Regardless of medium, I believe absolutely that any work of art needs to make you feel something. It needs to draw you in, to create and manage desires that you weren’t aware of. It needs to kick you in the stomach like a donkey. We look at death all the time—films and paintings and Christ—obituaries and biographies—memorials and televised funerals of celebrities. How many dramatizations of that last breath have I seen? Hundreds. Thousands? We desire representations of death, but we do not televise murders, or footage of school shootings, or the bodies falling from the towers. We do not want to look at actual death. It is sacred. But what is the difference? What is the difference when we are being explicitly asked to observe?

What kind of museum would buy it? What kind of collector? Who would show it? Who would buy tickets? Carey always made me feel that I was skirting the fault lines of what I was supposed to want to look at, and this was the pinnacle: I’d never seen anything like it. It was terrifying and sad—and it was a conscious, rational choice, written out the same way as all her other artworks, methodical and planned, a decision.

That’s what struck me the hardest: how deliberate it was.

*  *  *

I wondered if the film truly existed. It didn’t have to, not necessarily. She could have written this page and never filmed a thing. But either way, Carey did not get what she wanted, because everyone referred to her death in the same exact way: as the suicide of a woman suffering from a long-term mental illness.

I read it again. It will be filmed from two angles. Two reels and a notebook; this was almost certainly the work that Eliot&Sprain was suing Pine City over. Oh—holy cow—this was it. To be certain, I grabbed the other two notebooks that I could not identify. They both contained many pages of notes. I was surprised to find that they were both written in the same color ink, whereas the sculpture ones were written in such a patchwork of color, but I reasoned that she did a lot less moving around on these—there was probably a single pen that never got lost, as opposed to studio work, where you’re always getting dirty and losing things.