Include Me Out Read online

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  The river stinks. Mara, however, continues walking along its banks. She can’t avoid it. As she walks she kicks the garbage left behind after a weekend of microtourism; it feels therapeutic, and she needs that. The few people who cross her path look at her as if she were crazy. On Mondays, this place looks like the movie set of a retro catastrophe movie, images of the apocalypse as imagined in the fifties. The kiosks and shops are closed, but you can see what they have inside. Her favorite is one that has games for children, almost all based on predictable riddles or some other kind of basic skills tests, and that give prizes that nobody would think of as prizes: plastic dolls, a variety of sweets, hats with visors, and a badly damaged ball, which nobody ever wins, most likely by design. She wonders what those kids, dragged along on microtourism vacations after being connected to their cybernetic entertainment all week, think about these games. They must experience it as time travel, or like one of those history programs with those snooty announcers shown on the documentary channels. She looks at this devastation, the sour aftertaste of cheap consumerism, pieces of which she keeps kicking as she goes, which float in the water, and suddenly she remembers the face the museum director pulled a few days ago when she called a meeting of the entire staff to talk to them about the importance of the fast-approaching exhibition and to make clear to them what is expected of them; but she had not finished her sentence when somebody raised their hand and asked if anybody had thought about cleaning up the river for that day of the homage and exhibition. Few times had she seen so much discomfort in one face. Perhaps because the question, she’s certain, had been asked with total innocence.

  • • •

  During the second rehearsal, she deliberately slowed down each movement; she’s planning to carry out her sabotage late at night, and she knows that this, in addition to the need for stealth, will undoubtedly slow her down. Now she knows it, she just proved it. She has studied and timed every step but she still doesn’t know what chemicals to use to trash those horses, destroy them. Impossible to find at least one of the components of that ridiculous formula, now she understands why the taxidermist didn’t want specialized assistants. Definitely impossible, no matter how much she’s tried. This place, without a doubt, is totally destroying her ability to guess what another person is thinking. To think that for years this was the key to what they called her brilliant career, the reason they hired her for the most interesting and highly paid conferences. It’s true, if she focused on what someone was saying, she could almost guess word for word what would come next. Or not exactly, but the main idea, at least, which is what counts. Shut away in her booth, she would go into a kind of trance, and then she’d listen and guess at the same time or grasp it telepathically in advance or it was dictated to her from another world, she never bothered to find out how it worked for her, but it did. On a few occasions, this gift frightened her, she’d feel a kind of vertigo. But apparently she’s not so infallible anymore, all her strategies at industrial espionage have failed. She has no intention of giving up on her plans because of this, but she really regrets it: using at least one of the components of the formula for the sabotage was a more direct, more efficient means of incriminating the taxidermist. All she had to do was inject a larger dose into the recently restored horses, an exorbitant dose, something that would really destroy his work and that could not be ascribed to anything other than bad praxis. No other suspects. She’ll carry out her sabotage with a different product, soon she’ll figure out which. She gets up from her chair and walks back again to the ticket window, but there’s nothing new. She’s been waiting almost two hours for a bus that will take her back home. Over the loudspeakers they said that the road to her town is closed, the company considers it preferable for the passengers to wait here at the station until it opens up, rather than on the road, then no further announcements. And nobody has asked any questions after that shrill announcement. Everybody here seems to surpass her in spades when it comes to the practice of a detached life, which she didn’t achieve, as it turned out. For now, at least. That man she always sees when she takes the bus back, for example, he was walking toward the platforms when he heard the announcement, then he looked at his watch, grabbed a newspaper that someone had left on a rickety chair who knows when, and he’s been sitting there ever since. He’s still reading it. A newspaper with probably fewer than thirty pages. Mara could swear that the frequent passenger has not looked at his watch again the whole time. She decides to go outside to get a little fresh air even though the afternoon heat doesn’t feel very inviting. At that very moment she sees the taxidermist’s wife approaching with her ethereal stride. She appears near the platforms, where Mara is waiting, then walks over to the ticket window. While waiting to be helped, she looks disconsolately toward the inside of the station, where the number of people and bags and stray dogs has been increasing throughout the afternoon. Someone comes to the window, and Talvikki appears to ask something, something she’s worried about. Then she returns to the area near the platforms and lights a cigarette. Mara gets up and greets her with all the restraint she can summon. They exchange a few pleasantries about the closure, the possible reasons for it—idle comments. Talvikki keeps staring at the platforms, as if any second the TGV in Paris will arrive rather than a ramshackle bus in the middle of the province of Buenos Aires. Mara can’t determine if it’s the bother of having to talk to her or some other kind of anxiety that gives the woman that fixed expression of being elsewhere, of escape. On the other hand, another perception is quickly becoming a certainty, a kind of insight that assaults her there among the bags and the loudspeakers and the stray dogs: this woman could be the person who finally helps her carry out her task; she has to know something, even if not the complete formula, at least some of its components. Based on what Luisa said, she often buys materials for her husband. Mara asks some casual questions, engaging in one of those conversational throat-clearings she has become so adept at. The key is to establish the right tone from the beginning, which she figures she can still do. Then it’s simply a matter of letting the other talk and remaining sufficiently alert so as to grasp what she needs at precisely the right time. Talvikki says that she was born in Finland, and she appears to be less eager to talk about her husband’s work than her own. Studies in fine arts at the Aalto-yliopisto in Helsinki, some time in academia, a few shows of her work, other countries, more shows, other cities, a lot more shows, until she met the taxidermist, and she was tempted by the idea of coming here. She looks at her watch, looks back at the platforms. It was because of her husband, or rather, his work. She met him when he was restoring pieces at the museum in Antwerp, where she was conducting research. While she watched him obsess over the perfect form, over attaining the original or even surpassing it, she couldn’t help but focus on everything that was thrown out during every taxidermy. The guts, the organs, the bones, the sinews, the fragments of skin. She stopped seeing them as what they were, and she started to see them as raw material, a strange type of material: something in constant oscillation between life and death. That’s the line she’s working in, one could say. She lights another cigarette and looks again toward the platforms. Mara is almost more surprised than excited about this moment of unexpected extroversion, but she doesn’t lose focus. Talvikki tells her that she came to the station because she’s waiting for material that should have arrived from Buenos Aires. Polyester resin, to be precise. She uses it to make sculptures out of bones. In this case, bones from a couple of pumas her husband is taxidermizing at the moment, one of those private orders that pay really well, not like at the museum. Hunters, most of his clients are hunters who decide one day they want to keep a certain piece as a trophy. Who knows why. There are a lot more people with fetishes than you’d think, she says, and she stubs out on the frame of an iron door what must be her seventh cigarette since she started waiting. Whatever comes between her and her work, she explains, makes her very nervous.

  • • •

>   Mara looks at the bed where she is supposedly going to spend the night, and she is reminded of that Pygmy tribe she visited in Burundi. A bit because of its size, another bit because of the sorry state of the room in general. There’s a little window with the blinds down, but she doesn’t feel like raising them. One night, it’s for just one night, she repeats to herself, but even so she doesn’t dare put down her backpack, or sit down. Something like dejection is hovering. And here, no Pygmy children will come to sing her those hypnotic songs. She goes to the bathroom: something tells her that if she does the first thing she always does when she enters a hotel room she’ll be able to convince herself that she is in a hotel room. Leaning against the tiles is a rubber floor squeegee that she can’t avoid seeing as a Giacometti figure, in tears. She regrets not having walked home. Now it’s too late, much too late. She goes back to the bathroom to splash water on her face, but this time she doesn’t turn on the light. If she thinks about it, she should be grateful. She would never have been able to have a one-on-one conversation with Talvikki if it hadn’t been for that bus that never showed up. It must have been ten o’clock when the same loudspeakers that had announced the delay announced the cancellation of service, and the two of them were still talking. Talvikki wanted to know when the next bus would come, she’d run out of resin at the most important moment. Mara’s help deciphering some of those blurry shapes behind the dirty ticket window in the terminal was crucial. They left the station together, on foot. She’d spent days and days chopping up the bones of one of the pumas, Talvikki said, remaining focused so she could summon up all the patience that work requires, and now, right when she could dig into the best phase of her work—mixing the remains with the resin—the material doesn’t arrive. Mara asked her a technical question in order to segue out of a zone that could devolve, she intuited, into a ritornello with no exit, and, even worse, with no results. Talvikki asked her to call her Tal, as her friends call her, which means her husband and the woman who comes to clean the house three times a week, because the truth is she doesn’t talk to anybody else in this town. And then she described how she cuts the bones into very thin slices with an electric saw, just like a good chef, she specified, and then she chops them up, which is what she had been doing for the last few days. It’s a somewhat tense process, which requires a lot of patience. A lot. Some of her colleagues delegate that kind of work to assistants, but she never does. She puts on good music and gets to work. She takes it as a kind of meditation, a way to get into the groove, so to speak. In fact, it’s precisely during that stage of the work that she’s managed to feel most clearly, most palpably, the ambivalence between life and death. She’s just run out of cigarettes, she realizes as she pats the pockets of her designer jacket. She can’t believe days like this, she just can’t believe them. Mara assures her that there must be someplace open at that time of night, she can go with her, and she continues with her questions, which sound casual. She’s always worked in a similar line, from the beginning, Talvikki says, since her first piece. The one she made when she was a kid, when her brother died. Her only brother, the love of her life. A ski accident: an incomprehensible sport. When his body arrived in Helsinki, her parents decided to cremate him. And that’s what they did, without even holding a wake, and that same night, after the ceremony, they went to bed early, to be as rested as possible the following day when they were going to travel to the seaside, to a little town to the north, where they always spent their summers, to spread his ashes. In fact, that night and all of the following nights, her parents went to bed early, almost always without feeding her dinner. The truth is that she doesn’t know why she’s remembering that now, precisely now. Because she can’t work, because the resin didn’t come, because she doesn’t have cigarettes. Anyway, the truth is, in her most recurrent memory of childhood she is standing in front of an open refrigerator, the light dim, trying to decide what she can throw together to make a decent dinner. But that night, the night her brother was cremated, she didn’t have that problem. She looked in her notebooks for a cookie recipe that she’d learned in school a while before and got started. The ashes of her brother and the flour mixed together perfectly, to this day she doesn’t understand how her parents weren’t capable of recognizing it. Not that, and not the act of love contained in those cookies. Her only brother, her only family. That’s more or less how she works now. Except she has to be very careful with the resin that didn’t arrive today, and that she hopes will arrive tomorrow, because it’s highly toxic. Many artists have died because they didn’t know that. She doesn’t even touch it; she wears a suit, kind of like an astronaut’s, when she works with it. She does the same thing to handle the formulas she uses to reduce the animal remains—the organs, the paws, the pieces of skin that her husband discards. She always makes sure they’re unrecognizable, turned into a gelatin, a powder, a liquid; she does make sure something latent of the animal remains in every one of her works, even if perfectly camouflaged, transformed into indiscernible particles. Mara remembers feeling a chill in her teeth at that point in the story, and she feels it again now, at that very moment, sitting on the bed in that scruffy hotel room and clinging to her backpack. Talvikki Ranta—she made sure to make a mental note of her whole name. She goes down to the bar, which is also reception. They not only have a sandwich but also an internet connection on the computer on one of the tables in the back. First she answers a few emails, the indispensable ones, as she has been doing since she got to this place. Fortunately, with time, their numbers have dwindled; it’s been a while now since she stopped feeling, as she had at first, like a screenwriter, simultaneously following several strands of a story, because in order to justify her year of absence without alarming anybody, she told her friends one thing, her family another, and a few colleagues yet another, and so on. For a long time she was struggling to credibly maintain a series of jobs in remote places, a family emergency, and a contagious disease. Anything was preferable to raising an alarm with her absence, even though it was her absence that they were so used to. Once the last of the emails is finished, she looks to see if Talvikki exists in cyberspace. She scans several of the top hits. She puts down the sandwich and starts to read one in particular, an interview she did with a London magazine about her show at the Biennale of Saõ Paulo. Mara has the impression that when she mentions the South American animals she works with, Talvikki includes her husband on the list.

  • • •

  From the Notebook:

  Marion receives a transfusion of horse blood. But she doesn’t go into shock or fall ill because Marion isn’t one of those undocumented women who offer themselves for risky medical trials in order to pay the rent or obtain a passport; she’s a French artist who prepared for this long in advance. For months, under the supervision of a Swiss pharmaceutical company, she was injected with small doses of horse immunoglobulin until those antibodies were able to withstand her own organism’s defense systems, enter her bloodstream, and, as a result of that synthesis, take effect in her body without making it burst. That’s why today, in this aesthetically antiseptic operating room set up in the gallery in Ljubljana where she is presenting her performance, she can receive the blood with so much glamour, wrapped entirely in black and raised on heels that are in fact prostheses in the shape of equine hooves. She is accompanied by the horse-blood donor, also black, visibly averse to all the ceremony. Hyper-powerful, hypersensitive, hyper-nervous, a superhuman: so Marion said she felt after the experiment. She also said that her piece is a denunciation of the anthropocentrism implicit in the genetic manipulations animal and plant species are subjected to. The old misstep of including social critique in a piece that is supposed to be avant-garde. “May the Horse Live in Me,” is the literal translation of the title Marion and Benoît Mangin, her partner, assigned to the piece. “Get Off Your High Horse,” is what they should have called it, I think, as I get lost in the small streets of this impossible city.

  (After Que le Cheval Vive en Moi, performanc
e piece by the duo Art Orienté Objet, Ljubljana, Kapelica Gallery, 2011.)

  • • •

  Every time she eats lunch there, in the room where her colleagues usually eat lunch, she can’t help but be reminded of all the common spaces of the condemned: dining rooms in hospitals, military barracks, offices, boarding schools. The smell of food prepared for many, the clanking of metal trays, the understory murmurs, a combination of all those things. She always thought that the act of feeding oneself, which is very different from eating, should be private. And in this room, where the museum employees gather, that opinion has only gained strength. In any case, she goes there rarely, as infrequently as possible. She was well trained in her previous life: other than breakfast, whenever she could she would find a way to sneak away from those long tables plagued by predictable conversations, dirty looks, and misunderstandings when settling the check. As soon as she arrived in a new city, she’d find as quickly as possible a good spot near her hotel to get street food, and she’d eat there as often as she could, far away from her gourmet colleagues. Those she now has sitting at her table are not very different from those others: they complain, get excited, swap information, invent, make assumptions, are overwhelmed by the excessive burden of their own jobs while at the same time envy the jobs of others. At some point they mention the exhibition-homage, but they don’t add anything new. Mara’s mind returns to her encounter with Talvikki and the other bits of information she found that night on the computer at that hotel. She tries to memorize the five most important bits in order to have them on hand tomorrow, when she goes to visit her, when she goes to see the work that Tal spoke to her about at such length throughout that long night they waited together. She’s certain that once she’s there, in the taxidermist’s house, the name of one of the components will pop up in front of her eyes. Maybe they’ll be the same ones Tal herself uses in her experiments with dissolved animal remains. Very likely they’re the same, she’s convinced, but she is eager to finally confirm it. She has to keep her cool, it’s obvious that luck is on her side. Only one more day. No, less than twenty-four hours, she sees when she looks at one of the walls where the tarnished clock, always somewhere in those common spaces, is hanging.