“Hey,” Tom said. “Want to come over? I’m hanging.”
THREE
Most of the university campus was done in Collegiate Gothic, but the art gallery occupied a sleek new glass-and-steel structure that had been endowed by a hedge-fund billionaire with roots in the community. The permanent collection filled the flat disk of the main building; new exhibits went into the wing, which extended to the north like a tonearm. William entered through the front door and gave Tom’s name to a fiercely tattooed brunette whose face was almost entirely obscured behind a Japanese graphic novel. “That way,” she said, extending a finger elegantly.
Tom was alone in the middle of a mostly empty large room, head lowered, looking like someone else’s artwork until William got close enough to see the phone in his hand. “Send him over,” Tom said. “I need him to make sure the projector works.” There was a word for what Tom was, with his thick limbs and his large head and his jaw always set.
“Billy Boy,” he said, turning. “Just firming up a few last things.” He waved toward the far wall and his shoulder muscles shifted beneath his shirt. “Video loop over there.” Burly: that was the word.
Tom was a graphist. Not a graphologist—“that’s handwriting analysis, and everyone types these days,” he said — but a visual artist whose work consisted entirely of charts and graphs, most drawn on paper, a few painted on canvas. His subjects were self-referential and possibly philosophicaclass="underline" he made charts, he said, about the way people looked at charts. Before Tom came back to town, Louisa, in a burst of sisterly pride, had shown William an online interview with Tom. “Graphs are supposed to help us see clearly,” Tom said. “But what if they teach us that seeing clearly is impossible?”
The interviewer, a young man with early gray at his temples, leaned forward into his next question: “The untrained eye might say these are just comic versions of ordinary graphs, the kind you might see in a newspaper.”
“As Kepler said,” Tom said, “the untrained eye is an idiot.”
That video was not in the exhibit. Instead there was another short feature, narrated by a young woman, that called him a “prop comedian whose props are some of our most commonly held ideas” before giving way to a montage of his graphs: bars, pies, points. The final was a line graph that rose sharply and then fell off as it went. It was titled How Well You Understand This Graph Over Time.
Next to the video were three huge gray bars stretching from the floor toward the ceiling, and over them an equally huge caption that read Percent Chance That, in the Original Full-Color Graph, Each of These Bars Was the Color It Claims to Be. The first one, labeled “red,” rose to 60 percent, “green” went to 70, and “blue” left off around 25.
Tom was off the call now, coming toward William with a purposeful stride. “Funny,” William said.
“Funny slash sad,” Tom said. “If a color isn’t what it says it is, what is it?”
“I’m no philosopher,” William said. “But I would say that color is a liar.”
“Isn’t a lie just a deeper truth?” Tom said. “Each of these works is a way of conducting an experiment into what we believe: into conventional ways of organizing ideas, conventional narratives, conventional morality. And all convention leaves something to be desired. Here, let me show you the new pieces.” A hand went on William’s shoulder again, and William felt the weight of Tom’s attention.
Beyond the smoked-glass door at the corner of the room was the lobby for the entire exhibit, which was called Faculty Voices. Participants included, according to a brochure, a Native American woman who rendered biblical scenes on parfleche and a Frenchman who created grotesque miniature sculptures and set them before distorted mirrors that reflected them back as normal. The tattooed brunette from the front desk was there, sitting behind the same book. “Jenny,” Tom said. “This is Billy, my brother-in-law. I’m going to show him all the important work in the show, by which I mean all of my work.” The girl lowered the book, beaming. Was she his next-in-line? Or maybe she’d already passed through.
Beyond the lobby was a small rectangular room. “Here you are,” Tom said. His eyes flashed impatiently. “Take a look.” The room had three pie graphs printed in bright colors; he could read only the first, which said Is This Pretty Much the Roundest Thing You’ve Ever Seen? One hundred percent of respondents had answered in the affirmative. There were also half a dozen black circles on the floor. “Percent chance that someone will walk on me?” William said.
“Not bad,” Tom said. “But wouldn’t be accurate. We strive for accuracy.” He patted the near wall, which was fully white save for a stenciled title: Heights of Visitors.
“Nice,” William said. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“Hang on,” Tom said. “Nate should be here any second.” And he was, a young man whose T-shirt was emblazoned with a logo of a skull and crossbones, the former made from a paint can, the latter from paintbrushes. “Right on time,” Tom said. “This is Billy. He’s here to see the piece. Fire up the standing circles?”
“Certainly,” Nate said. He went back to the small door and slid his finger along the space to the right of it. “Stand on one of the circles,” Nate said to William. “Any one.” William picked the one closest to him; suddenly a gray bar materialized on the wall.
Tom stood on another circle, and a slightly taller bar appeared next to the one William had generated. “You too,” Tom said to Nate. He stepped onto another, which produced a third bar.
“How does it work?” William said. “There’s a hidden projector?”
But Tom wasn’t listening. He was staring coldly at Nate. “Go back to that other circle,” he said.
“Which other?”
“The one right by the door. It didn’t even flicker, but you went right on past it.” Tom was not raising his voice but rather lowering it, which shrank Nate.
“I don’t think so,” Nate said.
“Don’t need to think so,” Tom said. “I saw.”
Surrender came into the boy’s eyes. “I just wanted a good demonstration. There’s something wonky about the sensor.”
“Fix it.” Now his voice went up in volume. “That’s your job. When you’re hired to do something, you do it. You don’t skip it and think that people are so blinkered or so timid or so used to settling that they’re not going to look you in the face and ask you exactly what I’m asking you, which is why you can’t figure that out without a reminder.” His anger was like another person in the room.
Nate slunk away through the door. Tom looked up at the ceiling and rolled his head around like it was loose on his neck. “Dim bulb,” he said.
“He’s just a kid,” William said.
“No,” Tom said. “The problem is a dim projector bulb. The circle works fine. If he’d been paying attention, he would know that.”
“You’re not going to tell him?”
“Can’t,” Tom said. “His senior thesis is about the psychological aspects of gallery shows. He has to figure it out for himself.” Tom restaged the demonstration, stepping on the circles in quick succession, including the culprit by the door, which produced a faint outline. “The thing about this piece,” Tom said, “is that the projector is also a recorder. When it’s all done, you can review the entire history of visitors.” He had William step on every circle and then played the set back. The bars appeared on the wall one by one, shadows of things that were no longer there. “I hope it works on opening night,” Tom said. “Because that’s what the world needs more of: hope.”