Light and Space Read online

  After my visit to Marlon Rayle, I tried the number I had in my contacts database for Bob Ketban, but it had been disconnected. Back when I purchased his grandfather's papers, I'd barely even glanced at the contract he drew up before I passed it on to MoMA's legal department. But upon dredging the document out of my filing cabinet, I discovered that it gave his home address, which astonished me when I recognised it. Today, the neo-Romanesque building on Great Jones Street that used to house Conroy Glasser's studio is four floors of office suites above a Hawaiian restaurant that's popular with the fashion industry. All those of us who believed Glasser was innocent of murder felt some relief when that restaurant opened – I'd be lying if I pretended otherwise – because it meant that the gutting of the building had not excavated Jillian Glasser's bones from a wall cavity or a septic tank. Opposite, there is one of the last remaining single-room-occupancy hotels in New York, which would also have been redeveloped years ago if a long-running ownership dispute hadn't left it in limbo. The address on the contract was the address of the hotel. Bob Ketban, so rueful about "the family business, Calamity Inc", had chosen to live directly opposite the former studio of his grandfather's collaborator. On my way out, I checked my email one last time. Still nothing from Shenzhen. They'd been out of contact for over a week.

  For reasons that nobody but the lawyers understood, it was important that the family who'd operated the SRO hotel on Great Jones Street for 60 years should continue to do so if they were to maintain their legal position. The result was that they hadn't evicted any of the elderly tenants who still lived there, but they also never bothered to fill the vacancies or maintain the rooms, and the place was now a fungal palace, a sagging wreck. This was what I learned from the superintendent when I went to look for Bob Ketban. Bob Ketban, he told me, had been found dead in his room in May 2011, or in other words no more than a couple of months after we met for the first time. When the superintendent took a cardboard box full of Ketban's personal items down from a high shelf in his office, I suspected he was hoping that if I'd come there to claim it, he might finally get the shelf space back.

  I don't think anyone could have looked at that box, so dispiritingly similar to the old accordion file in which Leslie Ketban's papers had been coffined, without picturing their own death. And the first object I took out of it was, as it happens, not really one of Bob Ketban's effects, but rather one of his grandfather's: a sort of rectangular trophy or plaque engraved with the words "Leslie Ketban, Hudson Plastics Salesman of the Year, 1969". It was moulded, unmistakably, from Hudson-Glasser 11. My surprise at the greasy, almost amphibian texture of its surface made me realise that in all my years as a curator, all my hours in front of Feretory, I'd never actually touched anything made of that resin with my own hands – and in the instant of that realisation, it slipped from my grasp and cracked on the floor. I should emphasise that the trophy was translucent, like the pillar in MoMA, but very much thinner. You could see right through it. And yet when I bent down, mortified, to pick up the two broken halves, I saw that they had split just at the point where something was embedded in the resin, something that had been invisible until now. A baby rat, perfectly preserved.

  'Look, you're thinking about this the wrong way," said Marlon Rayle the second time I went to see him. "You're thinking about it like a stain on a skirting board or a germ in a handshake. Just because Jillian Glasser was killed in the building on Great Jones Street, you want to know why those models don't run screaming out of the restaurant every night. That's not how it works. Andrea Wooney's studio was over in Williamsburg, and she never had anything to do with Conroy Glasser directly. Your fabricators are on the other side of the world, and they've never even set eyes on Feretory. But when you find out that everybody in that factory in Shenzhen is dead, or worse, I hope you'll start to understand. Why do you think Hudson Plastics failed in 1970? Why do you think those buildings burned down? It's about the formula. It's about Hudson-Glasser 11. That's where she lives. She lives in the resin, no matter who's mixing it."

  I glanced at the orderly in the corner, whose psoriasis had now spread as far as his left earlobe. "OK, but now you're wondering about MoMA. You've had Feretory there for decades. Why is the place still standing? Why is everyone still alive?"

  Rayle leaned forward. "Look at the layout of the gallery on the fourth floor. Look at what's on the walls. There are three Agnes Martin drawings positioned in direct opposition to Feretory. I think those drawings are all that's been keeping you safe from her all this time. What was it Boethius said? 'The devil hates bounds and limits, so fear not dark corners. Madness hides in light and space.'"

  The scenario that now seems most plausible to me is this: that Leslie Ketban became sexually entangled with Conroy Glasser's wife, but instead of turning the two friends against each other, it brought them closer together, plotting against a common enemy. In those years, downtown Manhattan had a lot of stray cats and dogs, and that, surely, is how they tested the formula on a reduced scale. They wanted the resin to bend light in such a way that you could look straight through to the other side of the sculpture without seeing the carcass that was sealed inside like the proverbial mosquito in amber. But when they adapted certain innovations from the work of Leslie Ketban's government contacts, they can't have guessed that in the process they would also be introducing quite unanticipated potentialities into the substance.

  Even after my "indefinite suspension" from the curatorial staff, and the baffling discoveries in Shenzhen, MoMA are going ahead with a modified version of Before Downtown, which means that Feretory will be moved into a different gallery, not only unbound from the divine grace of those Agnes Martin grids, but also multiplied in its power by the presence of several of the smaller works that Marlon Rayle once planned to show in Philadelphia. The SFA was closer to the literal truth than any of those campaigners ever realised: stare hard enough into the sculpture, "stare the eyes out of your head", and you will see that it still contains Conroy Glasser's crime.

  As I tiptoed towards Feretory with that fire axe on Christmas morning, I told myself that I was there to destroy the resin empress. But Hudson-Glasser 11 is mightier than a will as weak as mine. When Conroy Glasser hung a noose from a ceiling pipe in 1969, he was following orders he couldn't disobey, just like Marlon Rayle years later, and Andrea Wooney, and Bob Ketban, and maybe Steven Zduriencik, too – all dead now, except Rayle. How much of my work on Before Downtown was really of my own accord? I don't know. But the truth is that I stood paralysed for many minutes with the axe raised over my head before that night watchman found me. Yes, at that moment I wanted to destroy Jillian Glasser. But not nearly so much as I wanted to set her free.

  *© Ned Beauman 2013, First published in The Guardian in 2013