Jessie raised his hands and backed away. “Whoa OK just chill lady.”
“Rae . . .” I sighed.
“No, Joe. Don’t ‘Rae’ me. You weren’t there. You’d conveniently disappeared, yeah? I was there. I saw what she went through. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t sleep. All she did was draw weird pictures of forest fires and listen to The fucking National. For a while I wasn’t even sure she was going to finish the selfies project. Meanwhile, you were off doing what? Gawking at trees in Wyoming.”
“Montana.”
“Excuse me?”
“I was in Montana, not Wyoming.”
“Whatever. You were gone. Didn’t give a fuck. So I don’t care if you need to see her, she does not need to see you. Got it?”
I tried to tell myself her words were not chipping away at my resolve, but when I said, “I give a fuck, Rae,” my voice sounded feeble.
I thought about screaming October’s name and wondered if she would hear me, if she would recognize my voice, if she would care.
Rae again raised her phone thing. After taking a closer look, I decided it resembled a pager from the nineties.
“I’m giving you ten seconds to turn around and walk out the door,” she said. And then she started counting backwards.
And I almost did it. I almost aborted the mission. But I thought about how Cal believed this was a good idea, and I trusted that. Not to mention that if I left, if I failed to speak to October, Cal would assume I’d chickened out, and I was better than that now. I had to be.
Rae was down to 2.
“Wait.” I was trying to think of the right words, the right tone to sway her. “Listen. The thing is. You’re right. You are.” I put my hand on her hand, the one holding the phone pager thing, and said, “But are you sure?”
She recoiled from my touch, and I felt awkward about having touched her. “Am I sure about what?”
I chose my words carefully and spoke as if I were asking for Rae’s advice, not disputing her. Because despite Rae’s valid disdain for me, I knew she could be reasonable. She cared about October, and I had to trust that her decision would ultimately be based on that.
“Are you sure about what October would want you to do?” I asked. “It’s highly possible you know better than I do what she wants now. But please be honest about it. If you can say with complete certainty that she would want you to kick me out of this line and send me on my way, I’ll go.” My voice was shaky, my mouth dry. I needed water. Most of the people in line had water with them. I was an amateur art aficionado. I cleared my throat and continued. “But if you think there’s even a small chance she might not want you to do that, then you have to let me in, and you know it.”
I could see her weighing my logic alongside her aversion.
Yanmei’s hands were tiny, like October’s, and she was pressing them, palms down, to her chest, one on top of the other like a lowercase “x.” I think she recognized my good intentions and was rooting for me.
Jessie mumbled, “I vote to let the guy in.”
Rae shot him another shut-up-or-die look and then glared at me with scathing hostility. And she mulled over my appeal for so long the line had to move on without me. Jessie walked by and I became number fifty-eight. The two women behind him apologized and did the same. Fifty-nine. Sixty.
Rae’s face was a swarm of bees, buzzing, ready to attack.
“Rae . . .”
She gripped her hips, her elbows pointing out at sharp angles, even through her jacket. Her clothes were so boxy she looked like a child puppet about to break into a dance.
A little guy in a Chicago Cubs jacket walked around me. Sixty-one.
“Rae . . .” I begged one last time.
She exhaled with fury. Then she spun on all points of her feet and stomped back up the stairs in her big black boots, fuming and mumbling to herself.
It wasn’t until she was gone that I heard the music playing in the room, the volume so low it was scarcely perceptible. I hadn’t noticed it amid all the drama, but there it was. The same song, on a loop.
I don’t wanna get over you—
TWENTY-SEVEN.
I squinted at the shattered glass house with Yanmei inside, trying to make out how the experience was going for her. All I could see were blurry, broken up shapes at a table.
I had a hunch that October was going to feel a real connection to Yanmei, and I was right, because when Yanmei’s time was up, October stood and hugged the girl. She hadn’t done that with anyone else all day, and Susan, the woman behind me now—a seventy-one-year-old art-loving grandmother of seven, on her third visit to the exhibit—said she hadn’t seen anything like that the first two times.
Yanmei’s smile was so big when she exited the glass house, I thought it might lift her off the ground. I was hoping she was going to make eye contact with me so I could check in and give her that thumbs-up I’d missed out on earlier, but the security guard at the back door ushered her to the rear of the gallery, where she had the option to exit the museum or to go up the steps into the main lobby; Yanmei headed up the steps.
When I was second in line to enter, I noticed the computer screen to my left, positioned on a bronze base at the end of the queue, framed much like the house itself, only without the broken glass. It displayed instructions pertaining to the performance:
SFMoMA and October Danko, in association with the Thomas Frasier Gallery, welcome you to Sorrow: This is Art. Please follow
