The Blazing World

Oswald Case (written statement)

Rune never gave up on irony. That was his victory. Despite the general nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-again moaning and hand-wringing and great American soul-searching that went on in the aftermath of 9/11, if you ask yourself whether the art world was permanently altered by that day, the answer is an earsplitting no. After all is said and done, three thousand dead downtown ranks as a sneeze in the market, a momentary convulsion of conscience. Yes, artists whined about meaninglessness and a new beginning, but a few months later, it was life comme d’habitude. Mea culpa. I am the author of “Irony Died at Ground Zero,” published in The Gothamite the week of September 23. Let me put it this way: When I banished irony, that most necessary of all forms of thought, I meant it. Lower Manhattan was a freshly dug graveyard, and I thought I had been remade as Monsieur Sincère. Furthermore, I have since acknowledged my error. That is more than I can say for any number of my esteemed colleagues who poured their thwarted literary ambitions into cringingly bad articles. They forgot the motto of our noble profession: here today, gone tomorrow. My offering to the end-of-irony moment was not nearly as bathetic as most of the garbage that was published after 9/11. How many times did I read: “Who could have imagined it?” Every two-bit screenwriter in Hollywood had already imagined it. Rune had it right. He knew the spectacle would be used, exploited, rewritten in a thousand different and, mostly, tawdry ways.

When I interviewed him in 2002, he talked about his struggle with catastrophe as art. How could a slaughter that had already been manipulated into multiple narratives be represented? He talked about the speed of technology, about simulation, and finally, about awe. He said he’d never experienced it — awe. He hadn’t felt it before 9/11. He called it “emotional superconductivity.” He wanted it in the work. I know that Harriet Burden believed she had found a third cover for her this-woman-can-become-a-celebrity-artist-too campaign. The question is, did she intervene enough to rob Larsen of credit for the works, which would be shown a year and a half later? I think not. I think he knew exactly what he was doing. Beneath hit the art world like a tornado. The timing was brilliant. He knew that to show the images everyone saw on television on 9/11, and for a few days after, would not do, not in New York City. But if you had to walk through a maze, and look at black-and-white film footage of devastated cars or kiddy shoes covered in dust, along with that weird mask fantasy sequence (which I believe Rune directed), the viewer’s experience would increase in intensity. He used Harriet Burden as a muse. I give her credit for that, but mingling the fantasy images with others that were completely banal — Rune with a coffee cup looking out the window or snow falling — directly referenced Banality. Also, the robotic motions of the dancers are pure Rune. Beneath looks nothing like those squishy Burden works that are being shown now.

Well before my interview with him, Rune had become a bad-boy celebrity, which of course means that he was not nice. He was too complicated to be a nice guy, but then, niceness is not only overrated, it is far less attractive than it’s cracked up to be. People love a large, meaty ME. They say they don’t, but in the art world a cowardly, shrinking personality is repellent (unless it has been highly cultivated as a type), and narcissism is a magnet. The artist’s persona is part of the sell. Picasso was a genius, but look at the mythology. He ate people for breakfast. He had lots of women and loved torturing them. He was King of Confidence, a bloated, swaggering tower of talent whose scribbles on napkins are worth more than I will earn in a lifetime. If you don’t seduce people, you don’t have a chance. Look at Schnabel in his pajamas. Entitlement works.

In that first interview, Rune revealed his savvy for the ins and outs of the market. When I asked him about his last show, he said, “The Banality of Glamour did well because collectors found it edgy. They liked the reference to Hannah Arendt, even though they’d never read her book. I’ve never read it either. But the play on glamour and evil is fun because evil is not supposed to be banal but now glamour is.” By then, Rune had recorded himself daily for years: the life of the artist as a young man about town. I shall take this opportunity to correct a tired old truism: “Beauty is skin deep.” It is not. It is life down deep. Beauty makes you. Six-three, blond, blue-eyed, and fine-featured, Rune’s northern European roots blared as loudly as the commercials on TV that run at several decibels higher than the regular shows. His eyes were pale blue. There were times when I looked at him and felt as if I were talking to one of the replicants in Blade Runner.

For a while in the nineties, he adopted metrosexual affectations — cologne, manicures, hair mousse, body scrubs, self-tanners — and dutifully filmed all these applications for his diary. Then he stopped. He turned himself into an art cowboy au naturel—stiff jeans, boots, sweaty T-shirt. Not long after his Western incarnation, he appeared everywhere in sleek Italian suits and made loud statements about this or that artist, which entered the rumor mill. He understood his image, understood that he was his own object, a body to be sculpted in his work. “It’s fake,” he said. “The film diary is a big fake. That’s the point. It’s not that I staged it. It’s me waking up. It’s me at the parties. The fakeness comes from the fact that you believe you’re seeing something when you’re not seeing anything except what you put into the picture. That’s what celebrity culture is. It’s not about anything except your desire that can be bought for a price. I know that if I stick to some story about myself, I’ll get boring. Look at Madonna. My reinventions mean that I have no looks, no style. I’m bland, a bland blond. I haven’t created anything new. It’s been done before, but I’ve added little twists and turns, and people like it. I actively fight against every trace of originality.”

His stance was a tease, a smart, complicated tease about America as consumer heaven where things are neither original nor real. Whether they knew what he was talking about or not, Rune made people around him feel hip. The colored crosses were so simple, they excited people. They were as easy to read as road signs, but hard to read, too. What did they mean? Modeled on the Red Cross symbol in different colors, they could have been an ironic reference to the whole history of Christianity or to the Crusades. After 9/11 they looked prescient: East-and-West conflict, civilizations at war. Or were they just a shape? Yes, some critics went after him, but I didn’t notice that collectors cared. The true irony is that September 11 did change him. He felt he needed a new aesthetic, at least for a while. Maybe this led him to Burden, an artist so obscure she wasn’t even a has-been. Personally, I find her work to be little more than neo-Romantic gushing — high-flown, sentimental, and embarrassing — one big agonized groan that reminds me of a half-baked Existentialism. I have yet to penetrate the supposed interest of her “metamorphs.”

Political correctness and identity politics have infiltrated the visual arts as well as every other aspect of cosmopolitan American culture and account for a good part of the applause that her work now receives. The poor, neglected woman who couldn’t find a gallery! Poor Harriet Burden, rich as Croesus in five-hundred-dollar hats, the widow of one of the shrewdest dealers ever to work in New York City. My heart goes out to her. It throbs with sympathy. Art is not a democracy, but this blatant truth must not even be whispered in our prickly, tickly city of do-gooder, liberal, decaffeinated-skim-latte-drinking mediocrities blind to the facts. To suggest, even for an instant, that there might be more men than women in art because men are better artists is to risk being tortured by the thought police. And yet, read The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, distinguished psychologist and a bold prophet of the new frontier — genetics-based sociobiology — and then tell me that men and women are identical, that they have the same strengths, that “gender” difference is environmental. Test after test in brain science has determined that men score higher on visual/spatial skills and mental rotation tests than women. Might this not, in part at least, be related to the dominant position of men in the visual arts? It’s evolutionary. It’s in the cards. Men are hunters and fighters, active, not passive, doers and makers. Women have been nurturers, caring for children. They had to stay close to the nest. Has there been discrimination and prejudice against women? Of course there has, but feminism hasn’t helped the cause; feminists have screamed about numbers and quotas and turned women artists into political tools. The good ones want nothing to do with feminism. Harriet Burden is the latest craze in a venerable tradition: the woman victimized by a “phallocentric” world, which stomped on her greatness.

Nevertheless, Rune was looking for a way to mix up his work — to add a retrograde element, to introduce something of the past, some nostalgia for the avant-garde, for Expressionism, for art before Warholian accommodation to the ultimate consumer fantasy — the world before Campbell’s soup. I think he found it in Burden. She didn’t find him. He found her. Later, he told me as much. The woman was well placed, and he had known her husband. Just for the record, Rune wasn’t gay. Women were all over the man. They sidled up to him. They brushed against him, as if by accident. They cooed and babbled at him with silly, dumbstruck expressions on their faces. Young and beautiful women and not-so-young-and-not-so-beautiful women couldn’t get enough of him. I recall a pool game Rune and I played together downtown. Afterward, we had a beer at the bar. A babe in her twenties, a real babe (forgive me if I ruffle any delicate feathers with this mild slang for “gorgeous female”) with dark hair and a tight shirt tied at her waist, so her navel with a little gold ring in it was just visible, walked over and sat down on the stool next to him. She didn’t say a word. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t buy her a drink. Niente. He turned to me and said, “Night, Ozzie.” I watched them leave the bar together and turn right at the corner.

For the profile on Rune I needed the facts. They’re sticklers for facts at The Gothamite. They check and recheck the facts. The joke on all this fastidious fact-checking is that you’re allowed to humiliate anybody, as long as the subject’s birth date, hometown, and all numbers connected to him are flawless. And you can quote out-and-out liars, as long as you quote them correctly. It gives roundness to a piece: a bit of positive, a bit of negative. We like balanced reporting. But balance is most important in things serious. Politics is serious. Muckraking is serious, and it must have prose to match. War zones require that all humor and/or irony cease and desist. The arts are not serious, not in the U.S. of A. They do not involve life and death. We are not French. In reviews of the arts, if you spell the guy’s name right, you can write whatever you want. You can send hate mail to whichever pompous ass you choose in the form of a review and make a reputation for yourself in the bargain. Do I offend? Excusez-moi.

H. L. Mencken once wrote that if a critic “devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner,” he gets respect. The contemporary platitudes are: Dump on white males, encourage diversity, and destroy the canon; or conversely, wave the flag for the canon and old-fashioned artistic virtues. Of course, Mencken was writing back in the day when college meant literacy. It no longer does. I could regale you for hours with stories of our interns, fresh from the Ivy League, who cannot distinguish between like and as, who cannot conjugate the verb to lie (as in lie down on the floor), whose diction errors give me gooseflesh, but from their semiliterate mouths come one transient “right-thinking” platitude after the other. How I yearn for the future, when these people who cannot write a cursive hand have taken over the world.

In the visual arts, Clement Greenberg was a successful dictator while his reign lasted, but that world is finished. And yet, the more writing generated around an artist, the better, especially if the arguments for said artist’s greatness sound suitably abstruse. I wasn’t reviewing Rune, however. For the profile and later for my book, I needed his life story. The facts are these: Born in Clinton, Iowa, in 1965 to Hiram and Sharon Larsen. One younger sibling: Kirsten. Father, owner of car repair shop. Mother takes in sewing. Described by neighbor as “a quiet, polite boy.” Attends Clinton High School. 1980, wins first at science fair. 1981, mother commits suicide by sleeping pills. 1982, arrest by local police for vandalism (decapitating garden dwarf in neighbor’s yard). Attends Beloit College for one year on scholarship. Transfers to University of Minnesota. Takes classes in engineering and media studies. Drops out after six semesters. Erratic transcript. Hitchhikes to New York City. 1987, cast as extra in the movie City Slaves. Same year becomes attached to Rena Dewitt, author of the novel City Slaves, who is briefly famous. Dewitt, daughter of the Percy Dewitt, heiress to pharmaceutical fortune, introduces new boyfriend to joys of big money — Hamptons parties, nightlife, and art world. 1988, begins self-documentary. 1989, declares himself an artist of one name only — Rune — in his Diary, ceremoniously amputating family name by holding up sheet of paper and cutting loose Larsen with a pair of scissors. 1991, debut in group show at P.S. 1: Just a Regular Guy [Diary entry 1556], film of Rune painted blue, à la Yves Klein, narrating his day to a small robot that nods its head up and down. Noted in New York Times as show highlight. Befriends and is often seen with model Luisa Fontana. Luisa comes to a bad end. She jumps from the eleventh floor of her apartment on East Sixty-seventh Street in April. Sad death of beautiful girl merits big story in the New York Post. Rune is mentioned as one of her coterie of friends.

(No known source of income between 1986 and 1992.) 1992, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do [Diary entry 1825] shown at the Zeit Gallery. Two films run simultaneously: (1) Documentary film of Rune and Dewitt’s histrionic parting of the ways in huge glamorous apartment on Central Park West owned by Dewitt. Considerable athleticism displayed by both parties in hurling of shoes. (2) Animated “cybernetic” version of two figures enacting identical gestures. Generates press attention. William Burridge takes notice. Rune leaves Zeit for Burridge Gallery. Several hypocritical articles published by journalists moaning about invasion of privacy. Isn’t that what we do? Rune claims Dewitt knew about camera and both versions are “simulations.” Dewitt claims she forgot the camera was there. October 1995, Hiram Larsen dies in Clinton family house of head wounds sustained after falling down stairs to his basement workshop. Rune attends funeral in Iowa. November 1995, William Burridge attempts to contact Rune in Williamsburg, where he had moved in with Katy Hale, but to no avail. Breaks with her after two months, takes up with India Anand. No film, video, or digital recording. Autobiography stops until 1996, when Rune resurfaces in New York City. No fixed address until November.

October 1997, blockbuster show The Banality of Glamour at Burridge Gallery using facial morphing technology to incrementally alter his features in video sequence of himself waking up, walking in streets, and attending an opening at night wearing T-shirt that says Artificial Man. Simultaneous films of plastic-surgery patients under the knife (both cosmetic and reconstructive) mixed with images of prosthetic and robotic hands, arms, legs, as well as crucifixes and crosses. Bricks poised at various junctures in gallery with simple inscriptions: Art, Artificial, Art Man, Man Art, Manart, Artman, Cross, Crosses, and Crucifix. Brisk business in bricks. Art Assembly publishes article “Rune: Constructing the Non-Self.” Shows in Cologne and Tokyo. Cross show in September 1999. Yellow cross sells for three million.

“In heaven,” someone wrote, “all the interesting people are missing.” Rune was surely an interesting person. He told every journalist a different story about his missing period, not a vague or general narrative but highly specific accounts, which each reporter swallowed whole. A synopsis:

1. He left New York heartbroken after his affair with Dewitt and moved to Newfane, Vermont, where he lived under another name, Peter Granger, and did odd carpentry jobs to make a living.

2. He escaped to Berkeley and, after losing a job as a clerk at Cody’s Bookstore, ended up homeless and lived among a roving group of bums in San Francisco.

3. He lived in his car for those months, driving from one place to another, taking work where he could get it but never staying anywhere for more than three weeks.

Nobody I spoke to in Newfane had ever heard of Peter Granger. The people at Cody’s knew nothing of Rune, and the on-the-road tale could not be verified one way or another.

Rune fed me a fourth version. After the fiasco with Rena Dewitt and his father’s death, he felt not depressed but elated. “I could do no wrong,” he said. “I was so up, I never walked; I soared. The feeling was way beyond good. It was ecstasy. I spent money. I had sex, sometimes five women a day. I danced, sang, and jerked off. I had visions, man. No drugs, just wild mirages of big red beasts and women with dog teeth. Scared me shitless. One of my sex partners, who just happened to be a psychiatrist, took me to Psych Emergency at New York Hospital after we had fucked. Well, fucked and fought. Imagine that, one minute you’re panting over a sexy shrink, and the next thing you know you’re an inpatient in a locked ward.”

Although I tried to check this story, privacy laws for psychiatric patients in New York State impeded me at every turn. I tend to go with number four, not because I was the recipient of this explanation but because it is bizarre and, having made my way into solid middle age, I have heard enough of the world to know that the truth often sounds invented and the invented has the ring of truth. It is at least plausible that Larsen had some kind of breakdown, although it has not been confirmed.

Doing research for my book after Rune’s death, I understood that his sister, Kirsten, knew where her brother had been during much of that unrecorded period of his life. Kirsten Larsen is a craniofacial technician in Minneapolis. She makes facial prostheses for cancer patients and others who have lost noses, ears, cheeks, chins, and jaws, et cetera. Although it is admittedly difficult to imagine this as a life’s calling, during our phone conversation she spoke of it as a noble profession, waxing grandiloquent on the challenges of forming just the right proboscis in “biocompatible materials” for the man who has lost his own, and cheerfully acknowledged that her work had played a role in The Banality of Glamour. She was far more reticent when it came to her brother’s disappearance, however, and spoke vaguely of his need “to find himself.” Rune had wanted solitude. She was “not in a position to say,” et cetera. When asked point-blank about possible mental illness, she said very quietly, “I think he had to be crazy to die like that, don’t you? That’s all I’ll say.” “And your father’s death? Was it very hard on him?” There was a long silence. I waited patiently. Then I heard sniffling. I lowered my voice and adopted the consoling lilt I have perfected over time; it had not been my intention to upset her. Their father’s accident must have been a shock, a terrible shock. Sobs on the other end of the line. “He found him. Don’t you understand how terrible that was? He found him dead.” And then, growling, she said, “The dead deserve some respect. Don’t you get that? Mom, Dad, Rune. They’re all dead. But they ought to be respected.”

Investigative reporting can be trying, and one has to get used to the intrusions that are necessary for a story. I had adapted to the tearful faces and choked-up voices long ago, but here was a woman who wasn’t willing to talk, and I liked her for it. We live in a world in which those desperate for media attention regularly sell their souls for a turn on TV. The mere mention of my magazine brightens eyes and loosens tongues, but as the ironies pile up, one on top of another, it must be said that Rune lusted after attention. I said this to Kirsten. “Don’t you think your brother would have wanted a book about him? Wasn’t his last gesture for art and technology? I believe he made it clear that his death was an aesthetic statement, and that was how he chose to do it.”

Before she hung up the telephone, Kirsten Larsen said, “I don’t think you understand anything.”

Rena Dewitt released a statement articulating her “shock and sadness” after the death, and then vanished behind the legal wall that inevitably surrounds billions of dollars. I have hours of taped conversations with Katy and India, however, who provided minutiae about their mutual paramour’s likes and dislikes, his childhood stories, his eating habits — the real Rune, as it were. There was some agreement. He read a lot, especially science fiction, comics, biographies of artists. He loved Nietzsche and liked to quote Marinetti, the Italian Futurist, who kicked every drippy sentiment in the pants. All the particulars are revealed in my book, but to make a long story pithy: The reports on his personal life did not match. Interview after interview with friends and acquaintances uncovered not one person but several. He loved his mother. He called her a “cold bitch.” His relations with his mother were “troubled.” He was alienated from his father, who used to beat him. He admired his father, but found him a bit “simpleminded and conventional.” He had taken a number of hallucinogens in college. He had never touched drugs but had spontaneous hallucinations. I can confirm that he liked whiskey. One night when we were out, he put his arm around me after four drinks and said, “You know why I like you, Ozzie, old man?” After I had dutifully said, “No, Rune, why?” “Because we get it. The world is shit.”

This may pass for a philosophical statement, I suppose. We were both confirmed atheists, but what fascinated me about the man was that with me, too, he changed from one day to the next. He talked a lot about “honing his image” and his “self-presentation,” his need to “nail down a game plan.” But then he would confess to a desire to make art that would “slice people open” and “shake them hard.” According to Katy, he wept regularly over newspaper articles about dead and/or abused children, gave money to a host of animal charities, and professed vegetarianism. It may have been a phase. With me, he ate meat.

Rune was a fabulist. He reinvented himself again and again ceaselessly until the end. In this respect, he was a man of our time, a creature of the media and of virtual realities, an avatar walking the earth, a digitized being. No one knew him. His comment about his autobiography as a “fake” is at once deep and shallow. And that is the point. There can be no depth in our world, no personality, no true story, only images without substance projected anywhere and everywhere instantaneously. Soon we will have communication devices implanted directly into our brains. The distinctions between reality and image are already fading. People live in their screens. Social media is replacing social life.

I saw Harriet Burden with Rune once at his place not long after Beneath had been mounted. I liked to refer to Rune’s warehouse conversion as “Versailles on the Hudson.” The elevator held twenty. The rooms were stupendously large, with monumental sofas and overstuffed chairs covered in brocades, silks, and velvets in brilliant colors, streaming with light. “I wanted it to look like a Hitchcock movie, a Technicolor extravaganza,” he said. His own gigantic film stills were hanging everywhere. His girlfriend at the time, Fanny-something (former Victoria’s Secret model), drifted in and out wearing Ugg boots and cut-off jeans. “I need a pan for the brownies, Rune.”

Sometime later, Felix Lord’s widow was ushered into the room by some underling who had answered the door, and there, in harsh contrast to the lithe and lovely Fanny, stood the enormous Harriet, a shrill presence even before she had opened her mouth. I knew she had been buying and selling art, had spied her at a few openings, but I had not spoken to her since the day I met her at Tish’s studio. She greeted me coldly, sat down, and said nothing for a while. Rune and I talked about AI, an interest we shared, when she interrupted us with a harsh comment to the effect that AI scientists couldn’t even make a robot that walked like a human being, for God’s sake. Then she started in on consciousness, as if she were some kind of expert, and then I mentioned Beneath. She called it a big change after the crosses. I was polite. I humored her. I said it was the oscillation in Rune’s work that was interesting — the movement from one position to the other — but that his work was always about bodies, technology, and simulation, this time in disaster mode.

She interrupted us. “I don’t see how Beneath is about technology.”

I mentioned the robot dance.

“Why do you think those figures are robots?”

Rune took my side. The dancers had robotic movements, he said, sure, in line with his earlier work. Most of the reviews, he said, had described them that way.

I merely echoed this comment, saying that it was obvious to everyone.

This set her off. Her voice rose an octave. She asked who “everyone” was, said I was blinded by context and so were the other fools, or something to that effect. She accused me of multiple failings as a writer, most of which I can’t remember. I was embarrassed for her, really, and wasn’t going to egg her on with a response. This annoyed her further. Women who resort to wailing have always had a chilling effect on me. My admittedly brief marriage ended because I became allergic to my wife’s voice. Since then, I only consort with women who keep their tones low and dulcet. The Harriet tirade lasted seven, maybe ten minutes. Rune tried to placate her: “Harry, Harry, it’s not important. Relax. Come on.” The upset ended with her sweeping up her coat and hat and making a grand exit.

I had no sense that the two were collaborators. It was obvious that Rune was calling the shots. I asked him what her problem was, and he said she was overly sensitive, a bit unstable, but a friend. I would like to note here that he defended her: “People don’t understand Harry, but she’s highly intelligent. She’s stuck on her own view, that’s all. I admire her for it.”

After Harriet left, Rune and I strayed onto the meanings of money, that eternal American subject. He had never seen real money before he came to New York. His hometown, Clinton, Iowa, had rolled in the glories of lumber riches in the second half of the nineteenth century, but when the forests were depleted around 1900, the wealth died with the trees. He had grown up with the moldering mansions and ragged parks left by long-dead millionaires, but in New York City those riches had been reborn in the body of Rena Dewitt. “Her soul was made of money,” he said. My own initiation had come at Yale, where I witnessed firsthand the casual assumptions of class, its ease and smugness, the lawns and paintings and town houses that lurked behind the friendly but distant smile. Of course we need the rich. We always have: to ogle and envy and imitate. They are our spectacle and our joy because in the head of every American lies the thought That could be me. (That could be I, grammatically correct though it is, does not lurk within our collective heart, not anymore.) The rich constitute our mythos, after all, our fairy tale, our hymn to success: the self-made man, the robber baron, dog-eat-dog, rugged individualism, nice guys finish last, carry your own gun and ride in your own limousine, long-legged babes with enhanced boobs on either side of you as you drive to the premiere and exit the car, flashbulbs exploding around you. There is still old money around, quiet and hidden and stealthy, but it has no grip on the public imagination as it once did. The social register, the 400, the debuts — still around, but there are fewer and fewer Philadelphia stories told in our world of Twitter and Facebook.

Rune and Rena — a gleaming pair. “Rune, the Rube,” he joked, “learned fast.” He learned because in the United States there is still a teeny-weeny bit of truth in the myth. Millionaire hairdressers hobnob with heiresses. Cowboy traders, suddenly flush, saunter through the doors of the Metropolitan Museum for a gala. The actress, once the kept paramour of Mr. Old Money slumming backstage, is now royalty in her own right. The newly minted artist buys up lofts and houses right and left. I have seen it all. Believe me. They’re up. They’re down. They soar and they crash. I am nobody’s conscience, but I am the man who looks on at the fiascos and the greed and the pills and the booze and the bouts in rehab. And I still have a job. I am still in my comfortable apartment, and I am invited to dinner a couple of times a week with people who count. I own two tuxedos. No one remembers the Crawler, but the techniques I used then are still good, and I have what cannot be faked: wit. It is a commodity in short supply.

The art of conversation has been dwindling steadily until there is nearly no art left, but I do my best to resurrect it when I can. And I understand the power of the compliment, which must always seize upon a truth. I told Rune that day that he was fascinatingly elusive, that he held my interest not only because I admired his work but because he embodied contradictions I felt in myself. I am continually torn between admiration and contempt for the circus of vanity and stupidity I witness every day and on which I dutifully report. I admire the ruthless vigor of the climbers, but I often bemoan their lack of style. I feel the pull to the future, the revolution of the digital age, but I long for the literate niceties of the past, for a touch of romance and courtesy.

He snorted at my comment, but then he made a long, rambling, excited confession of sorts, which I taped. I wasn’t going to use it. I just pushed the button through my jacket pocket and, even though the sound wasn’t perfect, I got a lot of it. He had always wanted to get out of Clinton, and he attributed this desire to escape to his mother. Not surprisingly, when one examined the son, the mother had been a beauty, a homecoming queen and then Miss Iowa Dairy Farm. Yes, even in Rune’s not very distant youth, such traditions continued in the Midwest. The woman had nurtured her own Bovary pipe dreams focused chiefly on Chicago, which came to naught. She had loved Motown music and used to dance wildly to the Supremes, bumping, grinding, and panting with her two children as all three laughed until their sides hurt in the living room, where she kept the framed photographs of the homecoming court — she at center smiling beside the king — as well as several eleven-by-thirteen glossies of herself in full Miss Dairy Farm regalia with a ribbon that crossed her chest and a golden crown on her head. “That was her glamour, her moment,” he said, “everyone staring at her.” She never let go of the moment, apparently, to her husband’s annoyance. She told the stories of her triumph again and again. “My poor mother,” Rune said. “She used to dress up for nobody and sashay around the house. Now I think she was crazy, nuts, certifiable.” And then there were the days when she didn’t get out of bed. She’d lie inert in her nightgown, staring at the ceiling, a glass of vodka beside her, disguised as a Coke. “Or she’d cry.” Brother and sister would try to rouse the listless parent, but nothing worked.

No, it was not a charming family portrait. The woman killed herself with a lethal combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. It was probably intentional, but Rune didn’t talk about her actual death, how exactly it had happened, and I didn’t ask. He beat his thighs as if they were two bongo drums through most of his tale, his eyes not on me but on the lamp beside his chair. At some point, he wandered onto the story of the cat, and he stopped drumming. He had been eight at the time.

Mrs. Sharon Larsen, an orphan of Nordic stock — hence the names of her two progeny — had been feeding a feral or near-feral cat against her husband’s wishes, a scraggy tabby, who came around for food late in the afternoon. After a while, the cat settled into the household, but the three familial conspirators would always put the feline out before the Patriarch returned, although the man took to sniffing for the animal and complained bitterly about “cat stink.” “No cats! I said no cats!” And then one fateful afternoon, the interloper gave birth in the family’s hamper on one of the paternal shirts, a gray work shirt with the name of the business, Hiram’s, embroidered on the pocket. A domestic battle ensued, which led to the act Rune then described. His father scooped up the litter of tiny, blind pink bodies in paper napkins and drowned them in a bucket in the garage as his mother screamed “No!” and the children cowered in the doorway. When Mr. Larsen retreated back to the laundry room to grab the tabby and expel her permanently from the household, Mrs. Larsen kneeled beside the crime-scene bucket and fished out the corpses as she howled, “I hate you! You monster!” The neighbors called the police. By then, Mr. Larsen had come to regret the massacre, and had apologized to his spouse, but Mrs. Larsen would have none of it. The officers managed to frighten her into silence, but there was no reconciliation between the couple, despite the fact that Mr. Larsen, according to his son, begged and blubbered and, at one point, kneeled in contrition. In the morning, the children found the cat remains on the garage floor. Rune’s descriptive adjective for the poor stiffs was “gross.” Kirsten orchestrated a proper burial in the garden, complete with prayers, but her brother did not participate. “I decided,” Rune said, “right then and there, looking at those disgusting dried-up little pieces of shit, that I wasn’t going to be me anymore.”

When I asked him what he meant, he said he knew that he didn’t belong to those people, and he never would. They weren’t going to see him again. I asked him if he had run away. No, he didn’t mean that, he meant that they could see someone, but not him. “I’d give them Rune Two, Rune Three, or Rune Four, but never Rune One. They couldn’t tell the difference. As long as I didn’t bother them, what did they care?” He said the cat kept coming around looking for her kittens, meowing outside the door. He used to go out and talk to her, pet her, and give her something to eat. His mother, it seemed, had lost all interest in her former cause. “She became my cat,” Rune said. “I had her spayed with money I stole from Sharon’s purse. She never noticed the cash was gone, or if she did notice, she probably thought she had spent it on the booze she imagined she was hiding so carefully. I never let my cat into the house. I’d go out to her.”

Rune smiled at me. The ready adjective for that facial expression among many of my colleagues would have been sphinxlike, but I work hard to keep my prose unsullied by slack clichés, not that anyone truly notices in our illiterate age. The man’s smile was illegible. I put the family cat histrionics into Martyred for Art because I admired the idea of numbered Runes, whether he had invented it on the spot for my benefit or not. It captured his aesthetic and a longing for virtual selves: one, two, three, four, and (the coming rhyme is intentional) perhaps more.