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But I didn't want to be like that. I wouldn't.
It didn't take as long as I thought it would. Those helping me were already taking pictures with their phones from beneath the tarp.
“All right,” I said when it was ready. “Let's show this thing to everyone.”
And they lifted the tarp away.
The clouds had lifted for once, and sunlight fell on my creation.
People raised their cameras and began taking snapshots. As per our understanding, I'd taken Jake with me under the tarp, and he had been able to scope out the best angles for taking his final photographs. I saw him at the front of the crowd, crouching down, snapping his pictures.
The sculpture was big—the biggest I'd ever made—and the plexiglass box glittered and shone from the right angles, obscuring the contents. I knew, though, that when you got close to it you could see the thing trapped inside. I had it memorized, and I closed my eyes and saw it in my mind.
It was a tiger made of water.
I was incredibly proud of it. When I'd first seen Anton, I'd noted that he moved like a predator or like water, smooth and flowing, and I'd tried to capture that essence in my creation. Bit by bit, a huge tiger had taken shape
under my pounding and pushing. It crouched in a puddle of clay, its edges blurred and liquid as it emerged from the water. One paw, claws out, reached over its head, raking at the glass box, too small to contain its huge form. I'd painted it in pale gray and black, and its angry eyes glittered gold as it's snarling muzzle bared huge fangs as long as my fingers. It stared up at the creature atop its box.
A rabbit. Small, lithe, and ridiculous in the face of those fangs. And yet strong. It clung to the end of a sledgehammer I'd buried in the plexiglass, gluing the bits and pieces of glass that I'd had to saw away to the end of the hammer, suspending other bits from the top of the box with invisible wire.
So there you have it. A tiny rabbit smashing the glass box containing a snarling tiger. Words are pretty shit to describe it, honestly, so just trust me. It lived.
“You're kind of simple,” Sadie said as she stood next to me.
I shrugged. “What use is art no one can understand?” I said. “I think this is pretty powerful.”
I glanced at her. She was staring at the sculpture, a faraway look in her eye. “So that's how you really feel, huh?”
I nodded.
Sadie licked her lips. “It's beautiful, Lis,” she said. “I'm not going to pretend to really understand your relationship with Anton, but if it makes you make art like that...” She trailed off and shook her head.
I looked back at my piece. Yeah, it still owned. “It's definitely something,” I said. Off in the distance, sirens were blaring. Good old NYPD. Always quick to pepperspray young women making a statement. I looked forward to it. The pictures were taken. I couldn't very well have dumped the sculpture on Anton's doorstep. That would just look desperate.
“You think he'll figure out that you like him?” Sadie asked me as a cop car pulled up by the curb.
“I don't know,” I said. “He seems a little dumb in the mooshy feelings department.” We watched as the cops got out of the car and began their investigation—namely, asking who was responsible for this. Fingers pointed at me.
“Maybe you should have made him a mix tape,” Sadie said.
“Maybe you should shut up,” I told her, and then I got arrested.
*
Okay, it didn't happen quite that quickly. First there were lots of questions and lots of pictures snapped by gawking bystanders, but the bottom line is that I ended up in cuffs when I refused to remove the 'illegal installation,' mostly because I really didn't know what to do next and getting arrested seemed like a good idea at the time.
Sadie promised to keep my sculpture safe for me.
“You better,” I told her as they shoved me in the back of the car. “That's what I pay you for.”
She made a face at me as we pulled away.
I got processed and put in a holding cell. My bail was set at five thousand dollars. I figured I was going to be there for a while and settled in, staring at the crude yet incredibly creative graffiti on the walls left behind by my fellow criminals. Some of them had been very good artists.
I was in the middle of scratching out my own contribution to the communal artwork—a loving rendition of a butt in a cop hat—when an officer opened my cell.
“You're free to go. You posted bail.”
