Appreciating Art

The idea to eat the helicopter was mine. I say that now to excuse everyone else involved. In the end I won over the detractors by explaining my approach was actually quite conservative. My initial vision for the project had been much more drastic. The eating-an-aircraft part, at least, had been done before. People have been eating everything forever, I told my gallery representative one night over the phone. A guy ate a Cessna in the 1970s.

“Will you be eating anything else?” he asked. I imagined him picturing a hunk of metal on a plate with rice and string beans. Yes, I told him, of course. You can’t live off nothing but helicopter. No, he agreed, that couldn’t be healthy.

The Hind D is the most beautiful piece of military hardware ever produced. Its Rubenesque curves culminate in the paired communications domes positioned above the stacked baby bumps of the two-person cockpit. The stunted winglets bristle with rockets and machine guns, lending the craft a kind of cherubic hermaphroditism. Its camouflage patterns evoke the Afghan desert or the steely blue of the Caucasus mountains or the pine forests of Siberia, and whenever I watch a video of it flying, I feel a chill, like I’m listening to heartbreaking music, as it emerges from the landscape, its body pressing against the fabric of reality until its true identity is revealed in a blink of metal and glass.

My assistant, Nora, and I easily found a Hind D for sale on the internet. The Hind is the AK-47 of helicopters, ubiquitous in armies and paramilitaries around the world. While more modern variants, such as the Hind E, come equipped with advanced avionics and electronics that inflate the price, the barebones weapons platform is pretty reasonable. We ended up in talks with a seller from the Emirates who was willing to do low six-figures, with a couple RPGs and AKs thrown in for some colleagues of mine who were doing an installation upstate. I shouldered the up-front cost on spec and Nora and I began searching for co-sponsors.

At first I was reluctant to involve corporate money. I’ve never been much of a salesperson, so the thought of standing in front of a bunch of MBAs explaining how I wanted to eat, excrete, and then 3D-print the disassembled parts of a Soviet helicopter for the sake of art struck me as a non-starter.

Thankfully Nora was much more enthusiastic. She got on the phone and talked to people and found money. She was very smart about which parts of the project to “provide color on” and what to leave to the imagination. Within three weeks of buying the helicopter, she had landed us a partnership with a nonprofit arts organization, as well as supporting grants from an energy drink company, a regional bank, and an art supplies chain.

I asked Nora if the sponsors understood what they were supporting. I worried we were overstretching ourselves, that the money would vanish the moment the real project was revealed. She offered to show me email receipts. “I’m not misleading them,” she said. “The project speaks for itself and people are really excited.”

She pulled up a wireframe of the splash page the energy drink company had thrown together to promote the event. “Are they going to put me on TV?” I asked. “Webcast only to start,” said Nora. “We can renegotiate the digital rights after we see analytics.” She closed the tab. “You just think about your diet,” she said. “Don’t worry about any of this other stuff.”

Parts of the Hind started arriving in the mail. I unboxed and photographed each one, logged it in the database, repacked it, and sent it to the processing company that oversaw the transformation of the raw materials into edible 3-D printed replicas made from a solution of broken-down helicopter and soy-xanthan paste. The resulting slabs of helicopter-enriched protein I would stir-fry with brown rice or thinly slice and layer with avocado on a whole-wheat wrap. Years of vegetarian faux-meat experimentation had prepared me well for the Hind diet. The flavor of the helicopter is vivid in my memory, like plastic-y baloney spiced with graphite. The more I ate, the more addictive its distinctive bite became. As an ingredient it was versatile and forgiving. I bought a dehydrator and started making helicopter jerky that I snacked on between meals. I simmered it in olive oil with tomatoes, onions and garlic to prepare a rustic helicopter ragu.

One day I offered some pickled helicopter sausage to Nora and was pleasantly surprised when she accepted. “It’s sour,” she said. “I actually like it quite a lot.” “I know,” I said. “It turned out really well, I thought.”

There had been a nag in the back of my mind that Nora, for all her hard work on the project, secretly thought it was a joke and I was a fraud. But eating helicopter particles suspended in protein paste was the perfect Kool-Aid test. “I’ll bring you a bag from home,” I told her. “I’ve been trying out a few different recipes.” She smiled, cheeks puffing, eyes slivering. I took this expression to mean no, please no, even though she said yes.

But that Friday, she asked if I’d forgotten about the helicopter jerky I’d promised her. I was taken aback. “I thought you weren’t that big a fan of it,” I said. “Oh, the taste is fine,” she said. “But my thinking was more along the lines of keeping it.” I looked at her blankly. “You’d just hold on to the bag?” I asked. “Yeah,” she said. “Is that so weird? I was going to have it framed.”

***

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I’ve never been able to convince myself that my work has any value. Value as in it could be worth something to anyone other than me. That my art could be somebody’s investment makes my stomach ring hollow. I do not have a commercial sensibility. My work is intensely personal, my body a vitrine of organs marked by outlandish masochism.

For most of my “career” I incurred more money in fines performing than I earned in grants or appearance fees. My catalogue raisonné is a dossier of criminal and medical records: indecency after indecency, exposure after exposure. I have lifetime bans from dozens of regional contemporary art museums. I’ve hidden from angry audiences in supply closets and once my rental car was firebombed in a gallery parking lot. I find myself unwelcome in a greater and greater number of homes. Fewer and fewer friends call me back. That my spectacular self-immolation would ultimately prove to be my most marketable asset is an object lesson in capital’s inexorable drive to produce ever-diminishing and more absurd and abstracted versions of itself.

The turning point came in the early aughts, when I harvested stem cells from the bone marrow of my coccyx and exposed them for one year to high doses of radiation. I then re-injected the marrow back into my coccyx and attended weekly checkups with an oncologist until she could confirm that the tumor I was growing in my lower back had metastasized. After the cancer was removed, I contacted my gallery representative to see what could be done with it. A couple days later I learned an anonymous buyer had come forward with a sizable offer. This person, the founder and CEO of something called ChainSwap, which, my gallery representative explained to me, moved private information from one part of your phone to another part of your phone, all without you knowing it—this person wanted the tumor for his home collection.

Fueled by the hype surrounding this obscene purchase, my stock in the art world began to soar and I quickly became very rich. My gallery representative skimmed a generous percentage of these earnings and the rest I took as a lump sum, cash in a duffel bag. I am not lying when I say I have no idea how to spend money. I bought a bunch of nice clothes that fit me (I had lost a lot of weight because of the cancer) and a sofa I liked for my studio. I had bigger ambitions. I wanted to renovate my workspace and buy a Hind, but I was clueless how to do these things because I’d never had any capital to deploy (another Nora-ism).

I asked my gallery representative if he could recommend someone to help and he connected me with a client named Constantia Robins, who’d had a wonderful experience with a young woman from a company called YMRW. Their arrangement had been freelance and off the books, but she assured me the young woman would welcome referrals. I had my gallery representative drop her an official-sounding query and she responded within five minutes, from a different, non-YMRW email account. We arranged to meet for breakfast at my studio.

Nora showed up on time, neat, under-slept, and wired. She ate no more than a token nibble of the bagel spread, but by the time we’d finished our coffees she’d picked apart and reorganized from scratch every aspect of my finances. Watching her shuffle numbers around spreadsheets on her laptop recalled the prestidigitations of a casino dealer, morphing old, low cards into brand-new, higher-value hands.

“Do you realize you make six payments for Blockbuster late fees on your credit card every month?” she asked. “You know Blockbuster went bankrupt, right?” I had no idea what she was talking about, though it didn’t surprise me that my statements were rife with such oversights. Nora had to get back to her office, but offered to take a look at the rest of my administrative backlog that night. I said OK, only if it wasn’t too much work. “Don’t stay up late finishing it or anything,” was what I actually said. She looked at me like I’d just called her something unbelievably offensive completely out of the blue. “I’ll have it back to you for the morning,” she said. “I never sleep.”

With the money Nora was able to save by plugging all the embarrassing holes in my accounts, I could offer her a salary high enough above what she was making at YMRW as something called an “HR junior business partner” to become my full-time executive assistant. She had majored in art history as an undergraduate before going into management consulting, and expressed no shortage of excitement about switching fields. We entered the early phases of the Hind project less than a month after she started.

Things were going smoothly. We had deals lined up, a publicity campaign building steam. My meals were proceeding without complication. My movements were regular. Maybe it was the artistic and personal achievement for which I had been preparing my entire life coming to fruition more than what I was physically passing through my body every day, but I felt better—more alive and stronger—than I ever had before.

Then the stock market entered correction territory, the cost of long-term capital went up, creditors demanded extra margin, and all three of our biggest sponsors pulled out. I was speechless with confusion when Nora told me, but she helped give words to what I was supposed to feel. “For us, this suuuuucks,” she said. 

***

Nora and I decided to ignore all our commitments for the rest of the day and go out partying instead, since everything we had been working tirelessly on for the past year had been rendered meaningless by an arbitrary spasm of the financial system.

We got margaritas at a Mexican place and beers at a biergarten and something called the Drunken Boat, which was one of those miniature wooden boats they serve sushi on, hollowed out and filled with jungle juice, in the backyard of an upscale dive bar Nora said she came to all the time.

“They’re all a bunch of fucking cowards,” she said between sucks of punch. “Leave it to these Wall Street freaks to clip the lowest hanging fruit and keep the really risky shit lodged safely in the books. Like the Hind project makes a dent. When money’s cheap art looks like a bargain, but when the ten-year flood comes no one’s pulling the paintings off the wall.”

She was frustrated and drunk, and I was too, but it was harder for me to talk about my disappointment, which usually expressed itself in the form of inflicting pain on myself for creative or conceptual purposes. The bar had filled up by the time our straws rattled the ice at the bottom of the Drunken Boat. “Wanna roll?” Nora asked. “This guy I used to see is here.”

Minutes later we found ourselves flopped across each other in the back of a black cab heading back to the studio. It was hot, in the nineties, and the sugary booze and stress and lack of proper hydration had us both in a state of torpor, sweaty in our work clothes, heads still ringing from the bad news and the ambient sense of crisis in the air. Nora reached behind her head, which was resting in my lap, to roll down the window. From her bag she pulled a pack of cigarettes, lit one, and propped her hand on the windowsill so the smoke trailed behind the car. I had never seen her smoke before, had never suspected that she did, since she never smelled like it, and she just didn’t seem like the type. I was surprised but liked what it did for my overall picture of her, adding a little vignette effect, a halo of darkness, around her sharp, bright edges.

“Can I ask you something?” Nora asked. “It’s personal, so you can say no.” I said sure. I didn’t care. The most shameful things I’ve ever done are a matter of public record, with ample video and photographic evidence free to view online anytime. “Do you like men or women or both or neither?” she asked. She was holding her cigarette upright, parallel to the side of her head, the smoke curving over her shoulder and out the window. “I’m just wondering,” she said. “I’ve wondered since we met.”

“I was married once, to a woman, for eight months after I had just turned twenty-one and she was forty-five or forty-six,” I said. Skeptical runnels formed on Nora’s forehead. The taxi bounced off a pothole and we both screamed as we went momentarily airborne. I was drunker than I’d thought. “I take it you’re not anymore,” Nora said once we’d stopped laughing at ourselves for losing it over a fucking pothole. “Married,” she clarified. “It ended badly,” I said. “I’ve been deliberately unattached ever since.”

We cruised past some new sort of animated billboard that seemed to slow down time around itself. “Did she have a name?” Nora asked. “No,” I said. I had only ever known her by her official title, which was Big Gran.

Nora passed out on my beloved studio sofa under an Afghan blanket covered with a pattern of Hind Ds and AK-47s, camels and mujahadeen. I floated around for a few minutes, clearing mugs, straightening magazines, checking and rechecking the locks. Nora’s snores sounded like dejected sighs. As I passed her on the way to my apartment, upstairs from the studio, I saw she had twisted the blanket around herself, giving the appearance of a hastily wrapped mummy. You learn so much from watching someone sleep. The tossing of the body is an index of dreams and inner torments, the position of the covers—greedily snatched at or fitfully cast off—a window into temperament, desire.

I could have lingered, kept looking. But as I get older I defer more to propriety, shirk my excess oddness to better fit the world. I was tired anyway, sluggishly drunk. My thoughts squiggled like bacteria under a microscope, colonizing and breaking down the question of what to do next.

***

I came downstairs the next morning after one of the best sleeps I’d had in ages and found Nora already awake, sitting on a stool at the breakfast nook, sweaty and wearing workout clothes, with two iced coffees and a brown bag of bagels on the countertop. She’d just run six miles and called the Hind-protein processing company to cancel the remainder of the contract. Her skin emitted a faint amber glow. Under the kitchenette lights she was a beacon of youth and vigor. I asked if she’d slept well. “I woke up at four thirty with a brutal hangover,” she said. “But I just had to sweat it out. Those came in,” she added, nodding toward the door, where a few large cardboard boxes were stacked.

“I’m sorry if things got a little personal last night,” I said as I unpacked 3D-printed replicas of the parts that make up the Hind’s avionics and navigation system, arranging them in an exploded cross-section on the studio floor. “Sometimes I get in a talky mood.” “It’s nothing to apologize for,” said Nora. “I asked, after all.”

She microwaved half a bagel for ten seconds. When the timer dinged, she took it out, scooped out the softened inside with a cantaloupe spoon, and spackled the gutter with lite scallion tofu cream cheese. She returned to her seat at the counter, folded the bagel skein in half so that cream cheese oozed out the seams, and ate it, alternating sips of coffee, in under a minute. Then she came and knelt on the floor with me and the Hind parts.

“Are these stage three?” she asked. She knew full well they were. Her command of the supply chain was better than anyone’s. The integrity of the whole project rested on her ability to keep the orders straight, the inputs and outputs separate, impossible for me to mess up even at my most absentminded. I had taken seriously her order not to worry about any of that stuff. I detected a sadness in her voice, as if she were asking the recipe to a dish whose main ingredient had gone extinct.

There was a really easy way to tell, I told her. I picked up a piece, a hexagonal tube pocked with tiny indentations, and handed it to her. I asked her what the first thing she noticed was. She balanced the part in her palm, taring the scale with infinitesimal rotations of the wrist. “The color?” she asked. “Or maybe the texture is, I don’t know, smoother, like it’s been sanded?” I conceded she might be right, though neither of those things had occurred to me. “It’s lighter,” I said. “Just slightly, but you can tell if you handle the material a lot.” “Weird,” she said, tossing the part about a foot in the air and catching it again. She seemed bothered to have missed a detail as salient as a few percentage points of unaccounted-for matter.

“Why does it happen?” she asked. “I must be absorbing more of it than we thought,” I said. “You should have an MRI or something,” she said. “See if it’s concentrating anywhere. You don’t want it to sit and build up.” She passed the part back to me and I replaced it in its spot on the floor. I said I’d think about it. “Your call, boss,” said Nora. “I just don’t want you pissing helicopter in a couple months because you got complacent.”

The body is an inefficient and capricious artmaker, which makes every artistic act also an act of faith, faith not only in the art itself but in the body’s ability to endure its creation. The translation of an idea into something perceptible, material, always undermines the integrity of the unrealized original, perfect on its altar in the temple of the mind. And yet it is in this gap between the mental and the material that meaning is conferred, as if by alchemy, and so it is only by failing to reproduce what one imagines that any artwork acquires value. As long as it is not destroyed, and even in some cases if it is, art is an appreciating asset. The damage done in transit from the unrealized to the real is in some ways the only provenance that matters.

Nora helped me unpack the remaining boxes, the stage three main rotor and transmission and swashplate, and place their contents on the floor according to the diagram. If our estimates were correct, the whole disassembled and reconstituted Hind would have been able to fit in the studio, where I was planning to photograph it before returning the parts to the processing company for stage four. This final task, the laying out of these last parts, we performed without words, an obsequy for the aborted project and all its promise.

After the work was done, we sat on the couch for a while and watched TV news of the conflagrating financial crisis, or “meltdown,” as the experts were calling it, which had now spread from Wall Street to Main Street, and was threatening Green Street and KLAANG Street, too. I asked Nora if she could explain in layperson’s terms what was happening. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

It was all very interesting and complicated, what she told me, and yet the sudden end of the Hind project made it impossible to pay attention or care on any level beyond my own seething resentment at the hypocrisy of a global economic system that would sooner cannibalize itself for fear of not overindulging enough than allow me to express myself as I must. I probably said something sour about it, because Nora trailed off in her econ lesson, her focus drifting inward. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m just expressing my…” “Shut up, shut up,” she said. She closed her eyes and aggressively tapped the side of her skull, as if she were battling a stuck key on a keyboard. “I’m thinking, sorry, hold on,” she said.

On the TV, smoke was billowing from a window of a drab office building. The broadcast cut to a wet and cold-looking field where some men in uniform were pointing at a bank of fog on the other side of the field. The scene was infused with a distinctly Eastern European brand of folkloric menace. What lay beyond the fog was never revealed. The feed cut abruptly to the stately red carpets and white walls of the Reichstag, now in emergency session. The news had moved on to other parts of the world while Nora was getting me up to speed on what a financial crisis was, but what was going on in the United States was having ripple effects everywhere.

Nora’s eyes flipped open. “I’ve got it,” she said. “How obvious. What a fucking idiot I am sometimes.” She tapped her head so forcefully it made my teeth hurt. “Hey, don’t beat yourself up like that,” I said. But she was already on the phone. I asked who she was calling. “The processing company,” she said. “We’re un-canceling.”

***

We were on the buyer’s schedule for seventy-two straight hours, waiting for a window to open in his tightly orchestrated annual visit to the United States. Half a dozen times we got a text that he had a free upcoming block, fifteen minutes in the Barnaby’s lobby, twenty minutes at the R&H’s online orders pickup window on 23rd Street, only to have the meeting postponed or canceled or marked as tentative in the Outlook calendar Nora managed for me. She and I took shifts sleeping, one of us on communication duty at all times, and during these snatched naps I found myself visited by ghosts of missed calls from unlisted numbers, messages buried deep in spam vaults. At 8 a.m. the morning the buyer was scheduled to fly out, the buzzer rang, electroshocking Nora and me out of our exhausted despondency. “He’s here,” Nora confirmed, checking the video feed from the studio building’s exterior.

The buyer was accompanied by three men in argyle suits and sunglasses, each fitted with fleshtone earpieces. One carried an aluminum attaché case. I hung back while Nora made the introductions. “We spoke on the phone,” she said to the buyer. “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.” The buyer nodded. At six and a half feet tall, he was the tallest person in the room by many inches, yet his movements were slow and graceful and leonine, all coiled power, his own and that of others under his control. His silence and menacing disposition worried me, but Nora was accustomed to dealing with such people, the taciturn, proud, and dangerous.

She led the buyer and two bodyguards counterclockwise around the dismantled Hind D while I leaned against a wall and watched with my arms crossed. “Is this the whole helicopter?” the buyer asked. His voice was soft and authoritative, edged with the smirking humor of the well-protected and unaccountable. The remaining bodyguard stood by the studio door, denying exit. Only when I’d set it up myself for the sake of art had I felt more likely to be assassinated.

“We have documentation if you’d like to see it,” said Nora. The buyer shook his head. He never looked up from the floor, mentally cataloging the components as he followed Nora around the room. Once the circuit was complete, the buyer walked over to the bodyguard by the door and conferred with him in hushed tones. While they talked, Nora threw me eyes that said it was time to come over. “You might need to answer a few questions,” she told me in our own parallel huddle to the buyer’s. “It could kill you to be a little less weird.” I apologized. I just hated this kind of meet-the-public thing.

The buyer approached us, a peremptory smile rippling his lips. “We have an offer,” he said and passed a pink flashcard to Nora. A figure, written in thick sharpie, had already bled through the back of the paper, forming a Rorschach of what appeared to be a very large sum. Nora’s face gave nothing away. She tipped the card toward me but I waved it off. I trusted her to decide if it was enough.

Nora folded the card in half and slotted it into the breast pocket of her blazer. “This is acceptable,” she said. I detected a tap of the brakes in her voice, a tic of hesitation. I wanted to ask her about it, but now was not the time. We needed to present a unified front to the buyer, play it cool a little longer. The buyer beckoned for the aluminum briefcase. “This is half,” he said. “The rest we will deposit electronically into an account of your choosing once we receive the shipment.”

As he and the guards were leaving, he stopped at the perimeter of the exploded Hind and picked up a small, coccyx-shaped joint from the floor. He examined it, turning it over in his hand, then raised it to his mouth and bit the edge.

“Unusual flavor,” he said. “Like what are those candies? Warheads.” He knelt and returned the part to the floor. “Light too,” he said. “Some kind of alloy?” Nora shrugged. “We’re just the conduit,” she said.

The deal was done. The parts would be packed and shipped piecemeal to contacts in Switzerland and Belgium. From there, a trusted fence would reaggregate the materials and facilitate their gradual introduction into the conflict zone. For his services, the buyer would collect a 15 percent fee for each change of hands, as well as a portfolio of undisclosed kickbacks from the end-users.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he said from the backseat of the Land Rover that had ripped out of an alleyway to pick him up the second we stepped outside. “We’ll be in touch.”

That he said this last part to Nora and not to me didn’t register immediately as significant. I had, after all, remained aloof for most of the meeting. The buyer, in his line of work, likely encountered many silent partners. There was an understanding in place: Nora had been my voice, my agent extended into the inhospitable world of business. But then I got it, the reason we’d received such a favorable price, Nora’s momentary mental stagger over the sum. She’d been thrown in with the bargain.

***

After the buyer had left, I took Nora out to lunch at a farm-to-table restaurant that had recently opened on the waterfront, to thank her for all her hard work. We ordered some small plates and a bottle of Riesling and sat not talking for a while on the deck, watching the boats and the waves and the seagulls perform their peaceful repetitions, as if the view were a looped clip of film. The restaurant was mostly empty. It had not occurred to us that 3 p.m. was an unusual time for a meal, only that we had not eaten one for the past three days.

“I’m going to miss our time together,” I told her. “I bet you’ll be pretty busy, but I hope we can keep in touch.” “I was worried you’d be disappointed,” she said. “It means a lot to me that you’re supportive.”

Did I support what she was doing? It was hard to say. The value Nora had added to my life was incalculable, the little assists and shortcuts she brought to bear too numerous to count. I worried that without her I would slip back into the apathetic chaos of my old patterns, the financial overwhelm, the mid-project doldrums she had so expertly navigated me through. And yet I knew there was nothing to be done. Her choice was made and I supported it, materially and now with my blessing. A restless excitement flickered behind her eyes. The buyer was flying her out to Baqubah next week. The perks, she had gushed, were un-fucking-believable. I couldn’t compete with the compensation package. Nora was moving up.

We splurged on dessert, a rhubarb crumble with fresh mint and a quenelle of lemon-vanilla sorbet and a geographically improbable Bourbon Black Forest cake and two syrupy golden vials of Sauternes. “I’m sure you’ll meet some interesting people in your new job,” I said. She laughed, chocolate carnage from the cake dribbling down her chin. “God, I’m gross,” she said, and chugged a full glass of water and wiped her mouth with a napkin. I asked what she’d found so funny. “Nothing,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure I’ll meet all kinds of clients.”

The check came. I paid with the tortoiseshell rewards card Nora had set up for me and left an exorbitant tip, since the restaurant had kindly let us linger through the break between lunch and dinner service. I promised myself I’d come back once the seasonal menu changed. Nora and I walked together until we got to the intersection where our routes diverged. “What am I going to do without you?” I said. I was being maybe sixty percent serious. But her expression hardened and she punched me remonstratively in the arm. “Come on, boss,” she said. “You can literally shit money. You will be fine.”

***

About a month after Nora left the country, I was eating a cup of noodles in the studio kitchen when a nail bomb of pain detonated in my lower back. I fell off my stool and lay paralyzed in agony on the floor for a few minutes before I remembered my phone laying on the countertop. I had never used its voice-activated features before, was skeptical of the whole concept of talking to technology, but before long I was screaming for 911 and apologizing to Samsung and Verizon for doubting them. Sure enough, I soon heard sirens cutting around the block. A paramedic team jimmied the lock of the studio, loaded me onto a stretcher, and ambulanced me down to the ICU, where a troika of nurses knocked me out with drugs.

I woke up in a recovery room. The lacerating pain in my abdomen had been replaced with a dull ache everywhere. I took this as a sign I was on my way to recovery. The room was a copy-pasted version of every hospital room I’d ever been in. An air conditioner roared under a window draped in blackout curtains. My bed was aimed at a dresser with a muted TV on top of it, tuned to news of war. I squinted to make out the closed captions, unfolding like censor bars over aerial footage of smoking cityscapes and protesters versus military police.

I heard the door click open and a middle-aged nurse came in. She was sturdy and attractive in a confrontational sort of way, with blonde hair arranged into a complicated braid coiled up and piled on her head in a cartoon turd shape. “You’re awake,” she said, unimpressed. Her voice revealed the trace of an Eastern European accent. Maybe she’d been watching the TV while I’d been passed out. She went to turn it off, but I croaked in protest and she let it be. I saw now that she was carrying a small plastic jar. She set it on the bedside table. A black-gray lump, hard and crystalline, rattled inside.

“Did that come out of me?” I asked. “You expelled it, yes,” she said. According to the biopsy, the mass was mostly inorganic, a concretion of metal and plastic and glass and uric acid. “All we could say was: What on earth has this guy been eating?” said the nurse. Her laughter disarmed me. Behind her, on the TV, a group of soldiers was carrying a wounded man on a stretcher toward a Hind D idling in an airfield. The landscape was all fog and pine trees and faraway mountains. The rotors blurred to black circles, kicking up whirls of dust, blowing back the soldiers’ hair and clothes, tamping down the twitching grass. I uncapped the plastic jar and shook the helicopter stone into my palm. The wounded man was lifted into the fuselage and the Hind D began to rise. As it banked over the trees and shrank against the mountains, I massaged the calculus between my thumb and forefinger, working over the spiky points, the blistered surface. The helicopter faded to a translucent blue and was gone.

Witnessing war makes even the most comfortable among us consider the inevitability and random horror of death. It is a concept at an indeterminate distance, camouflaged, a blurred shape on the horizon that may at any moment swing screaming back toward us, its shadow flickering like black flames against the ground. We may die. We may lose parts of ourselves. But as an artist I’m not chasing immortality. Even if they have to scrape it off my insides, I will leave behind something that was not here before.