Indestructible Object Read online

  To the people I love

  CHAPTER 1 Artists in Love

  ARTISTS IN LOVE, EPISODE #86:

  “I Hope I Gave You a Good Love Story”

  Hosted by Vincent Karega and Lee Swan

  VINCENT KAREGA:

  The first time we met, you told me I had the kind of voice you’d follow down a dark alley.

  LEE SWAN:

  Oh yikes, did I? I can’t believe you had any romantic interest in me after that.

  VINCENT:

  I liked it. It was the first time anyone had ever suggested that I might be trouble. I liked that someone like you would think that about someone like me.

  LEE: (laughs)

  I think what I meant was, you have a trustworthy voice. I wouldn’t have followed a dangerous voice down an alley. What did you think the first time you met me?

  VINCENT:

  You were wearing a T-shirt that said, THERE IS NO MUSIC UNDER LATE CAPITALISM. I thought it was really pretentious.

  LEE:

  Because I am really pretentious, Vincent.

  VINCENT:

  Only about things you really care about. That was what I liked about you right away, Lee. That’s what I still like about you.

  Every week for the past two years, Vincent and I have met in my attic to record our podcast, Artists in Love. This episode, we are the artists in love. And we are about to break up.

  VINCENT:

  Have you heard about the performance artists Marina Abramovic´ and Ulay? They were lovers, and they made art together for over a decade. For their last piece, they walked from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, and met in the middle, and then they broke up. That’s what this feels like to me.

  LEE:

  So is this performance art, or is it life?

  VINCENT:

  Can’t it be both?

  Twenty-four hours before Vincent and I went up to the attic to record Episode #86, “I Hope I Gave You a Good Love Story,” I knew what my life was going to look like for at least the next four years.

  We’d been accepted to the same college, right here in Memphis, and the plan was that I would major in recording technology, with a minor in music business, and he would major in creative writing, with a minor in graphic design. We would funnel everything we learned back into the podcast. He would write our stories, and I would make them sound beautiful. We would get an apartment together. And after that, who knows? We talked about starting a new project together, or traveling the world, or moving to New York.

  We talked about how we’d avoid turning into our parents—his, so traditional and conservative and terrified of anything outside the airtight corridor between their home and their church; mine, a pair of feuding conjoined twins, too miserable to stay together, too codependent to mercy-kill their marriage.

  Case in point: my parents had announced their separation the day after I graduated from high school, and now two weeks later, neither of them had so much as packed a suitcase.

  I will not lie, there were times during my relationship with Vincent when I might have flaunted our love a little bit, as if to say to my parents, For fuck’s sake, I’m eighteen and I’m better at having a healthy relationship than you are.

  Shows what I know.

  LEE:

  I have an artist breakup story for you, too, Vincent. It’s very self-serving. It’s about Lee Miller and Man Ray.

  VINCENT:

  Ah, your namesake, to whom you would dedicate every episode of this podcast if I would have let you.

  LEE:

  Well, ha. Last episode, and you can’t do shit to stop me now.

  VINCENT:

  I wouldn’t dream of it.

  In the South, people name everything Lee—streets, schools, parks, entire neighborhoods. People plaster Robert E. Lee’s name on so many things here, it’s like they forget he was the bad guy in this historical narrative.

  Thankfully, I am not named after a Confederate general. My parents named me after the photographer Lee Miller, who started off as a model in Vogue, before she decided she wanted to be on the other side of the camera. She moved to Paris, joined the Surrealist artists, and had a series of passionate and scandalous love affairs, then became a photojournalist on the front lines of World War II. Nobody here knows about her, however, and people tend to assume I was named after Robert E. Lee like everything else around here is, so I guess my parents’ cheeky little joke backfired.

  I do like being named after her, though. She went where she wanted to go, lived how she wanted to live. She was the kind of person who would photograph her lover in a gas mask or organize a topless picnic in the woods for all her friends. I guarantee you that Robert E. Lee never once organized a topless picnic.

  LEE:

  In 1923, the artist Man Ray attached a photograph of an eye to a metronome. He set it in motion and painted to the rhythm. The eye on the metronome tracked his every move in the studio, letting him know if the work was any good or not. He called it Object to Be Destroyed.

  When Lee Miller broke up with him a decade later, he remade the object using a photograph of her eye, and included the instructions for its use, which read: “Cut out the eye from a photograph of one who has been loved but is seen no more. Attach the eye to the pendulum of a metronome and regulate the weight to set the tempo desired. Keep going to the limit of endurance. With a hammer well-aimed, try to destroy the whole at a single blow.”

  This time, he called the piece Object of Destruction.

  Because that’s what Lee Miller became. Once, she’d been the object of his affection, and then she destroyed his heart. It was like she took aim with a hammer, and laid waste to it.

  VINCENT:

  That’s intense.

  LEE:

  He was devastated.

  VINCENT:

  Is that how you’re feeling right now?

  LEE:

  It’s just a story.

  VINCENT:

  I don’t know if I could handle it, knowing that my leaving would cause you to suffer like that.

  LEE:

  That’s the thing about breakups, Vincent; the whole point of them is that you don’t get to know. Because you’re not there.

  When we finish recording the last episode of Artists in Love at one in the morning, we stop and hold each other, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s going to change his mind. But then he lets go of me, he wipes the tears from his eyes, and we go back to work.

  VINCENT:

  I should probably explain to our listeners. This week, I was accepted to Howard University off the waitlist. For our listeners who may not be familiar, Howard is a historically Black college, or HBCU, in Washington, DC, and it’s where some of the greatest Black scholars, scientists, politicians, and artists got their education. Toni Morrison went there, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Kamala Harris.

  And now, I guess, me.

  That was amazing enough on its own, but then something else happened. National Public Radio has a paid summer internship program. I was sure I wouldn’t get it. I was so sure, I didn’t even tell anyone I’d applied—and then I got it. So I’m moving to Washington, DC, next week.

  LEE:

  I’m happy for you, Vincent. I know it sounds cliché, but I really am. It’s a great opportunity.

  VINCENT:

  It’s a lot to process. Since I got the news, I’ve been having five feelings at once, at all times. I’m excited about the challenges; nervous I won’t be up to them; dazzled by the possibilities; terrified at the prospect of uprooting my entire life with a week’s notice.

  And of course, my heart is breaking to leave you, Lee.

  LEE:

  But I don’t want you wondering, What if? I want you free in the world. I want
you to go after the things you want. I’d be pissed if you never found them because of me.

  That’s some pretty evolved shit right there, isn’t it? Even in the moment, it surprises me. My voice becomes this center of eerie calm, even though the rest of me feels like a flooded wasteland.

  What I don’t say to Vincent is that I wish he’d told me about the things he wanted sooner. It might have occurred to me to want other things too.

  I don’t know what I was thinking, why I’d bothered getting idealistic about any of this when I had a lifetime of hard evidence that love doesn’t last forever and that tying your future to another human being is the surest way to end up regretting all of it.

  VINCENT:

  Lee, can you promise me you’re going to be okay?

  LEE:

  Can you promise me you’re making the right choice?

  VINCENT:

  Can you promise me you’ll keep doing this without me?

  LEE:

  Can you promise me you’re going to be happy?

  VINCENT:

  I can’t.

  LEE:

  Me neither.

  VINCENT:

  I guess you can’t ask other people to make promises like that.

  LEE:

  But Vincent, if this is the last time we’re here in my attic, telling each other love stories, I’m glad we’re ending with ours.

  VINCENT:

  I hope I gave you a good love story, Lee.

  And then Vincent and I sign off, the way we’ve always signed off at the end of each episode: “Until we meet again, make art, make beautiful love stories.”

  Around four in the morning, I almost forget we’ve broken up. We’re in our flow, me editing and mixing, him listening, rewriting, making us do it again when it’s not good enough. We’re both completely focused on the work at hand, and it’s nearly finished when I say the thing that’s been tugging at my sleeve for the past hour.

  “What do you think about cutting the last line, the part where you tell me you hope you gave me a good love story?”

  “Why?” he asks. “So we can end with the part you say?”

  “It’s not about who says it, Vincent. It’s about how, maybe some things should stay personal. Some things we should keep only for us.”

  He goes quiet for a minute, and it seems like he’s about to agree with me until he shakes his head and says, “But it’s a good line.”

  I don’t want our last episode, our last night together, to have a disagreement in it, and besides, we’re breaking up. We don’t need to keep anything for us because there is no us anymore.

  “It is a good line,” I admit.

  “Actually, it would make a good title for the episode,” he says.

  “Let’s leave it in, then,” I say. “Screw it.”

  “Yeah, screw it!”

  Vincent doesn’t swear. He has no vices that I’m aware of, so when he says “Screw it,” I know he is not fucking around.

  We upload the final episode of Artists in Love at six in the morning. We sneak down the attic steps together for the last time. I drive him home, and we hug goodbye, and he walks up the sidewalk.

  I keep up my eye-of-the-hurricane calm until he turns out the porch light, and then I fall apart because for two years of my life, this was everything, and now it’s over.

  CHAPTER 2 Love Is Dead

  Eventually I drive home. After I park in the driveway, I sit in the car for a minute, running my hands up and down my arms like my parents used to do when I was little, whispering “I am calm, I am calm,” until it almost feels true.

  When I open the front door, the alarm on my mom’s phone is going off, and my dad is yelling at her to do something about it, because he’s sleeping in the office and isn’t there to reach over and turn it off like he always did before they decided to split up.

  If someone told me they were going to continue on like this for another year, without either of them moving out, I wouldn’t find it shocking. Twenty years of misery is a hard habit to break.

  My dad lumbers out of the office in his plaid pajama pants and Goner Records T-shirt, his hair matted to one side of his head. He has no idea I’ve been up all night, no idea that Vincent and I broke up, and I decide it’s much too early to tell him that story.

  “What’s a combined breakfast food that hasn’t been invented yet, but should be?” he asks.

  This is how my dad talks to people. Most of the time he comes across as quiet, or even shy, but then out of nowhere, he looks you in the eye and asks you a question like that, and he really wants to know what you, specifically, think. People are generally flustered by these questions. They can rarely answer them, but are nonetheless flattered to have their opinion sought on such matters.

  “I don’t know, Dad. It’s too early to know. I’m going back to bed.”

  “I was thinking bacon-wrapped Apple Jacks.”

  He seems disappointed, so I decide not to leave him hanging entirely. “Seems like a lot of work. Would you do all of them, or just the green ones? Or just the pink ones?”

  “It’s too early to know,” he says, and continues on his way to the kitchen to make coffee, like we’ve just exchanged normal morning pleasantries.

  Soon my mom will get out of bed, and the two of them will start getting ready for work, ignoring and avoiding each other, but unable to resist making passive-aggressive, shitty comments. I decide to avoid the scene entirely and go up to the attic to hide out until they leave and I have the house to myself.

  I pull the attic steps up behind me, turn on the window air conditioner, and sit down at the computer to check the traffic on the new episode of Artists in Love. Over the past year, we’d attracted an audience of people we didn’t know, but our most vocal fans remained a group of underclassmen from our school, who were in love with the idea of Vincent and me. We were a power couple in a limited, niche way, aspirational to the theater, band, and poetry crowds, relationship goals for freshman girls who loved art and hated going outdoors. Or maybe they listened so they could swoon over Vincent’s sexy voice and lush descriptions of Frida Kahlo paintings.

  There are already comments from our fans in other time zones:

  Last episode? What happened?

  Ohhhhh noooooooo. Lee & Vincent broke up!

  Love is dead, and there’s no hope for any of us.

  I scroll farther down and see that at least one of our haters has weighed in as well. Or specifically, one of my haters. Nobody hates Vincent. They generally seem to agree with the commenter:

  He deserves better than her vocal fry ass.

  I delete the comment, like I always do. When people post things like this, I always wonder, who do they think moderates this thing? Interns?

  Maybe there are more, but that’s as much as I can handle reading. I lie down on the attic floor and realize that our breakup is real now. It’s out in the world, and there’s no taking it back. I listen to my parents moving around below and try to imagine whether I could endure this kind of cold war if it continues for the entirety of my college career. Before last night, it wouldn’t have mattered how much they hated each other because I was going to be moving out and getting an apartment with Vincent. But now I’ll probably be here, sleeping in my bedroom down the hall from them like a kid.

  At last, my dad’s friend Harold pulls up outside and honks the horn for their morning carpool to the Poplar–White Station Library, and then a half hour later, I hear my mom backing the car out of the driveway, and then I’m alone in the house. All I want to do is crawl into bed and stay there until it’s time for college to start, until the raw, pulpy exposed nerves of my heart have calloused over. I’ll sleep through the pain all summer, and when I wake up, maybe I’ll have missed it.

  I climb down from the attic and am on my way to my room, to carry out this brilliant plan, when I pass my parents’ office. It’s always been my parents’ office in name, though my mom hardly ever uses it, and even less now that my dad sleeps in there. I
haven’t gone in much myself, and when I look inside, I gasp.

  My dad is not personally tidy—he tends toward wild hair and scruffy fashion—but he is fastidious in his habits and surroundings. When he’s bored, he cleans grout or wipes down the blades of the ceiling fans, but the office looks like it’s been boarded by pirates and ransacked. The couch is still made up like a bed, the sheets wrinkled, and there’s a stale sweaty-sock smell in the air. The floor is covered in dirty clothes and wadded-up notebook pages, and crumb-covered plates and half-empty jam jars full of various beverages litter the desk. If his usual, real self could see this, he’d be appalled.

  Since he has spent the past eighteen years cleaning up after my mom and me, I decide to return the favor this once. I fold up the sheets and toss the dirty clothes in the hamper. I’m not sure what to do with the paper on the floor, though. I uncrumple one of the pieces and recognize lines of dialogue between two characters I’ve known longer than I’ve known most people, from a play my dad has been trying to finish since I was twelve. I don’t read it, but I don’t throw it away either. We don’t do things like that in my family, not when it comes to one another’s art.

  Instead I gather up the plates and jam jars, and I’m about to take them out to the kitchen when I notice a passport in the middle of my dad’s desk. This is curious because my dad hardly ever leaves Memphis and has never, to my knowledge, set foot outside the United States. Is he going to start now? Now that he and my mom are splitting up, is he going to run off to another country, change his name, and live in a garret with a cot and a hot plate and a stray cat? I open the passport. This isn’t private like a diary or a notebook—this is a government-issued document, and if my dad is skipping town, I have a right to know about it.

  He’s not going anywhere with this passport, though. It’s long expired, and my dad is young in the picture, still scruffy, but no gray in his hair or beard. He’s wearing a moth-eaten wool sweater, and he’s grinning with a sweetness that I sometimes see when I play him a song that I like or show him a story I’ve written. I wonder, when is the last time I’ve seen that grin? And then I notice the date that the passport was issued: six months before the day I was born.