Burn (Songs of Submission #5)(30)

“Mister Rivers!” A man in a black turtleneck and wire-framed glasses approached us. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, with a close-shorn head of grey hair. Darren recognized him. They shook hands.

“Monica, this is—”

“Samuel Kendall, your curator. You must be the lady without the passport.”

“I fixed that.”

“Obviously.” What could have been an insult actually wasn’t. He said it with a slight bow of his head and a little play of a smile. “I heard what happened to Kevin. We actually have a problem far more serious.”

As if a mask had been removed without him moving a muscle or changing his expression, I saw that Mr. Kendall, under his veneer of jolly intelligence, was livid.

“How serious?” I asked.

“Career-ending serious.” He smiled again in that same way. “Please, follow me.”

Darren and I walked down a long hall with him. He spoke with his head half-turned, his words echoing against the cinderblocks. “We allocated space for this piece, and a ton of it. We have financiers who expect a full show, and collectors waiting to see a whole piece.”

We entered a larger, unfinished space with exposed ventwork and sprinklers. Crates and boxes stood everywhere. Kendall found three crates close to the loading dock and indicated them. Two were eight-feet tall. One was as big as a kitchen table.

Kendall stood by them and smiled, tilting his head. “What the f**k is this?”

Darren picked up a clipboard from the short crate and flipped though the paperwork. I never realized how brave and unflappable he was. At least in situations that didn’t involve me or his sister. Or his sexuality. He was as easy to throw as anyone, just not in matters of his career. Bless him, that was the only place I felt as though I had the wrong time signature.

“We’re missing four crates.” He flipped through the pages. “A page of the commercial invoice is missing.”

I inspected the tall crates. They’d all been labeled and numbered to match the assembly instructions. Kevin had reviewed it with me for no other reason than to sate my curiosity.

“They’re currently in customs, thank you,” said Kendall. “Even if they’re released immediately, they won’t get here for the preview. Sir and Madame, I cannot express to you the financial impact this will have on the museum if we do not have this piece installed. Allocation of space is eighty percent of our concern, and to have a gallery empty is unacceptable.”

“The gallery won’t be empty,” I said. “We’ll have to figure out the sound system, but I think we can get this to work. It won’t be a complete piece, and it won’t match the catalog, but the space will have something in it.”

“If it sells, there will be financial repercussions.”

“If it doesn’t, it’ll be worse,” muttered Darren. He looked up from the clipboard. “Can we get these moved?”

“Right away,” Kendall replied. “We’ve gotten a lot of interest in this piece.” Darren and I looked at each other as Kendall hailed down a guy with a forklift.

CHAPTER 25.

MONICA

My idea was simple. The installation had four walls. Two had been delivered. A bunch of carefully indexed detritus was in the kitchen table-sized box. That was enough for half a piece. If we placed it against a corner of the gallery, we would at least have four walls.

“Two of them will be plain white,” Darren said. “The whole meaning of the thing was about the overwhelming nature of emotional vulnerability.”

“Think about the overwhelming nature of telling that guy his gallery’s going to be empty.”

We didn’t know what we were doing. We’d made something using Kevin’s expertise, and though we tried to learn all we could while contributing to the visuals, Darren and I had essentially designed the sound. We placed the speakers, deciding which types to use and where. We conceptualized it, recorded it, mixed it, and made it work. We talked with Kevin about how the sound would work within the scope of the piece, but anything that could be seen was his. He had the last word.

So the assembly design had been up to him, and it concerned us only insofar as the speakers needed a place to be hidden.

The galleries were packed with artists hanging their work, and when they heard about our plight, we found volunteer helping hands and working minds who understood how to put up an installation. The front of the house, with the doorway, and the adjacent wall. The bug inside was a whole, finished asset. The thing didn’t look entirely broken. Darren and I decided how to get the sound to work by using the museum’s walls, which we decided to leave white. Darren could have drawn something on them, but it wouldn’t have matched Kevin’s artistry. We placed the glass and broken cinderblock as we remembered it. When it was as good as it was going to get, with the walls stabilized, the top part hovering over the gash, and the layers of my voice filled the room, the artists that had helped us stood back and applauded themselves and us for pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Though we’d make a success of the show if it killed us, the talk around the galleries was that Kevin’s career was jeopardized. Non-delivery of work was such a dead serious infraction that even the craziest artists didn’t get away with it. Non-delivery was a loss of space. It was a loss of prestige and face. It was apologies and returned money.