Blast Radius

John Cox. Crash & Burn (with Leonardo). 1997. Acrylic and silkscreen on paper. 23.5 x 18.25 inches. Courtesy of The Dawn Davies Collection.

"I don't know if it's supposed to mean anything."

—Ronaldi's only on-record interview, shortly after "Shrapnel" incident. Ronaldi: An Assemblage of Random and Classical Modernica, p. 374.

Jerry returned to the bedroom with a spool of dental floss he found wedged behind the trap underneath his bathroom sink. This was fantastic news. He'd finished what he thought was his last spool after fastening the Plexiglas panes together and securing them to the eye bolt screws, which left him with few options for connecting the rest of October. He'd considered scraps of his shirt or jeans, but tearing or cutting them thin enough, and uniformly at that, would take too long, would bungle the whole thing. There was a chance the gas station a few blocks from the apartment would still have some, but a trip was out of the question.

Setting the floss in a coffee can, Jerry picked out a few pushpins and set them on the pile of news clippings at his feet. He'd come across three Dalí-esque clocks drooping over Mt. Rushmore, The Statue of Liberty, and a framed copy of Dalí's own "The Persistence of Memory" interspersed between a checkerboard of news briefs on Thursday's front page. They looked to be rough scans straight out of a sketchbook, and Jerry had been trying to discern if the smudge in the center of each clock was Ronaldi's signature grease pencil. He'd slowly clipped out each clock, careful to make even slices with the scissors, crisp ninety-degree angles at the corners, holding the paper awkwardly so as to not accidentally ignite it with his cigarette.

Breaking his focus, Jerry texted Allison: "Remember when you took me to Spain for our anniversary? You couldn't wait to take me to the Prado, even though you didn't realize that, instead of spending time walking around with you, room to room, talking about what we liked, making up little backstories about all the people frozen in time, I'd spend most of the afternoon in front of that Ronaldi painting of the Che Guevara sticker on the banana (I'm still sorry, by the way). But now imagine it again. I'm so lost in the painting that I couldn't feel the museum guards pulling at me when the exhibit closed, but this time while you're dragging me out, my ankles catch on a dislodged floorboard, severing both my Achilles tendons, my screams startling you so badly that you fall backward, impaling your spinal cord on the floorboard's exposed nails. Instead of calling for help, the museum guards quickly gather poles and velvet ropes in a square to enclose us, writing a sign next to it, calling it 'The Fall of Ronaldi.'" Maybe that would get her.

Jerry picked the Thursday paper back up. The front page featured a nine-column photo of a tear-off calendar page bearing nothing but "14," which hung from its top-left corner and curled up at the bottom. Unlike the days before it, this one appeared to have been burned by something, brushed with toasted marshmallow browns at the edges as if scorched by a distant heat. He scanned the stories beneath the illustration. The only thing of note was the editorializing tucked into the final sentences of each one: "What does it even matter;" "It might as well just happen now;" "As if it comes as any surprise."

Jerry turned to the C section. The top half of the page was dedicated to an illustration of another Dalí clock. This one, however, had little cartoon limbs, and it drooped against a black chain-link fence along a sidewalk. There was a bullet hole where the clock's one used to be, blood dripping through the spider cracks in its face. As the story followed, Ronaldi—an elderly painter-turned-graffiti-artist—had hung a banner over the...