The Slippage A Novel

THREE




Most of the university campus was done in Collegiate Gothic, but the art gallery occupied a sleek new glass-and-steel structure that had been endowed by a hedge-fund billionaire with roots in the community. The permanent collection filled the flat disk of the main building; new exhibits went into the wing, which extended to the north like a tonearm. William entered through the front door and gave Tom’s name to a fiercely tattooed brunette whose face was almost entirely obscured behind a Japanese graphic novel. “That way,” she said, extending a finger elegantly.

Tom was alone in the middle of a mostly empty large room, head lowered, looking like someone else’s artwork until William got close enough to see the phone in his hand. “Send him over,” Tom said. “I need him to make sure the projector works.” There was a word for what Tom was, with his thick limbs and his large head and his jaw always set.

“Billy Boy,” he said, turning. “Just firming up a few last things.” He waved toward the far wall and his shoulder muscles shifted beneath his shirt. “Video loop over there.” Burly: that was the word.

Tom was a graphist. Not a graphologist—“that’s handwriting analysis, and everyone types these days,” he said—but a visual artist whose work consisted entirely of charts and graphs, most drawn on paper, a few painted on canvas. His subjects were self-referential and possibly philosophical: he made charts, he said, about the way people looked at charts. Before Tom came back to town, Louisa, in a burst of sisterly pride, had shown William an online interview with Tom. “Graphs are supposed to help us see clearly,” Tom said. “But what if they teach us that seeing clearly is impossible?”

The interviewer, a young man with early gray at his temples, leaned forward into his next question: “The untrained eye might say these are just comic versions of ordinary graphs, the kind you might see in a newspaper.”

“As Kepler said,” Tom said, “the untrained eye is an idiot.”

That video was not in the exhibit. Instead there was another short feature, narrated by a young woman, that called him a “prop comedian whose props are some of our most commonly held ideas” before giving way to a montage of his graphs: bars, pies, points. The final was a line graph that rose sharply and then fell off as it went. It was titled How Well You Understand This Graph Over Time.

Next to the video were three huge gray bars stretching from the floor toward the ceiling, and over them an equally huge caption that read Percent Chance That, in the Original Full-Color Graph, Each of These Bars Was the Color It Claims to Be. The first one, labeled “red,” rose to 60 percent, “green” went to 70, and “blue” left off around 25.

Tom was off the call now, coming toward William with a purposeful stride. “Funny,” William said.

“Funny slash sad,” Tom said. “If a color isn’t what it says it is, what is it?”

“I’m no philosopher,” William said. “But I would say that color is a liar.”

“Isn’t a lie just a deeper truth?” Tom said. “Each of these works is a way of conducting an experiment into what we believe: into conventional ways of organizing ideas, conventional narratives, conventional morality. And all convention leaves something to be desired. Here, let me show you the new pieces.” A hand went on William’s shoulder again, and William felt the weight of Tom’s attention.

Beyond the smoked-glass door at the corner of the room was the lobby for the entire exhibit, which was called Faculty Voices. Participants included, according to a brochure, a Native American woman who rendered biblical scenes on parfleche and a Frenchman who created grotesque miniature sculptures and set them before distorted mirrors that reflected them back as normal. The tattooed brunette from the front desk was there, sitting behind the same book. “Jenny,” Tom said. “This is Billy, my brother-in-law. I’m going to show him all the important work in the show, by which I mean all of my work.” The girl lowered the book, beaming. Was she his next-in-line? Or maybe she’d already passed through.

Beyond the lobby was a small rectangular room. “Here you are,” Tom said. His eyes flashed impatiently. “Take a look.” The room had three pie graphs printed in bright colors; he could read only the first, which said Is This Pretty Much the Roundest Thing You’ve Ever Seen? One hundred percent of respondents had answered in the affirmative. There were also half a dozen black circles on the floor. “Percent chance that someone will walk on me?” William said.

“Not bad,” Tom said. “But wouldn’t be accurate. We strive for accuracy.” He patted the near wall, which was fully white save for a stenciled title: Heights of Visitors.

“Nice,” William said. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at.

“Hang on,” Tom said. “Nate should be here any second.” And he was, a young man whose T-shirt was emblazoned with a logo of a skull and crossbones, the former made from a paint can, the latter from paintbrushes. “Right on time,” Tom said. “This is Billy. He’s here to see the piece. Fire up the standing circles?”

“Certainly,” Nate said. He went back to the small door and slid his finger along the space to the right of it. “Stand on one of the circles,” Nate said to William. “Any one.” William picked the one closest to him; suddenly a gray bar materialized on the wall.

Tom stood on another circle, and a slightly taller bar appeared next to the one William had generated. “You too,” Tom said to Nate. He stepped onto another, which produced a third bar.

“How does it work?” William said. “There’s a hidden projector?”

But Tom wasn’t listening. He was staring coldly at Nate. “Go back to that other circle,” he said.

“Which other?”

“The one right by the door. It didn’t even flicker, but you went right on past it.” Tom was not raising his voice but rather lowering it, which shrank Nate.

“I don’t think so,” Nate said.

“Don’t need to think so,” Tom said. “I saw.”

Surrender came into the boy’s eyes. “I just wanted a good demonstration. There’s something wonky about the sensor.”

“Fix it.” Now his voice went up in volume. “That’s your job. When you’re hired to do something, you do it. You don’t skip it and think that people are so blinkered or so timid or so used to settling that they’re not going to look you in the face and ask you exactly what I’m asking you, which is why you can’t figure that out without a reminder.” His anger was like another person in the room.

Nate slunk away through the door. Tom looked up at the ceiling and rolled his head around like it was loose on his neck. “Dim bulb,” he said.

“He’s just a kid,” William said.

“No,” Tom said. “The problem is a dim projector bulb. The circle works fine. If he’d been paying attention, he would know that.”

“You’re not going to tell him?”

“Can’t,” Tom said. “His senior thesis is about the psychological aspects of gallery shows. He has to figure it out for himself.” Tom restaged the demonstration, stepping on the circles in quick succession, including the culprit by the door, which produced a faint outline. “The thing about this piece,” Tom said, “is that the projector is also a recorder. When it’s all done, you can review the entire history of visitors.” He had William step on every circle and then played the set back. The bars appeared on the wall one by one, shadows of things that were no longer there. “I hope it works on opening night,” Tom said. “Because that’s what the world needs more of: hope.”


Tom snaked back past the lobby and then through another small door, which opened into a large bright room with a rectangular snack counter and ten or fifteen circular tables. He sat for a second, then sprang up violently. “What are we doing here?” he said. “The coffee is terrible. Let’s go to that place on Gerson. Can you drive?” And then, when they were in the car: “I might need a favor.”

“Isn’t this a favor?”

“Something bigger,” Tom said. “Not too big, but a slightly larger investment. I can’t say much, only that it requires an automobile. And let’s keep it between us for now.”

“What about Annika?”

“What about her?” Tom said. “Oh, her car? She wouldn’t be right for this. And anyway, she’s gone with the wind.” He gave a dismissive wave. “She couldn’t accept my demeanor, which I understand. Many things are said when a man is in the demon’s grip. In vino vulgaritas. She’s not the first to object. In fact, there are certain countries I can’t go back to as a result of my high spirits.”

“Which ones?”

“Mexico. Egypt. Assorted island nations.” Tom had lived as an itinerant academic for more than a decade, and he kept his past whereabouts frustratingly vague. “All good options for Annika. She’ll be safe from me there.”

“Too bad,” William said. “She seemed nice.”

“And people are always how they seem.” Tom laughed. “If you’re not careful, you’ll end up a philosopher yet.” He smiled thinly, as if he could see what was coming for William and had nothing particularly good to say about it. “It’s probably better that she got gone. This way, I get free. I’m no expert at relationships. Never saw the point of them. They always say ‘a marriage of two equals,’ and it always ends up as an Anschluss. As it turns out, Thomas does not play well with others, and so Thomas does not play with others at all, not for the long run at least. He gets what he can, and then he gets back to work.” The weather had turned when they were inside, and the sky looked like a window with the curtains drawn. “It’s like Horace said: ‘Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit.’ ‘The man is either insane or he is composing verses.’”

“Why not both?” William said. His voice was filled, suddenly, with a vehemence that surprised him.


As they neared the intersection of Rosten and Sawyer, William noticed a man coming across the park. He was walking funny, wobbling side to side with every step. Then William noticed a second man, then a woman, and then he saw the fingers of thin, dark smoke at the corner of the office building at the far end of the park. Before long, nearly two dozen people were in the park. They were dressed for the workday—the men wore suits, the women dresses—but several were without shoes or had their shirts unbuttoned. One man, tall and reedy, with a receding hairline, came near enough that William and Tom could hear him talking on his telephone. “Fire,” he said, after which he doubled over and began to cough.

William took a bottle of water from the door pocket of the car, hopped out, and rushed to the man. “Here,” he said. The man braced himself and downed the entire bottle of water. “What happened?” William said.

The man jerked a thumb backward. “Started in the electrical closet, I think.” The man worked for an insurance company, Birch Mutual, which shared a broad two-story building with attorneys, a consulting service, home health care, and tax preparers. They’d had dozens of false alarms over the years, the man explained, so many that the employees learned to ignore them. “They usually tell us to wait for an update on the condition, and then they vanish for a few minutes,” the man said. “But this time they came right back on. This time you could hear the fear a little bit.” The man had been in the east wing. “They told us not to move. The west had to evacuate out the front door, but we were told to stay where we were.” So they remained, working, or trying. “We all were looking up to the second floor. Then there was a noise over by the central stairwell, and they all came running downstairs.”

Others leaving the building had gathered around them. Some had sooty faces. All smelled like smoke. A few of them came near William’s car. “Hi there, Fred,” said one man, holding out his hand. Fred didn’t reach out to take it. William was relieved; a handshake would have seemed inappropriate. Someone came from the park house with more water bottles, and they were passed from hand to waiting hand. Tom rolled down the car window to listen.

About five minutes after the first alert, Fred said, the alarm sounded again. A part of the roof had collapsed. “They told us in the drills that that was only a faint possibility,” said the man who had offered his hand.

“They don’t know,” Fred said. “At that point, everyone started grabbing what they wanted to take with them: family photos, cell phones, food.”

Tom came out of the car. “People grab to flee a fire like they grab to flee a flood,” he said. Fred nodded, though William didn’t know if he was agreeing or just acknowledging the idea.

Just then a woman gasped and pointed; the crowd turned, almost in unison. A man was going across the far edge of the meadow—at least William thought it was a man. It was a plume of fire with a dark core, and it was making a noise that was not quite a shriek but not quite a word: a high note, eerily pure. “Andy,” a woman said. The figure lurched forward a few more steps and then collapsed onto the grass. Another man appeared from the building and started hitting at the fire with his coat. “Is it Andy?” another woman said. Paramedics rushed toward the middle of the field like water to a drain.

Louisa’s friend Mary liked to say that there were two kinds of people: those who couldn’t stand to see people fresh from an accident, all busted up, and those who couldn’t stand to see people who were terminal, slowly withering on the inside. Louisa had announced she was the second type and waited expectantly; William said nothing, but they both knew he was the first. A few years earlier, Louisa, who never complained of pain, had felt a stabbing in her belly. Bleeding had followed. The doctor ran tests, and in the days of waiting, as William worried over every terrible possibility, he wanted nothing more than to escape, to get in the car and drive north as fast and far as he could. The tests came back, and the doctor explained what had happened, pointing to pink areas on a chart of the female anatomy. Louisa wept. A pamphlet outlining fertility treatments was pressed into William’s hands by an overeager nurse. On the drive home from the doctor’s office, Louisa stopped crying, and William made his peace with the almost lunar silence that followed.

Now, with the paramedics still on the burning man, William took out his keys and opened the car door. “What?” Tom said. “We’re not leaving, are we?” They could see the burned man’s legs, clothes in shreds, in the gaps between the paramedics. The man moved for a little while on the ground and then stopped moving. Orders were shouted, skin was wrapped, a stretcher procured, the body hoisted. There must have been sirens, but William did not hear them.


The coffee shop, the Bean Counter, was the small dream of a pair of married accountants. They had been fixtures in the place, greeting guests and always finishing each other’s sentences, until something snagged after a year or so and they split up. People now called it Grounds for Divorce, with not a little sadness. William and Tom ordered from a stringy young man with a faint caterpillar of a mustache and carried the cups to a table by the front. A pair of women fake-hugged another pair of women they didn’t seem happy to see. Three five-year-old boys were banging hell by the counter.

“You know what I was thinking about when we were by the fire?” Tom said. William shook his head. “I was thinking about the man who was running across the field.”

“That’s understandable,” William said.

“But not about his pain, or his misfortune, or anything like that. I was thinking about the physics of it.” Tom bent his head, dug a thumb into the hinge of his jaw. It was a gesture William had seen on Louisa. “You know Aristotelian physics? He said that certain elements seek certain locations. It’s in their essential nature. Earth moves toward the center, or down. Fire moves toward the sky, or up. By his reckoning, a man who’s mostly fire would fly away, but that man went down to the earth. I wondered what Aristotle, or someone who believed his philosophy, would have thought as he watched the man go down. He might have wondered, suddenly, if he knew anything at all. But people can’t really entertain that idea, because that’s when the slippage starts.”

William nodded and said yes, the slippery slope, and Tom interrupted him right back. “No,” he said. “The slippery slope is for politicians and propagandists. The slippage is a specific thing. It’s the moment when you start to lose your footing.” He held up a hand, rigid and horizontal, to represent the X-axis of some invisible graph. “See,” he said, “any graph is a set of expectations. It tells you what’s normal and what’s exceptional, where there are gains and losses. But what if you suddenly find that you’re plotting all your data on a graph that’s coming loose? What if the graph itself is unmoored, if you no longer know where you’re standing in relation to it?” The hand flipped so that the thumb and fingers switched positions. “Is the hand reversed now? Is it even the same hand? You don’t know if you can trust the graph, not because of its inaccuracy, but because of your disorientation. The slippage isn’t the moment when a graph turns upward or downward. It’s the moment when it turns on you.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

Tom rapped on the tabletop. “Well, then,” he said. “You’re halfway there.” He blinked fiercely. The right hand, the one that had been the baseline, fell into his lap. The performance had not gone unnoticed by those around them. The quartet of women snickered among themselves.