You don't know it? She shook her head. You don't know it. I'm disappointed in you. El Jaleo? By Sargent? You do know Sargent, don't you?
Karl. Be nice.
I am being nice. You haven't seen mean yet. Here. Look here. He pressed his thumb to where she was supposed to look, further smudging her chances of making out the data.
She stared, feeling her old loupes kick in. She scoured the wall behind the dancer, the play of macabre shadow, obscured in a cheap print, rubbed out through years of shameless use by hands that probably prayed more often than they washed. Seeing anything there was a hopeless prospect, except for his insistence that she see it.
And then she saw. Painted on the painting's painted plaster walclass="underline" a replica of the first-made images.
He's quoting Altamira, Karl said. Just discovered by Sautuola and his little daughter. Written up the year before Sargent does the painting. A Spanish cave, you see. The painting's not really about the dancer. It's about the first-ever proof that we have to paint. Paint like we clap our hands. Took four more decades for the experts to accept the idea of Stone Age art. Nobody wanted to believe that these bison were the real thing. Except for painters, of course.
She looked at him, taken apart by what she saw.
Scan Sargent and stick him in your nature walk, he said. You'll get Altamira for free. He stared back at the image inside the image, shaking his head a little sadly. Think of it. All these centuries of greater realisms, more light, deeper psychological penetration, and the golem still never came alive. Paint: disowned by technology, discredited, until technology needed it again. And now, he said, shrugging at the Cavern walls, the water and the mud and the spark are finally coming together. Now we're at last threatening to pull it off…
Karl. Karl. Who was this man? Why aren't you an art history professor?
His face flushed, as if her words had slapped him. A hard, red hand slap. Flamenco.
Fuck you, too, doll.
Ebesen bundled up his yellowing gift and removed it from the negotiating table. He turned his threadbare trousers on her — pallid mandrill on its deathbed — and made for the exit.
Karl. Stop. Stop right now! I meant that as a compliment.
He turned in the doorway. His face twisted up, as if he were a non-native speaker, trying to remember "compliment," the shifty homonym, the false friend.
Help me with this, she said, waving to include all that was now invisible. It's the greatest game in the world. But it would be even more fun with someone who understood all the jokes.
His face came forward a nanometer. Jokes?
Ah. Sorry. I mean "allusions"
Ebesen suppressed a lip twitch. He studied the Cavern walls, empty now, their projections shut down. Bled of all electrons, they looked as blank and white as heavyweight bond. You'// help us out with the architectural fly-through, in return?
Sure, sure. Although I warn you, I cant tell a corbel from a cornice.
And you'll let me litter your little theme park with my personal favorites?
Of course. That's the whole point. Only…?
Go ahead. Say what you were going to say. Only?
She winced. Only… we might want to work from some more recent prints.
Ebesen held the grubby book to his chest for an awful moment. You want me, you get my anthology.
I'm sure we can find an out-of-the-way bush to stick you both under.
So Design's senior derelict led Adie down the overgrown path of Western art. Ebesen muttered to himself while he worked, reciting stray facts and vesper-captions that kept him to the task at hand. She listened as inconspicuously as she could, from across the cubicle, reacquainting herself with all his old, exhausted favorites from scratch. From another's eye.
The man pattered on everything from Paleolithic fertility figures to late-day silk-screened sex sirens. On New Britain, he told her, people believed that humans came to life when the gods dribbled blood on drawings of them.
Or: Picasso thought he'd invented camouflage. And by free association: You know how the Dutch kept the Night Watch out of the hands of the Nazis? They hid it underground, in the Limburg marl grottos.
He'd hold two prints up for her, side by side. Comic in their contrast: Watteau and El Greco. Art has only two obsessions. Denial of death and preoccupation with it. Real achievement depends on either utter indifference or utter terror.
Genuflecting in front of the Ghent Altarpiece, he'd say, Do you know why Mary's hand towel is dirty? The angel took her by surprise, at her prayers. No time to tidy up for the guests. Know why the Annunciation script is upside down? God's dictating, from above…
Karl, Karl. Where on earth do you come up with these things?
She asked his opinion about the eighties international superstars, the market where art now lived. Ebesen just shrugged. His knowledge ended abruptly in the year that Adie's SoHo show had opened.
It passed for friendship in the low fluorescent light, Ebesen's halting glosses, his overture of closeness. And Adie kept her end of the bargain. She cleared herself a workspace in the room that Ebesen shared with Michael Vulgamott. The bagman and the architect had already used their Cavern tool kit to simulate a skeletal bungalow. The viewer could wand through this interior, not just along predetermined paths, but in any direction she cared to explore. Their simulated rooms occupied real volume. Although little more than hasty polygon fills with a dash of surface texture, their interiors held together from any angle. Walls blocked access and doors allowed it. Light streamed through windows from a consistent source. Stairs led up and down. Opposite views supplied each other's complements.
Proof of concept, Vulgamott said. Enough to show how the Cavern can bust open spatial visualization. But just a five-finger exercise. A mock-up for the real tool.
Their idea was to assemble a chest of architectural primitives: three-dimensional icons, universal building blocks for creating countless further rooms. They imagined a visual catalogue of prefab parts, designed once, reused forever — the full Vitruvian library of any building component that imagination might require. Each solid piece had to be deformable along any axis. When Adie joined them, Ebesen had already been working on the Ionic capital for weeks.
We figured we'd start with your more high-demand items, he
explained.
Doric was done. Abacus and echinus each bore resizable handles that one could click and drag to shrink or swell the capital. The moldings below adjusted accordingly, while the necking and flutes stretched to fit snugly onto any column underneath them. The Ionic model improved upon this basic unit, upping the number of flutes, changing the echinus to egg and dart, and adding adjustable volutes.
Ebesen worked the stone meticulously, testing on a flat-screen monitor. He carved, examined, jimmied, and carved again. The tedious scut work fell as far below design as design fell below the skills of the man who, Adie suspected, could freehand any object in creation.