The Museum of Modern Love(67)

The skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend

and all the rain falls down, amen,

on the works of last year’s man.



He saw himself standing in the Kawa forest. Marina walked beside him on the bank of a river. She laughed at something as if they were old friends. There were ferns crusted with the finest layer of snow and an arc of birds, long-necked and grey, passing overhead. There were trees with trunks wet and red and glistening and sun falling down like rain between the branches. He saw light falling as if it was rain. He saw every particle of life.

There is nothing to be afraid of, she said to him. We have walked this way before. He saw two sets of footprints in the snow ahead. He heard a calling bird. He saw the moon arcing between the trees, a sliver of moon in a blue sky, and she said, We are all these things. We are no different to earth. We are no different to time. We are rock and leaf and bird, earth-born and earth-fed and earth-returned when we die. For forty thousand years we have been eating and living and burying ourselves on this one sphere of earth. See how we know the pattern of things, if we only watch.

He saw Marina standing on the edge of a sand dune in another place where the sky was magenta and the earth was pink. Then they were in another place where two moons rose above a midnight sea, and they walked the shoreline. He knew he was going home.

But not yet, she said. Not yet. You have forgotten something very important.

He felt a sense of utter loneliness as if he had never lived in a world with anyone else. He wanted to hold Marina’s hand but she was a ghost and she was Lydia.

Was there a secret tally somewhere in every marriage for each kiss, each orgasm, each Sunday morning? He saw the counter ticking over and coming to a halt. He saw Lydia’s eyelashes, so very pale without mascara. He looked at her eyes and they were still the green of the sea thirty metres out.

‘Lydia?’ he said.

He saw her in a white room. He saw her watching the sea. He saw the sunlight that fell on the floor. He saw her lift her hand. She reached for a pencil. It fell.

He bent down to pick it up for her.

‘Lydia?’ he said again.

She did not turn her face. He opened her fingers very gently and placed the pencil in her hand. There was a notebook on her lap. He leaned down and smelled her hair.

‘Can we go home now?’ he asked. ‘I think it’s time we went home.’

Marina leaned towards him and he was speared with pain. He felt as if her face was that of an ancient woman, and now a boy, and now a girl, a monk, a nun. Now it was a bird, and now a fish, and now a tree and now it was a crystal, filled with power and understanding. Again it became human, but it was a face both eternal and temporal, dead and alive, calm and terrifying.

It is not about comfort, he heard her say, as if she had spoken the words right into his head. It is not about convenient. It is not about forgetting. It is about remembering. It is about commitment. Only you can do it. And you must be fearless.

When he left the square he hardly trusted himself to walk. Healayas watched him go and did not disturb him. She knew how deconstructed it was possible to feel after the experience of Marina.

Downstairs in the lobby, Levin looked at his watch. He found a quiet spot by the rear doors and dialled the number of Paul Wharton at his law firm. Wharton would not be in until tomorrow morning, he was told. Levin made an appointment. After that he called Alice. He remembered Healayas, and texted her, but she had to stay in New York for the final day of The Artist is Present. Then he rang Hal.

‘Do you think we could take a drive?’ he asked.





AND SO WE ARRIVE AT day seventy-five. The final convergence. The floodlights are on. Marco Anelli watches Marina Abramovi? emerge from the green room and cross the square. He watches Davide arrange her white dress about the chair. He sees Marina’s body submit to the chair this one last time. They are all smiling, but he does not want to think about it being the last day. He cannot afford to lose concentration.

He settles his camera and tripod at the top of the square and takes a single photograph of Marina as she stares at him down the long lens. The security team take their respective places.

One of the guards raises two fingers to indicate two minutes to go. The live feed clicks on. Viewers in Chicago, in Minneapolis, Montreal and Mexico, in Cape Town and Cairo, Sydney and Salzburg, in Helsinki, Istanbul and Iceland begin watching.

The gallery, the noise, the time, the people, the fatigue, the weather, the concrete beneath his feet, the white walls, the face of Marina, all of it had become like waves on the beach. Marco has lived so close to it he no longer hears it. Now sometimes in the atrium, when his thoughts arrive, they sound so loud it feels as if his mind is shouting.

When the queue is assembled, he goes along the line collecting permission slips as if it was any other day. He focuses the lens on each face and watches for the moment when intensity spills from the eyes. He settles into the space and the light and the performance.

He has moved past himself. The pain that had been vivid in his legs and lower back, and his neck and shoulders, after almost three months on his feet every day, bending over his camera, standing on concrete, has left him. He feels light, almost transparent. He has survived the show. When he’d agreed to do it, he’d never thought of it as an act of survival. He had wanted to do it with all his heart. And now it is almost over. It reminds him of a question he was asked a few days before by one of the guards. ‘When you get to heaven, what would you like God to say to you?’ ‘Not now!’ he had joked. But today he just wants God to say, ‘Well done.’