Rick Moody - The Diviners

Perception of entanglement, my word for a particular set of symptoms that appears frequently in paintings by adolescent bipolar sufferers, precedes formulation of aesthetic strategy, and since entanglement is merely a symbolically exaggerated representation of the fact that the patient is connected to other people and feels, in this connection, exaggerated sets of human emotions, is it correct to interpret canvases featuring entanglement as types of discretionary choice, or rather as diagrams that offer possibilities for self-understanding or even recovery? Perhaps in this way, as in the automatic activity of the surrealist movement, so-called genuine artwork, art in the category of the high, begins to become more meaningful as it recoils from aesthetic strategy and moves closer to the compensatory and therapeutic artwork of disturbed adolescents.

The victim, in her diary, uses these and other passages from volumes by Weller in order to talk about a particular series of artworks by Tyrone Duffy, apparently made toward the end of his productive life as an artist. These paintings, according to the victim, are known in some circles as the Thirst Paintings, at least among collectors of the work, though this title was not of the artist’s own design. Thirst here coheres with a theme noticed by the victim in Weller’s book:

Thirst is a frequent symptom of some of the medication used in treatment of these adolescents, both in outpatient clinics and in the hospital. Antidepressant medications, as well as lithium, used in the treatment of bipolar disorder, have dry mouth as a side effect. Inpatient psychiatric treatment centers frequently make sure that their clients have plenty of water to drink.

But, Weller goes on, as quoted by the diarist:

Doesn’t this thirst stand for something else, too? Doesn’t it stand for a quality that all adolescents have? A desire for religiosity and spiritual experience? A desire to be a part of adult life? A desire to have the self-determination of adults? Especially when confined in hospital, when self-determination is at a minimum, the adolescent thirsts, and so it’s no surprise that this parched quality is often a part of their dialogue and even of their artwork.

Duffy’s Thirst Paintings, according to the victim, here also compiling stories told by others, involve defaced works by contemporary novelists, wherein certain words are highlighted, as if to indicate patterns concealed in the work, patterns known only to Duffy himself, and although there is no indication that Duffy intended thirst to be the only theme of the work, he did, on every occasion, highlight the word thirst. The paintings themselves consist of paint applied with a “random energy” to leaves from books shellacked, varnished, or otherwise affixed to canvases. The paint then simultaneously conceals and reveals the secret texts, according the style known as palimpsest, so that, again, “ entanglement is the secret being revealed, a secret web of stuff, people, themes, places, lives,” according to the diarist.

In middle October, the victim apparently made contact with Tyrone Duffy himself. The meeting took place in a Polish coffee shop in the East Village known for serving twenty-four hours a day. Her first impression, she says, is that Duffy is “completely sexy.” And she goes on to ask, with intuition about her own motivation, whether it’s desperation that looks desirable or some inherently attractive quality.

His eyes are really far away, though I’m not even sure what I mean by that. He has trouble making eye contact. He never seems like he’s looking at me at all. There’s never any of that seesawing of glances you get when men are doing their seductive thing. I never look away and then catch him looking at me. But especially if I say anything about the work, about having seen some of the work, he doesn’t seem to want to hear about it. His voice is a whisper, pretty much, and he mostly refuses to talk about things. He says, “Well, that was all a long time ago, and I haven’t done anything like that lately.” He says he just reads now. Says he started reading the books in those paintings, instead of painting on them, and that he regrets defacing some of those books. Says he figured he’d go to graduate school, where he could read more, and then he stopped going to classes. I asked him what he was reading, because it would keep the conversation alive, and he said Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault and Edward Said. I’m not really sure he has stopped painting. I think he hasn’t and just says it.

The conversation between the victim and Duffy does not last that long because Duffy claims to need to return to work. When asked his profession at present, he looks at the victim skeptically, as if she should be able to tell. The victim indicates that a certain inexplicable horror overcomes her when she first learns that Duffy is now working as a bicycle messenger because it seems so hard. It seems to the victim that the economics of fame, however brief, however long ago, should have inoculated him against a marginal working-class job. And so she is simply hoping it is not true. However, it is true. At this point the victim asks Tyrone Duffy the one question she has been intending to ask him all along, which is simply: “Do you have any of the old work left?” To which Duffy, according to the diary, responds, “I got a whole mini- storage box of that stuff. Not that I’ve been in there in a while.” After which he makes an exit, “like a cavalier on his mount.” The victim reports that her feelings afterward were like “love feelings, all confused, like he was going to start affecting my appetite. I think it’s just the work, or the proximity to the work. Maybe to talk to Tyrone is to take my own job seriously, whether he can take his work seriously or not.”

At this point, the detectives would like to observe that it is a salutary development for the case that the victim is such a prodigious diarist. If the perpetrator were aware that a diary existed, the perpetrator would certainly have taken steps to prevent its being obtained by law enforcement. But the perpetrator didn’t remove the diary from the person of the victim, nor did the perpetrator take any money, nor did the perpetrator exert any sexual control over the victim. The perpetrator, who may have been on a bicycle, simply carried a brick in his hand until, for whatever reason, he saw the back of the head of the victim as she walked on a sidewalk, on Third Avenue, and the perpetrator then cocked his arm and battered the head of the victim. She stumbled forward and collapsed.

Once the facts are released by electronic mail message to the force about the possibility of Tyrone Duffy as suspect, by virtue of his being a bicycle messenger, the report comes back from a guy on traffic duty: He broke up a fight on Thursday morning between a bicycle messenger and some guys in midtown. That bicycle messenger sounds like this bicycle messenger. And that bicycle messenger’s name is Tyrone Duffy. Soon thereafter, the story has leaked to the press. Eyewitnesses are coming forth. Amid the hysteria of the city in recent days, the car crash in the Diamond District, et cetera, the detectives admit that reading the diary has been a pleasant way to spend a few hours. Even if the diary is sad, and even if the diary is the intimate record of a woman who now appears to have very little, if any, short-term memory. Most days, the detectives find themselves with chalk circles indicating the final resting place of deceased persons, and it is nice to read about the life and loves of a young woman, a woman who may well recover, and they find that in this way, they love the victim. The victim seems to have pluck and enthusiasm for the world, and the victim seems to stand for things that a young woman of New York should stand for, like hard work and frequent use of the public library system, and they think that maybe if they were younger and not married, they could fall for her, or at least each of them feels this way in his own private reserve, and it is at this point that they decide to go to the hospital to see if Samantha Lee is alert and receiving visitors.