Three Moments of an Explosion (44 page)

“He needs to be off the streets,” Ricardo said. “You know what he did.”

“He’s a bit of a broken man, to be honest,” said the liaison officer.

“My heart bleeds,” said Ricardo.

“Oh, absolutely,” the woman said. “I’m just saying he’s had a bit of a breakdown. My point isn’t
poor baby,
it’s that I wouldn’t worry. There are people I do worry about. To be honest. He isn’t one of them.”

Maggie checked his website. The work was still online, unchanged. The last time she had watched it had been a sinister, brilliant coagulation of images, the sense of a plan. The rabbit in its landscape. An explorer on a mission, unclear in a rough photograph, in her attic.

Now she saw videographic cliché. Infantile shock animation.

“I know the wheels grind very slow,” the officer said. “He hasn’t tried to contact you? Because that would …”

“No.”

Sometimes Maggie ignored it all. Sometimes she followed links and tried to remember the look and feel of the frame in her hand. It had been simple, without molding. All wood. She strove to remember the shape of the glued joins when the thing sprung apart. She looked at diagrams and learned a new vocabulary. The float. The lip. The rabbet.

Sitting at her computer, Maggie considered trying to track the thing’s history. A bad death, or two, or many, in that room full of discarded art. What else had that chisel, along the gouges made by which she had run her fingers, cut? There had been stains in the rabbet, the channel in which the artwork sat.

As if she would ask Sim where he had been, where he had found this. If she were a true researcher, she might find some carpenter to the art world guilty of murder. And what if she did?

Or the wood. It might have come from an evil tree. Or the varnish, full of spite. Or nothing. What would change?

She closed her computer.

“He took his website down,” Ricardo said one day. “It’s still registered in his name, it’s just gone. Fucking coward.”

They were pinched, but they did not take on another lodger. When Maggie imagined Sim, it was in the dirtiest streets of London, covered in muck, drawing images on bricks.

She stood in what was now a spare room. One day they would make it a study.

She watched the evenings framed by the windows.

Late at night, deep in the summer, Maggie woke.

Ricardo slept sweaty and fitful beside her. She listened but Mack was not awake.

Her eyes itched. She tried to sit up. The house made its noises. Through the monitor Mack spoke in his sleep. In the streets she heard catcalls and laughter of young people coming home.

Sleep hung heavy on her but she had woken at a sound from the stairs.

Her breath stopped in a fear so total she could not move.

The bedroom door opened and someone came in. Someone walked through the doorframe as though from behind a canvas.

A streetlamp shone between the curtains, and lit him, not enough. He was a darkness, an intention.

Someone had been crawling down inclines to railway lines. Someone had been sifting through trash. Collecting, sorting. Foraging for ruined wood shoved aside by trains.

Someone stood at the foot of her bed looking at her, and she couldn’t move. Around his face he held the frame. He looked at her through it. She saw the new nails that studded it. The industrial tape that wrapped it. The clots of glue that scabbed it. Its new, even more imperfect lines.

He framed his face for her. The bottom of his chin was mottled on the right as if with lichen or an illness or shadow. Maggie could not wake Ricardo. She could not move.

Someone held the frame around his face. He looked at her through it, yes, but he held it front out. He was presenting himself to her. He was what the frame contained. He looked at her and she could not look away, and he had made himself the work of art.

LISTEN THE BIRDS

A TRAILER

0:00–0:03

Two tiny birds fight in the dirt. There is no sound.

0:04–0:05

A man in his thirties, P, stands in undergrowth. He holds a microphone. He stares.

0:06–0:09

Close in on the birds. They are European robins. Their red chests flash. They batter each other in a flurry of wings. There is a noise of feedback.

0:10–0:11

Close-up of the man’s microphone.

0:12–0:15

The robins’ fight fills the screen. The feedback grows painfully loud.

0:16–0:19

Blackness. Silence. Then birdsong.

Voice-over, man’s voice, P: “Its territory. Listen.”

0:20–0:24

Messy apartment. P looks through LPs. A younger man, D, watches.

P says, “These are rare old field recordings.” He shows a record to D. We can’t see the cover.

D says, “What’s with the title?”

P says, “A translator’s mistake, I guess.”

0:25–0:27

A glass-topped kitchen table, messy with the remains of a meal. Fixed shot. The table is vibrating. Silence.

0:28–0:31

Close-up, P’s face.

Voice-over, D: “And you’re doing something like that?”

Voice-over, P: “Something like that.”

0:32–0:35

The table again. Now in its center two robins are fighting.

They spasm furiously amid plates and glasses. A candlestick falls. Cut to black.

0:36–0:38

P stares at his television. The screen is blue, text reads, “Scanning for Signal.”

P’s own distorted voice comes out of the speakers: “… like that.”

0:39

Close-up of a robin’s eye.

0:40–0:42

P walking down a crowded city street.

Voice-over, P: “There’s a signal and I can’t tell if it’s going out or coming in.”

Unseen by P, one person, then two people behind him raise their heads and open their mouths skyward as if shrieking. They make no sound.

0:43–0:45

D whispers, “What are you trying to do?”

0:46–0:48

Darkness. A thud.

P stares at a window. On the glass is a perfect imprint of a flying owl, in white dust—powder down.

Cut to the earth below the window. An injured owl twitches.

0:49–0:50

P in a cafe, talking to a young woman. We hear the noise around them. P’s words sound distorted. They are not in synch with his lips.

He says, “There’s a problem with playback.”

0:51

A man and a woman roll on the ground, battering each other. Their faces are blank. We hear the sound of wings.

0:52–0:57

Voice-over, D, whispering: “Would you recognize a distress call?”

D puts earphones on. We hear the crackling audio of a bird’s song. It grows louder, is joined by others, becomes a white noise of calls.

Cut to: a weathervane twisting on a steeple; a sped-up sequence of a plant changing the direction it faces; a battered old satellite orbiting earth.

The birdsong gets louder. On the satellite, a light comes on. It shifts, points its antenna at the world and sounds below.

0:58–0:59

D sitting opposite P at the kitchen table. He leans in.

He says, “Listen.”

1:00

P stares at a computer screen. A message reads: “No files found.”

1:01–1:02

Close-up of D’s face.

He says, “Listen.”

1:03

Night. P stands naked at the foot of his bed. He raises his head and opens his mouth and his throat quivers as if he is howling. We hear only feedback.

1:04–1:08

D shouts,
“Listen!”

P shouts, “No
you
listen!” He slams his hand on the table.

D looks down. There is a perfect imprint of P’s palm on the glass, in white powder.

1:09–1:14

Undergrowth. Close-up of the robins’ fight.

Cut to P, holding the microphone, staring. He is naked. His skin is covered in tiny scratches. There is no sound.

The robins abruptly stop fighting. They separate. They stare at P.

1:15–1:19

Blackness. The sound of a needle hitting vinyl. A crackly robin’s song begins to play.

Voice-over, P, whispering: “You listen.”

Title card: “Listen the Birds.”

A MOUNT

Framed in a small rear window in the building’s ugly yellowish brick, behind its single pane of frosted glass, stands a porcelain horse. It is a foot high, shiny and white and speckled with green designs, stems and leaves clustered around tiny white flowers. Its head is down, its forelegs up, a low boisterous rearing, an eternal china prance.

There is a boy in the street, weeping quietly before the horse. His crying embarrasses people. They don’t want to ignore him: one by one those who notice him out of their own windows or passing by come to ask him if he is alright, where his mother is, where his father is, what they can do, what the matter is. He will not answer them except with a brief shake of his head, a motion of his hand. He has no bruises, his clothes are not torn or dirty, and though he is plausibly as young as thirteen he might be seventeen—not a boy at all but a young man of his own agency and majority and this intercession a presumption. Still, if he does not stop crying someone will call the police or beg him to come with them inside or summon an ambulance, but his sobs are almost silent and the way he shuffles and ducks his head you have to watch him closely to see how stricken he is. Everyone who does see hesitates.

If you do pay close attention you may wonder where his clothes are from because there is something about the cut and color that is out of place in this north London backstreet at the end of which you can see the supermarket (it just issued a profit warning) and the garage door that was for a long time collapsing under peeling paint and is now finally gone, the wood replaced with raw MDF, behind which must be some local workshop.

It is clear and cold and between small piles of fallen leaves and ragged plastic bags still wet from rain the boy or young man or whatever you call him is staring at the china horse in the window of what is not his home. He will not touch the glass.

There is a pole through the horse’s body, impaling its miniature chest, a gold-colored pole a few inches long made of cheap metal or cheaply gilded china like the equine body it would have anchored, notionally, in its housing. The idea is that the horse has been ripped from a carousel. It is not a model of a living animal but a model of a model of a posed living animal. It might even be that all the mounts on the imaginary merry-go-round from which it has, pretend, been torn, were made of glazed and hardened porcelain, not wood, and that the china of which the figurine is made is accurate.

If that is the case the translation of the animal into representation is only one of size, not substance.

Unless the ride is really that size, the imaginary ride. Unless there is no larger amusement of which this is a tiny replica, and the carousel is, rather, intended for small creatures, for dolls, for little frightened animals clinging to the cold bodies of the artificial scaled-down ones that, in the mind, go round, go up and down as they spin.

There must be some logic as to why it is only this much of the ride that has been put into this toy-like form, if that is what has happened. Why not the bright conical canopy? Why not the other beasts? They might all be horses or they might be a whole menagerie, a garish, revolving, bobbing arc. This merry-go-round might, like the one in a far-off park in Providence, be a showcase, a working celebration of the best of the art, each mount a copy of a mount from some carousel celebrated among carousel-makers. Horses and ducks and saddled bears in decades of distinct styles, copies of this figure and that, a Bauhaus tiger chased by a Deco lamb, as many different schools as there are animals, in the patchwork homage of a carnival designer to the greatest of her antecedents, a best-of, the declaration of a canon in a slowly turning ride.

This collage carousel is surely haunted. Each copied mount must be ridden by a copied ghost, each passenger an echo of some originary apparition woken when the medley ride turns, invisibly blinking, eyeing all the others with courteous mistrust, wondering where they have all come from and where they are, afraid to dismount, to encroach on each other’s spectral space.

This is what the boy might try to explain if anyone can talk to him, can stop him crying long enough to speak.

He might explain this in a choking voice, and he might say it with an accent you don’t recognize and he might pepper what he says with unfamiliar phrases over which even he might pause, as if they do not come naturally even to him, as if he has learned a vernacular at one remove, as if he knows it but does not like it, poor boy, poor young man. As if he is using it according to instructions. If you talk to him you might feel those things about him. You might observe that he raises his hands repeatedly and grips the air before him as if he is grasping a pole and clinging on for safety. If anyone asks him where he is from he is likely not to answer, or not to be able to answer, or to say anything but single words.

You might aspire to take him off the streets but you would not be able to, he is too fast to be caught, and he will go if anyone comes at him with more than tentative concern and curiosity. If he does you cannot feel complacent that he will not return when it is dark, or that others will not come.

You might watch from your window, from behind a horse, see a newcomer try to climb against nothing, groping at the air and stepping too high, with no mounting block, no loupin stane, stumbling, over and over.