Twelve

The stale air in Alison’s office smelled exactly like her grandmother’s attic: dust, old furniture, and a certain tiredness that she could only detect in forgotten places. If her secret theory was correct, that discarded souls were collected and stored in doilies, then this room had a fine vintage collection of spectral debris. There weren’t a lot of buildings on campus that still made use of incandescent light, and the soft, singular bulbs of Props Storage Room B let off a tiny note of amber that made the place feel otherworldly and special. The circulation wasn’t great, but it was enough to send motes of dust dancing upward towards the warm light. The strange decor and secluded nature of the space gave Alison some comfort and security, which she had desperately needed with all she had on her plate. The old world tapestries and Greek busts contrasted sharply against transistor radios and bakelite kitchen sets. It was a hodgepodge of forgotten everything, and it was exactly the sort of place that Alison could slow down, take a breath, and figure out how she would get through the week.

It was also where she beat up rich boys. Well, only one, currently, and it was by his own request. But Casey Harrington should count as two. At least one for all the stupid anchors, and another entire person’s worth of undue confidence. If he actually had a boat, it would be called The Confidently Wrong. Whatever the final tally, Casey tested Alison’s patience with a significantly higher potable strength than the average New England trust fund baby, which was a lot to begin with.

There was one item with regard to himself that he underestimated, however: his physical strength. As he practiced his exchanges in rehearsal and in private lessons, he routinely came in way too hot. This was a problem for grapples, and this was especially a problem for swings. Even his knaps, where he was to mimic the sound of a blow, were coming through too hard, as evidenced by the sizable bruises he’d been giving himself on his forearm and thighs. And, as much as Alison treasured the fact that he was beating himself up, she had to slow him down, or someone (else) was going to get seriously hurt. This thought had been floating somewhere near the top of Alison’s mind when he came at her in a lesson at the tail end of a three hit combination with enough momentum to make an entrance in the tradition of the Kool Aid man. The third strike, a haymaker, was supposed to be blocked, but she could tell it was going sour while telegraphing the blow and press-rolled instead. The momentum of Casey’s wild swing sent him hurtling towards the empty space where Alison once was, and the power of the strike was a lot more than he was planning. He stumbled forward as the centripetal motion twisted his torso sideways, causing his knee to buckle hard. When he bit the dust, he rolled into a suit of armor, which crumpled on impact.

“Casey!” Alison exclaimed, but waited to say more. If he was injured, this would be a rather different conversation, and admonishment wouldn’t be of much help. He got up and dusted himself off, looking unscathed enough.

“Lost my footing a little, there. I thought there was a block on the haymaker.”

“Casey!” she repeated. “You would have broken my arm! You’re going way too hard. Why?”

He thought about this for a moment, an unusual feat for the surefire swabby. But he took Alison seriously, and was willing to be introspective for her sake, even if the software was a bit of a heavy load for the little Commodore 64 he had spinning around in his skull. “I guess I don’t know my own strength,” he finally offered.

“Well, you have to do better, Harrington. There’s no room for error in this. If you did that on stage, you would have hurt someone. Period. Eighty percent power and speed. No more, okay?”

“Jesus,” he returned. “You’re right. I am so sorry. I never even thought about that. You know, like my weight, and my strength, and like, um, energy.” He was scraping together a fairly sparse collection of remnants from high school physics, but Alison appreciated the effort.

Alison changed her tone a little. “Can I ask you something, Casey?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Alison took a moment to consider how she might word this. She decided to just go for it. “Has anyone ever asked you to consider how your circumstances affect the way you interact with the rest of the world?”

He gave it some thought and landed on “Honestly, no.”

“Okay, well, let’s give it a shot, eh? Think about some of your advantages.”

He looked lost. “Like, you mean, money?”

“Yeah. That’s an advantage. Does having money influence how you see others?”

“Yes.”

“It does? Tell me about that.”

He spoke right away. “Well, last year my dad got me LASIK, and now I can see others really well.”

Alison laughed, then made quick eye contact to make sure that was actually a joke. “You never struck me as a pun guy.”

“Most of my jokes are actually by accident, if you can believe that.”

She could.

Casey continued. “But no, I understand what you’re saying. How does that apply to this situation?”

Alison pondered this. “Let’s focus on your physical strength for a moment.”

“Okay, but, like, I would never hurt anybody.”

Alison stopped herself from reacting. This was actually starting to look productive. She continued. “Yeah, but you could. And that affects others. Like women, for example. If a woman is walking across campus at night, and you’re going the same direction, but twenty feet behind her, she’s going to feel uncomfortable. Every woman I know has a story about being followed by some creep. And a lot worse than that.”

He processed. “Okay. So, if I’m not a creep, that’s something, right?”

“Yes,” Alison replied. “That’s the bare minimum.”

“But what else can I–”

Alison raised her eyebrow, but didn’t interject. This was his moment to figure it out. She waited, hoping the load wouldn’t blow out his circuits.

He gave it a try. “Wait. You already answered that. I can– think about my situation in the context of like, the bigger situation.”

Alison gave affirmative finger guns. “Not too shabby, Casey. Let’s take a five and try the combination again. Tommy and Paige are coming in at two, and then we can run it with them in the frame. Maybe you can, like, not hurt them.”

Casey took a cathartic breath. “Yeah, that sounds tight. Thank you, Aly. You may not believe this, but nobody has ever talked about that stuff with me.”

“Oh, I believe it, Case.”

***

Suzie Garcia gave Alison an exasperated and incredulous look as the soft, blue mood lighting brushed cool on the corner table at Mother of Runes, a chic but clandestine bar tucked away on Bath Street. Rosewood and succulents were illuminated by drop fixtures that splashed ambiance on old brick and polished concrete floors. Alison looked back at Suzie over two Boulevardiers in rocks glasses with burnt oranges as garnishes. The normally bright red Campari looked a drab purple in the low light, though flashes of crimson seeped through in the flicker of candles. Suzie broke the silence.

“You know my style, Alison. I have a dialectic. I’m an oil painter. Baroque. Bloom lighting. I can’t just start doing a bunch of Yoko Ono business. And you want me to get on this– what– performance art?”

Alison laughed a little. She had never thought she’d be anywhere near the avant garde side of the coin either. “More of an– installation.”

“Oh, god, Aly. That’s even worse.”

“How is it worse?”

“Okay, not worse, but like, another kind of equally bad.”

Alison chewed on the situation. She knew she needed the smoke and mirrors treatment to make Altman Gallery even remotely approachable, and that meant foot traffic. Suzie, who had served as Alison’s babysitter in her latchkey preteen years, was now an accomplished artist in the MFA Studio Art program. She was finishing her second year and was still shopping around for a venue for her spring series. She came out with a bang the previous year with an Artemisia study that had sparked conversation about covert feminism in the Renaissance. The follow-up would need to hold up to that standard, and Alison hoped that scoring a show in the Rockefeller could be just the carrot to get Suzie to overrun the place with a charcuterie of pretentious art nerds. Come to think of it, charcuterie sounds good. She decided she’d get some of that, too.

“How’d you even score the Altman, Al?”

Alison sipped her drink. It was more bitter and herby than she was expecting, but it finished sweet. “I started a club. Clubs on campus can make facilities requests for events. I just put our little gala on the little form and sent it in. Got an email twenty four hours later.”

“What club? Don’t you need a faculty adviser to start a club?”

Alison put on her cool face. At least, she thought it was cool. Confidence with a little smirk. “I just put the form on Peters’s desk. He signed it without thinking. I doubt he even read it. I’ve been dropping a lot of paperwork on him lately for my department change and student-faculty designation. The club is called ‘Exploring Boundaries at Brown University.’”

“Hm. That easy.” Suzie took a meditative sip and considered. “It’s weird, right? A lot of these barriers to prestige are just– imaginary. Apparently, you can just fill out a form and do whatever you want.”

Alison folded her fingers. She didn’t care much for prestige, but decided not to speak on that as it was a necessary currency in Suzie’s corner of the art world. Like it or not, she had some to bargain with. She gave Suzie some space to consider, hoping access to the Altman would be enough to push the poor woman towards the night of utter atrocities she had planned. She took a moment to admire the song that had just snuck in with the lights in the shared goal of making everyone in the bar feel super cool. It was working, but to be fair, Kasabian was just plain cheating on that metric.

This particular track, Club Foot, just bled cool. The synths pounded square waves over buzzy guitars and driving, electronic kicks. The hooky background vocals and fast 4/4 lulled Alison into a waking trance. Her heart rate accelerated, synching up with the heavy drums and wild lyrical outbursts. She glanced down, catching her ring finger tapping in fours to the driving, electrical storm of rock and roll plasma.

One, take control of me?
You’re messing with the enemy
Said it’s two, it’s another trick
Messin’ with my mind, I wake up
Chase down an empty street
Blindly snap the broken beats
Said it’s gone with the dirty trick
It’s taken all these days to find ya

I’ll tell you I want you
I’ll tell you I need you

Alison took a speaking breath, but didn’t speak. She took the pause in conversation as an opportunity to consider her position. If her plan was going to have any chance of working, she’d need a canvas of confusion sufficient to create plausible deniability, which meant that Altman Gallery needed to be packed. Suzie was the only artist on campus capable of bringing in the foot traffic she needed. The problem of course was that she wasn’t a fit for a gallery full of dadaists and challenges to traditional forms. She’d need some finessing to hang her work next to blank canvases and a urinal. The untied thread lingered in Alison’s mind. Perhaps there was a way to work it to her advantage.

She knew she’d have to answer some questions about this wild ride, and she was still figuring out the details of how to sound “not crazy.” It was a tall order, and she decided ultimately that she’d settle for “not entirely crazy.”

“So, why me?” Suzie finally asked. “It’s not like I’m exploring any boundaries. My style is like four hundred years old.”

Alison hadn’t exactly thought about this, but her head was full of Kasabian-related adrenaline and she found herself able to roll with it. “That’s the thing, Suze! The contrast! We’re putting your series in the same room with Duchamp and Maciunas and all the weirdos. I mean– we’re always looking at that stuff in a vacuum. We never get to scrutinize it against the backdrop of like– art art.”

Suzie absorbed that thought. “So, you want to do an avant garde show that undermines itself?”

“You could say it’s the ultimate expression of avant garde.”

Suzie sighed. “You see, this is why I hate this stuff. It’s always so meta. This piece is asking questions about the nature of art and that piece wants us to examine the emptiness of humanity through the perspective of a cat by looking at a mirror through a spool of white yarn. And, like, at some point you’re just too tired to argue.”

Alison laughed, giving her cocktail another pull as she considered. The comment, and probably the bourbon, shook loose a little spark in her, and she decided to pivot slightly.

“Suzie. If you could paint a series that would be hung in the same room as Duchamp’s readymades, what would it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Probably oil masterwork depictions of his pieces. A urinal and a bike wheel and whatever, but, in Renaissance perfection. Show how much actual work goes into actual art.”

Alison took another sip and placed her drink down on the table like a chess piece revealing a devastating pin. She knew it was over. “So, if you could do that, would you?”

“Come on, Alison, I–”

Alison waited. No need to say anything more. Suzie was dead to rights, and it was her own idea that did her in. It was a worthy endeavor, and a whopper of an opportunity. And it was the perfect next step for her graduate career. On top of that Suzie was the only one who could pull it off. Alison settled in to enjoy the music and her drink and the beautiful bar while Suzie examined the pieces on the board one last time. There was no fighting it. It was checkmate. Suzie let out a sigh and buried her head in her hands. Alison had earned it, fair and square. She gave her answer.

“I hate you. I’ll do it.”