Words

The air was gray and soft, with a fine grain in it, as if it had been standing there since morning. We were walking through Brooklyn Berlin. The sun hung low between the buildings and seemed heavy, as though it might fall if no one held it.

“It’s a very important gallery,” my companion said. “Strange you’ve never been there.” I said that it looked like autumn. I wasn’t certain, but it felt appropriate to say so.

We turned into a courtyard, then into the foyer of a building one could pass through, then into a narrow alley, and finally stopped in front of a bar whose window went on for an unreasonably long time. For a moment it was unclear whether this was where we were meant to be.

“We have to go through the bar,” my companion said. “There’s another alley on the other side.”

Later I could not remember how we came out of the bar, or whether there had been an alley at all. I only remember that at some point a glass façade appeared, and behind it a gallery.

The doors were open. Inside there was a crowd, dense enough that the paintings were almost obscured. I felt interest, the kind I usually feel on such occasions. My companion, however, stopped at the entrance.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

We slipped inside.

The people stood scattered, in small groups, as was customary. What was unusual was how calm they were, and how many of them were looking down. There was the usual noise of an opening, but it seemed restrained, as though no one cared to be heard.

I also looked down. The floor was ordinary.

For some reason I smiled.

People behaved normal, as in such places. It only seemed that everyone had arrived somewhere by mistake, and having realized this, had decided not to draw attention to it. It was as if the place itself had gone astray and now stood there quietly, embarrassed.

There was no sense of anticipation, no regret, nothing resembling an intervention. People did not look dissatisfied. Some examined the floor with great attention, as though it might explain matters better than the paintings.

I thought that perhaps this was a new kind of cancellation, one that required presence. Everyone had come, after all. The works were there too, large, competently done. They existed, and that seemed sufficient.

“This is a new kind of theater,” my companion buzzed, not addressing me directly.

We went out.

Only then did the question occur to me: had the theater come to the opening, or was this the gallery’s closing? I turned the thought over several times, but it did not change its shape.

“I’m not sure,” my companion said, when I mentioned it. “In any case, it has already begun. And it will go on for quite a while. You come to an opening, you stand quietly, and you look at nothing in particular.”

I wanted to say something in reply, but instead made a sound that surprised me.

I woke up.

Still, the air in the room seemed gray, softly collapsing into grainy particles and with it the view of the beach in my window. I lay there thinking that some dreams are brief, while gray ones linger for a long time out of politeness.

Dear T…,

I am sorry to have sent you my phone, a footprint of all my work. I am not asking you to open it, look through it, or draw any conclusions. You may erase it without looking, throw it away, or, if you happen to have a place for it, simply keep it for now. Perhaps later it will surface again, or disappear on its own.

I am a child of artists, yet I have never thought artworks were the pivotal part of….Still, I couldn’t bring myself to assume the authority to delete the work I had no choice but to make.

Whatever happens, I will never know the fate of this phone. And we will never meet. Some things are designed to be of no use; this one is intended to be of no consequence. I only hope that you, or others, will not one day find yourselves flooded with ghost phones.

“I came to NYC to write a paper about IKEA and copyright law,”

Rebecca said.

“IKEA?!” I said sharply. I was jealous of a young girl so liked by the hosts of the dinner I came to. Like a daughter to them, a child of a close friend. They were a couple, and every couple I know I am a child of. An orphan, a self-appointed one. With permission to speak only granted by my brain under the protectorate of childhood.

IKEA, said Rebecca, a good daughter of a German design critic, Bauhaus Butter. Now evidently lost, everyone’s father, regardless of the generations present at the table.

IKEA, I said, I think. Realizing I can’t talk. Next to the actual child of a couple, an extra child of their friend, there was nowhere for mine to take place. The one word I needed to make my case disappeared irrevocably. “You don’t know,” the professor said. I stumbled, and attacked the professor in return. With the precision of a dropout, an I for an I. All ended.

Nobody knows the future, but IKEA is not in it. An absent mind of a universal aesthetic, available to all. Wherever you are, as a contributor to the tactile institution, admitted, as a family, as a nation. Built out of flat-pack panels, an Atlantis, I remembered the word, sinking piece by piece.

I had a home long ago, of pure design. Maybe it’s still there.

The company called IKEA may well survive. It will float like a Flying Dutchman, the skeleton, the closet stripped to its bones. An object that only comes to be when its body parts are 3D-printed on demand by millions of domestic visionaries. An abundance of printed plastic. What aesthetic is this, what copyright.

I was still seated at the table with my legs up on the chair, because putting them down would open my chest to every table knife. I wanted to grab Rebecca’s hand and scream run… let’s escape together, there is no more IKEA, it’s sinking, your father is blind, this couple has problems, you are so young, let’s run before it’s too late.

Instead I thought, if I were an artist, perhaps, I would collect IKEA’s leftover furniture, still appearing on Brooklyn streets, take them to my studio like an ant, misassemble them into the last remaining humble monuments, and write words.

On some Fridays I climb narrow stairs to visit my friend Magnet in her young gallery. First we laugh, then I follow her to the big room, where the art is hanging. Because truly, who am I if not for the art.

“The guy is your age,” she said, “but he is in Bard. All his life he studied medieval history and philosophy in Europe, and now decided to paint.” I became heavy. A suitcase, loaded and tugged, I followed my friend around looking at the work. We returned to the small office, where the oxygen of fresh gossip lifted my face with no effort.

“And… how is the reception?” I asked, with the invisible smirk oozing through.

“Difficult,” she said, and dropped her index finger on the empty table, “the known older German painter came by the other day, and roasted the poor artist. ‘Where are the genitalia,’ he asked. ‘These figures are not medieval, they are nothing, no meat, no sweat, no tension, nothing to reveal. These generations have no balls. Wtf.’”

I laughed, liking the safety of my distance. Uninvolved, I could hear the words as if they had been spoken to me alone. “The size is the fate,” I said loosely, repeating an old saying from home, sailing my hand through my long hair. Almost forgetting that in twenty years my friend became a gallery.

Later, I waited at the streetlight. Where are the genitalia? I repeated the question. What has it become, and what is it for. Are we finally free. Are we getting there? How soon, genitalia will reveal themselves as a designed object of pure indulgence, self-pleasure, unconstrained by any gender or childbirth, protruding in all forms and colors from who knows where. And when it would be open for show, no longer as a supporting tool, no more shame attached.

“So soon?!” I overheard the couple next to me, and walked on.