Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  “What?”

  “This.” He turned the volume up, but then spoke over it. “This company wanted to develop this old lot into an office complex with chain stores and everything on the ground floor, but this preschool or daycare or whatever that’s been there for, like, years or something didn’t want to move. The article I read said that without this place, working people in the neighborhood would have to drive forever to take their kids somewhere and at that point it stops being cost effective for them to stay. Which is totally what those assholes want, right? Get the low-rent payers out and build more condos for the corporate stiffs.”

  “Gentrification.”

  “Right. So they built the thing anyway. Of course. But they did it around the school, like an L-shape. It’s called the Sawbuck Center or something. Only, in a total dick move, when they changed the plans to accommodate the daycare, they made it so the back walls of the parking garage run along two sides of the school, around the playground. And there was already a building on one side. But now—There.” He pointed to the screen. “That’s what it looked like. Four-story concrete. That’s what the kids played in every day. A prison yard.”

  He was right. It was worse even. Prison yards don’t usually have multi-story walls.

  “So check this out.” He kept pointing to the screen. “Yeah, that’s it. Sawbuck Mill.”

  The anchorperson explained that someone, it seemed, had gotten over the side gate and into the playground behind the daycare and painted a mural over the walls. On one wall, some popular superheroes appeared to be punching the concrete blocks, which scattered to reveal a big green playground with rainbows and stuff behind. At the back was a river scene with flying dragons and some video game and anime characters.

  “Did they say what the Sawbuck people were going to do?” I asked.

  He shook his head as he watched the screen. “If they paint over it, it’s only to be complete fucking corporate assholes who felt entitled to property they didn’t even own. It’s not like they even have to see the side with the mural.”

  We listened as the lady on the screen explained that some local residents had petitioned the city to declare the mural a cultural landmark so that the corporation couldn’t remove it without permission.

  Samir was beaming with schadenfreude. “The cool thing, though, is that no one even knows how the guy did it. They’re telling the kids it was magic elves or something.”

  I shrugged. “If someone had the right dimensions, they could cut projection stencils for each color layer and then use a strong light to make shadows on the wall. Then it’s just a matter of tracing with the paint, basically. With rollers and spray cans, you could get that done in a few hours pretty easy.”

  He turned the TV down and handed me the remote as a customer walked into the store. Samir swiped the ten grand and walked to the back, lost in thought, like he was trying to remember where he left his phone or something.

  “You want any of this before I put it in the safe?” He held up the money.

  I shook my head.

  He shut and locked it and stood there for a second. Then he walked around the counter again. He leaned across it and kissed the side of my face, right by my weird eyelid.

  “You rock that thing like a pop star. Anyone tell you that?” He meant the hijab. He pointed to me as he walked past the customer, a regular. “Don’t let them give you any shit today,” he joked.

  The man told him to take a hike.

  That night, I went back onto the roof and sat by myself behind the big shop sign, looking down on the world. I took my colored pencils with me and a sketchpad and I drew Lykke with a tongue of money. Then I drew a black-eyed Kell sitting on the sidewalk, back against a brick wall, smoking a pregnancy test like a spliff and wearing nothing but the Chanel and a pair of panties.

  A police car went by with siren blaring. I heard it stop a few blocks down. Somebody was having a bad night.

  I took out Kell’s scrapbook and turned through it, which was harder than I thought. Inside, it was like someone had taken a time-lapse photo of her mind. The first few pages were different than the rest. They had lots of writing in her own hand. I guessed they dated to our first semester. She’d jotted ideas and drawn simple stick diagrams of works she’d never produced. An unlabeled phone number was scribbled at the top of page two, probably some random boy’s. In between the notes were cutouts of works by her favorite artists—Delvoye’s tattooed pigs, the photography of Joel-Peter Witkin, paintings by Robert Williams—next to inspirational quotes by Dali and Maya Angelou.

  There were three stiff pages of that, front and back, before it changed abruptly, as if she had come back to the scrapbook after a long gap. The next five pages were all concert tickets and gallery announcements and photos of us and our friends at parties. Rey was only in one. It was hard to get him in front of the camera. In it, he was sitting with some people on the original Corn Cob Couch, all ratty and brown, looking sheepishly at the lens. Kell had pasted a paper angel over him, like a flap. The crease at the top told me she’d lifted it often.

  After that, the collage got denser. Magazine cutouts of models, celebrities, makeup, shoes, and couture fashion were layered on top each other between pictures of beach houses and yachts and quaint little docks on mountain lakes. It was like someone barfed a high school girl’s Pinterest account onto the pages. Then it changed abruptly again. From there on out, it was all about Bastien, or guys who looked like Bastien, or pictures of things she did with Bastien or wanted to do with him—sexual and otherwise. Pages and pages of that. It was completely, utterly obsessive.

  “Ugh.”

  About three-quarters of the way through the book, everything stopped. The book was blank all the way to the end, where the last few were stuffed with loose pictures and clippings, not pasted. I spread them out.

  It was all my art. All of it. Not just the street stuff I’d been doing, but all my big pieces from school, too. She’d saved everything, an entire record of my meager career.

  I closed the book and sniffed. I didn’t have a tissue, so I wiped my nose on my shirt.

  “Shit, girl . . .”

  Kell was always surrounded by people. Guys who wanted to fuck her. Girls who wanted to be her. At least, that was my image. But filling those pages took time, which meant there had to have been long stretches where she was alone, cutting and pasting and doing God-knew what else, and that made me sad. I knew how she was when she was alone. Everyone needs to be alone sometimes, of course. But it was different with Kell. It was like her essence, her happiness, was a soap bubble, and she could handle anything in the world—anything at all—as long as that bubble was kept aloft. Once things settled and the bubble drifted down, there was a real chance it might pop, so it was never very long before the ebullience resumed. That ebullience—real or forced—was what made her so popular.

  I wondered then how many pages of that scrapbook were full because I had been up on the roof, in that exact spot, working on my next project, ignoring her texts. Ignoring the world. Ignoring life. I wondered how many nights I’d put her off because I just didn’t feel like being fucking ebullient. I wondered how lonely she’d been in those gaps. I wondered how much of her predicament could’ve been avoided if I’d simply been a good friend from the start.