultimately became the work. But the original contained a likeness of her face.” The
Priest smiled wanly. “Duchamp left it out intentionally, a private joke of sorts. Because she had disappeared. Would you like to see it?”

  The Priest turned and opened a drawer behind him. He removed an old box and laid it on the table. When he opened it, Lee saw a plaster cast of her face staring back at her.

  “Uncanny, isn’t it? So you see? Destiny. Do you think it coincidence that you stole With Hidden Noise from us? It was part of your destiny already set into motion.”

  “Did you know by then that the key was inside it?”

  “Ah. This is where it gets interesting. Do you know what a lacuna is? A lacuna is simply a space, a missing piece. It can be a section missing from a manuscript, or a space of silence in a piece of music. Or it can be the missing piece of a puzzle. Duchamp left lacunae in his Large Glass: the Juggler of Gravity and the Boxing Match. The Spiral. Their absence upsets the whole composition. For many years we had overlooked With Hidden Noise as merely a work of whimsy. But we failed to recognize that all Duchamp’s works were linked. Realizing this forced us to reexamine this piece that we had long ignored. Some of us had tried to decipher its cryptogram, to no satisfactory end. But when we took another look, in the light of the lacunae of The Large Glass, it suddenly became obvious. No cryptographer could have deciphered the code; in fact, his training would only have gotten in the way. Simply because there was no code to crack.”

  He unfolded a piece of paper and pushed it across the table. Lee stared at the too-familiar cryptogram, each block of text framed within a square box he had penciled around it.

  P . G . . ECIDES DÉBARRASSE .

  LE . D . SERT. F . URNIS . ENT

  AS HOW . V . R COR . ESPONDS

  . IR . . CAR . É LONGSEA –›

  F . NE , HEA . , . O . SQUE –›

  TE . U S . ARP BAR AIN –›

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Lee looked away. She was so tired. “A bunch of meaningless words.”

  “Exactly. It is our nature to try to extract meaning from the seemingly meaningless. But sometimes meaning is not found where we expect it to be. The text looks meaningless because it is. There is no sense to be made of it. What there is is lacunae: missing letters and missing connecting words that might make sense of the thing. Our impulse is to find the key that will crack the code that will allow us to fill in those lacunae. But what if there were no pattern or code to break? What if the entire point of it were the lacunae? Do you want to know how I figured this out?”

  “No.”

  “Indulge me, please.”

  Lee said nothing, which was all he needed to go on. “I had never paid much attention to With Hidden Noise, until I began to realize that all of Duchamp’s works are connected. That they are all pieces of a larger puzzle. And as I was going back over his entire oeuvre, it struck me that each of the two plates of With Hidden Noise is a square, just like a chessboard. Now look at this.”

  The Priest reached back and took from a shelf behind him a small box. When he opened it, there was only a yellowed sheet of paper inside, folded in quarters.

  “You recognize it. I see it in your face.”

  It was the exhibition announcement that Duchamp had designed, with the chess problem and the falling cupid. “Tomi showed it to me.”

  “Did he? How curious. I hadn’t shared any of this with him. I suppose he’d worked it out on his own. Such a smart boy—what a shame.” He paused. “Did he explain to you what it shows? The cupid, you see, is meant to point to a pawn on the chessboard. Or at least that is what we are supposed to believe. But look at this.” He centered the text from With Hidden Noise, then laid the cupid over it and held it up to the light. “Where is he pointing now?”

  Lee stared up at it. “One of the periods.”

  “Exactly.” He took the cupid and centered it over the second box, now holding this one up. “And now?”

  Again it was pointing at one of the periods. Tomi had thought it might be pointing to some sort of map, but that wasn’t really it. “The periods are the lacunae,” she said.

  “Exactly. And Duchamp was pointing us to them. As soon as I recognized this, I knew where Duchamp had hidden the key. Within the lacuna of With Hidden Noise itself: the space at the center of the ball of twine. The problem is that Lajos had embedded a mole with us, and so before I could send Tomi to retrieve With Hidden Noise and bring it to me, Lajos got wind of it and sent Kyle, our Busboy, to get to it first. That is how it ended up with the Station Master. But you stepped in and took it back. You tell me: how could this be coincidence? Áille Trivett was Duchamp’s own lacuna, and you, her spitting image, happened to fall into possession of the thing. You see? Destiny.”

  “You said that there were fissures even before you saw me. What happened?”

  “After the explosion, I was in the hospital, in and out of consciousness, for a week. And I wasn’t released for several more weeks after that. By the time I got out, Lajos had purchased a derelict missile silo with the cash accumulated through that nasty business and moved the entire operation there. Honestly, I was glad to get it out of this space. But I could read the writing on the wall. It was the beginning of the end.

  “With me sequestered down here and Lajos taking over the drug operation, running his parties, and Josef running his little bordello, they had lost sight of what was important, the reason we came together in the first place. We had always had our differences, Lajos and I. He saw things from a purely scientific angle, while I understood there is a layer of reality that cannot be explained solely through science. That there is both a physics and a metaphysics behind everything. We complemented each other, but no more. He got caught up in the mania of idolatry, all those young people throwing themselves at him, hanging on his every word. He became nothing more than another cheap cultist.”

  “So you were jealous because he was fucking teenage girls and you were stuck down here with nothing going on below the waist?”

  Again the Priest laughed. Nothing she said was rattling him anymore. “While he spent his time with all that, I kept at it down here, unpacking Duchamp’s secret one concept at a time. For over eighty years scientists have attempted to find a unified field theory, to no avail. And yet somehow a single artist, working without the benefit of any scientific equipment, found the solution to this long before it was even known to be a problem. He found the solution in alchemy.”

  “Duchamp wasn’t a mystic,” she said. She’d read enough to know that. “He said himself his work had nothing to do with alchemy.”

  “I’m happy to see you’ve done your research. But Duchamp said a lot of things, many of which are contradictory. He was always wary of anyone getting too close. Let me share with you what I know, and you tell me that he was not an alchemist at heart. Both science and alchemy tell us that the universe is made up of a single eternal substance. In alchemy that substance is called ether. In physics it is the God particle: the smallest, most fundamental building block of the universe, from which all mass is formed. String theory hypothesizes that tiny subatomic strings decide through the frequency of their vibrations what form that mass will take. Alchemy understands the substance of the universe as paired opposites: light and dark, yin and yang, male and female. The Bride Stripped Bare is a classic hermetic tableau: a vertical image bisected into two planes, representing the paired opposites of the universe. The goal of alchemy, like the goal of the Bachelors in Duchamp’s work, is to achieve a marriage of these opposites. And the key to this, which all alchemists seek, is the philosopher’s stone.

  “Traditionally the philosopher’s stone was thought to be a substance capable of turning base metals into gold. But I knew that Duchamp would never have interpreted the Holy Grail of the alchemists in such a pedestrian manner. To him, alchemy was not a means to wealth and power; it was a way to bring together the physicality of science with the metaphysicality of human consciousness. And I cam
e to understand something quite profound. No one considered that the philosopher’s stone might be not of nature but man-made. A device. It was as though a light had turned on within me: perhaps Duchamp was not looking for the philosopher’s stone at all but building it. Putting it together piece by piece. His life’s work, his final work, which everything he did was working toward. In the end Lajos saw only gold in it. But it is about much more than money. Duchamp said: ‘Art is an outlet toward regions which are not ruled by time and space.’ I suspect that the realization of his final work might in fact alter the very fabric of space-time.”

  Lee remembered when Tomi had given her that same quote. Later she had looked it up, on her own. Duchamp had been talking about art being the only expression that allows man to go beyond an animal state, to be an individual. It had nothing to do with the theory of relativity. Lee had thought the Undertaker was mad, but at least he believed in something real. She thought about the books in the other room, on cryogenics and neural mapping. Immortality.

  “The Undertaker was after money. You’re just a frail old man afraid to die.”

  “This is not about living or dying. This is about transcendence. The entirety of a man’s consciousness lives up here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Where the body goes, it goes. When he dies, all his memories, his dreams, his hidden desires go, too. Is that fair? If you could find a way to change the laws of that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Even if Duchamp’s machine did prove something, you’ll be dead before you can see any of it realized.”

  “It won’t take as long as you think. In any case, I’ll wait as long as it takes—there have been great advances in cryonics over the past few years. It took forty years to get from the birth of quantum theory to the first atomic bomb. With the hyperspeed of current technology, who knows how quickly we can pluck the fruits of string theory?”

  “You want to make a copy of yourself. But where will you put it? In some hard drive? You’ll be as trapped as you are down here.”