It wasn’t long before news came down about Duke, and it was bad: a four-game suspension. Most commentators thought the sentence relatively light, actually, given the sangfroid with which the receiver carried out the second of the assaults, and the fact that a five-game ban had been handed out the last time something similar had happened in the league, all the way back in 2006. In truth, I’d been waiting some time for a moment like this, for something to crack Paul’s cool, and finally it came. On our next conference call, in language larded with expletives that I never heard from Paul again, he questioned Duke’s viability as a subject for us now, given what had happened. The receiver was becoming an incontrovertible villain, Paul said, and the doubts about his suitability for the pros, the ones that had made him drop off the draft board earlier in the year, were rapidly being confirmed. How could you see things any other way? he asked. How?
Obviously Paul had come down with a crippling case of buyer’s remorse, just as Cotter and the Bears must have. I could tell, though, it greatly vexed Garrett that Paul was allowing his doubts to leak out of their Roosevelt Island headquarters and into our call. I knew that the marketing man had been trying to shift the campaign away from Duke and toward Daphne, and double down on the upcoming film she’d be starring in, her first feature-length American release. Now, on the phone, he was trying to recruit Karen to his cause. But Garrett held firm: We’re changing nothing here, you guys got that? Just let it all play out, everything. The principals’ misdeeds weren’t made off-limits to me in any way, then; they could and should be explored and depicted, even magnified, as much as anything else about them. I remember how deep the silence was at the end of that call. And so I continued spending my days toggling between Duke and Daphne, psychically and graphically, my impressions of one infiltrating those of the other, a natural result of alternately rendering the life stories of a nervy white girl and a gnomic black man, between whom there were radical differences in family income yet certain commonalities of heritage, none more defining, it seemed to me, than their each having a professor for a parent: Sheila, hanging on the margins of academia, and Tony, though once celebrated, exiled in the way of intrepid explorers.
All the time I’d been working on the last two pictures—early man with frescoed back, as well as the family of guns lying in bed—my feelings had been colored by Daphne and her extended absence. The drawings, without any special effort on my part, displayed this cross-pollination; the personalities on either side were vivid enough for that. Here and there in the curvature of a line, the thrust of a shoulder or a knee, or even the tones of the background—the manner in which they dissolved in aerial perspective—it was obvious I’d not been able to escape from such interpolations. I imagined this was all to the good as far as Garrett was concerned: precisely these mixtures and confrontations seemed most to engage him. At every point, whenever I thought he would advise caution or distance, he only suggested I dig deeper, entwine myself further in their fates.
Daphne was spending time upstate again, Garrett mentioned to me. She sent no photos this time, though; nor did she return any of my calls, the invitations to come by the apartment. She was back at the theater school run by that little man, Volger. I recall Daphne telling me, before she fell out of contact, that Nik was famously demanding of her time—of all of their time. I myself had not found him especially impressive, although I was assured he was, by Garrett no less, when he called to tell me about Daphne’s film. It was, in fact, Nik who was directing the picture, which was to be called Adiaphora or Obsequy, he hadn’t decided yet. The troupe was working together on a new draft of the script and the mis-en-scène, too, sequestered there on the ranch they’d commandeered.
I’d tried to make arrangements to meet with her, but she’d been remarkably cool about it all. Whenever she was back with the company, this seemed to happen. All the desire I observed in her, which found a sort of echo in me, suddenly seemed just as well satisfied elsewhere. I had to wonder, too, whether she was angry about our last meeting: she might blame me for her own drunkenness, or think I shouldn’t have drawn her in any such state—certainly that I shouldn’t have plastered her all over town like that. But I’d sent the drawings to Garrett and the team: I could only assume they’d gotten her approval before proceeding, if such approval was in her contract. Maybe she was embarrassed not by the images themselves, but by her behavior that day, if she remembered anything of it. Could it even have been my lack of interest in the crying coming from above, from Tanya, as we went to sleep?
We did eventually talk on the phone, more than once, sometimes for quite a while, even if Daphne remained introspective, intellectual, which must have been an effect of being among the troupe. She allowed me these calls, I think, mostly to please her Jimmy, who probably conveyed to her my consternation and how that might affect his project. So she began to explain to me the state of play around her, out in the countryside. Nik thought she couldn’t, at this moment, be disturbed from her training, or from the collective composition of the film, for any significant period; and that if I wanted to see her, it would need to be incidental, at the site of a shoot. Nik, who was named after Khrushchev, she said to me, though I don’t know how seriously, was fast becoming prominent beyond advanced theater circles. He’d already filmed a series of shorter works, a loose collection of narratives, none of more than forty minutes, and most closer to twenty. This string of films, a kind of serial production only projected live onto screens of modest dimensions, and never brought to video or television, had already met with success in Berlin. There were comparisons made to Shirley Clarke’s Connection, and to David Lean’s entire oeuvre, as well as less flattering comparisons, in Nik’s mind, to Peter Brook, whose shallow eclecticism was diametrically opposed to the group’s working methods, which eschewed any fixed technique, even if the biomechanical teachings of Meyerhold, Craig, and Laban loomed large. Each performer—each actor-theoretician, as Nik would have it—was left to develop their own technical facilities, an approach that was beginning to earn Nik comparisons, in the world of cinema, to Egoyan and Cronenberg. This new production would more fully inhabit the terrain of extended narrative film, and test how far ideas more closely tied to modern dance than to drama could be stretched. No classics was one policy they had. Character, too, was de-emphasized. In fact, Daphne explained, Nik frowned on the expressionism linking Stanislavski to Artaud, instead seeking to signify without needing to convey any inner state of mind.
There was the hope, throughout the school, that the film would announce the group’s un-Strasbergian ways to the wider world: Daphne’s in particular. For the first time, Nik would have a proper budget—low seven figures—secured from a newish financier hoping to shore up his bona fides by backing the ascending director. There was an old Hollywood stalwart connected as well, Malory Martin, a two-time Oscar nominee and former member of the Living Theater. She was entering her late-forties, a precarious time for a screen actress, which is what made her gettable by a relatively small production. The hope, I think, was that Malory’s recruitment would help propel Nik and Daphne, and Alonso, too, across the divide between serious theater and cinema.
All told, Daphne was a quite recent addition to Nik’s company. She’d been with him only a year, whereas others of the troupe had followed Nik around the world for twenty. If things went well, though, she offered gleefully, the two might develop one of those director-actor relationships like Godard and Karina, or Antonioni and Vitti, that would buoy them both. If things went less brilliantly, I thought, this production might represent not a precedent but a peak, garnering more attention in the cinema world than anything else they would ever make. In either case, a lot hung on it for both of them.
The first time I tried to arrange a meeting with Daphne, I got nothing back from her except some shots of a rather arid-looking landscape with a brush fire in the distance. I wasn’t interested in playing this game twice. Jeff, who’d become firmly ensconced in Nik’s group, helped me with some of the details: bizarrely, it turned out she was very far from the troupe then, in Seville, which was almost unaccountable, given this was a career-making opportunity. Her disappearance enraged Nik, so that when she returned, a couple of days back, he put her on a much shorter leash. A scene they were about to shoot was going to use the New Jersey woods; she’d be returning home to New York for it in a few days. I was to meet her beforehand at her apartment—that is, her father Tony’s townhouse.
In the meantime, my latest drawings went up in the city: firearms in shambolic ghettos, and then, always at a significant distance, around a corner, at some other intersection, on a different sightline, the lightning-rod: that primal African, somewhere between archaic and modern, inscribed with a fresco of black paintings, a collection of Goyas. If you relaxed your gaze, you could almost see the paintings as variations in the blackness of the man’s skin, or even whipmarks, the way I’d done them.
Lately I’d taken to riding around town by Uber at all hours, simply to observe my work, not to mention get a picture of the city I’d never properly had before, regardless of the ways in which we were shifting it. Eventually, after a two-hundred-dollar trip, I settled on a single driver, Ahmed. He was rated three stars; evidently he was rather stern with customers who misbehaved or abused his time. Yet he was superb on the road: calm, tranquil, unobtrusive when he could see I simply wanted to be taken around. He asked no questions, which I cherished, as over the last days, though I’d overcome the worst of the symptoms of my withdrawal, I had a harder time speaking, remembering words, answering questions. Could this just be the pre-Theria version of me returning? Had I simply been left who I always was? Yet what if the drink’s action over the weeks had opened up a gap, and I couldn’t recall that other me to be me? Wasn’t that as bad as actually not being me?
The phone calls began to come in almost immediately, first of all from the city council, which had kindly provided us with some of their privileged spaces in public areas. Owing to the secrecy of the campaign, Cosquer, the magazine, became the public front for the drawings, which were nominally pieces of unbranded art, not commercial objects. I was pleased enough, of course, to defend my work. Seeing it around town, I’d been overcome by the distinct satisfaction of its effecting a reconciliation of sorts with the larger world. Even Ahmed would comment on these pictures, whose density grew every day, and whose positions were continually reconfigured by Paul’s recondite research. (I suppose in that sense the marketer and I were collaborators—this was the best and least contentious portion of our relationship.) I even took a ride to the suburbs to see just how far the tentacles extended. Quite far—I was in Scarsdale before the signs gave out.
This isn’t how I defended my work with the council; it merely showed me that it was worth defending. The means I selected were the ones most readily intelligible to those trafficking in dead ideas. Critique, in this case. I urged the councilors, in an official statement, to look harder: these pictures bravely opine on contemporary culture, when of course they did no such thing, as far as I was concerned. But as other Cosquer work did fulfill this critical function, the council was able to swallow the pretext whole. Naturally Karen felt the pinch. I was sorry, in a way, as I knew she would have been alienated by this ploy, precisely at a moment when I could have used some closeness. But I believed in these drawings—Garrett had helped me to see that I should. Yes, I believed in them in a way I was unable to credit the commercial work I’d done so far, even if I didn’t quite have a grip on what they were exactly.
That such a grip—a theory, I mean—was vital had long seemed to me a kind of crutch, perhaps never more than now. Image-making had no need of subjugating itself to the project of truth and revelation. Perhaps as a text artist, typographer, and type designer, and more than anything a prose writer, Karen couldn’t quite accept or be brought to understand that explanations were superfluous. Still, angry as she may have been with me, she’d not abandoned the project: she must have had some sort of trust in the work itself, in me, even if I myself barely knew who I was anymore. Perhaps she couldn’t quite put words to my approach, which some had called anti-cognitive, others anti-aesthetic, and still others anti-ethical. Did this confusion mean I was finally on to something? Wasn’t that how it was with all great constellations: religion, say, or science? What could exhaust the meaning of the wafer and wine, the Hindu relics, the Chinese proverbs, the funeral pyre, and indeed all the age-old obsequies? What was the final import of gravity, force, velocity, time? All these things had the same primitive inscrutability to them: not the artificially induced obscurantism of abstract art, but the irreducible opacity of being itself.