Unknown - The Genius

Knowing that the artist hailed from that hellpit awakened a sense of obligation in me, one that I had no right to feel. I didn’t build the damn thing; my grandfather did. I wasn’t responsible for its poor upkeep; my father and brothers were. Nevertheless I began to rationalize. There wasn’t any harm in having a look at this so-called art by this so-called artist. Provided word didn’t get around that the Muller Gallery had flung open its

doors, all I stood to lose was a few minutes of my time, a sacrifice I would make for Tony. And he had a decent eye. If he said a piece had merit, it probably did.

Not that I intended to represent anyone new. My roster was full. But people like to have their good taste confirmed, and I supposed that even Tony, who I considered the picture of self-composure, was not immune to the need for validation.

“You can give him my e-mail address.”

“Ethan—”

“Or he can come by, if he’d like. Tell him to call first and use your name.”

“Ethan. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know where he is.”

“Who.”

“The artist.”

“You don’t know where the artist is?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. He’s gone.”

“Gone where.”

“Gone gone. Three months he misses rent. Nobody’s seen him. They start thinking he might have died, so the super opens the place up, but instead of finding the tenant, finds the drawings. He had the good sense to call me before tossing them.”

“He called you directly?”

“He called the management company. They called up the tree. Believe me, there’s a reason it got this far. The work is out of this world.”

I was skeptical. “Drawings.”

“Yes. But they’re as good as paintings. Better.”

“What are they like?”

“I can’t describe them.” An unfamiliar note of urgency came into his voice. “You have to see for yourself. The room itself is essential to the experience.”

I told him he sounded like catalogue copy.

“Don’t be snarky.”

“Come on, Tony. Do you really think—” “Trust me. When can you come?”

“Well. It’s a busy couple of weeks. I’m going to Miami—” “N-n-n. Today. When can you come today.” “I can’t. Are you kidding? Today? I’m in the middle of work.” “Take a break.”

“I haven’t even gotten started.”

“Then you’re not interrupting anything.”

“I can come up—next Tuesday. How about then?”

“I’ll send a car for you.”

“Tony,” I said. “It can wait. It’ll have to.”

He said nothing, the most effective rebuke of all. I held the phone aside to ask Ruby for a slot in my schedule, but Tony’s voice came squawking from the receiver.

“Don’t ask her. Don’t ask the girl.”

CCTJ ť

I m—

“Get in a cab. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

As I gathered my coat and bag and walked to the corner to pick up a cab, my cell phone rang again. It was Kristjana. She’d done some thinking. August could work.

4

ll twenty-four Muller Courts towers are named for gemstones, a stab at elegance that misses its mark by some distance. I had the driver circle the block until I spotted Tony waiting for me in front of the Garnet unit, his tan camel-hair coat vivid against the brick, sniffing distance from a heap of trash bags bleeding into the gutter. Above a concrete awning fluttered the three flags of country, state, and city, and a fourth, for the Muller Corporation.

We entered the lobby, overheated and fumy with institutional floor cleaner. Everybody in uniform—the security guard inside his bulletproof kiosk, the handyman prying off baseboards near the management office— seemed to know Tony, acknowledging him out of either cordiality or fear.

A reinforced glass door led into a dark courtyard, hemmed in by Garnet behind us, and on three sides by the Tourmaline, Lapis Lazuli, and Platinum units.

I remember once asking my father how they could have named a building Platinum, which even I, at age seven, knew was not a stone. He didn’t answer me, and so I repeated myself, louder. He kept reading, looking supremely annoyed.

Don’t ask stupid questions.

All I wanted to do from then on was to ask as many stupid questions as possible. My father soon declined to look up at me when I approached, finger crooked, mouth full of imponderables. Who decides what goes in the

dictionary. Why don’t men have breasts. I would have asked my mother but she was already dead by then, which might help explain why my questions so irritated my father. Everything that I did or said served the same purpose: to remind him that I existed, and that she did not.

At some point I figured out why they chose Platinum. They ran out of stones.

Seen from high above, the courtyards from which Muller Courts draws its name look like dumbbells. Each consists of a pair of hexagons, four sides of which are residential towers and two of which taper into a rectangular stretch of community property—the bar of the dumbbell—that features a playground, a small parking lot, and a grassy patch for sitting when weather permits. Between them, the various courtyards also contain six basketball hoops, a volleyball net, an asphalt soccer field, a swimming pool (drained in winter), a handful of unkempt gardens, three small houses of worship (mosque, church, synagogue), a dry cleaner, and two bodegas. If your needs were simple enough, you could get by without ever leaving the complex.

As we crossed the hexagon, its towers seemed to loom inward, weighed down by air conditioners painted in pigeon shit. Balconies served as overflow storage for decrepit furniture, moldy carpet remnants, three-legged walkers, charcoal grills abandoned in mid-assembly. Two kids in oversized NBA jerseys played a rough game of one-on-one, driving toward a basket whose broken rim drooped at a thirty-degree angle.

I pointed this out to Tony.

“I’ll write a memo,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

The so-called artist lived in the Carnelian, on the eleventh floor, and on the way up I asked Tony what efforts he’d made to get in touch with the man.

“He’s gone, I told you.”

I felt uneasy waltzing into a stranger’s apartment, and told Tony as much. He assured me, though, that the tenant had forfeited all rights when he stopped paying his rent. Tony had never misled me in the past, and I didn’t think him capable of doing so. Why would the thought have crossed my mind? I trusted him.

Looking back, I might have been a tad more careful.

Outside the door to C-1156, Tony asked me to wait while he went in and cleared the way. The entry-hall fixture didn’t work, and the rest of the place was very crowded; he didn’t want me to trip. I heard him moving around inside, heard a soft thud and a muttered oath. Then he emerged from the gloom and pinned an arm across the door.

“All right.” He stood back to allow me in. “Go nuts.”

BEGIN WITH THE MUNDANE, the squalid. A narrow entrance opens onto a single room, no more than a hundred and twenty square feet. Floorboards worn down to the bare wood, dried out and shrunken and splitting. The walls waterstained and pricked with thumbtack holes. A dusty lightbulb, burning. A mattress. A makeshift desk: inkstained particleboard balanced on stacks of cinderblock. A low bookcase. In the corner, a white enamel sink, ar-chipelagoed with black chips; underneath, a single-burner electric hotplate. The windowshade permanently down, unable or unwilling to retract. A gray short-sleeved sport shirt on a hanger hooked around the bolt of a heat pipe. A gray sweater draped across a folding chair. A pair of cracked brown leather shoes, soles pulling away from uppers, making duckbills. A doorless bathroom; a toilet; a sloped tile floor with a drain underneath a ceiling-mount showerhead.