Work Text:
January 17, 2020
The week – and the Chase Space's first major exhibit of the new decade – draws to a quiet close in a sleepy Seattle sleet shower. Victoria locks up two minutes after the last patrons, a young European couple on a grand gap year tour of every gallery on the west coast, disappear down the street in the lightless downpour. They didn't bring umbrellas, no doubt emboldened by the knowledge of their AirBnB sitting a short two blocks away. But the weather front moved in suddenly from the bay over the last two hours with an indiscriminate bite, like it's always done. This is a winter that only knows how to bare its fangs.
After waving off the guard from his security post, Victoria slips into the small mail room round the back of the building, bathed in yellow-tinted filament. There's the never ending mound of cover letters and physical submissions to wade through, but she only has eyes for her personal PO box tucked in the corner beneath the window the weather drums against in drenched finger streaks. Fridays are her nights, the one day she allows herself to step away from the work and back into herself.
She finds half a dozen envelopes and two packages nestled lazily in the off-white metal drawer. More than usual, but far less than what she received over the Christmas period. She scoops it all up in her arms and, rather than retire to her upstairs apartment, she makes her way to the main gallery floor. The mail room's light stays on. She doesn't like dark rooms.
Her shoes, fresh and polished, echo against the even more polished floor. There's something passively energising about empty galleries, seeing the art in a rare state of quiet dormancy that mutes but doesn't kill their visual presence. It's a bit like breaking into a school after hours, only this is Victoria's own space, one where she is safely in control. She picks her seat, a bench situated between the blown-up pseudo-apocalyptic landscapes of the Fleeting Moments collection. Before her is a sprawling blanket of colour, an aerial shot of the amazon in stripes of emerald, vermilion, and slate. Victoria had suggested the exhibit be called End of the World. It was shot down for being too “on the nose”. She looks to her right, at the close-up of a shooting star burning itself out in a hazy sky, and breathes out slowly. Over the weekend, all this will be taken down to make room for the annual Seattle Young Talent competition winners until the end of March. It goes by so quick, impressions that mean so much in the moment but that fade from memory the minute the frames are boxed up again.
Carefully, Victoria opens the first package, a small cardboard box. Inside is her estrogen refill for the next three months. She lifts up one of the two pill bottles and rattles it in her hands. She's been taking them for the best part of seven years now – so long that she can't be sure of when exactly next month the anniversary is – but she always feels the same small spike in her chest when she opens a new supply. So much is so different from that distant day. She is so far removed from that nervous seventeen-year-old in awkward overdone makeup standing six foot exactly, more excited about a small pill packet than an art school scholarship. Tablets built from the ground up to facilitate change have been the only constant in her life since. The irony isn't lost on her.
The next box is a densely-packed collection of polaroids, along with a cover letter. It's from some middle class artiste type who thinks his work on the universality of human experience stands so strongly that the chief curator will overlook the twin sins of receiving them to her personal address and of failing to match any of the submission briefs for the next twelve months. Victoria thumbs through a few against her better judgement. They're lo-fi shots of well-off twentysomethings doing well-off twentysomething activities, at least thirty of them. They seem to be the originals, too. She almost feels sorry to know this guy's work will be consigned to the trash. But not sorry enough to be willing to pay the extortionate return fee. She can't stand guys like him, wannabes who think they know the game well-enough to outplay it. It's far easier, and they have far better chances if they were to submit through the official channels, but they never learn. Victoria's been handling submissions in some form for the last four years. It never changes. She puts the box on the floor, half-intending to forget about it. If the cleaners do what they do with it, then it's not her problem.
That's it for the packages. She moves onto the pile of letters The first is a starch-white envelope that weighs almost nothing. She already knows this one's contents. The hospital bill stretches out for two pages, even with all the insurance and aid policies in effect. Nobody likes to pay out for stage four radiotherapy for women under sixty on the verge of going terminal. Victoria's mother lives almost full-time on the ward, sleeping in her wig against better judgement and insistence from her nurses. It's a thorny image Victoria never likes to consider for too long, because they all know the shape and form of the pit that awaits at the end of this road. When her eyes finally rest on the updated seven-figure total, Victoria feels a familiar burst of caged anger. It's directed to her father for dropping dead of that heart attack in 2014 and leaving the Chase Space in the red, and towards herself for spending those last good years arguing with her mother from the safe distance of Arcadia Bay, and refusing to grow up until the last possible minute. This has been Victoria's first year managing the Chase Space solo. She's pinning everything on a successful series of summer exhibits to coincide with both election and Olympic fever. Once she gets through that, only then will she dare to stop holding her breath.
Envelope number two is simply addressed to “the homeowner”. It's an estate agent enquiring about the remortgaging and potential sale of the Chase estates with all the unattached politeness of a shark in bloody water. Victoria moved out to the loft apartment above the gallery three years ago, and since her mother's illness nobody's been in the mini mansion for eighteen months. She knows she should close the deal and take the four million offer while she still can, but—there's hesitance. She never held any love for the estate, but it's still the place that appears behind her eyes when she utters the word 'home'. Giving up on it is to admit that nobody will ever be returning home there again. Victoria's not ready to see the burned ashes of that bridge just yet, even if that's enough money to keep her mother going for another year. She wants to hope a little longer. This letter goes alongside the polaroids in what she's now tentatively thinking of as the trash box.
She picks up the next envelope. Small and manila, with a familiar crest stamped in the corner that makes her stomach suddenly drop and twist. She knows the contents of this letter, like she does every one of its clones she's received since September. A personal invitation from Principal Ray Wells for her, and the other Blackwell graduates of 2015, to attend a five years on reunion this summer. There's promises of a chance to participate in an exclusive exhibition and mingle with high profile connections in the art world. She doesn't open the letter, but still barks out a shallow laugh that bounces off of a shot of a child riding a bike around a sinkhole sucking a spiral into the earth. High profile connections in the art world. The nerve. Still, she finds herself pulling the sleeve of her sweater over her free hand and fiddling with a loose thread to keep the incipient dissociative haze at bay. Fuck Blackwell Academy.
Four years of therapy during her time at college and Victoria still can't shake nightmares that place her back at that fucking Vortex pool party, still can't shake the imprint of Rachel Amber's beautiful and eternally young face from her mind. Most nights she's eighteen again, back in that classroom fighting not to be eaten alive by her peers, blind to the real apex predator in monochrome by the blackboard. I could frame any one of you in a dark corner, and capture you in a moment of desperation.
It's one of those things she can't dwell upon without feeling sick. Victoria's seen the empty red binder with her name etched with marker ink. She'll never run out of ways to imagine it being filled.
She has to reach deep for a breathing exercise she was taught at nineteen before she finds the strength to drop the letter with the rest of the trash pile. Burn Arcadia Bay to the ground and salt the earth upon which it stood. It's a greater kindness than what the town ever offered to girls like her.
The next envelope is a follow-up sucker punch to the first blow. It's the only letter to use her full name. The return address is the Tillamook County Correctional Institution. It's Nathan's monthly letter.
It's been over six years since that day he was dragged off the Blackwell campus in handcuffs on two murder charges and three counts of sexual violence. Six years, and Victoria still can't sort out her feelings into anything that resembles any sort of sense. What Nathan and Jefferson did was beyond understanding or absolution, so unforgivable that even Sean Prescott gave up on his son after the obligatory few months of caring. Victoria's the only person still in contact with Nathan, even if it's gone from visits to calls to letters. She's the only one who remembers that he exists. Mark Jefferson's the one who got the documentaries, the infamy. The Prescott family shut down any attempts at covering the other half of what's now become known as the Dark Room murders with weighty threats of libel lawsuits. The name Nathan Prescott is a footnote to a footnote, another inmate among hundreds.
He'd chosen her to be his next victim. He shot Chloe Price dead in the bathroom. He'd also been Victoria's rock for her first two years at Blackwell. The first boy that was intimate with her like any other girl, who helped her feel like her body was still wanted. The boy who'd pulled her through her darkest nights in that tiny dorm room, just as she'd been the only one to see him as anything more than a party favour dispenser. They'd elevated each other to the status of Vortex Club royalty. At the same time, he was taking vulnerable girls and doing unspeakable things to them with the help of his teacher. Nathan assaulted Kate Marsh, and Victoria plastered video evidence all over the internet. Victoria had genuinely, truly loved him for a period. He killed Rachel Amber. And so on the gnarled tangle goes in her mind.
Sometimes she can go weeks at a time without thinking about him, and she hasn't wept over his absence for years. But she doesn't think he'll ever truly be out of her mind. Not until one of them is dead. What they had was the bright and rapid intensity of young love and scored deep. The day he got dragged out of class, Victoria watched him go. He looked towards her with desperation, fear, and hurt. His eyes were wide and his face pale. There was nothing she could do for him. She felt like at that exact moment she was dragged out from her seat and down an endless dark hole. Sometimes she feels like she's still falling.
The letter's contents are predictable enough. Nathan's made some progress in therapy, made even more steps backwards. He fought this person, talked with that one. Is so so so fucking sorry about what happened to Rachel (never what he did to Rachel, never anything about the other girls he wasn't in love with) and for what nearly happened to Victoria. Hates his dad for abusing him right into Jefferson's manipulative reach and wants to know if Sean's still fighting for his freedom. Hopes Victoria's photography career is going well. Really wants Victoria to visit him in person again when life gets less busy for her. One day he'll be out, and they'll go right back to how they were before.
Victoria hasn't replied to him for the last five or so letters know. She's simply run out of things to say to him, this stagnant fragment of her youth. She's not eighteen any more, even if he never seemed to grow beyond that point. They both turn twenty-five this summer. They can't pretend like time isn't passing. Eventually these monthly letters will slip to every other month, to every six months, to once a year, to once every few years, until they stop. Until he gives up on her. It doesn't quite sadden her, but it does put a wistful weight on her chest. She supposes this is what it's like to finally let go of something so deeply entwined with who you are. Still, she sets the letter aside with the bills. She can't bring herself to throw any of them away yet. She has a half-baked notion of one day gathering up every last one of Nathan's letters from the lockbox in her room she keeps them in, and dumping them all on a bonfire. She knows the reality will be a quieter, slower extinguishing.
Second to last envelope. Addressed to her, written in standard corporate print, sealed by machine. She struggles to open this one and ends up tearing at the corners to get it out. It's the most human action this piece of paper has seen at any point. She already knows the contents with a keener sense of anticipation than anything she's opened so far. It rises past her diaphragm, and tastes sweet like hope on her lips, feels like seeing the cloud that could be the break in the storm.
The Park Gallery is thankful for Victoria Chase's submission to the RE:Define Identity photography portraiture collection. Unfortunately, the work is not compatible with the gallery's vision, and so the submission the self through glass fog must unfortunately be rejected for inclusion in this exhibition. The Park Gallery wishes Victoria Chase the best of luck in future work, and reminds her she is always welcome to submit her work to upcoming competitions and exhibitions.
It's not an unfamiliar sight. Victoria, like every other artist desperate to make it, gets more misses than hits. But outside of exhibits during her college days, Victoria's only had two successes: she made the shortlist for the Zeitgeist Gallery's 2017 pride exhibit, and she got a feature in a small pop up gallery over in Spokane in late 2018 for the few months the place remained open. She rationally knows all the factoids about failure rates and the average age of artists that make it for the first time, but she feels like her head's between a pair of jaws ready to snap shut if she doesn't do something. Time isn't on her side. Everything that constitutes her safety net will only remain afloat for as long as Victoria can struggle against the current. She hopes for—she doesn't know. Some juvenile hope that getting a gallery feature will get her sponsors generous enough to keep her life ticking over. For the universe to give her a fucking break for once.
She dumps the rejection in the trash pile, and reaches for the final envelope.
Victoria immediately pauses. Her name is on the letter, in lazy and uneven handwriting. Something about it tugs at her as deeply familiar. She tries to consider who would send a handwritten letter to her and comes up short. She never made any real friends at college, and on the rare occasions she thinks about reconnecting with Taylor or Courtney she does it through Facebook. She hopes this isn't some other joker trying to slink their way into the gallery through personal communication. Lord knows she's seen enough people like that over the years. But some part of her feels like it's something else.
With utmost care, Victoria peels open the envelope. It wasn't even stuck together that well in the first place. She slides the letter out. It's a pulled-out piece of lined paper from a notebook folded in half. When she unfolds the note, she realises almost immediately why it felt familiar.
Hi Victoria.
How have things been? Stupid question actually. We've not seen each other for years. That's definitely too much time to brush aside with small talk. I hope you've been well, at least. I've been following the Chase Space for the last few years, and the stuff that's been going on seems really cool.
Definitely an awkward way to start a letter, but I've been trying to write this for the last week and haven't been able to come up with anything that sounds good. So I'm just putting down what's on my mind to get it out. Sorry if it doesn't make sense. There's a lot to say. Too much to say in one letter.
I'll say one thing: you were totally right with what you said at our Blackwell graduation. New York has been really good for me. I've only had a couple decent sized features, but I've helped out with a lot of big gallery projects. I've also met the coolest people here that you'd totally get along with. Kellen reminds me of you if you were into panoramic shots. And Justice is *the* selfie queen, I'm sorry to report. I've shown them your work and they really like it. So you've got two fans who'd love to collaborate with you if you ever end up on the east coast!
I know I could have reached out to you sooner, and I'm sorry. I've always been bad at keeping in touch with old friends, and things are always so hectic over here that it's hard to find the time. Not that I'm trying to make excuses!
Anyway. Let me get to the point. I'm moving back to Seattle! One of my old professors got me in with a 12 month internship at the Seattle Art Museum starting this April, so I'm moving back in with my parents. Of course, this is also right in your backyard, so I'd love to meet up with you once I get over there. I've also not been in Seattle for (god!) nearly five years, so I'd appreciate the expertise and knowledge of someone who's on the ground level of the art scene. I'm sure you know where all the cool stuff is happening, and who the cool people are to know. It seems no matter what, I always end up feeling like a stranger whenever I return home. At the very least, I have my eyes on the Chase Space's “Speak Your (voice)” spring exhibit. Not that this is me trying to backdoor my way into a feature! I play by the rules.
My number's on the back. Feel free to get in touch with me once you get this letter. I'd really like to reconnect! I'm sure we both have so much to talk about. My new friends are nice, but you're the only person from Blackwell I'm still in touch with. There are some things I can only talk about with someone who also went through the same stuff, if you know what I mean. Not to end this letter on a downer or anything – we're different people in different places from back then, and I'm done with turning back time. Facing the future is way cooler.
Hope to hear from you soon!
Yours
Max Caulfield
PS. We can finally collaborate on that portfolio we talked about back at Blackwell. I still have that Avedon book you got me for my birthday! :)
The rain trickles to a stop as Victoria reads through the letter. Her heart catapults between her throat and her stomach. She doesn't dare breathe.
This is—this is not an answer to all her problems. But it's a branch extended, a life raft in the wash. It's something new. Something promising. A reminder that no, she's not alone. That she doesn't have to drown. She sits alone in a dying woman's art gallery, an overgrown young girl in a cashmere sweater and skirt in the wrapped clutch of late winter, but she feels the first groans of a long stasis starting to shift. Change feels possible now, something unknown and overwhelming, but tangible with all the promise and potential of dice flipping in the air.
There's a long way to go between now and someplace good, but she sees a starting line for the first time. Victoria pulls out her phone and lets the tears well in her eyes. It's been so long since she felt like she had a tangible future.
VICTORIA: Hey, Max.
VICTORIA: It's Victoria.
VICTORIA: I just got your letter. I'd love to meet up when you get here.
MAX: Victoria, good to hear from you! I'm glad my letter got to you.
MAX: And yeah, I'm totally meeting up with you.
MAX: We're gonna make great things happen. I can feel it :)
Three more months. Then things will get better. She has to believe it.