A contractor found the first installation in an abandoned middle school in the process of being renovated into an office block. Mobiles made of twisted wire and braided hanks of hair, blonde and gray and tawny and black, hung from the ceiling. Dozens of them. Some of the braids were so long they brushed the dirty tile floor. The mobiles spun lazily in the drafty room and made a rustling sound like dry leaves. Even in the grainy, vertical YouTube video taken by the contractor, you can hear the rustle.
This was late 2015. A few months later, a janitor found another installation in an empty storage room of a building that used to be a hospice. A crude sculpture of a hand with too many fingers, the size of a horse. Papier mache and chicken wire and splatters of tempera paint and other splatters dark and crude and hard to identify. The hand was big enough to sit in. You could let the hand hold you if you wanted.
After that the findings accelerated: in condemned buildings, in public parks after hours, in shuttered hospitals, in unused sections of schools and hospitals. Almost all of these were found around the Charlotte, North Carolina area. The one farthest away was found in Charleston. The finders were rent-a-cops and custodians and teens looking for places to get high. All of the pieces were made with materials you could find in elementary school art rooms, mixed with organic material: animal teeth, hair, dirt, rotten food.
The news started calling the artist The God of Empty Rooms. The name came from a phrase scrawled in grease pencil on the wall of a storage container full of clay tablets, many roughly heart-shaped, embedded with chicken bones and half-moon fingernail clippings. The press assumed this was a kind of signature. No other legible text had been found in the installations, only a few half-formed words written in dust, lipstick, grime: thanks, chew, gift, sleep, sorry. The God of Empty Rooms hung around the news cycle for a while, kind of a “weird world” thing. Some people in the art world took the pieces very seriously, penning critiques of “Mobiles with Hair” or “Eggshells, Broken Plates, Wire Birds.” Colbert made a joke about it on his program, wiggling a doll made of chewed gum and googly eyes in front of the camera.
The findings tapered off and people moved on to other things. I don't remember the media attention at all. I spent the last half of 2015 in a deep funk. That was the year I dropped out of my photography program. I slept through Christmas. I found all of this stuff combing through Google the past few nights. I learned a lot. I haven't been able to sleep right for a while, so I had plenty of time to research.
Let me start at the beginning. Two weeks ago some friends and I from my city's small UrbEx club went to check out an abandoned nursing home called Palmetto Fountains. We wanted to take some pictures for our club's message board. The curves and swoops of its Miami-style Art Deco architecture used to be the gem of a cute little neighborhood that was now a decaying gallery of nostalgia—an abandoned Blockbuster, a boarded-up strip mall that used to have a laser tag palace inside, a dead movie theater. I used to work at Palmetto Fountains as a candy striper when I was a teen to fulfill a volunteer requirement for a scholarship.
Even after almost ten years had passed, I could still remember the salmon-colored walls and the smell of baby powder. The salmon-colored walls were still there—water damage puckered and peeled them until they looked disturbingly like flaky sunburns—but the baby powder smell was replaced by the bleachy odor of mildew. Another smell lingered under the mold—an oily, nutty cockroach stench that made me nervous. I thought about calling things off there. Sometimes if abandoned places were too rotted-out and gross, they weren't worth exploring. You were likely to step through a sodden floorboard and twist your ankle, and the only thing to see would be rat corpses bobbing in puddles. Still, I wanted to press on. The faded Art Deco touches in the décor would make great photographs. Also, I was curious to explore the old building for old time's sake. Even though I only worked there for a summer, strong memories remained.
There were only three of us exploring the building: Lanie and I, both photographers, and Mike, a writer. For visualization purposes, Lanie and I are your typical pretentious art school dropout chicks: undercuts, septum piercings, thrift store clothes. Mike is a lanky guy who always wore a baseball cap with a Super Mario mushroom on it.
It looked as if the staff abandoned the building in a hurry. Faded Halloween decorations still hung from a nurse's rotation chart in the lobby. On the front desk sat a withered vase of flowers. When Palmetto Fountains shut down--years ago--old high school classmates posted about it on Facebook because it was somewhat of a local scandal. Apparently it had something to do with a legal battle. A client's daughter suing. Elder abuse.
Many of the hallways were flooded with gray, stagnant water that soaked the ankles of my jeans as we trudged through the building. I hoped we might find mementos left behind in the rooms—personal articles like family photographs, half-finished knitting, diaries—that would make poignant photographs for the message board, but the rooms had been stripped. Even the mattresses were gone. Empty bed frames rusted, water stains spread across blank walls. We weren't the first people to explore the empty building. Some idiots probably thought there might still be pills stashed away somewhere. There was a lot of fast food trash and broken bottles. Lanie snapped photos of graffiti on the walls. Later, she would apply grainy, black-and-white filters. I ignored the scribbles. The pentagram, 666, Satan Lives stuff got old fast, although some people on the message boards ate it up.
We came to a set of saloon doors.
“That's the cafeteria,” I said. “Let's skip it.”
I thought about cockroaches breeding and scuttling in the cabinets. I had seen dozens of them skittering across the peeling walls already.
“Jen's right,” Mike offered. “It might be totally infested in there.”
“Come on,” Lanie groaned, rolling her eyes. Reluctantly, I followed the other two in.
Four dummies the size of children sat propped up in chairs around a stainless steel table. Layered plaster and cloth and wax had been smeared with makeup and nail polish to approximate facial features. Scraps of decoration differentiated the dummies from each other—a single pink button for an eye, a red winter coat bundled around a torso, strands of long white hair sewn into a scalp. A huge pair of ribs, probably from a chicken carcass, served as the table's centerpiece.
“Holy shit!” Lanie exclaimed. Her heavily punk-mascaraed eyes lit up. “This is a God of Empty Rooms piece!”
At the time, I had no idea who that was. Lanie attempted to give me an explanation as she clicked dozens and dozens of photos of the mealtime dummies. Her description made sense. We were in the geographical location where the artist worked and this...installation...definitely matched his style.
“This is a huge deal.” She crouched next to one of the dummies, the one with the white hair, so close that the strands brushed her cheek. For some reason, a wave of nausea shivered through me at the sight of her so close to the dummy. “We'll definitely get on the news for this. Or maybe we'll publish the pictures ourselves and go viral. Jen, you better take some pictures, too.”
I had to admit Lanie had a point. Still, my hands shook as I operated my camera and a sour, vomity sting lingered in the back of my throat. The muscles in my legs felt hard and tight, screaming for me to turn and run from the room. I zoomed the camera on the dummy with the button eye. This dummy slumped forward in its chair, as if sleepy. Then I saw why the dummy sat off balance. It had something in its lap. A baby doll, armless and legless, wore a pale periwinkle sleep sack and old fashioned sleeping cap. Its head was soft, peachy-pink plastic, the face molded in a dimpled smile, the eyes half-lidded. Years of cuddling had left the pajamas pilled and faded, the face's features rubbed nearly smooth.
The acid in my throat surged up and my eyes filled with tears. I choked down the urge to throw up. My vision swam and my camera nearly tumbled from my sweaty, trembling hands.
That was Annette's doll. The one they buried her with.
“Mike, move the light?” Lanie said. The weak yellow glow of the flashlight shifted. Dozens of shiny brown cockroaches skittered out from the dried-out chicken carcass.
That pretty much ended our little adventure.
That night, in my apartment, alone, I lay on my bed, waiting for the inevitable crash. Sleep didn't come. I couldn't stop thinking about Annette. She had always been my favorite patient. She loved when I helped her paint her nails, especially in bright, glittery colors. She asked about her grandson constantly, although I didn't meet him until the day of the funeral. She remembered when I had exams coming up in school and asked about them. She wanted to come to my high school graduation.
And she carried that doll around everywhere. She called it “Sweetie Pie.” She knew it was just a toy—at least, I think she did. She used to make jokes about him, turning him to face me when I talked about boys I liked in school. “He loves gossip,” she'd whisper conspiratorially, then laugh her warm, rusty laugh.
I think I spent more time with her in those last few months of her life than any other person. Maybe that had been the most companionship she'd truly had in years. At her wake, she had Sweetie Pie tucked into the crook of her arm. I could remember the expression on her face as she lay on her casket. Her mouth was turned down at the corner, as if she was trying hard to remember something she had forgotten.
I know I didn't sleep. I didn't sleep that night and I haven't slept for nearly three nights since, not real sleep. But I saw someone standing in my bedroom doorway, someone wearing wearing a nightgown, so long the tattered, muddy hem touched the floor. The light from the hallway turned the person into a shadow. I could make out only one detail--a hand, resting on the doorframe, with sparkling red polish on the nails.
We looked at each other a long time, the shadow and me, and then the shadow turned and left. I heard my front door open and shut. I heard my heart thundering in my ears. I lay frozen in the dark until the sun rose.
I spent the next morning scrubbing dried mud out of the carpet.
Submitted October 02, 2018 at 06:04AM by little_milks https://ift.tt/2QrktfV
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