The Currency of Paper Page 5

  On the first occasions of his depositing these objects with strangers, he’d experienced exquisite feelings of fear. Nervous energy was generated by his constant thoughts of discovery. Specific scenes would play themselves over and over again in his mind. He could already hear the piercing shriek of a hysterical woman feeling him brush up against her. Suspicious eyes would fall upon him, to be followed by the indignity of being led away by policemen, who would proceed to interrogate him inside a small room without windows, where perhaps his counterfeiting activities would also be discovered. Nevertheless, nothing ever happened. Perhaps commuters were too preoccupied with thoughts of how they would spend their evenings to notice the subtle movements of his fingers.

  For a brief period of time he attained a certain level of confidence and no longer worried about the possibility of being caught. However, it was an act that required a great degree of care and had to be performed at a tempo which would render his movements almost invisible, so that it seemed as if he had only given rise to a vague moment of shuffling or writhing that was indistinguishable from the many other anonymous movements of the crowd. He felt it was akin to a theatrical performance, one that had to be hidden from view, but which had originally needed as much practice and effort as that required by a stage actor. At first he would spend hours staring at himself in a tall mirror, mimicking his actions many times, until he became conscious of every last movement that he made, and was capable of manipulating his body into all manner of postures and poses.

  Before depositing an object, it was of paramount importance that he first observe the crowd and decide which individuals were suitable candidates. He could always tell which commuter might be too sensitive or anxious for him to work on with impunity. There were always those passengers whose distraction or exhaustion or anomie left them seemingly oblivious to the fact that there was anyone else surrounding them at all. After rapidly assessing each candidate’s particulars, and ruling out the obvious dangers, Maximilian would select his targets on the basis of their appearance: the way their faces spoke to him, attracting or repelling him, suggesting particular professions or ways of living. For the most part, he chose whoever appeared to be most empty, inert, and lacking in feeling. He found that he could not help but want to jolt such people into some more “genuine” state of being, even if only for a moment or two.

  He was never caught, though there were a few close calls. Certain individuals could always sense when their personal space had been trespassed, no matter what their faces communicated. A vague twitch, dimly felt, at the top of a thigh, was more than enough to arouse suspicions. Then one of the throng of commuters might suddenly come to life, startled for reasons that he or she couldn’t quite articulate, moving their heads to and fro to survey their fellow passengers and find someone to blame for their peculiar feelings of unrest. Undoubtedly it helped that Maximilian was only 5’ 2” tall. At that size he was more easily dismissed by taller people, who tend to discount shorter people when it comes to assessing threats. Maximilian often thought that the ideal agent for this particular project would be a child or a dwarf.

  The best moment to act was when a train pulled into a station. Amidst the confusion of jostling limbs attempting to evade each other, it was reasonably straightforward to slip one of his objects into a pocket or a bag. Whenever he noticed a particularly large or loose pair of trousers with pockets that were easy to access, or a bag gaping open at one corner, he found it very difficult to resist the temptation to quietly drop one of his mementoes into the space provided.

  After he had disembarked, Maximilian could not help but continue to meditate upon his “victims.” He would imagine their journeys home, the tiredness in the muscles of their feet, the look and feel of the properties to which they would return; the fact that in a few cases his actions might cause a quiet moment of rupture or revelation in the steady continuity of existence that most people were accustomed to inhabiting. He hoped that his creations would instigate worthwhile confusions: perhaps his recipients would ask “How did that get there?” “Who gave this to me?” “What is that?” . . . He saw their faces making their way out of crowded trains, ascending the escalators, passing through the station doors, and walking into the familiar and comforting tedium of the street, where the same newspaper vendor and flower seller sat metres apart, day after day, barely exchanging a word or a glance in the other’s direction. He imagined their walk across the rain-slicked streets, the same route every day, passing landmarks reassuring in their banality. The public house, the fish and chip shop, the bookies, the newsagent, the shops that were closed but didn’t bother to shutter their window displays. Journeying across the slabs of paving stone, a walk that added to the silent residue of other old, exhausted footsteps. And beyond each High Street the endless rows of identical houses with their creaking waist-high gates leading onto well-tended lawns and beds of flowers, before the advent at last of the long-awaited atmosphere of comfort circulating just beyond the front door, the reassurance that had settled over so many years into the odours in the kitchen, the grains in the wallpaper, the sounds of the children.

  Maximilian wanted to interrupt this all-too-logical flow of events. Intruding—in a mild-mannered way, of course—he hoped to disrupt the sense of inevitability that pervaded such a scene. He imagined the few amongst the millions of men in black hats and suits who would rummage in their pockets and look for their keys, in the process discovering the unfamiliar outlines of an object that they would proceed to hold up to the diminishing light still trickling from the sky: an object that would reveal itself as a strange intruder, perhaps causing a faint wrinkle to impress itself upon their brows.

  Most of his recipients would merely shrug their shoulders, he knew, whatever the nature of his gift, however extraordinary its qualities; then again, many would never even find them, or perhaps would assume that the objects were in fact their own possessions. But even if this were the case, Maximilian delighted in the fact that he had discovered another way to quietly alter the prevailing formations of social reality. To shift matter from one location to another, causing tiny disruptions in the accepted patterns of the city: this was his modest aim.

  After a day spent in his habitual solitude, Maximilian sometimes found it a perverse sort of thrill to join the stream of humanity from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M., to steep himself in the tension generated by this manic convergence of workers joined together each day in order to ensure their collective survival. Even without distributing any of his objects, he felt as if he were engaged in silent communion with the populace simply by having placed his body amongst them, a location in which he could listen and observe. Surveying their faces for signs of familiarity became his own sort of comforting ritual. He liked to be part of the crowd, keeping his secrets to himself, lurking at the periphery, undetected. It soon reached the point where these expeditions were the high point of his day. He would wait the length of an afternoon in eager anticipation, unoccupied, anticipating the moment when all the offices would close and empty of their workers.

  He chose to end this particular phase of his life’s work when his eagerness began to be disrupted by bouts of paranoia. Nothing had actually changed, indeed he had met with nothing but success, but the early panic he had found the confidence to ignore now began to eat away at his own comfort, and he started to feel genuinely at risk whenever he boarded a train. Many times he would tell himself that this was absurd, especially considering the far greater dangers posed by his counterfeiting activities, but to no avail. His rush-hour activity had something of the sense of a physical violation about it, however minor. It was to this that he attributed his growing anxiety. And so he turned to other pursuits.

  Occurrences of an Afternoon of Leisure

  (1959)

  (a series of thoughts, observations, queries, possibilities, and events encountered on the twenty-ninth of october)

  12.00 P.M.

  Maximilian sat in his armchair at home, legs crossed, pipe smoking, ponderi
ng.

  12.01

  He considered the many kinds of chairs in the world and their vastly different arrangements. This led to thoughts regarding the extent to which the style of chair sat in, and its precise spatial attributes, might determine the nature of the thoughts produced when seated in those particular conditions.

  12.16

  Flicking through a full-colour magazine feature on life in the Riviera, he found that these gaudy images appealed to him far more than the accompanying text, and it was to these that he directed his full attention, after reaching the middle of the second paragraph.

  12.18

  A soft, almost intangible belch escaped from within.

  12.24

  Imagining the commencement of a new life in a crofter’s cottage, three miles away from the nearest human being.

  12.27

  Lying on his belly, he bent both legs and raised them into the air, holding on to his feet with both arms outstretched behind. He kept this position for a full two minutes, a rough approximation of the yoga posture Dhanurasana.

  12.34

  Closing his front door behind him he began to whistle a cheerful tune entirely of his own invention as he commenced an unhurried stroll towards the West End.

  12.37

  Observations of a shadow thrown from a bench in the shape of a rhomboid.

  12.41

  Encounter with a film poster blazoned with gigantic red letters, a screaming woman wearing a yellow dress, rushing waters, aeroplanes, tanks, ranks of buildings tumbling into rubble or being consumed by fire.

  12.44

  He bent down to tie up his left shoelace (in order to match the strength of the knot with that of his right shoe).

  12.53

  He wondered if it was possible to re-establish naïveté after a certain level of self-consciousness had already been attained, or would this always then be a false naïveté, an impossible attempt at reversing what had been indelibly fixed?

  1.17

  Officious air of typists eating sandwiches during their lunch hour.

  1.22

  Screwing up a waxy ball of paper, Maximilian aimed it at the mouth of a rubbish bin and launched it into the air.

  1.24

  The irritating way in which toothpicks become soft and useless almost immediately upon contact with the teeth.

  1.26

  Impertinent faces of the riders of horses featured in equestrian statues. The lack of imagination in all public sculpture.

  1.32

  A cold glass of pineapple juice placed to his lips.

  1.41

  Concerns about his shaving technique after detecting hairs sprouting from the skin covering his lower jaw.

  1.52

  Halting momentarily, he considered the commotion at a building site, a frenzy of hammer blows. An enjoyable sense of witnessing minor yet historical changes in one’s environment.

  1.58

  An old man, with prominent boils and flaring eyes, seen pacing up and down the street and muttering quite audibly to himself about partridges.

  2.04

  Maximilian turned right off of Tottenham Court Road and onto Oxford Street.

  2.06

  Aeroplane glimpsed in the sky. Aviation daydream interlude.

  2.08

  A little girl beaming and holding a green balloon attached to a length of string.

  2.15

  Italian Gents Hairdressers—a giant comb and pair of scissors, crossed over each other, filling the entire window. Barbers within producing monologues about mortality and horseraces. Swirling red-and-white striped pole jutting out from shop sign.

  2.17

  Obnoxious displays of the accoutrements required for contemporary existence. Nothing more inspirational or remarkable on offer than that.

  2.18

  Everywhere the constant streaming of bodies, all neatly buttoned up, choking out each inner fire.

  2.23

  Shopping expeditions being undertaken for who-knows-what nefarious purposes.

  2.27

  Overcast skies casting a pallid gloom on all lying underneath them. At least rain would be decisive.

  2.34

  The possibility of inventing entirely new ways of spending afternoons. To become a seer of the leisure classes.

  2.41

  Considerations of what the maximum possible human achievement within the space of a five minute interval could be.

  2.46

  Passing resolve to risk involvement of paprika in tonight’s dinner.

  2.48

  Maximilian’s gaze fell upon an eighteenth-century paper fan depicting a couple seated in a garden beside an overflowing basket of fruit, a dog attendant at their feet, a gushing river in the foreground.

  3.06

  The way in which most objects seem improved when placed upon a boat.

  3.19

  A broken glass bottle seen in the gutter amidst dead leaves, scraps of newspaper.

  3.21

  Sudden apprehension of the face of a young woman staring at him from a fifth-floor window. Curious eyes, not hostile.

  3.29

  It struck Maximilian that experts on the subject of seaweed presumably reside somewhere in London. Where do they live? What do the rooms of their houses look like? Are they eaten up with melancholy?

  3.45

  Pigeons and their definitive place within the hierarchy.

  3.48

  He turned from Sackville Street onto Piccadilly.

  3.51

  He recalled that a number of buildings in London had beehives installed on their roofs.

  4.03

  Struck by the ambition to destroy a car completely, to annihilate its forms until no longer recognisable.

  4.09

  The garish, unreal effect of artificial lighting upon those objects which it illuminates.

  4.18

  The fascination of what lies behind each closed door, each shuttered window.

  4.25

  Memories of when he was a child and would climb trees and stay on top of them for entire afternoons, hiding from enemies, spying on mercenaries, equipped with his comic-book collection and some apples in a burlap sack.

  4.32

  He passed a young woman wearing a red angora wool sweater and white slacks.

  4.38

  Nasturtiums. Phosphorescent, encased in a rounded glass vase.

  4.46

  To live within his body with an aspiration to absolute knowledge of sensory awareness.

  4.59

  Idea: to visit ten museums during the course of an afternoon, each of them for no more than ten minutes.

  Beyond the Turquoise Door

  (1960–1998)

  Early that year, Maximilian became the owner of a bungalow in Hackney. He would live there for quite some time. It only had six rooms, but he felt that this was more than enough for him. He had vowed to keep only a minimum of clothes, bedding, cooking utensils, foodstuffs, toiletries, towels, and cleaning implements. He also allowed himself a modest collection of books and records, neither of which could exceed more than one hundred items at any time. Furniture was limited to a mattress laid out along the floor and a single threadbare armchair, in which he would sit reading or musing for many hours each evening. Other than this, he kept the rooms entirely empty.

  He had developed a series of moral arguments with regard to the expenditure of his counterfeit fortune. To pay exorbitant sums for housing, furnishings, food, holidays, or any other such luxuries would constitute, in his opinion, an abuse of the privileged situation he had created for himself. Although he did purchase many commodities above and beyond his strict needs, none of these, in his view, were indulgences, and he kept them, in any case, far removed from his Spartan living quarters.

  Goods took on a different character and status as soon as they became part of a work of art, of course; never once did Maximilian purchase something merely to enjoy the act of possession. All of his accumulated belongings se
rved an active, useful purpose. To his mind, these were not extravagances but necessities. His intention had always been to make his art public only following his death, but once this happened, all the materials he had purchased in the name of art would achieve apotheosis, becoming items with a real social value, no longer mere possessions. And this would be the case, Maximilian decided, whether the public appreciated his work or not. (He couldn’t imagine that the vast majority of people could ever think well of what he had accomplished.) Naturally, then, he preferred to keep all his art materials far from the bungalow, storing them in one of his other properties, so that there could be no confusion between those things he bought in order to use—be they opulent or utilitarian—and those he bought in order, simply, to live.

  Returning to his bare rooms each evening (one of which was always kept entirely empty) became an important daily ritual. The bungalow had a tranquil, calming influence on him. In truth, it was an entirely unremarkable building in which nothing very interesting ever happened, but this was precisely its charm. It provided Maximilian with a place in which every last detail was entirely predictable, a place to which he could retreat from the often chaotic states of mind to which he subjected himself, elsewhere in the city. Whenever his imagination strayed into difficult territories or he became overwhelmed by the scale of his projects, he would simply stay at home for a while, drifting through a series of empty days in which nothing much happened, during which time he might lie down or stare at the wall for many hours, until he had reached the point where he felt he could continue with his endeavours.

  He never spoke to his neighbours. To avoid arousing their suspicions, naturally, but also out of inclination. His curtains were always drawn. Never once did he answer his front door. Whenever he departed from the bungalow he would immediately get into his car and drive away, not returning until dark. Of course, there was no way to avoid those liminal periods of entering and exiting during which it was possible for anyone on the street to see and hail him, despite his restricting his movements to those hours during which his neighbours were at work. Yet, Maximilian had no trouble adhering to his rule of total solitude: no one bothered to make his acquaintance. London was large enough to sustain an almost entirely anonymous existence for years on end, he found. Everyone on his street came to know him by sight, but they never asked his name.