The Genius Read online

“Go right on ahead. You can stay as long as you want. But you have to leave at six, that’s when my girls come over. We play Scrabble.”

  Did you ever hear him talking to himself?

  “Victor? Goodness, no. Who told you that?”

  Your neighbor across the hall.

  [makes face] “He’s one to talk, with the music that he plays. He plays it so loud that I can hear it, and I’m half deaf. It’s true.” [indicates hearing aids] “I complain to the superintendent, but they never show up. You know, my husband was probably right: we probably should have left a long time ago. I keep hoping things might get back to the way they used to be. But. They never do.”

  PATRICK SHAUGHNESSY, superintendent: “Quiet. Never complained and I never had a complaint about him. That’s the kind of tenant you like to have, although he was so damn quiet you have to wonder how a person could stand to hold it in for so long. When I saw the state of the place, that’s when I figured it out. I said to myself, ‘Patrick, that’s where all his talk is going.’ Sight to behold, I tell you.” [spreads hands three feet apart] “Incredible.”

  Yes.

  “I said to myself, ‘Patrick, what you’re looking at is art. You can’t g’wan and throw it out like it’s garbage.’ I know it when I see it, am I right? You’re the art dealer, so you tell me: am I right?”

  You’re right.

  “Right, then. Hey, now: do you think those paintings are worth anything?”

  Do you?

  “I would think so. I would think so. But you tell me. You’re the expert.” It’s impossible to say just yet.

  “I sure hope so.”

  Do you know where he went?

  [shakes head] “The poor fellah might’ve gone off anywhere. He might be dead. What do you think, he’s dead?”

  Well—

  “How do you know, you’re not the police, right?”

  No.

  “Okay, then. That’s who you should be talking to, if you want to find him.”

  Would the police know?

  “They’d know better than I would. That’s their job, isn’t it?”

  Well—

  “You want to know what I think, I think he decided he didn’t like it here anymore. Can you blame him? Got his money saved up and went to Florida. That’s where I’m going. I’m getting prepared. The nest egg and more coming, I tell you. If that’s what he did, then good for him. More power. I hope he has a good time. He never seemed too happy, I will say that.”

  Unhappy in what way. Depressed, or guilty, or—

  “Most of the time I remember him looking at the ground. Straight down at the ground, bent-over-like, weight of the world n’so forth. I used to see him and think that he wanted to look up but couldn’t stand what he’d see. Some people might keep quiet but get along fine, cause they don’t have anything to stay. Him, though. He had a lot to say and no way to say it.”

  DAVID PHILADELPHIA, upstairs neighbor: “Who?”

  MARTIN NAVARRO, Rosario Quintana’s ex-husband, now moved eight flights below: “I can tell you what I remember. Wait a minute, though, you talked to Kenny?”

  Kenny?

  “My son. You said you talked to him.”

  Yes.

  “What did he look like?”

  Like—

  “I mean did he look happy. I know what he looks like. He looks like me, you don’t need to tell me that. She keeps saying that he looks like her father but, trust me, she doesn’t know what end it’s coming out of. Not a clue. So whatever she told you about your guy, you can bet it’s wrong. What did she tell you?”

  That he was a taxi driver.

  “Okay, first of all, first of all, that is wrong. No way that guy could drive. He couldn’t even see. He was always bumping into the walls. That’s what used to drive us crazy, because he was always dropping things and bumping into the walls at two in the morning. You should ask the neighbor downstairs, I’m sure they can tell you about that.”

  So what was he, then?

  “I don’t know, but he wasn’t driving no taxi. What kind of job does somebody like that have? Maybe he was a bus driver.”

  You said he couldn’t see.

  “Have you ever been on a bus in this city? Maybe he was one of those guys that sold the pretzels.”

  He seems a little old for that.

  “Yeah. You’re right. I didn’t think about that. How old was he?”

  What do you think?

  “He was old. How old did Rosario say he was?”

  She didn’t say.

  “Whatever she said, add ten years. Or twenty. Or subtract. Then you’ll have the real answer.”

  GENEVIEVE MILES, downstairs neighbor: “It sounded like he was kicking sandbags up there.”

  Her husband, Christopher: “Yeah, that’s about right.”

  What does that sound like?

  “What do you think it sounds like.”

  Like—thumping?

  “Uh-huh. Like thumping.”

  HOW DO YOU DISPLAY TWO ACRES OF ART? That was the question facing me as I began to claw through the Victor Cracke oeuvre. By our estimate, there were around 135,000 drawings, each on the same type of 8½-by-11 paper, low brightness, cheap and readily found—enough paper to cover 87,688 square feet. We couldn’t very well hang the entire piece, unless the government of China decided to lease us the Great Wall.

  I advanced a year’s rent on Victor’s apartment and brought in a photographer to document the placement of every item inside. I hired two temps, whose sole mission was to number the boxes, record their general contents, and haul them down to a truck. After the apartment was empty, I had it scrubbed and vacuumed to clear out the rest of that choking dust. Then the operation moved from Queens to Manhattan, where I set up a makeshift laboratory in a storage facility three blocks from my gallery. With the boxes piled high in one locker, I outfitted the adjacent locker with a desk, chairs, a high-powered surgical light, a plastic tarp that I spread on the floor, cotton gloves, a magnifying glass, a space heater, floodlamps, and a computer. Nightly, through the end of winter and all of spring, Ruby and I sat with two or three boxes, sorting their contents as rapidly as possible while still noting pieces of exceptional quality, racking our brains to figure out how in the world to put up a show.

  In theory we could have—I don’t know—laminated them all. I suppose we could have done that. We could, I suppose, have laid them all out in a field in western Pennsylvania or the Hudson River Valley and affixed them to the ground, invited people to walk around the perimeter, like some big conceptual piece by Smithson. That would have been one option.

  But the logistics upset my stomach. Once sheathed in plastic, how well would the drawings align? Standing at the edge of the piece, would you be able to tell anything about its center, a hundred feet away? Was there even a center? What about glare, or wind, or warping? How could I possibly get people to make the drive?

  At the same time, I had to acknowledge that shown individually, the drawings lost much of their power. Which is not to say that they weren’t still arresting—they were. But splitting them up undermined what I believed to be one of the piece’s essential themes: connectedness, the unity of everything.

  I drew this conclusion soon after bringing the first box out of storage and laying out fifty or sixty of the drawings. When had I pieced them together, I saw immediately the true nature of Victor Cracke’s monumental work: it was a map.

  A map of reality as he perceived it. There were continents and boundary lines, nations and oceans and mountain ranges, all labeled in his meticulous handwriting. Phlenbendenum. Freddickville. Zythyrambiana, E. and W. The Green Qoptuag Forest, sending its fingers down into the Valley of Worthe, in which gleamed the golden cupola of the Cathedral Saint Gudrais and its Chamber of the Secret Sacred Heart—KEEP OUT!, he warned. Names ripped from Tolkien, or Aldous Huxley. Adding more panels, zooming out, you encountered other planets, other suns and galaxies. Wormholes led to distant parts of the map, alluded to by their num
bers. Like the universe itself, the edges of the piece seemed to be speeding away from its unfathomable center.

  It was not just a map of space; it was a map of time as well. Places, figures, and scenes recurred in adjacent panels, moving in slow motion, like a comic book photocopied a thousand times, torn up, thrown into the air. Walking alongside the piece, reading its repetitions, one sensed the frustration at being unable to record everything, seen and imagined, in real time—the lines on the page always a few seconds out of date, and Victor sprinting to keep up.

  DOES ANY OF THAT MAKE SENSE? I’m not sure that it does. Great art does that: it cuts out your tongue. And Victor’s art is especially hard to describe, not just because of its size and complexity but because it was so damned weird. Everything was out of whack; everything repeated ad nauseam, giving rise to two unsettling sensations. On the one hand, once you got used to his visual vocabulary—the creatures, the wild proportions—you began to feel a profound sense of déjà vu, the strange becoming familiar, the way jargon starts to sound normal when everyone around you speaks it. On the other hand, the moment you stopped looking at the drawings, you were besieged by jamais vu, the familiar becoming strange, the way a regular word starts to sound wrong if you repeat it enough. I would look up from the drawing and notice Ruby playing with her tongue stud and the sound of it, the glint of it—her whole face—her knees tucked under her—her stark shadowed shape on the locker wall—all of it would somehow seem wrong. That is to say: the drawing was so massive and encompassing and hypnotic that it had a hallucinogenic effect, distorting our perception of the real world to the extent that I sometimes felt like Ruby and I were figments of Victor’s imagination—that the drawing was reality and we were characters inside it.

  I fear that I’m not making sense again. Let me put it this way: we had to take a lot of breaks for fresh air.

  SO THAT WAS THE PARADOX I FACED: how to exhibit an artistic Theory of Everything in fragments.

  After a lot of thought and struggle, I settled on showing ten-by-ten segments, a decision that yielded “canvases” approximately seven feet by nine. The gallery could not accommodate more than fifteen or so—or about one percent of the total work. I would suspend the canvases away from the wall, allowing viewers to walk all around them, to see the drawings’ luminous fronts as well as their systematic backs, which I came to interpret as a war between Victor’s right and left brain.

  He had done his best to create a work of art that thwarted the notion of public exhibition; however, I am not easily put off, and I hate to fail once I’ve begun. In short, I didn’t give a damn about the creator’s intent.

  I told you I behaved badly, didn’t I? I did. You were warned.

  HE DID MORE THAN DRAW. He wrote as well. A few of the boxes contained thick, faux-leather-bound journals dating back to 1963. In them he had recorded the weather, his daily intake of food, and his church attendance, each category filling several volumes: thousands of entries, many of them identical. The food journal, in particular, was mind-numbing.

  His meals never varied, with the exception of Christmas, when he ate roast beef, and one week in January 1967, when he ate oatmeal for breakfast—an experiment that must have failed, because by the following week he was back to scrambled eggs, a habit dutifully recorded for the next thirty-six years.

  The weather journal, while it varied every day (containing information on temperature, humidity, and general conditions), conveyed much the same effect.

  They made for dreadful bathroom reading. But I saw a kinship between the journals and the drawings, the same obsessiveness and strict adherence to routine. You could even call it love; for what is love, if not the willingness to repeat oneself?

  Whereas the church journal made the idea of a benevolent, present God seem absurd. If you prayed every day, three times a day or sometimes more, wrote down all your rosaries and Hail Marys and trips to the confessional, and yet nothing changed—your meals remained the same, the weather kept on being gray or slushy or muggy, just like it always had been—how could you continue to believe? “Mass” began to sound like just that and no more: a bulk of useless activity that added up to nothing.

  Lest you think I was reading too much into the work, let me tell you that I was not alone in finding something awe-inspiring about the journals. They were Ruby’s favorite part of the installation, much preferred to the drawings, which she found somewhat overbearing. At her behest I decided to display the journals in their own corner, without explanatory text. We would let people decide for themselves.

  We put the opening on the books for July 29. Usually I run shows for four to six weeks. I slotted Victor Cracke in for eight, with a mind to let him run longer if I so chose. We hadn’t even touched the bulk of the work, but I simply could not wait to get the pieces up. I called Kristjana and told her that her Arctic ice pack installation would have to wait. She swore at me, threatened me, told me I’d hear from her lawyer.

  I didn’t care. I was lovesick.

  For those six months I barely went out. Marilyn would come by the storage locker after work, bring me a panino and a bottle of water. She’d tell me I looked like a homeless person. I’d ignore her and eventually she’d shrug and leave.

  While Ruby and I labored to compile the catalogue raisonné, Nat handled the front end of the gallery. He consulted me on important decisions, but otherwise he had total control. He could have stolen anything he wanted, sold pieces for half off, and I would not have noticed. The lone apostle has a full-time job.

  AND THE PROPHET HIMSELF?

  To tell you the truth—and here begins my confession—I stopped looking for him. Before very long I thought that I might be better off never meeting the man.

  I conducted the interviews excerpted at the beginning of this chapter, as well as a handful of others with people who claimed to have noticed Victor roaming the halls of Muller Courts. All their stories turned out to be fragmentary, anecdotal, and self-contradictory. One of the security guards told me that Victor had been a drug dealer. Others suggested janitor, cook, writer, and bodyguard.

  A physical description proved slippery as well. He was tall; he was short; he was average. He was gaunt; he had a big belly; a scar on his face, a scar on his neck, no scars at all. A moustache. A beard. A moustache and a beard. That everyone remembered him differently made sense; he had never been in one person’s presence long enough to leave a distinct impression.

  He tended to stare at the ground rather than look you in the eye. On that people agreed.

  With Tony’s help I learned that Cracke had been a tenant since 1966, and that his apartment was heavily rent-controlled, the monthlies low even for the slummiest part of Queens. Until the time of his disappearance, in September 2003, he had never missed a payment.

  There were no other Crackes in the phone book.

  Father Lucian Buccarelli, of Our Lady of Hope, had never heard of Victor. He recommended that I talk to his colleague, Father Simcock, who had been around the parish a lot longer.

  Father Allan Simcock didn’t know any Victor Cracke. He wondered if I had the right church. I told him I could be wrong. He made a list of all the neighborhood churches—a list far longer than I expected—and, wherever possible, gave me the names of people to talk to.

  I did not follow up on them.

  I am not a detective. And I owed Victor nothing. He could have been dead; he could have been alive. It didn’t matter to me. All that mattered to me was his art, and that I had, in spades.

  PEOPLE DON’T APPRECIATE the creativity of dealing art. In the contemporary market, it is the dealer—not the artist—who does most of the work. Without us there would be no Modernism, no Minimalism, no movements at all. All the contemporary legends would be painting houses or teaching adult education classes. Museum collections would grind to a halt after the Renaissance; sculptors would still be carving pagan gods; video would be the province of pornography; graffiti a petty crime rather than the premise behind a multimillio
n-dollar industry. Art, in short, would cease to thrive. And this is because—in a post-Church, post-patronage era—dealers refine and pipeline the fuel that drives art’s engine, that has always driven it and always will: money.

  These days especially, there is simply too much material out there for any normal person to be able to distinguish between good and bad. That’s the dealer’s job. We are creators, too—only we create markets, and our medium is the artists themselves. Markets, in turn, create movements, and movements create tastes, culture, the canon of acceptability—in short, what we think of as Art itself. A piece of art becomes a piece of art—and an artist becomes an artist—when I make you take out your checkbook.

  Victor Cracke, then, was my definition of a perfect artist: he created and then he disappeared. I couldn’t have imagined a greater gift. My very own tabula rasa.

  SOME OF YOU MIGHT DEEM my actions ethically squishy. Before you judge me, consider this: plenty of times art has been dragged into public without its creator’s knowledge—even against his will. Great art demands an audience, and to deny that is itself unethical. If you’ve ever read a poem by Emily Dickinson, you will agree.

  Moreover, it’s not as though I lacked precedent. Consider, for example, the case of the so-called Wireman, the name given to the creator of a series of sculptures discovered in a Philadelphia alley on a trash night in 1982. I’ve seen them; they’re eerie: thousands of found objects—clock faces, dolls, food containers—cocooned in loops of heavy-gauge wire. Nobody knows who the artist was; nobody knows what motivated him to produce. We don’t know for certain that he was, in fact, a he. And while the question of whether the pieces were intended as art is open to debate, that they were pulled out of the garbage would seem to indicate quite clearly that they weren’t intended for public consumption. This misgiving, however, has not stopped galleries from selling the pieces at commanding prices; it has not stopped museums across the United States and Europe from mounting exhibitions or critics from commenting on the work’s “shamanistic” or “totemic” properties, speculating about its similarities to African “medicine bundles.” That’s a lot of talk and cash and activity generated by what might have ended up as landfill, were it not for a sharp-eyed passerby.