THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 55
1.
R.,
a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus
to the afterlife. He had no
baggage. That the destina-
tion was the afterlife was understood,
a given. This fact R. couldn’t have ex-
plained. He didn’t have to. None of the
others on the bus—it was loosely
packed, perhaps a third of the seats
full—challenged R.’s certainty. They
knew as well.
The facility was large. At a glance,
all he had time for, R. failed to see its
limits. Wide glass doors slid open, and
R. and his fellow-passengers moved in-
side as if swept, yet willingly. Once they
were within, the whole matter of the
bus seemed irretrievably distant. (Had
a movie been playing on an overhead
screen? Had R. slept? What caused him
to pay so little notice to the scene out-
side the windows, the journey that had
led him here, to the afterlife?) In fact,
as R. milled about, he soon lost sight
of the doors by which he’d entered.
The central room, if it could be called
a room, was almost unimaginably vast.
Atrium? That was a word R. knew. This
wasn’t an atrium, nor was it a hangar.
The ceiling, though high, wasn’t so high
as that, or arched. Instead, it was a flat,
bland grid, translucent panels conceal-
ing the source of light.
Despite the size, R. was almost im-
mediately aware of the presence of side
rooms. Continuing to be swept by the
general imperative of motion that had
guided their entry, he and the others
from the bus—which, he’d begun to
feel certain, was only the most recent—
dispersed and explored. There was room
enough. R. turned a corner into one of
the side areas, one relatively unoccu-
pied. Windowless and featureless, in
other situations it would have been a
large room. It was small only in con-
trast to the larger area at R.’s back. There
were at the start only three or four oth-
ers here, others who, like R., kept mov-
ing, circulating across the endless floor,
in some cases exchanging words. There
seemed to be no prohibition on speech.
2.
R.’s work, his efforts for the past de-
cade or more (the work his gallerist
had advertised as his “signature”), con-
sisted of a green-gray oatmeal surface
applied over a variety of acutely an-
gled abstract forms. They were sized
to stand on the floor, at a height of
three or four feet, to stand as unthreat-
ening, enigmatic bodies in public space.
The surface was pebbly and matte, nei-
ther exactly fleshlike nor vegetal. It was
approachable, natural in affect, though
actually consisting of polymers and
resin. The shapes were derived from
elements of functional objects—com-
puter stands, electrical outlets, dish
racks, etc.—displaced from their con-
text and enlarged, so as to become un-
recognizable. Sculpture was every-
where; it only took his eye to know it,
and a few gestures to render it and coat
it in the green-gray oatmeal concoc-
tion. His eye was good. His work sold
in bunches.
In this place, as anywhere, R.’s eye
scouted for uncommonly funky or
graceful design features—bannisters or
handles, sconces or vents, junctures
where piping met ceiling or floor. He
indexed these wherever he went, and
turned the best he found into new sculp-
tures. Here, there were none.
3.
R. began to wonder whether he’d find
anyone he knew. Even as he regis-
tered the thought, he understood that
this was a preoccupation among many
of those roaming the floor. In fact,
he saw now that it was this impera-
tive that dictated the general move-
ment, the characteristic circular mill-
ing. All present had seized on it by
instinct, the urge to sort through the
faces of others, in search of recogni-
tion. R. was party to this. More bod-
ies had moved into the side room,
perhaps feeling a kind of reverse claus-
trophobia, a terror of the vastness of
the main space.
He grasped instantly that there was
no reason to deny strangers acknowl-
edgment. Or more than acknowledg-
ment—brief, friendly greeting. Yet
the hurly-burly militated against
doing more. One was driven. There
might always be a person one knew
from before, if one only kept looking.
Under such circumstances, even the
briefest acquaintance would signify
enormously.
A teen-ager, grinning, reached down,
and touched the knees of R.’s pants.
The gesture was obscure, not necessar-
ily unfriendly. In any case, the teen
mingled into the bodies and was lost.
The crowd, loose at the outset, seemed
to be growing denser. Was this hap-
pening only in the side room he’d en-
tered? Perhaps it had grown crowded
with those like R., who’d felt curious
to see what it held. It appeared as
though at the far end of the side room
it opened to another enormous indoor
space, one perhaps as without bound-
ary as the one that R. had just left. Yet
the density of bodies in the current
room made it unappealing to attempt
to cross. So R. turned back toward the
large room from which he’d come, seek-
ing free space.
Though things had grown generally
more crowded, it was looser there, yes.
He felt a little animation at this dis-
covery, and a thrill—for the first time?
Again?—at the extent of this space, and
all the possible encounters contained
within it. The smaller room, he saw
now, had been a mistake, a waste of
time. He resumed energetically mill-
ing. The point was to relish the free-
dom here, to refuse constraint. And
among these numbers R. felt certain
he’d find, if not actual acquaintances,
then those like himself—his tribe, his
type, his people.
“I hear—”
“Monsters are us—”
“How long does this go on?”
“Apropos of nothing—”
“Everything happens at parties.”
“Does remembering make you sad?”
“I said to her, if the future of sex
is bald men with ponytails, I want no
part of it.”
“—songs sung by ghosts—”
“They quit stocking the minibar—”
“Tell me about the time someone
gave you money for something crazy.”
“What happens to your shit when
you’re gone?”
“—vicarious holiday weekend—”
“I need a date.”
“—perfectly good empty apartment
in Bed-Stuy—”
“Funny? Or stupid? Or in bad taste?”
The moment R. attuned to speech,
it rose and swirled around him. The
fragments jostled his ears like the bod-
ies jostling in this space. If he could
