He printed out invitations and signed them by hand: “Join my tiny world!” It would take them at least two days to be delivered, that would still be three weeks before the opening. “Opening of what?” he giggled internally, remembering an old joke. “An umbrella in your…”
It had cost the gallery so much to rent two dozens microscopes that he agreed to partake in the expenses. After all, it had never been about money. He was constantly in the red. So what was it about, Willy would get asked repeatedly, people’s faces hiding confusion behind polite smiles. How could he even begin to explain? Those brief moments—milliseconds—in between two heartbeats. “Because there is a pulse in your fingers, you see, so you need to wait for it to stop,” he would say whenever he got encouraged enough to open up. Squeeze your fingers together and create the work in an instant.
His personal favourite was a skateboarder on an eyelash balanced on a pinpoint. What is a better signature than his own eyelash? One can sometimes fit more in the eye of a needle, than they can in their head. Mount Rushmore. The Last Supper. The Milky Way. The infinity.
Ever since he had been a little boy, Willy retreated to his own little imaginary world. He hid from school in a shed in his parents’ garden. That is where he once noticed a swarm of ants. Were they looking for food? For shelter? He decided to build apartments for them. They didn’t want to pay the rent, he would joke when he was telling the story decades later. That was how it went, the ants had brand new homes, and Willy had a brand new vocation. Thirty years later he would learn he had autism.
Humanity had a habit of only accepting what they could see. But it was the little things. The invisible. Willy was convinced of it.
Letting other people into his world did not come naturally, until he realised that all humans had their own invisible landscapes, too, which you had to look very closely to perceive. Understanding them would never get easy, but Willy did not care about easy. When his daughter Marnie was born, he planted an oak tree on the top of a nail. It would grow together with her, he thought. And it seemed so, as the years went by. She had the nail framed in a little glass locket and wore it to her prom. That evening Willy felt his inner landscape expand and saw how it connected to his daughter’s. “Make sure to be home by midnight,” was the only thing he could utter, but he filled it with all the affection he could possibly scoop out.
The prom locket was going to be part of the exhibition. Marnie wouldn’t be able to attend, as she lived an ocean away. The local paper would print that his newest sculpture—the longest, tiniest miniature bridge in the world—had caught all visitors’ attention.