Minerva Blues - A Short Story
(“Minerva Visiting the Muses”: Johann König)
After Julie’s suicide, there was a question of what to do with her apartment. Rent it to a new tenant, obviously—but the matter was complicated by the fact that the top-floor loft in which Julie had lived and died was the most prized apartment in a residence dedicated to housing artists, and, as you would imagine, every other artist already living there coveted the loft either secretly or openly for themselves.
Take Conrad, for instance, who believed that Julie’s superiority as an artist in both aesthetic and commercial terms was heavily if not directly correlated with her three-year occupation of the loft. Or take Zeller, also for instance, who believed the opposite: That Julie’s place in the loft—like a favor from the Unnamable Gods of Art—had been prepared by her superiority, which she had achieved while living elsewhere, in a domicile characterized by less opulence and greater squalor, squalor being, according to Zeller, a necessary precondition for the emergence of a superior artist from the chrysalis of a middling or inferior one. The larval stage in the life cycle of the artist, as Zeller sees it, is childhood, wherein nothing much that could properly be termed art takes place. Then comes puberty, pubescence, Zeller will tell you, wherein those who are destined to be artists suddenly explode with aesthetic sensibility—with sensitivity to the primal and omnipresent element of the aesthetic—and with violence equal to that of a religious awakening. It is widely known in the artistic community that Julie lived an idyllic childhood that was suddenly riven by what her dear friend Zeller would call a disastrous pubescence. It is even speculated by some, such as Zeller, who knew Julie best (albeit not very well at all, in the balance, as she always maintained that no one really knew her or ever could), that the dark ripples of Julie’s tumultuous adolescent years carried through to her young and then middling adulthood, chasing her, gnashing at her heels, until no amount of aesthetic or commercial success could salve her wounded soul, until she had no choice left—or so she believed—but to take her own life. Which, as it happens, was achieved using a rope and a high wooden rafter.
It was Conrad who found her. He lived in one of two apartments below her, always listening to her footsteps above traversing the wide expanse of her studio loft; he would be alternately inspired or annoyed or haunted by those footsteps, depending on the time of day. In the morning, Conrad would sometimes be awakened by Julie’s footsteps across the wooden floors above and would feel inspired by the work ethic that had her up and out of bed at the crack of dawn each day—a peculiarity among artists, who tend to be nightcrawlers. But once Conrad’s inspiration ran dry, by early evening at the latest, Julie’s footsteps would irritate him, as if she were taunting him from on high. It was when he would sometimes wake in the middle of the night to hear her padding softly in circles around the perimeter of her loft, the floorboards creaking eerily as she went, that Conrad would feel haunted, as he confessed to me once.
And then one day the footsteps stopped. Nearly forty-eight hours passed without Conrad or his neighbor across the hall, a meek and awkward hermit named Esther, hearing a single footfall from the loft above. After almost two whole days of silence yawning from Julie’s loft, Conrad consulted with Esther, knocking on her door too loudly, so that she was frightened and took several minutes to work up the courage to open it, to peer out at him from the murk with two shaky, ratty little eyes and ask in a high, breathy voice what he wanted. He asked if she had seen their friend, Julie, at any point in the past forty-eight hours. Esther had not. Nor was she aware of any business Julie might have had to attend to in the outside world, as artists sometimes—at the expense of their sanity—have to do. After a quick tour of the house, talking to all the other inhabitants—except for Zeller, with whom Conrad was not presently on speaking terms—Conrad became afraid, because no one had seen or heard from Julie in the past two days.
So, swallowing his fear (he was a renowned swallower of fear), Conrad climbed up to the third-floor loft and knocked softly on the door. After several minutes of knocking with increased urgency, his anxiety climbing back out of his gut and ascending toward panic, he tried the handle. Julie had left her door unlocked. She’d left a note too, on the desk, explaining the body hanging from the high wooden rafter by a rope.
“The world is too beautiful,” said the note. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
//
No one ever saw Conrad weep over Julie’s death, though it is possible he wept in private. He did not weep at the funeral service, I am told, nor at the funeral party afterward, held in the common room on the ground floor of the house where Julie had taken her own life.
It must have been a somber affair. Zeller has told me that the funeral party was silent and dreadful. One of the three ground-floor residents, a middle-aged woman named Candace, had put on some music, a mix of Julie’s favorite songs and songs that reminded her of Julie, but the silence born of grief and shock and horror was so powerful that it seemed to swallow the music; no one could hear anything but the roaring silence of Julie’s departure. People danced and sang and chatted, but it was as if in a sorrowful vacuum, where no sound could travel. That was Zeller’s experience, anyway.
Conrad has reported that only once they were all good and drunk did they begin to speculate on the question of why. “There was no need for us to ask,” he said. “Not that her suicide note explained much . . . but, then again, it explained everything. Only Esther didn’t understand.”
That is, only Esther was autistic enough to be unable to fathom why a great artist of Julie’s stature would seek to end her pain by ending everything else along with it. The full spectrum of the human heart was a mystery to a creature like Esther, who was essentially a mole-person. No one else at the funeral party could really claim to be surprised, not upon honest reflection. The fact—which was agreed upon by Conrad and Zeller and Candace, as well as Lacroix, who dwelt on the ground floor with Candace and Zeller—was that Julie had been an artist of such acute aesthetic sensitivity that, for her, beauty and pain were synonymous, fused, indivisible: The world, Julie’s world, was made of beauty, more beauty than a single human soul could fathom—and thus, the world was more painful to her than she could bear. For Julie, pain was beauty and beauty was pain, and she could only go on reflecting or refracting this ineluctable truth in her artistic labor for so long before her poor little heart could take it no more. Conrad always thought that she was dramatizing when she explained her aesthetic sensitivities, he always secretly thought that she was full of shit, although he was not enough of a bastard to tell her so to her face. She probably knew, regardless, he once confided to me, bitter and drunk. He believed that Julie had sensed his derisive attitude toward her professed aesthetic sensitivities, or that she had learned of his derision of her through the proverbial grapevine, and he wished bitterly that he could change his attitude toward her professed aesthetic sensitivities—but it was too late now, she was gone, and he didn’t see the point.
While she was still alive, he was always sniffing at her door, “like a dog,” as Zeller puts it, always looking for some ingress to her highly coveted confidence, which she always withheld from Conrad, keeping him at an arm’s length—perhaps because she could sense his carnal desire for her, like an undercurrent or a subtext—whereas with Zeller there was no need to repel or evade him because he was, or so he claimed, an asexual, a man without erotic sensibilities, and thus did not desire her in a carnal way—only in the way that being near to her made him feel, as he puts it, “Closer to grace.”
Does it go without saying that Conrad was bitterly jealous of the men (and women) Julie regularly brought home to fuck in her spacious top-floor loft? Well, anyway, I’ve said it.
It probably does go without saying that Zeller took this shattering loss the hardest, weeping constantly throughout the funeral party, as reported by Candace, who held him as he wept and once or twice wept along with him.
It was Candace who called me on the day of the discovery of Julie’s body. I relayed the sad news to the landlords, who had never met Julie, who always left everything regarding the upkeep of their various properties to me (the property manager), and so it was no surprise that they left this to me too: the matter of Julie’s suicide. It wasn’t the first suicide to occur in that house, as you can imagine, and so I was not exactly baffled as to how I should proceed, but I do have to say that for some reason it was the most shocking, the most regrettable suicide of all of those with which I’ve had to deal, perhaps because of Julie’s great local success, or perhaps there was just something about her, as we say when we don’t know how else to explain the inexplicable. It was I who called the coroner to come collect the body; I was there as the detectives inspected the scene of the suicide and as they interviewed all the remaining artists in residence. There was nothing at all suspicious about Julie’s death, they concluded; it was sad and it was real and that was all.
//
After the funeral party, it fell to me to decide who among the artists in residence could take over the much-coveted third-floor loft, as well as to find a new artist to assume the vacated room. The latter matter was of little consequence, as there was always a whole horde of hungry artist dying to live in that house; the former matter of selecting a new resident for the room that Julie had so dramatically vacated was much stickier. I would have left it up to a democratic vote among the other five, but Conrad wouldn’t hear of it. He was of the opinion that he should be allowed to move into the loft because, of the two second-floor dwellers, he was the only one who both wanted it and was not afraid to live in a room where someone had died, whereas Esther wanted the loft but was afraid of ghosts. In Conrad’s mind, if in no one else’s, the construction of the house had prescribed a natural hierarchy in which newcomers were consigned to the ground floor and had to work their way up to the much-coveted loft by first ascending to the second floor, etc. If you asked Conrad, Lacroix, being the newest addition to the ground floor, had no claim on the loft—no matter how successful he was or how much he wanted it. But Zeller, who had moved into the house on the same day as Conrad but had allowed Esther to ascend to the second floor ahead of him because he did not believe in hierarchies, Zeller argued that if the matter could not be settled democratically, then it should be settled arbitrarily: that is, by putting all their names into a hat and picking one out. Conrad—a great enemy of democratic solutions, of democracy itself—scoffed at this suggestion, called it stupid; he would not participate in anything “so childish.” As for Candace, she wanted to live in the loft and was not afraid of ghosts, but she seemed to be of the mind that either Conrad or Zeller should take it, both of them having more claim to it than she. Why? Because they were willing to fight over it, whereas Candace was a great keeper of peace.
Without the possibility of a consensus being reached, the matter would have to fall to an outside arbitrator. To me. A headache I really didn’t need, busy as I was managing all six of the landlords’ local rental properties. I’d been through this wringer before, three years prior, when my decision to let Julie move into the much-coveted loft had driven her primary rival, an artist named Sandor, to move out in the middle of the night, breaking his lease. Sandor had been Candace’s sometime lover, and his departure caused a brief though non-fatal rift between Candace and Julie; the tension in the house reigned for months. It would have been Candace’s turn to move to the second floor, into Sandor’s vacant room across the hall from Esther, but she ceded the ground to Conrad or Zeller, if only to boost the morale of the one or the other in her motherly way, and Conrad, an unwavering believer in hierarchies, moved on up. His ascension caused no friction with Zeller. Though interminably at odds with each other on an aesthetic and philosophical level, they were still, at that time, lifelong best friends.
They still are, I’d wager, though now they are simultaneously best friends and enemies. It is probably even the case that they have always been friends and enemies, with the portion of enmity in their relationship gradually growing across the years, gradually eating into the portion of friendship—beginning, one imagines, with their artistic awakening. There is no way of knowing who woke up first—Conrad or Zeller—because they cannot agree, they are in constant debate, one claiming that he was the first to be touched by the divine light of an aesthetic sensibility, while the other claiming that no, it was him who was first. Whatever the case, by the time they were in high school, both of them wanted to be artists—whatever that meant. The truth being that no one knows how to become an artist, and no one ever really knows what it means to be an artist until one already is, if ever. The artistic awakening, according to Conrad, is like a second pubescence—a puberty not of the body but of the spirit. Most people do not enter into this secondary metamorphosis, let alone come out the other side, and so most people remain spiritually stunted. Zeller would agree, going on to add that the reason so few people who enter this secondary pubescence make it out the other side is because it is painful and rife with danger: Some turn their backs on the artistic impulse in favor of safe and uncomplicated and pleasurable lives, while others kill themselves instead. Those who make it all the way through, Zeller and Conrad will agree, are either zealots or freaks or saints or some combination thereof. Esther, for instance, was obviously a freak. Julie was a saint. Candace was also a saint with just a touch of freakishness. Conrad considered himself a pure zealot, although Zeller pegged him as an aspiring zealot with a touch of repressed saintliness. And as for Zeller, whom Conrad considered a pure freak, Zeller considered himself an even mix of freak and saint. For the record, the zealots tend to reach commercial success, the freaks tend to languish in obscurity, and the saints tend to die young.
It was on the matter of commercial success that the friendship between Conrad and Zeller tipped into intractable enmity. Until the night of that argument they had prevailed in amicable competition. But the argument split them down the middle—a pure philosophical schism. I happened to be there in the house when the argument arose. I was fixing a broken toilet. All of the artists in residence (minus Esther, who rarely came out of her room) were gathered in the ground-floor common room, drinking wine or beer or liquor and pontificating about art, as they are so prone to do. Lacroix and Candace and even Julie had all quickly been relegated to the outskirts of the pontification as Conrad and Zeller went head-to-head over the matter of commercial success. Where once they had both agreed that no artist should ever aim at commercial success—never sell out—they were now no longer aligned, a brutal discovery that sent them both spinning.
It was Conrad who appeared to have gone out of alignment; Zeller still maintained, as he always had, that in order for an artist’s work to remain pure, any commercial success that might befall the artist had to be random and, furthermore, utterly beside the point. Once the artist begins to care about commercial success, let alone seek it, he is compromised, as is the art that he produces. It was Conrad’s newfound position—perhaps still murky but getting clearer every day—that it was possible for an artist to work commercially in order to put food on the table while privately continuing on with his true spiritual labor. “Everyone’s gotta eat,” he opined. That’s when Zeller claimed that he would rather starve than do commercial work, two words he despised, two words he always pronounced in the most acidic of tones.
The fact was that Conrad had just landed an internship with a posh graphic design firm. The residents had all gathered in the common room to celebrate this windfall, which would see Conrad designing ads and logos for various commercial brands and products.
“Monkey work,” Zeller called it, offended and indeed wounded that his best friend would lower himself to such a vulgar, unartistic application of his skills.
“Don’t be jealous,” Conrad chided.
The chiding clearly cut Zeller like a knife. He professed that to waste one’s artistic zeal on such “bourgeois trivialities” was akin to masturbating when you could be making love instead. It was dishonorable, he said. Self-denigration, self-annihilation. A path to disfigurement, mortification, and death. Artistic death, anyway—aesthetic death—whereas the body would live on and grow fat on the profits of doing monkey work for “the capitalist machine.”
“You’ll drain yourself,” Zeller said from his chair, from behind his beer, his face gripped by a woeful cast. “Drop by drop, you’ll sell off all your vitality until you’re neither a zealot nor a saint nor even a freak anymore—just a shell. That’s what they do to artists in that machine: They hollow you out. Drain your fluids. Stamp out the divine spark of your aesthetic sensibility and replace it with . . .”
“With what?” Conrad challenged, still more amused than offended by his best friend’s aspersions.
“With money,” Zeller decided.
“So what?” Conrad said. “I’m perfectly capable of doing so-called monkey work to make ends meet and doing true spiritual work in my free time. It’s even possible that I can use my success at so-called monkey work to springboard my true artistic work into the limelight.”
Zeller laughed darkly, snidely, and drunkenly. “I think you’ll soon learn that’s not true. You’ll find it impossible. You’ll keep getting smaller and smaller and fainter and fainter, and when you finally decide to turn back it will be too late. You won’t even be an artist anymore. Just a pusher for whatever they’re selling.”
It was Conrad’s turn to laugh, and he laughed, or so it seemed to me, because he found Zeller’s position so naive that it was funny, laughable, but also because Zeller had struck a nerve, and he did not want it to show, he wanted to uphold the image of the incorruptible zealot, the artist of steel. He was standing, leaning against a wall, drinking Japanese whiskey that Lacroix had brought back from a pilgrimage to Mt. Fiji. “So what, then?” he asked. “I should just die in obscurity?”
“If that’s what the Fates have in store for you,” Zeller said, “then yes.”
“You’re pathetic,” Conrad said, looking down upon his friend with conflicting pity and disdain. “Our skills have value. There’s money to be made—and there’s no shame in making it. I refuse to be ashamed of being successful.”
“There’s no shame in just being successful,” Zeller argued, recoiling from his friend’s disdain but also seeming to draw power from it. “Julie is wildly successful, but she never went chasing it, she doesn’t care about it, she came by it honestly—that is, arbitrarily—and so her commercial success is powerless to rob her of her artistic gifts.”
At this, Conrad looked to Julie for confirmation, and poor, doomed Julie (who must have already begun to draw plans to exit the world) merely sipped her wine with a demure batting of the eyelashes. That is when Candace tried to play peacekeeper by asserting that both men, Zeller and Conrad, had made good points, both had spoken some facet of the truth. Both men disagreed. Zeller was immoveable in his insistence that his friend, Conrad, was selling his soul, while Conrad’s zealotry was tipping in the direction of chasing commercial success—as if only to spite his friend, Zeller. It truly hurt Zeller to see his friend abandoning artistic purity in favor of material gain, and it truly hurt Conrad that Zeller was hurt by his success. It hurt Conrad to be accused of not being a true artist just as badly as it hurt Zeller to be accused of being doomed to obscurity.
“Have fun selling garbage to the proles,” Zeller said with finality.
And, with more forceful finality, Conrad said, “Have fun dying broke and unloved.”
//
That, as you can imagine, was the end: The point at which the enmity in the relationship came to outweigh the friendship, and from then on, the enmity only bloomed, gobbling up the friendship and generally turning the house into an unpleasant place to live. It is even conceivable—though I dare not say so to anyone, not even out loud to myself—that the toxicity of the atmosphere in the house from that night on, born of a fundamental philosophical and even ethical schism, was what finally drove Julie to hang herself. It certainly couldn’t have helped, and in any case, three months later, she was dead. Not that I blame Zeller, he couldn’t have known what effect his reproach of commercial success would have on Julie, so secretive an artist, but I can’t help imagining that Zeller’s bold excoriation of the drive to commercial success only inflamed Julie’s secret guilt about having achieved it, about having escaped obscurity, which is the one thing that every artist fears the most, even if they revel in it, even if the face they show to the world is enamored with obscurity, even if what they tell the world is that they wouldn’t have it any other way.
The world isn’t listening, as every artist knows. One has to make them listen. Although she was loath to admit it, Julie knew this all too well. It wasn’t entirely true, as Zeller proclaimed, that her commercial success had just fallen out of the sky one day and landed right in her lap. She had very deftly aimed for commercial success while seeming not to, a difficult feat for any artist to pull off. Zeller’s love of her and esteem for her had blinded him to the degree to which she had chased commercial success, while Conrad had always suspected that her success was anything but dumb luck, and so had tried to pry her secrets from her so that he could duplicate them in his own career. It is not even out of the question that Julie let Zeller into her inner circle, so to speak, for the very reason that his fawning assuaged her guilt over her success, while she froze Conrad out for his refusal to believe that her success was an accident. It is certainly within reason, given the picture of Julie that I have managed to cobble together from everything the others have told me about her, that she loved success and hated herself for loving it and that, no matter what her suicide note said, she killed herself because this irresolvable love-hate dichotomy had made it unbearable to live.
She was able to postpone her inevitable departure, or so I imagine, for weeks or months or even years by playing the hedonist, losing herself in drugs and drinking and sex, cocaine and wine and lavish bisexuality. I imagine that the death wish was always with her, even before her commercial success and subsequent self-loathing; it must have followed her out of the dark tumult of her adolescence, regarding which she was always so forthcoming in her art. It is even there in her final unfinished work, left uncompleted on the day of her departure, a piece that seems to me to depict a young woman who is missing a heart. Whether her heart was torn out or surgically removed or it was never there to begin with, the piece leaves unclear, or so it seems to me. It seems to me that this matter of the missing heart is left intentionally ambiguous, i.e., not a result of the unfinished status of the piece. I do not believe that Julie set out upon this work of art with the intention of eventually filling in the heart; I believe that she left out the heart by design.
Everyone in the house has seen this final artistic piece and they all have their own opinions of it, which they have confided in me (minus Esther, who has hardly ever spoken two words to me, and has certainly never looked me in the eye). Zeller has commented that the piece is tragically beautiful, “heartbreaking.” Candace thinks that it is confused and unrefined and yet not altogether unsuccessful. Lacroix, who has never liked Julie’s work, has judged that it is “fine, I guess,” while Conrad, who has always been conflicted over Julie’s work, envious of some of it and disdainful of the rest, Conrad confessed to me in private that he finds Julie’s final artistic piece “sadly infantile.”
“She can do better,” he said. “Or she could have . . .”
As ever with Conrad—as opposed to Zeller with his radical honesty—I could not tell how much he believed what he had said. His honesty was always beclouded by bitterness or suppressed desperation or—if he was in a good mood—the thickest sarcasm. The success of others generally filled him with quiet rage, whereas even the minute whiff of their failure gave him hope for himself. If asked, he would have denied it—but I know the truth.
//
Julie had killed herself on the 16th, which left me roughly two weeks to get the situation with the house sorted. I kept putting it off, more out of superstition than anything else: I got the odd sense that by choosing who was to take Julie’s place in the much-coveted third-floor loft, I was condemning them to a similar fate—perhaps not condemning them to hanging from the wooden rafter per se, but to some shadow or echo of Julie’s self-inflicted fate, as if the room itself and not Julie’s own chemical imbalance or her tortured soul were responsible for what Julie had done to herself. To be honest, I was leaning toward Conrad, if only because he was the only one of them who was not shy about wanting the loft, nor about admitting that he believed living in the loft would have some beneficial effect upon his artistic career. The others were so coquettish about their desires to live in the loft that by the 30th I was resigned to award the loft to Conrad.
And then he left. Moved out. Broke his lease. Went to New York to pursue his “monkey work” in graphic design. And all because, as he told me over the phone, he could not stand to live in the same house as his ex-friend Zeller anymore—not even if it meant he could have the loft. And poor Zeller, who was still so rattled at the loss of Julie, he tried to pretend that Conrad’s sudden departure did not rattle him too, tried to effect nonchalance or apathy, though his efforts were transparent, at least to Candace, who told me that she could hear him through the walls every night, weeping himself to sleep.
One imagines that Zeller’s refusal to move into the loft was somehow related to how badly his departed friend, Conrad, had wanted it. Zeller claimed to have lost all desire to live in the loft. And Candace said she would only move in if no one else wanted to, stressing the word “only.” And Lacroix said he’d take it, sure, why not?, so on the first of the next month Lacroix moved into the loft, and Esther moved into Lacroix’s ground-floor room in order to put more distance between herself and the loft, which she believed to be “seriously haunted.” Candace moved into Esther’s room, which, as you can imagine, required thorough airing out and a thorough disinfection, and a new resident named Horkheimer moved into Candace’s ground-floor apartment. The first thing Horkheimer asked me after settling himself in his new room was whether he could move into the loft if and when Lacroix moved out.
//
Lacroix became fantastically successful within a year of moving into the loft and then moved back to Paris, from whence he’d come. Within that same year, Horkheimer was dead of a fentanyl overdose, probably accidental. Esther started seeing dead people and checked herself into a mental hospital, probably for good. Zeller moved to New York to chase Conrad, though he would not admit it to himself, and there he rose to moderate prominence in the art scene, though not enough prominence to release him from moderate squalor. And since Candace didn’t really care enough about all the new artists who moved into the house, at least not enough to care whether any of them wanted to live in the loft, she took it for herself.
On the anniversary of Julie’s death, I went with Candace to visit the grave. Julie’s work had seen a spike in popularity following the suicide, and for a while there had even been talks of an independent filmmaker shooting a movie about her life, though by the time of the anniversary of her death the art world had stopped speaking her name. “She probably died a little too young to leave enough behind,” Candace surmised, standing next to me before the grave, which friends of Julie’s had painted in rainbow colors. “I miss her,” Candace said. “But the weird thing is—and this is maybe the wrong place to say it but fuck it—I think I miss Zeller and Conrad more.”
“My boys,” she added after a ponderous silence. “So alive. So lively. So devoted heart and soul to art. And not only to the creation of art, but to the philosophy of art as well. That’s something that a lot of artists overlook or cast aside or just fail to cultivate: A core philosophy of art. It doesn’t matter that they always quarreled. It doesn’t matter that their philosophies were at times diametrically opposed. They complemented each other, don’t you think? It’s a bit cliché to say so, maybe, but I think every thesis needs its antithesis—can’t exist without it. And maybe . . . ugh, I know it’s fucked up of me to blather like this but maybe that was Julie’s problem all along? She didn’t have an antithesis?”
I didn’t know anything about it, so I kept my mouth shut.
“If she’d had an antithesis, maybe . . .” Candace wiped her leaking eyes and said “ugh” again in a tone of self-reproach. “Maybe she would have found the world a more habitable place, you know?”
“What about you?” I ventured. “Who’s your antithesis?”
“Oh, I don’t need one,” she said, wiping her leaking nose. “I’m not good enough.”
I didn’t know anything about that, either. I hadn’t studied art, hadn’t even ever made any. All I’d ever done was have the weird luck of managing a property where artists came and went, some of them taking a shine to me, and me taking a shine to some of them in turn. Without, for instance, being able to say who was the better artist—Conrad or Zeller—I could at least agree that I missed them both. In fact, I had found it impossible to relate to Zeller without Conrad for ballast, and the inverse probably would have held true, so maybe there was something to Candace’s blathering about thesis and antithesis—about which, if you ask me, I will still claim to know nothing.
She was getting herself all worked up, dear Candace, weeping and dribbling snot from her nose, and I wanted to comfort her, so I told her a story about the first time I had become entangled in one of those long, deep conversations about art that Zeller and Conrad were always having. It wasn’t long after they had moved into the house, sharing a room on the ground-floor until a second one opened up, both of them still art students, in the days before Zeller graduated and Conrad dropped out, Zeller believing that a degree in art studies would legitimate him as an artist, if only in his own eyes, whereas Conrad had nothing but disdain for an art degree or any other, believing that the work was all that mattered, and furthermore claiming that anyone who needed to be taught how to do art would never be a real artist. Conrad had only studied art because his parents had insisted upon him studying something, and also—though he could never admit it to himself—because he couldn’t bear to be apart from Zeller, who had applied to art school despite his parents’ vehement disapproval. But the conversation I told Candace about in the cemetery took place before Conrad had found the courage to defy his parents and drop out or art school; it is even possible that he hadn’t yet come fully to grips with how disdainful he found the formal study of art; it is possible that he was still lying to himself for Zeller’s sake.
Whatever the case, the three of them were talking about art in the ground-floor common room: Zeller, Conrad, and Julie (who, for the record, had never spent a day in art school). I’d come to fix the boiler, which had given out two days before Christmas and turned the house into an ice cave. Once finished, I was offered a beer, which I accepted, and then I accepted another one, by which time I had become thoroughly entangled in this conversation about art, regarding which I knew nothing. As luck would have it—according to Conrad, or was it Zeller?—me knowing nothing about art made me the perfect person for them to consult in the matter.
(It should be noted that Julie always clammed up when I was around, suspicious of anyone who knew nothing about art, so she will not figure prominently in the conversation to follow.)
Upon moving into the house, Conrad and Zeller had each decorated the walls of the common room with pieces of their art—not spontaneous works of creativity but, rather, assignments. The piece by Zeller that most caught my eye was a self-portrait, rendered in dark inks, violets and grays and browns and blacks, the portrait of a desperate young artist drowning in his own darkness, in the deep and cold waters of his identity crisis. I told him that I liked it. He scoffed and said he hated it, wanted to destroyed it, but thanked me anyway.
The piece of Conrad’s that most caught my eye was almost the polar opposite of Zeller’s self-portrait, tonally speaking. It was a painting of a woman, rendered in bright inks. Her pale skin was flawless, as was her golden hair, and she was smiling with teeth of the whitest white, and her blue eyes seemed to sparkle, and yet nothing about her plastic facial expression made me feel happy, I did not even recognize any possible happiness on the woman’s part. Conrad was eager to dig something out of me, some understanding—that is all any artist worth his salt ever really wants, or so it seems to me: to be understood—and so he kept grilling me about my thoughts about his painting, digging deeper and deeper, forcing me to draw some analytical conclusion rather than just telling him that I liked the painting and moving on. In short, he was pleading with me to give his work meaning. Or to affirm the meaning that he was so terrified he’d failed to infuse into the work. I told him that it reminded me of dystopian fiction like George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
“In what way?” he pressed.
“It looks like she wants to look happy,” I said, “or to conform to someone else’s idea of happiness, but I don’t think that she, herself, is happy. I think her apparent happiness is, in itself, the result of political oppression.”
“Yes!” Conrad shouted. What he’d painted was a representation of the ideal of happiness, he said, not an image of happiness itself. In other words, he’d painted a lie. The same banal lie we all so often tell ourselves and the world in order to elude scrutiny and, subsequently, persecution.
“Thank you,” Conrad said to me then, looking and sounding happier than ever before or since, and then he said: “You just validated my entire fucking life.”
Poor Zeller, I could see that he was jealous. No need though, really: I didn’t like Conrad’s painting any more than I liked Zeller’s; I liked them both, the only difference being that Conrad believed his painting might be good and had the courage to coax me into confirming his cautious belief, whereas Zeller believed his painting was shit and so could not bear to do any such coaxing. Only later would I come to see that Zeller had attacked the assignment with all of himself—perhaps even too much of himself, but what do I know?—whereas Conrad had kept himself out of it, zooming out to encapsulate not himself, the artist, but rather society itself.
“That was the fundamental dichotomy of Zeller and Conrad,” Candace said to me there in the cemetery before Julie’s grave. “Solipsism and clarity. Confidence and trepidation. Compromise and refusal. They’re both going to be great someday.”
//
Candace had kept in touch with Conrad and Zeller throughout that year and the one to follow, and through her I was able to keep in touch in my own way. But they were moving away from us, as if desperate to forget us, while strangely—inexorably, you might say—moving back toward each other. Circling each other. Or just circling the drain. The drain in this case being imposter syndrome: that nagging suspicion that you are not, in fact, an artist, no matter how many pieces you sell, and furthermore that you were never an artist to begin with.
Conrad had kept his word to balance his commercial work with his spiritual productions, while Zeller had approached success from a wholly spiritual direction, or so he claimed. From afar, it was difficult to say who had reached greater success: Conrad or Zeller. From afar, it looked as if they were on the same middling plateau: as if Zeller had caught up to Conrad and Conrad had not then pulled ahead, putting on the breaks for reasons unknowable to anyone but Conrad; both of them mired on that plateau by forces they could scarcely understand. Julie would have said—or so I imagine, having overheard her say things of the sort—that neither Zeller nor Conrad had ever “learned to suck a cock.” I don’t know if the cock in this scenario was literal or metaphorical, but in any case, I think she was right. Though Zeller and Conrad were at odds on the question of seeking commercial success versus waiting for it to come out of the blue, neither one of them had a stomach for politics, for climbing the ladder, as they say. Both believed in some version of meritocracy, and so neither could live with the fact that playing footsie under the table with this art dealer or that gallery owner, so to speak, could get you a leg up in the art world. So demoralized by having to confront this insipid truth were they, according to Candace, that they had each in his own way begun to wither, to recede, to question every choice they had ever made and every so-called success they had ever achieved.
It is unknown which of them first reached out to the other to bridge, however briefly, the gap that had come between them, but the fact remains that they showed up to the same party one night in New York and did not run from each other, did not ignore each other, perhaps driven by the pain of artistic stagnation to reunite. And what was there for them to do once united other than to commiserate? Art is dead, after all.
That was the last thing Zeller said to me before vacating the house. “Art is dead.” And he said it with such deadpan conviction that I believed him. I pictured him going to New York to awaken Art from its grave, and needing Conrad’s support to succeed. Only together, I thought, could they resurrect the corpse of Art.
I picture them on the night of their reunion at that party in New York arguing over who or what had killed art. In my imagination, Conrad argues that various niche postmodernist movements—comprised of activists masquerading as pseudo-artists who actually hate art and all of art history—have finally bled art of all its meaning and vitality: death by a thousand cuts. And Zeller argues that art—not to mention the human spirit itself—has died of fatigue inside the machine of “late capitalism.” Zeller argues, furthermore, that art has been smothered to death by television and magazines, by advertising and the internet, by big tech and smart phones, by artificial intelligence apps that people use like toys although they are actually weapons against art and the human spirit. They think that these apps are making art, Zeller proclaims loudly, half-drunk on sangria, but what these apps are really doing is simulating art and dissolving it in the process, removing the artist from the equation and thus cutting out any possibility of meaning, for without the artist, inspired by the will to create, and no matter how much the simulated art produced by the artificial intelligence apps looks like real art, it is not and never will be real art.
Conrad agrees vaguely with all that Zeller has proclaimed, although he is distracted by the sorrowful suspicion that their dearly departed friend, Julie, has contributed to the death of art—at least more to the death of it than to the life of it—by prematurely snuffing out her own artistic light and thus decreasing the number of true artists in the world. Think of all she could have done had she decided to live instead of die! She was a true artist, he admits—and her suicide was a betrayal. The true artist’s duty, he says, is to live and work until death no matter how painful or lonely it is (or how pointless it seems) to go on living and working; anything less, he says, three-quarters drunk on whiskey, is a thorough betrayal.
Since Zeller does not want to talk about Julie, let alone disparage her memory, he changes the subject. A question: Which of them—Zeller or Conrad—has produced more authentic art. A stupid question, Conrad believes. Nevertheless, Zeller would like an answer, and Conrad indulges him. Conrad believes, or so he says, that Zeller is obviously the more authentic artist of the two; that Zeller was partially right when he foresaw how working commercially would sap some of the vitality Conrad could have used to produce private works of true spiritual merit. Zeller waves him off, believing that his friend is being ceremonially deferential, and he says that though it pains him, he must admit that such limited works of true spiritual merit as Conrad has managed to produce all these years while working commercially are vastly superior in authenticity to the drivel—the absolute feces—that Zeller has produced. Ever since coming to New York, Zeller has felt alien to the world and alien to himself, and he has hated every new piece he produces more than he hated the last. Despite scoring a few gallery shows and selling some pieces and even being covered in more than one media outlet devoted to the diminutive and insular art world, he feels dissatisfied and directionless, unsated and unmoored, as if he is plummeting into an abyss of inconsequentiality. “I am an artist of no consequence,” he says.
Conrad laughs in his face. He believes his friend’s misery to be performative, i.e., hammed up to maintain their shaky reunion, which could fall apart at any second. He does not believe that Zeller likes his art now any more than he ever has, although he cannot say so outright to Zeller without destroying the interim truce. So, he changes the subject again, or circles back to the previous subject, something he feels they can argue about without bruised egos, something outside of themselves and beyond their power to affect. That is, Julie’s suicide. Instead of making any bold assertions, Conrad softens the subject by formulating it as a question: He asks Zeller if Zeller thinks that they would have ended up in New York no matter what, as in: If Julie had not killed herself, would the two of them still have come to the same point: lost in the New York crowd, drowning in stagnation?
“Is that what we’re doing?” Zeller asks, if only to dodge the heart of the question. “Are we drowning?”
“Maybe not drowning,” Conrad concedes. “Maybe just treading water,” he says. And then he repeats the question.
“What does it matter?” Zeller asks.
And since Zeller seems determined to go on dodging, Conrad tells him outright that he believes Julie’s suicide had no effect on their respective destinies as artists other than perhaps to accelerate their arrival at this very point.
Zeller laughs at this, revealing despite himself that he believes their friend’s suicide not only changed their artistic trajectories but also changed the world: a permanent wound. This dramatic claim does not sit well with Conrad, and causes him to wonder out loud if anyone really still remembers Julie. Of course, her friends and family still remember her, but does the art world remember Julie the Artist? Now that all of her life’s work has been snatched up by greedy buyers—“art fiends,” Conrad calls them—and at prices inflated by her death, did anyone still think about that work? Did any of the art fiends who had snatched it up still even look at it? Or was it just hanging inertly on their walls now, at best a social signifier, at worst a mere decoration?
It is revolting to Zeller to think of his dearly departed friend as forgotten; to posit that she has become, already, as inconsequential as he feels. He would reproach Conrad for even asking the question—but he can’t, not if he wants the night to end on a palatable note. Instead, he argues that the inflated price of Julie’s works of art after her death was the result of greed—exploitation, through and through. An assertion that Conrad cannot abide, knowing as he does that price is not a function of greed but, rather, a fundamental market signal regarding scarcity—and what is more scarce in the art world than work by a revered artist who will never make any more of it, at least not in this world?
“You think Julie could be making more art in the next world?” Zeller asks in a pleading tone.
In a stern voice, Conrad tells him: “I wouldn’t know.”
//
I can imagine all of this easily enough, although what I cannot imagine at all is how Zeller ended the night lying crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell at the party with a broken neck. Conrad claims not to know, he claims he left the party early with a headache, and with a promise to meet Zeller for coffee or drinks sometime soon. No one saw Zeller fall down that dark and seldom-used back stairway—or, in any case, no one has come forward to admit that they saw him fall. Foul play? No—Conrad will not hear of such a thing. There were plenty of people in their world who disliked Zeller for all kinds of reasons—because he was successful, because he was “derivative,” because he was ideological, because he had thin skin, because he was a romantic, etc.—none of which could have precipitated Zeller’s disposal, not in Conrad’s mind. Zeller wasn’t in anyone’s way, Conrad will insist. Zeller hadn’t taken anything that belonged to anyone else, he’ll profess. Zeller was drunk and fell down the stairs in the dark, he’ll say. As for the question of suicide—that is, the question of Zeller throwing himself down the dark and disused stairs in a sudden paroxysm of existential dread, for instance—Conrad will not even entertain it, not for one second.
//
“It’s kind of fucked up to say so right here,” Conrad said to me as we were standing over Zeller’s fresh grave, admiring the fine masonry that had produced his headstone, “but at least now maybe Zeller will get the aesthetic accolades he always thought he deserved.”