H_MOSS CLOUD DRIVE: H_MOSS>J_POMPEE
OCTOBER 19, 2089
Before Miracolo, Joseph Pompée had one of those jobs that sounded impressive but meant nothing. He was a person who could skip work for a week and no one would notice. He spent most of his life sitting in an office with a closed door and a window he faced away from. He lived alone and hated going home.
And then one night, he ordered a pizza and was delivered a tree of heaven stump with instructions on how to carve it. Later, he would describe the stump as being infused with a holy light.
Pompée did not go to work for a month after receiving the stump, and, in fact, no one noticed. He watched some YouTube videos, and at the end of the month, he had whittled Miracolo—with a butter knife, a grapefruit spoon, a hammer, and one of those scouring kitchen sponges shaped like a smiley face—never once asking who had left the stump, or why.
You always loved someone who would do your bidding without question. You loved for art to take on a life of its own.
At first, I was foolish enough to think Miracolo belonged to us. You never could tell me you loved me to my face, but I thought Miracolo was your way of saying it.
Some people can only see what they lack. Others see only what they desire, another form of lack. I am one of these people.
Pompée has never made another work of art, which is how you know he’s not a real artist, since artists exist because of their failures. Poor Joseph Pompée turned art into a bullshit job, but I suppose he did give the world Miracolo.
Goddammit, Finch. I have been here, loving you, this whole time.
We did our research, hours and hours learning about Joseph Pompée. We hired a PI, we interviewed childhood friends who divulged secrets for no reason other than the fact that we asked. We were looking for something no one had done before. We were a team of equals.
For his undergraduate thesis, Joe examined the single known poem of a 19th-century child poet named Ruby Williams, daughter of a famed abolitionist, who wrote it from inside her family’s print shop as it burned to the ground. Claiming to have solved the mystery of the cause of the fire that consumed her, Pompée pointed to the code of smudges and misspellings in the poem, which he said spelled out “police chief.”
The day the thesis was due, he printed three copies for his professors with his own money and distributed “The Eternal Desire of the Featherless Biped: Steganography of an Unknown Poet.” The title was a quote sometimes attributed to Flaubert, but the featherless biped was what Plato called human beings. That is, until that stinker Diogenes plucked a chicken and waggled it at Plato, saying “Behold, I brought you a man!” Plato, rightly irritated, adjusted the definition of human to include “with broad flat nails” so no one might waggle a chicken at him again. Diogenes moved on to bigger and better things: he slept in a can like Oscar the Grouch, masturbated in public, peed on people.
Joseph Pompée got an F on his thesis. Because he was a business major. But his “F” didn’t matter. He became a finance bro.
You studied the work of Juliet Rosenberg, who sought to scrub meaning from art, to disengage from meaning altogether, and you thought you could improve on that by grooming a meaningless artist.
The sculpture Miracolo made Pompée famous, and the human Miracolo, our crotchety old neighbor, almost landed us in jail because he knew too much. The lesson of both Miracolos, then, is that with the right tools and the right timing, you can change the course of a life on a dime.
Another story I shouldn’t know: Joseph Pompée was French and had the misfortune of moving to the United States the summer his hormones went bananas. He was tortured by his new classmates with the nickname “Speedo.”
The eponymous Speedo, bought the previous summer, was not built to contain Joseph’s new bulge. No big deal, maybe, in Bordeaux’s bulge-friendly piscines, but in our puritan public pools, it was pornographic. Girls who had never before given a moment’s thought to the bulbs and ridges of a penis, for whom a penis was still basically theoretical, now were perplexed. The anatomy didn’t add up in any meaningful way. Poor Joseph’s pubescent cock preceded him. If only he had moved in the fall! If only he had bought a baggy new American bathing suit, big shorts with drag that slow a boy down in the water. He stopped swimming, shut out the pleasure of water on skin. He faked an American accent until it became real. He lay a coat across his lap and guided girls’ hands under it, his coat trick, much emulated by his peers but never as successfully. Joseph’s cock became a rite of passage for high school girls and a couple of boys, and if it was a grim, sometimes painful ritual for all involved, if it was sometimes performed under duress, when all was said and done, Joseph decided he was impermeable, no one could ever say he was less than or too much for, no one would ever catch him off guard again.
But then you came along. He called you to order that pizza, and instead of hello you said, “Time isn’t a line or even a loop. It’s a pool. We swim and swim and never get anywhere, have you noticed that?”
There was a pause. You imagined him looking at his phone screen to make sure he had dialed the right number. You gave me googly eyes and I covered my mouth to keep from laughing. “I wanted to order a pizza?” he said finally. “Your website is down?”
“Ah yes, terrible inconvenience,” you said. You who had taken the website down and routed the phone number to yourself, because we had researched and anticipated his every move. “The beginning of the end, maybe. Are you ready?”
“You taking cards?” he said. “I have cash if not.”
“Hold onto your butt, Speedo, it’s time to dive in.”
Joseph hung up fast. You brought him the pizza he didn’t pay for, and the stump.
We didn’t tell him what the female figure of Miracolo should look like, so everyone sees what they want to see.
I used to think you were a lamedvavnik—one of the 36 righteous here on Earth to keep humanity afloat, however little we deserve it. But you wouldn’t know if you were, and neither would I. These days, I tend to think the 36 have been phased out so the exhausted world might finally end. I feel too lonely for it to be otherwise.
Joseph Pompée packed a suitcase with two pairs of underwear and Miracolo and a toothbrush. He traveled to Maine by plane and by foot, to the vision of a lighthouse in his mind. He found it. He climbed the rusty spiral stairs, placed Miracolo atop its spotlight. Anyone can visit the sculpture. Visitors have been known to weep.
The other night, I worked up the courage and asked you to visit Miracolo with me.
“You’re still thinking about that old thing?” You laughed.