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itself unethical. If you’ve ever read a poem by Emily Dickinson, you will agree.
    Moreover, it’s not as though I lacked precedent. Consider, for example, the case of the so-called Wireman, the name given to the creator of a series of sculptures discovered in a Philadelphia alley on a trash night in 1982. I’ve seen them; they’re eerie: thousands of found objects—clock faces, dolls, food containers—cocooned in loops of heavy-gauge wire. Nobody knows who the artist was; nobody knows what motivated him to produce. We don’t know for certain that he was, in fact, a he. And while the question of whether the pieces were intended as art is open to debate, that they were pulled out of the garbage would seem to indicate quite clearly that they weren’t intended for public consumption. This misgiving, however, has not stopped galleries from selling the pieces at commanding prices; it has not stopped museums across the United States and Europe from mounting exhibitions or critics from commenting on the work’s “shamanistic” or “totemic” properties, speculating about its similarities to African “medicine bundles.” That’s a lot of talk and cash and activity generated by what might have ended up as landfill, were it not for a sharp-eyed passerby.
    The point is that in creating his objects, the Philadelphia Wireman did only some of the work, and I would argue not the majority of it. He made
things
. It took dealers to make those things into
art
. Once anointed as such, there’s no going back. You can destroy, but you can’t uncreate. If the Wireman showed up tomorrow and began shrieking about his rights, I doubt anyone would listen to him.
    And so I regarded as more than fair my vow that were Victor ever to turn up at my door, I would pay him according to the traditional artist-dealer split: fifty-fifty. In fact, I congratulated myself on my generosity, knowing that few of my colleagues would have made such an outlandish and indulgent promise.
     
     
    I’LL SPARE YOU THE GORY DETAILS of prepping the show. You don’t need to hear about rail mounts and track lighting and the procurement of mediocre pinot. But there is something I don’t want to leave out, and that’s the strange discovery Ruby and I made late one night at the storage locker.
    We had been working for four months. The space heaters were gone, replaced by a series of fans strategically placed so as not to send piles of paper flying. For weeks we had been searching of panel number one, the point of origin. The boxes had gotten mixed up in transit, and we’d start on one that seemed promising—whose top sheet numbered, say, in the low hundreds—only to find that the page numbers went up, not down.
    We did eventually find it—more on that later—but on that night it was a different page, from the 1,100s, that caught Ruby’s eye.
    “Hey,” she said, “you’re in here.”
    I stopped working and came over to have a look.
    Near the top of the page, in slashing letters three inches high:
     
MULLER
     
    All the warmth went out of the room. I can’t say why the sight of my own name terrified me the way it did. For a moment I heard Victor’s voice shouting at me over the whirr of the fans, shouting at me through his art, clapping his hands in my face. He did not sound pleased.
    Somewhere, a door slammed. We both jumped, I against the desk and Ruby in her chair. Then silence, both of us embarrassed by our own skittishness.
    “Odd,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “And
creepy
.”
    “Very.”
    We looked at my name. It seemed vaguely obscene.
    “I guess it’s reasonable,” she said.
    I looked at her.
    “He did live in Muller Courts.”
    I nodded.
    She said, “Actually, I’m surprised you’re not in there more often.”
    I tried to resume work, but I couldn’t concentrate, not with Ruby clicking her stud against her teeth and that drawing radiating ill feelings. I announced that I was heading out. I must have sounded paranoid—I certainly