The Museum of Modern Love (30 page)

For ten minutes Marina and the actress gazed unwaveringly into each other's eyes, then the actress bowed her head, stood up, and walked back across the square. The guard scooped up her soft brown sandals and handed them to her.

Next the woman accompanying the actress crossed the floor and sat. Marina opened her eyes and looked up again. The room shifted about. There were seven people ahead of Levin.

Healayas had been beside him for much of the night. He had told her his plan to wait in the queue and she said she couldn't miss the chance to interview the people who were willing to sleep on concrete in order to participate in an art event.

‘But not me,' said Levin. ‘If you don't mind.'

‘Of course not, if you don't want to be interviewed,' she said. ‘I'll just keep you company.'

Still, he had been surprised and delighted when she had arrived at 9 pm and thrown her duffle bag and an air mattress down next to him, explaining to the boy next to Levin that she was a journalist and she wasn't jumping the queue or planning on sitting. She was just here doing her job. The boy looked so struck by her beauty, Levin thought Healayas could have told him anything and he'd have agreed.

Levin inflated the mattress for her as Healayas worked her
way along the queue. He couldn't quite believe the madness of what he was doing. All his life he had avoided camping.

Healayas had told him to buy an air mattress, but he'd thought it would be overkill. By midnight he regretted acutely that he'd only brought his Pilates mat. For twenty bucks at Kmart he could have been comfortable. He could have cried at his own inadequacies that seemed, under the rigid overlit sky, to be countless.

‘You can't be afraid of stars. How did I not know that?' Healayas had laughed as the chill crept into their coats and hats and they huddled against the wall in their respective sleeping bags.

‘It's not something I can help.'

‘Well, be afraid of the sea. Or cars. Something that can kill you—but not something so beautiful, Arky.'

‘It's just emptiness. In fact, it's the past rushing at us. Everything out there, other than the sun, died years ago.'

‘That's kind of depressing. How do you get around such miserable thoughts?'

He had laughed. ‘Music.'

‘Is that enough?'

‘Probably not.'

Along the queue the conversation slowly grew subdued. They settled down and waited for sleep to overtake the night.

At some point Healayas rolled over and looked at Levin on his pathetic layer of rubber. She grinned at him. He gazed back.

‘Come. You look so alone there. Come cuddle me.'

And he had. For a few sweet hours he had held Healayas Breen, and later she had held him, on an air mattress outside MoMA, spooning together like two children at a sleepover, while the city carried on around them.

Levin dreamed of Lydia. They were both laid out on funeral biers and elaborately clothed in traditional garments for the dead. They were being carried by a crowd of anonymous mourners
into a funeral home. But they weren't dead. He had woken her, ran with her from the funeral home and across the street into a cafe, where he had kissed her passionately. When he woke he remembered a fight they'd had.

‘What you're dissatisfied with has to be about you, Arky,' Lydia had said to him.

‘Well, fine, seeing your life is always going so well.'

‘Are you serious? Have you noticed something about my life?'

‘I've noticed lots of things.'

‘But not the fact that . . . fuck, Arky, you are so blind.'

‘I do notice . . . but I'm the last person you help. It's always Alice first, then your clients, your girlfriends. I mean, when the fuck is it going to be about me?'

‘It is about you, sweetheart. It's always about you. Everything is done for you, and you don't even notice. But I can't keep doing it. It's not my responsibility. I am pretty busy over here in my own life. Sorry if my being fulfilled in my life confronts you. So sorry if I don't have time to provide your fulfilment as well.'

‘Fuck you. If it's so desperate here, why don't you leave? You and Alice, just go.'

‘Oh, that's right, so everyone will feel sorry for you?'

With Alice gone there had been much less to fight about. But still he felt ashamed. She had been so ill and he had taken her positivity for buoyancy, not bravery.

When he woke again, morning had arrived and people were going for coffee and pie runs. A great cheer went up when the hot dog seller arrived opposite at 7 am. He and Healayas drank coffee and ate bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches he brought back from a cafe on Sixth. They laughed at their night together and curled up again for a while longer as the morning brightened.

Then finally, at 9.30 am, they'd been allowed into the lobby of the gallery. And at 10.30 the queue, in an orderly single file, was carefully conducted by security guards up the stairs to the familiar sight of Marina Abramović in her white dress with her head bowed, waiting on her chair. The night queue had been joined by new arrivals and there were now over a hundred people snaked back around the gallery, all waiting to sit. The famous people were over and done with by 10.50 and when they had departed everyone else, one by one, began to cross the floor to take their place opposite the artist.

‘What if someone decides to sit the whole day?' Levin asked Healayas.

‘There would be a riot. Don't worry, you'll get your turn. I know it.'

Throughout the morning Healayas moved through the atrium, recording more interviews. When the person ahead of Levin finally went to sit with Marina, Healayas came back and stood beside him.

‘Any advice?' he asked her.

‘Count to ten as you walk towards her,' she said.

‘We're here from London,' said some people behind Levin. ‘We didn't realise the queue would be so long. What time did you get here?'

‘Five-thirty,' he said. ‘I mean last night. The gallery closed and the queue started.'

‘Wow,' they replied. ‘You mean you waited outside all night?'

‘Slept on the street.' Levin grinned. ‘Hard core.'

Levin considered how he would look on the live cam. He thought about Pillow-Marina and how he had thanked her yesterday afternoon before he'd dismantled her, putting her parts back on the couch and into the closet.

He thought about Lydia. Would she recognise him if she were to see him on the live feed? Would it compute? It pained him to think of it.

And then the person in front of him vacated the chair. The guard tapped him on the shoulder.

‘It is time,' he said. ‘Maintain eye contact, do not speak. When you have finished drop your eyes. Walk away.'

Levin was crossing the square and counting to ten. He was taking a seat. The chair was fixed to the floor. He hadn't known this until now, but that's why everyone sat the way they did. He could not move the chair. Abramović had her eyes closed, her head lowered. He breathed. He could feel the prickling of fatigue and the same frequency of nerves that he had before the orchestra played his music for the first time.

He was acutely aware of people talking all around him. He closed his eyes and then he opened them, met Marina's gaze and everything stopped.

LYDIA FIORENTINO, LEVIN'S LYDIA, SWAM
in the night sky and she had no edges. She moved slowly, languorously, and the moon was her guide. The night embraced her and she was a tiny light in a great sea of lights.

Later she was no longer afloat on stars and sea. She was held, carried, washed. She had no words. She had no sound. She was amorphous, diaphanous, pixelated. She was a confluence of atoms released at the moment the universe began. She was a tender mottled sky drawn across the dawn. An ocean of clouds above the sand dunes. The days were a single strike on a triangle. The nights were voyages. She was the dove in Max Ernst's forest. She was Miro's star watching over the woman and bird. She was Man Ray's
Pisces
lying in the shallows and a silver fish at first light. She was a rose from Dorothea Tanning's table. She was the gold in a Turner and the green in a Seurat. She was gone from somewhere and there was only a faint remembering of things past. A flash of an eye, a fabric, a voice, a name. She must come back. But where was back? There was only here. Nothing was everything. She had no form.

She was the flower in the egg in the hand beside the pool with Narcissus. Ah, it went, and was lost, these four seasons.
She awaited the angel of uncertainty. Tight clouds stood watch on the horizon.

She was washed in rain. A shower of warmth above or below the fog. She was returned to a cocoon of white. Light played beyond her eyes. There was a taste in her mouth. And another. Good. Good, they said to her. That's very good, Lydia.

There was an arm and another, a leg and another. They were moved by people who came by day and night. There were voices and faces telling her things. They said over and over, Lydia, Lydia, Lydia. They moved the hand, the foot.

They wrapped her in blankets and light burned against her eyelids. She had no name for the warm thing and the bright surfaces that changed through the day. She had no words at all. Words were structures that she glimpsed before they fled again.
Sun
—it came to her and was gone.
Ocean
. And then the great void of everything returned and she floated. Weightless, formless, speechless, timeless.

But time did pass. Weeks and months.

At some point she was aware of a young woman but she had no words. She liked the place with no words and no feelings. It was simplicity. There was a gentleness lulling her through light and dark and all the colours and textures in between.

Flavours washed over her tongue, sweet, soft, bright, dense. She tasted and with the taste came pictures. Faces returned to her and patterns, carpets, smells that made her think of rooms and people. Vanilla. It came back as if someone had typed the word on her mind and she read it to herself, sounding it out with some inner voice.

There was no outer voice. She was a silent observer of the room and its visitors. She was a recipient of sound. She was an inhabitant. She was a watcher and she was observed.

Shadows and sunlight moved in particles across the glass. She was the silence of mist coming in from the sea. She was the forming and unforming of clouds, paint stroke after paint stroke brushing the sky. She was the hush of waves on the heartbeat of the coast and every moment was new and new and new again.

Now there was flavour on her tongue. Now she swallowed. Now she woke. Now she saw birds leaping into the sky. Now she saw the sea discoloured and rippled, the sand darkened. Now there was music. Music? Was that music? Yes. Yes.

Music swirled her through fragments and the road of memories coiled, rising up, wanting to whisper a name, make a sound, a sound, but no words for that were allowed inside her.

She dreamed her body was laid out, her feet in Manhattan and her head resting in the Great Lakes. She stretched herself further up into Canada, south to Boston and Washington. She pushed her hands and fingers across into the Midwest, slipping them up into the grooves of the Rockies, stretched her toes all the way down to Florida. Her other arm reached all the way to the grey pebbled beaches of Portugal. Her body continued to slip and stretch out around the world. Her skin swam into coastlines and over mountains. She gazed out into the void of darkness and she wanted to step off the world and slip away into starlight. She was sure that was the way home.

Home, she thought. Home. The words in her mind had been drained and emptied. A noise lived within her and like her it had no voice. Like her it could not move. It could not reach out and speak to the people who came to the room. Together she and the loneliness watched the light and the dark and all the colours in between that the sea and the sky made for her each day and she understood that something was waiting. Something was waiting and the stars could not have her back yet.

On the table by the window, letters and postcards accumulated. The nursing staff set them out so that Lydia could see them. They understood it was a strange case. It was Ms Fiorentino's explicit wishes, spelled out in court documents, to be left alone save for her daughter and a few select girlfriends who came regularly. But it was hard, seeing it. It was hard to see anyone in the state she was in. She gave no indication of hearing or seeing anything at all. Her physiotherapy indicated that her body was, for the time being, able to maintain some strength. But it was probably only a matter of time before she had another stroke or her kidneys gave out. It was a horrible condition and people didn't last very long once it had gone this far.

They had seen worse, and they had seen better. This wasn't a place from which many people got to go home. But every now and again there was a sort of miracle. Sometimes the stroke victims regained movement. Sometimes the coma people woke up.

The staff read aloud to Lydia the letters that came every week from someone called Yolanda.