“It’s called ‘redaction fatigue.’”
Jessa watched Nadine and Josh through the window above the sink. She remembered a time when she told Art stories with the same nervous enthusiasm: Nadine gesturing in swells and Josh’s smile, soft and swoony, in reply. Jessa’s friends with children claimed a love for them that bested anything the childless could kick up in their ghost town hearts, but was there anything better than a fresh attraction?
“I’m not familiar.” Tasha looked dubiously above her mask at the plate of vegan nachos Jessa was assembling.
Jessa turned her attention back to Tasha. “It occurs in people who redact confidential material in legal documents, health records, that kind of thing. The monotony of blacking out words hour after hour brings on symptoms like chronic fatigue syndrome. They lose concentration, make mistakes.” Jessa poured something that looked like human plasma over the chips. “Anyway, that’s how I feel in quarantine. I keep erasing more and more of my normal day until I’m left with this new routine I can barely understand.”
“Is that cheese?” It came out more accusatory than Tasha had intended.
“Of sorts. It’s almond cheese, so…”
“I don’t understand.”
Jessa looked down at the not-chos then out the window. Josh reached for the cassia petal in Nadine’s hair, a gift from the tree Jessa had planted in the front yard. Nadine and Josh smiled at the petal in Josh’s hand before it was lifted again by the wind to whatever furling afterlife, whatever softly crumbling kingdom that is a petal’s final resting place.
“I don’t fucking know.” Jessa swept a lock of her own hair, mouse gray from quarantine, behind her ear. “Cyndi, Ronaldo and Kellee decided to try vegan in quarantine. Maybe out of necessity, probably out of zeitgeist or their ability say ‘not-chos’ with a straight face. I’m just trying to be a good host.”
The corners of Tasha’s eyes wrinkled above the mask. “Oh, I understand the vegan part, I just don’t understand how you get cheese from almonds.”
“You don’t.” Jessa shoved a chip in her mouth and carried the plate into the living room.
He has been hiding in plain sight, much like that Whitey Bulger over on 3rd Street. He had watched the Feds on television pulling stacks of cash and guns out of Bulger’s apartment walls in a blizzard of crumbling drywall. While he felt neither affinity for the elderly murderer nor remorse for his victims, he did have a sensation of those walls, of hiding for those in hiding.
Of course, that was years ago and now four struggling OTIS graduates occupy the apartment. They take turns tacking their M.F.A. drip-and-smear abstraction on those same walls, insuring yet another security deposit will not be returned. He knows this because his job requires him to visit artist studios throughout Los Angeles, even if the studio is the sun-suffering apartment of a dead mob boss.
It is Sunday and the apartment is hot. The four roommates affect poses of belle époque ennui among furniture and decorative oddities discarded from earlier decades for a reason. One is smoking marijuana through a pipe shaped like a mermaid, and he can’t help but interpret this as a sign of disrespect.
The art here is nothing for him to worry about. Everything he’s seen over the years follows the trajectory of an overcast day. The Ghenie in one decade that is a Bacon in another. Casteel canvases exhausting themselves trying to be Marshalls. The Twombly abstract familiar because it’s been on display in a French cave for the better part of 35,000 years. Take the Curtiss, swap it out for a Magritte or a Japanese uyiko-e print—would anyone even blink? He often thinks the most and least fascinating aspect of humans is their adoration for the familiar. Even in the way they rebel. What is avant-garde or fringe in one generation becomes episodic across the fan of time. Cycling through shifts of power, politics, religion, wealth—it is always the same art in different stages of laundering that will repeat until the quarters run out. Freshly minted artists, such as these OTIS grads, aren’t even bothering to run their predecessors’ work through the wash. This is more like a gentle press. On the walls of the apartment, he sees knock-offs of Robert Motherwell, Romare Bearden, and, he assumes sarcastically, Bob Ross. He is spared the last artist’s work as she explains through hits off her mermaid pipe that none of it is in “post-formative stages” even though she was the one that invited him to the apartment in the first place.
After some laconic encouragement, he turns to the group and asks, “Did Whitey leave anything behind?” The artist with the mermaid pipe points through a tuft of smoke, “Just the blinds.” In the corner, vertical blinds have been cut down, colored and mounted to the wall in the spitting image of a Donald Judd stack. “They’re for sale.”
He steps out onto 3rd Street, inhales Lamaze breaths of that over-round Pacific, loosens his tie and walks toward the pier. He is beginning to feel things he has previously been pretending to feel. The sun through fronds of scoliotic palms lining the street. Tunes, too practiced to be alive, from Promenade street performers nest in mid-air. The heat of the afternoon, hyper-awake on his cheeks and skull, condenses in rivulets on his neck.
He is known as Alistair Wheeler, freelance curator. This title suggests an autonomy he does not enjoy. The Tunnel observes his every move, sometimes retroactively, and responds in kind the way any employer would, with admonishments for poor production and accolades for achievement. These usually appear to him at night, when most of L.A. slumbers under window-unit fans or in radiantly cooled bedchambers worthy of modern pharaohs. They come as visions his native mind can still recognize diluted through the carapace of his human mind. The longer he is here, the clearer they become as his native brain uses its sophistication to cooperate, not compete, with its host. It is a longer process than he anticipated. He has been at his post for over fifteen years and he is only beginning to feel unity. The life forms here are programmed to attack what is foreign.
Often the messages are reports from other EMCOG Visual Stimulation sectors. The Detroit sector agent is concerned about a painting called “The Gourd Nest Hanger.” Miami Beach sector wants the Côte d’Azur sector to monitor sculptor Bernard Venet based on a work he sent to Art Basel. The Côte d’Azur sector wants an agent from the Paris sector to do it, but right now they are busy with Anselm Kiefer. The New York agent assigned to monitor Marina Abramovic is begging for a transfer. Alistair typically has nothing new to report.
As more artists move to Los Angeles, The Tunnel checks in almost every night. They are nervous and it is making what has been a workaday occupation stressful. Unlike the messages from other terrestrial-based EMCOG agents, Alistair experiences The Tunnel communications closer to his native language. At first, he enjoys the increased visions. Their form and frequency stimulate his native brain with their familiar dialect. They are not words or symbols. His host brain interprets them as colors. Filtered through his host brain, his native brain receives them like Rothko paintings. A good message would be “White Center.” Troubling messages, those he has been receiving as of late, would come as “No. 16” or “Four Darks in Red.” That he cannot respond to The Tunnel’s communications further complicates matters. He has not spent enough time in his host for native brain metastasis to allow for this. Few agents are able to achieve this before their host bodies die and integration has to start all over again inside another host. Until then, he is a ship telling the lighthouse it is safe.
This assignment, however monotonous, is not without its perks. As his native brain acclimates, he has come to experience “the weekend.” Because most art shows, art walks, art fairs, art happenings, most art in general occurs on the weekend in Los Angeles, Alistair’s weekend begins late this Sunday afternoon. The Santa Monica Pier is a mesh of early tourists, children in sunglasses too wide for their faces, and couples leaning toward or against each other like threads of a Bertoia sculpture amid the caramelized smells of summer. He buys a red, white and blue twister lollipop from a vendor. It is over five inches long and completely conspicuous for someone of his age, sex and wardrobe to consume. But it is delicious and arguably the best piece of art he has seen in months.
Two young women giggle as they pass him. They are fresh from the water wrapped together in one novelty towel, the equestrian sounds of their wedge heels against the planks provide tempo to his licking. He has come to understand that his host body is considered handsome. He has the kind of jaw set in Renaissance Carrara, chestnut hair he must tame every morning and eyes the color of weak tea. His job requires him to wear expensive suits that he finds increasingly uncomfortable as his native brain adapts to sensation. Human perception of attractiveness and ego does not fully translate to his species but sometimes he is able to comprehend it subtly, like in a smile to the passing women.
Very rarely, he will meet someone who teaches him something ponderous and unfamiliar, and he fantasizes about explaining the mission to them. These people are never artists. They are people like the candy vendor who organizes his cart’s wares by color, not by flavor. They are people like the two passing women who share a towel and walk in step. They fish off the pier only to return their catches to the sea or walk with umbrellas on the brightest of days. He imagines approaching these people on a Sunday, like today, when the wind finely marbles the water putting the human brain at ease. He would ask them to exhale, close their eyes and clear their minds of everything but one color. Whatever color they like best. Then he would calmly speak in his human voice with a tambour so crisp that even the artists he criticizes receive it as complimentary. He would say, “We are here to help you. It will be painless. Fear, rage, regret, the terrifying angel of beauty: we do not experience these things that taunt you, that rule you like an absent, hysterical king. Your new rulers will rule from inside you, with you. Your emotions and creations will no longer be tidal. They will be an immovable horizon. They will be peaceful. We come in peace.” Alistair knows such acceptance by humans is an impossibility. That he has these thoughts makes him doubt the mission. They are not part of his native expression. They are most like human hope.
When he reaches the end of the pier, he looks out across the beach. In time, it will look like Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Everyone will gather expressionless at the water, his species nesting comfortably in their human forms. When he first saw this painting, he warned The Tunnel even though Seurat had been dead for some time. They have people called prophets here.
Suddenly an encaustic patch of sky turns red. Lesions of white and orange light bleed over the ocean. It reminds him of the flares from his home planet’s sun that stripped the atmosphere of all its water. His vision is devoured by red. It is a message from The Tunnel. As the colors shift, his human brain interprets slowly:
What of the student artists? Does any of their work reflect a subconscious detection of us? More of us transport each day. We must remain undetected until the number transported exceeds empty hosts. Look for anomalies in subject matter. Look for recurring themes of exorcism, the extraterrestrial, slavery and metamorphosis. Look for fixation on dehumanization and the unknown.
Look for every common theme of modern art, thinks Alistair. The Tunnel believes that initial detection of the invasion will begin as embodied cognition. Humans will detect subtle differences in the behaviors of those inhabited. For what they lack in intellect and rationale, humans compensate for with their powers of observation. Alistair thinks it might be their finest adaptation. As such, The Tunnel has determined that early detection will occur in artists, the most sensitive human observers. They feel it will manifest as art that is different from the canon. Not necessarily depictions of alien abduction or invasion but more radical art. Like a rash that indicates toxicity in another part of the body. What exactly they should be looking for is anyone’s guess. Agents like Alistair will have to improve their powers of observation as it is not their strength. They have evolved toward unity rather than individualism.
We are relying on you. This is a delicate time. Your ability to diagnose early detection ensures an ample supply of hosts and curbs violence. Be vigilant. We value your work.
The last statement comes in purple snuffing the flames of color around it until the vision mellows to a suckling pink that evaporates in front of the ocean view. The sea is charged with foam. He wonders how much time has passed.
Alistair feels a sharp tug on the leg of his trousers. A small boy with a chocolate upper lip points to the pier planks next to him. “Ya dropped it.” Alistair’s twister lollipop, half finished, lays at his feet. Its whirling colors against the grain of the wood makes the plank look transcendent. He bends over and picks it up. The boy spins back around to his parents, pleased that the pier has not been violated. Tossing the remainder of the lollipop in a trash can near the stairs, Alistair heads down to the beach.
Another sensation he has come to enjoy is the feeling of warm sand on his feet. Its caress against his arches, how it crowds between his toes calms him after this unusual daytime message from The Tunnel. If he didn’t know what other agents are providing, he would believe he is not producing enough intel to be of value. They flag artists as busywork, the typical supernumerary business of justifying employment. It only leads to a lot of investigation into artists that are all eccentric in the same way.
He cuffs his pants and angles toward the water. The Tunnel keeps transmissions to a minimum so he allows himself a sigh to finally punch the clock. It has been a busy week of wayward abstraction and cartoonery. He honestly hoped that one of the OTIS graduates possessed a rare talent or was worthy of a moment of suspicion. He is so bored he would invite danger. It is as if all human culture and thinking are operating under the same constraints as the body of water before him. The tide may break unpredictably but its crests and depths are bespoke by the physics of the planet that created them, a planet they destroy. And here come the humans to the water, always to the water, with their dichotomous tastes for variety and intolerance. Bikinis, swim trunks, diapers, some fully clothed, they enter the water as though it is a blinking entertainment and not a necessity of life.
A pair of glasses rolls in on the tide. They have black frames with the lenses still intact. Sea salt has gessoed the glass so when he lifts them to his face, he cannot tell if they are for distance or reading. The lenses are thick enough to tell that someone is truly missing them. There are so many things one needs as a human. The Tunnel assures him that once his native brain assimilates, his host will lose this fragility. His thoughts will be clearer, the lollipop will no longer taste like anything and the sand will be another surface to walk on, without warmth or suppleness. The day will not seem lighter because it is Sunday, and his race will gather by the water not to swim but to worship. It is a good planet and they have arrived just in time. Alistair looks forward to the day when they are settled and can begin the depopulation and deindustrialization necessary for their new home to reach its potential. When all of this ersatz art and accompanying wealth will be gone, and the real art will reveal itself in the impasto of mountain ranges, the white expression of the tide.
“Art is a longing for God.” The artist Alexej von Jawlensky said this. It is a statement that visits Alistair often. If art has lost its longing, is the God gone, too? Alistair has no evidence of Him and he has been looking. If He is gone, should not others come along to take His place?
He carries the glasses a few steps away from the water. Maybe they will find their way back to their original owner, though they seem to have traveled far. Nevertheless, he will do his part in their rescue and place them atop a small mound of sand. At the very least, they will find a new owner who will only have to clean them to make them like new.
“Should we help with the clean-up?” Josh asked.
Art craned his neck to glimpse Jessa through the window stacking plates in the manner of someone foreign to restaurant work. “Nah,” he said, “she has Tasha.”
The two were seated on the front stoop where Josh and Nadine had sat hours before. The AA meeting had dissolved and night was coming on in its quirky Southern California frequency of blue-orange-red-orange-blue-orange-black. They were busy digesting the not-chos consumed out of politeness. Art reached into the bush and pulled out the bottle of tequila.
“Aha!”
“You thought I forgot?”
“Never.”
Art took a long pull off of the bottle and handed it to Josh who hesitated. “If you want to go in there and get glasses, that’s your business. I, personally, prefer to keep my lashings to a minimum these days.” Art took another swig, “I’ve tried everything to make that woman happy. I’ve used all of the psychologies: behavioral psychology, reverse psychology, reverse cowgirl psychology…she ain’t having it. So my new approach is avoidance and alcohol.” He handed the bottle to Josh again to the same reaction. “I understand if you don’t want my cooties, but I mean, come on,” he swept his finger across the much less than six-foot distance between them.
“Fuck it.” Josh took the bottle from Art and wiped down the rim with his sleeve before drinking.
“Wise man. How have you been holding up?”
“I’m at the ‘get high and watch Ken Burns documentaries’ stage of quarantine,” Josh said, squinting his eyes from the blow-back of the tequila. “What about you? How’s the screenplay?”
Art shrugged and took the bottle back with purpose.
Josh quickly pivoted, “Hey, I wanted to tell you ‘Caustic’ is the 8th top-streaming movie on Netflix this week. That’s something to celebrate.”
“I saw that,” Art said, dolefully. He wrote “Caustic” two years ago to mixed reviews and a decent box office. It was his signature dish: a young detective becomes entangled with a serial killer who (surprise!) turns out to be a relation, all the while bedding a sultry psychiatrist and blowing up half of downtown L.A. It delivered what it promised, kept the VFX shops in Teslas for another year and threw Nic Cage some work. There was even a small part for Nadine. But at the premiere, Art overheard Jessa privately panning it to Nadine and he hasn’t written with any passion since. Things haven’t been the same between them either, if he was being honest with himself. But honesty was something else to be rationed in those lean times.
“ ‘Caustic’: a Covid success story. I’m like a god to quarantined dads sick of watching Trolls 2 for the zillionth time.”
“Better to be worshiped than writing.”
“I think that’s why J.D. Salinger had like a 5-year career.” Art began absently pulling leaves from the bush next to him.
“You know,” Josh proceeded like a lion tamer, “the last time we were in this place, we took a step back and made a list of things that were stifling your creativity.”
“I wish you would stop saying ‘we.’ It’s like when men go around saying ‘we’re pregnant.’ I’m the writer. You’re the agent. My body, my business.”
“I just don’t want you to feel like you’re alone in your…” Josh let the sentence trail. Finishing it would mean acknowledging the boogeyman, the first step in bringing it to life.
“I am alone.” It was indulgent but if Art couldn’t say things like that, what was the point of being a writer? While no one, including himself, considered what he wrote high art, that he could not create it was as devastating to him as Beethoven deaf in front of the piano. A shadow fell on his shoulder. He could feel Jessa in the window behind him. He took a drink, holding the bottle up to the light. It was almost a relief to know the cause of her anger before he went inside.
Josh rose, stretching his small body in the suit. He knew nothing he said would improve Art’s mood once tequila and self-pity took hold. “Well, at least you started AA preemptively.”
“Cheers to that.”
Josh waved to Jessa in the window behind him and saluted Art. “Next week?”
“Same bat-time, same bat-channel.”
Josh stopped just shy of his car parked in front of the house. “Should I be worried?” Art flipped him off. “I’m going to call you tomorrow.”
“Not necessary.”
“I’m going to do it anyway.”
“Don’t.”
“Can’t stop me.”
“Won’t pick up.”
“Then I’ll stop by.”
“Won’t be here.”
Josh rested his arm on his open car door and smiled triumphantly. “Sweetheart, there’s nowhere else you can go.”
**This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.**
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