It is a fact of life for museums that you simply cannot keep everything. There was a standard process for disposing of artifacts that had been declared surplus. From time to time, the practice raised a public outcry when pieces of precious pottery were found in dumpsters, or ancient sideboards appeared at auction, but for the most part museums go about their business of sloughing off very carefully, and unnoticed. As a curator, Matt had managed dozens of these processes. He knew the forms that had to be filled out and the committees that had to be convened. He knew the criteria off by heart; he had been part of the group that authored them in the first place. The nine-sectioned Bruno memory wheel (not the plywood demonstrator, which was pretty well destroyed by the time the exhibition closed) fit the bill without ambiguity. It was large and therefore difficult to store. It was peripheral to the museum’s core collections, having been part of a special exhibition that was unlikely to be remounted. And it was a reproduction, no matter how convincing. Matt had engaged an old hippie who had a woodworking shop tucked away behind St. Michael’s College to craft it. There were enough compelling reasons for getting rid of the thing. What was unusual — irregular, the Director was eventually to pronounce — was that the deaccession protocol had been triggered neither by space concerns, nor relevance, nor provenance. Ingrid had simply asked Matt if she could have it. Even that irregularity might have been forgiven were it not for what had then been done to the object in front of an audience.
Ingrid was desperate to devise a replacement for the failed fabric choreography. She didn’t have all the details worked out, but it had come to her that the wheel was to be central. Matt made her promise that the choreography would have nothing to do with the erotic game they had played with the plywood wheel that night in the museum, and then he filled out the paperwork. The committee was a rubber stamp. The museum’s van delivered the wheel to the studio of a friend of Gina. Ingrid insisted that she needed privacy to develop the work, and more time than she could possibly take in the room provided by the museum for rehearsals and the performance.
In fact, she apparently needed so much time that her trysts with Matt had to be put on hold. “It will be worth waiting for,” she said, unaware of the irony of the use of that particular phrase for Matt. How many times had he been put off as a young man, in the back seat of a parked car or at the doorway of a dorm room, by exactly those words?
In the end, it had been worth waiting for. When he saw the piece for the first time at the final rehearsal the night before the public performance, he was sure that Ingrid had created something that made sense of all of the work they had been doing.
Ingrid began by drawing a large circle on the polished concrete floor with a chunk of sidewalk chalk. Matt thought it should be easy to erase; he would warn maintenance. Inside the circle, she inscribed squares and triangles in a quick approximation of something you might see in Vitruvius. Watching her work, one of the participants whispered that it looked like the drawing on her vitamin-pills bottle, only without the spread-eagled figure. Another immediately corrected her: it must be the twelve houses of the zodiac. Then Ingrid ground the chalk stub under her heel, scooped up the dust, and blew it from her palms.
At each of the twelve points where the triangles touched the circle, she placed an object. She did it slowly, ritualistically, investing the objects with more gravity than their banality might seem to merit. The objects were in pairs and they recalled aspects of the performance that had gone before. There were two toothbrushes to stand for the procedural memory segments, two file boxes for the archive fever piece, and, to represent the Twin Towers exercise and the constant time-lagged video feed, two outlandishly large VHS video cameras that she must have gotten from a yard sale. All of these, she placed with the members of the pairs facing off at twelve o’clock and six o’clock, three and nine, and two and eight. At one and seven, four and ten, and eleven and five, she installed facing pairs of paint cans, small bunny-eared television sets, and tiny cakes that were supposed to be madeleines. You could barely see their oval shape and the ribs were invisible, but Matt thought the audience would get the drift. The almonds that went with them were impossible to make out.
Once the objects were in place, Ingrid danced lines between them, drawing connections, first moving from one member of a pair to the other, and then gradually beginning to mix them up, travelling in a quick step from twelve to two or a long glissé from eleven to four. On the large projection screen, she had arranged for a series of still images of functional MRIs, linked together in a way that made them seem animated. At about four minutes into the piece, she registered awareness of the projections, stared at them for a full twenty seconds, and then began feverishly rearranging the objects, moving more and more frenetically until she finally collapsed on the floor. Matt thought that might be the end, though he knew it shouldn’t be. Then she gradually rose up to her knees and began — with a cloth she must have had tucked up her skirt the whole time — to wipe away the chalk markings. Once the drawings were blurry, she tackled the objects, packing the pair of toothbrushes and one of the paint cans into a black sack, which she then slid under one of the front-row seats. The nine remaining objects were rearranged into a tighter circle. That was when Matt knew she would bring out the artifact she had asked him for. The wheel had nine divisions, not twelve. He was curious to see how she was going to make the transition, wondered how the broken pair would come into it. But immediately after she had installed the wheel at the centre of her circle, she stopped and called for lights and announced that the rest was still in development.
Matt thought Gina might have a fit, but she simply nodded and thanked everyone for an excellent dress rehearsal, reminding them about their call time for the next night and urging them to get some sleep.
“It’s going to be amazing,” Matt said to a sweaty Ingrid as he took his turn in the line that had formed to give her what he had come to think of as those obligatory theatre hugs.
“Here’s hoping,” was all she said back. “I’ll work on it tonight. Sorry.”
He supposed he should have expected that, although he had been hoping they might go back to her apartment, celebrate a successful rehearsal, and toast the coming performance. Both of them knew that the project’s end would also almost certainly mark an end to their affair — if that was what it had been. He went to the bar on Bloor Street by himself and drank three bourbons before heading home to Jennifer.
He wished afterward that he had worked harder to get Ingrid into bed that night. The piece could have ended perfectly well with her sinking to the floor exhausted. Then the wheel would never have come into it.
Jennifer had a faculty thing she was supposed to go to on the night of the performance, which removed that potential awkwardness quite neatly. She had half-heartedly offered to skip it, but he had said she must go; it was important for her career. Matt was looking forward to sitting anonymously in an audience of strangers, he said, taking in the work just as they would.
About two minutes before the lights were due to go down, the Director spotted him and went to the unusual length of asking a woman to move one seat over so he could sit with his friend. Matt had never thought of them as friends, but he could hardly raise that objection and ask the woman to stay put.
“Quite a good crowd.” The Director said it as though he were personally responsible. Matt wondered whether he would have been as quick to take credit if attendance had sucked. “Great outreach for the institution. It’s so important to be in the public eye whenever we can.” Matt waited for him to thank him. “I was talking with a few of the participants this afternoon. They are very excited. They say the two women have been wonderful.”
Matt wondered if the Director even knew Ingrid’s and Gina’s names. He wanted to point them out on the program, but the improvised house lights started to fade.
Inevitably, there were a few stumbles in the performance, and a technical hiccup with the delayed video feed, but the audience, including the Director, remained rapt. Matt got one sidewise glance from his boss during his voice-over on the subject of how collection policies are driven by the potential memorability of objects, but he thought it was more quizzical than defensive.
The early parts of Ingrid’s finale unfolded as they had the night before, with a few small tweaks that Matt thought were brilliant. The toothbrushes had been supplemented by other brushes of various kinds — hair, scrubbing, and toilet — to make a pair of bouquets. And to erase the chalk triangles, rather than producing a cloth, she simply removed the skirt she wore over her black leotard and rubbed that across the floor.
Rather than reducing the objects to nine, Ingrid gathered them all into a much larger black sack than she had used the night before. She disappeared with the sack for a moment, and when she stepped back into the lights, her head and face were covered in a balaclava-like sock. Combined with the leotard and tights, the impression was of an all-black Spider-Man. Matt dismissed the analogy as trivializing and disloyal. Stuck to the balaclava (presumably with Velcro) was a pair of neon-pink ears, a large nose, and an open cartoon mouth that might have been Mick Jagger’s. The effect narrowly avoided Mrs. Potato Head by the addition of outsized, red-framed sunglasses. Ingrid turned around to be sure the audience could see that there were Velcroed patches on her crotch and bum as well. The nine openings of the human body. What had started as a summary of the collective’s work had become suddenly and weirdly personal. And almost certainly sexual. Something with a message for him. Lewd and therefore memorable, she would have said. Matt missed the cans of paint and toothbrushes.
When she dragged the memory wheel to centre stage, Matt didn’t need to look at the Director to sense his dismay. His sharp intake of breath must have been audible to everyone in the room. Matt wanted to turn to the man and ask him, hadn’t he read the week’s lists? He wanted to reassure him that the deaccessioning had been done strictly according to the book. Whether or not the wheel was any longer the property of the museum was unlikely to matter to him though. People would inevitably identify it as such.
Ingrid was now pulling the patches off herself and affixing them to the nine positions on the stationary outer wheel. The nose tore in half to allow each nostril a spot, and the sunglasses broke at the bridge so the eyes could be separated. Matt worried that the Velcro that she must have affixed to the wood of the wheel would ruin the lettering. It was gold leaf and had taken days to get just right. Then he noticed that the letters on the two inner wheels were gone altogether. No wonder she had needed privacy. He might have stopped her if he knew she was altering the beautifully crafted wheel. The letters had been replaced by crudely painted images of ears and eyes and nose and mouth, and what he could only imagine were supposed to be renditions of anus and labia.
As a few people in the audience giggled and the Director went rigid in his seat, Ingrid began spinning the two inner wheels, watching intently until they ground to a stop. Her reactions each time suggested there was indeed a set of rules in place for whatever game this was, but they were not immediately apparent. Only when three ears finally lined up on the three circles and Ingrid replaced a Velcro ear on her head did Matt sense what was happening, though he still could not tell what she meant by it. The audience quickly caught on when she was able to restore half her nose, and they soon came to sound like a crowd around a roulette wheel. The Director was stonily silent. After a dozen further spins with no positive result, suddenly the stereo speakers — which had been silent since Ingrid erased the chalk triangles — came alive. Bob Dylan. Matt thought the choice was too obvious, blamed it on Gina, who he now thought must have known Ingrid’s plans all along. “I’ll Remember You,” Dylan promised from a too-tight throat.
Then came what Matt had heard Gina and Ingrid call a Brechtian moment. Did people really talk like that? In stark contrast to the musical backdrop of slow, measured nostalgia — memory as bittersweet — Ingrid began to thrash about: memory as torment. It was as if she was moving to a different soundtrack altogether. She pushed the wheel off its stand and began to jump on it. When it did not break (the hippie’s work was very good) she began to work more methodically, but still at a frenetic pace. Within a minute, she had separated the three wheels. This was not difficult, Matt reflected. There was a central hub with a bolt that could be freed with the removal of a wing nut. Wing nut. He smiled for an instant at the aptness of the word. A glance at the Director wiped the grin away. Ingrid had begun to spin the wheels on their edges. The largest didn’t work very well — Matt supposed the bodily orifices stuck to it spoiled the balance — but the smaller two twirled like dimes. She kept them going until the Dylan song approached its end and then she let them judder to the floor, where she joined them as the lights snapped to black.
“What the fuck, Matt?”
Matt had never heard the Director swear. And he seldom called Matt by his first name. “The last part was new. Since last night. I hadn’t seen it.”
“That was an artifact. A museum piece.”
Matt debated whether to remind him it was actually a reproduction, then decided against it. The very public act of destruction tonight rendered moot any such quibble.
“People would have seen it in the exhibition. Your exhibition.”
Matt doubted any of the same people had witnessed both The Art of Memory and the I remember … performance.
“And then to see it desecrated here tonight. I just hope none of the board was here.” The house lights had come up — they had agreed there should be no curtain call — and the Director nervously scanned the audience, muttering something about the public eye, which had obviously, suddenly become much less attractive to him. As soon as their row cleared, he fled the room.
Matt shook hands with the fellow who had run the projections and then headed behind one of the sets of velour panels they had hung to create improvised wings. The Twin Tower trio had popped a bottle of champagne and were passing it around, the froth slopping on the composite flooring. Matt couldn’t see either Gina or Ingrid. He crossed the performance area and parted the curtain on the other wing. The mood could not have been farther from the jubilation not thirty feet away. Here there were tears and sad hugs. Matt was reminded of scenes on wartime train platforms or at hospital bedsides. The participants had formed a community, a society, and they did not want to let it go, though they knew that was exactly what they must do after this night. Gina was comforting the old woman who had done the teeth brushing. When she saw Matt, she broke away.
“Where’s —”
“She left this for you.” Gina handed him a cream-coloured envelope. It smelled of lemon. When he opened it later in his office it contained a slip of paper with the words “We’ll always have Toronto.”
Jennifer found it crumpled in his jacket pocket two days after that. She had never gone through his things before.