Serpentine Gallery 24-hour Experiment Marathon

When you hear the echo before you hear your own voice, you might figure you're living backwards. But it could be that your voice is just the echo's echo. We're all hollow inside.

In the dark, especially. In the dark you're hollow right up to your skin, and your skin is nothing but the place where one kind of darkness rubs up against another one.

On a boat inside a ship sat Olivia, with a boat inside a ship inside her mind. On that boat sat her brother James, who was dead. It was possible that Olivia was also dead and did not know it. In the dark alive is just the place where one kind of nothing rubs up against another one.

The oil slurped at the sides of the boat inside the ship inside Olivia, where Olivia's brother was remembering. This: He was crossing from one place to another. In the old place there was a war. In the new place there was also a war. The war was about oil, probably. They usually are, his knowledgeable sister had said. For now he was on a boat inside a ship. The ship was on an ocean, probably. It could have been a channel or a sea or a sound. It had been so long since he saw it. ('Can you see a sound?" Olivia-inside-James-inside-Olivia asked.)

'Oil tank,' said the sailor, who looked just the way James had thought he would. 'Climb down the rungs. You'll find a boat tied to the bottom one.'

They did. It was a small orange rubber boat. On its floor they found a blanket and a plastic ring. 'What's the ring for?' Gloria had shouted up at the sailor who, black against the blaze of the closing hatch, no longer looked like Popeye.

Except his sister's name was Lisa--no. Olive? Olivia.



Olivia, thought Olivia, I thought my name was Alice.

There was a lot he couldn't remember, or remembered wrong. Had he once had a watch on which a ghost went round and round? Had he once had a T-shirt that said, 'It's only a movie'? Had he once had a face?

Darkness has no days, but to keep time going forwards, they held an imaginary sunrise. 'The sun rose from the oil like a cat's head, radiating fur,' said Olivia. "If fur were fire.'

'The fire fur was dripping oil that burned so black,' said James, 'day turned to night.' It was hard to keep oil out of it. And night.

Once there was a storm. The oil heaved and sucked. The ship reared and plunged on waves of whatever. (Was there water anymore?) The boat inside it on billows of oil. James cried then. His sobbing echoed off distant metal walls and the echo echoed too. James felt each sound-wave pass him, ruffling his hair like a hand. 'It sounds like there are twenty of us in here,' James said, James said, James said. 'Each a little smaller than the last, the last.'

'So they can fit inside one another,' Olivia could have said. Instead she said, 'It's OK, Swee'Pea,' and clenched him in her arms.

'Olive Oyl,' he could have said, 'I wuv you,' but this story isn't about wuv, is it?

Outside the ship all sorts of things could still be seen, probably: a nurse named Annie Pink, an implausible landscape, mechanical owls, deodorant, a whippet on a sofa, hanged men creaking under cranes. Somewhere shingle fountained up. Shutters banged in the wind under a hard blue sky. It all looked a bit pixilated. Here's what was real now: a blanket. A plastic ring Olivia had taken to wearing on her thumb. A brother (dead). Darkness, echoes. And a smaller, skyless ocean of oil.

People say that all stories are about oil, thought Olivia knowledgeably. The syrupy cling of it, like family. Its weight, like memory. And then how it burns, making the brightest light--and light's the least of it. Oil gets you places, and stories go places, don't they? They don't rock in the dark, listening to echoes. Stories are about oil, and all oil stories are about war, people say.

But there were different kinds of oil, right? Bonny Light Oil, Heavy Virgin Naphtha, Cabinda Crude. They had names, like cartoon characters. Different kinds of oil, different kinds of war, different stories.

Olivia sat, rocking, turning the ring on her thumb. If she could talk to the brother inside her, her voice would sound huge. Hollow. Like an echo of something that hadn't been said yet. He might think he was living backwards, going terribly home, back to the old war. He might think he was his echo's echo, that he was just a hollow throwing back a memory of something someone else had said. Or he might just curl up and listen and let her tell him a story, a story that didn't go back or forward but went in.

James was hungry. The hunger grew until it seemed bigger than his stomach. He was just skin stretched around a black and echoing emptiness. Around him, the oil made sounds like a mouth. He put his hand over the boat's side and then brought his coated fingers to his lips. They tasted like Olivia.