I tried to read. Instead my mind wandered and my eyes kept lifting to stare at the room. The library was massive: Two stories, it had stacks on both floors, a narrow central courtyard, and walls lined with books, brass rails, and ladders. The only shelves I couldn’t read were at the very top of the room. They looked full.

I scaled the first ladder. The top shelves held files on Eliot&Sprain artists: catalogs, binders, file boxes, stacks of paper that I didn’t dare touch. I rolled the ladder awkwardly to its neighbor and climbed over; the next shelves were the same, full of privacies I wouldn’t dream of violating.

Yet on ladder number three, at the very top, I found myself looking at a series of black notebooks that took up an entire shelf, labeled with white paint marker on the spine with different project names. They looked exactly like my own.

The spines read:

HOLD ME

CAREY 2

FORGIVE/FORGET

THE BURIAL PROJECT

72 HOURS

TOMBSTONE PIZZA

CHOKE ON IT

SLEEP DISORDER

ELIOT&SPRAIN HOUSE

OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES

DROP OUT

YOKEFELLOWS

LOVE THAT MIRACLE

SIDE EFFECTS (MODAFINIL)

Next to the notebooks, museum and gallery catalogs, along with a tatty binder full of clippings, occupied the remainder of the shelf.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing.

It was Eliot&Sprain’s entire Carey Logan collection—the archive of her, the locus of her memory—the only place she still lived.

I let out a tiny gasp. Here was the exact thing I wanted.

It made me feel good simply to touch them. Finding evidence that Carey had existed at all put a cork in my loneliness. It is completely natural, I told myself—accepted, even—to be posthumously interested in dead artists. Everybody does it. You’re exactly like me, Carey told me that night on Grand Street. You’re exactly like me. I was already using her studio. What difference would reading her notebooks make? Was it any less intimate than what I was already doing? I wasn’t sure, and negotiating with myself didn’t matter because I couldn’t stop. I grabbed the closest notebook in the row, which said HOLD ME, and opened it to the first page.

HOLD ME: I will invite people to a gallery and wrap all the visitors in a net and hold them for as long as they allow me to. This piece is short in both duration and difficulty.

It was her first performance piece, set up almost exactly two years before she died. There was no explanation as to why she’d changed course so abruptly. The rest of the notebook was filled with detailed notes related to the piece, things like:

10.2: met with JOAN J. for coffee on LES in the afternoon, spent one dollar sixty-five cents. Smoked one cigarette. JOAN is supportive.

10.05: sent letter to curator at MASSMOCA. No reply yet.

11.06: phone call with JORDAN about MS. GALLERY