SOMMES-NOUS DEVENUS MAGNIFIQUES?
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Secreted away in her private workshop, The Builder was assembling a living collage.
It was female and bare-chested, breasts supplanted by the lawn mower engine she'd shoved through its sternum. Its hair was tangled copper wire, its arms were absences, and its torso, centauresque, smoothly extended from the far side of a 18th-century mahogany table. The skin and muscle of the left side of its stomach had been pulled back like the hood of a car, exposing its steaming organs to the afternoon light.
The Builder frowned and squinted into the meat of it. High school anatomy really didn't prepare you for how much stuff there was in people. It was beautiful, in a way. Red and white wrapped around bursts of glistening, vivid color. Yes, it was beautiful. And really goddamn tricky to work with. The Builder reached backward with a wooden arm, puppet-jointed and goreslick. With her sleeves rolled all the way up, you could see the line where the geometry of her prostheses met with the scarred flesh of her forearms.
"Pliers," she said. Her assistant, a quiet, young man with a violently violet crew cut named Aubergine, passed her the pliers. She reached in and, untroubled by viscera, pushed aside a bit of intestine with one hand to fret at the delicate machinery she'd installed inside. When she twisted a bit of metal about, the collage opened solid black eyes and made a sound like birdsong crossed with a chainsaw's roar. The Builder's frown deepened.
A tall, dark woman wearing stylish clothes and a pale mask was watching her work. She was lounging on a nearby table saw, leaned against it casually with her hand placed dangerously close to the blade.
She said, "Try turning that counterclockwise."
The Builder turned the pliers counterclockwise. This time, when the collage's eyes opened they were solid white, and it made no sound at all. It still wasn't the response she was looking for, but it was a marked improvement.
This sort of work — biomechanical collaging, amateur experimental surgery, an abomination against God and nature, whatever you wanted to call it — had never been The Director's field of expertise. She'd always been best at providing guidance. Management. Direction. It was why she was there.
At the start, The Director had told their bright-eyed volunteer to stay alive. So long as she was nearby and didn't give it a new direction, the collage wouldn't die on The Builder's table. Which was good, because she hardly remembered anything from high school anatomy.
The Builder held an organ — a kidney, maybe? — to the light. "Does this look important to you?" she asked.
She was still wrist-deep in its innards when the workshop's buzzer sounded. The Builder wiped the back of her hand against her forehead, carelessly smearing red blood into the black of her cropped hair, the bronze of her skin.
"Can you go downstairs and get the door?" she asked. Aubergine nodded and started picking his way through the half-finished projects that littered her workspace.
The Director tilted her head quizzically, her mask's expression a coy, black-lipped smile. "Expecting more company?"
"It's The Janitor." The Builder carefully picked up a suture needle with her lacquered fingertips and began stitching the artpiece closed. "I had it collect some weird bones for the collage. I'm surprised it got them all so quickly."
"Hm." The Director drummed her fingers on the sawblade's edge, restless and uninjured. The Builder knew how sharp these things could be. "That thing has upsetting wrists. It's dangerous."
The Builder spared The Director an appraising glance. "I keep forgetting how recently you joined," she said. "If I were you? I wouldn't worry about it. The Janitor's designed to be harmless to us."
"Designed," echoed The Director. "The rumors are true, then?"
For as long as there'd been an art movement associated with the letters A, W, C, and Y, there had always been a Critic. And as long as there'd been a Critic, there'd been an clique within the clique, an inner circle of anartists handpicked by the Critic of their time to lead the community to greater heights. It was a paradox that a group like theirs would have such an ingrained, unquestionable hierarchy at its core — but then, paradoxes had always been part of the point.
Little was known about the first Critic, that mad iconoclast who started it all. Even his name and face had been forgotten by time. Even his body of work — every piece of art he'd ever made — was lost. Every piece but one.
"Depends on the rumor," The Builder said cryptically. "Not that I'd know."
Two men entered the room. It was Aubergine and someone that wasn't The Janitor. He looked like an oversized dandelion seed; pale and gangly, with a big brown afro. The man carried a well-loved sketchbook under one arm and was holding a video tape with the other.
In lieu of greeting, he wiped a smidge of indigo paint from the corner of his mouth and asked, "Where's your Betamax player?"
"Nice to see you too, Painter." The Builder's gaze didn't stray from her work as she knotted the suture closed. "I think I left it in the junk pile. What do you need it for?"
"The Clipper sent me this tape he found. I hear it's killer stuff. Barely anyone's seen it yet."
"Don't tell me it's another snuff film. Those are getting old."
"It's… not not a snuff film."
The Director pushed herself up to full standing, leaning heavily on the sawblade. "Don't you already have a Betamax?" she asked.
The Critic, they all knew, was a little obsessed with the VHS's less-successful sibling. Whenever someone joined the "inner circle" he'd give them a Betamax player along with their definitive article. In a far corner of the chamber, The Painter was already pawing through a pile of discarded objects. A bag of nails, a partially-disassembled blowtorch, an inside-out Furby — each was cast aside as he searched.
The Painter ducked his head and muttered, "Sold it to an analog witch. It's gone." The Director and The Builder shared a knowing look.
The Builder grinned. "It's full of paint, isn't it? I keep telling you acrylics aren't a good recording medium, man."
"FOUND IT," said The Painter, overloud. He lifted a battered Betamax player from the pile. "SO. Where's your TV?"
"Under the couch."
Aubergine said, "I'll get it."
As The Painter and Aubergine went about unrolling and inflating her television, The Builder wiped her hands clean of gore, fingers clacking like drumsticks. She looked at the collage. It wasn't finished yet, but it was getting close. Soon, The Janitor would be arriving with a bundle of bones — strange bones, long and flexible, from animals without names. She was going to attach them to the collage's temples and fan them out like antlers, like TV antennae. The bones would take in whatever signals they touched and coalesce them together into obscure clusters in its chest, then sink them down to burn in the pit of its stomach. Sound and fire beneath its skin, illuminating it from the inside.
Across the room, The Painter pushed the Betamax tape into place. The inflatable television burst to life.
A title card, in comic sans: LES TITRES SEMBLENT PLUS SIGNIFIANT EN FRANÇAIS
The recording opens on an empty stage, lights dimmed. The susurrus of an audience, out-of-frame, runs beneath.
Lights go up. The theater quiets. The viewer now sees a huge canvas laid across the back wall, end to end. A woman enters, stage right. She is wearing a white sleeveless dress. Her hair is long and unbraided. It is difficult to describe her further; the poor video quality abstracts her body. Her face is an indistinct haze. She bows once to the audience, dipping her head low, and begins.
The woman turns and extends her arm, palm outstretched. A long, thin tendril of skin peels off her arm, twisting languidly through the air, unbloodied. The tendril melts into the canvas, leaving behind a beige coil on its surface. Her arm twists and more thin tendrils of skin peel away. She sweeps out her leg, foot pointed like a ballerina, and tendrils curve out of this part of her, too. She continues on like this, moving through a strange, slow dance, bits of skin gently pulling away in some impossible breeze to become pigment.
Then she starts to bleed.
She doesn't falter, at first. Her blood flows, yes, but it flows up. Ribbons of blood follow ribbons of flesh in elongated helixes, introducing shades of crimson to the canvas. Her dress remains clean and unmarked, even as new wounds open like flowers across her body.
The painting that forms on the canvas is difficult to make sense of, splotchy and impressionistic. But something is growing there, in the empty spaces, an image in the process of being born. The woman stumbles for the first time and a single mote of red stains the edge of her dress.
She stumbles again. And again. Her movements grow less refined, overtaken by a split-open, frantic energy. Graceful ribbons become urgent splatters and splashes. She nearly falls and throws an entire finger, popping it against the canvas like a water balloon. Blood seeps through her dress.
In the thick grain of the video, her face is unreadable. Perhaps she holds an expression of serene acceptance, or perhaps hers is pained and ugly. In this way, she too becomes a canvas. The viewer paints emotion on to her.
Bleeding profusely and missing chunks of herself, the woman reaches her limit. She stumbles, stumbles, then topples like an overturned tree, collapsing into a pool of her heart's own blood. She is dead. Her painting is unfinished. The audience erupts into ecstatic applause.
Cut to black.
After several moments of nothingness, the screen says: SOMMES-NOUS DEVENUS MAGNIFIQUES?
Once it was clear that nothing was left on the tape, Aubergine switched off the television and yanked out the plug. It made a pitiful little whistling sound as it began to deflate, slumping over to one side. The Builder's assistant flopped back onto the ratty couch, around which the group had congregated to watch the sanguine performance. The Painter sniffed noisily and swabbed away little dribbles of turquoise paint from his tear ducts.
"That was beautiful," he said, voice cracking like splintered wood.
"Yeah," agreed The Builder. "Like something from a Mónica Rojas fleshcrafting exhibition."
"That was such a load of horseshit," retorted The Director. Both of The Builder's eyebrows shot up. She'd never heard The Director speak so acrimoniously — the other woman always seemed so in control of her emotions. Beneath her ever-smiling mask, The Director's arms were crossed, fists clenched in opposite sleeves.
"Damn," said The Painter. "Who pissed in your paint mug?"
"That video," snapped The Director, "was a slap in our collective face. The exact kind of petty garbage I've come to expect from— Only Ruiz Duchamp would try to win an argument by killing herself."
Aubergine leaned close to The Builder and whispered, "Is this going to go on for a while?"
"Our discussions tend to," The Builder replied honestly.
"I'll go get lunch, then. You want me to pick you up anything?"
"Can you grab me a bag of woodchips? I've been craving them all day."
"Sure."
The Builder's eyes automatically tracked Aubergine's route through the debris of the workshop as he departed — he was getting better at navigating the space. Soon, she wouldn't have to worry about her assistant getting himself horribly maimed; this was very good news.
It was then, when she was turning back to the conversation, that she noticed it: a number of long and ancient bones had been carefully, precariously stacked like an inverted house of cards on top of the Betamax player. She hadn't noticed it before. None of them had. Someone had walked in and painstakingly arranged the bones right in front of their eyes without being perceived.
The Builder smothered the urge to look about herself. She knew it'd be useless.
The Director was saying, "—went to theater school together. We had a lot of arguments about what artists owe to their art, among other things. Didn't get along."
"You still haven't explained why Duchamp's video has you so riled up," interjected The Builder.
The Director pressed her fingertips to her mask's forehead, as if attempting to massage her temples through the pallid shell of it. "Did Duchamp do anything to the tape? Any kind of exploit to keep it from being copied?"
"Something like that," nodded The Painter. "Clipper told me he tried to make a digital version for his personal library and it bluescreened his laptop. How'd you know?"
"Because this tape is targeted at us — at The Critic, his well-documented Betamax fixation, and everyone directly associated with him. It's a statement, directly addressed to the anartist community: she's saying that she's more dedicated to her art than we are. More willing to give everything for it — because now she has."
"So, what," said The Builder. "She's saying 'I'm a truer artist because I hurt myself instead of other people'? What does it matter? Pain is pain, no matter the source."
"Uh." The Painter plucked a thin paintbrush from somewhere in his hair to scratch at the inside of his ear. "I think she was saying she's got more personal commitment — and artists like us don't have nearly enough."
"Exactly," gritted out The Director. "As if living a long life and devoting it — all of it — to art isn't meaningful. As if dying isn't easy. Anyone can do it. People kill themselves every day. She's not special."
AND YOU ARE?
Everyone turned. The slumbering TV had rewoken, blaring electric blue as it righted itself, still unplugged, before them. There were words on the screen, and a voice was behind them. A woman's voice, stretched across the rack of static until it became something cacophonous, inhuman. A radio scream. The tower of bones wobbled, unsettled.
DOES HURTING PEOPLE MAKE YOU SPECIAL? DOES IT MAKE YOUR ART REAL?
"Did you turn the TV back on?"
"Girl, you know I didn't—"
BECAUSE IT DOESN'T. YOU'RE NOT SPECIAL.
"Well, turn it off! Jesus, my ears—"
YOU'RE NOT A REAL ARTIST.
"I'm trying!"
AND YOU'RE NOT COOL.
"BE QUIET!"
The television collapsed in on itself, silenced by The Director's command and exhaling stale air. For a fraction of a moment, the room was suffocatingly silent. Time stretched. Then the bones came thundering to the ground.
The man the SoHo anart community knew as Aubergine slouched in an alleyway and plugged a number he knew by heart into his burner phone.
"Agent Tangerine, reporting," he said. "I found Duchamp." He paused. "Dead, sir." Pause. "Not sure. I saw a video of the event, not an actual body. It didn't say when it was recorded." Pause. "No, sir. Going by the reactions, I'm sure it was real. These people would know if it was a hoax." Pause. "Best case scenario? We probably have a week or so until shit hits the fan. Worst case could be hours. And this is just a hunch, but—" He looked up. Storm clouds were gathering over Backdoor SoHo, bearing down on the city like colossal anvils waiting to fall. "It's going to be a bad one. I can feel it."
