Paula drove to San Pedro on a June day so wet and gloomy that crossing the bridges from Long Beach was like flying through clouds. Once she got to San Pedro she drifted through the streets, putting one foot in front of the other because she didn't know what else to do. She saw a lost sweatshirt in the gutter, and next to it a lone shoe. Further along there was a wrapper from a fast-food hamburger alongside discarded fries sodden with ketchup. She paused occasionally to look through shop windows, but only registered a few details – a beat-up alto sax, the brass reflecting in the window dull and flat, an army tank made from Legos, a purple-sequined cocktail dress. She moved without purpose, describing a trail without aim or sense or need. Did she want to buy something? Was she hungry? Nothing appealed to her, nothing seemed satisfying. She considered eating, she considered learning to play alto sax, she thought about making Lego models of entire towns, of becoming a model railroad buff, of collecting comic books or coins or stamps or rare toys, Teddy bears so old they resembled their presidential namesake – but just kept walking.
She remembered a diner she had found once before and wondered if she was hungry enough to try to find it. The mist turned to drizzle as she considered the question, and she ducked into the next open door. She found herself in an art gallery, a room clean and well-lit and spare, all plaster walls and concrete floors and hard, sharp angles. The exhibition was a sparse collection of photo-realist drawings, still-life scenes so expertly rendered as to be indistinguishable from photographs. She paused before a picture of a Delft vase filled with pink roses that looked so real she was almost surprised she couldn't smell them. A fly on the edge of one petal was poised for take-off. She moved on, till her attention was caught by a drawing in which two cats sunbathed in an open doorway while a third prepared to pounce on them. Paula was alone in the room, and the sound of each step bounced off the hard surfaces. The high ceilings made her small, an unkempt figure with frizzy hair and damp clothes. The rain outside began to seem more attractive, and she thought maybe she was hungry, so she turned toward the front door to go, and there just to the right of the front door she saw the work of art. She stood still.
It was an assemblage piece inside a large box that only barely contained its mess. The side and back walls were lined with row after row of shelves and drawers spilling over with vials, beakers, copper tubing, tools, bits of machinery, scraps of paisley and damask fabric and porcelain figurines. There were specimens of rocks, birds' nests and eggs, feathers, butterflies, mineral crystals and bones. Rubber hoses and iron pipes appeared to run in and back out through the walls, as if part of an elaborate ventilation or sewer system. The floor was tiled in black and white, and the front wall was a glass door. In the middle stood a workbench, a stool and an elongated figure of a man encased in leather. The face was ethereal, hugged by an aviator cap that left the broad brow uncovered but fit the cheeks and jaw like a wimple. Rising up from the stool were the pelvis, vertebrae and skull of some reptilian skeleton. The creature seemed almost animate, the vertebrae curving toward the man, the heavy jaws about to open and seize him. The man looked up at the creature in wonder, as if it had come to life unexpectedly and prematurely.
She stood transfixed before the artwork, gazing at the man and the beast and feeling herself grow strong and serene. She was moved by the apparent power of the skeletal creature and the angelic quality of the man's expression and attitude. She stood up straight, almost growing taller. After a time – she didn't know how long – she handed over her credit card without looking at the price.
When the artwork was delivered, Paula thought it seemed bigger than it had been in the gallery. The crate barely fit through the door of her studio apartment, and she wondered how the delivery men had maneuvered it around the corner in the outside hall. She told herself that the artwork would look smaller once it was out of the crate.
The work had felt comforting in the gallery, but in her home it seemed strange. It constantly commanded her attention. It was a shrine, its shining gravitas as holy and compelling as any statue of Vishnu or the Virgin. She began to watch the scene inside the box in the evenings instead of watching TV. Sometimes she made popcorn or poured herself a drink before settling down on the couch across from the box. Other times she knelt before it with her face close to the glass and examined every detail of the scene. She delighted in discovering new things. She noticed that the tiny vials were filled to varying levels with some red liquid. She observed the shapes of the bone specimens and picked out the curves of sockets and the straight lines of limbs. She saw that there were books open on the workbench, their pages covered with illegible writing. She stared into the box every morning and evening for so long that occasionally she thought perhaps the figures inside moved.
One day she came home and found one of her cats sunning himself on top of the box. Horrified, she shooed the cat away. Then she put her shoulder to one side of the box and pushed it out of the direct sunlight, making great scratches on the wood floor.
After a time she began to feel uneasy with the work. It seemed inappropriate to focus her attention away from the box, but she found that sometimes she just wanted to read the cereal box while she ate breakfast. Then the artwork reproached her with its presence, and she cast it guilty glances. She rearranged some of her furniture to face away from the artwork, and she threw a large scarf over the top of the box, letting a corner partly obscure the glass front.
She dreamt at night of entering the box. She dreamt that she could, if she chose, simply open the glass door and walk right in. Again and again she approached the door in her dreams and laid her hand on its knob. Again and again she stopped and stepped back, arrested by the shining, prescient eye of the beast inside. In one dream she worked up the courage to stare the beast in the eye. She put her hand firmly on the doorknob, turned it, pulled – and woke up. She got out of bed and turned on a light. Inside the box she saw the empty eye socket in the skull, and she told herself, The thing is not really going to come to life. It's just not.
After this dream, she wondered what the man might be like, if she could go inside and meet him. He seemed at once startled and at peace, as if both stricken and comforted by the aspect of the skeleton. She wondered what he would do next, now that the skeleton seemed to have come to life, before he had even finished putting it together. She wondered if the skeleton would move about the laboratory on the stool, chasing the man around the bench, and she imagined the man's beautiful face contorted in terror. She spent more and more of her time regarding the work of art. She rearranged her furniture again, so that the box was the focal point of the room. She gave up reading cereal boxes. She spent whole weekends curled up on the couch under an afghan, watching the shadows move inside the box as the sunlight travelled across the room. She took time off from her work indexing books to watch the box, and eventually stopped accepting new contracts. She hardly ever left her apartment. She dreamt frequently of the artwork, the same dream as before, and as before she awakened just as she was about to open the door.
When she sat close to the glass, she felt like a child with her nose pressed up against a store window, waiting for it to open, knowing that even when it did that she didn't have the money to buy anything inside. Still she stood there, wishing for the things inside, wishing she could afford just one bright shiny whirligig or gizmo. She suspected that she would be disappointed if she collected the money she needed to buy one of the useless, coveted items in the window, that it would be hollow and empty, joyless, a lumpish thing that would spin and twirl but not captivate her, not send her into ecstasies of enjoyment – still she waited and wished. She looked at the angelic figure's face and wondered where his gaze ended. She wanted to enter the box, wanted so much to be able to go inside. It wasn't escape from her own life that she craved, though perhaps she should have wanted that. No, she wasn't just getting away, she was going toward something. It was an object, a goal, something devoutly to be wished, a desire that itself was almost fulfillment. She didn't know what she would find inside, she didn't know why she thought she would find anything. Really, what difference could it make? She would be looking at the same little bits of clutter, the feathers, the vials, the tubing, the metal rods going every direction at the top of the box, looking as if they shored it up, as if some crazy architect were convinced that no amount of rebar would be enough to hold the integrity of the box together in an earthquake – looking at all these same things from a different point of view, that's all. Just a different angle, but not different things, so what would that matter? Maybe she would see the way the artist had constructed the work, maybe see the glue that must hold it together, the baling wire and chewing gum. Maybe all that would be evident, all too evident, revealing that the artwork was just a thing, a box full of stuff, not a portal to something else, something beyond, something more. But still, she wanted to go inside. She wanted to talk to the angel inside, wanted to hear him speak, to sing in the voice of a castrato, that unearthly keening she had heard once in an old recording. She imagined sitting inside the box and listening to him and barely being able to make out the words, so far beyond all she knew and could understand.
One morning she woke early and simply opened the door to the box and stepped inside. As the door closed behind her, the man tore the leather cap off his head and threw it to the floor. The skeleton didn't budge. The man ran his fingers through his hair and turned to his workbench, apparently looking for something on it. She took a step toward him, and he looked up and scowled at her.
"Stay out of the way!" he said. The man was shorter and thicker than he had looked before. His face in animation was plain, bearing no trace of rapture.
She stood where she was. The artificial light inside the box was bright, with the faint green cast of fluorescence. She saw all the same things – the bones, the books, the skeletal creature rising from its stool – but up close they looked smaller, duller, all more detritus than specimen. She turned to face the man, careful not to move toward him.
"What are you trying to make?" she asked. The man was still rummaging around on the workbench. He turned up a bone fragment with an air of triumph.
"I'm not making anything. I'm reconstructing it."
"Reconstructing what?"
"A chimera."
"I thought they were mythical."
He gave her an exasperated look and with one hand indicated the skeleton. You see it here before you, the gesture said.
She tried again. "Do you live here?"
"Of course."
"Where do you sleep?"
"Sleep?! I have work to do."
"You never sleep."
"I have work to do. And you're interfering with it!"
She was quiet for a while, and wandered around the lab, looking at things. The man didn't seem to notice. She could see even more now that she was inside. In one nook there were bunches of dried flowers, a few cameos and some cut-out silhouettes. She opened a few drawers and found trays full of scalpels, probes, tweezers, steel-nibbed pens and other instruments she couldn't identify. The man turned from his work.
"Don't touch anything," he said. She closed the drawer she had just opened without looking inside it. But her attention was caught by a sectioned box of wingnuts, each different size in its own neat cranny, and her hand strayed toward it.
"I said, don't touch anything!" She stood still for a moment, afraid to move. He looked up again and seeming a bit abashed.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to be so discourteous. Why don't you sit there, if you're staying," and he pointed out a stool that stood off to one side.
She sat down on the stool and watched the man for a minute as he went back to tinkering with the skeleton. Then she began to look around again, and she realized that she wasn't sure of what many of the items in the laboratory were. Some she recognized – the old typewriter and the telegraph she identified immediately, and the titration set-up she knew from high school chemistry. But many things were entirely mystifying. On one side of the box a metal rod extended from front to back, with more rods depending from it with what looked like little hot plates screwed into their side, and directly over it were suspended several beat-up pots and pans. A length of rubber tubing was coiled up on the floor in one corner with one end flopped on the floor, not connected to anything, the other snaking half-way up the wall and apparently venting to the outside. In the opposite corner stood a machine looked like a cross between a popcorn maker and a juke box, but she thought it couldn't be either.
She looked back at the man. He was not at all what she thought he'd be like. She had imagined a mystic who would address her in enigmatic phrases, trailing off as he lost track of what he was saying in this world, distracted by the songs he heard from another. Instead he was clearly devoted to the task immediately before him, experimenting with one way of attaching the bit of bone he had found, then another, and then again a look of triumph crossed his face as he apparently lit upon the answer.
He affixed the bone with a bit of wire, drew a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket and wiped his hands on it, put it back, and then gave her an appraising look. She was suddenly conscious of her greasy hair and unwashed face.
"I'm so glad you've come!" he said.
"Oh? I thought I was intruding. You didn't seem all that happy to see me."
"On the contrary, I'm quite happy to see you. Things have been a bit dull around here for a while. I haven't seen another soul in ages. No one to talk to, at any rate."
"So you're reconstructing a chimera?"
"Yes."
"Where did you get the parts?"
"They're right here!"
"But they couldn't always have been here – they had to have come from somewhere."
"Where?" he asked.
"Well, didn't you dig them up somewhere? Or buy them from someone?"
"Who?" he asked.
"I'm asking you!" she exclaimed, beginning to feel like she'd walked into a Laurel and Hardy sketch. She tried again.
"It can't be a chimera. A chimera has two heads."
"A chimera doesn't have to have two heads. A chimera is any animal made up of the parts of other animals."
"Which is impossible!"
Again he looked at her and indicated the beast. "You see it here before you."
"Yes, I see it," she said. "But just because you're putting a bunch of bones together doesn't make this a chimera."
"Putting a bunch of bones together is precisely what makes a chimera!"
"I thought you said you were re-constructing it," she objected.
"Of course. I didn't create the thing."
"So you're saying it existed before you came upon a heap of bones."
"Yes, it did. I'm a scientist – I investigate the real. I don't make things up that don't exist."
"But chimeras don't exist!"
"Here it is. Don't ignore the evidence right before your eyes! Don't give in to the willful ignorance that allows so many to see only what they expect to see, what they want to see. Open your eyes and observe."
"I see it," she said. "I see the bones. But you have put them together. You're constructing what you believe to be a chimera, not reconstructing one."
"How do you know this?"
"Because chimeras simply don't exist!"
"Because you have never seen one? But now you have."
She gave up, and the scientist went back to tinkering with the skeletal beast. She sat on the stool, looking around her, trying to make sense of the conglomeration around her. Her impression of some kind of mid-Victorian lab didn't hold up once she looked more carefully at what was actually there. Nothing seemed to be connected up to anything else – the tubing didn't go anywhere, and she knew that the ducts in the walls had no outlets on the other side. There were rods going across the ceiling in all sorts of crazy directions. They could have been used to suspend things from except that some hung lower than others and were thus in the way. There was no apparent function to most of what she saw.
She wondered why the man thought chimeras existed, and then realized the foolishness of her train of thought – she had stepped inside a piece of assemblage art and it had come to life, and here she was, wondering about why a character, a fictional character, who couldn't himself really exist, why that character believed chimeras existed. Now that she was inside the box, he no longer had the smooth face of a genderless being from beyond the spheres. Now he was a man. His face was lined, with the brackets of middle age holding his mouth tightly together. He could have used a closer shave.
She sat a bit longer, watching the scientist, contemplating the strangeness of her position, and then suddenly wondered – what would happen if she left? Would he continue to move around? Would she be able to watch him through the glass? Would he continue to re-construct the skeleton? She decided to find out. She got off the stool, thought about saying goodbye, and then thought better of it – she would just quietly exit. She opened the door, stepped out, and closed it behind her. And she turned and looked, and all was as it was before. The artwork was exactly the same. Nothing had moved -- she looked closely and saw that not even the little piece of bone that he had discovered and affixed to the skeleton when she first came in appeared to have moved.
She contemplated the box for a moment, and then went to the bathroom, took the first shower she'd taken in days, dressed herself, and went out.
In the following days she tried to devote herself to the artwork the way she had before, but she couldn't train her attention on it. Where she had been enraptured before, unable to look away or re-orient her life, now she couldn't sit and look at the artwork even when she tried. She received an inquiry about her availability to index a book about Bishop Berkeley and she took the job. Her life began to fall back into its earlier shape.
But the box still stood in her apartment, and she couldn't put it out of her mind. She had speculated endlessly about what might happen if she entered the box. She had thought to meet an other-worldly messenger, someone who would speak in Buddhist koans, who would echo the Desert Fathers, who would shoot fire from his fingertips and bring a message so fine, so pure, so far beyond the mundane everyday round of her life, that it would revolutionize everything. Her life had seemed on the point of change, on the cusp of revolution, and she had prepared for it – she had prayed and fasted and worn the sackcloth of dirty pajamas, and she had been ready. Ready for her life to change, ready to cross the Alps with Hannibal and Wordsworth, ready to cross the Rubicon and the Tiber and every other river of demarcation, ready to dive into the Jordan and emerge a completed, fulfilled, transformed being, as transcendent as she imagined the figure inside the artbox to be. And he wasn't what she thought. He was no Gabriel, no Mohammed – he had nothing to say. He wasn't even a real scientist. He appeared to be a scientist, he had the devotion to method and detail, the inquisitive mind, the reliance upon data and even the ability to hypothesize – but he was investigating a world so small it fit into the corner of her living room, and a world so unreal that the reconstruction of a chimera seemed an entirely plausible and even important occupation to him. And the machines in the box couldn't actually be fixed, were more whirligig and thingamabob than technology.
She grew increasingly irritated about the experience she had had with the man in the box. He had failed her. The whole thing had failed her. She decided he owed her a better explanation of what had happened, of what he was doing, of the "chimera." Without preface or contemplation, she simply marched up to to the box, pulled on the door and walked in.
And nothing happened.
The man didn't move, didn't say anything, didn't change – nothing.
He appeared exactly the same – the same beatific expression, the still gaze at the unfinished skeleton before him. She stood in the box, just inside the opening, staring, waiting to see if he was simply delayed, but still – nothing. She heard a cat scratching at the box on the outside, so went out, closed the door, shooed away the cat, and sat down on the sofa.
She stared at the box. It was exactly the same. She sat for some time, contemplating the box, wondering why nothing had happened, whether anything had ever happened.
She finally drew the large scarf over the entire scene. After ignoring the box entirely for several months, she called an art appraiser and asked him to come have a look and see what she could get out of the box. He appeared at her door the following afternoon, a dry, brittle little man with flaking skin and a twitchy demeanor. He barely greeted her, but examined the box very carefully for some time without saying anything. He didn't open its door. She thought about telling him about her experience, but didn't. Finally he turned to her.
"You opened the box." It was an accusation.
"Well, yes, I did."
"You shouldn't have done that."
"I know. But I did."
"It's devalued the piece. You should never have opened it up. It looks as if you moved things around."
"A few things, yes. But couldn't it be put back?"
"Didn't you hear? The artist just died – this was one of his newest pieces, and it wasn't properly documented before he sold it. No one knows exactly how it was."
"Then it doesn't really matter, does it?"
He looked offended. "Of course it matters! You can't just go messing around with these things!"
She stood silent, looking at him. After a bit, she said, "But I did open it. It's done. And I want to sell it."
"All right, I'll see what I can do," he said. "But it may very well be junk."
Inspired by the work of Ron Pippin.
© 2012 Ruth Warkentin