Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  And then—in an eye blink, less—someone appeared in one of the westbound lanes.

  Hazy, then solid, then hazy again, like the filament in a light bulb cooling and snapping back. But he was visible enough: a beard, a button-up shirt with the pattern showing when he flared bright. Pants tucked into scuffed boots. A gaze so distant and lost as to hardly be there at all. An Esplanade drove right through him, veering sharply much too late, and finally coming to rest after plowing through a pair of bus stop benches.

  Various other collisions ensued as well, multi-vehicle pileups. The moment between the last pebbles of safety glass tumbling to the pavement and the first screams was a heavy one, pregnant with that silence that comes seconds before injuries become apparent. Drivers behind the sight-lines of the wreckage lay on their horns, oblivious, cursing the rain, other drivers, the city itself.

  The smoke pivoted in the roadway, his hands laced around his head as if it was all too much for him, his frenzy and fear obvious to those few able to see him. And then he, like the Bride, like all those to come, disappeared.

  He would follow a familiar pattern: He was there, he was lost, and then he was gone.

  4

  Portland’s Pearl District had long been a breathing dichotomy, a place moored in a willful schizophrenia.

  The Pearl today: boxy, monolithic lofts, upscale bars, and dance clubs with lines out the door and wrapped around the corner on weekend nights. Overpriced salons and restaurants espousing menus that were local, cruelty-free, organic, vegan. The luxury of the well-to-do: the choice of morality when coupled with commerce. And yet the Pearl District has grown from the roots of the city’s skid row.

  Outside the doors of the coffee shop with its biodegradable cups and green-garden roof, the homeless stand smoking on street corners in loose clusters. Businessmen bark into ear buds as they wend through these men, on their way to the nearby financial district, another loosely delegated name for what is the complex, interwoven, organic beast of Portland’s downtown. Food carts line parking lots where women in business suits and Reeboks order lunch, their office shoes poking out of their purses like shy little pets. Ten feet away men sleep in doorways, huddled beneath garbage bags and flattened moving boxes.

  This dichotomy, old as Rome.

  Fuel Gallery sat at Broadway and Glisan. It was a large, two-story storefront couched between a boutique full of nearly naked glass mannequins and a gelato shop with a fetish for brushed steel. Even this place was an anomaly: so much of the Pearl had been reduced to condos, luxury high-rises for the massive influx of new money into the city. Vale walked down Glisan carrying something wrapped beneath a blue tarp. He nodded at a man in a wheelchair holding a scorched teddy bear.

  “What’s up, brother,” the man crowed. His palsy gave him the air of one tuned to some interior music.

  “Hey,” Vale said.

  The man winked, held up the bear. “You got a cigarette for my friend here?”

  Vale passed him and without breaking stride said, “I look like the guy that’s handing out cigarettes today?”

  He hit Broadway and leaned into the storefront window of Fuel, his hand over his brow to block the glare. Abstract works lined the walls. Warm pastel panels—peach, vermilion, sherbet—fused atop bands of oxidized, blowtorched metal. He tried the doors but they were locked. As he peered in again, he could see someone leaning over a computer at the reception desk near the back of the room. Vale knocked and the man looked up and shook his head. He pointed at his wrist, annoyed.

  Vale leaned the tarp against the window and was fishing his cigarettes out of his pocket when someone said his name.

  He turned. Jacob Burfine was standing there on the pavement, his jaw hanging open.

  “Mike Vale?”

  Burfine stood there in his skinny black jeans, his button-up. A pair of sunglasses perched on his forehead. The surprise seemed genuine: to say they no longer ran in the same circles was an understatement.

  “Jake,” Vale said brightly. “Looking pretty slick, man.”

  Burfine, meanwhile, looked like he was trying to grin through a bout of food poisoning. “Yeah, hey. Mike. Wow. You’re looking pretty . . . wow.” He patted Vale on the shoulder and managed, “It’s been a while. It’s great to see you.” The vast falsity of that statement hung in the air, awkward as a fart in church. They were both embarrassed by its obviousness.

  In the bathroom earlier that morning, Vale had taken a shower, gingerly rinsing his devastated forehead with as much delicacy as he could manage. He’d bought gauze pads, alcohol, and an elastic bandage at a Walgreen’s. The cashier had openly gaped; blood was still beading up from the wound.

  Now, he stood before Burfine with his untrimmed beard, the gauze cinched around his head and a bloodied bandage poking out. His tarp rustling where it leaned against the window. He looked like he belonged there in the Pearl, another castaway member of downtown in the middle of a housing and homeless crisis. Just another piece of the class-collision jigsaw puzzle that made up the neighborhood, the city.

  Vale shook his head, smiling. He lit a cigarette. “Don’t bullshit me, Jake. I get it.”

  Burfine laughed uncomfortably and jammed his hands in his pockets.

  “But I want to talk to you about something. I need to make some money,” Vale said. At the mention of the word money, a certain dullness fell over Burfine’s eyes.

  Vale could read that look in a heartbeat. He’d been seeing variants of it countless times since he’d signed that damning contract all those years ago. Seen it every time he paid for a pack of smokes with change, laying coins down and pushing them across the counter; every time he asked Nick at the Ace High, or some variant of Nick, to let him sign over a check for his tab. There were varying degrees of that look, but they all meant the same: Go fuck yourself, Mike. No handouts for you.

  “I said I need to make some money, Jake. I’ll be the first to tell you—I understand that nothing’s for free.”

  Burfine winced and moved past him, again with the delicate shoulder pat. He kept looking at Vale's gauze. “I’m sorry, Mike. I am. I just . . . I don’t know how I can help you.” He knocked on the gallery’s glass door and Vale saw the assistant rise from the computer.

  Vale walked over, pulled the tarp away. He dropped it to the cement and stepped on it so it wouldn’t flit away down the street. He hoisted the painting up and said to Burfine’s back, “I want to sell this painting to you, Jake. At a very significant discount.”

  Burfine turned.

  Vale had painted This Great and Permanent Unraveling in 1994, and in his protracted decline it had been seen by very few people; mostly by those few lost and drunken women he could wrangle into his bed. It measured two by five feet and had been Brophy’s supposed “gift” to him: he’d allowed Vale to keep one painting of his choice after signing the contract. A single painting, provided he, Brophy, could photograph it beforehand.

  In 2005, Sotheby’s had published an estimated auction price for the painting, amid dozens of other Vale originals Brophy had flipped to collectors over the years. Vale had read about it online. This Great and Permanent Unraveling, Sotheby’s estimated, would probably go at auction for $350,000–400,000. Especially considering it had only been in Vale’s possession since its completion. And that had been back in 2005, a lifetime ago.

  “I need some money,” Vale said flatly. “I have to get to a funeral.”

  Burfine looked at the painting, looked at the mess that made up Vale’s head, took a deep breath and said, “Come inside.”

  • • •

  The assistant hovered around like a fretful bird until Burfine leveled his gaze and said, “Chadwick, why don’t you go make Mike some espresso.” The assistant nodded and spun on one heel and Burfine turned back to the painting. They were playing the game, curator and artist. Vale’s skull throbbed.

  They stood in the back room of the gallery. A gigantic butcher-block table in the center of the room held a computer, shipping
boxes, giant coils of Bubble Wrap, containers of Styrofoam peanuts. Huge shipping pallets stood stacked against one wall. A latticework of vertical shelves took up another, most of it filled with inventory waiting to be cycled through or shown to visiting collectors: paintings, drawings, lithographs and prints from Burfine’s roster of gallery artists. This Great and Permanent Unraveling hung unceremoniously from a nail. Burfine had taken everything else down around it.

  “It’s a beautiful painting,” he admitted, his knuckles mashed against his lips as he stared.

  It was. And Vale held a slim pride in the fact that he’d held onto it for all these years. Through evictions and catastrophe and hundreds of sad, knife-edged mornings, he’d held onto this one painting, this last vestige of what he had once been capable of.

  “I’m willing to cut you a deal,” Vale said. “Provided you can give me some cash up front. That’s the trade.”

  Burfine snorted. “Just how much of a deal are we talking about, Mike?”

  “I’ll sell it to you for ten percent of market value.”

  Burfine nodded, considering. Trying not to show his excitement. But Vale had caught the eye-bulge: Holy shit. “I have no idea what the market value for this piece is. Like I said, we’d need to involve Brophy in this, because of that shitty contract you signed.”

  Vale felt a stitch of anger work its way through him. “Uh-huh.”

  “It complicates things, is all.”

  “Two things: This is my piece. I’ve got the paperwork for it. And don’t bullshit me. You know exactly which painting this is. Sotheby’s quoted it between three-fifty and four, and that was fifteen fucking years ago.”

  Burfine shrugged. “You know how things go. Market’s fickle. Prices fluctuate.”

  “Give me a break,” Vale said.

  The assistant came back with a tiny porcelain cup of espresso, a tiny saucer. Vale’s hands trembled as he reached for it. It was so sweet it made Vale’s teeth ache. “Look. If you can get me twenty thousand dollars today,” he said, “I’ll write you a bill of sale for the fucking thing right here. I’ll sign it in blood if you want. I don’t care. That’s an insane deal.”

  Around his knuckles, still staring at the painting, Burfine said, “I don’t have that kind of cash around, Mike.”

  Vale sighed, walked out onto the gallery floor. Pieces of distorted, painfully twisted metalwork sat on pedestals around the room. Five-digit price tags. He wanted to pick one up and hurl it through the window. He thought, Every minute I’m here is one I’m not using to get to there.

  He called out, “I need to get to LA, Jake. You buy that painting, everyone from the New York Times to Art & Artists is gonna be running a piece on Fuel. It’s a deal.”

  Silence from the back room. Vale drank from his little cup.

  A minute later, Burfine called his name. He was standing at the butcher-block table. He exhaled as if it pained him and pushed pieces of paper and a pen across the table at Vale. He’d printed out a bill of a sale and a certificate of authenticity. The assistant stood nearby with a digital camera.

  “I can juggle some things around. I’ll need to run a few errands.”

  “Okay,” Vale said. “How long?”

  “I can get you the money in an hour.”

  “That’s fine.”

  He leaned over to sign, the ache in his head flaring in tandem with the pulse of his heart.

  He signed it and thought, I’m moving toward you, Candice. Years too late, but still.

  Try to forgive me, yeah?

  I’m on my way.

  5

  From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

  The fog had deepened by the time we entered the gates of Rouen, the sun above a glittering coin in the pale sky. The hoofbeats of our mules were damped and muted in the heavy air, and the city’s turrets and parapets above the wall rose like something from a dream. I heard the town well before I saw it. The cries of the barkers, the market already thrumming early in the morning. I smelled horse shit and rotten vegetables and the brine of fish in the air. I found myself trying to meet peoples’ eyes, but everyone passed us as if we were invisible. It was the first inkling into who my father was, what he had been molded into by time and circumstance.

  The constabulary was a squat stone building in the center of the city, the lip of its roof peppered in crows shouldering each other for space. We tethered the mules and stepped inside and my father greeted the crag-faced man seated behind a great oaken desk. The room was dank, moisture seeping from the cracks between the stones, the stink of mold in the air.

  Wordlessly the man pushed a small sack across the desk and my father put it in the pocket of his coat.

  “You can count it,” the man said.

  “You say that every time,” my father said. “To cheat me . . .”

  “Is as likely as cheating the gallows itself,” the man finished in pompous mockery, and my father seemed to take some grim satisfaction from it. “I hear you, Jean.”

  The man squinted then, holding a scrap of foolscap far from his face, his lips moving beneath his grayed, drooping mustache. “Two of them downstairs. Luc knows the details. After that, there’s two cows died over at Jon the Black’s farm, northeast of town.”

  My father sighed. (I would later find that beyond the executions and sessions of torture to extract confession, a large part of my father’s job constituted the removal and interment of dead animals and men who had died in nearby prisons.)

  “Who’s this?” the man said, lifting his chin at me. He had dirt in the wrinkles of his neck.

  “My boy, come to learn the trade,” my father said, and with that the man leaned back on his stool and laughed and laughed, clapping a bony hand against his knee. When we stepped past the desk and down an arched hallway, the smell of rot growing heavier, he was still laughing.

  Down a flight of slick stone stairs, water pooling in the seams between wall and floor. Down another flight, we came to a hallway studded with torches that dripped tallow, the wall blackened behind them. Half a dozen oaken doors lined each side of the hall. The occasional moans of men came from behind the doors. A rat ran bold over my foot. My knees trembled, went watery.

  One of the doors hung open and inside it stood a boy whipcord thin—presumably the constable’s apprentice—and an emaciated man chained to the wall. The boy turned and grinned at us and it was a terrible thing to see. His teeth looked as if they’d been flung into his mouth by someone with questionable aim. That and the flat, obvious madness in his eyes are the two things I will always remember most about Luc. I tried not to look at the man on the wall.

  “Why are we here, Luc?” My father already sounded tired.

  The boy hooked a thumb at the hanging man. “He was caught stealing both bread and coin from a baker. And then, at the time of his arrest, he fought the constable.” Luc turned to the man and crowed, “Didn’t you, good sir?” He held a broad spike in one hand, and a small mallet in the other. He stepped forward, traced the hanging man’s jawline with the spike, but the man didn’t seem to notice. He was already covered in suppurating sores and terrible red and white blooms ran up his legs. His head sagged on the stem of his neck. I had to put my fist over my mouth as we stood there; the stench was unreal, beyond words, the rot of it. The prisoner was rotting alive.

  Still with his spike against the man’s chin, Luc said, “Across the hall, that one’s been accused of heresy.”

  “The bishops have been informed?”

  “The bishops sent him here.”

  Pointing at the man in chains, my father said. “How long has he been here, Luc?”

  “Not long enough, clearly.” He tapped the spike in a downward arc with every word: chin, throat, chest, navel.

  “Has he confessed?”

  “Oh, a hundred times over.”

  My father sighed. “Get a signed confession and oath of repayment. Brand him for a thief on the hand and let him go.”

  “But—”

  “Let h
im go, Luc.”

  Luc exhaled, his eyes glittering with fury. “Of course,” he said.

  My father put his hand on my shoulder and with his other hand removed a key ring bristling with keys from beneath his coat. We stepped across the hall to the other man, the wet stones glimmering in torchlight.

  • • •

  I walked down Eighty-second Avenue, keeping my eyes open for Julia’s officers. A lowrider blared past me, strobing bass and gas fumes. I passed a restaurant with a gigantic plaster bucket of chicken on top. I was embarrassed. Ashamed, really: I’d overreacted.

  I had set up the perimeters of my relationship with Julia. I had placed myself in a position to be hurt. She was doing what she thought was best.

  I saw a police cruiser among the northbound lanes a block or two up and I veered, as discreetly as I could, from the sidewalk toward a low-slung bar with scabbed yellow paint and one red door. Tiny windows like an afterthought. Neon cursive hung in red script in two of them, the word halved: Dest iny’s.

  I walked through the door and a scattering of regulars looked up, squinting like moles against the light. The door wheezed shut behind me and they turned back wordlessly to the mouths of their drinks.

  I straddled a stool and ordered a beer. The place was full of muted televisions and the rattle of the AC. The half dozen men lining the bar were roughly my age, and one would occasionally lean over and murmur something to another and then chuckle wetly. The slow traffic of a game of eight ball unfolded in the back of the room.

  “What can I get you?”

  The bartender’s cleavage belonged to a twenty-year-old, and her eyes were a beautiful, fierce green, ringed in clots of mascara. The rest of her seemed sun-blasted, and fiercely red. Skin hung loose at her throat—old as I was. The man beside me coughed and coughed like he was drowning in his own lungs.