easily identify who among us had been groping his girlfriend. Some clown left a big five-fingered handprint across the left buttock, as clear as the fossil outline of a leaf. But that, too, was soon obliterated by other fingerprints and indentations, sly squeezings and strokes and pinches that left the once smooth surface pocked and pitted as if by cellulite. Someone used the sharp point of a pencil to gouge a long, wavy incision down the back of the right calf that, had it been the real Abbie and not simply her likeness, would have required a trip to the ER. (We knew it was a pencil because he, or possibly she, left it impaled in Abbie’s right foot.) The nipples, perhaps not surprisingly, came in for a lot of attention, and were soon twisted off altogether—one lay discarded nearby, carefully placed on a table, as if the person who’d done it thought maybe it could be repaired. The right breast bulged from the impression of so many kneading fingers that it, too, fell off in the end. On first seeing the piece, some of us had called to mind votive statues, their bronze surfaces worn smooth by prayers and kisses, but it soon became clear that this was something altogether more savage, like those gruesome medieval depictions of martyrs fingering their open wounds. Pretty soon the statue resembled a carcass on which wolves had feasted, a slow-motion explosion of modeling putty and body parts.
Far from being annoyed by the artwork’s disintegration, Tim seemed fascinated. He came to inspect it at least twice a day, pointing out the latest changes, however small, to whoever happened to be in there. He took no part in the remolding himself, or none we ever saw, but it was as if his fascination egged us on. The sculpture lost both hands—vanished, presumed stolen—and its head began to loll drunkenly. Many people simply tugged a small lump of putty from one part of the body, rolled it into a cylinder between their palms, and stuck it back on somewhere else, so eventually it looked as if the statue were covered with short, fat worms. And finally there was a kind of tipping point, a moment when DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!) no longer even resembled a human form, but simply became a big block of malleable graffiti. What had once been the shoulder was fashioned into a rough approximation of a grimacing second head. Someone broke off part of the arm and used it to make a crude penis that jutted for a while from the statue’s crotch—until that, too, fell off, and lay with all the other handfuls and scrapings of Newplast trodden into the floor like lumps of chewed gum. And then the head itself was gone, ripped off and torn in two, as if the unknown perpetrator had tried to peer inside it. Like a Greek Aphrodite, someone said pretentiously of the malformed torso that remained, but we all knew this was quite different from those graceful effigies.
Next morning, the sculpture—what was left of it—had disappeared. Abbie had even cleaned up after it. The meeting room was spotless.
We felt slightly ashamed, the way you might feel after a night that had involved tequila, a night when you hadn’t behaved quite as well as you should. Some people even went so far as to suggest that, if there was another opportunity, they’d do things differently. Like, maybe take turns to act as security guards. A roster could be drawn up, CCTV installed.
But most of us felt that was missing the point. There wouldn’t be another time. What had happened to the sculpture had happened. That was the whole purpose of it.
A few days later our office walls were taken over by a display of photographs. Giant black-and-white prints, three feet square, starkly lit, taken at twenty-four-hour intervals, documenting the gradual disintegration of DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!). Abbie had come in each night to photograph our handiwork.
We were pleased there was a record of the project. We hadn’t liked to think of it just vanishing into the ether. But now that we studied it in time lapse, as it were, frozen mercilessly in those big, stark photographs, we could see just how quickly the sculpture had been reduced from graceful humanity to primordial sludge. It made us uneasy to think about it.
Those pictures, digital copies of which were sent—by Abbie? Or one of us?—to several art blogs and Instagram