Example 15

Glen followed his robots around the gallery, although to say he followed them suggests that the robots were moving or that Glen was moving when what was happening instead is that Glen was watching his robots when the reviewer from The Hostel Happenings came in and because I was in between projects at the time I was there too and while the reviewer did her best to engage either Glen or the robots she didn’t start off well when the first robots she crushed under her sensible flat shoes and then gave her foot an extra turn before she realized that she wasn’t stepping on an especially crunchy roach but the very thing she had been sent to observe though she was desperate to explain to Glen as they sat at the only table in the room she hadn’t been told that all the robots were no bigger than grasshoppers though the hoppers she had known back home in Mississippi were no laughing matter ha ha and Glen had looked at her with the level of interest he reserved for his robots when he was waiting for them to do something and since the opening of the show the robots had moved three inches, if you counted the progress of all fifty of them, she wrote in her article that she had felt very uninteresting indeed and that she was all for the Green Movement in art but that Glen had taken it to the level of composting and we were all worried about how Glen might take it but he stayed in the gallery watching the robots though Sheila suggested that robot was a pretty big term for a clockwork bug that reminded her of the first alarm clock she had ever smashed against an early morning wall but these has small bottles on their back, filled with liquid, black or green or blue and even gold and there had been one silver one but the woman from Happenings had finished that one while the rest carried only clear and while they were marvelous in their making and stood up from the ground on thread thin legs springs and gears and in the silence of the gallery I could hear Glen’s breathing and the January drizzle while outside the cars scarred the streets on MacArthur and the sun refused to shine which Glen said mattered his beings being solar powered but I couldn’t see any panels of any sort and the night of the opening approached and I wasn’t sure but that they did move a bit, their legs dragging in the dust on the white painted floor their legs flowing with their ink tracking patterns of veins or limbs or some skein that I wasn’t sure but what I could be imagining it while Glen I was sure sat in the same place and even curled up there his head on its side saying he wanted to be on their level and even on the night itself as the room filled up with people in their gallery best the wine glasses belling out into the room and the clothes rustling and all of the sounds loud after the days of such nothing the whispers in the room of Glen and how this would be his first failure and more wine and I had turned off the fans as Glen had asked me and the sweat pooled under people’s arms and the women laughed and said they glowed, I remember that, a woman saying she was glowing, right before the robots, their ticking gears, their windings springs, their heat formed metals tilted from all the body warmth and on their thread steel legs Glen’s clockworks sprang into the room, twanging, one after another, spattering their liquids across the crowd that to its credit screamed and danced and slapped and from the floor  where he had the best view of the colliding shoes and ankles Glen said well it’s about fucking time.