The Perfect Wife(54)

Far from being annoyed by the artwork’s disintegration, Tim seemed fascinated. He came to inspect it at least twice a day, pointing out the latest changes, however small, to whoever happened to be in there. He took no part in the remolding himself, or none we ever saw, but it was as if his fascination egged us on. The sculpture lost both hands—vanished, presumed stolen—and its head began to loll drunkenly. Many people simply tugged a small lump of putty from one part of the body, rolled it into a cylinder between their palms, and stuck it back on somewhere else, so eventually it looked as if the statue were covered with short, fat worms. And finally there was a kind of tipping point, a moment when DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) no longer even resembled a human form, but simply became a big block of malleable graffiti. What had once been the shoulder was fashioned into a rough approximation of a grimacing second head. Someone broke off part of the arm and used it to make a crude penis that jutted for a while from the statue’s crotch—until that, too, fell off, and lay with all the other handfuls and scrapings of Newplast trodden into the floor like lumps of chewed gum. And then the head itself was gone, ripped off and torn in two, as if the unknown perpetrator had tried to peer inside it. Like a Greek Aphrodite, someone said pretentiously of the malformed torso that remained, but we all knew this was quite different from those graceful effigies.

Next morning, the sculpture—what was left of it—had disappeared. Abbie had even cleaned up after it. The meeting room was spotless.

We felt slightly ashamed, the way you might feel after a night that had involved tequila, a night when you hadn’t behaved quite as well as you should. Some people even went so far as to suggest that, if there was another opportunity, they’d do things differently. Like, maybe take turns to act as security guards. A roster could be drawn up, CCTV installed.

But most of us felt that was missing the point. There wouldn’t be another time. What had happened to the sculpture had happened. That was the whole purpose of it.

A few days later our office walls were taken over by a display of photographs. Giant black-and-white prints, three feet square, starkly lit, taken at twenty-four-hour intervals, documenting the gradual disintegration of DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!). Abbie had come in each night to photograph our handiwork.

We were pleased there was a record of the project. We hadn’t liked to think of it just vanishing into the ether. But now that we studied it in time lapse, as it were, frozen mercilessly in those big, stark photographs, we could see just how quickly the sculpture had been reduced from graceful humanity to primordial sludge. It made us uneasy to think about it.

Those pictures, digital copies of which were sent—by Abbie? Or one of us?—to several art blogs and Instagram feeds, eventually found their way onto the Chronicle’s website, and from there to several Bay Area TV stations. As a result, Abbie became quite well known for a time, a minor local celebrity. The news stations’ angle was that what we’d done to the sculpture showed tech workers in a bad light; that we’d been creepy and destructive, like the antisocial nerds we were. We thought that was unfair. We were hardly vandals. Anyone would have reacted to the installation, and its deliberately provocative title, the way we did.

Luckily for us, Tim didn’t think it reflected badly on the company at all. He was immensely proud, particularly when Abbie started getting interviews and profiles. He even had one of her black-and-whites, the first one in the series, hung in his office, opposite the Muhammad Ali quote. And Katrina Gooding, the PR consultant, placed pieces in several tech blogs about how visionary and radical Tim was, to have thought of employing an artist-in-residence in the first place.





41


After Lisa leaves, you stay in the café, thinking. You’re pleased with how your conversation went, given what she’d previously said to the TV station. But then, you of all people know how those reporters can get someone to say whatever they want.

But you still have a sense—an intuition, if you like—that your sister was holding something back, not quite telling you everything.

Does she know your secret? Is she another one who’s afraid you’ll pass whatever she tells you straight back to Tim?

Before Lisa left, she asked if you remembered the Twilight Zone episode where a small-time thief wakes up in the afterlife. He finds himself living in a beautiful apartment, he never loses at the casino, and he’s surrounded by beautiful women. Eventually he becomes bored and tells his guide he’d like a break from being in heaven—he likes the idea of visiting the other place. To which his guide retorts, “What gave you the idea you were in heaven? This is the other place.”

“Or, to put it another way,” Lisa concluded, “be careful what you wish for.” And she’d given you a look you couldn’t decipher.

Even now, you can’t puzzle out what she meant.

You really have no choice, you realize. However unsavory the guy in the phone shop might be, you need to know what’s on that iPad.



* * *



—

When you get there, Nerdy Nathan’s leaning against the counter, doing something to the insides of a phone. Seeing you, he grins and pushes it to one side. Then he comes out from behind the counter and turns the sign on the back of the shop door to CLOSED, flipping the dead bolt for good measure.

“Come in the back,” he says.