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  Tuesday’s fine, you choose film, I’ll order takeout. Have fun w/date!

  Coffee, coffee? Damn. She’d walked right by the place, two blocks earlier.

  Was there enough time to go back? She glanced at her watch: eight o’clock sharp. Nola in the living room, singing softly to herself first thing in the morning, cradling a coffee mug . . . that image still so vivid. Her voice, too. Something odd: though never recorded, Nola’s voice was easier to recall than Walter’s. There were plenty of recordings of il baritono, of course. And occasional pictures of him, too, in the Times’s Arts section, grainy black-and-white photos from music festivals in Salzburg, Vienna, London . . . After he retired, the visual evidence ended, yet the man himself was still over there in Italia. And right now it must be lunchtime in Cremona. Hence two elegant octogenarians would be having prosciutto and melon, with a glass of prosecco to wash it down. Espresso afterward. Then a brief stroll and a nap.

  Nola meanwhile consumed by worms.

  And speaking of things long gone: why’d they arisen now, those seven numerals—6 3 8 6 0 3 3? Like birds from nowhere, startled into flight?

  Nethermead

  1

  The artist responsible for the C-note: Blair Talpa.

  Born and raised in Brooklyn Heights. Twenty-four years old, short and lithe, with cropped wavy hair, strong hands, broad feet. A recent graduate of a visual arts program in San Francisco, to which she’d sent herself after accumulating the necessary funds.

  During her twelve-month tenure there, the big western sky had been troubling. It gave off a false sense of freedom, as though the people living beneath it felt authorized to do whatever they wanted, without having to pay for it. Back east, the sky-roof was less expansive but offered more reliable cover. Under it, she’d prepare to commit artistic acts. Sort of like committing crimes—same level of risk, different scales of judgment and punishment.

  Albert Camus: the only good reading she’d done in San Francisco.

  The Stranger was a book worth the trouble. And the essays. Most of the other reading assignments for school had been dull things written by a bunch of windy art critics. Camus, though—he got it. Especially about respect: if it’s based on fear, it becomes despicable. Action was the only basis for respect. And action always implied reaction, hence rebellion. Camus was right about rebellion, too. It wasn’t noble by itself, he said; only its demands were noble.

  Art’s sole purpose was to increase the sum of freedom. Making art meant deranging orbits, forcing minds into new directions and patterns. Of course people would resist. Human beings, Camus said, are the only creatures that refuse to be what they are. They betray themselves, refusing the new, caving in to the familiar. But an artist still had to try.

  School in San Francisco had been unexceptional. Not a surprise; she’d expected as much. After all, who could teach derangement?

  Yet she’d learned what she needed—techniques and craft, ways and means. Her main accomplishment was an invisible performance piece called “Tabula Rasa.” Twenty-four weeks of secret, deliberate self-annulment. Like gestation, but not of a child; rather, of a nonself, a nullity. She’d pulled it off, lent absolutely no impression. Paid the tuition bill, attended the classes, did the assignments as ordered, and almost never spoke. To teachers and students alike, she’d been essentially nonexistent.

  Annul: reduce to zero. Zero being the most powerful number.

  2

  The C-notes, her first attempt at street art, were a step in the right direction. There’d be more such experiments; mistakes, too. Part of the process, a warning to herself.

  Like the thing with the kid. An error she’d make only once.

  Camus said freedom was a chance to be better. There’d be no one to stop her; nobody would care. “Tabula Rasa” had proved it was possible to be invisible—like a current of air that moved freely yet unseen, pushing people slightly off-kilter, then more, more, til they couldn’t maintain their usual mental orbits any longer.

  At which point they’d think differently; they’d have to. And act and react differently as well.

  3

  Returning from San Francisco to Brooklyn, she found an apartment, a small studio. It was near the Gowanus Canal, on the top floor of an old brownstone. The canal’s rank odors wafted through the windows on warm days, but the space was quiet. There was no one bothersome in the building, no one curious to know who or what she was.

  Soon enough, she landed a job in an arts supply store in lower Manhattan. The work was menial—stocking shelves, mopping floors—but required little interaction with customers. Though the pay was crap, the hours were flexible. And lifting the small stuff she needed (brushes and paper, paints, charcoal) wasn’t hard; nobody noticed.

  Having few acquaintances and no close friends made everything easier. There was nobody to report to. Nobody to whom something was owed.

  The parents were both remarried now. It was no longer necessary to hear their rants and sob-stories. Both of them earned good salaries; they spent the money on their ugly homes in New Jersey, their Club Med vacations, meals in tacky restaurants, lousy Broadway shows. They couldn’t care less about what was happening outside their self-congratulatory little worlds.

  Now and then, one or the other would ask her to coffee in the city. It wasn’t hard to field their questions and lob a few bland answers: yeah, the job’s okay, Brooklyn’s fine, they’re cleaning up the Gowanus Canal. No, I don’t need money, thanks. Take care, see you.

  The parents didn’t recall how she’d spent her adolescence in Brooklyn Heights. In her bedroom, mostly—reading art books while they yelled at each other and at Keith. She’d read, slept, and checked the news: the first Gulf War, Bush’s stolen election. And done some drugs, too; mostly pot, occasionally hash. No coke or crack or meth or smack, though. And not much booze. No getting into real trouble, like Keith.

  4

  Stay off everyone’s radar: rule number one.

  The parents made that easy. Before their divorce they’d been on each other’s backs so often, they’d barely noticed her. And they’d been caught up in blaming her brother for everything they weren’t heaping on each other. Now they were absorbed in their new lives. And Keith was gone.

  He’d be thirty soon. Hard to recall the details of his body. Long hands and feet; thin hair; a scar on his right elbow from when he’d been shoved off his bike by a fourth-grade bully. As a kid he’d almost never laughed or smiled. Behind his blank expression, though—inside his head—there’d been so much going on . . . School meant nothing to him. Right from the start, the parents had shrieked at him about his grades, insisting he was lazy, uncooperative. Why couldn’t he make friends, why such a loner? It was wrong, they said. Whatever he was doing was wrong.

  The truth was Keith only liked animals: dogs, cats, birds. Once, he set a bird’s broken wing. He was patient even with nasty animals, like the stray dog who’d snapped at kids in the neighborhood. He fed it, got it to lick his hand. Said the dog was just scared.

  He’d had trouble reading, a learning disability of some kind. No one could figure out how to help him deal with it. When he hit seventh grade, the parents got him a tutor, a preppy college kid who treated Keith like an idiot. The tutor kept hissing you stupid shit when the parents were out of earshot. In high school, kids called Keith other names—dogfucker, pussycat. His answer was to steal things. Nothing valuable at first, mostly crap from kids’ lockers and neighbors’ houses, or stuff he’d find in cars when someone forgot to lock the doors. Once he took a sapphire ring from a neighbor’s kitchen counter and chucked it in the trash. The woman who’d left it on the counter was so stupid, he said, that she didn’t even know her own son was nicking bills from her wallet.

  That had to be true; Keith didn’t lie about stuff like that. He noticed things other people didn’t.

  Then there was the neighbor with the BMW. She’d gone inside with groceries, and her phone rang and she forgot about the keys tossed on the passen
ger seat. Keith hopped in, drove the car to Floyd Bennett Park, piled trash from garbage cans into the back seat, and set the whole thing on fire. Fucked it up, and himself, too: burns on his arms, a jail sentence. He’d just turned nineteen.

  Once he was taken away, the parents wouldn’t even mention his name. They just kept fighting, mainly over money. As for their second kid—herself—they’d figured she would go to college and get some sort of job. Not as an artist, they’d never imagine that. And then some guy would come along and lift the remaining sack off the parental shoulders.

  5

  Talking was mostly a waste of time.

  In high school, people turned away when they didn’t understand stuff, such as being a boy in a girl’s body. Keith always knew. When she was six, he said look, this is how boys do it, you need to know. He’d shown her a few times; slowly, not too hard. This is how we do it, he said, but don’t tell anyone I’m showing you. When you want to do it to someone, you can use a finger instead, in either place. Boys mostly do it here with girls. And here with other boys. But you can do it however you want.

  From watching animals, he said. That’s how he knew, how he’d learned.

  When he got out of jail, he disappeared. He must’ve figured out how to get past it—the shit that was stopping him from being who he was. No one had heard from him since.

  Become so free, said Camus, that existence itself is an act of rebellion. That was the goal; hers, anyway.

  As for other artists, the ones in the street-art world talked a good game, but all they really wanted was money and fame. Like that guy Neck Face, the one who did those black-and-white stickers on billboards and lampposts. He’d begun as a nameless slacker, then became famous for a little while, then a boring sellout. And what about those graffiti artists from a while ago, the ones who’d used subway cars for canvases—Keith Haring’s entourage—where’d they all gone? At least they’d managed to fend off the SoHo and Chelsea pimps for a while, til Basquiat came along and people started paying millions for his canvases.

  Pitfalls like that could be avoided, though. It just took discipline. Eat well: no meat, plenty of fruit. Go easy on booze, and no hard drugs. And deal with sex, not let it get in the way. On that score, Camus wasn’t great; he had a bunch of lovers and a messy marriage. But what mattered was his writing. That way he had of getting straight to the point: you’re alone.

  Things were starting to fall into place.

  People were basically distracted. If you stayed quiet, or made dumb remarks about the weather, you’d be left alone.

  Art’s lonely, her fifth-grade art teacher said once. He’d come up to her while she’d been finger-painting, off by herself in a corner of the art room. Out of nowhere he’d leaned over and whispered: Art’s lonely. Get used to it. He’d spoken to her as though she’d been a grownup, not some girl dragging a thumb sideways through blue paint.

  He’d patted her on the shoulder, then turned away. Message delivered.

  Her first C-note, the one on the sidewalk in front of her middle school—she’d made it in his honor. Gradually it would fade. But it’d still be there, doing its work of derangement.

  6

  Memory could be a problem. Yet with practice anything, even forgetting, got easier.

  On awakening, for instance, it was often hard to recall the thoughts she’d had before falling asleep. Or the face of whoever she’d had sex with, a few hours earlier. Or even where the sex had taken place. Of the act itself, a few meaningless details stayed in memory for a few hours, then vanished.

  One thing was certain, though: whatever had happened, she’d been on top. No sex with anyone, male or female, unless they accepted that rule. And no negotiating. The rule came from experience.

  When someone’s on top of you, it’s hard to get out from under that person unless he or she cooperates.

  And when someone’s on top of you and suddenly stops sucking your chest and mumbles something like I don’t feel well and stops moving—so at first you think she’s kidding, then realize she’s not—when that happens, it’s even more difficult to get out from under. Because that person now weighs a ton. She’s five-foot-ten, at least a hundred and fifty pounds. All her weight seems to be right on your solar plexus. You’re suffocating, but you can’t say get off me, I can’t breathe, because she won’t—can’t hear you. Her head’s turned to the side, by your shoulder; you can’t see her face. All you can do is squirm til you finally get free and take a deep breath and realize this person isn’t breathing. It’s not a joke, she’s not playing with you.

  Not an experience to be repeated. And not easy to delete certain details from memory—like the questions asked by the EMT guys, along with the answers you had to give: I don’t know who her husband is (true), I’m a new acquaintance of hers (also true). I stopped by to pick up a book and she told me to wait, she was about to take a shower, then she dropped onto the bed (sort of true; they were in bed before she stopped breathing).

  The EMT guys said she’d died of heart failure. Just like that, no warning. Only one thing to do afterward: answer the questions and get out. Leave that stranger lying there on the bed, some woman you’d encountered by chance a week earlier. Just get out.

  They’d been in Prospect Park, walking in opposite directions along a path deep in the woods, nobody else around—that’s how they’d met. Mid-week, on an empty trail.

  The woman had given her a look, paused, and murmured wait. They’d stared at each other. Then the woman had scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and handed it over. I’m home during the day. No one’s around. That was it.

  A week later, the woman had answered her knock at the door. Smiled a little. Then led her directly to a bedroom at the back of the apartment. All fine, the way things ought to go, no small-talk beforehand. There’d been decent art in the bedroom. A couple of copper-wire sculptures, simple and clean. And a small painting of a ten-dollar bill with a bird at the center, instead of a human portrait. The bird’s wings glinted. It was a strange painting—strange in a good way. There’d been a few other canvases, but the one with the bird was the best.

  The woman had stripped her, then taken off her own clothes. The woman came first, then got on top, lay there for a moment, mumbled I don’t feel well. Then stopped moving.

  No one on top during sex, ever again.

  The police had called a few days later: the husband wanted to talk with her. She’d told them no; they said okay, it was her choice. So it ended.

  7

  Three in the morning, and perfectly silent in the station.

  Her next project would be an unsolicited contribution to Arts for Transit, the city’s public-art program. The makeover of the Eastern Parkway station didn’t amount to high art, but it did mix old and new in a smart way. Along the corridor that linked the station’s two entrances were ornamental fragments, sections of old lintels and cornices and some gargoyles, which had been set into a bright-blue mosaic. With their thin gold borders, they looked almost giddy against the wall’s white tile.

  Actually, just a few of the Arts for Transit installations were memorable. The wall of opaque glass designed by Robert Wilson for the Coney Island terminus—that was pretty great. Photos and sketches had been embedded in the glass, as if in jello. The prehistoric creatures set into the walls and floors at the Museum of Natural History’s station were good. So were the theatrical figures at Lincoln Center, and the terracotta beavers at Astor Place. Also the border motifs in Canal Street’s N/R station, inspired by ancient Chinese designs. And those little brass humans and animals at Fourteenth Street on the A line—they were strong comic sendups of money-grubbers.

  But that mock-geologic stuff in the connecting passage between Fifth and Sixth Avenues at Forty-Second Street didn’t work. Nor did the mural of flowers at Lex and Fifty-Ninth Street: too eye-catchy. The hats at Twenty-Third Street’s BMT station were a dumb attempt at coyness. As for those tiled eyes on the walls of the Eighth Ave. platform on the downtown side (
at Canal, was it, or the old World Trade Center stop?)—their gaze was just silly, especially after 9/11. Somebody ought to vandalize that station.

  Best installation? A mosaic mural on both sides of the passageway leading from the A/C platforms at Thirty-Fourth Street to Penn Station.

  The mural told a story. A father wearing a suit and tie, returning from work, enters a kind of magic circus. He tosses away his briefcase and becomes a performer on stage. Yet he’s still a man greeting his wife and baby, an ordinary father transformed into a juggler of roses—a companion of trapeze artists. He’s living a secret life that his family will never know about.

  At least the artist had managed some actual strangeness. Art should shake people up, rattle them like ragdolls. Else why bother? She’d done that once: rattled someone. While living with the parents, commuting by bike to Brooklyn College before dropping out in the second term . . . That was back when the parents were fighting all the time. And drinking more than their usual too-much. Ramping up for the divorce. The babysitting job she’d landed had been a way of staying out of the house. A whole summer with just one kid, five days a week, six hours a day, seven bucks an hour. An easy gig, for the most part.

  That one day, though, the kid had behaved like a tyrant. Kept trying to tackle her, push her onto her back. Wouldn’t stop laughing when she told him to knock it off. Poked at her with fingers, his eyes bright like some ugly animal’s. Kept calling her a fake. You think you’re a boy, don’t you, he kept saying. But you’re not, you’re just a girl.