Art Along the Aether, Chapter 10 – Xperience Fiction – by Liam Sweeny.
Suzy guided them through the dancers, of which there were many more than offered by the first glimpse. They accused the four of them of “tone policing,” and “mansplaining” and “sea-lioning,” straw men attacked even though Halloween was months before. They didn’t find it hard to ignore the dancers, as their words seemed to be just that; words, empty, said with the regularity of a good turkey baste. Ollie heard “ownvoices” before when more cultured people would hang about backstage, and he figured it meant to tell your truth, be authentic, which he dug, but hearing in from a dancer in the Gallery, it didn’t seem to mean anything at all. If anything, it came out like a taunt; or better yet, a mating call, to be answered by “no uterus, no opinion.” Someone had force fed them picket signs and ipecac.
Suzy grabbed a couple of chairs at the edge. Another stairwell, equal in construction to the one downstairs, had their back. If they were headed to the third floor, that was the route. They sat down, Ollie figuring Suzy was their way up. The all sat down except Juli, who fiddled with her hands.
“Guys, I don’t think I want to go up to the third floor.”
“It’s not going to be that bad,” Sarah said. “We’re just going to-,”
“I know, the book. I’m not afraid to go up. I just want to stay here.”
Ollie laughed. “You seriously want to stay here and drink sand with these… lovely patrons? What part turns you on? The Problematic 200 Model K, or the fact that you need a password to get in here?”
“You don’t get it, Ollie. You got somebody that gets you. I don’t. These people here get me.”
“Yeah, they get you as long as you’re everything they want you to be. We got you in here. You’d still be in the warehouse if not for Sarah.”
Mentioning her name gave Ollie pause to look her way, and he noticed how weary she looked, how the shade of sand-strewn lighting found the undersides of her eyes delectable.
“Sarah, she’s your friend.”
“We haven’t even talked to these people, Juli.” Sarah turned to Suzy. “Okay, so you’re trans, right?”
“Non-binary, but trans works. I’m not picky.”
“Do you feel like these are your people?”
Suzy chuckled. “I don’t know if they’re my people, but I’m their people, you know? Like I could take a shit on the floor and they’d all do it for solidarity, no thought given. But then again, you all were the ones picked me up off the dance floor.”
“So they’re assholes,” Ollie said.
“They’re lost,” Suzy said. “They’re trying to save the world from themselves and they don’t realize that fact. Art is dead, and they’re still going through the motions, only they’re not tapping into their own love and joy and grief and pain – they dilute all that stuff on social media.” Suzy raised her knee and swiveled her ankle.
“They’re tapping into this community,” she said, waving her free hand about, “of creating about creating, and they load their shoulders with social responsibility of being this thing called a creator, a benevolent crusader god, Thor, whatever, and it’s a wonder if any new thing would actually come from them. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a five-year-old drawing a firetruck with dragon wings.”
“I don’t care,” Juli said. “I want to stay. My body, my choice.”
“That’s not-,” Ollie started, but Sarah stopped him.
“We got you in here,” Sarah said. “They could kick you out without us.”
“I’ll take that chance.” Juli said. “Thanks, Sarah, for getting me here.”
“Yeah, no problem. Happy to facilitate your rise in station.” Ollie wasn’t used to Sarah’s sarcasm, but it intoxicated him.
Juli turned around without another word and disappeared into the dancers, soon grabbed by a partner and enjoying a lambada. Ollie hugged Sarah. He knew it was hard on her; the whole idea was to get Juli out, and they succeeded, but not in any way that would’ve given Sarah the victory she needed. Juli had just as much a chance of drowning in the sand there as she had drowning in a trashcan fire at the warehouse. At least there she had God watching over her.
“I’m sorry you all just lost your friend to this place,” Suzy said. “You know, the people here aren’t bad, per se. I know you guys are from that band Permasoul, right?”
“Yeah, good eye.” Ollie said. “You know the thing is, I get the point. Don’t be a dick. Treat people the way they oughtta be treated, Golden Rule, I get it. But why do they have to be so insufferable about it? So self-righteous? Like you’re a flesh-eating bacteria if you tell a bad joke, and everyone’s so afraid to say ‘calm the fuck down’ to the high-and-mighties?”
“It’s like punk rock,” Suzy said. “A lot more than you think.”
“Shaved heads, tattoos and died hair doesn’t make it punk rock.”
“They do that because they feel like punks,” Suzy said. “These people, black, brown, gay, bi, trans – they’re society’s trash, the freaks. They’re just owning the freak flag and they’re flying it. You ever meet a metalhead that was a total prick and decided who were real metalheads and who weren’t?”
“I know a ton of those pricks.”
“Well, it’s the same thing here.” Suzy stood up and tried to put weight on her ankle, bracing that leg with the stick. “This identity stuff is open,” she said. “So sometimes we get power-hungry narcissists in the scene that get off on telling people what they can and can’t do. It’s a rush to create a viral hashtag; it’s like crack. And since words like ‘racist’, ‘bigot,’ and ‘homophobe’ are so deadly, and rightly so, everybody is terrified of being painted with those brushes, so no one has the guts to risk it.”
“I honestly think that half the bigots are dug in because they can’t stand the other side,” Ollie said. “They don’t even need the bigotry, they just don’t want to give smug people a win, something more to feel smug about.”
“That may be true,” Suzy said. “But every war goes on a year longer than it has to because of that very reason.”
Suzy got up and set her weight fully upon her foot and danced a hobble around in a circle, arms out for Sarah and Ollie to act as brace. She sighed.
“So I imagine you want the book.”
“Yeah.” Ollie said. “It’s upstairs, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Suzy shoved off and, using the stick as a cane, guided them over to the stairwell. She took her steps and they followed.
“Something you should know,” she said. “Nobody comes up here, no one. That’s because it’s not a third floor so much as a fourth wall.”
Suzy struggled on her foot, palm on thigh, and Ollie shot eyes at Sarah to see if she still was alive, and he found her pensive, timid. He figured she’d lost her friend and thus her raison detre, her spirit du corps and a few other French words. She smiled the smile of a nailbiter.
They got to the top of the stairwell, and the door was mismatched to the doorframe and a crown molding not touched by a maid or the tip of a vacuum.
“Can either of you swim?”
Ollie looked at Sarah, who nodded.
“We’re good.”
“Good. Brace yourselves, I guess.” Suzy unlocked the door with a tarnished brass key, causing a creak that let out light in bursts like the rocky course of the bubbles in a mountain creek. Ollie and Sarah stepped in, and Ollie’s eyes grew wide and scratchy at the sight of so much sand. A pool that may well have been Olympic were it not squeezed into the narrow width of a common Albany brownstone occupied near the entire floor. Sand filled it; sand, rustling, living, bubbling up and popping and spraying like the dunk of a pour of a pop cola spritzes the air. Sand, but it wasn’t. Sand, but it shone in sparkles beyond glints of reflections. Sand, eating away at the words of written screens on second-hand tablets sinking down. Sand surrounding canvases dragging them down to the deep end to devour them and turn them into their weight in glorious, purposeful sand.
Ollie looked up from the pool full of sand to catch Suzy walking toward the side of the room where a lifeguard post stood bolted to the floor. She stopped by it and grabbed her ankle, preparing to mount and preside over the fantastic desertscape. It was once she sat that Ollie noticed a heavy oak bar suspended from the ceiling by a charred iron chain. Affixed to the bar were two manacles.
“What’s that?” He asked. “The wooden thing.”
“It’s my cross,” Suzy said. “I thought you would’ve guessed.”
“Your cross? Oh, don’t tell me you’re Jesus.”
“I won’t, but you’ll go away guessing if I don’t.”
“So you’re Jesus.”
Suzy waved her palm flat, angle to angle like a biplane feeling feisty. “-Ish.”
“We saw your pops at the warehouse. Not a talker.”
“Not a lot to say over there,” Suzy said. “Curious about the sand yet?”
Ollie knelt by the edge of the pool and filled his palm with sand, a feeling that didn’t bring him to any beach he’d ever been.
“It feels weird,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like sand. It tingles.”
“That’s because it’s not actually sand,” Suzy said as she picked her teeth with a micro-screwdriver. “It’s data. That tingle is the electricity coursing through ones and zeroes. Each grain of sand is a piece of data that is being copied from the internet.”
“Downstairs you said it was aesthetic,” Sarah said.
“That’s what’s being copied. Aesthetic. Art styles. Writing, music styles.”
“Makes a ton of sense.” Ollie wasn’t adept at sarcasm, but Sarah was adept at slapping the back of his head.
“What is it for?” Sarah said. “The data? Why is it here?”
“It’s AI. It’s eating the internet. The creative stuff is priority one. Art. It’s eating art.”
“Why?” Ollie said, and he braced his head against Sarah. “Why would it eat art? If I was AI, I’d be munching on nuclear launch codes, right?”
“It doesn’t need computer code,” Suzy said. “It can do computer code. It can do anything except create. It can’t do that, so it’s eating up enough to fake it.”
“What’s it going to do when it’s full?” Sarah said. “What’s the end game?”
“It’s Prometheus, kids. Give any kid the ability to be Renoir if they can just spell his name into a prompt. It’s stealing the work of every artist that ever lived and lives now. It’s eviscerating artists, and they’re all holding their entrails in with duct tape.”
“It’s not that bad,” Ollie said.
“You both just went through this whole Gallery,” Suzy said. “Did you see anything that made sense? Do you think the art scene is nothing more than empty critique and ideological purity? The Gallery just bought that Problematic. A few years ago that waiting room would’ve been a passionate, heated dialogue. Now, anything remotely controversial is just eliminated. Artists don’t do this. The artists all died.”
Ollie walked over to the lifeguard station, and Sarah followed, finding her own spot and setting her legs over the edge of the pool.
“They stole your book because it was real,” Suzy said. “Never been on the web. Invisible to AI. It’s in the center of the pool at the bottom. I thought it would keep the AI up here, but they’ve gotten bored trying to figure it out. Soon, the AI will just pour out of here onto the other floors full force.”
Ollie ran his hand along the lip of the pool. “So how are you Jesus? I don’t get it.”
“I’m the ultimate offense.” Suzy said. “Did you know that children born like me in the past, in the distant past, in cultures other than the west, were considered supernatural? A blessing? The ‘Two Spirits’ of the natives of this land, the Hijras in India, many others in many other cultures, we weren’t freaks. We weren’t pedophiles. But the conquerors couldn’t see the rest of the world like the rest of the world saw itself, so…” Suzy sighed. “I am the sacrifice for everybody that can’t see without black and white, without labels. Whoever can see me for me can know the greatest truth… that the death of art will have a rebirth.” Suzy tossed Ollie a phone as she latched herself into the manacles with a deft motion that may in fact have pointed to her having a supernatural nature.
Ollie looked at the phone, which was set to “gallery.” The pictures were amazing. They were intricate and Ollie couldn’t imagine the headspace one must have to develop the compositions that Suzy had showcased.
“Those are mine,” Suzy said. “I did them with AI.” She shook the bar, and machinery went into gear that raised her up to the ceiling, suspended by her manacles.
“Dive down and get that book,” she said. “Do it, both of you. Do it quick; this thing is terrible on the shoulders.”
Ollie put his hand on Sarah’s back. She got up, eyes deep and damp, and hugged him. They transitioned to hands in hands, and one a three-count swing of arms, jumped into the middle of the pool.
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