Fake Like Me

by Barbara Bourland

  “I know. I’m going to try and get ashore.”

  “Don’t fall in.”

  “I might. If anyone’s going to fall in, though, it’ll be Tyler.” My heart fell at the mention of his attendance. “Eat and drink anything you want, okay? Gotta run. Talk soon. I’ll be back next week.”

  I was horribly, hideously crushed after that phone call. He was already back. Tyler had no reason to invite me to that party in the city, and even if he’d wanted to, I was working: All I could do was work. I couldn’t leave. We both knew it. There was no rational reason for me to be upset, but I was, and I sat there feeling stunned and miserable and left out. Then I combed my freshly pink hair out, violently, yanking at the knots with enough force to pull them from my scalp in little clusters, hard enough that I had to physically stop myself.

  At Max’s, I could be distracted. I grabbed the nearest clean t-shirt, another Atticus choice that had a smiley face on the front and the words HAVE A NICE DAY: FUCK SOMEONE on the back.

  The drive to Eliot House took another ten minutes, and I parked directly in front of the Mies-van-der-Hobbit-Hole door, finding the access panel easily and gaining entry in thirty seconds.

  The house was completely silent; I was alone in the concrete spectacle.

  Now that it was free of living people, I could see all the details. The doorknobs were indeed all hands—shaped in fists and handshakes and open palms and every other permutation—each one different from the next. The brass banister, at the top, was the crook of an elbow, as if you were taking someone’s arm on a slippery sidewalk. I realized that the tube of it was bumpy because it was a series of different biceps cast in one long, undulating line.

  The light fixtures, hanging in clusters from the ceiling, looked like the bulbs were made of grapes. I peered at one and saw that it was an eyeball, with a pale iris and an opaque white pupil, held to its cloth-covered cord of ivory silk, braided with tiny, irregular veins of red and blue, with a grommet made from a golden coin.

  The transoms above each door, to let in light from the atrium, were, like Max’s office, smooth slabs of semiprecious stones. The edges where the stone met the wood were ever so slightly beveled, like they were gigantic pieces of jewelry in the setting of a door. Max’s office was rose quartz, and the other doors on the third floor (which I didn’t dare open) glowed, backlit by their own glass ceilings. There was rusty carnelian, Caribbean-blue apatite, chartreuse brazilianite; the second floor had transoms of paper-thin jade, pear-tinted heliodor, and crystalline Egyptian faience. One door—the one next to my painting, for the library—had a cage transom, laser-cut brass patterned in tiny hexagons, same as the ones on Marlin’s fuzzy prints.

  My palm fit seamlessly into the outstretched brass hand of the knob. When it turned, in a handshake, I found the library exactly as it had been before.

  The catalog appeared to be alphabetical by movement. Each shelf was sleek and full to the brim, though here and there a book had been removed. At each hole in the collection, I tried to figure out who or what was missing, if it was only the books I’d seen in Max’s office, but my knowledge simply wasn’t complete enough to guess the names that had been taken out.

  I started browsing. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for—I was enjoying the search, waiting for something to catch my eye, for something to jump out and tell me, This is what to do!

  On impulse I took out catalogs from recent exhibitions on the early abstract painter Clyfford Still, the Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, and the medieval painter Giotto di Bondone, a fourteenth-century muralist who worked at the beginning of the Renaissance and was mentioned in Dante’s Divine Comedy.

  I tried to read. Instead my mind wandered and my eyes kept lifting to stare at the room. The library was massive: Two stories, it had stacks on both floors, a narrow central courtyard, and walls lined with books, brass rails, and ladders. The only shelves I couldn’t read were at the very top of the room. They looked full.

  I scaled the first ladder. The top shelves held files on Eliot&Sprain artists: catalogs, binders, file boxes, stacks of paper that I didn’t dare touch. I rolled the ladder awkwardly to its neighbor and climbed over; the next shelves were the same, full of privacies I wouldn’t dream of violating.

  Yet on ladder number three, at the very top, I found myself looking at a series of black notebooks that took up an entire shelf, labeled with white paint marker on the spine with different project names. They looked exactly like my own.

  The spines read:

  HOLD ME

  CAREY 2

  FORGIVE/FORGET

  THE BURIAL PROJECT

  72 HOURS

  TOMBSTONE PIZZA

  CHOKE ON IT

  SLEEP DISORDER

  ELIOT&SPRAIN HOUSE

  OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES

  DROP OUT

  YOKEFELLOWS

  LOVE THAT MIRACLE

  SIDE EFFECTS (MODAFINIL)

  Next to the notebooks, museum and gallery catalogs, along with a tatty binder full of clippings, occupied the remainder of the shelf.

  It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

  It was Eliot&Sprain’s entire Carey Logan collection—the archive of her, the locus of her memory—the only place she still lived.

  I let out a tiny gasp. Here was the exact thing I wanted.

  It made me feel good simply to touch them. Finding evidence that Carey had existed at all put a cork in my loneliness. It is completely natural, I told myself—accepted, even—to be posthumously interested in dead artists. Everybody does it. You’re exactly like me, Carey told me that night on Grand Street. You’re exactly like me. I was already using her studio. What difference would reading her notebooks make? Was it any less intimate than what I was already doing? I wasn’t sure, and negotiating with myself didn’t matter because I couldn’t stop. I grabbed the closest notebook in the row, which said HOLD ME, and opened it to the first page.

  HOLD ME: I will invite people to a gallery and wrap all the visitors in a net and hold them for as long as they allow me to. This piece is short in both duration and difficulty.

  It was her first performance piece, set up almost exactly two years before she died. There was no explanation as to why she’d changed course so abruptly. The rest of the notebook was filled with detailed notes related to the piece, things like:

  10.2: met with JOAN J. for coffee on LES in the afternoon, spent one dollar sixty-five cents. Smoked one cigarette. JOAN is supportive.

  10.05: sent letter to curator at MASSMOCA. No reply yet.

  11.06: phone call with JORDAN about MS. GALLERY

  11.07. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.07. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.07. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.07. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.07. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.08. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.09. email with JORDAN and KIM about MS. GALLERY. See USB.

  11.21. Took net to MS. GALLERY on MTA SUBWAY.

  11.22. MS. GALLERY show. I held a young man in blue who smelled like sour tobacco. I held an older man in red who tried to feel me up. I wasn’t sure whether or not to let him? Am I supposed to resist? I think it made me uncomfortable. Am I supposed to be uncomfortable? Is there a boundary?

  Interesting questions, in theory, but there was nothing to explain why she needed to ask those questions in the first place. The notebooks were not diaries, exactly; they were deliberate, businesslike records. The details went well beyond what we’d been instructed to do at school, though she’d clearly learned the exact Academy process from Tyler, Marlin, and Jack. I slid HOLD ME back on the shelf and grabbed the next one, FORGIVE/FORGET:

  FORGIVE/FORGET: Cast bodies into a slow dance, like a high school dance. This piece is short in duration, high in difficulty
.

  11.17: ROBERT called today to say he thinks my material process is lacking and that I need to work harder at bridging the realist gap. He wants me to call RON and get some tips. I am scared to because I am afraid RON won’t think I am talented enough. I’m scared he’ll make me demo talent. Drank three beers, ate a turkey sandwich for dinner.

  The process of her practice—paint shades, glaze recipes, firing temperatures, mold forms, shipping costs, phone numbers—were all there, a patchwork of block print in different inks. The notes contained exactly the same luxurious banalities as the last—the sort of information that would be interesting to a curator, or an art historian, or me. I wished I had the time to read them all, but it was terrifying, up here on the ladder, and I was hit with a sudden wave of guilt. I was genuinely trespassing. I quickly returned it and opened the next one, THE BURIAL PROJECT, the show I’d seen my sophomore year of art school:

  THE BURIAL PROJECT: I will cast and paint body parts in different stages of decay and bury them, one by one. When one is found I will bury another one. I will catalog their discovery over the years and the confusions that result. This piece is extra-long in duration, medium in difficulty.

  7.15: SHOULDER from BODY 32 discovered outside of Albany. Police called. Crime scene erected. Sculpture revealed when coroner arrived, who is now v. familiar with my work. He says the county is going to sue for wasting their resources. I told him to go ahead and that he would be embarrassed to learn how many more parts are waiting undiscovered.

  8.30: LEFT FOOT from BODY 12 discovered in Taghkanic farmhouse by elderly widow. She knew immediately that it was fake. I’m not sure how. Age, I guess. She drove it over here and dropped it off. Kind of a letdown.

  9.11: FINGER from BODY 38 found at bottom of dumpster at Montessori farm school by janitor. Very satisfying: school shut down for a day. Coroner called again, extremely angry, I taped our conversation, so much authority and rage in his voice. Upsetting. I tried to explain about the Calusa—the Native Americans in Florida who buried their dead wherever they fell down—but he wasn’t interested in discussing anthropology.

  It became clear to me that her notes were intended to be read by the other members of Pine City, especially when it came to her feelings on a critic, curator, gallery, or museum; like everyone else, she was keeping score—except she had four people to leverage in any given situation.

  “E&S are hesitating, I can hear it in their voices,” she wrote. “I think they need to be encouraged—Tyler and Jack, can you say something to JR about a studio visit, Marlin and Jes, can you say something to Donna, too, and let it slip to people?”

  On another occasion, over a formal dinner that Eliot&Sprain wanted her to host in Miami:

  Charles is asking me to host a dinner. I’ll insist we commission Jack for the table and Jes for the sound.

  I reached for YOKEFELLOWS, nearly falling off the ladder as I did. For a dazzling instant my guilt gave way to a wild freedom, a sisterhood, a sense of being in the right place at the right time.

  YOKEFELLOWS:

  to yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause

  YOKEFELLOWS bodies will be Pine City’s bodies: Tyler, Jes, Jack, Marlin, and Carey, tangled together, in progressive stages of decay.

  The bodies weren’t identified when I saw the show—in any of the text or any of the materials. I went cold, thinking about it, that I had seen what Tyler’s body would look like when it died. That I knew already what it would look like. And worse—that he had seen Carey’s fake dead body in the show—and then Carey’s real dead body, later.

  What followed the initial idea were notations: on molds, casts, temperatures, firings, glazings, the usual. I read and read until I got to a page that only read

  6.01: There’s a dagger line across T6 calf

  The same line I’d noticed in the exhibition at Eliot&Sprain, ten years ago, when I was twenty-four and lost in the depressive years between Ohne Titel and Accounting for Taste. And then, in Carey’s blocky handwriting, adjacent and in a different color—

  Decided to leave it

  Nothing more. It seemed that she had done it by accident and later changed her mind. It had been her last sculptural show; after this, she transitioned entirely to performance. One last painterly gesture, I thought. There were probably myriad mistakes in her other sculptures, the kinds that nobody sees except the artist. Yet this was the only one I’d ever noticed. I liked that, intentional or not, she’d left a big one for the road.

  After YOKEFELLOWS, I went back in time, paging through CAREY 2 and TOMBSTONE PIZZA. I felt immeasurably calmed by the details, by the evidence of how much work her work required. Mine was overtaking me. Hers did too. I was not alone.

  Frequently she was personal and emotional. After a turbulent phone call with a curator, she wrote, “Dan from [redacted] called me an ungrateful bitch today, making me out to be less than nothing. I cried when I hung up. When things like this happen, I see that my role requires me to undertake more emotional and spiritual abuse than everyone else. I don’t think any of us should work with him again and I resent having been put in this position.”

  In my own notebooks, I only wrote about people to record my impressions in the moment so I could make the best of a situation, like, “Phone call with Jacqueline Milot. She asked me to pitch her a show and I agreed to send something in the next month. She speaks very quickly, so I think it will be better to exchange over email.” My notebooks were written only for me, and it was fascinating to read through narratives so clearly intended for public consumption. Pine City, I realized, taught Carey how to record her work in the way we did at the Academy, and naturally—she put her own spin on it. I thought too about Jack Wells, and our conversation about the retrospective. He’d insisted there was no way to know what Carey would have consented to, but the notebooks seemed so deliberate to me—they were more than consent. They were very nearly instructions. I thought about Jack’s eye-rolling about his job at the Academy—how secure he was, how successful he’d been, how he graduated from college into a literal boat that kept him above the waterline. Jack might have known Carey, but he couldn’t understand her.

  The pages trembled in front of my eyes—my hands were shaking. I was desperate to whisk these away. It felt like I was meant to find these—like I was meant to have them. Like they had been written just for me. There was something here—I knew, I knew it in my bones. There had to be. There would be an explanation, a rationale, a reason for changing her work, for killing herself. Maybe—maybe it was in the details of that mysterious final work, the film that Charles and Pine City were fighting over.

  I looked around and assessed their location. It was impossible to see these two particular shelves from below. They were located to the left and five feet above the doorway, so you didn’t face them walking in, and then the vantage point from the floor was so far down that the only thing you could see was the bottom side of the shelf, not the contents. Still—if someone got on the ladder and looked—they would know the books were gone.

  Yet—I could take pictures without anyone knowing, I reasoned, so I left Carey’s work on the shelf, slid to the bottom of the ladder, ran outside, and grabbed my camera from the truck. I darted back inside and jumped down the stairs two by two, intending to document as much as I could before anyone came home—only to find Charlie standing in the middle of the room.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Some cat burglar you’d make,” Charlie said, looking up and smiling at me. “I heard you the second I closed the garage door.”

  “Hi!” I sputtered, trying not to look up at the shelf above the doors. “I thought the house was empty.”

  “You decided to break in and read all my books?”

  I stared up, willing him to keep his eyes in one place. I waved my camera. “Research. Max gave me the code.”

  “What are you looking for?

  “I can’t say…,” I told him truthfully. “There’s something about verbalizing wha
t I’m doing that renders it irrelevant, do you know what I mean? As if, when I say it out loud, that’s what it will be and I won’t want it anymore…I was sort of hoping for some library magic. For something to call out to me.”

  “I understand.”

  “The gist is that I’m looking for alternative methods of attaching pigment.”

  “Isn’t that your entire milieu?”

  “It’s an infinite question,” I said, smiling. “A lifelong question.”

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it,” he said. My stomach growled. “Would you like dinner?”

  “Is it that obvious?” I chuckled. “That would be amazing. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “It’s no trouble. It’s already cooked, I only need to heat it up—it’s the Fourth of July, after all. We should celebrate. Half an hour okay?”

  “Sure. I won’t be long.”

  “You’re welcome to borrow these, if you want.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “They’re heavy, and my fingers are always covered in paint. Pictures and notes will do for now.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll knock again in a bit.”

  The moment he closed the door, I snapped my eyes up to the Carey shelf, where, thankfully, nothing poked out. Then I wondered, far too late, if there were any cameras in here. I moved my head slowly, trying to seem casual, and found the security-pod bumps dotting the ceiling. Once I saw their encasements—opaque white lenses—I breathed a sigh of relief. Motion detectors. Not cameras.

  Still—I didn’t quite dare climb the ladder again, not all the way to the top, anyway. I took one picture of the spines before shame washed over me in a choking wave: This wasn’t my property, and this wasn’t my house. If I was caught trespassing like this, it would ruin an important professional relationship. I didn’t want Charlie to perceive me negatively.

  I assured myself that Charlie hadn’t seen anything amiss, that if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have invited me to dinner. I returned to work, distracting myself with the Still, di Bondone, and Moholy-Nagy books, taking photos and notes whenever I found a passage that described a material process that intrigued me: Still’s original rabbit’s-foot glue recipe, an elaboration on the chemical properties of lime as a binding agent when painting a fresco on wet plaster, what the original material used in the development of cliché-verre—a cameraless, hand-applied early variant of photography—had been (smoke from a kerosene lantern). I tried not to think about what I’d been doing up on the ladder; it brought up an equal measure of curiosity and disgrace that made my stomach roil. By the time Charlie knocked, I was officially starving.