I wonder if it happened like it did because of Max’s house. In some ways, all I ever wanted was to know what the rules were. I wanted to be like Max, who could look at her mother and grandmother to learn how to be beautiful and poised and decorative in a way that gave her hard economic security. I wanted to be like Charlie, who could look at every man who had ever lived to learn how to be the man who got to decide which women were the most important.

Even though I knew there were no rules to this life, I wanted to know what they were. I wanted there to be someone like me who could tell me that yes, work was hard and sometimes your heart gets broken, and here is how you finish something. I wanted to know what the signpost was between keep going and give up. I needed to know the difference between move on and drop out.

I went straight to the library.

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

A pit formed in the bottom of my stomach as I examined its coffee-stained first page. The handwriting was ragged, but it was unmistakably Carey’s.

DROP OUT PIECE:

I will remove myself forcibly from the world in an intentionally posthumous work. I will fill a pair of large rain boots with quick-dry cement (volume over my feet is 1.6 gallons per foot, approximately 30 pounds per foot) and walk into the lake. DROP OUT will be filmed from two angles. The footage should be edited into a continuous, linear narrative and displayed as a film. It must not be referred to as a suicide: rather, it is my final work. I am of sound mind. I know this life is over. I choose to document the end.

The rest of the notebook was empty, but this single page, covered in fingerprints, had clearly been read over and over and over. I stared at it, reading the words, amazed by what I saw, sick to my stomach at first but then angry that it had been a secret for so long, that it had never been validated, or framed, or hung on a wall, or even talked about, because I felt, suddenly, and so strongly, that it deserved to be. If Bas Jan Ader could sail into the Atlantic on a one-way trip and call it a romantic artwork; if Hannah Wilke could photograph her own fatal disease; if Lee Lozano could call quitting itself a performance piece; then Carey Logan deserved to have these explicit final words made public.