“Well…” I drummed my nails on the table again, their rounded ovals of bright-red paint now slightly chipped and packed with dirt. “I think that DROP OUT deserves to exist. As an idea, at least. Carey wanted it to, so in that way, it’s not even up to you, though obviously one of the problems is that she did leave it up to you. However—I think that it doesn’t necessarily matter if the film is real or if it’s fake. I don’t believe you have a moral obligation to disseminate the real film, because the only people for whom the real film has a specific meaning is you. And you’ve watched it. A public audience needs only to believe that whatever they’re seeing is real in order for it to serve the point. And even then—they can wonder if it’s fake. The wondering itself is part of the work. The genuine article is completely unnecessary. And like I said, because I really need there to not be a police search of my studio right now. But most of all, it’s because of Max.”

“What about Max?” Tyler asked.

“Max is going to write about Carey and DROP OUT in her book because, you know, Carey’s notebooks have been sitting in her library for three years and memoirs need news hooks.”

Shock rippled across their faces, from Tyler to Marlin and back again; they hadn’t known about Max. “Max has a lot of things, but she can’t have everything. I don’t think it’s quite fair for a woman who is going to inherit an entire town in Connecticut to profit from the literal dying body of a working-class hero. This is my way of interrupting that. She won’t know the difference, but I will.”

Jes snorted with laughter. She didn’t like Max either.

“What exactly did Max write?” Tyler asked.

“I haven’t read it. My guess is that it’s probably a description of the work itself, followed by Max’s personal narrative about Carey. She’s citing Lee Lozano”—I raised my fingers, one for each point—“that guy who sailed his boat into the Atlantic and died; the German woman who wrote that manifesto; and Hannah Wilke. Fleur, her collaborator, is probably the only person who’s read it, but they’ll send it to an editor, soon, I would think. Oh, and Max thinks you all hated her. Carey, that is.”

I was looking down when Jack hurled something across the room. By the time my eyes found it, there was a long crack in the window, the thin brown soda already pooling with the curlicues of broken glass across the floor. The violence sucked all the air out of the room.