The Genius Read online

  “I can’t. Are you kidding? Today? I’m in the middle of work.”

  “Take a break.”

  “I haven’t even gotten started.”

  “Then you’re not interrupting anything.”

  “I can come up—next Tuesday. How about then?”

  “I’ll send a car for you.”

  “Tony,” I said. “It can wait. It’ll have to.”

  He said nothing, the most effective rebuke of all. I held the phone aside to ask Ruby for a slot in my schedule, but Tony’s voice came squawking from the receiver.

  “Don’t ask her. Don’t ask the girl.”

  “I’m—”

  “Get in a cab. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

  As I gathered my coat and bag and walked to the corner to pick up a cab, my cell phone rang again. It was Kristjana. She’d done some thinking. August could work.

  • 2 •

  All twenty-four Muller Courts towers are named for gemstones, a stab twenty-four Muller Courts towers are named for gemstones, a stab at elegance that misses its mark by some distance. I had the driver circle the block until I spotted Tony waiting for me in front of the Garnet unit, his tan camel-hair coat vivid against the brick, sniffing distance from a heap of trash bags bleeding into the gutter. Above a concrete awning fluttered the three flags of country, state, and city, and a fourth, for the Muller Corporation.

  We entered the lobby, overheated and fumy with institutional floor cleaner. Everybody in uniform—the security guard inside his bulletproof kiosk, the handyman prying off baseboards near the management office— seemed to know Tony, acknowledging him out of either cordiality or fear.

  A reinforced glass door led into a dark courtyard, hemmed in by Garnet behind us, and on three sides by the Tourmaline, Lapis Lazuli, and Platinum units.

  I remember once asking my father how they could have named a building Platinum, which even I, at age seven, knew was not a stone. He didn’t answer me, and so I repeated myself, louder. He kept reading, looking supremely annoyed.

  Don’t ask stupid questions.

  All I wanted to do from then on was to ask as many stupid questions as possible. My father soon declined to look up at me when I approached, finger crooked, mouth full of imponderables. Who decides what goes in the dictionary. Why don’t men have breasts. I would have asked my mother but she was already dead by then, which might help explain why my questions so irritated my father. Everything that I did or said served the same purpose: to remind him that I existed, and that she did not.

  At some point I figured out why they chose Platinum. They ran out of stones.

  Seen from high above, the courtyards from which Muller Courts draws its name look like dumbbells. Each consists of a pair of hexagons, four sides of which are residential towers and two of which taper into a rectangular stretch of community property—the bar of the dumbbell—that features a playground, a small parking lot, and a grassy patch for sitting when weather permits. Between them, the various courtyards also contain six basketball hoops, a volleyball net, an asphalt soccer field, a swimming pool (drained in winter), a handful of unkempt gardens, three small houses of worship (mosque, church, synagogue), a dry cleaner, and two bodegas. If your needs were simple enough, you could get by without ever leaving the complex.

  As we crossed the hexagon, its towers seemed to loom inward, weighed down by air conditioners painted in pigeon shit. Balconies served as overflow storage for decrepit furniture, moldy carpet remnants, three-legged walkers, charcoal grills abandoned in mid-assembly. Two kids in oversized NBA jerseys played a rough game of one-on-one, driving toward a basket whose broken rim drooped at a thirty-degree angle.

  I pointed this out to Tony.

  “I’ll write a memo,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.

  The so-called artist lived in the Carnelian, on the eleventh floor, and on the way up I asked Tony what efforts he’d made to get in touch with the man.

  “He’s gone, I told you.”

  I felt uneasy waltzing into a stranger’s apartment, and told Tony as much. He assured me, though, that the tenant had forfeited all rights when he stopped paying his rent. Tony had never misled me in the past, and I didn’t think him capable of doing so. Why would the thought have crossed my mind? I trusted him.

  Looking back, I might have been a tad more careful.

  Outside the door to C-1156, Tony asked me to wait while he went in and cleared the way. The entry-hall fixture didn’t work, and the rest of the place was very crowded; he didn’t want me to trip. I heard him moving around inside, heard a soft thud and a muttered oath. Then he emerged from the gloom and pinned an arm across the door.

  “All right.” He stood back to allow me in. “Go nuts.”

  BEGIN WITH THE MUNDANE, the squalid. A narrow entrance opens onto a single room, no more than a hundred and twenty square feet. Floorboards worn down to the bare wood, dried out and shrunken and splitting. The walls waterstained and pricked with thumbtack holes. A dusty lightbulb, burning. A mattress. A makeshift desk: inkstained particleboard balanced on stacks of cinderblock. A low bookcase. In the corner, a white enamel sink, archipelagoed with black chips; underneath, a single-burner electric hotplate. The windowshade permanently down, unable or unwilling to retract. A gray short-sleeved sport shirt on a hanger hooked around the bolt of a heat pipe. A gray sweater draped across a folding chair. A pair of cracked brown leather shoes, soles pulling away from uppers, making duckbills. A doorless bathroom; a toilet; a sloped tile floor with a drain underneath a ceiling-mount showerhead.

  All of this I saw later.

  At first I saw only boxes.

  Motor oil boxes, packing tape boxes, boxes for computers and printers. Fruit crates. Milk crates. 100% REAL ITALIAN TOMATOES. Boxes lining the walls, tightening the entryway by two-thirds. Smothering the bed. Tottering in stacks like elaborately vertical desserts; on the sink; in the shower, crammed in up to the ceiling; boxes, bowing the bookcase and bricking up the windows. The desk, the chair; the shoes crushed flat. Only the crapper remained exposed.

  And in the air: paper. That rich smell somewhere between human skin and bark. Paper, decaying and shedding, wood pulp creating a dry haze that eddied around my body, flowed into my lungs, and burned. I began to cough.

  “Where’s the art?” I asked.

  Tony squeezed in beside me. “Here,” he said, resting his hand on the nearest box. Then he began pointing to all the other boxes. “And there, there, there, and there.”

  Incredulous, I opened one of the boxes. Inside was a neat stack of what appeared to be blank paper, sour yellow and crumbling at the corners. For a moment I thought Tony was playing a joke on me. Then I picked up the first page and turned it over and everything else disappeared.

  I lack the vocabulary to make you see what I saw. Regardless: a dazzling menagerie of figures and faces; angels, rabbits, chickens, elves, butterflies, amorphous beasts, fantastic ten-headed beings of myth, Rube Goldberg machinery with organic parts, all drawn with an exacting hand, tiny and swarming across the page, afire with movement, dancing, running, soaring, eating, eating one another, exacting horrific and bloody tortures, a carnival of lusts and emotions, all the savagery and beauty that life has to offer—but exaggerated, delirious, dense, juvenile, perverse—and cartoonish and buoyant and hysterical—and I felt set upon, mobbed, overcome with the desire to look away as well as the desire to dive into the page.

  The real attention to detail, though, was concentrated not in these characters but in the landscape they populated. A living earth, of wobbling dimensions: here flat, there exquisitely deep, inflated geographical features, undulating roads labeled with names twenty letters long. Mountains were buttocks and breasts and chins; rivers became veins spilling purplish liquid nourishing flowers with devil’s heads; trees sprouting from a mulch of words and nonsense words; straightrazor grass. In some places the line was whisper-fine, elsewhere so thick and black that it was a miracle the pen had not torn stra
ight through the page.

  The drawing pushed at its edges, leaching into the murky air.

  Electrified, unnerved, I stared for six or seven minutes, a long time to look at a sheet of of 8½-by-11 paper; and before I could censor myself, I decided that whoever had drawn this was sick. Because the composition had a psychotic quality, the fever of action taken to warm oneself from the chill of solitude.

  I tried to place what I was seeing in the context of other artists. The best references I could muster at the time were Robert Crumb and Jeff Koons; but the drawing had none of their kitsch, none of their irony; it was raw and honest and naïve and violent. For all my efforts to keep the piece orderly—to tame it with rationality, experience, and knowledge—I still felt like it was going to jump out of my hands, to skitter up the walls and spin itself into smoke, ash, oblivion. It lived.

  Tony said, “What do you think?”

  I set the drawing aside and picked up the next one. It was just as baroque, just as mesmerizing, and I gave it the same amount of attention. Then, realizing that if I did that for every drawing in there, I’d never leave, I picked up a handful of pages and riffled them, causing a sliver near their edges to disintegrate. They were all dazzling, all of them. My chest knotted up. As early as then, I was having trouble coming to grips with the sheer monomania of the project.

  I put the stack down and returned to the first two drawings, which I set side-by-side for comparison. My eyes went back and forth between them, like those games you do as a child. There are nine thousand differences, can you find them all? I began to feel light-headed. It might have been the dust.

  Tony said, “You see how it works.”

  I didn’t, and so he turned one of the pages upside down. The drawings aligned like puzzle pieces: streams flowed on and roads rolled out. Faces half-complete found their counterparts. Then he pointed out that the backs of the drawings were not, in fact, blank. At each edge and in the center, lightly penciled in a tiny, uniform script, were numbers, like so:

  The next page was numbered 4379 in the center, and then, clockwise from the top: 2017, 4380, 6741, 4378. The pages connected where the edge of one indicated the center of the other.

  “They’re all like this?”

  “As far as I can tell.” He looked around. “I haven’t made much of a dent.”

  “How many are we talking about?”

  “Go on in. See for yourself.”

  I squeezed into the room, covering my mouth with my sleeve. I’ve inhaled plenty of unnatural substances in my day, but the sensation of paper in my lungs was entirely new and unpleasant. I had to shove boxes out of the way; dust leopard-printed my slacks. The light from the hallway dwindled, and my own breaths seemed to have no echo. The eight feet between me and the door had effectively erased New York. Living here would be like living ten miles below the earth, like living in a cave. I don’t know how else to describe it. It was supremely disorienting.

  From far away, I heard Tony say my name.

  I sat on the edge of the bed—six exposed inches of mattress; where did he sleep?—and took in a stomachful of dirty, woody air. How many drawings were there? What did the piece look like when assembled? I envisioned an endless patchwork quilt. Surely they could not all fit together. Surely nobody had that much mental power or patience. If Tony turned out to be correct, I was looking at one of the larger works of art ever created by a single person. Certainly it was the largest drawing in the world.

  The throb of genius, the stink of madness; gorgeous and mind-boggling and it took my breath away.

  Tony shimmied between two boxes and stood next to me, both of us wheezing.

  I said, “How many people know about this?”

  “You. Me. The super. Maybe some of the other people at the company, but they were just passing on the message. Only a few people have seen it firsthand.”

  “Let’s keep it that way.”

  He nodded. Then he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “What was the question.”

  “What do you think?”

  • 3 •

  The artist’s name was Victor Cracke.

  ROSARIO QUINTANA, apartment C-1154: “I didn’t see him a lot. He came in and out a couple times a day, but I’m at work, so I didn’t see him unless I was home sick or I had to come back for some reason, to pick up my son when his father drops him off too early. I’m a nurse. Sometimes I passed him in the hall. He left early in the morning. Or, you know what, he might’ve worked at night, because I don’t think I saw him after six o’clock. I think maybe he drove a taxi?”

  ROSARIO’S SEVEN-YEAR-OLD SON, Kenny: “He was weird-looking.”

  How so?

  “His hair.”

  What color was it?

  “Black.” [rubs nose] “And white.”

  Gray?

  “Yeah. But not all of it.”

  Long or short?

  “…yeah.”

  Which one. Long?

  [nods]

  Or short?

  [rubs nose]

  Both?

  [nods, makes gesture indicating spikes in every direction] “Like that, kind of.”

  Like he stuck his finger in an electrical socket?

  [look of confusion]

  JASON CHARLES, apartment C-1158: “He talked to himself. I heard him all the time, like a party goin on.”

  How do you know he was alone?

  “I know cause I know. He never talked to nobody else. Unfriendly dude.”

  So you never really spoke to him.

  “Hell naw, man. What we suppose to talk about, the Nas-daq?”

  What did he say when he talked to himself?

  “He had, like. Different voices.”

  Voices.

  “You know, different kinds of voices.”

  Different accents?

  “Like. Like a high one. Yiiii yiii yiii. Then low. Like hrmahrmahrmm. Yiii yiii yiii, hrmmhrmmhrmm…”

  So you couldn’t understand him.

  “No. But he sounded mad.”

  Mad about what?

  “All I hear’s him screaming at t’top of his mufuckin lungs. Sounds mad to me.”

  He was screaming.

  “Sometimes, yeah.”

  What about a job? Do you know what he did?

  [laughs]

  Why’s that funny?

  "Who’s gonna give him a job? I wouldn’t.”

  Why not?

  “You want some crazy-ass crazy-lookin dude running around your restaurant scaring the fuck out the customers?”

  Someone said he was a cabdriver.

  “Shit. All I know, I get in a cab and it’s him, I’m gettin out.”

  ELIZABETH FORSYTHE, apartment C-1155: “He was lovely, just a lovely, gentle man. Always he said hello to me when I saw him in the hall or the elevator. He used help me carry my groceries. I may be an old woman— don’t shake your head, you don’t think I believe you, now do you? Well aren’t you a flirt.… What was I saying? Oh, yes, well, however old I may be, he was hardly in a position to help me, at his age. He lived in that apartment longer than I can remember. I moved in in 1969, and he was already living here, so that should give you an idea. My husband passed in 84. He wanted to leave because he said the neighborhood wasn’t the same anymore. But I used to teach right around the corner—at the high school? Math. So we stayed put.”

  Do you know how old he was?

  “My husband? He was—oh, you mean Victor. Well. Around my age.” [sees questioning look] “You’re not supposed to ask a lady that, you should know that.” [smiles] “Now let me see. Well, I remember on V-E Day, going with my sister to meet her boyfriend, who had just come home from the Navy. She left me alone, right there in the middle of the street, so they could go off and neck. Sally was five years older than me, so you can figure it out. But I never knew exactly how old Victor was. He wasn’t too chatty, if you get me. It took a while for him to warm up to us. Years, I imagine it was. But once he became familiar wi
th us, we came to see that he was very gentle, not at all the person that he seemed at first.”

  How could you tell?

  “Oh, well, you should have seen him. You know things about a person the first time you look at them. You just look at their hands. Victor had the smallest hands, like a boy’s. He wasn’t much bigger than a boy, only an inch or two taller than I am. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he was very religious, you know.”

  Was he?

  “Oh yes. He went to church all the time. Three times a day.”

  That’s a lot.

  “I know. Three times a day, for Mass. Sometimes more! I go to the First African Methodist on Sundays, but before I knew Victor I wasn’t aware you could go that often, that they would keep on admitting you. When you buy a ticket for the movies you can only go to one show, after all. My husband and I used to watch the double features, back when they still had them.” [sighs] “Well. What was I saying?”

  About church.

  “Yes, church. Victor liked to go to church. That’s where he was headed, darn near every time I saw him. ‘Where are you off to, Victor?’ ‘Church.’ ” [laughs] “Our Lady of Hope, I believe that’s where he went. It’s near here. He had that look that Catholics have, you know the look? Like they’re about to be punished.”

  Guilty.

  “Yes, guilty, but also resigned. And afraid. Like his own shadow might jump up and bite him. I think the world was a bit much for him.”

  Does he have a job?

  “Well, I’m sure he must have, but I don’t know what it is. Is he all right? Has something happened to him? From the way you were talking before, I thought he might have passed, but now you’re making it sound as though he’s still around. Is he? I haven’t seen him for months.”

  It’s not terribly clear.

  “Well, you find something out, you let me know. Cause I liked Victor.”

  One more question, if you don’t mind.