The Herd(87)

Another beat, then the shriek as she buzzed me in. I hurried up the cracked marble steps, past red and green garland, paper candy canes, and snowman cutouts. Mikki looked harried as she answered the door, still clad in sweats, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie.

“My precious,” I murmured as I scooped up my phone. There was a small glass pipe next to it, the weed inside still smoking.

“You want?” she said.

I shook my head. Pot made me paranoid—she knew that. “No, thanks. When did Hana leave?”

“Just a few minutes ago.” She rubbed her eyes. “I was just gonna finish the movie and crash.”

“Okay. I’ll be right back.” I headed toward the bathroom. The hallway was covered with framed paintings she’d brought back from a three-week stint in Vietnam: nudes on uneven sheets of bamboo paper, a few black strokes intimating the female form. I mistook her bedroom door for the bathroom before continuing down the hall.

On the walk back, I peered back into her room. I was drawn to the massive workspace hulking in the corner, covered in haphazard piles and a bulky ceramic lamp. An orange trapezoid of light from the fire escape fell on it squarely, like a spotlight. Without turning on the light, I tiptoed through the space between her closet and bed and leaned down to look.

The collages. I’ve been doing these large-scale works and then taking photos of them and working those into my collages, she’d said in the bathroom of the Herd, topless and powerful, all those weeks ago. There were no final products here, but I spotted a few usable chunks of photos: a mouse spray-painted on the sidewalk, the photo of it cut into the shape of a cat, and a female reproductive system, ovaries and Fallopian tubes and everything, stenciled on what looked like aluminum siding, carved into the shape of California. The word HERE written in fat white bubble letters, so familiar I could swear I’d seen them before, with the final E crossed out in a careful red X, the photo then cut into a bird’s silhouette.

Fringing the gray-white desktop were little scraps of photos in odd, puzzle-piece shapes, the literal cutting-room floor. The leftovers, the negative space from whatever she carved out. I picked up a chunk, smooth along one side and carefully sliced along the others, curvy and sawtooth in spots. I tilted it into the light, wriggled it to lose the glare. Mauve with delicate white pinstripes. The Gleam Room.

Large-scale works. I remembered the first time I’d entered that room, almost too entranced by the array of pretty Gleam products to notice it. UGLY CUNTS. But there was no way Mikki…why would she…

The overhead light switched on like a migraine, like a seizure, and I whirled around. Mikki stood in the doorframe.

“Baby girl,” she said, her lips curled into something between a smirk and a grimace. “Are you creeping on my desk?” She took a few steps forward and paused by her open closet door. She leaned against it, and the hanging organizer stuffed with cocktail jewelry and feathers and beads slid along the wood.

My brain was doing something frantic—the graffiti, the tagging, what does it mean that she did that—while my torso took over with something much more primal: fear. “I just wanted to see the collages you’ve been talking about!” I stretched my mouth into a smile, groped around for a joke: “Figured I’d give it the ol’ collage try!”

She smiled. “Why were you in the dark?”

“I—I didn’t want you to think I was snooping. Which I totally am.” I realized I was still clutching the pinstripe photo and casually dropped it on the desk behind me.

“Well, what do you think?” She crossed her arms. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you about the collection for a while.”

“I’d love to see a finished one. Where are those?”

“What were you looking at?” She crossed the few feet between us and I flinched; she reached past my hip and picked up the picture scrap of the Herd’s Gleam Room wall. Without looking up: “You recognize this, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure. Hey, I should get going.” I shifted my weight and she looked at me, her thin frame somehow formidable.

“You recognize this, I can tell.” She dropped the scrap on the bed and its soft landing made me think of a snowflake.

I shrugged, channeling all my energy into seeming casual. “I know I know it, but I can’t place it. Is it the Herd?”

“Ding-ding-ding!” She aimed a finger-gun my way. “That’s exactly where it’s from.”

“I love that you worked it into your art!” I gave my shoulders a cheery shake. “Your beautiful aesthetic is all over the Herd, on every square inch—and your package design, obviously, on the products in the Gleam Room.” Why was my heart pounding, jittering my entire torso? Mikki still hadn’t said or done anything nefarious. But there was something I was so close to seeing, a revelation hovering on the tip of my tongue. “And now you’ve worked it into your own art. It’s like a hall of mirrors!” I thought crazily of the foyer in Eleanor and Daniel’s townhouse, the big mirror-fronted closet doors. A million Mikkis, Hanas, and me’s fading out into the distance.

“I guess you could say that.”

“Were you just getting the striped wall here?” I asked, my fingers sweeping toward the image. “Or were you actually capturing the graffiti? That would be very…avant-garde.” Because there’s no way you could’ve done it, I tried to beam from my brain to hers. You would never antagonize Eleanor like that.