Michael was a talented sculptor, but his work was born of the moment and so it was preoccupied by the Anthropocene. He worked with detritus, but in a different space of time, his medium had been white marble, excavated from the quarries of Marathon and hauled by wagon to Athens where he worked for months to create a relief for the theatre of Dionysus, the god of wine. The marble gave way to a scene of the maenads, mythical women inspired by Dionysus to abandon their homes and families and roam the mountains and forests, singing and dancing in a state of ecstatic frenzy. Michael’s figure wore an ivy wreath and carried a fennel stalk bedecked with leaves and berries. She moved forward trance-like from the stone, her drapery swirling about her.
Michael’s relief of the maenads depicted a scene from a new play by Euripides called The Bacchae. In the play, the mortal king of Thebes, named Pentheus, is crazed by power, and believes he has the strength to move mountains and to see two suns. Pentheus angers the god Dionysus by banning his worship in Thebes. As a rebuke, Dionysus drives his maenads into a frenzy. They rip Pentheus’ body into pieces before returning to their intoxicated trance. The wrathful Dionysus is content, the maenads restoring his place before the mortals.

—

Michael’s contemporary sculptures conveyed the same manic joy of the maenads, but they were amplified to the carnivalesque, an observation on the pathologies of the current epoch, or so Nolan thought as he considered the new works during the opening at MacGill gallery in New York. Nolan caught Michael’s gaze as he stood before one of the sculptures. The piece, titled Chair II, was a throne composed of detritus, found objects each painted in technicolor, bejeweled in colored crystal glass, and bound together by coats of resin. Michael gave a knowing smile to Nolan and then returned to his poised stoicism as he listened intently to the art collector beside him, an eccentric financier that had amassed a fortune by developing an unregulated betting market for energy securities, and with his gains, had taken a queer interest in Michael’s assemblage work. The sale of Chair II would be the financier’s third acquisition, this one destined for his firm’s lobby. Michael was ambivalent to the eccentrics that his work attracted. He long ago resigned himself to this role in the art world, itself a barnacle on the ship of international finance. Michael routinely saw the artificial value of his sold artworks inflate at auction, a pawn in some scheme to launder money, he speculated. This matter, along with really all matters outside the realm of his Brooklyn studio, was out of his control, he thought.
Nolan left Michael to his company and made his way through the gallery crowd, arriving to the reception desk where a gallery assistant poured wine into plastic cups and served them to the guests. As he collected the cup, he saw a familiar figure surveying a sculpture, titled Settee I, a bulbous sofa-like piece made of upholstered cashmere in pastel colors.
“Katerina!” called Nolan as he walked up to her. The wispy length of the back of her black hair rocked when she turned to face her caller.
“Imagine seeing you here,” said Katerina.
“Is that so,” said Nolan, leaning in to embrace her with a kiss on the cheek.
“How have you been?” he asked.
“You know, well enough,” said Katerina, although the truth was that she didn’t know. “How about you? How is everything at the magazine?”
Nolan sighed. “It’s okay, I think,” he said unsurely. Last year, Nolan had taken the helm as editor-in-chief of an independent magazine, known for pioneering the artist-on-artist interview format and documenting New York’s high and low culture. Four months into his new position, the magazine filed for bankruptcy and then, by some divine intervention, came back from death. Nolan had known there were issues at the magazine before accepting the position, he had heard stories throughout the years, and his role was to support a course correction, he had been told, but the opportunity to oversee a magazine that buoyed him in youth clouded his better judgment. The magazine was founded decades earlier by a famous American artist, known for leading an art movement that introduced imagery from popular and mass culture in fine art. The artist saw the world through the kaleidoscope of a child, and so the magazine was a reflection of this and his social life, which any given week might include encounters with a rock star, a supermodel, a politician, an actor, a business magnate, a nun, and on and on and on. Being featured in the magazine (or working for it) had been a rite of passage for many, and so it still held an appeal to some. This was a different era, however. During his first week in the editor-and-chief’s chair, Nolan realized how dire the situation was. The magazine owed over $10 million, had $30,000 in the bank and was valued at a mere $50,000. It was also facing multiple lawsuits alleging unpaid wages, wrongful terminations, and discrimination. Nolan tried to temper the flames, using his reputation and the goodwill he had amassed in the industry to help placate a handful of the hundreds of photographers, stylists, writers, and others that were trying to collect pay. His efforts were fruitless, and Nolan recognized his unwitting role in merely managing decline. Worse yet, he saw the real actors in this tragedy of value-extraction: the one-time billionaire and shipping magnate Adonis Ambrose, the pre-bankruptcy owner of the magazine, and his daughter, Athena.
“Is Athena coming tonight?” asked Katerina.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Nolan.
“She and Michael are very close, no?” asked Katerina. “They overlapped at RISD.” She felt embarrassed for remembering such a personal detail, or rather for revealing to Nolan that she had remembered it.
“I haven’t spoken to her much at work the past week, honestly,” said Nolan, taking a mouthful of the wine, its ancient tart scorching his tongue, its taste refracting into so many hues and savors of earth.
This was not a lie, but it was also not the truth. Nolan had not spoken to or seen Athena in nearly a month. It had not been without trying. He had called and sent her countless emails and texts, even before coming to Michael’s opening that night. An absent Athena was not usually a cause for concern as she was often truant, leaving the city unannounced either on family business (so she claimed) or for the magazine, returning with a story about an unknown artist to feature or with a lucrative advertising contract from an overseas watch manufacturer. This time had been different. Her absence had come after a mutiny among the staff, disposing Nolan to confront Athena in the office with allegations concerning the true ownership of the magazine. The magazine had folded and then relaunched with such haste that it had been difficult for onlookers, including Nolan, to ascertain what had truly transpired. The magazine rose from the dead under the ownership of a new entity called Oracle Media. The president and publisher became Athena, the daughter of the former owner, Adonis Ambrose. It was difficult to separate Adonis from the magazine; it was effectively a family business. Adonis first invested in the magazine in the year that it was founded. Throughout the years, he helped manage the business of the magazine, expanding circulation and the advertising and sales department. After the founder artist’s death, Adonis took on an outsized editorial role by placing a string of his family members (typically ex-wives) into executive roles. As Adonis developed a reputation for not paying the bills, media consumption shifted online and print advertising revenue declined. The magazine was hemorrhaging cash, almost by design, setup to spend more than it was bringing in, with exuberant executive salary being the biggest culprit. Then, the sexual misconduct allegations and lawsuits came. With the mounting debt and threat of litigation, Adonis sought protection under Chapter 7 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, with all the assets of the magazine to be liquidated and distributed to its creditors. A bankruptcy court appointed a trustee to the bankruptcy case. The liquidation process was swift. The trustee filed a motion to sell the magazine’s assets, free of any claims, at an auction. A mere $500,000 was set aside by the court to distribute among the debtors, and a new entity called Oracle Media won the auction and became the owner of the magazine’s intellectual property, trademarks, subscription list, and archive. As the new parent company of the magazine, Oracle Media appointed Athena Ambrose to become the new president and publisher. The company had been funded by private investors who Athena declined to name in the press, but she said the operation did require a significant amount of capital. Upon winning the auction, Oracle Media had already contracted a public relations firm and the media-trained Athena was poised to speak on behalf of the new company. “This is a huge risk for me and there is risk involved for our investors. We have a plan to have this break even very, very quickly,” said Athena. “Furthermore, Adonis Ambrose holds no position, he is not an investor in the company, and he has nothing to do with the magazine. The press and other places have a lingering preoccupation with how the old company operated,” continued Athena, “I know people endlessly fine the relationship between myself and Adonis complicated, but the only thing that I, and the magazine, can do now is operate differently. There are things that I am trying to do to earn back some of that trust. I understand that there is a certain amount of baggage that the magazine brings with it, but the brand itself is the thing that is worth saving.”
Athena took the opening to start fresh with the magazine after the liquidation. She implored Nolan to continue his role as editor-in-chief, convincing him to retain his network of professional contacts: the writers, photographers, and others whose labor the magazine needed to operate. Nolan obliged, but he maintained to Athena that if the magazine’s reincarnation was to succeed, it needed to distance itself from the mismanagement of Adonis Ambrose’s era. The magazine staff and the creative community at large needed to have faith they would be paid. However, many theorized that Adonis orchestrated the bankruptcy filing to maintain control of the company while clearing his debts, all the while using his daughter as a smokescreen. This was the allegation that came to a head at the office weeks before Michael’s opening. The editorial director, Florian Garrec, was a mainstay of the magazine, one of the few employees remaining from the era of the founder artist. Athena was ambivalent to him, but Nolan had convinced her to keep him on during the relaunch, as he had a real talent in coaching the younger staff who were susceptible to frequent turn over. Due in part to his seniority, Florian made his grievances vocal about the decline and new direction of the magazine, often leaking information and gossip to the press, at times he transmitted damaging, personal details about the Adonis family. Among the office staff, Athena was known for her wrath, but even if they were inclined to disagree with her on a matter, they would not dare to stand up against Athena. Florian did not share this fear. Since the relaunch of the magazine, he had assembled a sort of fledgling union effort, aligning the different freelance and salaried staff members against the management, making demands for basic benefits, like insurance, retirement, and paid leave. Worse yet, Florian helped crack the façade that the new management was anything more than the old mismanagement, claiming Athena was a marionette of Adonis. Athena had become wise to Florian’s complaints and his efforts to band the staff against her, so she instructed Nolan, against his better judgment and dissent, to arrange a plenary session with the entire magazine staff in the open office. It was during this meeting that Athena reprimanded Florian for his offenses to her family.
“Florian obviously has something on his mind,” said Athena. “By all means, allow him to express it.”
“I speak of the debasement done to this magazine and the legacy of its founder,” said Florian “by making an heiress, the daughter of a lecherous crook, its leader.” As Florian finished the sentence, Athena swiftly grabbed a pair of scissors resting on a desk, the kind used to assemble the dummy, or the sample pages for the issue being worked on at the moment. The stainless steel blades were sharp enough to cut through human flesh. As if wielding a spear, Athena threw the scissors through the air, and in an instant, the blades pierced the drywall behind Florian, level to his head. The scissors stuck out perfectly from the wall, like a modern sculpture by the artist Berry Le Va. Florian turned pale, as if his spirit had entirely let his body. Then, he scrambled out of the office, heading to the emergency stairwell, not daring to wait for the elevator and face more of Athena’s wrath. Athena walked to the wall and retrieved the scissors. Holding her weapon in hand, she placed the scissors across her chest, as if giving a pledge. She turned to the pacified staff, making eye contact first with Nolan.
“As your President, I encourage you from time to time, and always in a respectful manner, to come to me and question my logic,” said Athena calmly, her gray eyes meeting each person bold enough to look at her directly. “If you are unconvinced that a particular magazine feature, business decision, or plan of action that I have decided is the wisest, tell me so, but allow met to convince you, and I promise you, no subject will ever be taboo,” she paused “except of course the subject that was just under discussion. You will pay a price for bringing up my family as a negative. If any of you have anything left to say on this matter, now is the time.” The room was silent. “I thought so,” concluded Athena, walking into her office without saying anything more. No one spoke a word for the rest of the day, even the phones seemed to lose their ring. The silence did not last long, however. Fabien had gone to the press. The next day, Nolan fielded phone call after phone call from reporters, declining to comment on behalf of the magazine or Oracle Media about the alleged incident. Fabien and Athena did not return to office the next day, and they were not the only ones; a slew of staff had emailed Nolan with their resignations, while others outright vanished. Even without a statement from the magazine, the press ran their stories anyway, smearing Athena’s name. It was in the wake of this incident that Nolan made his first public outing for Michael’s opening.
“I see,” said Katerina, “Athena isn’t coming then.” She craned her head slightly and left the matter at rest. She wasn’t one to be interested in the personal lives of others, especially acquaintances, like Athena, who she had only known through mutual friends and had exchanged pleasantries with at dinner parties from time to time, but she, like many others, was one of the writers with an outstanding claim, of which she had given up on years ago, so the unraveling of the magazine captured her attention.
“I read your article in the Times,” said Michael, bringing the wine again to his lips. “Did you get any backlash?”
“Backlash is a very strong word,” said Katerina, pausing to survey Settee I again, “and barely anyone read it anyway.”
“What did you call contemporary art,” asked Nolan, “a catalog of our junk?
“Anthropocentrism is a bourgeois eschatology,” she said. “It’s a statement of fact, not value.
“You said climate change isn’t real.”
“No, that’s what you interpreted.”
“Explain it to me then.”
“You are less important than you think.”
Nolan laughed.
“No argument there,” he said, and then took another mouthful of wine.
Katerina’s frank way of addressing certain topics came off as punishingly unsentimental, but it was this incendiary nature that gave rise to her influence. She knew how to get a rise out of people while remaining unflappable. Katerina did so gleefully, finding great joy and comfort in creating discourse; she conquered through division. It was during one such debate years before that Nolan met Katerina. They separately attended a dinner party at an artist’s studio loft down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass. The evening had started amicably enough, but it turned into an outright brawl between two attendant artists over the use of fascist imagery in art, a banal issue in retrospect. During the scene, Nolan watched Katerina carefully, the one who wily incited the spat, leading each party against one another through a series of calculated queries. It was after witnessing this that Nolan approached Katerina with an offer to write a piece in a magazine he edited at the time. The article became one of her earliest credits and helped raise her profile. Katerina had a way of operating on the border between two things, making it difficult for others to position her motivations or allegiances. She was a mystery, which made her all the more alluring in the communities she engaged.
Katerina had moved to the United States with her parents and older sister just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, under the auspices of a new policy allowing religious minorities to emigrate. Through the scheme, once emigrants arrived in western Europe, they could apply for refugee asylum at the United States embassy, which is the path Katerina’s parents took. The family arrived in Italy after eighteen hours on an overcrowded train from Moscow. For almost a year, the family shared a single room in Rome, awaiting final processing. Katerina remembered it as a happy year. Instead of attending school, she and her sister sold fruit on the street corners to help her parents pay for food. Sometimes they begged for money, but this was a sort of game for them, which their parents disapproved of. After the year in Rome, once their entry papers had been approved, Katerina and her family were finally permitted to make their way to the promised land of suburban New Jersey.
One of Katerina’s earliest memories in the United States had been a trip to the Museum of Modern Art, where she remembered staring at a Vasily Kandinski watercolor, stupefied with awe. In art, Katerina did not crave beauty as much as ideas. For Katerina, art’s great value was that it actually shouldn’t do anything. She was critical of the fetishization of functionality and use in the art world. The demand that art ought to do something, or be political, or perform an identity, in order to justify itself seemed particularly American to her. Instead, she was inspired by art’s ability to hold things in a state of suspense, and in that suspended state, the viewer was able to think through something. Katerina passed the hours of her days visiting museums throughout the city, her favorite the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In college, as a student of economics and history, she took the train from her crowded apartment in Brooklyn into the city, meandering the museum’s great halls, passing through time from the Greek and Roman collections and the decorative arts of Byzantium, to the Medieval era and the golden age of the Old Masters. During one visit, she came upon a special exhibition of the Spanish romantic painter Francisco Goya. At the age of seventy-five, deaf and alone and in state of despair, he completed fourteen murals, later known as the Black Paintings, painting with oil directly on the plaster walls of his country villa on the outskirts of Madrid. During his lifetime, no visitor reported seeing them, and Goya did not write or speak of the paintings. Fifty years after his death, the paintings were taken down and transferred to canvas. Goya’s paintings took on a biographical mystique: the aged, deaf, misanthropic artist painted these unearthly images in a hermetic rural retreat, an outflow of his tormented soul. Katerina walked the three galleries that held the Black Paintings and found herself drawn to the grotesque Saturn Devouring His Son. The painting haunted Katerina: clouded by darkness, the cannibal god on bended knees, like some savage animal; his mouth agape, indulging in the flesh of his flesh; his tattered, gray beard and mad, wide eyes, looking back as if being caught in the violent act; his arms tightly clenching the headless, bloodied body of his begotten son. The painting seemed to have existed before it was created, like some familial specter of the past laying its claim on the present. The image repeated throughout the ages: Abraham binding his son Isaac for sacrifice on Mount Moriah; God offering the sacrifice of His son Jesus Christ on the cross; Lucius Junius Brutus founding the Roman Republic and then executing his sons Titus and Tiberius for conspiring to overthrow his rule. Katerina contemplated this notion of God the Father as Saturn. The name Saturn was derived from the Greek name Kronos, meaning time. Goya’s painting was an allegory of Saturn as time. Time devours the ages and gorges insatiably with the years that are passed. The past consumed the future, and the old suppressed the new. Katerina thought of how this manifested in the tales of the present: a bearded father time, dressed in a robe and carrying his hourglass and scythe, or a grim reaper collecting the souls of the dead. Even her own milieu held tightly to anxieties about the astrological return of Saturn, parroting like a mantra the adage that Jesus himself died upon his Saturn return. Had mankind not paid sufficient tribute to time? She thought of reverence for other forces of nature: Helios the Sun; Gaia the Earth; Poseidon the Sea. Had this disrespect of time repeated? Was it too much for time to be recognized and accepted as part of the human experience? Was the devoured son the one at fault after all? Enraptured by the painting, Katerina’s mind raced, her thoughts at once incoherent and prophetic, as if remembering a dream, her mind a symphony in the song of Saturn.
“Anyway,” said Katerina to Nolan, recovering from his fit of laughter. “My critics are always right. They are free to draw their own conclusions.”
“A critic embracing her critics,” said Nolan.
“Freedom of speech, isn’t that what this country is all about?” she said.
“Something like that. Have you found any exhibitions interesting lately?” he said, changing the subject.
“No, not particularly,” she replied earnestly.
“Are you tired of the exhibition format?” asked Nolan, thinking of the newest  trend in the art world, critiquing the mode of display itself.
“Absolutely not. I’m more exhausted by the sort of people that start to hang out,” she said, stressing the word, “in the art world and stop caring about art. You know the sort, the people that go to an opening and literally ignore the paintings. They don’t register. They don’t care about them. The openings are little more than a good place to gossip and find others like them.”
Nolan looked about the gallery and saw the crowd engulfed in conversation, but very few people were considering Michael’s art.
“I’m tired of the conversations,” concluded Katerina, “about everything but art.”
“Should I take that as my cue to excuse myself to refill my wine?” asked Nolan, smiling.
“No, you’re fine.”
“I know, I’m just joking.”
“I am thinking about leaving though,” she said, drawing her eyes to the exit. She paused. “Or on second thought, maybe I will stay just a while longer.”
Athena entered the gallery. She wore a white dress, narrow and fitted at the top and widening out from the bust. Her iron scorched skin complimented the white dress, helping to soften the stiffness that she always carried on her face. The crowd stirred as she entered, but she did not appear to notice, or she chose not to react to them. Her gray eyes immediately flashed to Nolan and Katerina. She walked through the gallery to greet them.
“Nolan,” said Athena, her voice seemed less charged, its iron lacking filigree.
“Athena,” said Nolan. “I didn’t expect you tonight,”
“Michael called me here,” she said. “Have you talked with him yet?”
“No,” said Nolan. “It seems like he’s been occupied most of the night, holding court with the buyers. There’s a large crowd out for him.” Athena surveyed the room, looking back at those who watched her from the corner of their eyes. Their features appeared unnatural, glint and snatched, as if they had intentionally coated their faces in a resin, permanently locking their unsightly expressions.
“Athena,” said Nolan. “You remember Katerina. She was at Nigel and Clyde’s dinner party in Montauk over the summer.”
“Yes, of course,” said Athena, turning to face her. “You are quite the iconoclast.” Athena snapped each word like a dove’s neck.
“We were just discussing this!” said Nolan.
“Please, not this again,” replied Katerina, annoyed by the reputation that preceded her. 
“Nolan,” said Katerina, “Let me get you another wine, so you and Athena can catch up.” She turned to Athena. “Anything for you?”
“No,” said Athena, “thank you.” While Katerina went to fetch more wine, Nolan was able to properly assess Athena without worrying about revealing the concern on his face. Athena looked uncharacteristically depleted, the light of her eyes dimmed and her voice bankrupt of bark. “Are you all right?” he asked, leaning to whisper in her ear, “Are you tired?” He wanted to provide her with the dignity of an excuse, an escape route.
“I’m fine, but yes, you are right, I am a little tired,” said Athena. “I just landed from Milano, after staying for a few days. I haven’t had an opportunity to rest.”
“Italy?” asked Nolan.
“Yes, Adonis bought a horse at auction there, and I had to be arrange for him to be brought back to New York,” she said, her spirit awakening as she referred to the purchase of a $4 million thoroughbred colt. “He will be a great sire. His breeding is impeccable. His family speaks for itself. He will do well on the track. He shows every indication of doing so.” Athena paused. “He is whiter than snow and runs like the wind.” Athena was of another kind. In her world, bloodlines were important indicators and long lineages were carefully memorized. Genealogy had the important capacity to qualify. Even objects had a genealogy in that the catalog of their previous owners endowed the objects with special significance. This was alien to Nolan, men and their objects were as impermanent as the leaves, he thought.
“You saw Adonis?” asked Nolan surprised.
“Yes,” said Athena. “He is my father.”
“I thought that—,” said Nolan, before being interrupted. 
“I will discuss no more of this,” she hissed like molten bronze in water. Her face was caught, half in anger, half in a sort of fear. She looked almost like her old self. Nolan was calm, as if Athena’s anger was only another thing in the room, a sculpture, a wine glass. He was used to this side of her, and at times was even drawn to it.
“I see Michael,” she said, looking beyond Nolan. “I’m going to go say hello to him.”
“Please,” said Nolan. “I’ll wait here for Katerina.”
Nolan watched Athena glide away to Michael, seeing him immediately interrupt a conversation with his gallery director and a collector to embrace Athena. In her presence, Michael appeared to nearly levitate, with the air gathered all around him, glowing brightest silver on his skin. Nolan had only read about relationships like he witnessed between Michael and Athena. Experiencing the two in person was at once familiar and otherworldly, as if the nature of their bond transcended the age. It was more than the artist-muse trope that felt foolish or unseemly in modern times. Athena had more will to power than the any single person in that room, or any room for that matter, so it was impossible for Nolan to consider her as a subject in any capacity, even for piece of art. Athena did appear to gain something (though this remained a mystery to Nolan) from Michael that others did not have the ability to provide her. In surrendering to her cult, Michael was rewarded famously. Even if Michael’s achievements could not all be directly traced back to Athena by the common eye, Nolan saw them for what they were. Nolan wasn’t prone to introspection, but as he stood watching Athena and Michael, he was unable to keep himself from experiencing a sort of appreciation for his clairvoyance. Clairvoyance was one of his most profound faculties, the ability to see the story unfold beforehand, as if he had a part in breathing life into it.
Katerina returned with two more plastic cups of wine.
“She moves quickly,” said Katerina.
“You have no idea,” said Nolan. They both stood there in silence for a moment, watching Athena and Michael.
“Michael,” said Athena. “What an extraordinary accomplishment!” Athena had no trouble in recognizing the intensity of the sculptures and had felt an immense pride for Michael: of course, for the accomplishment of the work, for his ability to produce colors and structures that made all other images seem ashen and empty in comparison, but also for his ability to at once reckon with the past and make you see the world anew—imagining a future beyond the event horizon.
“Do you really think so?” asked Michael sincerely.
“Yes, of course,” replied Athena. “I am so proud of you!” This simple comment panged Michael. He had not felt such joy since his time at art school with Athena in Providence, Rhode Island. He and Athena would often spirit themselves away from their group of friends on campus to the cove, spending time together late into the night under the stars, talking about not only their classmates and their amateurish artworks (provocation more than art) but also their dissimilar upbringings and families. During such nights, Athena began teaching Michael the names of the stars overhead. Athena knew them all by heart and sang their names as if she had set them to verse herself. Michael made a promise to himself that he would always remember their names, but with time away from Athena and those nights in Providence, the names of the stars escaped him, though he recollected the Pleiades were loosed in December. 
Michael’s gallery director once again tugged at his attention, as if he were a rope that had gone slack, pulling him away from Athena. It occurred to him that he should have asked Athena the names of the Pleiades: what were the names of those seven sisters and their parents. But by the time he finished with his gallery director, Michael didn’t remember the question to ask Athena, or the thought that had inspired it. His had been stolen away, and had not even heard Athena when she excused herself, had not seen her walk to the back of the gallery alone.

—

Michael finished holding court and grew fatigued by offering the same rehearsed explanation of his process and intentions behind the exhibition to the various visitors that were summoned to him. He had yet to speak at length with any of his friends that attended the opening, and began to worry where Athena had gone, failing to reappear after she left him. Michael thought of the bottles of expensive, resinated wine he had specially ordered for the opening, knowing the event would draw late into the night and the crowd would thin at some point to only his crew of friends. Michael gave his apologies to his audience and made his way to the  gallery’s back office, stopping before the bathroom. He sensed Athena’s presence beyond the door, the air lightly fragrant of iron.
“Athena?” he called, knocking on the bathroom door, and when there was no answer, “I’m sorry, I’m coming in.” He pulled the door open and found Athena on the tile floor, one leg tucked up against her chest and her head collapsed over her body. The bathroom was nauseously bright, its fluorescent lights emitting a man-made, artificial glow, like a second sun, reminding him of a Bruce Nauman exhibition on view at an upstate museum (where the Ambrose family maintained a large gallery), and he was so disoriented by the light that it came as less a shock than it should have when he saw Athena. She had vomited, and some it had pooled on the ground before her. Her eyes had become milky instead of gray, and she was sweaty, and with one hand, she covered her mouth and nose, even as the blood dribbled through the cracks of her fingers. Some of the blood began to dry on her white dress into a large marble pattern, a brackish rouge that Michael found enchanting and consecrate, even in that twisted moment. At the time, Michael was scared, and confused, and began to ask Athena question after question, none of which she was in a condition to answer. 
“Michael,” she whispered, ignoring his questioning. “They cannot see me like this.” The world outside of the bathroom came back into Michael’s view. He thought of the people attending the opening, an audience hungry for another episode in the decline of her family, in spite of their previous worship at the Ambrose alter, attending their generous parties to drink their wine and indulge in their ambrosia. Michael thought of his eccentric financier and the other collectors, and how this incident would cast a specter on the coverage of his exhibition in the press, and potentially his career, bounded in print to his ill-fated friend. Michael understood that she was not paralyzed by pain, but at the spectacle, the scene it would cause when exiting the bathroom, facing the crowd in her bloodied dress. He understood the power of the image, how images had supplanted genuine human interaction, how images had come to mediate everything, and now, how the real Athena was at risk of becoming a mere representation of herself.
“Wait here,” said Michael matter-of-factly. “I’m going to get something to help you. This time, please lock the door when I leave.”
Michael exited the bathroom and made his way to the gallery’s storage room. He located the stack of soft, cotton cloths that he used to polish his resin sculptures just hours before and took more than he knew would be necessary to wipe away the blood. Next, he entered the main gallery space and made his way through the crowd.
“Michael, there you are,” said Bernard, the director of the gallery. “I must introduce you to Mr. Wilhelm Nilsen. He heads the contemporary collection at Serpentine.”
“Just one moment, Bernard,” he said, placing a hand on Bernard’s shoulder to gently push him away. Without hesitating, Michael pulled down one of his artworks, titled Drape I, a large-scale tapestry hanging from the wall to the floor. Working with a collective of weavers in eSwatini, a landlocked country five hours east by car from Johannesburg, where Michael participated in an artist residency (that Athena had a hand in securing for him), he wove silk with a gold-wrapped weft, creating a cloth of gold. The piece was a departure from his principal material of detritus, a preoccupation with the Anthropocene, and consequently the least lauded. It seemed to Michael that artwork with inherent value was shunned as garish or even violent. The project of the art world was fabricating value, searching for meaning in the dross where there ought to be none.
The speed to which he removed the artwork stirred the crowd, their eyes one by one moving on to him. With the gold fabric in hand, the crowd parted for him. Michael caught Nolan’s eyes, seeing him with Katerina. Michael’s eyes widened to Nolan, and with that signal, Nolan exited the gallery for the street with Katerina following in tow.
Michael returned to the bathroom, trying the door handle, and it pulled open.
“I thought I said to lock the door,” said Michael, entering to see a resurrected Athena. In the moment that Michael was absent, she had arisen to her senses, standing at the bathroom’s vanity, scrubbing the blood from her hands with soap and water.
“Here,” said Michael, throwing the stack of cotton cloths into the sink. He moved behind Athena and began to undo the clasps that held the dress to her form.
“What are you doing?” she asked, recoiling to the invasion.
“I found you something new for you to wear,” said Michael. “We have to move quickly.” He draped her in the divine fabric.
“Ready?” asked Michael, seeing her reflection through the looking glass.
“Yes,” she replied, and together they entered to the main gallery.
“Everyone! Good evening!” exclaimed Michael theatrically, expelling all his charm like a magic trick to enchant the crowd. Their eyes followed him and Athena as they strode to the gallery’s front. “Thank you all for coming tonight! I would like to present to you with a new Michael Atkins artwork, donned by the ethereal Athena Ambrose, its new owner!” Athena glowed bright wearing the artwork as if just-forged bronze, her drapery swirling about her. Michael loved her face in that moment, she beamed with power and joy. The crowd’s reaction was at first a foreign sound to him. He had acted too impulsively, on instinct and adrenaline, to calculate the variant outcomes that his performance could have taken. Michael had not expected to hear this reaction: the sound of applause.

—

With the applause ushering them home, Michael and the glimmering Athena stepped outside to find Nolan and Katerina at the curb with a hired car. Nolan opened car’s door and Michael vaulted Athena inside. “Nolan and I need to stay,” said Michael, as he helped place Athena in the car. “Katerina can accompany you, to make sure you get home.” Athena did not protest. Instead, she looked out from the back of the car to the three others standing outside on the curb, and she began to laugh, as much as in relief for the escape as in utter bafflement of the series of unfortunate events that had come to compose her life. Athena’s laughter had somehow relieved the tension, and Michael and Nolan both dropped their shoulders, and Katerina unclenched her pointed jaw.
“Tell Bernard to send me an invoice for the dress,” said Athena, while reaching her hand out to Katerina. “Jump in.” Katerina obeyed and the car door closed, and the two made their way into the night.
As the car drove off and turned north onto Tenth Avenue, Michael faced Nolan, realizing that he had failed to properly greet him yet that night.
“How are you?” asked Michael.
“Oh,” said Nolan, drawing out the word to make of show recollecting. “You know, the usual.” 
“Right,” said Michael laughing. “Let’s head back inside. I brought some nice wine for us.”

‡