Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

“You don’t look old enough for an eighteen-year-old.”

She laughed. “You don’t look old enough for a line like that.” Most of the fries were gone, and there was still some peach schnapps pooled at the candied-cherry bottom of her glass, but he thought Jolie was a little drunk too.

—

He was aware of her crossing the street with him while he booked the room, and he was aware of her following him up and down the hall, of her shouting “Bingo” when she found the room number before he did. Probably she said something about getting him settled in or wanting to freshen up; he didn’t listen.

The room was wall-to-wall green carpet and two huge beds of depressing floral, quilted and sheeny like the insides of caskets. He sat at the foot of one while Jolie ran the bathroom faucet. He was tired all of a sudden. Everything in the world was conspiring to make him tired. Sleep made him tired. Coffee made him tired. Scotch. Receptions. Handshakes. Two Melissas. The price of things, that all things had a price.

Brown Bear. Brown Bear made him tired, plus old. Also? When the woman you’ve lived with fifteen years decides she won’t understand you anymore. When you know she could, only she doesn’t want to.

And Jolie, at the bar, that moment with her son. When she had seemed to him sad, and a bit pretty — even then she made him tired. That she was losing her son, that Jack was losing, well, everyone, that everyone loses everyone, eventually. How can anything make you more tired than that.

So Jolie came out of the bathroom with her hands still wet, and she put one of those hands on his hip, and she rocked a minute where she stood, or the vodka rocked her, and the rocking was like a blip in the system that told him this too was not real. They both were tired from so much lost, and nothing was real, to either of them.

Jack moved her thumb out from inside his belt loop and said good night.

—

He could lie down knowing he’d done the right thing, sending her home, making himself alone. He arranged his weight on one of the beds and from his pocket pulled a yellow-wrapped piece of taffy. He’d taken some the second time it was offered, with Jolie waving the bowl at him—“Now & Later?”—and without Kevin around he’d only varied the joke: “Maybe a Later.”

He gnawed at the wrapper with his bottom teeth and was hit right away with that banana smell that no actual banana ever had. His cell was dead, so he used the room phone to dial out, dial Deb, but he got only her voice mail and everything sticky. “Hey. It’s Jack. I mean, it’s me.” Even drunk he could hear how drunk he sounded. He told her where he was staying, and he could not find any extension on the base of the phone, not even the room number, “but if you give my name at the desk, I’m sure they’ll patch you through. Seems like we keep missing each other.” No good, this missing each other. Different pages.

He didn’t have the car. It was still in the parking lot outside the art museum. He flopped back on the bed and dragged his laptop onto his stomach to rise and fall with his breathing. The hotel Wi-Fi, big surprise, wasn’t working.

Different pages. Another taffy. Only yellow, these taffies? He realized he’d done the wrong thing with Jolie, letting her drive when she was that way.

You know you’ve hit bottom when you want for solitaire, for Minesweeper. What can you do without Internet, and not even any music on the machine, which had been for email almost exclusively. Email and also a few audio files, here. He’d never played them, but right away he knew what they were, and right away he knew that he would.

Double-clicking the earliest, he heard their first clear error, by no means the biggest of mistakes they would make. They’d used the recording software that came free with his machine (but no games?), and neither he nor the girl had known about the metronome that had to be toggled off. So it had stayed on, ticking like a clock or a sterile heart, keeping time with them, with how much time they had.

Okay. I think it’s recording. Is this okay?

Doesn’t bother me.

Um. So I’m just going to start. I have this list of questions, but we can deviate from them.

Sounds fine.

Do you think it’s an artist’s obligation to address current events?

Current events?

Like September eleventh.

So really we’re just talking about one event.

For the purposes of this conversation. Yes.

Okay. Obligation? Do I think the artist is obligated? No.

I think, good luck to her if she thinks she can avoid addressing what you call current events. What’s so fucked up in the world.

So nine-eleven was something you couldn’t avoid addressing?

I had to get it out of my system, I guess. I guess you could say that. At the time, you have to understand, I was working only a few blocks from the World Trade Center. I was there that morning.

I wanted to ask you about that. You’ve since moved uptown. This interview is taking place at your studio in Hell’s Kitchen.

I’m sorry, is that a question?

What motivated your move?

To Hell’s Kitchen? I liked the sound of it. We’re above a methadone clinic, I don’t know if you noticed. So there’s the atmosphere. And it’s cheaper. They say prices downtown fell after nine-eleven, but no one told my landlord.

So safety had nothing to do with it?

I don’t believe lightning would strike twice. Grand Central Station, Madison Square Garden. Maybe there.

Really they should watch the Empire State Building. The Chrysler. That would be harder, for people. No one loved the Twin Towers, the structures themselves, like they do those buildings. The terrorists would know that

if they watched a couple of New York movies.

You say a lot of inflammatory things I think without realizing they’re inflammatory.

I realize.

You don’t care about upsetting people then.

I care. The bullshit is that after nine-eleven everyone felt like a real New Yorker? Fuck that. You can’t wait for tragedy.

You’re from Texas, aren’t you? Texas originally?

Houston, that’s right. My parents are there still.

I’m sorry, I thought your father — I thought he passed away?

Yes. I’m sorry, yes, that’s correct.

Talk a little bit about what you saw that Tuesday. How did you find out? Were you on the street?

I went out. I listen to the radio while I work. Can’t hear it half the time, when I’m cutting or welding, but that’s how I learned something happened. I saw, you know, what everyone saw. The stuff on television. The stuff that ran once on television and got pulled. People running. People tired from running. I remember I’d been walking a while in a loop when someone offered me a bottle of water. They thought I’d been, somehow, a victim. Maybe one of the ones who got out. I get dirty when I work.

There’s this theory I have about your September series.

By all means.

You reminded me when you touched on the buildings. Instead of the towers, you chose to depict the victims — the actual physical people, the man on the plane, the woman in the office, the falling man—

Yes.

No one was willing to show those images. It was a kind of censorship.

Censorship is a strong word.

Where were those images then? Where else?

I don’t think I can address all that. Clearly, what I was trying to do, I failed.

You got people talking.

Not in the way I intended. That’s something artists say a lot, don’t they — good or bad, as long as it gets people talking? I don’t understand that. People are always talking. They’re desperate for talk. They’ll talk about anything. Most of what they say is stupid.

And if they hadn’t taken the series away when they did?