After Cora’s death I had a recurring dream. A heavy black cloud would pass over me. The cloud was evil. I don’t mean that evil was among the incidental properties of the cloud, like its color or its state of matter, but that the essence of the cloud was evil, traveling only in order to fall. As the cloud approached me, a change in the pressure of the dream medium would pin me down by the chest, leaving me unable to breathe. Only once the cloud had passed could I gather enough air to scream. And this was how I woke the next day.
I reached for the bottle of water on my bedside table, hoping I had not woken Sybil in the neighboring room, and then I practiced the breathing exercise I had learned from a friend in remission. A gap in the curtains cut the streetlight into an accusatory finger pointing across the floorboards. I closed my eyes and felt the air move through my body, displacing panic. The absence of Cora was every morning a shock.
Seeking solace in scale, I spun the material of my love for her into a silk thread that wrapped around every star in the galaxy. I thought about the microbes in my gut that would persist after my death as a diaspora, each of them finding new communities in foreign bodies and writing modernist novels in exile. With my mind’s eye I followed the beams of light carrying pictures of Cora on their journey through space, bent out of shape by gravitational fields but unimpeachably beautiful, until I came to a hubcap spinning on the forecourt of the petrol station next door to my childhood home and realized that I was dreaming. I woke for the second time into a room radiant with the morning. The spider that might, in combination with Sybil’s hallucinogens, have prompted these associations tiptoed across the white curtain rail, thinking itself unseen.
I took a cold shower to shock the night’s excesses out of my system. The Technicolor dust motes dancing through the kitchen suggested that this plan had not entirely succeeded; that the garden was a network of incandescent lineaments corkscrewing through the ground to feed on the greenish sins of the dead was enough, on balance, to confirm it. But the liveliness of this autumn day seemed benign, and I was pleased to take advantage of being awake before Rotimi to pack the stovetop machine with his superior coffee. When the music on the radio was replaced by dispatches from a strictly limited intervention I turned it off. The news was to be avoided.
As I searched for the expensive ginger-and-orange marmalade that I suspected Rotimi of hiding from me, it occurred to me that I should go to Tate Modern. I could spend that Saturday morning looking at Reith’s work in the collection, and thereby convince myself that its transcendence as art justified the compromise of my principles. Because I really was conflicted about whether to take the offer. I would be working on what I knew to be a branding exercise for a luxury property development, which was difficult to square with my stated position on the corruption of art by corporate interests. But it was becoming clear that I was a terrible teacher, I wanted a way back into the career I had abandoned in the crisis precipitated by Cora’s death, and the money was very good.
If you find the tinkle of empty nitrous oxide canisters when they are punted down the pavement beautiful, as I do, then London was very beautiful that morning. Trainers hung by their laces from telephone lines and a man with a heavily bandaged hand was eating peri-peri chicken outside the overground station. At Blackfriars I bought a croissant and carried it to the garden at St. Paul’s, where I sat on a bench, dedicated to Wisdom, beneath a window decorated with skulls. The sun was diffused by mottled clouds into a blueish glow.
Feeling philanthropic, I dropped some crumbs onto the grass so that a swarm of ants might share in my breakfast. A column was organized, by means I will never understand, from which one confused worker became detached. He wheeled round in panicked circles, and so I encouraged him onto my finger, rotating my hand to keep him from falling as I raised him to eye level. I told him that all would be well in this world, the best of all possible worlds, and then I lowered him to the ground.
That we cannot identify with other forms of consciousness might be the most moronic of the many moronic assertions of western philosophy, because the city was that morning shot through with electric sympathy. From the bridge I watched illuminated elevators rise like bright sap through glass buildings, while the river beneath me repeated and the birches on the bank swayed to the rhythms etched into their bark. Inside the museum, shoals of robot jellyfish floated on swivel-jointed propellors over schoolchildren, and the air was thick with patchouli. I felt, on the escalator, that I was perfectly in time.
I would have walked straight past the painting, having seen it a thousand times before, had the black grid lines separating its primary-colored rectangles not been vibrating like plucked strings. I had first come across this canvas fifteen years ago, on a school trip from the less credulous North, most of which I spent laughing with my classmates about what people were prepared to accept as art. But this painting had stopped me. The three chords in primary colors, a truth that didn’t need explaining. No aristocrats, no symbolism, no lies. A painting clear as love. And now, back in the narrative present, this composition that I had revered for its conviction was trembling out of its frame. I hurried away.
Reith’s most famous work was housed in an extension paid for by a pharmaceutical company’s success in addicting millions of people to opioids. This “interactive sculptural installation,” as the wall text described it, consisted of three Perspex cubes resembling vividly colored snow globes. The flurries of pigment inside them were dispersed by bursts of air delivered through the base of the box. The frequency of these small explosions was, as the same text informed visitors, determined by feedback from air quality meters in cities across the country.
The middle box, for instance, was correlated with a playground in East London. The poorer the air being inhaled by children in Hackney, the more regularly the dust was agitated and the thicker the storm and richer the color inside the box. The pigments were matched to sunsets painted by Turner and Monet, the sublime effects of which were caused by pollution from the Industrial Revolution, and so the work was likewise beautiful in direct proportion to the poisoning of our atmosphere. When the air is perfectly safe, the boxes will be transparent, as if one of Constable’s cloudscapes were uncannily to clear.
I still associated this work with Cora. Before we were married, five years after my first visit to the museum, she had taken me to an exhibition of Reith’s work on an industrial estate in Deptford. Back then I was working as a real journalist and still tended to think of contemporary art, if I thought of it at all, as an exclusionary etiquette or an inscrutable financial instrument. I hadn’t realized that art could be so at odds with the idea of itself, that it might advocate for its own extinction. I was enthralled. It became the first work of art I ever wrote about.
Now, as then, shifting white shapes had been projected onto the walls around the boxes. Standing alone in that dark room, it seemed momentarily that the dust might settle into constellations, that the loosely biomorphic patterns would resolve into words and phrases. Overwhelmed by something like vertigo, I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I found Cora standing next to me, smiling in that characteristically crooked way, the light of seven heavens flooding through her. There was a burst of dust in one of the boxes and shouts from the corridor and the image of Cora beside me flickered out, leaving only the upturned edges of a catlike smile, and the memory of her floated up in a rose-pink miasma to break against the ceiling.
Angry to have been interrupted in this vision, I followed the shouts to a young woman standing beside a painting smeared with blood. “This is happening,” she was shouting to an audience of camera phones. “Open your eyes!” Her T-shirt was printed with the logo of one of the many recently proscribed organizations and the veins in her neck were taut. The prospect of her imprisonment so depressed me that I pushed back against the tide of rubberneckers into a gallery scattered with sand in re-creation of a Brazilian beach.
Hanging beside a replica wooden hut was a birdcage with a note explaining that the parrot had been removed for its own mental well-being. In the adjoining room a long jag of bronze lightning was suspended from the ceiling over scattered casts of reindeer droppings. I imagined myself in the parrot’s place, pressed without consent into the service of art history, forced to stare every day out at the work of this tiresome German charlatan, and I felt its despair. Alarm bells started ringing. My kidney ached. Policemen hurried past me, batons drawn.
I sat down for a moment on a marble bench inscribed with the phrase IT’S CRUCIAL TO HAVE AN ACTIVE FANTASY LIFE and put my hand to my heart to slow it, practicing for the second time that day the breathing exercises on which I had become reliant. A young girl inserted herself into one of a series of metal shelves installed on the wall, repurposing a sculpture beloved of bald academics for a bunk bed. Inspired by her disregard for the rules, I pushed through an alarmed door and ran down a flight of metal stairs until I broke with relief into the light of the day.
The first step toward a better society, I reflected while queuing outside a Routemaster bus repurposed as a riverbank café, would be to burn down all the museums. Licking the whipped cream from the top of my hot chocolate, I watched diaphanous skeins of light stretch between mirrored buildings and thought, Fuck everyone else. Here was my chance to get out of London, this counterfeit of death with its everywhere rage and its moribund culture and its smug population and its streets steeped in resentment and the sky pressing down like a chloroform rag. I took the appearance of Cora for a sign of her approval. I neither wanted nor needed anyone else’s.
That night I signed the contract and the NDA without so much as skimming the small print, before ordering in pizza as a concession to my flatmates for my betrayal of their values. Sybil seemed indifferent and Rotimi was understanding, even if his righteousness had shaded into something more like worry, and together we watched a film about a sentient planet that could make real the unconscious fears of orbiting astronauts. In the morning I received an email from Asha to say that my flight to Athens had been booked and accommodation arranged. I would start in the spring.
__________________________________
Excerpted from The Floating World by Ben Eastham. Published by Astra House. Copyright © Ben Eastham 2026. All rights reserved.
