COOL WHITE by Robert Dall

    In the beginning all I wanted was a normal life.

    Not that I had any experience in this matter. The only kind of life I knew how to lead was the twitchy, angst-ridden life of the overeducated. I'd had a revelation of sorts: the revelation that another year of sifting through art-history arcana, prowling the library archives and living on vending-machine food, would vault me straight past twitchy and into spasmodic. I wanted a change. I wanted a regular old job; I wanted to lay down my burden at 5:01 and say, perhaps aloud, “Another day, another dollar”; I wanted to move out of the intellectual ghetto. So that spring, I took an indefinite leave of absence from my doctoral program and moved into what seemed like a nice apartment on York Avenue.

       As it turned out, I'd traded my soul for 400 square feet and a view of the East River and the miracle of rent stabilization. I was so overjoyed to get the apartment in the first place that only once I began living there did I realize that the terms of the arrangement were pretty damn restrictive. I explained the situation to my girlfriend, Angie, a couple of days after I'd moved in.

       "Wait till you see this," I said, handing the lease to her across a pyramid of Chinese takeout cartons. "It's thirteen pages long."

       "Thirteen? God, Ben, what's in it?"

       “I don't know. I thought maybe you'd read it over for me, check the legal stuff.” I counted on Angie for legal advice (she was a child welfare bureaucrat, and bureaucrats wear business clothes, as do lawyers); I loved her for her practical nature. And while she rolled her eyes at my request, eventually she gave in and read over the lease, top to bottom. While she did, I made my first foray into domesticity: selecting a place to hang my print of Picasso's Guernica.

     "What a creepy picture," she said, looking up between clauses.

     "Well, it's about war and the suffering of the human spirit. Of course it's creepy." I looked around the room. The space that seemed best suited for the print was the expanse of white wall above the bed, so I shrugged and climbed aboard, arms full of hooks, wire, a box of half-inch brads.

     "I know what it's about. But to hang something that disturbing above your bed?"

     "Well, the funny thing is, it's been called not disturbing enough. You know Buñuel? The film director?"

     "Yeah, I've heard of him." She turned her attention back to the lease.

     "Well, apparently Buñuel made a trip to New York sometime after the war and was sitting around drinking with some other Spanish exiles, and the talk turned to Picasso, who after all was a Spanish exile himself. They pretty much agreed that Picasso had become bourgeois and his works reactionary. Anyway, they had a few more drinks, and at some point they decided it was necessary to go over to MoMA and blow up Guernica as a revolutionary statement. Pretty wild, huh?"

     "Blow it up? What were they going to blow it up with?"

     "Well, 'blow it up' was sort of the unattainable ideal. Probably they just meant to deface it. It's pretty easy to deface a work of art, just once, if you think about it."

     "Do you think about it?"

     "Well, no, I —”

     "Then how do you know?"

     "It would just be an easy thing to do. It's pretty clear."

     "So did they do it?"

     "Uh, no. I think they just drank some more and piled into a cab and passed out."

     "Huh. Some revolutionary statement."

     There was no point in further discussion, so I made a pencil mark on the appropriate bit of plaster, stuck a couple of brads in my mouth, and raised the hammer to bang one in.

     "Hold on," called Angie, waving the lease at me. As she said it, I drove the tiny nail home, one guiding tap then a single stroke, tapBANG. "Mm. Shouldn't have done that." And she proceeded to explain, with much finger pointing and underlining, how Clause 31 contained several addenda prohibiting me from, among other things, driving a single nail into any surface in the apartment.

     "Aw, c'mon, that's ridiculous."

     "That's your lease, Ben." God, I hated it when she was right. But she was right, that was indeed my lease.

     We spent a celibate night beneath that solitary nail (I'd be damned if I could make love to her, when she'd been right like that, and as for the nail it was too late to take it back). The next morning, after she'd gone, I reviewed the lease myself. Although I lacked Angie's legal expertise, I could gauge the situation clearly enough: I had fallen victim to a control freak of a landlord, who feared I might be a savage bent on trashing his apartment, when the irony was that I was the most normal guy he was likely to find. I actually worked at it.

*          *          *

     I'd been working at it since the day of the revelation, sometime around the disappearance of the last filthy slushbanks from the sidewalks. I emerged from the library late one afternoon to a startling display of light, low rays of late-afternoon sun slanting between buildings and dancing off metal and glass, casting a golden glow over the swarms of real and wannabe downtowners. I’d spent the better part of three years in a four-by-eight carrel, mining away at the same narrow Surrealist seam, and that afternoon I couldn’t help but contrast that dimly lit space with the living city before me, bright and beautiful and endless. I felt like Lazarus, emerging from the tomb to reclaim (and be reclaimed by) the world, drawn by a force that I could only follow but not name. And it was only after that initial rush had passed that I saw it for what it was, the simplest thing imaginable: the desire to be normal. I realized that if I could just say yes, all I want is something real, there was no reason I couldn’t have it.

     But, first things first — to pay for all that normality, I needed an income. So, armed with my M.A. in art history, I presented myself not to curators and conservators but to runners of ads in the "Help Wanted — General" section. "What's your experience?" they'd ask; "Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism," I'd reply; "So long," they'd say, sometimes with a wave and a smile.

     I began to leave things out. "What's your experience?" they'd ask; "Dunno," I'd reply, sometimes with a wave and a smile; "Get lost," they'd say.

     I began to lie outright. "What's your experience?" they'd ask; "I've worked at [restaurants, retail stores, mailrooms] all over the city," I'd reply; "Sure you have," they'd say.

     Finally, I decided to visit places with no strategy whatsoever but to beg. The first place I visited was the Lexington Avenue FotoMart, which needed an assistant manager; something about that visit made me desperate enough to stand up and say, "You have to give me this job." Mike, the manager, hired me on the spot. Liked my spunk. Or was desperate himself. I showed up the next Monday, put on my "Hi My Name Is Ben" badge, and started to earn my living by giving other people their big moments — double prints or digital copies free with coupon, and, oh yeah, come back and see what develops. It was just a job, but that was the whole point, settling for normality, rejecting the arrogance of those who thought they had a "calling."

     The day after the reading of the lease I felt something calling me, though. It was the goddamn nail, sticking out of the wall and straight into my brain, making a complete botch of my day at the shop. I confused Kodachrome with Ektachrome, spilled fixer all over the darkroom floor, and nearly got into a fight with a customer over change (Mike was off that day, so I got to keep my job). To top things off, I barged into the darkroom at exactly the wrong moment and overexposed an entire roll of film.

     "Jesus," I moaned, to no one in particular. I'd completely ruined someone's pictures. Of course, once it was done they weren't even pictures anymore — they were something else, the record of my own ineptness. Toward the end of my shift, in an attempt to escape attribution, I removed my name tag and replaced it with another on which I'd scrawled "Hi My Name Is Pablo Picasso." It actually seemed to work.

     When I got home, though, the nail was still there, mocking me. No good, no can do, no nails in the wall, said Clause 31. I couldn't stand it. This was considered a lapse in stewardship? Swatting a fly against the wall would cause more "damage" than this...

     ...it's not even a nail, I thought, it shouldn't qualify as a nail. I sprang off the bed and grabbed a plastic bag out of the carton I used as a toolbox. Inside the plastic bag were some big mother nails, heads practically the size of dimes. I grabbed one of these then used the claw of the hammer to rip the little pipsqueak nail out of the wall, tossed it aside, and started pounding the larger nail into the same spot, whaling away, missing occasionally and striking plaster. When I was finished, my brow dripping in the humid air, I stepped back to look: all that showed was the head of the nail, now battered into a concave shape like a stray hubcap, surrounded by a few dimples in the wall.

     "Now that's a nail!" I shouted. The words echoed around the apartment. Guernica continued to sit in the corner, its twisted limbs and screaming faces gathering dust.

                                                         *          *          *

     Angie noticed.

     "What's that huge nail doing there?"

     I shrugged. "What's done is done." This didn't quite answer her question, but it was inarguable, and that's how I wanted things. "Come on. Let's go out, take a walk."

     "No, really, Ben." She grabbed my arm. "Why did you do that?"

     God, did I want to rip my arm away. I hated to be grabbed, and just then it felt like all she'd ever done...but I didn't, I patted her hand instead. "It's simple," I explained, "if I'm going to break my lease I should really break my lease."

     "But what’s the nail there for?"

     "Because I put it there. Because it's mine. So by extension, the wall is more mine than it was before." I was making it all up on the fly, but it came from the heart.

     Angie didn't care. "What's gotten into you?" she demanded.

     "Nothing that wasn't there before."

     This time she didn't even spend the night; it was just me and my not quite bare walls and a lot of pent-up energy. To work some of it off, I grabbed the hammer and pounded four more of the big nails into the wall, surrounding the original nail in a diamond. With every hammer stroke I repeated silently: Mine. Mine. Mine.

     At work, I faced the world as "Pablo Picasso" as often as I could, which really did make me feel safer. Thinking back to that accidental overexposure, I also began to play around in the darkroom — not enough for anyone to complain, but enough to leave my signature. A little shadow in the corner, falling over a toddler at the top of his arc on the swing set; a slightly washed-out band down the center, cleaving bride and groom...oops...well, sorry folks, not your picture anymore. Mine. I left work each day feeling as though I'd really done something; on really good days, I'd come home and pound a nail or two. I'd walk around the East Side perky, all wrong for the season, practically strutting.

     Angie, who knew me as a nonstrutter, was having trouble adapting. "What's wrong, Ben?" she asked, all sincere concern; she was too practical to be obscure. But while I loved her for that very practicality, I was starting to feel crowded by it as well.

     "Wrong? Why should anything be wrong?"

     “You tell me, Ben. But you haven't been yourself."

     "How can I not be myself? Maybe the definition of 'myself' is just changing."

     "That's what I'm talking about! It's like you're trying every definition out, one by one, and rejecting them all, like you'd prefer being no one."

     Being no one?

     "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

     She gave me a long, tired look. "Well, either you're lying, or you really don't know. And I'm not sure which is worse." She grabbed her bag and crossed to the door, where she lingered an instant before continuing on. All I could do was stare at her, thinking how strange things were becoming, and then she was gone.

*          *          *

     Angie kept her distance, which left me suspended on the edge between mournful and hopeful. I spent most of my spare time thinking of ways to get her back and, simultaneously, began a campaign of infidelity. It wasn't very well thought out or effective, but that's what it was.

     The campaign centered on Maureen, one of the assistants in the photo lab. Maureen had a killer smile and blonde bangs that fell just so across her forehead and, best of all, she had not to date questioned my existential framework. I had a standing invitation to go nightclubbing with the folks from work, an invitation I'd always declined because Angie didn't like clubs, but after our last go-round I had a change of heart. Sure I'll come, I told Maureen, smiling and looking closely, for the first time, at the eyes behind the blonde bangs: green and placid, inscrutable. Perfect.

     I'd like to say I resisted the temptation that was Maureen. Failing that, I'd like to say I couldn't resist the temptation that was Maureen and so betrayed Angie with a night of unforgettable frenzied sex. Unfortunately, neither of those things happened. What happened was, I couldn't resist the temptation that was Maureen and so made a move on her and so had the entire contents of a frozen zombie dumped on me. To complicate matters, it turned out that Maureen knew a woman who worked in Angie's bureau and had befriended Angie and, well, a few days after the whole club debacle Angie came over to claim her underwear and toothbrush.

     "You really should get rid of those fucking nails," she said on her way out.

     That evening I pounded another two dozen, in a kind of sickle shape, into the previously untouched wall opposite the bed.

     I could see by now where this was headed. I thought of the Invisible Man, systematically wiring every square inch of his room with light bulbs. How many, I wondered, how many nails to cover the walls completely? I tried to rough it out, so I could buy them all at once and get a volume discount, but there was so much to factor in — the discrepancy between head diameter and shaft diameter, the tendency to bend, the integrity of the plaster surface. In the end, I settled for a dozen or so a day, sometimes in patterns, sometimes in a scatterplot.

     Not one of my neighbors ever once complained, or made mention of the noise in passing. I wondered if they thought of me as "the guy with the hammer," then I realized that they probably thought of me and my noise about as often as I thought of them and their clattering pots and barking dogs and screaming babies, that is to say not a whole lot. It wouldn't have been normal.

     I went on doctoring film at work; it seemed important, if only because the doctoring and the nail driving fed off each other. One day I brought in a roll of my own. I'd shot most of it months before, at Angie's brother's birthday party out in Great Neck, and now I saw the party again, resolving slowly in a bath of chemicals. Angie in her first floral print of spring, head cocked, sly smile; Angie beaming beside her tiny grandmother; Angie and I sitting on the front steps as daylight began to fade, paper plates of birthday cake and plastic cups of sweet red wine by our side (who took this one, anyway?). She was looking not at the camera but up at the sky, her head tipped back to watch the clouds swirl, and I was gazing at her as though I'd recognized in her face something more wondrous than the heavens, something that was still opaque to me but that I had to know.

     That was back in April. Now, four months later, I couldn't for the life of me remember what it was I'd been feeling. Or rather, I remembered but I didn't really remember, not with my heart, and that afternoon was more like an artifact than a living thing. I stood staring at that image, helpless, for what felt like and may well have been half my shift. Finally, I began to play with the exposure, fixing it so that a bluish-black shadow — an artificial night — fell across the frame.

     A week or so later, the city locked in a late-summer heat wave, I put off returning home after work and began to wander: down Lexington, over to the park, across the east Fifties, eventually finding myself at the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art. My first visit to a museum since...I decided to stay for the air conditioning.

     Inside, I wandered the galleries half paying attention, half drifting, feeling the slow dissolve from real season to museum season. Just as movie theaters have their own season, so do museums, the eternal 72-degree cool-white equivalent of a tepid bath, and the deeper I progressed the more I realized that's exactly what it was like. The installations were asking me to immerse myself, to daub myself with Art like a cleansing mud and feel it set and tighten against my skin till it cracked and peeled away, leaving me refreshed, reborn. But I couldn’t do it; it didn’t seem possible. Standing in the center of a long white gallery, surrounded and all but annihilated by towering canvases and hulks of corrugated metal, I remembered what had driven me out in the first place: the feeling that it had all been teased apart and denatured, nothing left to do except...

     ... “except blow it up," I whispered aloud.

     "Excuse me, sir?" The gallery guard, decked out in standard-issue blue, had been standing five feet from me.

     "Oh, nothing," I said, and strolled away casually. But in my mind I was flying, electrified, seeing the paintings and installations with sharper eyes than I had in years.

                                                          *          *          *

     Blow it up?

     Well, "blow it up" was sort of the unattainable ideal. Unlike Buñuel, I didn't have Spanish exile cronies to help devise tactics, but it was still exhilarating to think about what might be. The blueshirts came one or two to a room, and most of them were too bored or too torpid to respond quickly. I could pick my spot at MoMA and slash Monet's water lilies, behead a Rodin nude, flush Duchamp's urinal. I could stash a cherry bomb in my pocket and fling it inside one of the Egyptian tombs at the Met. I could knock off pretty much the whole Guggenheim with a pair of roller skates and a can of spray paint. It was just a matter of picking the right spot.

     Meanwhile, my walls had gotten to the point where I saw shapes and patterns not in the nails but in the absence of nails. From a distance, in the right light, it looked like the crude map of some newly discovered world in which plaster stood for land and nails for water. Every day, with every fresh nail, the waters would rise to claim another isthmus or cape and I, a disinterested god, would sit awake into the night to ponder that world's fate. I struggled through those nights, too hot to sleep, consumed by what still dangled, unresolved, in the stale heavy air: the warning I'd received for "distractedness" at work, the tightrope walk between letting go and fighting back, and, always, Clause 31.

     I'd walk from bus to shop with snippets of the lease caroming around in my head, colliding with flashes of those last doomed days with Angie; of the airless world of the stacks that I’d left behind, with what now seemed like my last breath; of Guernica and a world of dead artifacts; of nails spreading over my walls like kudzu, unstoppable. One day I arrived at work to find Mike waiting for me. He was standing behind the counter, arms folded, scowling, and spread before him were a dozen 8-by-10 glossy prints, each showing a burst of white light surrounded by blackness.

     "Care to guess what these are...Pablo?"

     "Looks like a supernova."

     "They're wedding pictures. Or they were. They've been tampered with."

     "Could just be avant-garde."

     "Go clean out your locker," he said. "You're fired."

     I could have disputed the charges — there was no proof of malice — but I didn't. After all, I'd done it for a reason, and by now the job didn't seem as important as staying true to my reasoning. I grabbed my things, which consisted of an exacto knife and some rubber gloves, stuffed them into my daypack, and walked out in silence.

     I already knew where I was going. I'd been carrying the gallery maps with me for days. Twenty minutes on Lexington was enough to outfit myself. Supplies in hand, I walked west on 86th, turned right at Fifth Avenue, and headed uptown past green awnings and Prussian Army doormen, dachshunds on leashes, stripped and rusted bicycle frames chained to signposts, spandex-clad joggers panting out of the park. What a beautiful, alien city, I thought. I could have gone on forever wondering at it. But it was only three blocks before I arrived at the familiar concrete jello mold.

     Yes, I'd chosen the Guggenheim; that spiral ramp would be my launching pad. Because if, in the beginning, all I wanted was a normal life, what I wanted now was much more. I wanted the chance to erase my trail of missteps and wrong turns, to blow it up and build on the remnants. And I was ready to blow that day, that moment, shielding the bag between myself and a knot of German tourists, shuffling ahead in little half-steps as the line snaked along and telling myself one step closer, one more step till I reached the ticket window. I paid my admission, pressed my ticket into the nearest open palm, and surged forward into the lobby.

     The walk up the back stairs was supercharged yet interminably slow, as if I'd been shot out of a cannon into nectar. I still felt every step, heard each footfall's echo over the crowd buzz: closer, closer. At last I reached the end of the staircase and emerged to find myself at the top of the spiral, an abstract canvas to my left and the truncated cone of the atrium to my right. I turned to the canvas, precise and geometrically perfect patterns of white on white, white canvas against white wall, white placard beneath. My heart began to race, the way it did when I was gripped by fear or falling in love, and this felt like both. I slipped the pack from my shoulder, slow and careful, and looked around. No one within twenty feet, no blueshirts within fifty. Now, I thought, but even as I thought it I felt something else, an irresistible urge, and I turned to look down on the corkscrew of canvas and bronze and a thousand-odd patrons, swirling and clustering in the soft filtered light. I felt like a king, or a pope, and in fact I couldn't resist doing a little stiff-armed wave as I scanned from the tiny shapes at ground level to the larger, more substantial forms one level up to the faces of those nearest me, almost familiar but not quite, as though someone had airbrushed the scene just beyond recognition.

     This should have been an intoxicating moment, the ultimate euphoria for an inveterate retoucher of scenes, but instead it had the opposite effect: it made me feel sick, clammy and lightheaded. I spun around like a top, helpless, then saw the daypack lying against the wall. I almost didn't recognize it as mine — what sort of maniac would do this? — but then I realized that the story of the pack was, in fact, my story. And in that moment, seeing my story for the farce it was, I felt the fever break. I stood there, my heart pounding, sweat rolling down my cheeks, until I’d regained my equilibrium. All I wanted now was to get myself and the pack out of there intact. I scooped it up and was escaping down the ramp when I heard, from no more than three feet behind me: "Bag, sir?"

     I ignored the voice and kept moving ahead, but I hadn’t gotten far before a hand grabbed my wrist. "Your bag, sir." At my side was a guard, pointing at the bundle in my hand. "You'll have to check it." Now, I should have known enough to retreat at this point. I should have trudged back to the checkroom and handed over the pack and realized that they never open the things, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I clutched it to my chest, like a boy holding a puppy. The guard, sensing that something was wrong, reached forward and grabbed a strap; I grabbed the other and tried to yank it back. Our tug-of-war, which by then had attracted a small crowd, ended with the splitting of a seam that sent the both of us ass-over-teakettle and the contents of the pack spilling across the floor: a blizzard of gallery maps, a can of black Krylon, the knife and rubber gloves from the shop, and my employee badge, printed side up. Neither one of us moved; it was as if time had slowed nearly to a stop.

     I stood at the center of the circle of onlookers that had gathered, regarding them with as much disbelief as they regarded me — for I couldn't, even then, get over their expectant air, the sense that they wanted it all to be for something, catalogued and printed on a neat white placard. I wanted to tell them that they were wrong, that it was more complicated, but I didn't know how. I just watched them, frozen in place: an old couple frowning in disgust; a kid in a baseball cap staring in pie-eyed wonder; a woman in an orange dress, brilliant as the sun against that cool white ocean, looking back and forth between me and the badge that lay between us. I followed her eyes to where it lay on the floor, stooped down, and scooped it up. As I closed my fingers around it I felt the guard jerk my arm away sharply, and things began to move at full speed again. "Let's go," he said, leading me away down the ramp, and as we set off I looked at the badge and saw its message as a foundation stone, the first simple step by which I'd begin again.

     "Hi," I said. I was ready. “My name is Ben."