4, 10—
I change hotels to an EconoLodge a few blocks away from where I’d been staying. There’s hardly any staff here, only a maintenance guy in charge of the sweepers that troll room to room. I check in under the name Wallace Stevens—no questions asked.
Mook’s death hit SF.net two and a half weeks after I’d found his body and the story goes viral—crime scene photographs stream for tabloids, blog posts memorialize the death of a rising street art star, Blum & Poe reports the price of Mook tags salvaged from billboards and mailboxes ballooning four hundred percent even though most people had never heard of “Mook” until now. User commentaries theorize Mook’s death was a CIA assassination. Zebra-striped face and hollowed-out eyes. Maxing out credit cards with my hotel room rate and AutoCab fares—I didn’t expect to stay in San Francisco this long. Whole Foods for groceries but I spend the days canvassing galleries. KRON4’s been reporting on Mook’s murder every evening newscast—the killers were caught on video, but their identity’s unknown. Plenty of HD footage of three men in police SWAT uniforms, their faces hidden by black visors. They seemed to know where every security camera in the Brocklebank was located. Their visors loom close to each lens before the cameras go dark—deactivating security camera to security camera all the way to Mook’s room. The news reports that these police officers are imposters and not members of the San Francisco PD, warns of imposter cops at traffic stops. The San Francisco People’s Org advertises their PD ID app to identify legitimate members of the SFPD by badge number and career profile. I download the app. The streams report the motive appears to have been simple robbery—the victim’s Adware was stolen, the Adware more than likely already hacked and wiped and impossible to trace.
SFMOMA praises Mook in press releases, announces a retrospective to be held in the spring of next year. The streams tell us he was a visionary artist, a genius of the modern age, but the general public yawns—nothing but a juvenile-minded vandal and the sale of his artwork should reimburse property owners he’d victimized. His name was Sherrod Faulkner but he’d gone by Mook since he was a teenager in Wichita. He moved to the West Coast to attend Harvey Mudd, majoring in VR environments and game design, but dropped out. He drifted to San Francisco and worked as the dayshift manager at a Denny’s on the corner of Mission and 4th for over fifteen years. I took myself to breakfast at his Denny’s a few days ago and ordered big but didn’t eat much. I asked my waitress about him, saying I was an old friend from school and was sorry to hear what had happened. She said, “Sherrod doesn’t work here anymore—”
The streams pull apart his life. His work as Mook is encrypted, hidden, but his IP addresses as “Sherrod Faulkner” and his search histories are hacked and broadcast. Right-wing and Fourth Amendment websites and a taste for hard-core porn—a thing for redheads, erotica, decadent art—links to the e-texts of Ayn Rand and Julian Assange, user accounts with the Anarchist Loose Collective and a fan club member of the band Eat Christ. Some of his personal papers were hacked and published—fanfic written in the form of epic poetry imagining graphic sexual encounters between John Galt and President Meecham, about their child slipping from her like a bolt of lightning. The tabloids uncover his family back in Kansas, upper-middle-class parents and a sister in Chicago. His father makes a statement about the death of his son, begging the news streams to let them mourn in private, to respect their privacy. Mook’s avatar as Sherrod Faulkner was a picture of Alfred E. Neuman that will chortle, “What, me worry?” in archived comment streams and chat rooms until the world goes dark.
Iced coffee at a Starbucks in the Mission, late afternoon. The baristas recognize me for being in here so much these past few days, taking breaks here in between art gallery inquiries—they tell me “see you tomorrow” when I slurp the last of my venti and trash the cup. Already four thirty in the afternoon, most places will be closed by the time I get there, but I have time to swing by a gallery called Cell. The front room’s a lounge with worn-in couches, a few paintings hanging on the walls of dollhouses inhabited by foxes. The attendant’s neon-pink bob’s like a pom-pom floating above her PVC bodysuit. Her lips are painted oxblood, and silver studs bullet her eyebrows and tongue. She tells me they’re closing in ten minutes but I show her the paintings anyway. She recognizes the images. When she brings out a portfolio from the flat files, I know I have her. The attendant slides out a stack of ink and watercolors, the paintings hand-stitched together in groups of six, each leaf separated from the one below by a sheet of acetate.
“She calls these her fascicles,” the attendant explains.
The attendant handles the paintings like she’s handling sheets of gold leaf. Images of gray wood, rotten, of architectural details out of context, several of the house’s front door, porch columns, the words of Christ painted in whitewash but folded in on themselves, a coal chute, the interior of stairs, hardwood floors, cracked paint, stripped light fixtures in inks and charcoal, the bed where Timothy kept her, several of the bed. Only a few paintings show the house beyond these few details. One painting’s of the root cellar door—and looking at the image I can almost hear the sound of breathing I’d heard in the Archive behind that door.
“Who did these?” I ask.
“A local artist,” says the attendant. “Dar Harris. She was part of one of our group shows two years ago—”
“Dar Harris?”
“Darwyn Harris,” she says. “She’s Pittsburgh—or had friends there. She works in fashion. One of the big houses, I think. Fetherston, maybe—”
Darwyn—that was Peyton’s hometown. Darwin, Minnesota.
“What’s she like?” I ask. “Who is she?”
“You notice when she walks into the room, if that’s what you’re asking,” she says.
“I’ve been searching every gallery in San Francisco, but no one’s heard of her—”
“It depends on who you’ve been asking. Dar keeps to a certain scene—she only participates in group shows with people she knows well. I approached her once about having a solo here, but she seemed uncomfortable with the idea. I let it drop—”
“Why?” I ask. “Her work’s incredible—”
“She keeps to herself,” she says. “She’s not a recluse, but I don’t know. I don’t think she wants too much publicity. I remember she refused to be photographed for the promotion we did for this group show, which is fine except she looks like a model. Would have brought more people to the gallery if they knew what the artist looked like. I don’t get it, but I respect the decision—”
“You know her well?”
“Well enough,” she says. “She sells each fascicle as a whole, but I see you have two separate works there. They should be kept together—”
“I have the others. I bought them already separated—”
“Where did you buy them?”
“From eBay,” I tell her. She’s interested in who was selling, but I beg off, vaguely worried that these paintings may have been reported stolen and she might be fishing for information. I tell her I’ll come back the next day, to look over the collection. A Spicy Chicken meal at Wendy’s before sat-connect at my hotel, scouring the streams for mentions of Darwyn Harris—she’s easy enough to find now that I have her name. She has a Facebook page, without a profile pic. Her About is brief, without a mention of Pittsburgh. Scroll through her site’s slideshow—image after image of the same ruined house, each bound together in fascicles of six. There’s another series of paintings as well, as obsessively detailed as her renderings of the house, but these are paintings of a blonde, the tone not unlike Wyeth’s Helga images if shattered and reformed by Picasso or Braque—the same muted colors she uses for the house, but lighter, hay-colored blonde, the cream of pale skin, darker hair in curly tufts and the pink of lips and nipples and interior folds, the blue of her eyes. I look at slideshows of several of the fascicles before I realize the woman she’s painting is Peyton. House and blonde. Some fascicles feature the woman and the architecture echoing each other, but most of her small books keep to their own unified themes.