The Children(42)

Guin refreshed her email, heart spiking when she saw a reply. It was a bounce back: the USC address for one of the three, Nisha Dey, didn’t exist. Digging a little more, she discovered the article had it wrong. Dey wasn’t at USC, she was at NYU. A fortuitous click: she was right here in the city.

After resending her message to the proper address, Guin went out for a punishing run. When she returned, two replies were waiting. The first was from a woman named Antoinette Kelly.

I couldn’t be less interested in participating in whatever revisionist history you’re trying to write. Have some goddamn respect.





The second was from Nisha Dey. Cordial, to the point.

Hi Guinevere,

I’m leaving town at the end of next week and will be gone most of the summer. If you’re free tomorrow morning, I have time for a chat.





She suggested a time and place and signed off -n.

What harm could a conversation do?





Interstitial




The Door Museum (2024)

Ennis Sharpe (1991–)

Carter-Schenck Textile Mill, Los Angeles





According to its press materials, The Door Museum was inspired by the meditative labyrinths of the classical world, the artist’s stint working in the backstage spaces of European opera houses, and a mind-opening (i.e., drug-induced) vision he had following a trip to the House on the Rock.

No mention was made of another likely inspiration: the tricky and fantastical doors through which Ennis and Guinevere Sharpe entered the Ninth City.

The show was made almost entirely of these portals, and the liminal spaces between them. Built inside a defunct textile mill in an industrial section of Los Angeles, the shape of it was uncanny, doors and halls and nested rooms winding in and around each other in ways that were impossible, architecturally, to track. Every journey through it was unique. You might find yourself stepping back into open air after an hour, or stumbling out, starving, after three.

Critics wrote of the unspooling they experienced as they moved through the installation. The genuine revelatory fear of being lost, of experiencing a path you couldn’t hurry or cheat your way through. Visitors spoke of breakdowns and breakthroughs, buried memories surfacing with such intensity they were akin to flashbacks.

There were windows inside the installation that looked out—seemed to—on strange spaces: unidentifiable cities, long vistas of dust or grass, depopulated suburban avenues. Ennis was cagey as a magician in discussing his work, the tricks he used to give these video projections such stunning depth.

On a soft April evening Marla Kaufman, a second-year film student at USC, attended the show with three friends. Visitor entrances were staggered and spread among five entry points. Everyone entered alone, after relinquishing their devices at the door.

The four young women walked into The Door Museum between seven p.m. and a quarter after. Marla’s friends exited without her one by one: the first around eight, the third a little past ten. An unofficial night market of food trucks and vendors had grown up around the show. As they waited for Marla, her friends wandered through it. When eleven p.m. rolled around, they began to feel uneasy. At midnight the installation closed, and their worries began in earnest.

Visitors were ticked in and out with counters. An attendant confirmed it: one person was left inside.

Marla’s friends weren’t allowed to reenter. The search was carried out by a half dozen attendants in dark denim boilersuits, plus a tough-looking older woman in black. A little before two in the morning a pair of workers carried Marla’s body out.

Anyone who watches TV knows you don’t move a body. Maybe they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to find her again. They’d taken pictures, at least, for the police: Marla lying on her side on the ground floor, below an X of catwalks. Her injuries were consistent with a fall.

Like many people her age Marla Kaufman lived a highly examined life. She was an aspiring screenwriter with active social media accounts and a very minor celebrity associated with a horror short she’d written, shortlisted a year before her death for a film prize.

And she’d been funny. Self-deprecating, warm, so vibrantly alive her death was easy for thousands to take personally. When Ennis was dropped by his gallery, then his agent, it wasn’t because of the death or the lawsuit. It was the way he spoke about her in that interview, as if her life didn’t matter at all.





Twenty-Four

2000




The grown-ups drank. Anne, Edith, and Llewellyn. They played cards. They drove off in Anne’s car and came back with one of her paintings: a canvas that looked like a box of twilit fog.

Edith said, “My first purchase as a rich woman,” and Llewellyn said, “Love, you had silver spoons coming out of both ends when I met you,” and then neither acknowledged the other for a long while.

Anne didn’t seem to mind any of it. She was as impervious to tension or offense as a cat. Once, when Guinevere’s parents were sniping at each other again, Anne took her by the hand and led her outside. She crouched next to her in the mud and said,

“Artists are sponges. Like kids. You’re an artist and a kid, which means you soak it up double. Don’t let the tough stuff soak all the way in, alright? Don’t hold it to your heart. Use it in your work instead. Burn it off.”