Gradations of white and shadow and masses of vapor comprise forms without names as Irina’s dream iterates through her memories of clouds. The cirrus layer seen from the window of a plane over the Midwestern desert becomes the fog over Keflavík airport and now the thunderheads looming over the sweltering Singapore rooftops, and she struggles to articulate their textures and complexity, but vainly, for beyond the crude jargon of meteorology there are no words. In her frustration she remembers the clouds drawn on the wall of the glyphs down in the tunnel, which, she realizes, have a secret form, or not so secret, because they’re just letters, however stylized, spelling “LEdERER,” like a signature.
She sits up in bed, still seeing the tunnel, not knowing where she is, but there’s the pattering of rain on the windows, water sluicing through gutters, the muted rush of traffic, and as she situates herself in the Doric she realizes that hotels have a smell, wool and furniture polish and faint burning dust. The blinds are closed so she turns on the lamp and across from her in the mirror is a bleary woman with damp, disordered hair, naked to the waist amid a tangled mass of blankets, her abs well-defined thanks to a tweaked metabolism, which is surely someone’s idea of pornography, and for a moment she wishes she knew whose, and how to find him.
Her bag is out of reach but the room’s remote is on the bedside table so she turns on the TV, making the hotel room a cave full of light. She finds a search engine on the TV and queries on “Lederer graffiti,” and her intuition must have been right because the first result is from a site called ExArt, which bills itself as the comprehensive resource for guerrilla and street art, and the snippet reads, “Lederer, or LEdERER, is the nom de guerre of a West Coast graffiti artist (real name undisclosed) known for the manic detail of his images and for his alleged non-neurotypicality.”
The second result is a documentary that opens with a shot of a man, presumably Lederer, Hispanic, perhaps forty, sitting with his back to a graffiti-covered wall. He seems oblivious to the presence of the camera, staring into space so intently that at first she thinks he’s drunk, then that he’s meditating. The graffiti behind him is a riot of intertwining botanical forms, denser than any actual forest. He looks rough, less artist than thug, and clouds must be his thing because there’s a stylized thunderhead tattooed on his shoulder.
He says, “One morning and I was sitting by the window watching the traffic go by and everything just … it was like the meaning drained away right before my eyes. All that was left were shapes, shapes purely. I was afraid at first, but then I was just interested, because it was like I was seeing for the first time, like this was what had always been there.
“I was married, then, and we had a new baby. We had a condo on a gated street in Dogpatch and a share in a car. Maybe it was a choice—my ex insisted it was—but if it was I’d already made it. She found me sitting there, just looking at the street, and tried to talk to me, and then she got scared and called an ambulance. It was only when the paramedic was shining a light into my eyes and enunciating that I’d probably had a stroke that I was able to tell them I was fine, and to go away.”
Smash cut to a still image of a smiling woman with dark hair holding a baby—it could be a portrait of a young mother from any era since the invention of the camera.
Lederer says, “She wanted me to see a neurologist, said I could die. Later she said that I was no kind of a man if I just abandoned them, and she was right, about that and about everything, but it didn’t matter, because I was already gone. My life had been my family, but after the stroke, or whatever, my road-to-Damascus moment, I was only interested in what I saw, and in drawing.
“I don’t remember if I actually quit my job or just stopped showing up. I do remember that when I was still at home I drew over every inch of the bedroom walls while my wife was at work. I heard she had it painted over, later, because she was angry, which is a shame because now I guess it’d be worth something.
“I’d been a tagger when I was a kid but I stopped in high school when I got serious about life. My tag was 1DEATH, one word, all caps. Sometime after I bailed I sat in an empty room writing 1DEATH in a drawing pad, over and over, but changing and rearranging letters, until it morphed into LEdERER”—he draws the letters in the air, and, in the film, his finger leaves a glowing trail—“and that felt right.”
She turns on closed captioning and fast forwards. Doctors debate at speed whether he suffered a genuine vascular event, or just wanted an excuse to abandon his family and maybe an angle for marketing his art. Comparisons to Gauguin, Lucian Freud, Wei Tao, Abraxas. The manic enthusiasm of the critic who brought him to the art world’s notice. Lederer working in the waste spaces of San Francisco, his murals reminding her of the art of autistic savants, though less purely mimetic—they’re composed largely of faces, vegetation, the elements of buildings, and never a glyph in sight. In the film’s final scene Lederer is starting a new mural on a blank wall while complex cello music plays and subtitles announce that he hasn’t seen his ex-wife or daughter in seven years, then lists his recent sale prices from the galleries representing him in Vancouver, Manhattan and San Francisco.
She opens the site of the Vancouver gallery and scrolls through Lederer’s paintings until she comes to his photographic prints, which surprises her, as photography doesn’t really seem like his medium. The first shows a city seen from the deck of a boat, maybe LA, but it’s hard to be sure since only the center of the image is in focus. The next shows the chaises longues on the pool deck of a washed-out white hotel that’s probably the newly renovated Chateau Marmont, and the next a pretty eurasian girl in panties and a T-shirt looking at the camera and putting on her lipstick as though in a mirror, and then Irina realizes that she can see flyspeck and tarnish, so there was a mirror, and she’s wondering about micro-cameras when it dawns on her that the girl is the camera, that this is a recording of her visual percept, that only the centers of the images are in high resolution because that’s how vision works, though it’s an easy thing to miss. She wonders if the girl has an implant—it’s hard to get that much detail uninvasively, at least outside a lab.
The next photo shows gleaming multicolored spheres laid out geometrically in bins—it’s fruit in the hold of a ship, and she responds viscerally, recognizing the heat, the stench of the durian, the nausea of the roll, that the ship is down from Malaysia to work Singapore’s waters, because this is an image from her memory.
She checks all the details, checks them again—there’s no question but that it’s hers. It’s not possible—her implant is secure to the point of eccentricity—but there it is. Shivering, she remembers how young she was, how she’d only been in Singapore a week, had felt the world was opening.