The Children(41)
Guin laughed. She sat up, letting the book slide to the floor, and toed it back out of sight.
Coffee made a black whirlpool in her stomach. She was chewing on an idea she couldn’t quite shake. Probably a bad one. It had been dogging her since she sat at the bar yesterday.
She moved to the kitchen island, opened her laptop, and pulled up a video she’d watched only once before, right after it was posted last year. Rackety with caffeine, breathing out through rounded lips, she hit play.
In the video Ennis Sharpe sat cross-legged in an Eames chair. Black T-shirt, black jeans, blond hair falling past his chin. His eyes were very blue behind big glasses with ice-white frames. At his back was the receding canal of a sunlit room, comfortably cluttered. Painted canvases, leggy plants, record player. His posture started out easy and tensed as the video went on. His leg began to jiggle, and periodically his right hand pinched his left. When he did it, Guin felt a tender rush beneath her heart: she’d bet anything he didn’t know he had the habit.
Now came the part she dreaded. The female interviewer spoke off camera.
Interviewer: Let’s not talk around it anymore.
Sharpe: It. What is it?
Interviewer: I’m referring, of course, to The Door Museum, which closed last month after a college student named Marla Kaufman suffered a fatal fall inside the space. The installation was known, celebrated, for its disorientation. In it you created an Escher-like journey through a seemingly defined space, which lost its definition as visitors moved through it. The show played on themes of memory, loss, isolation, the kind of portals found in children’s fantasy books—
Sharpe: You sound like you’re reading off a gallery wall.
Interviewer: Fair. I’ll reframe. What responsibility do you feel toward the people who enter your created spaces? If your goal is to disorient, with no literal or metaphorical guardrails in place, what responsibility do you have, specifically, to Marla Kaufman and those she left behind?
Sharpe: What responsibility do I have? A fuck ton. To the art. Are you saying my work should be critically affected because one person, out of the thousands who’ve engaged with it, made a terrible error? Or—it’s fair to admit the likelihood—a choice? There’s a price to pay for real art.
Interviewer: Are you saying Marla Kaufman paid that price? That her death was a necessary evil?
Sharpe: You disingenuous child. If that’s what you got from what I said, in the context of all I’ve done and made, I have nothing more to say to you.
Interviewer: So that’s it? Speaking on the record. Addressing for the first time the death of a woman with her whole life ahead of her. Issues of culpability aside, speaking as a human being—is that all you have to say about Marla Kaufman?
Sharpe: What else is there to say?
Guin clicked the tab shut and pushed herself back from the counter. Let her eye run out the windows and on to the high far frill of upper Manhattan.
Her mind bloomed with slow images, like colored ink expanding in water. Vivid, unlinked. The buttery angles of a marble sleeper in the Met sculpture garden. The dark of a Film Forum stall, parting like deep space around a screenful of Caprian blue. Hylas surrounded by painted nymphs, their skin the unlikely color of underbelly.
The Door Museum. A palace of thresholds through which thousands had walked. They must’ve started out skeptical, lots of them. Must have resisted their own confusion, until they were so stripped by it Ennis could press wonder against their open skin like salt.
Without meaning to she imagined a faceless figure. Not Marla Kaufman exactly but a sort of stand-in, seen from far above, like one of Harry Lime’s distant moving dots.
She weighed that dot against CinemaScope visions that burn the dust off your brain. Against art that unravels you, couplets you carry on your bones forever, like scrimshaw. There’s a price to pay. For real art.
Abruptly she stood. Spit into the sink then rinsed the taste of metal from her mouth, reining in the wicked scrolling of her thoughts. Even Ennis’s hypothetical nearness made her weird. It bent her, how she thought and felt and saw, the way dark matter bent light.
No one, she thought with deliberate care, was claiming Marla’s death was an acceptable sacrifice. Not even Ennis Sharpe.
She moved a plastic container of leftovers straight from fridge to microwave, thinking. Marla Kaufman attended The Door Museum with a trio of friends, initially left anonymous. As the story deepened from newsworthy to culturally relevant, it gained in narrative detail. Eventually the friends, all fellow students at USC, were named.
It took about a minute to find their names again, then to determine how USC email addresses were formatted. Guin paced the hall, eating her flavorless food, crafting a mental message as she chewed. Swiftly she typed it up and sent it to each woman before she could think twice: a brief introduction and request to chat.
Why? Well—she drummed her fingers hard on her collarbone—why not?
There was a blank at the center of the story, that was all. If Marla Kaufman had fallen, that was an everyday kind of tragedy. But. If she hadn’t.
Guin’s mind splashed around the edges of the thing. If Marla jumped, what did that have to do with Ennis? What in his work could possibly have made her do it?
She winced, struck by her own idle syntax. It couldn’t make her do anything. Art didn’t implant; it sowed, illuminated. Marla walked into The Door Museum carrying her own demons. Whatever happened next—and that’s if it wasn’t a fall—was the final link in a terrible chain that began forming far from the work of Ennis Sharpe.