The Book of Instructions

 

I.

They came quietly, the way ghosts or debts come—by mail. Cream-colored envelopes, sometimes pale blue, often typed, sometimes handwritten in a strange elegant cursive that curled like a vine around my name. They came every few weeks, regular but never predictable. Each one with a task. Not a demand, not

a favor. A suggestion that arrived like a soft imperative.

    "Take 12 photographs of birds—any kind, any place."
    "Write 6 poems about someone you love."
    "Make 10 notes about old memories, even if they're false."

The return address was always the same—an artist in another city, a name I’d once seen footnoted in some underground catalog of collective performance pieces. We had met once briefly, I think, in a train station or at an opening for someone else’s work, her hair coiled like wire, her smile something quick and

technical. But now, we spoke only through these one-sided correspondences, and I did as I was told. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because something in the ritual thrilled me.

I took the photos of birds—crows outside the hospital, a heron knee-deep in garbage water, pigeons under a freeway underpass glowing in dawnlight. I wrote the poems, some real, some fabricated to fill the quota. I peeled the scabs of memory open and scribbled whatever I found inside. I did it all, every absurd,

holy, useless instruction. I placed them in my trapper keeper, labeled with my name and the number she had assigned me: PARTICIPANT #74.

And then, nothing.

II.

Weeks passed. Then months. Silence.

At first I thought I’d simply missed the final instruction. That maybe I was supposed to wait in stillness, a test of patience or trust. But more time passed, and the silence stopped feeling profound and began to rot inside me like old bread.

So I went looking for her.

Her address was a crumbling apartment building at the edge of an industrial district—now half-razed, soon to be developed into offices for green tech startups. The buzzer didn’t work, so I went around back, climbed the rusted fire escape, and found the door unlocked. Inside, the apartment was abandoned, but

not empty. It had been left like a shrine.

III.

The walls were covered with charts, diagrams, piles of folders. Index cards with names. Dozens of binders, colored and labeled like grade-school relics. It smelled of glue, dust, and burnt coffee. Her mail had stacked in slow sediment near the door. Her mattress was rolled up and tied with string. But what struck

me most—what dropped my heart into my feet—was that my trapper keeper was there, placed neatly among the others.

I recognized it instantly. Purple with neon lightning bolts. I opened it and flipped through my photographs of birds, the poems I had written (some of them still made me blush), the ten memories written on yellow lined paper in my unsure hand. It was all there, unchanged. But it wasn’t mine anymore. Or perhaps it

had never been.

IV.

That’s when she arrived—the other woman. She barged in with angry eyes, a nervous energy in her jaw.

"You too?" she said.

I nodded.

"She told me I was part of a grand piece. She told me I was helping her construct a web of meaning. I did everything she said. I sent my binder. Never heard from her again."

She looked at me, trembling. Not with rage, not exactly. More like betrayal shaped as fury.

I went to the wall. Her binder was there. I took it down, handed it to her like a ceremony.

"Here," I said. "Don’t be afraid. I found yours. And mine. And many others. And now I understand something."

She watched me. Her rage was cooling, morphing into something else—reluctant wonder, maybe.

"These pieces—we made them, yes. But we didn’t author them. She did. She’s the artist. The true creator. We were her hands, her instruments. Vessels."

She blinked.

"And that’s not a betrayal. That’s a gift. We were invited to participate in something larger than ourselves. Something without edges. And I can’t imagine a better kind of grace."

V.

We sat in the quiet hum of the abandoned apartment, flipping through pages. Notes, drawings, artifacts of invisible rituals. How many others had received her instructions? How many had obeyed? How vast was this project? Hundreds? Thousands?

There were folders labeled in Polish, Arabic, Nahuatl. Some had been mailed from jungle villages, some from Manhattan lofts. One was bound in goatskin. One was nothing but a USB stick taped to a piece of cardboard.

The deeper we looked, the more impossible it became to grasp the scope. She had built a world inside this modest apartment. A museum of participatory obedience. A cathedral of small gestures. A silent archive of human willingness.

I stood by the window and watched the sky turning orange with industrial dusk.

"This is art," I said. "Not because it is beautiful or even complete. But because it changed me. It turned my life into a sequence of rituals. It made me pay attention."

She nodded, quietly now.

And somewhere behind that orange sky, I imagined the artist herself—maybe sitting in a new apartment in another city, watching someone else obey. Watching the net grow larger.

I left the binder on the floor like an offering. Then I walked out. I didn’t lock the door.