Preliminary searching had brought up no records. Scarcely even a traffic violation. For several days now, Dwayne had watched him—long days at the office, a coffee run, even a Tuesday morning manicure. Like I’m on safari, he thought. First sighting had been at The Schoolhouse—yet with the way Cannon had walked in, briefcase in hand, it’d seemed more business than pleasure.
Dwayne also saw him at the beach.
Max. He’s talking to Max.
Once Cannon moved away, he approached Max, who sat on a blanket surrounded by his artwork, elbows rested on his knees. Same position as when they’d met.
“Hey there,” said Dwayne. “Back at the beach.”
Max shook his head. “How many more people know I’m here?”
“Why were you chatting with that guy? You know him?”
“Not really. I’ve seen him at The Schoolhouse and at my shop. He’s putting together an exhibit he wants me in.”
“Exhibit?”
“Yeah, so he says.”
“Karen tell you about him?”
“In a manner of speaking. I first saw him with Karen.” Max hesitated. “Is...she okay?”
“She’s all right. Taking a few days off work.”
“That guy, James,” Max said, gesturing to the crowds. “He came into the Sirens Shop to buy Schoolhouse videos. He saw I worked there.”
“He say anything?”
“Tried not to.” Max was making sparse eye contact. “Like my mother said, every bit of him spoke the truth except his mouth.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. He seemed on edge. Antsy. Too curious. Is—?”
Max was interrupted by two older men in fisherman hats, collared shirts and swim trunks, who slowed to take in his work.
“Is this charcoal?” asked one of the men.
“It is.”
“I’m gonna go,” Dwayne said. “Take care of yourself, Maximo.”
“You too.” For the first time in their exchange, Max’s eyes met his. They were stone. “Tell Karen to be careful.”
***
Blink blink blink—the cursor, patiently awaiting input. The humming computer screen burning into his eyes. So infernally blank. Once again, Ritter surveyed his notes, twelve pages of crowded, serpentine text drawn from Feldman’s exhibition, his interviews. There seemed little to say. In so many words, Bennett Wilson had even pridefully made the point that Neo-Naturalism encouraged very little discussion beyond the thing itself. It was the scooping out of wordless ideas—not ideas, maybe, but drives, raw emotions—and transmuting them into tangible visions.
Knowles wanted the coverage for the next issue. Ritter had time but the deadline was still tight. Writer’s block. Every word had to be perfectly formed, perfectly placed, right out of the starting gate. Such a thing was impossible, of course. So why not take a cue from Feldman? Spew it all out, stream-of-consciousness, and sort it out as he progressed? But what was there to spew out? Ritter considered the dubious genius of Neo-Naturalism’s influence on him: they championed something, and he knew what it was, but couldn’t find the words to describe it—a predicament seemingly at the heart of Feldman’s philosophy.
“As we’ve made it!” said Feldman in his mind. “The words we’ve given ourselves, the methods we’ve given ourselves, have made such Something sadly ill-defined, walled it up behind glass. See but don’t touch.”
Touch, touch what? God? Ritter thought. The ancient hermit living in some remote neural wilderness?
It didn’t help that, with the forthcoming baby, Ritter’s mind was increasingly elsewhere. Angie was due in two weeks. Dr. Fallon had said to be prepared in case labor happened sooner than expected.
No, not touch God. Be God. Assume the role people were born to play. To remember. To do what? To make breathing artworks?
Of course, writhing in this seething mess was the age-old question of what art was. To Ritter, art was everything made. Artifice, after all. Anything could be art, so in a way he empathized with Feldman’s thesis. Ritter certainly thought there were degrees of art, just as there were degrees of any profession, or education. Different grades. The minors and the majors. But what did made mean? People made bowel movements—were they art? No. And the very early art, Ritter considered, might have been as blind as bowel movements, generated less from an analytical frontal lobe than from the grander, infinitely patient intelligence that pervaded everything and held together bodies small and celestial alike. Pure, clean expression.
Feldman, it seemed, wanted to go back to listening to that intelligence. But people didn’t know if there truly was such intelligence. They knew their own mind, sort of. So the world, the cosmos, could not be considered art, an artifice, because the verdict was still out on whether or not it was indeed “made.”
But if we’re of this world, this cosmos, we’re part of it, we are it, so why can’t we just speak for it, which really means speaking as it, and proclaim our identity as it, the ultimate Maker, the ultimate Blind Maker that, through us, gave itself eyes to see and voice to shout its magnificence?
Ritter thought: I need a drink.
Suddenly unnerved by the silence of his office, he turned on the desk radio. The weather. Sports. An update on the King trial—the jury was still deliberating, and expected back soon. With a verdict.
Chapter 7
I
Teresa’s food had gone straight through him. Those vegetables, all that fiber, crashing through and cleaning house. It was a good excuse to stay long in the john, a porcelain Fortress of Solitude in which to read his first issue of Direct Canvas, freshly arrived with a colorful expressionist piece on the cover attributed to a late, horn-haired Brooklyn artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Yet it was an interior spread that most interested James, an article on a Clifford Feldman, a former banker from Seattle who, now in his mid-fifties, had generated a bit of a rumble called Neo-Naturalism. What did that mean, exactly? That was another thing that had kept him on the fringe of the art scene: fibrous knowledge of its history and vicissitudes and all the key
