The Guard's Revenge

October 14th. Letter to nobody.

My name is Anna, I am twenty-three years old, and I work as a guard at Bright City Contemporary. I stand in corners and watch people look at art. I am writing this letter to myself so I cannot pretend later that I did not have a plan.

Here is the plan.

In under two weeks the gallery opens a show by Javier Vane. Javier Vane is my ex-boyfriend. I dated him for a year and a half. He is thirty-one and calls himself a performance artist, which means he does things in rooms and waits for applause. Last November, at his opening, he gave a speech. He called it an address to his muse. Then he described me. He described my body, my habits, my faults, in front of maybe a hundred people, while I stood there holding two glasses of wine. He said it was art. He said I should be honored.

I left. I did not cry until I got home. That was a year and a half of my life he turned into material, and he got a review in a magazine out of it.

So. The plan. His assistant is named Bo. He is twenty-six, he worked for a friend of Cassidy's, and I met him at a party six months ago. He was kind to me before he knew who I was, which matters to the plan, or I tell myself it does. I am going to get close to him. I am going to get him talking. Assistants know where the bodies are buried. Every artist has unpaid fabricators, undeclared work, a trail of borrowed ideas. I will find one thread and pull it before the opening.

I keep telling myself this is justice. It does not quite taste like justice. It tastes like something I bought at a gas station. But I am going to do it anyway.

Anna

* * *

To: b.okafor@brightcity.org From: a.mercer@brightcity.org Subject: crates?

Hi Bo,

This is Anna, security. We met at Cassidy's thing in the spring, you were the one who knew every word to that terrible song, do not pretend otherwise.

Clarissa has me doing odd jobs before the Vane opening and I am buried in crates. Forty-odd crates coming in next week and nobody has told me where half of them go. I heard you have handled his install before. Could you spare an hour sometime this week? I will trade you coffee and my eternal gratitude, or at least the coffee.

Anna

* * *

To: a.mercer@brightcity.org From: b.okafor@brightcity.org Subject: re: crates?

Anna,

I do remember the song. I stand by it. It is a good bad song, which is a real category.

I can do Wednesday after five. Fair warning, I have seen these crates and some of them are lying. Labels say one thing, contents say another. Vane likes it that way, he thinks it keeps people honest. In my experience it just keeps people confused, but I do not put that in my invoices.

Wednesday. Coffee accepted, gratitude optional.

Bo

* * *

To: b.okafor@brightcity.org From: a.mercer@brightcity.org Subject: re: re: crates?

Noted on the lying crates. Honestly that tracks with everything I have heard about him.

Can I ask a work question that is maybe not a work question? Do you like his art? You do not have to answer. I am a guard, my opinion on art is basically a fire code opinion.

Anna

* * *

To: a.mercer@brightcity.org From: b.okafor@brightcity.org Subject: re: re: re: crates?

I like my opinion on the record only after Friday, when the checks clear. That is a joke. Sort of.

Honestly? Some of it is good. Some of it is a man explaining himself at great volume. I move the crates either way. You stand in the corner either way. There is something almost noble about that, you know. The whole building runs on people who just show up.

Wednesday, five. I will bring the coffee if you unlock the door.

Bo

* * *

Wednesday, 6:40 pm. Guard log, side room.

Regular entry: doors secured, east exit checked, no incidents.

Irregular entry: Bo Okafor came by at five like he said. I did not expect him to actually be like this. I expected smug. He is not smug. He is tired in a friendly way, and he knows where every label on every crate is lying, and he told me the system for it, three columns, one for what the crate says, one for what is in it, one for what it weighs. He said the weight column is the honest one because crates do not have egos.

We unpacked four of them. He talked about his mother, who paints landscapes in Baltimore and thinks his job is a sin. He asked what I do outside of guarding. I said nothing interesting. He said guarding is interesting if you pay attention, everyone acts different when they think nobody official is looking. I said that was a strange nice thing to say. He shrugged.

The plan part: he mentioned that Javier still owes a fabricator in Chicago for the last show. Eleven months, no check. I wrote it down. The name, the amount, the fact that Javier paid for a boat before he paid a person who built half the show.

Then I felt bad about writing it down, which was not in the plan.

Regular entry resumes: lights out, perimeter secure.

* * *

Friday, 11:15 pm. Storage room.

Regular entry: late shift, inventory walk, no incidents.

Irregular entry: Bo stayed late to label the last of the freight. He found me in the storage room checking the camera blind spots, which is a thing guards do and which sounds worse written down than it is. He was holding two coffees from the place on Fifth that stays open late. He said, "You looked like you needed a rescue."

I said, "It is almost midnight. Why are you nice?"

He said, "Habit. My mom would haunt me otherwise."

We sat on a crate marked FRAGILE and drank the coffee and did not talk about Javier at all, which was new. He asked about the gap on my resume and I told him the truth, that I had a bad year, that a person I trusted made me into a story without asking. He went quiet. Then he said, "That is a lousy thing for anyone to do. Especially someone who makes things for a living."

I said, "You are the first person who did not ask what I wore."