The Museum of Modern Love(65)

‘Fuck you. If it’s so desperate here, why don’t you leave? You and Alice, just go.’

‘Oh, that’s right, so everyone will feel sorry for you?’

With Alice gone there had been much less to fight about. But still he felt ashamed. She had been so ill and he had taken her positivity for buoyancy, not bravery.

When he woke again, morning had arrived and people were going for coffee and pie runs. A great cheer went up when the hot dog seller arrived opposite at 7 am. He and Healayas drank coffee and ate bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches he brought back from a cafe on Sixth. They laughed at their night together and curled up again for a while longer as the morning brightened.

Then finally, at 9.30 am, they’d been allowed into the lobby of the gallery. And at 10.30 the queue, in an orderly single file, was carefully conducted by security guards up the stairs to the familiar sight of Marina Abramovi? in her white dress with her head bowed, waiting on her chair. The night queue had been joined by new arrivals and there were now over a hundred people snaked back around the gallery, all waiting to sit. The famous people were over and done with by 10.50 and when they had departed everyone else, one by one, began to cross the floor to take their place opposite the artist.

‘What if someone decides to sit the whole day?’ Levin asked Healayas.

‘There would be a riot. Don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. I know it.’

Throughout the morning Healayas moved through the atrium, recording more interviews. When the person ahead of Levin finally went to sit with Marina, Healayas came back and stood beside him.

‘Any advice?’ he asked her.

‘Count to ten as you walk towards her,’ she said.

‘We’re here from London,’ said some people behind Levin. ‘We didn’t realise the queue would be so long. What time did you get here?’

‘Five-thirty,’ he said. ‘I mean last night. The gallery closed and the queue started.’

‘Wow,’ they replied. ‘You mean you waited outside all night?’

‘Slept on the street.’ Levin grinned. ‘Hard core.’

Levin considered how he would look on the live cam. He thought about Pillow-Marina and how he had thanked her yesterday afternoon before he’d dismantled her, putting her parts back on the couch and into the closet.

He thought about Lydia. Would she recognise him if she were to see him on the live feed? Would it compute? It pained him to think of it.

And then the person in front of him vacated the chair. The guard tapped him on the shoulder.

‘It is time,’ he said. ‘Maintain eye contact, do not speak. When you have finished drop your eyes. Walk away.’

Levin was crossing the square and counting to ten. He was taking a seat. The chair was fixed to the floor. He hadn’t known this until now, but that’s why everyone sat the way they did. He could not move the chair. Abramovi? had her eyes closed, her head lowered. He breathed. He could feel the prickling of fatigue and the same frequency of nerves that he had before the orchestra played his music for the first time.

He was acutely aware of people talking all around him. He closed his eyes and then he opened them, met Marina’s gaze and everything stopped.





LYDIA FIORENTINO, LEVIN’S LYDIA, SWAM in the night sky and she had no edges. She moved slowly, languorously, and the moon was her guide. The night embraced her and she was a tiny light in a great sea of lights.

Later she was no longer afloat on stars and sea. She was held, carried, washed. She had no words. She had no sound. She was amorphous, diaphanous, pixelated. She was a confluence of atoms released at the moment the universe began. She was a tender mottled sky drawn across the dawn. An ocean of clouds above the sand dunes. The days were a single strike on a triangle. The nights were voyages. She was the dove in Max Ernst’s forest. She was Miro’s star watching over the woman and bird. She was Man Ray’s Pisces lying in the shallows and a silver fish at first light. She was a rose from Dorothea Tanning’s table. She was the gold in a Turner and the green in a Seurat. She was gone from somewhere and there was only a faint remembering of things past. A flash of an eye, a fabric, a voice, a name. She must come back. But where was back? There was only here. Nothing was everything. She had no form.

She was the flower in the egg in the hand beside the pool with Narcissus. Ah, it went, and was lost, these four seasons. She awaited the angel of uncertainty. Tight clouds stood watch on the horizon.

She was washed in rain. A shower of warmth above or below the fog. She was returned to a cocoon of white. Light played beyond her eyes. There was a taste in her mouth. And another. Good. Good, they said to her. That’s very good, Lydia.

There was an arm and another, a leg and another. They were moved by people who came by day and night. There were voices and faces telling her things. They said over and over, Lydia, Lydia, Lydia. They moved the hand, the foot.

They wrapped her in blankets and light burned against her eyelids. She had no name for the warm thing and the bright surfaces that changed through the day. She had no words at all. Words were structures that she glimpsed before they fled again. Sun—it came to her and was gone. Ocean. And then the great void of everything returned and she floated. Weightless, formless, speechless, timeless.

But time did pass. Weeks and months.

At some point she was aware of a young woman but she had no words. She liked the place with no words and no feelings. It was simplicity. There was a gentleness lulling her through light and dark and all the colours and textures in between.