Spencer Nitkey
The Wanting, 2011-2023
Luka Andersen
steel, desert, glass pane
“The wanting is the rainstorm,” says the artist, when asked to describe this challenging piece of mixed media geosculpture. When viewing the piece from the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall observatory window in the gallery today, you may not witness art at all. The wanting, the art, is not the desert. It’s not the morning sun’s whisper across the steel. It’s not the steel: twenty-nine corkscrews, each thirty feet high, installed like skeletal cacti across the landscape. It’s not your mother asking if you want to wait a little longer to see if the clouds will come today. The wanting is the rainstorm, and rain comes only twenty to thirty days a year in this cracked land. On a clear, cloudless day, as the sun pools over the desert sand like red paint spilled over a carpet, you will be looking at a canvas. An artfully arranged canvas, yes, but a canvas, 3 hours outside Phoenix where the saguaro peer with blue eyes along the horizon.
The wanting is the rainstorm. It is the lightning that strikes and the thunder that curdles. The rainstorm is the wanting. Want, the artist says, is true miasma, a black cloud of not-enough that never dissipates. You want the rain to come, for the long trip here, from the hotel where your cousin will be married tomorrow, to be worth it. You want to be lucky. For it to happen for you. More than that, you want to be more than the pedestrian worries and pettinesses you have begun to suspect constitute the vast majority of adulthood. Better and larger than your neighbor Lydia’s weekly arguments with the butcher. More than Gio’s patronizing gestures from his porch toward cars that deign to go the speed limit and not ten miles an hour slower. You want to separate like an aged balsamic from the oil of everyone else.
This is your wanting, the first time you see this installation on a washed out Saturday. The sun makes shadows and spears of the steel screws. Their interstices tangle along the flat desert. It looks so very much like a painting: the reds, the black lines, the sky like a dome. It could be art. But this plaque, these very words etched at the artist’s insistence remind you that no, this is not the art. The wanting is the rainstorm. So you leave, want a steel shadow across your chest.
You leave. You change. Your wanting transforms. You begin to long for this vision of the ordinary you once loathed. You want the energy to be angry at the butcher, to wish the cars would drive slower—children play on this street, after all. You want these concerns, rather than your own: worrying whether the speech therapist will make it through traffic in time for your mother’s appointment; whether the exercises you do with her after dinner each night as she scowls and tries to point at parts of her body after you name them will work; whether the consonant and vowel sounds you repeat together every day will ever find purchase on her tongue; whether her right leg has grown strong enough to conquer the stairs or whether you’ll need to take out the last of her 401K, a full decade early, to replace the broken stair lift. You want to vanish from these midnights spent crying over insurance claims on the kitchen table, the future like a cracked, empty desert, either sweltering or freezing, but always unlivable. You want normalcy as you knew it before, as butcher meat, as talking to your mother on the phone during Sunday night football and caring about anything normal.
In time, like the earth's mantle, this wanting shifts, too. A dozen years after your first visit, you return to this gallery. You have thought about the wanting, the pregnant promise of it’s almost-art, many times since you left. Now you enter, alone, and stare out the window at a blue sky. You are asked by the absence of the artwork to think about your wanting. Inside your chest, you find a new miasma, a new normal, a cliche until it isn’t. You want dinners out where the staff has served someone in a wheelchair before, a night where the Eagles win by 7 and not one of your family members cries in your arms. You want her to gain one new word this month, just one. You want to keep your blood pressure below 130 and your mothers below 120 and you want lychees to be in season. This is your wanting, and the wanting is ambrosia and just within grasp some days. So you stare out the gallery window toward the barren and bountiful desert and find you do not mind the sun. You do not mind this gentle assurance of normalcy. You do not even mind the bitter-edged memory of being here with your mother, there is light in it, too. You are fine without the wanting, today.
But the wanting does not care. The sky shawls itself gray in an instant. Athenaic bursts of rain dehisce the clouds, and the screaming of a storm reaches you, the gallery, and the steel all at once. Rain smears the window. You watch as each flash of lightning extends in white searing arcs, cracking against steel corkscrews, veining between them, creating primordial shapes your mind recognizes before your eyes can register them. This is the wanting, as certain as laughter, ignorant of you and your newfound contentment. This is the wanting. All twelve years of it bearing down upon you. This, all this, the rainstorm, your tears, your mother back in California, your sister texting you updates, the lightning striking, the cars driving too fast, the butchers cutting too sloppily, all this is the wanting, and God, isn’t it heavy.
Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Does it Have Pockets, Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart, and Rhysling awards. You can find more of his writing on his author website.
