by Mary Wallace
“It’s not that bad a neighborhood,” she said.
“They’re ripping it down all around you. It’s so bad that the government is bombing you. So call the damn cab.”
“I’ll see you in a while,” she said, impulsively turning off Skype and her laptop by unplugging the power cord from the wall.
The apartment was quiet. It felt so empty that she tucked the laptop under a sofa cushion to hide it from potential intruders. She went to the coat closet and pushed aside her winter coats, reaching for a black artist’s portfolio container hidden against the back wall. Even before Eddie, she’d hidden it. Didn’t want anyone to know that her only way of communicating was with shaped cardboard and spray paint. She penciled a drawing on an unused piece of cardboard and then cut out the inverse of shapes she’d drawn. It was a longer message than usual. Her kiss goodbye. She’d pack up and move, forced out by demolition and no transportation out of her gasping, broken-down neighborhood.
She grabbed her purse, phoned for a cab and was out the door in minutes, closing the door after checking to see that she’d left a side lamp on in her bedroom and the stovetop light on in the kitchen. The place felt warm and sleepily inviting when she came in late at night to soft lighting, but as she turned her head, she wondered if the building would be standing in a few weeks when her lease was to renew.
Millions of dollars were being channeled in an almost desperate attempt to sweep away the reminders of community impoverishment, and she now saw what she had not wanted to see, that her future needed a dramatic redrawing. She’d held out longer than most of the people she used to nod to as she walked to and from the bus to work.
She walked towards the arriving taxicab and climbed in, looking back at her apartment building. It was losing its hold on her. The old people were gone from the neighborhood; there were no longer mothers and strollers clogging the sidewalks.
It felt good to be out in the evening, heading to party with Frank, hoping Eddie would return the next day. Driving to a restaurant for dessert with Frank and his expensive champagne bottle, she realized that she’d somehow found her way to the dream part of the life she’d wanted but not known how to conjure. Moving would mean that her own third of her life would now grow, she might actually think through what she wanted for her future and take steps towards it, instead of living with feet of concrete keeping her in the same old habits, unable to lift her head above the rut of everyday life.
But the bus station and downtown called, and she leaned back in the taxi, resting her head on the seat, grateful that she was not home alone. She felt like a phoenix, escaping the void of her withering past, rising out to a new life with places to go, beloveds to see, paint in her purse.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Boarded up storefronts lined darkened sidewalks sparkling with the sand-sized bits of glass from generations-ago broken windows. Sad little stripping joints sat quiet with no one at the door barking out to entice customers to the yellow lights, canned music and nakedness inside. The bus terminal was the only building with any lights on, and they flickered weakly.
She stepped quietly onto the sidewalk and sidled up to the front door. No one was around. She walked through the lobby, it was deserted, chain link fences were installed in three of the corners. Offices behind the fences were abandoned, empty and dark. The walls were covered with printouts declaring re-routes and service cuts.
She walked lightly towards the bus yard, still no one in sight.
She heard Frank’s low voice, “We’d better not get busted. They never make you look good in mug shots.”
She laughed as quietly as she could, “We could make it your new Facebook profile pic, but your dad would kill you.”
He motioned a strangulation with both hands around his neck, “You’re right, I could never go home again, the first criminal in the family!”
She pushed aside a hurricane fence, making herself as thin as she could, easing into the yard sideways thru an opening just large enough for her.
Frank was squeezing himself through when she barked, “No,” at him. “I do this alone, Frank. It’s me and my city.”
He nodded and turned, scanning the interior of the terminal.
She snuck over to a parked bus, the line that went up and down Michigan Avenue. She put her purse down on the ground and quickly extracted and unfolded her new stencil. She grabbed it with one hand, tucked the spray paint cans into her shirt neck and wedged first one foot, then the second into the small opening between the bus bumper and the bus body, grabbing onto the windshield wipers to stabilize herself. She placed the cardboard on the right window and pulled out the red can, spraying a broken heart onto the large window. She pulled out her white can and sprayed through the ‘We need each other’ stencil underneath the heart, then sprayed a small HOPE with blue paint as her signature.
She tucked the cans back into her shirt and jumped nimbly off the bus bumper, heading over to the next bus parked in the darkness. She clambered up onto its front end, wondering how many front windows she could deface in the few minutes she had before someone, anyone had to find their way into the terminal. It was radio silence from Frank, so she knew she was safe. She sprayed, jumped down and kept going down the line of soon–to-be mothballed buses. She stopped counting at 11, but kept going for a few more. Some of these buses might not do routes tomorrow morning, so she knew she’d have to cover enough to ensure that someone saw her message.
When she ran out of red paint, she knew it was time. She stood, quietly, her faith gone. Her mother would be heartbroken, she knew, to see the depths of Detroit’s downfall. Her mother relied on the buses, as did she. The poverty of the city was now going to crush its citizens, leaving them no chance of getting to far away jobs, since there were no jobs in their neighborhoods.
Tears floated in her lower eyelids. Her time here was done.
She walked softly into the light of the terminal, motioned to Frank and headed to the front door, pushing the glass door open to the street. It squeaked loudly. Aged in its hinges, it hung a quarter inch off kilter, just enough to ensure it couldn’t close properly.
They walked quietly a few blocks, hand in hand. She edged up to a trash bin and stealthily dumped the spray paint cans into the bottom, reaching in to cover them with a left behind newspaper.
She motioned to Frank and he led her another block or two away. There were no open businesses. Clearly Frank’s lovely memory of a restaurant nearby was just that.
The neighborhood was desolate except for nearly invisible homeless people sleeping in closed store doorways, covered by tarps and cast off cardboard which could not be expected to ward off the looming cold weather.
Not,” he said, tripping over a foot jutting out from a street stairwell, “our crowd.”
‘The cab driver said it’s a bad neighborhood.”
“And he left you?”
“He thought I was either Mother Theresa or shopping for drugs,” she said. “I told him I was down here for champagne and dessert and I didn’t understand why he kept looking at me from his rear view mirror.”
“He thought you wanted coke,” Frank laughed. He mimicked shorting coke, “when you said dessert, he thought you meant sugar.”
“Oh, my god,” Celeste said.
“You’re such an innocent,” Frank said. “How would you ever survive without me? I shudder to think.”
They walked block after block, shaken by the emptiness. The buildings were dour, the sidewalks dirty with weeds growing through broken concrete. The streetlights lit from twenty feet above their heads, casting eerie glows as though expecting customers and residents that would need their lights.
But no one moved. The few people there were asleep on the hard pavement, covered so that Celeste couldn’t be sure they were human.
The blocks all looked the same, Celeste thought. Utterly decrepit.
Six or seven blocks later, they began to encounter small groups of people stumbling out of bars, loitering in front of
liquor stores.
“They’re ruining my buzz,” Frank said.
“Did you really bring your bottle?” Celeste asked.
Frank pulled open his heavy wool black pea coat, showing the bottle clutched underneath. “I don’t know that we’ll find anywhere decent around here, though.”
“No cheesecake for you,” Celeste said, mimicking their favorite line from a sitcom they’d watched together online.
She scanned the now-forming crowds. They blended in with one glaring difference. She and Frank were the only people speeding to get somewhere. Everyone else loitered, leaning on walls, standing on sidewalks, no momentum at all.
“I’m getting my creepy feeling, it’s how I feel when I get out into the suburbs,” Frank said, “They’d just as soon shoot you with their hunting rifle and stuff you and hoist you to a special spot above the fireplace. Here, it’s worse. It’s like zombies waiting for a wakeup call.”
“Don’t scare me,” Celeste said. “We should have stayed home.”
“No way. I finally get a night out with my girl. And your hair looks good.”
“So we keep walking.”
They passed a bar, its darkened doorway open to the street.
Something caught Celeste’s eye and she grabbed Frank’s hand.
In a moment, they were both thrown in the air with the force of a deafening blast. Crashing into each other, they crumpled against a car at the sidewalk. Celeste’s arm went into the already breaking window.
Before she could compose herself, she felt warm liquid on her wrist. She lifted herself off the ground and saw blood trickling from her elbow.
Frank was shaking his head back and forth, looking down at a four-inch shard of glass.
Celeste quickly hunched over him, opening the buttons of his coat. The glass had slipped in the fabric sideways, thank goodness. If it had gone straight on, it would have pierced his chest.
She dragged him to his feet and saw that he too was bleeding. Drips of redness expanded on his shirt and the top of his pants. He seemed confused, unfocused.
She opened his coat more and the shattered champagne bottle fell to the street.
“God damn,” she said, patting him down to see if any glass shards had impaled him.
He stood dazed.
She pulled a few pieces of the bottle’s glass out of his clothes and found three different puncture wounds on his torso.
“We’ll have to get you to a doctor,” she said. “I don’t think you need stitches but we sure won’t be having champagne.” She turned on her cell phone and dialed 911, asking for an ambulance.
“We’ve sent out several already,” the dispatcher said.
Celeste followed the line of Frank’s distracted gaze. They were surrounded by strangers milling around the bar’s entrance, some running in as though the bar was a magical cave suddenly opened up. She grabbed for Frank and pulled him close to her, sheltering his wounded stomach with her arms.
Strangers pushed against each other to get in to the bar, some coming out shoving little white baggies into the darkness of their coverings. She recoiled as people whose faces weren’t visible, their heads recessed deep into the hoods of dark sweatshirts, fought each other, desperate for a high to get them back into any possible numbness. A drug stash was suddenly available in ground zero of the explosion, for all those sleeping zombies forced into withdrawal by poverty and homelessness.
As whispered rumors spread, strangers in the darkness literally clawed and climbed over each other to get into the bar, crushing Celeste and Frank back against the car until they could barely breathe. They gripped each other in terror.
And then, from the back of the now-jammed building came another deafening roar, a fire bomb exploded upwards, sucking termite-eaten upper wooden floors down onto each other, into the basement, the dried out wood of the dead building then exploded back into the sky through three floors.
The zombies staggered out of the blazing doorway, their skin melting into their off kilter eyes, burns on their arms and legs where their clothes had incinerated.
Unbearable heat blew at them, knocking the strangers onto the ground and, though she knew she should keep her eyes closed, Celeste was hit with a suffocating blast of chemicals that burned her eyes and throat. She saw that Frank was now doubled over. She put one arm over her own face and the other over his, to protect him from the black billowing smoke.
As the sounds of sirens wailed, she shoved the two of them down the sidewalk where arriving fire trucks were racing to park on the wide-open street.
Her head hurt from the fumes, the impact of being thrown against the steel of a car door and now the incessant screaming of ambulance sirens. She lowered her inflamed eyelids and watched in shock as what looked like phosphorescent moon men got dressed at the side of a red truck, covering their navy blue uniforms with yellow puffy suits.
It was surreal, the pain, the care of Frank, the burning acrid air and now the presence of running hazardous material suits in and out of the flaming building fifteen feet behind her, the continuing push of some zombies to get into the active blaze to steal one more hit.
She held Frank as he convulsed on the sidewalk, his eyes shut from inflammation. Ambulance workers pushed past her to retrieve the dying from the dead piled up at the building’s door. Their wounds were ghastly.
She dragged Frank to standing and held him up, put her arm around his waist and then his arm over her shoulder, despite his pained gasps. With all of her strength, she hoisted him enough to walk, helping him step by step, heading away from the destruction towards an ambulance, any ambulance not already dealing with the screams of burn victims.
Suddenly they were out of the hordes of city vehicles, where she let them both drop to the ground. Moments later, she felt herself being lifted onto a gurney, though she protested about not leaving Frank, and eventually she opened her eyes in the back of an ambulance, holding Frank’s hand as he lay on the gurney next to her.
“What happened?” she heard Frank ask, repeating himself until an EMT who was checking his vital signs said ‘meth lab explosion but you’ll be okay, maybe broken ribs. Your eyes are seared shut because of the chemicals in the fire. You’ve got lacerations around your ribs. No sign yet of internal damage.”
“And you,” they said, speaking to Celeste, “those eyes will need an eye wash and you’ll need to have your lungs checked. You guys are lucky.”
“How?” Celeste asked, confused by a hollow ringing in her head.
“Those crazy users, they kept going in for more. They’re either dead or going to be in a burn ward for a long, long time.”
Celeste felt the scratchiness of the bandages he put on her eyes, the goopy salve leaked around her eyelids. She fell asleep on the gurney and then awoke ten hours later, signed release forms and climbed onto Frank’s hospital bed to nap with him until he too was released after another six hours.
She had to take sick days, the first she’d taken since she had come to work.
Jeannie was worried, but whispered into the phone that they were going to hire replacements for a week at a time because they didn’t know how much longer the office could sustain itself. Collections were down, no one had cash to pay their bills.
When Eddie returned, she could feel his worry and guilt as she told him the story of wanting to meet Frank at his childhood haunt, the explosions, the burning air in their lungs.
He stayed home with her, caretaking, laying next to her for a day or so until she fell deeply asleep from the accruing painkillers prescribed by the hospital.
Then she felt him leave, from her deep sleep. But she let him go, her eyes needed to rest but they wouldn’t. They rubbed against grainy muslin when they jerked back and forth against her eyelids, trying to see him in her sleep.
Hours passed, two days passed and she opened her eyes to see him, asleep on the bed next to her, his boyish features overcome by exhaustion, his body wracked.
On the third day, she rose, famished a
nd groggy. Eddie was weaning her off the pain medication, “Too addictive,” he said. He’d gone out to get more groceries, kissing her hands instead of her face. Her eyelids had recovered, they were almost back to their normal size and her energy was slowly returning. There was a tall glass of ice water on the table next to her bed. Her laptop was on his pillow and as she sat up, she heard Frank’s voice, “You’re alive, Missy!”
“Frank,” she called out, “where are you?”
“I’m in my box,” Frank laughed sleepily.
She looked at the laptop screen to see his face rising to the center. He was lying down in his own bed, white gauze wrapped around his temples, covering his eyes except for small slits he opened with his fingers.
“Your hot Army boyfriend brought over some groceries.”
“Eddie did?”
“Yup. He’s stopped in twice. But I hate him. He’s being a cop with my painkillers.”
Celeste asked, “How are you?”
“Fine, except for the fact that my gorgeous six pack abs have a purple, bottle-shaped bruise!”
“Oh my god!” Celeste laughed gently, “You have to take a picture.”
Suddenly, in her laptop screen, she saw his stomach with a black and blue shape exactly like his favorite expensive champagne and she couldn’t help it, she broke out laughing. “What were we thinking?”
“I don’t know,” he said, smirking. “This town is so screwed up. Eddie told me that the old bar was a meth lab. Is there any building in Detroit that those idiots haven’t taken over?”
“I think it’s everywhere. At least that’s what the doctors were saying at the hospital. Fire trucks carry those yellow haz mat suits now. They can’t go into fires without them if it’s meth. The chemicals are too dangerous to breathe.”
“When are you going back to work?” Frank asked.
“Whenever you do,” Celeste answered. “I can’t do that job without you.”
“Me neither,” he said. “I’m going to wait until Monday. It hurts to sit up. I had to switch to ibuprofen because that mean bf of yours is marshalling out my legal drugs.”