There Must Be Some Mistake (12 page)

CHANTAL'S CONDO
at Forgetful Bay was all dressed up in mid-century modern, Eames stuff, Aalto, Risom, some stuff I didn't recognize except to notice that it was in the same ballpark as the stuff I did recognize. Most interesting was that nothing looked like a replica. “Great house,” I said. We were gathered there to preview Tinker's video project.

“In which I have lived for many years,” Chantal said. “My late husband was a collector.”

“Late husband,” I repeated.

“Bert,” she said. “He died right upstairs.” Here she pointed straight up at the ceiling.

“Good to know,” I said.

“I've still got the body outline on the floor,” Chantal said.

“That's a joke, I recognize that,” I said.

“We're going up to Tinker's room for the preview,” she said. “You want something on the way up? Some cake?”

“You have cake?” I said.

“I do,” she said.

“Maybe later,” I said. I wanted the cake right then and there, but I didn't quite trust her. It might have been some abnormal kind of cake. She still made me nervous.

Tinker was on the bed attending her phone when we got upstairs. She was wearing black tights, a black T-shirt, various other things including tattoos and jewelry and so on. A video camera was set up pointing at a straight-back chair in front of a bare wall. There was a large flat-screen TV on the floor, showing the chair and wall, two other chairs in front of the windows opposite. “Want me to roll this shit?” she said, sliding off the bed to retrieve the remote.

“Sure,” I said.

Chantal and I took the two chairs, Tinker took the one in front of the wall. She appeared on the large TV sitting in the chair. The picture was sort of distorted, like it was run through a Lomo filter, or a set of such filters, making the image much less clear and much more visually evocative, like those filters are supposed to do. Make pictures more interesting than they are. There was a second flat screen on a table beside her. “I'm doing this nude,” she said. “I'll let you imagine that, OK?”

“OK,” we said.

Tinker sat in the chair onscreen and started reading from what looked like a diary.

“I spend my days at the university's I. A. Pung Primary Lessons Center doing work with giant roster apes, the ‘reds' as researchers are inclined to call them. I am feeding the apes treated paper, in particular, the pages of some of this century's greatest works of fiction, as part of a continuing thirteen-year study on the effects of printing inks on the digestive systems of mammals. Here I read pages I am preparing to feed Rector, a four-year-old female red.”

I did not know exactly how to parse this. I was not unfamiliar with performances of this kind, though it had been years since I'd seen one in a gallery or museum. But in Chantal's condo, in the bedroom, with Chantal's daughter, well, it was a little wacky.

Tinker kept on reading some text that I couldn't follow, and which I eventually figured out I wasn't supposed to follow, and I sat there with Chantal, my hand on my chin, ridiculously, watching the proceedings.

“Some urban liberals hope the spread of new sources of information through the kingdom will bring a modest flowering of tolerance and pluralism to postwar society,” Tinker said. “However, many feel that is not likely. Dahar al Daza, for example, the first virgin-born ruler, believes that her people ‘jumped the gun' in their rejection of Western societal models for the family, and she is on record with this sentiment. There is no way to be certain that even the former Crown Prince of Efficacies would approve this casual dismissal of progressive values. Daza spoke in an on-the-record session at her celebrated Eastern Retreat. She noted that state-controlled television had stopped its experimental broadcasts and had returned to programming prayer and separations of a physical object, or a portion of a physical object, into two or more portions, through the application of an acutely directed force by government ministers. She said she was not going to encourage or entertain any ‘weird' happenings, that hers were a people who looked at technology, but also looked at religion and morality.”

I nodded, occasionally brushed back my hair, switched which leg I was crossing over the other, attempted to appear engaged with the show. I noticed that Tinker's eyes were not entirely, or even closely, symmetrical. I noticed that whenever she moved her jewelry chimed a little. I noticed that her legs were shapely and that her arms were cut with muscles. I noticed that there was a mosquito hawk in the room, swerving about, landing sometimes within the frame of the video.

“The collapse of the American family in the past few decades is historically unprecedented in the US, and possibly in the world. Daza, who has spent much of her adult life studying the American familial unit as an alternative to the Otareen model, remarked of her former companion, Naziri, that he grew more puzzling the more she tried to study him. She only emerged from this despair when she found that others, including his wife, were equally bewildered.”

Her teeth were very nice, I noticed. I thought that was odd, given the hardscrabble background, that her teeth would be near perfect, and bright white. Once I had noticed this it was impossible to look away, to see anything else, at least for a few minutes.

“Our team excavated the front half of a large skeleton, recovering a skull, a two-foot shoulder blade, and limb bones two feet to three feet long and six inches in diameter. The group also uncovered a three-inch tooth. The find is being preserved in freezers in prisons, libraries, colleges—all sites visited during her education in the country.”

Chantal touched my arm, and it shocked me. I jumped. I turned to her and she made some face that seemed to ask if I was all right, and I made some face back to indicate I was, and added a shallow nod in case the face I'd made was misinterpreted.

All this time Tinker was reading the notes in her book, diary, or whatever, without ever looking at us. I guessed that was part of the program, ignoring the audience. I assumed she meant to sit in the gallery and read material like this while it was also being recorded and displayed on an accompanying television screen. I wondered why the material was so opaque. What was the point of this opacity? Was that cultural comment? All remarks are opaque or some such? The nudity of the real performance, I figured, would model the stance of the work toward the audience, that is, open, lacking artifice, but also challenging.

There was a rip in Tinker's tights at her left thigh, two inches. Skin was visible there.

“Asked about the prosperous isolation and a return to the austere, both tenants of individuation theory, she reported that the Commerce Department report (which she is charged with leaking) does specify the universities and institutes later targeted because they were believed to be engaged in biological and chemical research believed damaging (or possibly damaging) to the prospect of peace. When queried about her capture, one of the scientists, an Algerian, who said he once worked as a taxi driver in Los Angeles for a year, recalled that there were one hundred nine victims in the hideaway.”

Here Tinker paused and closed her book or diary and then began slapping herself with it, mostly about the shoulders and arms, her legs, her chest, in a way that seemed random. The book wasn't a big thing like a dictionary; it was leather covered, similar to a small missal you might find in a pew at church, a book of hymns, perhaps, you'd need if you were to sing along. I was afraid of what might come next, with the diary, but after a few minutes of slapping she suddenly got up and left the room, leaving us there with the TV displaying the chair and the wall alone. That was a huge relief; I was stunned how relieved I was at being left there with this placid video of a single chair against a wall. I noticed its shadow, cast diagonally behind and away from the chair by the light from the lamp on the dresser. It was a soft shadow, softer on the video than in real life. From outside the room Tinker started reading again, but in a weak voice, so quiet that I couldn't really hear what she was saying. She must have gone slowly down the stairs because the reading got progressively softer until you could hear only the muffled sound of a voice in another room. Then Tinker stopped speaking altogether. Chantal and I remained in the bedroom staring at the empty chair and at the image of the empty chair for a while. I was happy to do that longer, but Chantal tapped me again, and we went downstairs.

The postmortem was in the kitchen. I started with “I liked it. I liked it especially when you got up and walked out, leaving us there with the chair.”

“Yeah,” she said. “That's what I was aiming for.”

“Relief,” I said.

“Free from the threat.”

“Not a threat, exactly,” Chantal said. “Discomfort, maybe.”

“Same thing, same area,” Tinker said.

“The text was, I don't know,” I said. “Unintelligible? Like I couldn't make sense of it. Was I supposed to be processing all that?”

“It's up to the observer. It's there to distract,” Tinker said. “You expect it to make sense so it mobs your brain for a few minutes, puts some smudges in there, while you're sitting right in front of me and I'm, like, really naked. I want the people to be that close to me at the gallery.”

“Is that, like, legal?” Chantal said. “I guess it is or the gallery wouldn't do it.”

“Dunno,” Tinker said.

“The texts are about stuff, though,” I said. “Conflict, truth, convoluted references, rhetorical stories of a kind we're used to. Some sounded like TV reports.”

“It's all copped off the Net here and there, news reports, wiki entries, some of it chopped up and reassembled. Something for me to read. I don't want to make too much of it. Usually it's stuff I like the sound of. Can you ‘understand' the text, decode it? Sure. Surfaces are everything, the only thing, interpretation is required here as anywhere. Note the text is filled with the rhetoric of insurrection, of sensibility setting itself over against an established mode, a special sympathy for so-called third-world peoples, a commitment to spiritual values as well as humanistic ones, a voice constantly aware of the otherworldly, the larger-than-life, the place beyond the pines, so to say, and primary positions afforded women, perhaps a suggestion of discontent with leaders and a preference for woman leaders, with the perceived inclusion in their worldviews of more diverse value systems, particularly as to getting and spending and such. You will see that the text traffics in language systems that seek out from the assembled diverse modalities new ideas and opinions, freshness of view being highly regarded, and that there is in the text a willingness to try to reveal complex subjects via reduction, even if, as might be supposed from your reaction itself, the complete unpacking of the content is not necessarily expected or required; in other words, a premium is put not upon complete understanding but upon some understanding—catch as much as you can, being the concept, perhaps. There is also the mystical dimension, which can be teased out and laid bare, further demonstrating the willingness of the text to entertain concepts largely disallowed by more conventional political systems, except in the way of ‘talking points' such as always pressed forward in current political systems.”

“I see that,” I said, and turned to her mother.

“So the work is about you being naked?” Chantal said.

“That's important, someone being there naked,” Tinker said. “Could be anybody. Intrusion, violation of the standard protocols, implicit threat, crossing personal boundaries, that shit.”

“And then releasing us,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said. “I got it from this guy I hung out with in Denver. He used to walk around naked all the time. We weren't lovers. I was living in his place, and I felt this powerful aggression in the way he did that. It was like he was stabbing me with his junk all the time. Every time he left the room I felt better.”

“Hmm,” I said. “I see that.”

“If you got that, you got the thing.”

“Was terrific,” I said.

JILLY TOLD
me about her baptism. “I was three or four when I was baptized, only we called it christened, that was our name for it. I was three or four and I still remember it. It was at the river, more of a creek, really, that ran through our farm and then down past the church, which was a Quonset hut with some plants around it dropped in the middle of a parking lot. There was a leggy oak down beyond the parking lot, actually several of them, so there was shade over the water, and that's where the Parson Bob did the baptisms. He was an old guy, much older than my daddy who got himself rebaptized the same day. Anyway, I was scared about being baptized, but not of the water. I was scared of the parson's teeth, which were big and square and loose. They looked like they were made of wood or something. They had bad color, and everything he said took on a strange sound, like the words were slipping and sliding in his mouth. Clicking around. He was leaning over me real hard, had a big hairy hand on my back to keep me from drowning, and his face was real close to mine as he dunked me. I had nightmares about it later. The creek was muddy from all the baptizing he'd been doing, so I held my nose when I went under, and spewed a little when I came up. People thought that was funny. Daddy went in after me, and the parson had a little trouble holding Daddy up when he laid back into the water, so he had an accident and had to get up out of the water on his own steam. Parson Bob lost control of him when he was performing the ritual. I remember we left pretty fast afterward, jumped in the car, which was a Buick that Daddy got from his parents before they died, and we shot down the highway toward our place. Daddy drove all the way home barefoot, which I never forgot, I was so surprised. I'd never seen his feet before. They were big and white and veiny. Hairs on his toes. I can still see them down around the pedals, dripping wet, I can see those feet like it was yesterday.”