The ants arrived the day before.

Five thousand of them, contained in a clear plastic bottle—the kind normally used for oversized pills. It was oddly appropriate, as if what I was about to introduce into the piece were both medicine and symptom at the same time. They weren’t dramatic in their arrival. No ceremony. Just a container, handed over, and suddenly the work was no longer inert.

Up until that moment, everything in the cave had been constructed. After the ants, it was alive. They entered the piece the way living systems always do: indifferent to intention, alert only to conditions. I remember watching them briefly, making sure they were moving, making sure the system held. And then I had to let go. There was nothing more I could control.

The next day, people arrived.

I know that Lynn came. My family. Regina, possibly. Mike and Maryellen, almost certainly—they had been part of the physical ordeal, and it feels right that they were present at the opening. But the truth is, I don’t remember the night at all.

That absence used to bother me. Now I understand it.

The work had consumed every available channel—mental, physical, emotional. By the time the doors opened, there was nothing left in me to witness the event as an event. I had crossed some internal threshold where attention simply shut down. What remained was only sensation.

The one image that has stayed with me is not inside the museum.

It’s Broadway.

For two blocks, the street was washed in red neon light, thrown outward by the preamble to the Constitution glowing in the semi-circular window above the storefront cave. The language wasn’t contained by the window—it spilled into the city. Traffic slowed. People stopped. The street itself seemed to register the work.

In the days that followed, I learned—almost secondhand—that the piece had landed. It was covered by the Village Voice and by other New York publications. People were talking about it. I was being talked about.

I had been seen.

What mattered most to me then wasn’t the praise or the coverage. It was something quieter: the realization that the work had crossed a boundary. It had left the studio, left Minneapolis, left intention behind, and entered public life on its own terms.

The ants were doing their work.
The language was glowing.
The cave was no longer mine.

That was the moment the saga completed its arc—not with celebration, but with release.