Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

Each time I watched Fadia gather Selim up in her arms and put him in his pram and then walk round the quad and disappear once more through the main gates of the College, I felt certain there would be no next time, that at any moment she might disappear without explanation or forwarding address. I made a point of not hectoring her, always waiting for her to contact me by email or text message to arrange our next meeting until the final one before my departure, which I took the risk of requesting, inviting them over to my house one evening in late July this year, the day before the movers came to pack. Selim was by then seven months old and although not yet crawling he was turning over and alert, and, I liked to think, happy to see me. As we sat in the garden I held him in my lap and he dozed, sucking the tip of my index finger.

‘He’s growing fast.’

‘His parents are tall. And his grandparents. At least mine are. Yours must be, too,’ Fadia said, though I realized we had never shown off photos of our parents or other family members to each other. I had looked up photographs of her mother and father on the web but they had not seemed particularly tall to me. Saif I had not risked searching for, afraid, even then, that entering his name into a search engine might raise a red flag to whatever powers of monitoring might be at work.

‘Reasonably tall. Both under six feet. I don’t know where I got my height.’

‘Better diet.’

We had made a custom of this kind of small talk, but I knew there was too much politeness about it. It was not the conversation of people who had slept together more than once, and who were now living with and loving the unexpected result.

‘I leave at the end of the week.’

‘I remember.’

‘So this is goodbye for now.’

‘Indeed,’ she said.

‘Can I hope to think you might come to visit New York?’

‘He doesn’t have a passport yet.’

‘That’s easily sorted.’

‘Don’t pressure me, Jeremy.’

‘I didn’t mean to, honestly.’

‘No, I understand. You want to see him again. I want that for him, too.’

They stayed another quarter-hour and then she said it was time to go, he needed a nap, and she hoped to do some work. It was the last time I saw them. All my subsequent messages, my emails and text messages, my phone calls, even the physical letters I have sent through the mail, have gone unanswered, unacknowledged. I assume she and he, my ex-student and son, are still in Oxford, although I know it is possible they may have moved on, to London or Paris, or, though the prospect terrifies me, to Cairo. Each month the money slips from my British account into hers. It goes and it goes, and I hope in a way that perhaps makes me worse than a fool, that it goes to support my son, and that wherever he is, Selim is growing up with the knowledge of me as his father.

All this unfolded in my mind on the train back to the city from Rhinebeck, only weeks ago, the tails of my coat spread behind me like wings, the Catskills receding as I was propelled backwards towards the city and my own uncertain future, moving away from the past I have been contemplating, staring at the frozen waters and the storm blowing down from Canada, gaping at the wreckage of my life that remains heaped before me.

Although it was a Sunday and her gallery was closed, I knew there was a chance Meredith would be there, working, as she often was. When I arrived I could see her standing inside before a large canvas composed of millions of small dots depicting a street scene in what could have been New York, although it was impossible to tell for certain, an image like a pixelated shot taken by a CCTV camera aimed down from a lamppost to record half a dozen women and two men walking in either direction, one woman with a phone pressed to her ear and oblivious of the man whose hand was reaching into the bag slung across her back. I missed the opening of the exhibition in October and knew nothing about the artist, a French painter called Guillaume Pari, whose name was painted in three-foot-tall gray letters across one of the gallery’s white walls.

As my daughter let me in, kissing me on both cheeks, she turned back to the painting, the surface of which looked machine-made, each dot of acrylic paint raised and beveled along its perfectly square edges.

‘I can’t stop staring at it. I really had no reason to be here today but I wanted to come look at the paintings by myself, without any members of the public or collectors or, you know, my employees. I wanted to be alone with the work.’

‘I can leave if this is a bad time.’

‘No, Dad, that’s not what I meant. You’re not other people. What do you think of the paintings?’

‘Very precise. Not like the work of a human hand.’

‘It’s done with a CNC machine. Pari takes images from CCTV cameras and manipulates them on his computer, degrades them, and turns them into these impressionistic visions of the now , like Pissarro or Seurat. We forget the Impressionists were painting contemporary life, no more classical or biblical scenes, and that in itself was revolutionary, their drive to make the ordinary into art, to demonstrate what painting can do that photography can’t, although we might argue about that, I guess maybe that’s what Pari is doing, demonstrating how the degraded photograph is effectively no different from what can be achieved in paint, or that painting is itself a kind of mechanical process whose effects are ultimately no different from photography. When you take a picture with your phone or your tablet and then use a program to alter it and it comes out looking pretty convincingly like a painting made with a brush, it’s hard to be categorical about what is and isn’t art. Anyway, when Pari has finished manipulating the images, the computer spits out the commands to the machine, which makes the painting.’

‘Is it art if the artist isn’t the one controlling the paint?’

‘But he is controlling it. It’s his design, his program, just a machine doing the actual application of the medium. I don’t know that it’s any different in the end, only a matter of degree. I think they’re beautiful, and creepy, however they’re done.’

‘How does he find the images?’

‘They’re licensed from all these different law enforcement agencies. At least that’s what his gallerist in Paris tells me. I’ve never met Guillaume in person, and I kind of suspect he doesn’t actually exist. There are no photographs of him anywhere. No one I’ve talked to has ever met him, not even Marie-Edith, she’s the French gallerist. The paintings are delivered by a van to her gallery in Paris but the driver picks them up from some warehouse in the countryside and Marie-Edith says she even tried to track down the owner of the warehouse but could only find a holding company, and then another holding company, and then a shell corporation, like a Chinese box or something — and get this, the warehouse is on a street in the middle of nowhere and there’s no CCTV watching it. Whoever Guillaume Pari is, he’s found a way of making himself invisible. He might not even be called Guillaume Pari. He could be some other person, not even an artist, or it could be a collective of artists or activists. It’s kind of wonderful, all the uncertainties, the invisibility of the artist who makes work entirely about visibility. I wrote an essay along those lines in the catalog. Did I give you a copy?’

‘I haven’t had a chance to read it. I will today, this evening, when I get home. Are we completely alone here?’

‘Why, are you going to kill me?’ she laughed. It seemed an odd joke.

‘I just wondered if you had time for a coffee.’

She led me through the three white rooms of the gallery, which opened off each other in the converted Chelsea warehouse located within spitting distance of the Hudson, and at the back, through a white sculpted door that is itself a work of art, a piece by Castellani probably worth more than what Meredith pays her assistant each year, we came to the offices and the kitchen where she pressed a button that ground beans and made the coffee, drizzling into two stainless steel cups.