Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison

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Idea for a novel about two friends who both decide to become counterfeiters, one of whom decides to make counterfeit art while the other decides to make counterfeit money.

Working title: Secret Pleasure, Secret Poison



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The first few pages:


For years I couldn’t stop writing about the oncoming fascism and then the fascism was here and I couldn’t seem to write about it anymore. Keep that in mind with everything that follows.

Most of the people I interacted with on a daily basis didn’t know that capitalism was already over. I knew. Which might have been one of the reasons I chose to enact such a foolish plan. There were many contradictory and confused reasons.

I don’t drink any more. Sable still drinks, but for her it was never really a problem. Sable always stopped just before that fatal last drink, while for me the fatal last drink was an almost daily occurrence. So the memory was somewhat unclear, except for the fact that we both must have been drinking, me noticeably more so than her. I remember her saying: “I’ve always imagined an ongoing game where the purpose is to try to invent an art movement.” And I remember thinking: Why just a game, why not actually make an art movement in real life. And then, as if reading my mind, she followed up: “I mean, art movements were a thing that happened last century. I don’t think they’re really a thing that can still happen now.” And I thought to myself: “But why not try? Attempt the impossible. Rise to the challenge.”

That was maybe the night I first had the idea. But I’m not sure if I told her then, or some other night. And I know she never told me. I had to find out through other sources. But then, much later, when I asked her about it, she said I could stop by some time to watch her work. It was more specific than that: she said he’d be interested in having me there, in sensing my reactions. By then we were both in what one might refer to as deep, deep trouble. I’m not sure if she knew it more than I did, or if I knew it more than her, or if we both knew so on equal footing. There was also a sense in which neither of us knew, our activities were too seductive, the experience that you could have your cake and eat it too. (The French version of this expression is to have both the butter and the money for the butter. The reference to money brings us closer to the point.)

I stopped drinking because of the plan, to fulfil the plan, to enact the plan. It would require waking up extremely early, with a clear head, or staying up extremely late, working away when all normal type people were fast asleep. It required finding places that resisted surveillance, never slipping up, one false move or decision might cost me my freedom. At least, that’s how I thought of the matter in the months leading up to the plan. Later I must have thought of it a bit differently.

The dilemma that most concerned me before beginning was as follows: I hated money and I wanted money. Money isn’t real. It’s a fiction, a story. But money can do things that nothing else can do. So in that sense – at the level of power – it has some sort of greater reality.

I wear gloves because I’m worried about fingerprints. I of course don’t wear the gloves all the time. And try not to wear them at times when many people will see me doing so. In that sense they are secret gloves, for when I’m working alone. But I also wear them when I’m transporting the cases. I feel if I’m caught out wearing these gloves during times when one isn’t normally expected to be seen wearing gloves it might generate suspicion. But having my fingerprints on the paper before there are any other fingerprints to lend cover would be worse.

The art movement became a code name for our respective activities. Or different art movements at different times. “How is your Situationist thing going?” Sable might ask me, and then a few weeks later she’s instead ask about my Cubist undertaking and I’d respond by asking her about the Stuckists. (If you don’t know about the Stuckists I’ll probably find my way back around to the topic a bit later on.) There have been a lot of art movements in human history so we tried to keep it all spread out. I didn’t know all that much about the topic when we began, so I had to keep reading up. I was often looking for things to read that didn’t add any extra stress to my already stressful life. My stress most often focused on the idea that I would be caught, tried, and send to jail. I tried to calm my nerves with the counter-idea that there were worse things in this world then being sent to jail. I wasn’t certain exactly what it would be like, and didn’t do any research into the eventual reality of the experience, but I imagined there might be things I could learn there. Conversations with people I would never otherwise meet, exercise I would never otherwise do, reading and writing. It might be a dangerous place, I certainly intended to avoid that outcome if at all possible, but anything that happened would also be an experience. At the same time, jails are getting worse, fascist jails are obviously even worse than previous ones, which were already unbearably cruel. And if I had a choice I would choose to live in a world without prisons. But we don’t get to choose the world we live in, we only get to choose the world we fight for. So many of my ideas about the world, what it’s like, were from what things were like before, before this sudden, sharp increase in fascism, and I often have to think long and hard when it came to understanding or describing what things are like now.

Many artists feel their work does not get all the attention it deserves. Jealousy of other artists is perhaps the one of the most natural parts of being an artist. Sable responded to this common impasse in a unique way. She had a theory that the more she hid away, the more general interest in the work would increase. That hiding a success were, for her at least, intertwined. It began on a whim with her not attending one of her own openings, then later announcing in advance she would not be in attendance. Already there were relatively few photographs of her in circulation, and she then made a certain effort to scrub as many of the remaining ones from the internet, and to avoid having her picture taken whenever possible. Her work had a certain modest following, but she was far from being famous, and there was certainly no one chasing after her to take her picture. That she no longer made public appearances merited a certain degree of curiosity, and if someone decided to write about her work they would often mention it in the first or second paragraph. In fact, it seemed there were now slightly more articles than before, and sales slightly increased over time, leading her to believe that her theory was correct. Many still knew what she looked like, she hadn’t magically transformed into Thomas Pynchon or Elena Ferrante overnight, but there was, nonetheless, some new sense of mystery surrounding the work. And when I thought about this aspect of it I was always intrigued. How it was possible to be both public and secret at the same time. How your art was directly connected to your physical appearance and biographical details, and interest in it could be influenced by how many of these biographical details you chose to release or not release. How when people looked at your art they were also considering it in relation to your life.

I saw Sable only about a dozen times in the years during which we were both fully immersed in our respective art movements. Most of these encounters took place during my visits to her secret studio, across vast swathes of silence while I watched her paint. Watching someone paint is almost like an artform unto itself. At least that’s how I considered my own approach to the activity, giving it all my space and concentration. Sometimes we spoke while she painted, but most of the time it was pure silence, and then when she was done for the day we would eat together, not have a drink together (since I had already quit by that point), and speak of the things we didn’t allow ourselves to speak about with anyone else, the secrecy lending intensity to every word.

I first acquired the printing press under the assumption I would use it to publish literature. Maybe there was some part of me that even believed this lie. In retrospect, that lie was also the first of many, all the small and big untruths I had to perpetrate once my art movement was well under way. Before this undertaking I didn’t have much experience with lying. And what was surprising was how many of those lies were told at the spur of the moment, without forethought, because the situation required a quick explanation, and the actual explanation involved information it would endanger me to divulge. I don’t know if I’m lying to myself when I state that I still think of myself as an honest person.

I don’t believe I would have bought the printing press if I hadn’t discovered the secret room. The secret room was the discovery that set off the first domino leading onto my current path. I had just rented an apartment that was slightly too expensive for me. All my belongings were still packed in boxes in the far corner of the main room. I was carefully exploring the apartment, wondering how I was going to set it up and also wondering how I was going to afford it. There were bookshelves built into the entirety of one of the walls, perhaps the main reason I had chosen to sign the lease, since over the years I had accumulated a large quantity of books. For some reason I was pressing my weight down on each of the shelves, I suppose to ensure they were sturdy enough before filling them with books. I also ran my palm across each shelf, difficult to know what I was hoping to find, but to my great surprise I did make a discovery. A kind of hidden switch in the back corner of the very top shelf closest to the window. I was standing on a chair when I made the discovery. The entirety of the shelf swung inward on well-concealed hinges, and behind this section of shelving was a room about half the size of the main room. The hidden room was entirely cleared out, so it was impossible to guess what it had been used for, yet it had clearly served some secret purpose. I brought in a chair from my freshly moved belongings, placed it directly in the middle, sat down, and gave my mind over to a single question: what use might I have for a secret room?

Let’s return to that night at the bar, back when I was still drinking, when drinking still felt like one of the many solutions to my many problems, problems both imagined and concrete, when I was more drunk than Sable, as was always the case. Now I’m unsure if I remember the timeline as clearly as I’d like. Was that night at the bar before or after my discovery of the secret room? It must have been after, because without the secret room I don’t see how I could have conceived, in practical terms, starting that specific kind of art movement. But I also think there might have been a different timeline: that night in the bar, ending with Sable deciding to start her art movement and me deciding to start mine, followed by a period when I put it all out of my mind, until the moment I was sitting alone in that hidden room and the idea returned to me. Now the art movement had a location and every art movement needs a location. Either way, what I do know is the secret room sat empty for almost a full year before I met someone who knew someone who was selling a printing press. I did some research. It seemed this model of printing press might be up for the job. The money to buy the printing press came from a relative who had just recently died. Intergenerational wealth seems to be the case behind the scenes of every art movement.

I have a clear memory of how, at that time, I was feeling something I’d never quite felt before: I was feeling bitter and washed up. I was also thinking a lot about how one could take new created money and give some of it to the people who needed it most. There were social problems that couldn’t be solved with money alone, but there were other social problems that perhaps could be. The money would have to be successfully laundered first. It would be very wrong to find people with difficulties, and add to their difficulties the danger of being caught red-handed with fake money in their pockets. The reality that I was about to be adding to my own difficulties in just this manner was not lost on me. But I wanted to take the risk, a leap into the danger of the unknown.



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