Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
taylor
The gallery could hardly be called that, located in a crumbling old building by an abandoned industrial complex. It might have once been an office building, though it was attached to a silo. A discontinued rail passed near the compound, fading slowly into the gravel and earth and sprouting grass.
Though it wasn’t really a high-end gallery, it seemed an appropriate place for an exhibition of German expressionism.
Not that I was particularly knowledgeable beyond the basics.
A lot of people had a lot of trauma that they didn’t know how to process, so they started making some deeply disturbing art.
Luckily, I had a date who seemed to know everything about everything.
Last night, while I danced, Harrison went full method and tossed the script aside. He channeled a heartsick lover to such perfection that it was borderline eerie he could act so well. I’d glanced at Jason, who struggled to look away from Harrison most of the night.
I couldn’t remember ever being looked at quite like that.
There was warmth in Harrison’s eyes that glimmered inexplicably, and his lips parted a little, and he inhaled a shallow breath of air before closing his mouth and tensing the muscles in his face.
He simply looked at me, and I felt like I could do anything, like I would do anything, just to keep his attention for a moment longer.
Weird. Weird stuff. But it had fooled all my friends, and they’d kept looking at me like they were waiting for me to say something after the party. Everything they said lingered in the air, their inflection leaning a little into question. “Your friend is…interesting?”
All I had to do was nod and remain uncharacteristically quiet, so my script was easy enough to memorize. It left them shaking with curiosity, but it sent me back to my room sooner than I’d wanted to go because I was splitting at the seams, holding in the laughter.
Harrison waited for me in front of the gallery, the collar of his coat lifted, shoes shiny, light brown sweater fitted perfectly for his build. He only lacked a fedora and a cigarette to pass for a cool-cat detective in a noir novel.
The way he glanced left and right, his posture tight with tension, he really could have used a cigarette.
“Are you alright?” I asked, stepping close to him and giving him a hug. It was performative, just in case Emma popped out from behind one of the abandoned, rusting train wagons, but it also wasn’t. He looked like he needed it.
The thing about Harrison was, when he needed a hug, he refused to accept one. So I hugged a boulder, patted its back awkwardly, and tucked my hands into my pockets. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
So we did. I touched the back of his arm, then placed my hand on the small of his back. The muscles in his neck and face were so tense that I was pretty sure he would soon give himself a headache.
“You need to look a little more relaxed,” I said.
Harrison glanced at me, something in his eyes softening a little.
“Like last night,” I reminded him. “Remember? You pulled it off so well.”
The tension returned with a vengeance. Harrison took a step to his left, creating space between us.
“You’re right,” he said, words clashing with the language of his body.
He drew a deep breath, held it, then exhaled through his nose, nostrils flaring and eyes catching the overhead light. He looked anything but tranquil.
I tried not to wonder too much about this.
I tried not to question his sanity or the logic behind his actions.
At times, I felt like a selfish piece of shit, to tell the truth, because I let him act out his silly plan without making him consider things a little more carefully, because it was fun to be around him.
And if we didn’t have a reason to be around each other, would he really invite me to a German expressionism exhibition? Would I have agreed to come?
I wish I could say I would have.
And so I let him hurtle into a borderline psychotic plan to cross paths with his ex at a weirdly dark and erotic exhibition while playing his boyfriend.
We walked into the first hallway of paintings, where many canvases sported shades of brown, surprising splashes of red, and a lot of big, block lines painted black.
Harrison, who seemed like the type of person who would have enjoyed every second of this, walked through like a ghost in the mist, blending in with the paintings, passing through like he was in a train station, barely noticing things around him.
He didn’t want this.
He didn’t want any of it.
He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to see her.
He didn’t want to keep pretending. But he was committed to his plan, and he didn’t know how to break free from it.
He was a wholly different person from who he had been the night before, that relaxed, easygoing, daring guy who’d let me untuck his shirt for show and who’d gazed at me dancing as if nobody else had been in the room.
Odd how I’d never had the balls to dance like that for a girl.
Maybe I played it too safe with girls. Or I expected to be laughed at.
And maybe playing the part of a lovestruck boy came naturally to Harrison. So maybe I liked his attention. And maybe, when he paid his attention to me, he looked so relaxed and confident and free of burdens that I liked performing for him even more.
“Tell me about these,” I said, finding his hand and touching its back with the back of mine.
The first painting Harrison stopped at was small, maybe twelve inches across, a figure bent at an angle that made your spine ache just looking at it. Brown and black and that one terrible streak of red.
“This one,” I said.
He glanced at me. “What about it?”
“What’s wrong with the guy?”
A pause. His jaw worked. “Nothing’s wrong with him. That’s the point. He’s just…” He tilted his head a fraction. “Kirchner painted people like they were vibrating at a frequency nobody else could hear.”
I looked at the figure again. “The red’s the frequency.”
Harrison looked at me instead of the painting. A quick look, assessing something. Then back. “Something like that.”
We moved. I kept my hand loose at the small of his back, light enough that he could ignore it if he wanted to. He seemed to want to, mostly. His eyes kept sliding toward the far end of the hallway.
“And this one,” I said, stopping in front of a canvas thick with impasto, a city rendered in sickly greens, buildings leaning into each other like they were gossiping.
“Meidner.” His voice flattened out.
“He hated cities?”
“He was terrified of them.” His shoulder dropped a centimeter.
“He painted apocalyptic cityscapes for years. Couldn’t stop.
He wrote later that he’d felt something coming and didn’t know what it was.
” Harrison glanced at me. I wasn’t sure what the significance of it was, but the soft sadness of his gaze wrecked me. “This was 1913.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The war started the next year.”
A couple moved past us, speaking quietly in what might have been Dutch. Harrison watched them go, and something in his face settled, the muscles around his eyes loosening by degrees.
“So he was right,” I said.
“He was right, and it ruined him.” He glanced at the label, then back at the painting. “He converted. He became a pacifist and stopped painting the cities.” A small sound, not quite a laugh. “He said he’d gotten it out of his system.”
The next room opened without announcement, and I walked into it first.
The stills from Metropolis were large format, mounted on panels, Maria’s face reproduced in that high-contrast grain that made everything look like a secret.
The robot. The crowd. The flooded undercity, children scrambling over each other.
I’d seen all of this when I was a kid, sitting next to my dad in some sweltering Phnom Penh apartment after he’d come home from school.
Harrison stopped walking.
“Lang shot this in 1927, and the studio cut thirty minutes before release.” His voice had changed.
Lower, faster, the words finding their own weight.
“The full version was lost for eighty years. Someone found a 16mm print in Buenos Aires in 2008, in a film museum, badly deteriorated, and they restored it.” He stepped closer to the nearest still. “Eighty years. Sitting in a can.”
He touched the edge of the panel, not the image itself. Just the frame.
“What did they find?” I asked.
“Everything that was supposed to be there.”
I watched his hand on the frame. His shoulders had dropped a full inch since we walked in, maybe more.
I didn’t point it out. He didn’t move away from the panel.
“The part they recovered,” he said, “changes everything about the ending. Without it, the film is a fable. The rich boy sees how the workers live, has a change of heart, and reconciles capital and labor. Neat.” His finger followed the frame.
“With it, Maria’s not a symbol. She’s a person who gets destroyed for being one. ”
“The robot version of her,” I said.
Harrison turned to look at me fully for the first time since we’d walked in.
Not checking where I was standing in relation to the door.
Actually looking. “The machine Maria does everything the real Maria would never do. She incites the workers to riot, to destroy their own machinery, and to flood their children’s homes.
And the men follow her because she looks like someone they trusted.
” He paused. “Lang said he was disgusted by the film later. Called it naive.”
“Was he right?”