She heard herself talking, from across an echoing hall. And you don't think that man murdered her?
Well, you know, Mark went off to a double lifetime prison sentence swearing that Gail…. helped herself over the sill.
Adie studied the woman, her public shows, her private nondisclosures. She shook her head. Wasn't there something about repeated abuse?
Another thing that I'd fail to give her.
And the neighbors in that building, testifying that they used to hear him, drugged, threatening at the top of his voice that he was going to kill
her?
Adie swung around to face Ebesen. He was studying her with a quizzical expression. You've retained a surprising number of details about the case.
She shrugged. I was a young artist, living in New York City.
Ebesen stood up. So were we all, once.
He crossed the room without a word, walking away from her. The interview was over.
Karl. Please. I'm sorry.
He disappeared into his bedroom, behind the lacquer screen. She stood forever, wondering if she should let herself out.
Hang on, he called at last. It's around here somewhere.
When he returned, he was toting a cardstock portfolio like the one he carried around with him at the RL, only bigger and rattier. He laid it out on a plateau on top of the floor clutter. She came behind him as he flipped through the enclosed sheaves. With each riffled picture, she wanted to call out for him to stop and back up. But he was going somewhere, flipping so rapidly that every so often he tore one in his hurry. Every tear ripped into her.
At first glance, she took them for color photographs. My God, she said, after a handful went by. What's the medium?
These? They're just acrylics.
Holy shit. Did you use projection?
He dismissed her with a laugh. If I'd used projection, these things might have been fashionable. As it is, freehand, they're just curios.
She needed him to stop flipping, to stop talking, to give her eye a chance to correct the impression of perfection, see the blemishes, figure out how it was done. But Ebesen forged on faster. When he finally came to rest on the thing he sought, she wished he'd kept going.
The image jumped out at her, an obscene crime-journalism spread. Gail Frank lay clutching the sidewalk, with half the legs of a spider, but twice as disjointed. Karl turned the paper ninety degrees. Odd, no? This way, she looks like she's scaling the north face of a sheer rock drop.
Adie could only stare. Stare at the ungodly, omnipotent technique. Stare at the obscene subject matter, painted here as if it were the heart of tranquil eternity. A woman lay sprawled on the pavement, her mechanism smashed. Pressed up against the floor of the world, clutching it, as if sleeping at the bottom of a deep well. All she lacked was a chalk outline around her now-obsolete body.
You couldn't have seen this, Adie said. Adamant. Hoping.
He nodded in contradiction. I did.
In your imagination.
Oh, my imagination isn't that good.
She looked again, refusing the evidence. A hyper-real, lurid tabloid shot of the victim after impact. Adie's head tracked back and forth, a searchlight in denial. This is… You must have painted this from a photograph?
I painted everything from photographs. It's absurd, isn't it? I mean, what's the point? A photorealistic copy of a real photo. The camera can do everything the hand can do, a million times easier and more effectively. He picked up the sheet of paper, then let it fall. Except be the hand.
Karl. It's horrible. How could you…? Where did you get the photo?
I took it.
She recoiled from him. Her hands pressed up to receive her face, taking disgust's mold. When they came away, her face was still there.
You don't understand, he said. She's not dead.
Those three words came from a place she couldn't look at. Her colleague, the bagman, a victim of the quietest mental illness imaginable.
I mean here. She's not dead yet, in the picture. In the photo I took of her.
She wanted to take him and hold him in his delusion, a greedy pieta, however much his body dwarfed her own. She reached out and took his elbow, cradling what she could.
He pulled away. No. It's not what you think. I made this about ten months before her death.
She shook her head. No: no.
It's from a favorite performance piece of hers. She used to find a nice stretch of public sidewalk down in the Financial District, get a demonstration permit, and then lie out on it for as long as she could get away with it. Used to scare the shit out of the Wall Street crowd.
Oh Jesus. Oh God. She watched the picture dissolve under her eyes, every detail changing to some identical other. You're saying her death was a… piece?
He looked again at the subpoenaed exhibit. That s what her boyfriend told the jury.
And you? What did you tell the jury?
I think it must have been a collaboration. A workshop effort. Ebesen shut the portfolio with brutal finality. Mark, Gail, and me.
You? Oh, Karl. How can you blame yourself for something that… She trickled off, losing her way out of the idea.
I shouldn't have been tempting fate. A person should never represent anything that they aren't willing to have come true.
Wait. No. That picture… had nothing to do with her death. You weren't even painting. You were just documenting the woman's… How were you supposed to know?
We know what we paint. And everything we paint comes into the world somehow. That's why God put the kibosh on graven images, you know. He didn't want the minor leagues fooling around with something they couldn't control.
She crossed the gap between them. She put her arms around him, to silence him. He made no move either to conform or to quit the sentence. Like embracing a six-foot burlap sack of rice. She pulled away, blunted, holding on to his flank.
Karl, you can't carry this around with you. Your picture had no bearing on… You're not responsible. You didn't do this.
Oh, but I did. Everyone does what they do, finally.
She let go of him. She stepped back, staring. He would not look at her. It fit together now, what the man was doing here, what he wasn't doing. All the things he'd never do again.
And you? he said, reading her thoughts. How about you? What's your excuse?
She shook her head. I have no excuse.
Why did you give it up?
She held her hair back with one hand and reddened raw. Because. Because it was a racket. Because we might as well be in an honest business. Because art does nothing.
He took her water glass from out of her fingers and vanished into the kitchen, leaving her the dignity of isolation.
You still love her? she called to him, for no reason. So there wouldn't be silence.
He called back, invisible, from the ell. Still…? What makes you say that?