It was past five when Duke and I drove back through the center of the city. His parents lived somewhere around here, he’d said, but I don’t think he wanted to talk about that, or anything else really. Cars seemed to bring out the quiet in him. Myself, I couldn’t rest after all I’d seen further south, so I turned to filling in my drawings, annotating them, too, a long-running practice of mine for early sketches. If ever there were an archive of my work—I wasn’t too humble to speculate on such things—it might strike a rather curious note, the way I marked up salient details I’d like to develop, or dubious bits that might have to go in future iterations, treating my own work as I did the proofs of Cosquer, effectively. That’s how these would read. Proofs.
As we pulled into the porte-cochere of the Westin that I was supposed to have checked into the night before, Duke abruptly awakened and insisted I should stay with him. I wondered where. Wasn’t there just the one bed? He might have thought its vast proportions could accommodate platonic arrangements, if he was even thinking platonically anymore. Yet my plan was to leave for New York in the afternoon, mostly for reasons of damage control back home: Rick, I knew, had worries about Antral, and he’d not appreciated my disappearing after the show at PS1, which left him unable to raise them with me. So, to thrash things out, we were going to meet up that evening in Bed-Stuy.
Duke looked remarkably fresh, sitting beside me in the car. I couldn’t be sure what substances had gone up his nostrils or into his lungs while I’d sketched firearms in the bedroom. Whatever they were, he didn’t offer all that much resistance to my plans, when I got out of the car in front of the vestibule. He simply gave my hand a squeeze and agreed to meet me soon in New York. Incredibly, the desk told me I was booked in for the hotel’s penthouse. I’d made no request from Garrett for anything but a comfortable room, nothing ostentatious like this. I had the feeling my boss didn’t have much use for these luxuries in his own life. But he did need to get back on my good side, after his faithlessness in our recent dealings. He would have known that for me there was a degree of novelty in such accommodations, whereas for him it had all become old hat long ago. Even before he’d established JG Chemical, his mother would have seen to it that he was lavishly cared for at home in Chicago; and I knew from Daphne that afterward, once Garrett was rich of his own accord, his estranged wife, Elise, had been keen on these same perks. Now, I suspected excess reminded the man of things he didn’t much want to think about: the paradise with Elise that was lost.
After multiple evasions concerning the campaign—how had he deceived Elise, I wondered—lately Garrett had grown more demonstrative in his wish to make things up to me. Early on, he’d paid a notable visit to my apartment, to see my works in progress, only to find the place verging on a landfill; at which point he’d idly suggested I consider renting something larger, more suited to proper work, especially if I wasn’t planning on finding a separate studio. The natural solution was just to clean up the place—but perhaps he didn’t imagine a true artist had that kind of control. I didn’t think much of his advice at the time, and I didn’t tell him about my claims to the floor directly below me. Later on, during the same call in which he asked me to go to Chicago, he returned to the suggestion, this time more insistently. And right now, on an early Saturday morning, his secretary was emailing me listings of two spots on either side of the East River, with one not very far from him, on Roosevelt Island. These buildings were owned by a close associate of his, she explained, and one of the towers had been built by him, too. Garrett’s friend could set me up with something vast at a rate well below market. Of course, I knew it would cost a lot more than my place in the shadows of public housing. Who could compete on prices with that kind of locale? But Garrett apparently was happy to pay the difference, the secretary wrote.
I’d had trouble, on the telephone with him earlier, coming up with a response to his offer of assistance, and also to the notion of living in a mansion that wasn’t in the ghetto: an actual mansion, I mean, not merely a weak joke. I was coping at that moment with the idea of having to travel to Chicago, and I was also suspicious about Garrett’s transparent attempt to buy back my trust, all the while never mentioning or apologizing for his most recent indiscretion. Offers like this one, he would have thought, made apologies otiose. Seeing his secretary’s weekend work, though, I had to think harder about the prospect. I considered the implications while rocketing alone to the penthouse on the Westin’s muscular elevators; the bellhop would bring my things up to my room separately. How long did Garrett think our project was going to go on? Or was he, or else Paul, thinking of keeping me on an indefinite retainer, as Antral’s “house artist”? The way he’d chuckled on the phone after my flummoxed silence, chuckled but didn’t explain, when that was clearly what I needed, an explanation, didn’t exactly comfort me. In the context of making a generous proposal, his laugh was almost frosty. But this was what you got with Garrett, a perpetual reticence that I and probably everyone else around him long enough had grown to resent and to fear.
Quickly I found myself in the living room of my suite. The place was off-white in every way possible: here it was bone and eggshell, there cream and champagne. Through gargantuan plates of glass I took in the city’s downtown, so much like New York, yet with a more unified personality, even if this was one of dark impenetrability—the product of so many shimmering black skyscrapers. I was feeling delirious again, wondering whether I ought to have gone back to Duke’s with him, if only for the Theria that was going to be there by morning. I kneeled down before the windows and very soon fell into a semi-conscious state, right there on the floor, in the kind of total exhaustion I’d not known since the nootropic had entered my life. At the Westin, though, even the carpet was enticing, offering the give of medium-firm memory foam, probably of a higher grade than the kind in my mattress back home. It was eleven before my phone gave an ugly bray; I’d chosen the tone for my alarm for its ability to disrupt most states of unconsciousness. I had a short shower, preparing for the flight back, and was just about to dress when Garrett messaged me.
Stay another night?
He himself was heading to JFK right now, on his way out to Chicago—not to see Duke but to talk whiskey with his staff at the old distillery. Anyway, he wrote, the two of us needed to talk about my work for the project. Why not do it there, at the source? It might be good for me to see the facility. If it didn’t conflict with my plans, of course.
Ever polite. This is what the penthouse was about, wasn’t it? The right to make last-minute requests I had no way of turning down, given what he’d done for me. Things would go the same way if I took the new apartment he was offering. Of course my plans couldn’t clash with his, when he controlled both. Still... I had to admit, I was quite comfortable in the penthouse. And so I swiped away at my phone until my flight became a Sunday affair. That done, I lay down on the bed, naked and in repose, basking in the pleasure of suddenly not having to be anywhere but where I already was, yet with the subtle nerviness of one who has given away his freedoms for his joys.
I was to meet Garrett at the distillery itself around four in the afternoon, so, for the second time in my life, I rented a car. The vehicle struck me as the penthouse’s obverse: a dusty maroon Buick with a weak turning circle and marshmallow suspension that transmitted nothing of the road. I’d tried to nap at the suite after hearing from him, but I got no further in suspending consciousness than closing my eyes and swimming within a sumptuous darkness for a couple of hours. Hardly rested, I wobbled out from the hard black density of the city into the green and gold countryside. The transition felt jarring to me, surely the upshot of a malnourished mind, of which I well knew the cause. If Garrett hadn’t detained me, I would have been enjoying the quarter-case of Theria I had left back in New York. Instead, here I was, driving out into the Illinois countryside, baffled by the giant, geriatric odometer of my rental: it must have been set too low, because when it read seventy, everything—I mean the homes and farms and factories; there were hardly any cars—receded at an ungodly clip. Nothing at all lasted. It was like being back with that possessed driver who’d taken us up to Duke’s apartment on the lake, though in that case our velocity had been very much palpable. Now, anesthetized by the car’s suspension and, I presumed, my own depleted sensorium, I had the eerie sensation of the world zipping past me, and of hardly moving at all, except for those moments at which experience roughened and, failing to bend with the road, the car nearly went off into the grasslands. My arms had lost feeling along the way, so that I seemed to have no say in where I was heading—that is, right up until the car came to the outer edge of the shoulder. Then, somehow, just before plowing into the prairie, my hands would tug at the wheel, although it never felt as if I was doing the tugging. It tugged the way it rained: without a subject. And I couldn’t have been gladder for it.
Chicago faded fast, I knew that much. Within minutes, the land began undulating in green and yellow-brown squares, and for a moment I imagined the scene from above, the indelible patchwork quilt of flyover country. Things were different on the ground, though, the grand vistas of the open road being stymied by the billboards that ran, I knew, from one coast to the other, insistently pitching Indian trinkets, dollar slots, strip clubs, gun shops, and finally, when there was nothing else to sell, bail bonds. I kept my eye on these signs as I speeded through, searching for Duke and Daphne, until both sides of the road turned to burnt sugar. The stalks were cut short, the new crop only recently planted. Farmhouses eventually appeared, but very far off the highway, so that they looked more like toy houses, mere barn façades in the distance, along tiny dirt paths that reddened as they made their way out to the horizon, which you couldn’t escape, no matter which way you looked.
Pelene was where I was headed. Garrett was thinking of naming the whiskey that—Pelene—for this town of six-hundred-odd people, about a hundred and twenty miles from Chicago, so small that even the word town seemed too grand for it. Village maybe. The distillery lay just outside the place, and by late afternoon, the old brown brick tower Garrett had told me to look for came into view, though it was a few miles still before I actually reached it: that’s how far you could see, it was so flat and clear. The tower stood at one end of the facility, presiding over endless wheat, and unlike the houses I’d seen thus far, the entire compound lay right along the highway. I slowed without stopping, peered into the plant’s windows: no-one inside, not that I could see, anyway. I turned the car around, running off into the gravel and tobacco-colored dirt that showed through in bare spots, and pulled up next to a metallic silver Land Rover on a patch of overgrown grass abutting the distillery walls. The bricks were clearly returning to particulate, the mortar receding like diseased gums, so that the site had the feel of a ruin, not a production plant. During the fin-de-siecle, it would have counted as a genuine industrial facility, but, since distilleries today looked more like nuclear plants than anything else, the appeal of the property was irreducibly nostalgic.
I kept my Buick idling, opened the windows, heard nothing but wind and birdsong. After messaging Garrett that I’d arrived, I sat behind the sweaty, vinyl-clad wheel for some time, torquing the oversized radio dial this way and that but picking up little besides a college station playing “oldies” like ‘Summer Babe’ and ‘King of Carrot Flowers,’ though even these tunes came in blurry and faraway. I switched off the engine and approached the corroded plant, which had chunky white letters stenciled onto its sides: White’s. Here was the man from which Garrett’s father would have bought the place. Why not just keep the name? Was it a question of copyright, or did Garrett have something better in mind?
The broad doors of White’s—why not call it that, until something better came along?—wore a pungent orange paint that had cracked all over, like a crazed glazing, revealing previous coats in yellow and white, particularly near the twin handles that projected like rusting iron nooses. I rapped on the iron tentatively and heard hardly a sound from the contact. I knocked much harder, jarring my knuckles, and although I managed to generate a bit of noise, nothing came of it, not even footfall. I took the asphalt path describing the plant and immediately noted, from behind the building, the strange and uneven weathering: the back portion, hidden from the road, had corroded profoundly, not like the front. White’s literally had its best face on for anyone passing through; you’d never have known it was rotting away like this. If nothing was done, eventually the rear was going to collapse, leaving just a roadside façade standing (who knows how much longer). Loose dirt formed something like a snowdrift behind the plant, and next to the pile of dirt—presumably the spot from which it had been extracted—water had pooled in a large, long hole. The rains in the region had lately been heavy, halting whatever renovations Garrett may have been making here. For now, then, the distillery had a pond, with water remarkably free of silt. Beyond the pool, arrow-straight rows of wheat dazzled in the late light of afternoon, while off to my left, the grain darkened sharply: another varietal, exactingly cultivated.
When my phone finally pinged it wasn’t Garrett but Rick. I’d meant to tell my old friend, on the drive over, about my change of plans, but so many details were now slipping my mind. I quickly proposed rescheduling for Sunday, but no reply came to my text, not right away. So I strolled halfway back along the path, studied the top floor’s vaulted roof and tall windows, until I reached the two vehicles. Hadn’t I seen this very Land Rover sparkling in the open lot near Antral’s offices? At the very least, the truck must have belonged to someone who would know where Garrett was, or when he could be expected. Within the distillery’s four stories, there must have been someone. I ambled to the back again. Instead of one door, like the front, the rear had three. The closest to me, on one edge of the building, was white, wood, and person-sized, no different to the entrance of a suburban house. I would have liked to find Garrett through this one, and take the lemonade he would certainly offer me. But this was no daydream; the knob wouldn’t turn, my knocks went unheard. The middle passage comprised a hulking set of wooden double doors, perhaps twenty-feet high and wide, clearly meant for drop-offs and pick-ups. I kicked these ones hard—my fist would have made no impression—and a gong-like shimmer resounded. I’d struck a broad metal panel built into the oak. Yet in the silence afterward, no-one came, and I detected no rustling within as I pressed my ear to the fissure between the doors.
The last of the ingresses, at the far edge of the distillery, revealed itself by a single door, not a set. Its proportions resembled the white one’s, although it was painted a sickly lime green and bore heavy scuffs from boots or tools. For all that, it was everything I’d been hoping for: open. In fact it was slightly ajar, though you’d only notice this from close range. Inside, a long, steep staircase led to a pair of small landings above. I got the feeling, looking at the top of the steps, that if I tripped on the way up, I could only end up where I stood now. (Of course, I wouldn’t be standing anymore, and I’d be left in the sort of shape that would make calling an ambulance pointless.)
To my right lay the heart of the distillery, a row of a half-dozen copper pots, each the shape of a whiskey decanter, except a thousand times larger, with bulbous stoppers and an array of gleaming pipes leading out of them. They summoned that phalanx of tubes sustaining patients in hospices, for while the ducts sparkled antiseptically, the pots appeared profoundly tarnished. You would have thought they sat on open fires all day, like witches’ cauldrons. I’d seen pot stills in Edinburgh that looked like Hershey Kisses, and others that looked like grain silos. Neither was as compelling as these. I wandered among the giant carafe-like vessels, marveling at their curved planes, holding out my phone—I’d forgotten my pad at the hotel—looking through the viewfinder and photographing them from all ranges and angles.
When I rounded the last of them, however, the viewfinder gave me a jolt. I nearly dropped the phone; the flash went off with my fumbling. Why hadn’t Garrett answered my knocks? He was facing away from me, and he didn’t turn immediately. With grave intensity he carried on inspecting the pipes of the last pot. It seemed to be coming undone, as if the patient had spat them out.
“That’s your Rover, then?” I mustered in a voice I hardly recognized, my mouth had become so dry. He went on tightening nuts with his fingers, paying me no mind. I’d expected a more ingratiating reception; he had a lot to be sorry for. Evidently he didn’t see it that way, or he just wasn’t going to give me the satisfaction.
“Was it hard to find the place?” Garrett asked, though he didn’t wait for an answer. “And what do you think of all this?” He stepped back from the pot and gave it an admiring glance. He was in a state of communion with the place, the one his father had left to him to turn around, to find success where he hadn’t. “They’re originals, these pots, though they haven’t been used in ages. I had them cleaned up and fitted out with all this.” He tapped on the steel ducts with his middle finger, a long thin note ringing out, before waving at a shelf running low along the dusty walls—a shelf filled, oddly, with electronics that had the feel of the twenty-first century, if not beyond. Here, what was new looked like the future, and what was old appeared feudal. I followed him up warily to the first landing, the steps creaking so loudly that if he’d told me they predated the Civil War, I’m not sure I would have doubted him. There were several offices on this floor, all bristling with computers; I might have been the only analogue element of his business. Perhaps that’s why I was so prized, although it was also why I was wobbling so badly on the first landing. I held onto the doorframe, feeling unable to reply, as Garrett carried on leisurely expounding on the business, the place.
“We’re thinking about using all sorts of grains here. I almost think doing new wheat is pointless, it takes so long to come anywhere close to the stock we have. Rye or oats, those could work in five years. Less, even. But it takes twenty, twenty-five, thirty years for wheat to develop deep flavor. Any younger than that, and it doesn’t compete very well with corn or rye. That’s why the place failed the first time. The Whites—we’ve known them for generations—ran it right into the ground. Brave idea, but no, it didn’t work. He didn’t have a plan.”
We were in some sort of control room, an immaculate space. I dropped into one of the Herman Millers, trying to compose myself, while he gazed into the faces of computers and carried on talking.
“Wheat is strange. It’s too soft, too mellow. Too banal. It takes years to find any character. That’s why you don’t see a lot of it, and what you do find is more of a novelty item than anything. The great accident, though, was finding all these barrels, just abandoned, more or less, and finding something so charming within them. Not perfect, exactly. There’s something unsettling about the dram, the way it’s always changing shape on the tongue. But it’ll be a generation till we can make more.”
Garrett looked at me squarely for the first time, almost challenging me to scold him. When I wouldn’t do it—I was too nauseated—a grin full of real warmth broke over his face. He reached out and gripped my arm. “Want to see them?”
“Do you keep any Theria around here?”
“Oh”—he stood and gazed through the plexiglass at the pots below. “This is strictly spirits, actually. Why do you ask? Something wrong?”
“I have a few bottles left back home, but I’ve got nothing with me.”
“Well, I’ll work on getting you more, when we can.”
“I just thought it would help me see, like you’ve been saying.” I pointed down at the pots.
“I don’t really know what’s happening with production.”
“My shipment never came last week, actually.”
“I think the team wants to make one tweak to the formula. So, you know what, why don’t you just wait for me to send you some more? I think even what you’ve got at home, it’s not as good as we can get it. Just toss it.” He looked at me meaningfully at the very end, and afterward he walked right by me, out the door and on toward the uppermost floors. “Now come and have a look at this.”
These stairs were even more suspect than the last, and now there was no handrail: I had to inch my way up so as not to fall. “We’ll do some wheat, yes,” he called out over the newly noisy distillery; a generator seemed to have tripped while we’d been in the control room. “But while we wait, we’re going to need things that mature a little faster. No corn, though. Only atypical grains.”
I reached the landing and made the mistake of looking back—a very long way down—which sent me stumbling through the doorway. There I promptly dizzied at the tawny barrels before me, dozens and dozens of them, laying on their sides and propped up on colossal stands reaching to the vault of the broken-down, double-height ceiling. I gathered now why straw and splinters and sawdust had strayed into the more scientific portions of the operation: the rickhouse was littered with natural detritus. Sunlight passed effortlessly through this whiskey cathedral’s enormous arched windows, brightening each barrel. The disparity with the control room and distillery below made the rickhouse appear like some holographic reconstruction of the past, the kind you went to museums to see.
Garrett put his arm around me and squeezed as we stared up at all that whiskey, and then around at this freakish hybrid building. “So,” he segued, walking slowly with me, “how is our man Duke, anyway? You haven’t said a word about Chicago either.”
“I only saw the practice fields, really.”
“Oh?”
“Well, and whatever it was Duke showed me later.”
“Didn’t care for it, I guess?”
“It was a little bit terrifying, I’d say.”
Garrett held his hands behind his back and turned from me. “He’s a wild one, isn’t he? You know, the first pictures of him and Daphne, back in New York, they are doing so well. I meant to tell you that on our walk up to Times Square, but you weren’t in the mood, it looked like. I understand. I’m sorry for the... confusion there’s been.” He faced me again. “I do love to walk around the city these days, though, just to see how we’re rewriting it. Or you are, really.”
He paused and pointed at the racks of barrels: “Do you know that the slightest changes up here change the whiskey? The control room regulates the pot stills, but it has no role up here. Really, there is no control up here, except sun, dirt, straw, wood. Tradition. God, you could say. Well, you wouldn’t. But I would.” He gave me a wink, swabbed one of the barrels with his hand, and stuck it out to me, layered with dust. “There are no improvements to this—to this light. You of all people must know about light: the seasons, the elements. But scientists have to know their limits, too. When we’ve been outdone by someone greater.”
I was never sure how to take these religious intimations of his. Was he teasing me in some way, or did he really did believe what he said, at least now that we were in the heartland? He turned toward the windows and poked his arm straight through: the ones with awnings, meant to keep out the rain, were actually just holes, unglassed. I stroked the barrels just as he had, felt the slight damp in the wood as a gritty paste of wood and whiskey built up on my fingertips.
“Sometimes the best thing you can do is absolutely nothing,” he said. “On the other hand, when it comes to distilling”—he turned his eyes toward the doorway, the stairs leading down—“the refining never ends. Although, even then, there are those stained copper pots. Nothing can touch them. Ancient magic.”
I shook my head slightly at the sermon, joined him in the sunlight, and forged straight ahead: “What would you say you know about Duke’s life?”
“Duke?” he asked. “I know some.” A strain of concern entered his voice. “But I want you to figure out the rest. We’ve talked about this.”
“I guess I just don’t know how... usable all of this is going to be.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, some things will be fine. I sketched out his tattoos. They’ll come out well.”
Garrett clapped his hands together with pleasure.
“But Duke also wanted to take me around a little, afterward, in the middle of the night.”
“I was hoping he would! Otherwise, why come all the way out here?”
“But what I saw was... terrible.”
He stepped way, toward the barrels, and turned back, his fingers dancing on his chin.
“That’s what I meant,” I said, “when I asked you what you knew about him. He was showing me his childhood, his old friends. South Chicago.”
“Right...” He walked toward me now, little clouds of dust kicking up at his feet as he crossed from shadow to light.
“It was a lot of guns, and drugs, and thugs, is what I’m saying.”
He stopped where he was; he stopped pretending, too.
“Well, that was his childhood, right?”
“It’s pretty clear he wants back in, though. He is back in, maybe.”
“But isn’t he something of an intellectual?”
“In a way.”
“His grades at Cal were stellar. Rog would know.”
“For the classes he finished.”
“Lots of college players take five years to finish. He only took four. I don’t know if you follow college ball—I assume Cal Arts doesn’t have a team.”
“No.”
He smiled tightly and looked away, out through the arches, surveying the road we’d come by, searching, no doubt, for just the right way of putting things. Instinctively I girded myself. I was used to him by now.
“You know,” he began somewhat gravely, “Chicago, my Chicago, has always had these problems. The South Side’s just dark. But it’s a place that means a lot to Chicagoans. Take the Bronx—wasn’t rap born there? The Bronx means a whole lot to New York, to the world, even if it’s all hellfire. You know that it does. You’ve told me yourself. And doesn’t Jerusalem, and Palestine, too? Did you get to see Cabrini-Green with Duke? And that’s not even the South Side. Did you get a chance while...”
I waved my hand.
“Well, it might be the most famous housing project in the world. It certainly has the right pedigree for it: the heirs of the Bauhaus dreamed the place up, when they all fled from the Reich and settled over here. Chicago’s taken so many wrong turns, socially, because we convinced ourselves we were going to fix the problems of man by committee. When nothing can fix them, except another man, maybe, acting without anyone’s approval.
“My point is, Cabrini-Green means something monumental, however wrong the place is. So whatever’s not right with our man Duke... and maybe it’s not even just his past that’s unclean, as my father used to say—did I tell you he was almost ordained, before he turned to industrial farming? Anyway, only Paul would think there’s something to worry about here. You don’t feel that way, do you? You can’t. He’s a professor, an adman. And I love him. But Paul is a craven man. He believes in nothing at all. That makes him very smart about certain things, much smarter than you and I. That’s why—I’m sorry about it—but that’s why we had to go ahead with some things without quite being able to check in with you first.”
He was still looking out over the charcoal road, unwilling, it seemed, to shore up his apology with so much as a glance in my direction. So I joined him at the window.
“I know you’re not happy about that,” Garrett said. Finally he eyed me, yet without turning his face. “I can see why. But sometimes Paul really does know best. I’ve learned that the hard way with him. You’ll just have to trust me.”
I regarded Garrett stoically until he turned toward me.
“He’s a fool, too, though,” he conceded, “because he’s never really made anything. He researches and strategizes brilliantly, but there’s nothing he can sign his name to in the end. You and I are the makers. And that’s how we know that even negativity is meaningful. Delusion, too. He’ll never quite get that, and that’s okay. We’re smarter than him on that; he’ll have to trust us.”
I smiled at this, slightly and unhappily.
“As far as Duke and Daphne go, we’ll just have to see, won’t we? But don’t they just get us dreaming so easily? Some people do that. Obama, he did that. Trump, too. Totally different fantasies, but what does that matter? Some of that stuff is just prejudice, obviously, it’s not real. But it speaks to us, in a way reality might never...”
I was beginning to lose the thread. I think he was, too. This happened periodically with Garrett; sometimes, no-one was entirely at the wheel. Yet he kept saying things that led to other things. Now he put his arm around me again and said with finality, “Just do everything without reservations. What you find or imagine is what you do. You meet Duke, like you have this weekend, and you dream, on paper.”
I made for the staircase.
“Because isn’t that what you did for her?”
I looked back at him expectantly.
“Claire?” he said.
“Maybe you think I’m more benevolent than—”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said, coming over to me, halfway to the windows overlooking the other side of the plant, the pool of water out back. “Just think about those pictures of her. They are savage. Or the ones I saw in your apartment that day, of the office worker who was an artist, who quit pictures and went to law school instead. And then the ones of your doctor friend?”
Immo. “Those are just sketches.”
“Has he never seen them? I guess he shouldn’t.”
I bowed my head.
“Do you ever wonder why you could have lost Claire? Think about those pictures for a minute, really. I think you did the right thing. But do you think those pictures could please anyone?”
“That wasn’t commercial work, though.”
“Well then don’t think of my pictures like that either. You ever heard of the Container Corporation of America? Paul was telling me about it. It was run by a man who didn’t think commercial work—advertising—needed to have much to do with commerce. He and CCA sponsored all sorts of artists. Paepcke was his name, back in the thirties, right before the war, and then after, too, straight through the seventies. Real artists: Man Ray, Magritte, de Kooning. Not just sponsored them—he got them to take part in projects he devised. The Great Ideas of Western Man was the big one. They could make whatever they wanted, basically, to illustrate words from all our best thinkers. Augustine, Aquinas, Freud, you name it. These things, Paul can show them to you, they have nothing to do with selling containers, which is, by the way, probably the most boring and necessary thing in the world. Boxes. But how different is Antral? We sell containers, too. And they couldn’t be more necessary to our survival. What’s necessary just keeps changing.”
“Like nuclear waste.”
He startled slightly. “Well, that is one kind of waste. And it does need containing, right? Would we be better off without my boxes? What about all the waste water? Refinery runoff?”
“And riot control, too?”
He seized up then, bewildered. For a moment, he couldn’t speak. I’d never seen him reel like this, but how else could I respond, hearing him speak with such impunity? He turned back toward the fields of grain, but I know he saw nothing then, his eyes were so vacant.
“Among other things,” he eventually got out. “Sure. Was it Paul who told you about JG? He loves the glory, doesn’t he? But you can’t say things are exactly peaceful out there, can you? Remember what we saw at the restaurant? Happens every day now, doesn’t—”
“But what did CCA get out of the ads, do you think?”
“Well, they barely have the logo of the firm on them. But they do. And that’s where I differ from Paepcke—to Paul’s chagrin, of course. I don’t even want the logos. Let’s go all the way.”
“To the logos.”
He turned his gaze toward me uncertainly.
“The Great Ideas.”
For a beat, he closed his eyes. “And aren’t you clever. The mythos, too. The telos. I want them all. Isn’t it just one thing anyway, a loop? Did you know I studied a little Greek before Cal, in prep school in Chicago?”
“That doctor friend of mine, too.”
“Well, now, don’t tell me that. He’s a dark, dark man, the way you draw him. He’s even worse than me.” Garrett chuckled in the most innocent way, leaned toward me, and slapped my shoulder. Then he spoke with a somber air, a softer voice: “Look, it’s always been my feeling, it’s my experience, too, again and again, that the things people want, or come to want, are things they themselves find... well... distasteful in some way. You don’t have to like something, or think well of it, to want to be close to it, to know it, have it. Now, does Paul accept all that?”
“Right.”
“If I put it like that to him, no, probably not. But I never would, not when we bunked as kids in Chicago, and not now. That’s the way you and I would talk, though, isn’t it? And I don’t think all his years of research prove anything other than that. But he wouldn’t like us putting it that way. I don’t know that Karen would either. What do you think?”
I grinned insincerely. Although he might have been right.
“At the end of the day, if either of them is genuinely unhappy with what we’ve done, maybe we let the two of them beat us back a little. And maybe that’s good. But what I am saying is let’s not worry. That’s their job. Not yours. Because you’re going to be paid for everything no matter what. And you keep all the rights—you keep everything.”
“Karen’s respect, too? Will I keep that?”
He stepped back from me slightly, looked me over with apparent concern. “Sure you will. She loves you. I can hear it in her voice. Daphne said the same thing.” He sighed earnestly. “This is partly why I wanted to see you out here,” he said. “Just us. Because we’re the ones who have this feeling of necessity, of momentum, even when it’s got nothing to do with harmony, even when it’s all just incredibly blind to reality. It’s deeper than any stance of ours. This feeling of what, exactly? Home? But Paul, he’s never been at home in his life. My father’s cousin kept me at his place in Chicago while I went to high school. And he kept Paul, too. That’s how I met him—my family put him up. He’s had his share of tragedy, let’s put it that way. Home is just something he’ll never know.”
Garrett gazed wistfully into the clear pool below; its shine was fading as light drained from the sky. In no time, it seemed, the mound of dirt on the water’s edge caught his eye.
“But look—you’re right,” he resumed. “We’ve worked on riot control. Chicago’s a mess. That’s known on all sides. And yeah, we rebranded. JG turned into Antral, in honor of CCA, actually: an antrum is just a space, a container, a pit, like in your bones, or your stomach.”
I didn’t care for the unseemly smile he offered me then, but that wasn’t going to stop him.
“I’m guessing you’ve also heard about our defense contracts. People think it just has to undermine the purity of my other enterprises: sports, fashion, health. But tell me—how? And who was seeking purity in the first place? Or what kind? Maybe that’s the question.”
We studied each other for a while. I think he’d almost surprised himself with what he’d just admitted, and now he was trying to gauge how put off I was by all of it. In fact, I was trying to answer the same question: how much did it bother me? How much should it? Nobody at Cosquer had voiced open opposition to Antral—not until recently, anyway. Karen had told me, a week back or so, that Rick was starting to grumble in earnest about Garrett’s interest in us—in me—stoked, I assume, by Lindy, who was always game for a crusade. Neither of them could have been too pleased I’d found myself a patron without even trying to, a man with Dia or LUMA and one day even Arnault money, who might well support me long after Cosquer sank as deep underwater as the cave itself.
In any case, this was why I was meeting Rick tomorrow: to put him at ease about the project. Karen hadn’t mentioned much of Antral’s malfeasance directly to me, not knowing what I might think of it. But I knew from John that she’d been defending the Antral account, which was likely to generate more money than any we’d ever known, against increasingly vigorous objections from Rick and Lindy. Even now, they were locked in a debate over the matter; indeed, this had been Karen’s reason for ditching the couple that day at PS1.
After a blistering silence, I offered only a question: “How many wars do we have going right now?”
“And how else was it going to go?” he said as his eyes shut tight and his tenor grew ugly and brash. “A massive, imaginative, venturesome place like America, and we’re not going to muck it up some, too? What makes the muck something we have to disown? Look, it took some time to get here. You don’t just end up the most prosperous country on Earth. But we’re here. It’s the same thing in my own life: this didn’t all just happen for me. Look at Daphne. Take her. You must have noticed by now.”
“What?”
“That there’s something wrong with her. And the world deals that unpleasantness right back to her, in all sorts of ways. It loves her for her trouble. I love her for it.”
“Does she love you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But what about me? All those wars that use my stuff, right? All those toxins stored deep in the Earth, or down in the oceans, in my boxes? That’s on me, sure. So maybe I deserve a lot of things, too. Unpleasant things. I’ve already lost Elise, more or less. We’re all just waiting for the shoe to drop, right? We’ve got this feeling, you and I, and I can see it even in the pictures of the ones you love, like Claire. I have that same sense for life, of seeing home everywhere I look, even when it’s nasty. Your work plagued me all night—that night at Roger’s. But what does happiness have to do with belonging? See what I mean?”
I think I finally might have.
We went back downstairs. I went all the way down, to mingle with the copper pots, ruminate on my client’s words, and daydream about all sorts of things. Garrett stopped at his office on the second floor to give instructions to a few weekend staffers lodged in the backroom. When he finally came down, he noted that I’d drawn nothing, but he didn’t harp on it while walking me to my rental.
“I grew up about ten miles from here, just south, he said contemplatively. “And what we have up there”—he pointed at the rick-house—“is literally these fields, my fields, in those barrels.” He stood by my sun-scorched Buick as I got in, started the engine, and rolled the windows down. I was itching to leave, but I let him reminisce. “We’re just replanting it, basically, in New York, Los Angeles, London.” He slapped some stalks right near his knees and they sprung back sharply, as if retaliating. “Maybe we’ll set aside more of these barrels for wheat. The son I have someday can sell it. Or drink it. Whatever he wants.”
We laughed a little. Did he really believe Elise was coming back to him? Or would this be a son by a different woman?
“Enjoy the night,” he said, bumping the wheel with his palm.
I rolled up the windows and put the radio on, but Garrett wasn’t waiting on me. He was jogging back toward a pretty girl who’d just poked her head out of the distillery’s front door, an entrance that have previously been sealed. I wondered what she could know about whiskey, but just then Garrett closed the door behind him with a snap. Already he’d forgotten about me.
I flew back to New York the next morning after fitfully napping in that beautiful bed. My dreams were a mess, just shards, impossible to remember whole, but very much there and more menacing for it. On the way in to JFK, I had a double bourbon to help me slow down, perhaps even get some sleep. Without Theria, I couldn’t think of what else to do but booze. I had fully believed Garrett would veto the less-than-wholesome things I’d discovered about Duke in Chicago, only to find he didn’t care whether the man’s troubles extended into the present, whether he was still underwater, choking. This surprise should have improved my mood, since it meant my Chicago trip had been very much worthwhile: the material I’d gathered wouldn’t be wasted. I should have been impressed—I was impressed—that Garrett was willing to go this far to associate his firm of high-tech luxury products with the fallen side of life. That’s how he seemed to understand Duke and Daphne. And not just them. Himself, too.
Wasn’t that what he was saying to me, when he’d described Antral’s sins? That he was no less unsavory than our two subjects, who seemed to interest him far more than anything he was trying to sell with their help? Had they held his fancy from the start—had the products always been something of a pretext? Or had he found the actress’s and the athlete’s travails, as they came out in my drawings, so compellingly dark that they now formed the root of his fascination with the two of them? Could it be this question that kept me awake now, rather than withdrawal from the drug he’d pointedly told me to throw out rather than finish? I wasn’t sure what I was going to do once I got home. Indeed, I wasn’t sure what it was that I felt, exactly, other than a new sense of doom.