DAVID LEO RICE / JAKOB AT MASS MoCA
I: The Cities
Beyond the bazaar there is a further territory, one I know I’ve been to before but can never arrive at again. After the last market stalls, where the streets slope up to the left and level out along the cliffs overlooking the river, stands a bridge used by very few people, stretching a long way to a far side that is even less visited, as if most of those few who do step onto that bridge turn back partway. I too will turn back soon enough. I pass the restaurants nestled behind glass in rock enclosures behind the back of the bazaar, all shuttered in the mid-afternoon heat, and I press on, making for the bridge, which I know I have to hit with some speed in order to not turn back right away.
The bridge opens over a rocky, fast-moving, shallow river dividing one continent from another. It’s a matter of common knowledge that I’m walking through Istanbul, but the continents aren’t quite Europe and Asia. That border is behind me, in the known part of the city. This is the backside, facing another border, a more illicit one, little discussed. I hurry along despite my guilt over never arriving at the restaurants, where I sense some appointment has been waiting to occur.
Extending well beyond the river, the bridge stretches straight and flat into the distance. It’s made of concrete and metal, but something about it feels tenuous, like a rope bridge over a narrow in the Amazon. I set out onto it, away from the last known district of Istanbul and toward my destination. I cross it easily, anticlimactically, no longer certain if it’s true that few have come this way before. Perhaps this is no more than my daily constitutional. Perhaps I even live on the far side.
Still, on the far side, I feel beyond the reach of where I’ve been before, in a district immediately notable for its lack of detail. I cross a concrete lot and enter a shopping mall where most of the stores are closed, empty slots with all the lights off, or only a few on. Perhaps a lone clerk behind a dusty till. I have no business here, no shopping to do or money to do it with, but I come often. This much is clear now. All the time, perhaps. A similarity strikes me between the emptiness of the stores and the emptiness of the being I’m embodied as, so that it seems equally difficult, and thus equally easy, to guess at the character of this place and that of myself. A trite thought, obvious enough on the surface, though still one I’m glad to have had.
I loiter, exploring the mall’s emptiness with no urgency but a growing unease, an awareness that soon I’ll be tapping on the back of the backside, knocking on a door that no one can open. I imagine how it would feel if this mall were salient to me, filled with tender or painful memories, and by imagining it, I make it slightly true. I grow increasingly less innocent here, as if I were sinking into a life I’d lived and then abandoned and then repented for abandoning, compelled back by a unique gravity.
The place begins to oppress me. I know there’s no way out except back the way I came, but I also know I can’t retreat. Something forces me onward, pressing my face against the far side of the concourse with its wilted palms and dry fountain, knocking my nose and lips against a smooth glass pane that I know I should turn from. But the glass is all I can think about. The openness of the Cities and my apparent freedom to inhabit them without responsibility means nothing if I can’t break through this pane and continue beyond it, into the territory that extends out of Istanbul on a side that is neither Europe nor Asia.
I know I could remain happily in the Cities forever if only I agreed to leave this pane alone, to turn from the mall and cross the bridge back the other way and explore the bazaars and opium dens that have been set out for my enjoyment, but my refusal to do so feels ancestral. A bad habit passed down through the generations, each pushing it along until it dead-ended with me. Indeed, I can see there’s some action I might postpone a little longer if the pane doesn’t give—I will not, here and now, dash myself flat against it—but the breakthrough my ancestors shirked feels too close to shirk again.
None of Istanbul, I can tell, with the certainty of someone who’s had this exact thought many, many times before, can be of any value to me until I discover what’s on the other side, even if it’s a sheer plunge off the edge of the earth. The Cities in all their bountiful extent are nothing but an insult until I know what they extend away from, and thus what reprieve they offer.
*
Nevertheless, for now, I manage to pull away. A flat outline of my body remains pressed to the glass as the rest of me skulks back into the dejection that flares up at this point every evening. My surrender is enough to manifest a door at the opposite end of the green-tiled concourse, a door I open onto the rain-slicked cobblestones of a hill that slopes up into the high piney mansion district overlooking the harbor of what might as well be Lisbon. A castle rests on a plateau at the end of the winding street, and I can see its floodlights swarming a hushed garden party in the dim ocean air.
I turn from it and trudge along, looking downward as the Cities boil and recombine through the night and into another hot noon. I work my way up and up the winding path until I can look over the glittering harbor from a ridge above the castle’s grounds, where servants now bustle with the garden party’s refuse. Rowhouses and the occasional skyscraper cover the hillsides descending to my left and right and I feel weightless and dimensionless among them, neither a beggar nor a wayfarer nor a hero nor a villain, nor even a tourist. I’m just here, listlessly tracking the bustle of ships in the harbor.
Sometimes I board those ships for evenings that are either titillating or terrifying, hobnobbing with nosy strangers who feign indifference, or who, actually indifferent, welcome me with feigned warmth. I roam through dining halls and ballrooms, looking for something so abstract I wouldn’t know it if I found it. Then I take a lifeboat back to Tokyo or Tunis or Tbilisi, and slip into the streets, crossing four-lane harbor-front boulevards into dense Chinatown alleys and then wide-open post-industrial lots full of subway depots and parked food trucks and factories with their frontage smashed or already rebuilt into breweries and tattoo parlors and espresso bars.
Since leaving Istanbul, it’s been like this, my path winding ever further from the resumption of whatever role I must’ve played in the Cities when I arrived. When I can walk no further, I sit down in a taxi that takes me through dense traffic, under colossal neon towers and then, after a narrow tunnel, over grass-covered boulders and plateaus of cement, like the ruins of the Great Wall of China, rocking back and forth as the driver strains to avoid sheer drops on both sides and I’m terrified that I’ve gotten us lost.
Us? I’m the only one here, I think, aside from the driver who surely knows where we are, yet I feel the guilt of an errant tour guide, of a cocky foreigner who’s claimed to know his adopted city far better than he does. The driver pulls on a pair of fingerless gloves to grip the wheel tighter as he lurches perpendicular to the road, rocking and bucking until we descend a stretch so jagged it’s nearly a staircase and then we’re back in the Istanbul bazaar.
I get out, badly shaken, and wander off, back into what ought to be my element, past a crush of bodies who refuse to regard me and all I can think is, I am no one here. The reach of my anonymity is staggering. I can live here forever only because I am not alive. I grow restless as I make the familiar circuit of the spice and coffee and fruit and fabric stalls, gathering supplies I can’t imagine using.
I’ve long known that my surplus of free time in the Cities is a gift from my family, an unlimited psychic inheritance which has unlocked this space and positioned me within it, yet it’s a gift I can’t accept much longer. If being here means being no one, then put me back on the strip of weedy street that passes Wing Hut, Giant Chinese, and Mama’s Pizza. It’s better to be known in one town, in one room even, than to be unknown in the wild freedom of the universe. “If that means living in a room forever, then so be it,” I declare to seven goat heads on a greasy hook. “Take me there today.”
*
But nothing and no one does. The longer I spend in the Cities, mocking their plentitude by revisiting the same few locations again and again, smearing them with a superfluity of attention in lieu of roaming as far as I’m clearly supposed to, the more fixated I become on a long black motorcade making the rounds of the narrow streets and congregating in the wide-open cathedral squares of what I’ll now call Vienna. I watch the limos and can tell they’re watching me. My attention on the tinted windows is the same as the attention coming through those windows back at me. This stands to reason, as I know that, despite the many loci it’s distributed among, mine is the only presence here, a feeling at once empowering and disgusting.
The motorcade multiplies as it drives, filling in its own shadows with more cars until it’s everywhere at once, on every street, nearly crushing itself at every intersection. The news kiosks and telephone poles have always been filthy with posters for political candidates and demonstrations and metal concerts in arenas in the high suburbs or out by the Danube, but, the longer the motorcade rolls unchecked through the space that no longer seems to belong to me alone, the more these posters converge into a single slogan: “The First Turning Point: Jakob at Mass MoCA.”
Jakob’s name returns to the Cities and brings with it a change of season. A cold wind blows me back to Istanbul and again across the bridge and into that mall, in search of a coat in the empty stores. I find one and pull it around myself and step back onto the bridge without confronting the pane while a long line of black limos crosses toward me beneath a banner that stretches all the way across the river, announcing Jakob at Mass MoCA in imposing bold lettering. I shudder as I stare into one limo after another and see the same passengers repeated in each, a man in front and a boy in back, speeding away from the very spectacle I realize I need to arrive at before it’s too late.
But too late for what? I lean against the railing and watch the limos and understand they’re escaping into the Cities whereas I, if I remain, will remain trapped in them, on the near side of an event that needs to be actualized, in my own lifetime, before I can take on any less derelict role therein. If I’m to take my place in that limo, I’ll have to take my place at the back of the line and begin the journey that those inside are concluding. I may not return as myself—my belly and sternum ache, already yearning to split between the man and the boy, to fill both at once even if it means annihilating whatever I am now—but if I don’t get in line, I’ll suffocate. The Cities will swallow their own air until none remains. Despite my coat, the wind burns my skin and warns me, as if it weren’t already clear, to find a way into that limo before nightfall.
*
I watch the motorcade vanish through a curtain or slit in the daylight behind the mall and, aware of how long and complex the journey ahead is bound to be, I’m overwhelmed by an urge to skip it. I again try to force my way into the back of those limos and ride onward from there, assuming a position of power in the Cities I know I haven’t earned. Whenever the limos stop, I leap out and yank on the back door but I always find it locked. I can see nothing but my own reflection in the tinted windows, looking back at me with an impassive, sleepy smile. When I’m rebuffed enough times and the wind has grown colder still, whipping through a coat that’s become merely decorative, I give up. Compelled by raw desperation more than any awareness of what I’m doing, I begin to gather material from the slag heaps that have come to fill the Cities, as if all the districts I’ve ceased visiting have crumbled in shame, and I drag them like a one-man mule team into a nexus of abandoned factories nestled between the mountains and the harbor in an offshoot of Istanbul that feels more like Budapest.
The environment is responsive to me by the same measure as that to which I’m responsive to it. As soon as my endeavor to build Mass MoCA begins in earnest, all the nightclubs and lounges I frequent, however perfunctorily, set to whispering about Jakob’s upcoming show. Like a stultified Weimar on the verge of its final collapse, the Cities grow increasingly unable to contain their excitement at the coming change. “Jakob’s show’s about to open, Jakob’s show’s about to open,” the Cities pant through the tongues of whoever remains unaccounted for within them.
In the bars and bordellos that remain, I sip the black milk of ambition, a thick, frothy, lukewarm beverage served in tin tankards overflowing their lips. I suck it down, unable to resist no matter how sick it makes me, determined to fill my frame with more ambition than it can hold so that, when it finally splits, both of me will stand a chance of survival.
High on the milk’s queasy, tremulous energy, I transform into a laborer, a conscript hauling stones up the nascent pyramids in the punishing sun, only here I’m dragging concrete across the grounds of a nascent Mass MoCA in the winter dusk. I drive myself onward with unrelenting focus, aware that soon a limo will stop for me. The labor batters me into a trance where I can see the boy-Jakob and his family approaching the museum for the visit that will set the rest of their lives in motion. If construction is not complete by then—if there is no museum for them to arrive at—they will eat a hot dog, take a short hike in a state park, and drive home.
*
I eat every day now at the hot dog stand where I fear Jakob and his family will also eat, and I joke with the vendor in his apron and paper hat about how much everything is going to change when the museum opens and the New Yorkers start rolling in. I ransack the mall for felt and feathers and wax, any materials I can find to slap a museum together in record time, demanding that the hot dog vendor call me Jakob and denying, to myself most of all, that I am or ever was a nameless denizen of the Cities. “I left my home to make something of myself in New York City,” I say aloud, day after day. “I crossed one Lincoln Tunnel after another until I surfaced into the early stages of my triumph and now I’m about to open my first solo exhibition at Mass MoCA, the bridge between the ascent and the apex of my career. The bridge I tried for so long to cross and am finally about to.”
The Cities wither like neglected houseplants as I drag their denizens by the hair away from their nominal lives and into the galleries I’ve built, posing them, some as artworks, some as visitors, some as staff, working as quickly as I can to meet the deadline I’ve committed to. “My show will open on time, my show will open on time,” I promise the sagging remnants of Baku and Tehran. “I haven’t emptied you in vain. Jakob will make it all worthwhile.”
Sometimes I still lose control and fall upon a passing limo, wrenching its back door, begging to be let in and to skip what I know is coming, but I pick myself up off the road after it drives away and return to my labor a little faster each time, repenting for the seconds I’ve wasted.
*
Soon, the Cities will smolder in memory. A realm of ruins, preserved on a little-visited floor of the museum, of interest only to the most esoteric scholars of the Jakob/Wieland life story. I find myself in an unexpected state of mourning in these final days, pumping black milk from the bottoms of kegs in vacant bars, gathering what details I can to feed into the Jakob I’ll have to be if I’m to instantiate myself as a legitimate actor on the other side of the Cities, in which it’s now too late to remain. The sacrifices of my ancestors were not for nothing, I think, though neither were they exactly for me. I cross through the bazaar one last time, lingering at the spice stalls and the fur stalls and the carpet stalls, waiting out the morning so as to arrive at the restaurants on that curving cobbled street just in time, where I intend to stop rather than continuing on to the bridge and the mall where I’ve ended up every time before.
Perhaps, I think, as I approach that street now, I never would’ve balked at the Cities’ finitude if I’d only hit these restaurants at the right hour, had a nice meal and then returned to the sultry afternoon languor in one of Istanbul’s innumerable café districts rather than pressing on to the bridge and the mall and the pane. Today, I arrive just a little after noon, having worked up an appetite through my stroll across the bazaar and a final tour of the Blue Mosque. Even so, one restaurant after another is empty. I try all the doors and find them locked, some with no sign and others with a note reading, in Turkish and English, “All staff rerouted to Mass MoCA.”
Unable to fathom an alternative, I set out up the hill and toward the bridge again. I’m about to cross when a final limo pulls toward me, forcing me backwards. The driver presses the front fender against my groin, adding pressure until I’m backtracking as fast as I can without falling over, unable to stop before my shoulder blades crack the glass on the nearest restaurant’s façade, and then I’m inside, on the tiled floor with the television crackling overhead.
*
The driver steps out, helps me up, blots blood from my shoulder blades, and seats me at a table before a platter of chicken kebab cubes with grilled peppers and tomatoes and minty yogurt sauce, a bowl of lentil soup with sliced lemon and a basket of flatbread beside it. He sits down across from me in a blazer and sunglasses, checking his watch again and again, making me eat a little faster each time.
When I’ve swallowed all that’s there, he nods to something behind me and I turn to regard a cooler flickering in the dark. I rise, approach the cloudy glass, and remove the lone remaining bottle. Returning to the table, I open the black milk of ambition, take a long swig, lick my lips, and nod.
“Alright, Mr. Jakob,” the man says, in a heavy accent, possibly affected, “time to go. The Museum Director is expecting you.”
Clutching my stomach, I follow him through the restaurant’s wrecked façade and into the limo, onto the seat I’ve so often approached in delirium from the other side. We roll out of Istanbul, out of Lisbon, out of Tbilisi, out of Vienna and Budapest and Tokyo and Prague, past the final madmen pounding on the windows and over mountains and oil fields and stretches of country highway beside wild brown meadows until we emerge onto a strip of housing blocks and gas stations and motels and the parked vehicles of summer circuses. Then we cross the Hoosic River on a narrow bridge that turns into several blocks of small-town access road before dead-ending in the Mass MoCA parking lot, beneath a thirty-foot photo of the face I have, for the time being, been granted the chance to wear.
II: The Town
Jakob’s head bobs against the back window of the station wagon, mashing his veil deeper into his eyes. Behind it the wide-open expanse of Istanbul shrinks, its domes and minarets and densely winding hillside neighborhoods collapsing into a thousand Tyson Meat Trucks. He watches the landscape dampen and peel until nothing remains but sparse trees and piles of concrete and then a campus of defunct factory buildings clustered around a giant parking lot beneath a banner that seems to show his face. He allows his mother to remove the veil though he knows it makes no difference here whether he wears it or not. He can already tell that Mass MoCA extends across both sides, the difference between them no greater than that of approaching the same point from the right or the left.
After removing their daypacks and locking the station wagon, his mother and father set out at a rapid clip across the cobbled plaza that separates the parking spaces from the museum’s outdoor installations, passing ice cream and wine windows that have yet to open. Jakob lags behind, taking in the expanse of the complex and giving himself an obscure sort of credit for devising it. “I know, I know,” he mugs at a pillar of orange neon, “I’m just a boy visiting with his family.” He laughs so hard that he staggers over to the open door of an Anselm Kiefer exhibit full of scorched and blasted steel beds and has to push backwards against his own belly to keep from lying down upon them and drifting already into a dream within the dream, skipping the whole apparent purpose of his coming here.
When he’s caught his breath, he hurries into the admissions hall to stand behind his parents while they negotiate at the desk. From a shelf opposite the shelf sagging with copies of the Biography in four languages, he picks up a brochure and reads:
In his first solo show at a major museum outside of New York City, Jakob posits for himself a fantastical origin story in which he comes to this very show with his parents as a child and gets lost—wonderfully, horribly lost—never to see them again. He spends years and years in the museum, sleeping in Anselm Kiefer’s brutal steel beds and crawling like a spider through the open ductwork, coming of age in more ways than one with the dead sister who lives in his blood until finally, at long last, he emerges as a full-grown man, into the light of day—today, of all days—in which he is no longer the boy who got lost but the man who made the show “for that boy to get lost in,” the man who envisioned the story thereof as the show’s governing principle, as its meaning or as the vessel in which its meaning was fated to travel, far and wide enough to actualize the ambition that has, at one and the same time, kept both boy and man alive and threatened to annihilate them both in an apocalypse of their own making. Please enjoy, and keep your wits about you.
“I know, I know,” Jakob whispers again as he closes the brochure and accepts the blue child’s rate pin his parents press into his already sweaty hand. He affixes it to his collar and walks with them into the first hall. They are among the day’s first visitors, so the Hall of the Cities’ Destruction is nearly reserved for them alone. They meander and creep among sculptures and dioramas of the bridge across the river and the mall on the far side with its ambiguously permeable membrane in back, which doubles here as a trick door into the next exhibit hall, detailing how the wild domes and spires of the Cities were dented and warped by unseen hands until, in the hall after that, the familiar bleak factory buildings of Mass MoCA come into view so that, in the next hall, the visitor emerges into the very museum you will have come to believe you began your journey in, as a giant swath of graffiti on the brick wall puts it.
Jakob is rapt with a sort of pride that feels too big for him and is thus simultaneously tantalizing and taboo, a sickening feeling that he hasn’t earned it even though here it is, free for the taking. My mature work… though the thought rings infantile in his head. When he turns to his parents, he can see that the next rooms are meant for him alone. Therefore I am, he thinks, already lost.
*
The family moves out of the Halls of the Cities’ Destruction, picking up the pace to keep ahead of a newly arrived tour group as they enter The Saga of Jakob’s Becoming, filled with imagery of the dump, the Town Museum, the Graves of the Bellmers, the Dinner at Chez Pierre and, in a curtained room up a steep ramp marked with a plaque requesting complete silence, the altar in the clearing in the woods.
As they ascend the ramp, the presence of his mother and father turns blurred and fills with holes, through which images of the sacrifice upon this altar return, an event that seems to stand at the very outset of his family line, occurring in his own past and also in that of his hoary bearded ancestors, eons ago, before the Common Era. Whether these images are photos on the wall or visions the exhibit is inducing in him feels like the exact question he must consider and yet as soon as he begins to, his head splits and crackles and then he’s pounding on a pane of glass until someone moves him to the left, just far enough to coast under a set of saloon-style doors, unable to read the warning posted beside them. He steadies himself on the other side, blinking in an alternately dim and blinding room in which his father brings the ax again and again down upon his mother’s neck, who falls onto a bed of leather and cellophane leaves and pine needles, swooning and calling out to a Jakob who… stands beside her, at once shocked and relieved by the imagery, perceiving it for the first and the millionth time. “I’m here for my appointment,” he mutters, flitting between the boy who’s part of the exhibit, standing beside the altar to witness a sacrifice performed solely for his own sake, and the boy who wandered into an ADULTS ONLY side-room and ought, if he knows what’s best for him, to wander back out before his horror becomes incorporated into the spectacle. But the more he turns, in search of the saloon doors, the fuller the spinning room becomes, until it’s so choked with trousers and leggings and perfume and the breath of mid-morning wine that it’s all he can do to sit down on the spackled carpet and cover his ears and think.
“Why would my parents take me to this? I’m only a boy!” a meek voice shouts, but this too feels like part of the show, strained with an untenable mixture of mockery and pathos, meant for an attention other than his own. He crawls past the feet that have gathered to observe him, forcing his way through hand-sewn leaves and fruit-scented blood into the log cabin behind the execution site. Inside, he burrows under a mattress and waits for the crowd to disperse. He muses on the question of whether he’s seen this all before, and if so, where, and if not, why does it feel so familiar? “Where are my mom and dad?” He wonders aloud, as he lies there, summoning several rouged and bespectacled faces to his bedroom door.
He stares at the black twinkling felt overhead and reminds himself that it can’t really be nighttime, that he just arrived, that his parents just picked him up at the dump and—he grins in the dark—dumped me here. Still, it’s night enough to close his eyes and descend to the next level of what the Jakob who made the show decided to put there.
*
On that level he dreams of growing up in this cabin after the execution on the altar and then traveling to New York City through one Lincoln Tunnel after another and removing the arms of hundreds of sub-Jakobs until he’s built enough power to stage a massive show at the Whitney which in turn grants him the power to stage an even larger one at Mass MoCA, on a scale that almost no living artist has reached. The show details his rise to power after getting lost in the museum as a child, suffering a primal trauma that could only be righted by staging the very exhibit he got lost in. “This was,” he told the public in interview after interview after interview, and repeated to his biographer in the deep leather future, setting the tone for the zeitgeist whose embodiment he would soon become, “the only way forward.” The redemptive, even transformative power of art, man’s ability to remake his world from within, using its own materials against itself. A heresy, a prophecy, a revelation.
*
The dream ends with a janitor hosing the cabin down, gawking with a clearly practiced expression of shock. “What you doing here?” He shouts, eliciting low gasps and applause from behind a series of curtains painted to look like the surrounding woods.
Tobin lurks just in front of these curtains, sawing a pig with graceful abandon. He drags his knife along the animal’s nylon or leather skin—“All skin is leather!” Jakob yelps, to more applause—then raises the blade to motion for Jakob to follow.
“Time to roll back down the mountain, Little Fink,” Tobin growls as he takes the boy’s hand and hoists him over the altar that still reeks of spilled blood and into a grove of felt and wooden trees—“All trees are wood!” Jakob yelps again, the line hot and prickly as it wells up his throat—that reek of fungus and wet dirt. The pig-man leads the boy down a winding ramp covered in more forest decor, then across a bridge and through a tremendous exhibit hall decorated like a meadow yellowing in the late summer heat, and finally along another hallway with the walls painted to resemble the outskirts of town, including the museum of Wieland’s work, some of which is recessed in a narrow side-corridor that also leads to the Mass MoCA bathrooms, and in through the front door of the diner where the man-Jakob once took his meals alone at the counter, back in his own boyhood, whenever Greta, his first gallerist, paid him a crisp ten or twenty for new augmentations on his Bellmers, the dogs whose carcasses he revised in endless permutations, mirroring the Demiurge whose work with the materials of the world was never and could never be finished.
The boy’s parents sit at a table by the crates of tomato paste and orange juice in back, flanked by cud-chewing extras. They sit in complete silence until Tobin forces the boy down between them and lumbers over to the counter. “We were worried,” his father declares. “We thought we’d lost you.”
His mother yawns, tilting her head back to reveal the line across her neck where the execution occurred last night, as it surely will tonight as well. “Stay with us now. The museum is big and we’ve only seen part of it. This is your last warning. If you run off again, we’re going home.”
Not if you can’t find me! Jakob thinks as the waitress hands him the menu. He looks at the categories—Favorites, Brunch, Specials, Lunch—and sees that all have been crossed out in thick red pen, replaced with the handwritten words “Black Milk of Ambition.”
“I’ll have the black milk,” he tells the waitress. Voices from inside the walls titter and click as she writes this down. Nothing happens until the milk arrives, sweating in a tall, frosted glass on a coaster embossed with an image of Jakob sitting at this table across from his parents. Beneath the image sprawl the words “The Tables Are Turned on the Old Puppet Game: Now Only Jakob is Real.”
He sips the black milk, muttering, in Wieland’s accent, “Tonight I could do milk. Tonight I could do milk. But tonight I won’t do milk.” His parents remain inert, their gazes fixed on the toast and eggs going cold in front of them.
As the milk settles in his stomach and charges up his body—already Mass MoCA seems far beneath him, an insult, a rural backwater he’ll die within if he doesn’t burst its confines, crushing its sad grey walls and bringing their dust as a token of his power straight to the Louvre—he feels his feet push against the linoleum floor and then his legs rise, trembling, and then he’s off, vacating the family visit for what the brochure claims is the second and final time.
*
He dings out of the diner, past Tobin pressing one fistful of bacon after another into his mouth, and makes his way into the town, where he strolls past an ice cream parlor, a real estate office, and a clothing consignment shop. Then he shoulders open the door of the bookstore, eager to spend the twenty dollars he finds rolled up in his pocket with a note reading For Book taped to it.
Inside, a kindly woman with short white hair and a ruby brooch—a less severe version of Greta, perhaps played by the same person—ducks under the counter and surfaces with a gentle, “Can I help you find it?” Jakob nods and steps back while she works her fingers along the spines, all of which bear the word Biography. She moves past one after another, either looking for a special copy or making a show of looking despite the absurdity of distinguishing one from another. When she’s touched every spine, she returns to the middle of the top shelf and takes one down. She brushes it against her blouse, double-checks the title page, and hands it to him, accepting his twenty with the note still attached. The other customers, all wearing their Mass MoCA pins, put down their own copies to watch the transaction with a look of utmost gravity on their faces; then they go back to browsing as Jakob leaves with the book in his armpit.
*
Trusting that more money will present itself, he rents a room above a Mexican-themed steakhouse in a gravel lot behind the main street and lays the Biography on the bamboo nightstand before turning down the comforter, dusty with the skin of strangers, and lying on the bed beneath it. He is unsurprised—if anything, it feels a tad obvious—to find that the bed is one of Kiefer’s rusted steel abominations, lumpy and jagged beneath his buttocks.
After a nap, Jakob goes down to the steakhouse and takes a scuffed wooden table in back, behind a dozen parties toasting over plates of steaming fajitas, and orders the black milk. At breakfast he does the same at the diner and at lunch he visits the ice cream shop, where he’s able to order a black milk sundae.
Rumors of the Jakob who staged this exhibit travel around town. Some say he’s a genius who retreated to the bower of his youth when allegations of bizarre and obsessive behavior with a young boy exiled him from the Art World and that he now lives high on the mountain in the deep woods, in a cabin guarded by looming metal spiders, while others remain in awe of his imagination and a local preacher takes it upon herself to gather a flock around the flame of that Jakob’s genius. In a fake mustache and glasses, the boy-Jakob visits her church one morning and hears her preach about a holy fusion, an “overcoming of the man-boy dichotomy to birth a new I with a coherence and inner motive force that neither was able to muster on his own. A final sacrifice of each to the other, permitting a return to the Cities in the age after this one. An age that will be defined by a man who forced his way to the molten heart of matter to remake himself, within his own lifetime, as the boy he could never have been born as. A break with ancestry the likes of which has never been seen on the mortal plane.”
The congregants fall face down on the floor at the mention of this coming age and remain like that while Jakob creeps out, tossing his glasses and mustache into the bin for melted candles and spent matches beneath the votive offering stand by the door.
As time passes, Jakob becomes Mass MoCA’s greatest attraction. He sits in his room smelling steak and drinking milk while making models of the impossible geography in which the town contains the museum while the museum also contains the town. He collects supplies—balsa wood, construction paper, superglue, rubber cement, silver and gold paint pens—from the store that always has them ready in a special corner of the checkout counter. He pays with the money he finds in his pocket. One day, he runs into Kiefer in the tools aisle and the two speak briefly. “I’m burning a window,” the great man explains, brandishing a canister of kerosene. “Into your room.”
Jakob sits on his steel bed and watches the faces appear in this window, visitors clamoring over one another to catch a glimpse of the lost boy drawing maps and building dioramas detailing his family’s journey in the station wagon from the dump through the outskirts and then into North Adams and the Mass MoCA parking lot, then into the museum, and then he shows how he got lost and found his way into the town where he sits now, making all of this up, or setting it all down before the record gets rewritten. After the guests depart at night, he makes other models where, sweating black milk from every pore, he goes to New York City to one day return to Mass MoCA with a name big enough to barely fit on the banner—a name bound for the Louvre and then bound to crush the Louvre as well—and then he designs the show in which the boy gets lost and that boy makes models of what the man did to him, until the work of modeling it turns him into that man and he breaks out of the museum and goes to New York in order to return here with his face overshadowing the parking lot, invincible at last.
At some point during the night, the work fries his brain. He curls up as his spirit returns to the Cities, to that bridge behind the bazaar where he can wander freely now, encountering other Jakobs in the mall without incident. Without pulling their arms off and brining them in a tub. The Cities are big enough to contain us, he realizes as he wanders from one milk bar to another, but therefore so large there’s no becoming. There’s no being somebody there. He stays, subsisting on the black milk, until the ambition makes it unbearable. Until he goes so fully to seed in his wanderings that he forces his way into the limo and across the line that deposits him at Mass MoCA again.
*
The Cities are crystal clear when he’s in them, but as soon as he forces his way out, they become a filthy black squiggle. He rubs his eyes in the fajita smoke and tries to fathom how the Cities function and where they are, but there’s no thread he can put his finger on. He returns to the town in a damaged mood, his head throbbing like it’s been dented. He broods past the doors of the church he’s decided never to reenter, eating a black milk sundae and thumbing through the Biography. He has, until now, resisted reading ahead, torn between not wanting to know what comes next and not wanting to believe that the book knows, aware as he is that to read its account of the future is to surrender to it. But now he flips to the page on which he’s eating this sundae and entertaining these thoughts and, relinquishing the last of his autonomy, he flips to the next chapter, entitled “Back on the Altar.”
He closes the book here. Then he drains an extra-large glass of black milk at the steakhouse and begins the long journey back to the altar in the woods. He passes the diner at which his parents still sit, interrogating the same waitress again and again, the words “Where is our son?” rising from their mouths in a fiberglass speech bubble. Then he passes the Town Museum where Greta caretakes his early work, and then the bridge that extends across an outdoor brook in one of Mass MoCA’s many cement courtyards, connecting one tremendous building to the next.
*
Tobin appears astride his pig as soon as Jakob steps into the woods and then he’s riding the pig too, lurching up the ramp that models the road his father once drove up the mountain, with his son veiled in the backseat. Jakob holds Tobin’s glistening flanks, naked beneath a burlap smock, as they pass groves of peeling birches and waterfalls and cliffs beneath which nestle clusters of museumgoers, looking upwards and snapping photos.
When they reach the summit, Tobin tips the boy off his pig, guts the animal, then pants, “Alright Little Fink. You’re on your own.” He drags the carcass by one leg into a service closet and shuts the door. Alone in the uneasy light, the air scented with a mixture of concrete and pine and bile, Jakob presses deeper into the woods, the black milk boiling in his gut. “I will make it out of here,” he announces to those recessed behind the deep green curtains. “I will make it out as my own man, up from the belly of the beast, a lost boy no longer. I will make it to the Cities as myself this time.”
He walks onward for a while in this manner, repeating these lines until they grow familiar. Overfamiliar, even, until it catches him by surprise to hear himself say, “I will find that Little Fink. He will not pollute my show any longer. He will not wrest dominion from me after all I went through to get here.”
He looks down to discover a yellow-handled Ace Hardware ax in his muscled and hairy hand, his wrists thick from years of punishing labor. He swoons and worries he ate something bad in the artists’ cafeteria where he’s taken all his meals since his show opened, not wanting to be seen anywhere outside the grounds or in any of the commissaries open to the public. But he knows there’s no stopping now. The Finale is here, the culmination of the show, after an unprecedentedly long run. Time to find that fink and finish him.
He grips the ax tighter, choking down the memories it brings, and emerges into the clearing around the altar just as a small boy emerges from the other side. Both stop to regard one another and, in that moment, each thinks, I could just as well be him. Though the opposition between them seems fundamental, a matter of life and death, at the same time it seems trivial, or less than trivial: no opposition at all. They both laugh, unable to determine if their goals for the Finale are incommensurate or identical.
*
The boy lies down on the altar and the man looms above him, posing with the ax high over his head. The black milk seethes in both of their bellies, causing their flesh to bulge and nearly pop, and then a panic overtakes them both and they’re smashing the scene itself, the man destroying the altar with the ax while the boy topples plastic trees and runs into the cabin where allegedly the great artist who made a name for himself in New York before devolving into bizarre and obsessive behavior with a young boy still lives. He tears down mobiles and dreamcatchers and blueprints of alternate realms, partial maps of the Cities, shrines to the pane at the back of the mall in outermost Istanbul, determined to burn through the milk in his stomach by rendering Mass MoCA uninhabitable, destroying all that came before so that, at long last, a space for him alone, even if it’s one of utter abandonment, will open up.
As the boy ransacks the lonely cabin he may years from now come to inhabit, the man lumbers inside too, swinging his ax at the walls and the floor and the ceiling, tearing down the model he made as an up-and-coming artist whose sensational Worm show at the Whitney made possible an even more ambitious opening in the dead factorylands of Western Massachusetts.
*
When the museum exists no longer, and before the media and police arrive, if indeed the destruction was not part of the plan, the man hurries out of the ruins, dragging the boy by the arm. He tries to make it look natural, like this is his son or nephew on an excursion from the city, up for a little culture and fresh air, but he can feel the eyes of the surviving townspeople from the show merging with those of the guests outside, the cashiers and baristas from the courtyard snack bars untying their aprons to mingle with the crowd.
So here it is, the newly unified Jakob thinks, as it forces both of its halves, still only tenuously connected, into the back of the waiting limo. The canonical moment, that in which I was kidnapped as a boy and raised in mystery and horror until reappearing as the man who kidnapped me, wearing the same suit I’m wearing here in the limo that pulls out of the parking lot like a piece of construction paper cut out of the background it had been part of, gliding past rapt faces on a plane it can no longer adhere to.
The limo rolls by the hot dog stand where Jakob’s parents sit eating after yet another visit to the lot where Mass MoCA stood in search of their son, and they turn to watch what they must, if any part of them retains the capacity for consciousness, realize is the original departure, the mystery solved in a space just beyond their reach.
*
Beyond the outskirts of North Adams the limo crosses the wild meadowlands and watersheds that buffer the Cities, uncrossable to all those without an appointment. Somewhere in this phase of the journey, the Jakobs finish fusing so that, when they shatter the pane that regrows behind them and drive straight through the abandoned mall and then across the bridge and into Istanbul, neither is who he was before. I sit in back until my driver stops in the heart of the bazaar, and then I depart on foot, into the life I gave up two lives in order to live. My name will be known throughout the Cities, I think, from Istanbul to Casablanca to Melbourne to Cape Town, from the Prado to the Pergamon to the Louvre, just as soon as it becomes known to me.
Author’s note: This story is a standalone part of a planned sequel to my 2022 novel The New House, about a roving family of outsider artists seeking the New Jerusalem deep in the American Interior.
David Leo Rice is the author of the novels Angel House, The New House, and the Dodge City Trilogy, and the collection Drifter: Stories, named one of the “10 Must-Read Books of 2021” by the Southwest Review. His novel The Berlin Wall and collection The Squimbop Condition are forthcoming in 2024 and he’s online at www.raviddice.com.