132: Cherry

It all started three days ago when one hitherto unattributed and incomplete painting by Piero della Francesca was taken out of storage and brought in for inspection. It was really just a patch of sky and the initial outlined sketch of a building; a ziggurat or some kind of early Mesopotamian temple, it was hard to work out. Despite its unfinished nature, the fragment of canvas is held in the gallery’s collection under special sheets of lenticular etched glass, which reveal, in a fine gold-leaf serif, exhaustive cataloguing and provenance records, but only when looked at from a specific angle – impossible to achieve looking at it head-on installed on the gallery wall. Requiring an angle of elevation from the base of the painting of just five degrees, this information can only be gleaned by an observer either by lying on the gallery floor and staring up at the wall, or by lying on the floor and staring across at the painting as it rests in similar repose. And it’s just this way that people are now lining up to view the work as it lies flat on the sloping floor, bathed in the low-level security lighting of the gallery. The pale blue washes dimly across all the walls, while an elderly couple on yoga mats, with luggage scattered about them, is inspecting the artwork from the “golden angle”. From this vantage point, they can verify it is a genuine della Francesca. Overseeing all this with the clipboard is Gail Cineteca, one of the Innovations Managers on the newly formed Collections Innovation Group. As the only one with the code to the vault – well, along with Chesterson Pørg – I’ve been called here to assist. The painting, along with several others of dubious provenance, was summoned here under the initial pretence of running a routine evaluation for canvas mites or rabbitskin-glue worms. I'd been asked to remove the work from its protective casing and gently rest it on the foam spacers, in the lower gallery, where it could be inspected, during which time, I was overtly encouraged to remain between the shoulders of the hastily assembled security detail. Having consulted the verification pane, one of the women digs around in her flight bag and whips out a digital magnascope, which she sweeps gently just above the surface of the painting, projecting its cracks and imperfections onto the ceiling, looking for clues. Suddenly, she gasps, letting the device hover over the bottom right hand corner of the picture. The gasp spreads and ripples among the visitors. Was it a fake after all? No, it’s genuine alright, but the signature’s been expertly removed and reapplied, and now reads “Francesca della Piero”. There have been a spate of PDFs being mysteriously FDP’d in museums throughout Europe and now this ghost with a regendering agenda has seemingly floated through the wall of our own high security vault. Just as yesterday’s ground is today’s substrata, this was just the start. A day later, a central island had been set up in the gallery and works from all the great masters as well as the last round of doodles from the education department’s summer workshops – really just a foil – were being brought out, laid down on special packing tables, wrapped, and carried out the back entrance into unmarked black high-top, short wheelbase Mercedes vans, flanked by Rolls Royces and driven out to some anonymous city mansion or country house. Natural light changes activities, obviously, but electric light, when it’s dark, changes everything about night. It superimposes the activities of light in the darkness. The bluer the darkness, the whiter the night. The glacé cherry on my frozen brain rolls off in the hot meandering currents of the security guard’s breath as she speaks: "The old ones looked like Lego: plastic nipply slabs. These were phased out for environmental reasons, or so they said. On Reddit, they’re saying it’s really part of an unsubtle way to invalidate all the previously issued donor cards, if they weren't exchanged by a certain date. The new one's hemp-based, with a mycorrhizal network running through it, kinda the forefront of where donor, loyalty and gift cards are going. The network’ll eventually reach through everything, throughout the whole planet— the “mycorrhiza of things”. In the future they’re hoping that if you're tired and need to sit down, you can plug your card into an empty chair, and it’ll let you sit down a little bit, until you’re rested. Anywhere in the world! Or a bed, or an oven. I got a discount on the Universal Package, as I work at the science park too.” The rain machine continues to drench everything, and the drains that collect the water — returning it to the mechanism that pumps it back to the sprinklers — have for too long now been used as urinals by the art handlers whenever they’re caught short, and so, with the hot coals installed in trenches to create the atmosphere of a sauna, a light mist of water, sweat and urine fills the gallery. In this fog of ammonia, I decide to blow the whistle. Snap out my phone and dial as many of the newspapers’ scoop desks I can, explaining it’s a free-for-all: “The Collection’s being yammered away into the hands of a rich minority”. Clocked by the guards, I hang up and swallow the phone before they can get to it. But they grab me by the shoulders and hoik me out a fire exit and into a dead-end side-street (clearly popular with breaking staff, judging by the rotting cigarette butt mound I’m dragged past). I’m led to the damp face of brickwork at the end of the passage, where a callous yet callow phosphorescent beam graces a dilapidated rabbit hutch. The hutch is triple-sized, the apparent home to a woman with several bunnylike features: long prehensile ears, twitching nose and cottontail tail. She’s speaking into an orange bakelite telephone. “We'll send someone down”, she says, putting down the receiver. She nods to one of the guards, who places her hand in a bucket of water beside her and slowly draws it out, allowing the water to trickle through her fingers and drip back into the bucket. “No capelin here” she says to the rabbit woman who stares back at me. “No capelin means ‘no whales’, you understand? Someone on the news desk will say something – ‘out loud’”. Both guards nod in agreement. “Out loud”, they repeat. And then: “Presence is at first a blind thing shocked into its glitching baby hardware, its form, giggling at its new found sight. An adult is presence hampered by the contracting or atrophying of its senses to a handful of grunts, grasps and groans.” Unveiled hues observed. Francesca's work reassigned. Truth seen in strange light.