Yegina had been conferencing all week with Janis, Bas, Hal, and Steve Goetz. She, Janis, and Bas had proffered the idea that the Rocque could be annexed into the new museum but keep its experimental performance programming (“which was always Janis’s first love”). Rather than being a single institution, the museum could become a downtown complex, eventually incorporating more buildings around it. One day it would rival the Smithsonian, but with an L.A. angle on the art of the present and future. Steve Goetz told her he wanted to think about it, but he called back the next day and said he liked all of it. Everything Yegina said. And that he wanted to phase Hal Giroux out by the time the museum opened and replace Hal’s presence with hers. As assistant director of the whole complex.

“Hal represents the past,” Goetz had told her. “You represent the future.”

“Get that in writing,” I told her.

“That’s what Janis said. She told me Steve Goetz is a hustler with a gold purse who thinks he’s a grandee.” Yegina laughed at the phrasing. “I don’t like him,” she admitted. “I don’t like how he talks about artists, or art. But he owns gobs of it, and he’s right. I am the future.” She pulled a tissue from her pocket and dusted my counter. “We both are. It’s the end of an era.” Her voice was triumphant, but her eyes were wistful. It was the end of an era for Janis, too. The last time I’d left the Rocque, I’d looked back at its long bank of windows, wondering how I would begin my mornings without seeing my own reflection stride across them—on my way to the realm where Janis ruled.

“She’ll be with you in spirit, if not on the phone at all hours,” I predicted.

“It’s weird that the leaders are going to become us eventually.” Yegina looked at me. “Our generation.”

“Hal won’t give up that easily,” I said. “He’ll go into private consulting and make pots of money.”

“The way you wrecked Shoe Cathedral when you fell, he actually loved it,” she said. “He was bragging about it on the Art News blog. He said it’s more complete than ever. The Westing’s closed, of course, but Hal already got a photographer in there, and they’re planning to sell high-end prints of the wrecked installation to raise money to mount a retrospective tribute to Brenae Brasil.”

I knew all this already, but hearing it from Yegina, cast in her new hopefulness, it seemed like a genuine attempt at reparations, and not a cheap publicity move.

“About time,” I said. Yegina continued to swoop her makeshift cloth over my furniture. “Would you please stop dusting?”

Yegina folded up the tissue.

“You do know who Steve Goetz is,” I said.