Mika said, “Join us for food on the island, near my house.”
She put her hand on my shoulder as though to survey me for the rawness of my nerves. “You don’t mind, do you, genius?”
I had sailed to the art gallery on the mainland earlier that night with Mika. We had seen the straw exhibit there, and on our way out, she’d stopped in the lobby to talk with a sculptor. His back to us made me think awhile about the anonymity of his shape against the worshipful crowd gathered in front of him. He could be anyone. I need no one to explain to me why he could be anyone—though he is, in this instance, the sculptor with an interested crowd in front of him as I look on from a short distance, marking him with anonymity.
“Haven’t seen you since school. Crown Heights,” Mika said, pressing into his side.
He spun to face us, pushing Mika slightly off balance and then catching her. A sound rose from the soles of his feet. “Well, stop the madness as the law allow. You exactly the train ride I need today!” He appeared relieved, as though he had begun a new project, as though he’d become newly fond of chance again. “Take me away. Now,” he mouthed to Mika, and showed me his eyes to allow me into their exchange.
I think: Wouldn’t we all like to be taken away.
Mika and the sculptor laughed into the un-silence of that cold hall and the crowd dispersed. Then I spent what seemed like half my life watching a nearby guard clutch his belt. His baton. Something like a gun—I couldn’t be sure. He looked at us every other second. I felt I should walk over to him. Or at least gesture to him to come closer so he wouldn’t have to perform his duty quite so dryly.
As things stood, I wasn’t sure what to do with Mr. Clutch-and-Glance. I’d want him nearby enough to hear his bones fissure when I asked him wouldn’t he rather have another life on a Friday night. “Then, at least,” I’d say to him, “you’d be part of a more stirring tradition—one where you’d never have to pretend you were empty of all emotion except fear.” Mostly I wanted him near enough that I could ask why these art institutions cleave to proving their seriousness about art instead of fueling the curiosity that would make such seriousness clear without confusing so many goddamned art-observers and art-doers and artists. Were they addicted to sadistic self-obsession? I, a critic, am here and now confused by this space. I wanted to ask, What are you busy with in this lobby? Pointillism or brutalism? Is this staircase supposed to clarify something photographic? Something poetic? Does this photograph illustrate something to be reimagined, the way a poem might depict a reflection?
“Air is your art. Air is your country. Honey, is it that serious?” I said to myself. Moving farther away from Mr. Clutch-and-Glance. I was confronted with sharp corners and Machiavellian concrete beams and blown-up photos of Depression-era whites plastered across the floor. The floor? What else do you want me to walk all over, Mr. Clutch-and-Glance? Because I’m hot with dreams of owning a backyard full of chickens and a horse.
Where was I?
I reversed into the conversation Mika was still having with the sculptor. They were going on about the times they’d eaten souse together. The pig’s feet, plump. The coal pits, flagrant with embers. Onions, garlic, celery. If there were ever two things I could be permanently interested in, those things were food and art. But this talk between Mika and the sculptor struck me as a throwaway one, and I was feeling dusty about it. Dusty. Like a Sunday one hundred years earlier. True, the night hadn’t been a complete wash. I was still enchanted by the dry-leaf exhibits, and the plastic bottles filled with moonshine and holding miniature straw hats, and the market baskets laid out along a boardwalk made of charcoal, all in the main space. The kinship among these elements made for a persuasive scene—positioning that needed little explanation. Except if you have lived a certain life, where you exist in the connectedness of what is expressed in front of you. Then you can simply sip on your lime juice and take the train and believe that not everything is propaganda for the artist. Some things thicken through what you put in them, and some through what is brought by those who come to view them.
That’s when Mika said to the sculptor, “Join us for food on the island.”
Because I did not mind, I said, “Of course.” With one final, wanting look at Mr. Clutch-and-Glance, this time I saw him smile…but I knew I could not afford to turn the night into a photograph deliberately cropped to remove context, where I was the only one there, and also hunter and also canoe and also shipwrecked. I’d long made plain to Mika that I was willing to follow her, willing to see everything that was there. There was there, I would say.
“Alright, let’s do it, Theo,” Mika said. Looking back at her friend the sculptor, she brought her hands together once in a clap. She led us across the grass and along the concrete path to the marina.
Out on the dock I am tethered to nothing—or nothing more sure than the Burning Man, the sailboat I inherited from Pops when he passed on, when he left us—his two children—squinting out in the sun.
“You come around here lots?” I ask Theo.
“Was here ten years ago as an apprentice to Bowyer.”
“Oh. Did he really choose to stop working as they’ve said? I’ve wondered over the years. Ten years ago, he seemed destined, a legend.”
Mika clicks her tongue several times quick, and says, “He is a legend. And he did not choose to end his work. He chose to end a certain relationship to it.”
“That’s right. He’s still sculpting. He found a way to make wood appear iridescent without using paint or any obvious trick. Just the technique of structuring. Arranging shapes into the block. I saw him only yesterday, and what I saw made me switch into art-speak. I haven’t been able to switch out ever since.”
Theo opens his hand at the skyline of the city. The tallest building’s tip is impaling a cloud the shape and tint of a flame. I nod to him. I’m not sure why but it seems like a good way to limit myself to watching what comes of the moment.
“Say more,” Mika says as she boards. She lets Theo help her step over the edge and she stands with her foot against the gunwale.
“The simple story is I found him in his yard. He was buried up to his chest in his lawn. I said, How are you, and he said, Fine, and I said, How come. He then told me he’d chosen to be buried up to his chest in this turf. I said, But the dead grass, the dirt, the noise of traffic the small ways off, the bird shit on your breast and nose; and he said, That’s the point and it’s a good point when you find what you come after. Every time he rotated his head to blow off an ant or a leaf climbing him, I thought, You are buried arms and everything below by choice. He told me he was in process, he’d had a breakthrough working on a way to make wood look shiny and he had to find a better way to be in the world for that to happen, so he was following through with what he’d learned. He described to me the moment he’d looked up at the moon, bloodied and engorged one night several months ago, and found it looked like a crater of bones, as if its surface means to shake up our Polaroid imaginations with all that hard light on grey.”
“ ‘Polaroid imaginations.’ He said that?” Mika says, hand on her chest.
“Every syllable. And then he told me to help him get out. I dug and dug. The soil was soft. He told me he’d arranged for his friend to do what I was now doing, but that I might as well be the one to participate in his philosophy about one of the acceptable ways to be cut off from the open world. Said that when I left him a decade before, I had been nothing but an apprentice. And now I have come back as the fantasy, the assignment he’ll never forget.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Wow,” Mika says after a while. “Did he ask you why you never tried to contact him after that?”
“He did not,” Theo says.
“He didn’t need to by the sound of everything you just said,” Mika says.
Ours is a long ride. We grow colder, bobbing as the air intervenes on our bodies like a pump, a weakening one, that demurs all around us. And soon enough, there is food. On another night, the city will narrow into a frame far from here. There will be mementoes, there will be art hidden under a bed, there will be every true thing we learned about what grows dull in our eyes.