Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

“Sorry, there must be some mistake. This is my loft.”

“No, Bosco’s been living here for over twenty years,” I insisted.

“No, you must have the wrong building. This is Forty-nine Walker.”

“I know it’s Forty-nine Walker, goddamnit! I live upstairs on five. I’ve been living there for years. What the fuck is going on here?”

The guy’s face tensed up then, and he started to close the door. He said, “You need to take a break, boss. Patty Constantine lives up there, and I doubt you live with her and Yvonne. I don’t know who you are, but you sure as hell don’t live in this building.”

He slammed the door. I pounded on it and yelled, “I’m Charles Wilmot!” a number of times, until my throat was sore and I heard the man threaten to call the police unless I left.

So I did. When I reached the street I was crying, just blubbering like a little lost kid. I was saying, “Okay, change back! Change back now! Change back!” but it kept on being the same merciless twenty-first-century New York, except that I’d been squeezed out of it like a zit and replaced by a painter who was doing just fine and was still married to the woman he loved and was painting just the kind of stuff I could’ve done and wouldn’t.

Then I had my cell phone in my hand and I was punching Mark’s private number, not Lotte, never Lotte, because she couldn’t see me this way, she couldn’t know about the drug or any of that, and what if she confirmed it, that we all of us lived in that beautiful rich-guy’s loft together and all my memories of the last twenty years were false?

Mark answered and I jabbered, and he said he was with a client and couldn’t talk but he’d try to break away, but for Christ’s sake calm down. In fact, his voice through the tiny earpiece was calming, it was contact with someone who knew me, the real me. I took some deep breaths and felt the sweat start to cool on my face and agreed to meet him at Gorman’s in half an hour.

The lunch rush was just clearing out when I got to the saloon, and I took a seat at the bar. “Where’s Clyde?” I asked the young woman behind the bar. I’d never seen her before, and Clyde has been the day barman at Gorman’s since the Beame administration.

“ Clyde?” she said, clueless, obviously, and my insides started to wobble again and I ordered a martini to make them stop. I drank it and ordered another one and I noticed that my Hillary painting wasn’t up on the wall anymore. It had been replaced by a framed vintage prize-fight poster. I asked the girl what happened to it and she said she didn’t know what I was talking about, and I was about to give her an argument-in fact, I was yelling at her-when Mark came in and dragged me to one of the corner tables and asked me what the fuck was up with me.

I told him. I told him about the fancy loft and my key not working in my door and the guy in Bosco’s place and it added up to…what? Someone had stolen my life and replaced me with someone else? And even as I said the words they seemed the very definition of crazy to me, a short step from conversations with space aliens and the messages from the CIA. But he heard me out and then said, “We got a problem, kid.”

“We?”

“Oh, yeah. I just guaranteed Castelli you’re going to do his ceiling and now you’re having a nervous breakdown on me.”

A little glow of hope here. “So the ceiling is a real job and I, like, wouldn’t have taken a job like that unless I was a starving hack commercial guy, would I?”

“I don’t know, Chaz. Maybe you needed a break. Maybe you’re fascinated by Tiepolo. Who knows what artists will do? Hockney did all those Polaroids for years-”

“Fuck Hockney!” I said, louder than I had intended, and people in the bar looked our way. “And fuck you! What happened to my Clinton painting?”

“What are you talking about, Chaz? What Clinton painting?”

“That one, the one next to the bar that’s been there for years, and the bartender’s wrong-”

“Chaz! Calm yourself the fuck down!”

“Just tell me I’m who I am!” I was shouting now, and he replied, in just the sort of soothing voice that does more than anything else to inflame incipient madness, “What good would that do, man? If you’re as nuts as you say, you could be imagining me saying just what you want to hear. Or the opposite. Look, let’s get out of here, you’re going to get eighty-sixed if you keep screaming like that.”

He threw some money on the table, more than necessary to cover our tab with a generous tip, and hustled me out into the street. There he used his cell to call his black car, and in a few minutes it appeared and we got in. Which was fine with me at that point. Black car, Mark talking on his cell to some client, a normal situation-he wasn’t particularly concerned with what had happened to me, so why should I be? Yes, crazy logic, but just then that was all the logic I had.

We pulled up in front of his gallery and got out. He had some business to transact; I could wait in his office, upstairs from the showroom. I was content to do so; I had no pressing engagements. I sat in Mark’s big leather chair and closed my eyes. Maybe I could go to sleep, I thought, and when I woke up everything would be back to normal. No, that wasn’t going to work, I was wired despite the drinks. Okay, I kept coming back to the idea that this had to be a side effect of salvinorin, something they hadn’t figured on, some delicate system in my brain had collapsed and I was hallucinating an alternate reality as a successful painter of the kind of paintings I happened to despise.

Then I thought, Wait a second, I have a life, with all kinds of physical traces, bank accounts, paper trails, websites, I’ll just check it out right now, and so I turned to Mark’s computer and Googled myself. I had a website, it seemed, a beautiful one, all about my wonderfully slick nudes, and strangely enough it displayed some paintings, early stuff, that I actually recalled doing. The website I remembered, with my magazine illustrations on it, was gone.

I tried to get into my bank account online. My password didn’t work.

I pulled out my cell phone and brought up my phone book. I had the name of every magazine art director in New York in that list, and they were all gone, replaced by a bunch of names I didn’t recognize. But Lotte’s name was there, and almost without volition I found myself ringing the home number associated with her name, a number I didn’t recognize, a Manhattan number. It rang; then a message telling me that I’d reached the home of Lotte Rothschild, Chaz Wilmot, Milo, and Rose, and I could leave a message at the beep. I left no message.

No hope then, the hallucination was complete. The me I remembered no longer existed. Except for Mark. And now I was terrified of Mark. Mark was God now; he could erase me with a word. So I passed the time until he chose to reappear. I played computer solitaire. I cleaned my nails with my Swiss Army knife. While I had the knife out I carved my monogram into the side of his desk drawer, so in case this was a complete hallucination and I was really someplace else, I could come back and check. If I remembered.

It turns out that when you’re going crazy it’s probably better to be with a complete narcissist like Slotsky than with a caring person. Your agony is so trivial to him that in a strange way it stops being so all-consuming to you. Mark came bouncing in with a big smile, talking about some killing he’d just made on a painting. He was in the mood to celebrate and he just happened to have an invitation to a big opening at Claude Demme in Chelsea. Sushi from Mara was promised, and unlimited Taittinger. My little difficulty was apparently forgotten, and I was willing to pretend it was no big deal for the nonce, because I was waiting to wake up. One day at a time, as they say in rehab. It goes for the minutes too.