Germs

The tag on the concrete pillar reads Exhibit 31.e, contributors noted as follows: N. Wadd; Janet Che; Atom E; Chaz O. The curators must have missed Voeller.

Let’s imagine these contributors as characters, gathered by intention, chance, or fate—chance’s evil twin—at a lofted-glass apartment.

We begin with Voeller claiming failure itself, in whatever shape it takes—death, entrapment, torture, stupidity, disillusionment—is more desirable than success. He tells them in this apartment he can’t afford, in a voice he doesn’t recognize, all at once, each of them hearing different words.

“Multiply upon yourselves,” says Voeller. The others remain silent. “You must maintain no fear of death, but, instead, a fear of meaninglessness.” They spend the rest of the night drinking tequila and painting with their tongues. The art is terrible, yet desperate, and they don’t realize it, but the desperateness imbues meaning.

When the day breaks, our characters are drunk and they walk three blocks to the museum and go inside to find a room on the top floor, only accessible via a stairway pinned to the outside of the building. In this small room sits complete emptiness.

Wadd, we can guess, speaks first and asks the group: “How does the artist suffer?”

“The obvious physicality of the sculpture. It’s a brute and must be shaped,” says Voeller.

“I disagree,” says Janet Che. “The artist is doomed to have his art misinterpreted and deemed unexplainable. How many people identify the sculpture as an object in and of itself?”

Wadd nods his head. “The and is critical. The sculpture is a paper weight and it is a . . .”

Silent thinking. Voeller sneezes. The room vibrates, sub-sonic cymatic hysteria, molecular grains of mortar buzzing in pairs and gaggles.

“Meter,” says Chaz. “It keeps time and measures the world as a constant.”

“It is a coefficient,” says Wadd.

“It is humanity frozen,” says Janet Che.

Atom nods.

“It is selfless and,” says Voeller.

“It is and,” the characters repeat.

And so, the initial scene finishes.

Imagine then, either a few moments or a few days later, Janet Che and Wadd run into each other at a ramen stand. They choose to sit together at a table on the sidewalk and discuss the Faustian Bargain of Creativity, and Wadd tells Janet Che, with her head leaned in close to his chest, about his dreams of disrupting evil:

”. . . a mountain pass with elaborate rock cairns made of boulders, I look back at the trail and wipe my brow, and there’s no sweat on my sleeve even though my forehead is dripping, and in the near distance a cave or a chasm or a dusty orifice or the pit of my mind’s eye opens and anti-matter serpents squeeze out of the core’s pulse, forced out by what’s left inside, piling on top of each other like rubble.”

“Do you escape?”

“The mountain follows me through the desert.”

Janet Che whispers to him about what she thinks it means, and he says, “Heaven is an invalid,” and Janet Che says, “My husband died; he was an invalid.”

Wadd kisses her on the cheek and excuses himself to the payphone by the street where, let’s suppose, he calls Chaz. He waits and waits for her to answer and covers the phone’s mouthpiece after he hears her voice, and he listens to her breathe and giggle and then he hangs up the phone.

Alternatively, we may think of the life of Atom. Atom sleeps late, as usual, and when he wakes up, he finds his glasses and grabs his notebook and writes down a series of numbers that had come into his head. He gets up to eat but instead smokes two cigarettes and calls Chaz.

“The city is disappearing,” she says.

“. . .”

“It’s not dissolving. . .”

“. . .”

“. . .and it’s not sinking. . .”

“. . .”

“. . . and it’s definitely not becoming invisible.”

“. . .”

“It’s disappearing by revealing its true nature as absent.”

“. . .”

“Excuse me.” Chaz takes a call from another line and returns to Atom a few minutes later. “Let’s meet for coffee.”

Atom goes back to smoke in his room and look at his numbers sequence.

We return to Janet Che as she leaves Wadd in the telephone booth and walks to her apartment a few blocks away. She doesn’t carry keys because she thinks the concept of locked entry is a product of capitalist thinking. She knocks on the door, and Chaz lets her in, and they sit on their small porch and watch cars pull in and out of the crumbling city parking lot.

Here, we begin to understand the nucleic togetherness of these characters, an intermingling of various forms of love and desire, relationships crystallized by the essence of art, whatever that means. By conjecture, we can assume the following: for Wadd, it is destruction. For Chaz, it is understanding. For Janet Che, it is reverence. For Atom, it is monastic observance.

Back to the characters. Perhaps Chaz leaves the apartment after an hour and takes a taxi to a small open-air café on the edge of a man-made reservoir on the outskirts of the city. The uncomfortable metal chairs are surrounded by columns reaching up to nothing and three concrete walls act as proto-comfort from the outside world. After Chaz sits down, Atom comes out of the bathroom behind one of the false walls. They watch the reservoir water pour in unbroken spurts out of a long, thin opening at the mouth of the basin, and Atom begins to fall asleep to the uneasy sounds of rushing liquid. Chaz pets his head and whispers to him, “Would you like to go to the place where the purity begins?” Atom follows her half-asleep to another taxi.

They get out a few miles away, in front of a clear glass building with metal pipes of different sizes extending in every kind of ninety-degree angle around each other. Chaz leads Atom through an open gate, and they stand inside the building on a small platform overlooking three circular pools of water. They communicate with their eyes under the deafening suction of the pipes, questioning man’s ability to change natural history, to remove microscopic biomes from the earth’s sudor, to challenge divine diaphoresis. This, they transmit with the hummingbird movements of their eyelids.

Let’s rejoin Janet Che. She’s speaking to a small man on the bus. “The speculators,” she postulates, “ruined all of your art.” She has given this man the name of Weber.

The memories deepen. Weber pulls the string to stop the bus at every stop. Weber gets off the bus and then gets back on. Weber is a performance artist, according to Janet Che. His inability to admit this fact makes it true. Janet Che believes Weber to be an anti-anti-communist. She believes he was rehabilitated in a camp out in fishing country. She believes he lived in Berlin for more than one hundred years. She believes his performance art is a commentary on the separation of the Eastern and Western Blocs. She believes it’s a commentary on the sameness of everything. She believes he will become renowned in death.

“First you will die and then we will wait,” Janet Che tells Weber. Out of the window, she sees a man dressed in black.

Back to our man Wadd, walking through the neighborhood toward the museum. He notes the unique look of the buildings, like they had been exploded by missiles and glued together in reverse. He uses this description as a line in the book he’s writing in his head. He’s three-hundred-thousand words into the narrative, he’s killed off his own doppelganger sixty-seven chapters prior, and now he’s introducing new characters based on Janet Che and Chaz. In Wadd’s story within our story, Janet Che and Chaz film themselves entering intimacy, and while they make hundreds of copies of the tapes, Chaz inserts a self-designed mechanism into each of the copies, which explodes VCRs from within, and they sell the tapes on the street.

Fresh from the sanitation plant, Chaz and Atom walk into the museum and take the elevator up to the small room, where they find a concrete pillar, the width of a small car. Janet Che, to no one’s surprise, already sits on the floor in front of the sculpture. The three characters wait with each other and smooth their hands over the concrete until Wadd enters the room. Only after Wadd enters does Atom walk to the back of the pillar and rub his hands together for a few seconds before extending his arms out, knuckles parallel, in the pose of an Olympic diver, and shove his hands into the pillar, which takes him in like clay. Atom then peels back the resultant cavity and inserts himself head first. Janet Che follows, then Chaz, then Wadd.

At this point, let’s remember Voeller. Consider him aimlessly walking around the museum, at some point seeing a woman humped by her over-sized poodle in front of a to-scale replica of Francis Bacon’s bathroom. He comments out loud about how the scene reminds him of Bruegel.

Down the hallway, Voeller enters a room with a pink rectangular cavern housed in the floor. He turns to the security guard and says, “So goes virtual reality,” before pretending to run and jump into the void.

The security guard ignores him.

“Can I piss into the emptiness?” Voeller asks.

Later, Voeller wanders into the basement of the museum, the location of an exhibit set up to mimic the reality of an empty city street. Despite the stillness of the surroundings, the sounds of a churning urban night emanate from hidden speakers in the ceiling. Car horns exploding on top of one another, murmuring voices eating into the air, the unidentifiable gears of the machine grinding without control. In the mist of the noise, Voeller identifies the organ of a church and the soluble voices of a congregation raising giddy praise to the heavens. He sees a church at the end of the street and walks toward it, looking up to the steeple pointing at a sprinkling of stars. He looks into the window and sees a cathedral pinned in darkness.

Finally, below the basement. Voeller is unsure if this realm is part of the museum at all. He finds a group of old men surrounded by a red velvet rope, walking backwards in a circle, unbuttoning their pants and sniffing with the vigor of hellish gophers.

“I’d like to join,” says Voeller.

“We’d like you to join,” say the men.

Subsequently, Voeller sweats on top of them, and a more sinister definition creeps from our wholly imaginary creation. Voeller’s journey to locate art has led him to undefinition. He cannot determine, as best as we are able tell, whether these men and their moist appendages transcend the human condition, or if they are the very gristle of banality.

Given the unbounded stamina of these guttural degenerates, it’s unfathomable to consider the end to Voeller’s subterranean dance. Instead, we pick up with him when he re-enters the room housing the concrete pillar, at some future point in the muck of time. He looks around for his friends, only finding a mother clicking her Kodak camera.

“Consider the substance,” he says, his arms lifting toward the sculpture.

The mother walks away and tells her son sleeping in a stroller, “In Italy, they debate the origins of food. In England, they debate the origins of bad taste. In America, we debate the origins of nonsense.”

Voeller looks out of the window—one he doesn’t remember seeing before, as if the room transposed from a far-off dream version—and watches a gray cloud slowly shift upwards before holding still, meeting an unseen wall. With a grimace, Voeller reaches into his pocket for a knife and aims the blade at the pillar. The surface gives way too easily, and the Styrofoam underneath crumbles out onto the floor.