LOVE THAT MIRACLE turned out to be a tribute to Carolee Schneemann’s Interior Scroll, the piece where Schneemann pulled a poem from her vagina and read it in front of an audience. OTHER PEOPLE’S RULES used a quote attributed to Lee Lozano’s notebooks—“artist, critic and dealer friends, I can still smell on your breath those other people’s rules you swallowed so long ago”—to justify its performance of smelling people’s breath from across a table. The notebook was filled with descriptions of the breaths. According to the date, it was her last performance. It made me feel something. It wasn’t quite as…expected…as the others. Weird, in a good way. It seemed like she was starting to get somewhere.

I pulled down the white binder of her clippings and paged through it, looking at the dozens of reviews Eliot&Sprain had collected on her behalf over the years, until I got to her obituary. A sentence toward the end caught my attention:

“Carey became incredibly depressed following the unnecessarily cruel reviews for Other People’s Rules,” Mr. Eliot told The Times this week, referring to a performance series in April of this year where she smelled the breaths of strangers. “She retreated entirely into her own world.”

I remembered the nasty review I’d seen on the back of the crossword, my first morning here, how it admonished her for her confidence. “She is certainly no longer the daring youngster who asked us to look unflinchingly upon the bodies of murdered women; instead she asks us to regard her privilege,” it said.

It was cruel, I thought, agreeing with Charlie. DROP OUT was her response: a fresh request for us to look unflinchingly upon the body of a dead woman.

*  *  *

Tyler found her body. If there was a film, he would have found it too, so if the film existed, then Pine City had it, and they—or perhaps Tyler alone—were holding it hostage against Carey’s explicit wishes.

There were a million reasons not to give the film to Charlie. My first thought was that it was likely grotesque and difficult to watch. My second thought was that if Charlie was right about the potential value of the work, then once it hit the marketplace, Pine City could very well find themselves in a position to do nothing but discuss, support, disseminate, and manage the work of Carey Logan for years. They could be completely eclipsed by her—spend the rest of their lives living in her shadow, even more than they already did. Everyone would be curious. Everyone would want to know the truth. Everyone would be like me, scratching at their private lives, demanding to know their thoughts and feelings.