Unknown - The Genius

All of this I saw later.

At first I saw only boxes.

Motor oil boxes, packing tape boxes, boxes for computers and printers. Fruit crates. Milk crates. 100% REAL ITALIAN TOMATOES. Boxes lining the walls, tightening the entryway by two-thirds. Smothering the bed. Tottering in stacks like elaborately vertical desserts; on the sink; in the shower, crammed in up to the ceiling; boxes, bowing the bookcase and bricking up the windows. The desk, the chair; the shoes crushed flat. Only the crapper remained exposed.

And in the air: paper. That rich smell somewhere between human skin and bark. Paper, decaying and shedding, wood pulp creating a dry haze that eddied around my body, flowed into my lungs, and burned. I began to cough.

“Where’s the art?” I asked.

Tony squeezed in beside me. “Here,” he said, resting his hand on the nearest box. Then he began pointing to all the other boxes. “And there, there, there, and there.”

Incredulous, I opened one of the boxes. Inside was a neat stack of what appeared to be blank paper, sour yellow and crumbling at the corners. For a moment I thought Tony was playing a joke on me. Then I picked up the first page and turned it over and everything else disappeared.

I lack the vocabulary to make you see what I saw. Regardless: a dazzling menagerie of figures and faces; angels, rabbits, chickens, elves, butterflies, amorphous beasts, fantastic ten-headed beings of myth, Rube Goldberg machinery with organic parts, all drawn with an exacting hand, tiny and swarming across the page, afire with movement, dancing, running, soaring, eating, eating one another, exacting horrific and bloody tortures, a carnival of lusts and emotions, all the savagery and beauty that life has to offer—but exaggerated, delirious, dense, juvenile, perverse—and cartoon-ish and buoyant and hysterical—and I felt set upon, mobbed, overcome with the desire to look away as well as the desire to dive into the page.

The real attention to detail, though, was concentrated not in these characters but in the landscape they populated. A living earth, of wobbling dimensions: here flat, there exquisitely deep, inflated geographical features, undulating roads labeled with names twenty letters long. Mountains were buttocks and breasts and chins; rivers became veins spilling purplish liquid nourishing flowers with devil’s heads; trees sprouting from a mulch of words and nonsense words; straightrazor grass. In some places the line was whisper-fine, elsewhere so thick and black that it was a miracle the pen had not torn straight through the page.

The drawing pushed at its edges, leaching into the murky air.

Electrified, unnerved, I stared for six or seven minutes, a long time to look at a sheet of of 81/2-by-11 paper; and before I could censor myself, I decided that whoever had drawn this was sick. Because the composition had a psychotic quality, the fever of action taken to warm oneself from the chill of solitude.

I tried to place what I was seeing in the context of other artists. The best references I could muster at the time were Robert Crumb and Jeff Koons; but the drawing had none of their kitsch, none of their irony; it was raw and honest and naive and violent. For all my efforts to keep the piece orderly—to tame it with rationality, experience, and knowledge—I still felt like it was going to jump out of my hands, to skitter up the walls and spin itself into smoke, ash, oblivion. It lived.

Tony said, “What do you think?”

I set the drawing aside and picked up the next one. It was just as baroque, just as mesmerizing, and I gave it the same amount of attention. Then, realizing that if I did that for every drawing in there, I’d never leave, I picked up a handful of pages and riffled them, causing a sliver near their edges to disintegrate. They were all dazzling, all of them. My chest knotted up. As early as then, I was having trouble coming to grips with the sheer monomania of the project.

I put the stack down and returned to the first two drawings, which I set side-by-side for comparison. My eyes went back and forth between them, like those games you do as a child. There are nine thousand differences, can you find them all? I began to feel light-headed. It might have been the dust.

Tony said, “You see how it works.”

I didn’t, and so he turned one of the pages upside down. The drawings aligned like puzzle pieces: streams flowed on and roads rolled out. Faces half-complete found their counterparts. Then he pointed out that the backs of the drawings were not, in fact, blank. At each edge and in the center, lightly penciled in a tiny, uniform script, were numbers, like so:

2016

4377 4378 4379 6740

The next page was numbered 4379 in the center, and then, clockwise from the top: 2017, 4380, 6741, 4378. The pages connected where the edge of one indicated the center of the other.

“They’re all like this?”

“As far as I can tell.” He looked around. “I haven’t made much of a dent.”

“How many are we talking about?”

“Go on in. See for yourself.”

I squeezed into the room, covering my mouth with my sleeve. I’ve inhaled plenty of unnatural substances in my day, but the sensation of paper in my lungs was entirely new and unpleasant. I had to shove boxes out of the way; dust leopard-printed my slacks. The light from the hallway dwindled, and my own breaths seemed to have no echo. The eight feet between me and the door had effectively erased New York. Living here would be like living ten miles below the earth, like living in a cave. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was supremely disorienting.

From far away, I heard Tony say my name.

I sat on the edge of the bed—six exposed inches of mattress; where did he sleep?—and took in a stomachful of dirty, woody air. How many drawings were there? What did the piece look like when assembled? I envisioned an endless patchwork quilt. Surely they could not all fit together. Surely nobody had that much mental power or patience. IfTony turned out to be correct, I was looking at one of the larger works of art ever created by a single person. Certainly it was the largest drawing in the world.

The throb of genius, the stink of madness; gorgeous and mind-boggling and it took my breath away.

Tony shimmied between two boxes and stood next to me, both of us wheezing.

I said, “How many people know about this?”

“You. Me. The super. Maybe some of the other people at the company, but they were just passing on the message. Only a few people have seen it firsthand.”

“Let’s keep it that way.”

He nodded. Then he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“What was the question.”

“What do you think?”

3

he artist’s name was Victor Cracke.

ROSARIO QUINTANA, apartment C-1154: “I didn’t see him a lot. He came in and out a couple times a day, but I’m at work, so I didn’t see him unless I was home sick or I had to come back for some reason, to pick up my son when his father drops him off too early. I’m a nurse. Sometimes I passed him in the hall. He left early in the morning. Or, you know what, he might’ve worked at night, because I don’t think I saw him after six o’clock. I think maybe he drove a taxi?”

ROSARIO’S SEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON, Kenny: “He was weird-looking.” How so? “His hair.” What color was it? “Black.” [rubs nose] “And white.” Gray?

“Yeah. But not all of it.” Long or short? “… yeah.”

Which one. Long? [nods] Or short? [rubs nose] Both?

[nods, makes gesture indicating spikes in every direction] “Like that, kind of.”

Like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket? [look of confusion]

JASON CHARLES, apartment C-1158: “He talked to himself. I heard him all the time, like a party goin on.” How do you know he was alone?