The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  “Don’t move,” he warned, wagging his finger at me, “or you’ll ruin it!”

  He waited for me to stop laughing, then applied more paint to my belly, but tentatively, ready to stop to avoid a smear in case I got ticklish again. Whenever I started laughing he told me to stay still, stay still, come on Arrowman, seriously! As punishment for my wiggling he leaned down and put a row of teasing kisses along my penis.

  It took a while and while he was painting I began to feel more peaceful than sexy. Content, as though I’d be happy to have this moment stretch to the end of my life. Sometimes watching him, sometimes just feeling him. He worked with concentration; his tongue crept out from the corner of his mouth when he was trying to get something just right; his hair fell back and forth over his eyes. When he was done he sat up and surveyed me, idly licking paint off his fingers.

  “How is it? The taste.”

  “Tastes like a Fruit Roll-Up,” he said. “Here.” He leaned forward—his penis, soft now from the focus on his painting, slid wonderfully against mine—and pressed his fingers against my waiting tongue. I touched his wrist to hold it there.

  “Mmm. It does.” I let go of his hand, licked my lips. I was desperate to pull him down on top of me. “Finished yet?”

  “Came out a lot better than I expected,” he said, grin huge. He leaned back onto his heels and stood up, wobbling on the mattress, and gave me his hands to lift me up. “I like it a lot. One of my favorites.”

  “I want to see.”

  We went in the bathroom and, standing behind me with his chin on my shoulder, he positioned me in front of the full-length mirror.

  “Wow. It’s your bridge.” Across my torso from my sternum to my thighs was an abstract rendering of the Zakim Bridge, its two main structures like giant divining rods pointing to my face, cables hanging between them and supporting a highway that ran along my waist like a belt.

  He said, smiling, “You make a good wall.” Then he turned me and kissed me, leaving smears of paint on my lips. “I want to sign you now!”

  We returned to the sofa-bed and I lay back down, careful not to smudge myself. He looked me over, tapping his chin. He ran his hand up my inner thigh. It tickled.

  “How about here?” he said. “I like this place.”

  I raised my leg a little. He took the tube of blue paint and squirted what was left into his mouth. He swished it around like mouthwash, mixing it with spit. He spread his fingers evenly on my inner thigh and leaned down, bringing his mouth close to my skin. He blew a hot, fine blend of paint and spit against his fingers, his dedinhos, using them as a stencil against me, so that when he removed them their negative image was left in the blue place on my thigh.

  I sat up to have

  a look and he was harder than hard and I was too and I was worried he might not want to splatter his masterpiece so soon. But then he pushed me down and did just that.

  We laughed during it,

  something he’d always done and which I was only beginning to get used to. Sex, for me, while never formal, had almost always been serious—but he brought a glee to it that you had to just roll with. When we were done he started cracking up, squirming beneath me, making a squiggly snow-angel in the rumpled white sheets. They were so streaked with paint it looked as though rainbows were pouring out of him.

  “What’s so funny?” I put my hands on the mattress just below his armpits and lowered myself onto him, making a jizzy splat when our bellies met.

  “Oof,” he said.

  “I’m tired now.”

  “Me too.” He crossed his legs over the backs of mine, ran his foot back and forth against the inside of my thigh, over the place where he’d made his mark. “And hungry. That paint wasn’t very filling.”

  “So hungry,” I said into his hair. “I could eat a foot-long sub.”

  “I could eat forty-two pancakes.”

  “I could eat a turkey.” I felt his hands on my back, fingers tracing my shoulder blades.

  “I could eat an entire Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “I could eat a cow,” I said.

  “I could eat a flock of cows.”

  “You mean a herd of cows. A flock of geese.”

  “A gaggle of geese.”

  “Smarty pants.”

  “I’m not wearing any pants.”

  “Heh.”

  “I could finish that wedding cake.”

  “Me too. They’d be pissed though. Want me to make you a sandwich?” I blew raspberries against his stubble.

  “Yes please.”

  “I must look such a mess now,” I said. “And I don’t know if I can move.” I feigned trying to push myself up. “I think we’re dried together forever.”

  “We’ll have to go to work like this,” he said.

  “They’d love that. What do you want on your sandwich?”

  “What do you have?” His arms crossed again over my back and his legs tightened around my thighs.

  “Honey ham. I think some turkey.” I knew we weren’t any closer to getting up.

  “I’ll have ham. And cheese?”

  “All the cheese you could want.”

  “Mayo if you have it.”

  “Miracle Whip.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Mustard too?”

  “Mustard too.”

  It was another fifteen minutes before I finally got up to make it. We ate sandwiches paint-splattered on paint-splattered sheets like some kind of performance art piece.

  At 4:30 his phone started

  squawking. To me it was squawking, but I guess to him it was like a starting whistle. On your mark. Get set. I snapped awake and clenched the sheets. “Wha—!”

  He reached for the glowing device and stopped its squawking. “Only my phone,” he whispered. “Sshh.” Squinting, he held it up to his face and worked the buttons with his thumbs. I grumbled and buried my face in the back of his head.

  “You forgot to turn it off,” I mumbled, his curls sticking to my lips.

  He rolled onto his back and my nose settled in his ear. “I didn’t forget.” His tone was normal but the words sounded ominous.

  “You’re not going out tonight—are you?” I pulled away—in light of those words it was no longer cutesy that my nose was in his ear.

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  I was silent a moment. Why indeed? “It’s our—wedding night.”

  He laughed. “Come out with me then.”

  “I don’t— I don’t want to come out with you. I want to stay in bed with you.” I leaned up on an elbow and stared at him, a stare I felt was glarey enough to argue my case. “I want to sleep with my boyfriend through one continuous goddamn night, for once.”

  “Hm.”

  I sighed. “I’m sorry.” I touched his hand. Never once had I seen it fully clean, and that was starting to bother me. “Can’t we just sleep? You already painted tonight anyway. And almost got caught, if you recall. And you painted on me. We were up late.”

  “That’s why I gave us extra time to sleep.”

  “Teo—” But I could see it was pointless. I rolled over and stared at the wall.

  “Are you coming?”

  I closed my eyes.

  “Fletcher. Are you coming I said?”

  “No.”

  He sighed. “Fine.”

  I opened my eyes. There was something resigned in his voice that made me believe I’d won, and with a quiver of excitement I waited for him to lay back down. Any moment now the bed would squeak under his shifting weight and his stubbly chin would fit itself back into the curve of my neck and shoulder. Any moment. Any moment.

  Instead there was a rustling of clothes, the sound of the bathroom door, the sound of mouthwash swished and spit. After a minute I felt lips on my cheek, and then the sound of clinking cans muffled in a backpack, the sound of a door opening and closing and quiet footsteps growing quieter as they receded down the stairs.

  I sat up, wide awake.

  He didn�
�t feel guilty, exactly—

  he felt that I should be used to this by now, and he wasn’t going to make any apologies to anyone about doing what he did. Least of all to me, his boyfriend, his almost-crew, who should be totally supportive of this part of his life, who should give him the benefit of every doubt on this topic. But he did wonder whether tonight was a night he should’ve stayed in bed. He could’ve pretended it was raining....

  No. There was work to be done, paint to unleash, words to write.

  With his hood up and his thumbs hooked through the straps of his backpack he walked a half-mile from my apartment to an area where the city was almost rural, to a bridge that went over a gulley and a stream. He’d started a Fact months ago on the concrete wall abutting the stream and he was surprised to find it still there. It must’ve rained shortly after he stopped working last time because the paint was bent into drips and cut with clear lines as though someone had squirted thinner at it. He tried to remember if the rain was what stopped his work last time. Really this should just be whitewashed and put out of its misery, but he had no rollers on him and anyway was in the mood to try to salvage something tonight.

  He shook his can. I was not, he was beginning to admit to himself, exactly into graffiti. At least not as into it as I’d been in the beginning. In the beginning he and graffiti had been entwined, an indivisible, exciting new package, but that was no longer the case. Now he was the boyfriend, linked, partnered, to graffiti on one side and to me on the other. It was a love triangle.

  Love?

  A fssshht of spraying paint not his own interrupted his thoughts and he looked up, startled, thinking at first, and hoping, that I’d followed him, that the sprayer was me. Someone was reaching over the overhang of the bridge and painting upside down with light-colored paint on the green-painted steel. In the dark he could see only the can and a shadowy arm but he could tell by the letterforms that it wasn’t me.

  The guy then spotted him too and Mateo lifted his chin and the guy gave a little nod and finished his tag.

  Mateo tried to work out from the angle whether the guy could’ve been able to see what he was painting. He decided he probably couldn’t, but nevertheless considered his options. He ended up walking casually six feet closer to the bridge, leaving this ever-in-progress Fact alone, and whipped out a decoy DEDINHOS in fast, tight letterforms.

  While he was doing this the guy on the bridge disappeared, and Mateo felt relieved. But a minute later he heard him behind him, coming down the slope, pea-stones skittering ahead of him and plunking into the stream.

  “Yo,” said the guy. Rather, the kid—he was young. Celtics sweatshirt and flashy sneakers.

  Mateo lowered his can and took a breath. He nodded and looked up at the kid’s work and back at the kid. “You write MAKO?”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah.” He examined Mateo’s decoy. “You write DEDINHOS?” Mateo said yeah and the kid said, “I seen your tags around. What’s a dedinho anyway?”

  “Just my name,” Mateo said. “Cousin stuck it to me.”

  “For real.”

  The wind moved the trees and the light and shadows changed and the kid noticed the other piece. “Holy shit, that yours?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you do the Izzies?”

  “The what? Oh—I fucking wish. No.” He swiped his hand over an old part of the Fact to demonstrate that the paint was long dry. “I just write DEDINHOS. Just DEDINHOS.” He prayed the kid wouldn’t step closer and find that some parts were still wet.

  “Oh.” Mako looked a little disappointed.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “Ever seen the guy?”

  “No. Actually, from the rumors I hear, it’s a girl.”

  The kid laughed and Mateo wondered why. “Right. I hear talk he ain’t even human, though.”

  “What is he then?”

  “Fuck if I know. Fuck if I know how he gets all those places all those times. Not human is a good guess. People say he’s a shapeshifter or some shit. So when he’s handling his business and a cop comes by, dude just morphs into a trashcan or some shit till the coast is clear.”

  Mateo hadn’t heard that one. “That’s what they say, huh?”

  “For real.”

  “What do you say?”

  “I don’t say. Mako is silent on the matter. Mako observes. For all I know dude’s shapeshifted into that fucking tree right there. I do not speak ill of the Izzies.” The reverence in the kid’s voice was both chilling and thrilling.

  “Good idea. You never know, right? Maybe you write them.”

  Mako looked at him intently, narrowing his dark eyes, trying to decide whether Mateo was being serious or poking fun. He shrugged. “All right, I’m out.”

  “Later.”

  The kid started walking back up the slope, slipped down hard on his knees, got up, wiped his legs, said “Dedinhooos!” when he saw Mateo had seen him fall, and continued up past the flickering trees.

  Mateo put some finishing touches on the decoy and pressed the cap back on his can. The Fact would have to wait again—he’d come back to it another night. He was done for today. Two close calls in one day was a record he wasn’t thrilled with setting.

  He walked slowly back to my place, climbed the stairs, and had already undone his belt when he found me not in the bed but sitting on the edge of it, tying my shoes.

  “Oh,” he said.

  I stood up.

  P A R T

  T H R E E

  The Writing On the Wall

  His fingers went: blue, orange,

  red, purple, blue, green, yellow (a bright lemon, not the honey of his humans), red, pink, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, yellow, orange, green, green, lime, purple, red, blue.

  As his fingers changed colors so did the trees, and soon at night we were spotting lumbering trucks and teams of men sucking up piles of dead leaves off the sidewalks with vacuum hoses as big around as barrels.

  “Do you think people ever get sucked up into those?” I said.

  “Definitely.”

  The night workers were like wild animals, like something you’d spot while fishing, something coming down to the edge of a lake for a drink. And like woodsmen we walked among them in an unstated truce. Surely they knew what we were doing but it wasn’t their concern what walls got graffitied that night—they had a job to do—so the leaf-blowers, the street-sweepers, the electricians coming up out of holes in the street, they left us alone.

  Sometimes being out in the wee hours doing what we did was exhilarating. Often it was. When he was suddenly grabbing me to run, when he most had that intoxicating, contagious thrill in his eyes. When we slipped into Cook in the morning and no one knew we’d spent the last hours of the night in his car, making space-constrained love in the backseat or just holding on to each other to keep warm.

  But the weeks were creeping by and it was getting colder. One night in mid-November I noticed his typewriter-ribbon–dark hair collecting grains of white crystal. The first snow.

  “Brrr,” I murmured, suddenly feeling colder. I looked up and saw snowflakes shivering in the glowing air around a streetlight. I could feel them on my face too, pricks of cold on my eyelids and nose. I stopped in the middle of an ARROWMAN, leaving ARRO, and capped my can.

  “Not going to finish?” he said.

  “I’ll come back to it.”

  “OK.” He dragged a spray of paint across his fingers to mark a finished Fact. “Let’s go. You’re freezing.”

  Winter that year had a premature climax, day after day in November burying the frosty city in wave after wave of snow. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs I started shivering at the first chimes of Mateo’s pitch-dark alarm-clock reveille. But by early December the winter was spent. Christmas decorations went up in lukewarm weather and lots of breath was expended on the subject of climate change.

  The weather was killer for painting, though, that’s what Mateo said. But my nose was always runny, my lips were always chapped, my eyes always fel
t tired, and the days always began too soon. Too many afternoons I was falling asleep at my desk, slumped backward like a drunk or falling forward onto my keyboard like a dead drunk. One afternoon I woke up to find seventy pages of Y’s on my screen. An unrelenting question.

  Why was I doing this every night? Why was I going out spraying paint on things that weren’t mine? It was true that since college, since my Porcupine City awakening, I’d fancied myself a bit of a bad boy—but why? Because I banged a lot of guys? Because I slept with people who wanted to be slept with? When I was out at night with a can in my hand defacing people’s property all my previous bad-boy escapades seemed as morally questionable as returning an old lady’s lost purse. Meanwhile Mateo painted away. Bad boy. Sometimes it was exhilarating, yes. When he was really in the zone there was no more beautiful sight on Earth. But other times it left me full of guilt, made me want to turn myself in. The rest of the long winter still loomed, and maybe I didn’t really want to be a bad boy. Maybe all I’d ever wanted was to be warm.

  “Relationships are all about compromise,” Cara would often tell me, her advice seeming more legit and persuasive the more pregnant and Buddha-like she became. “You shouldn’t feel like you have to go out with him every single night.”

  So I started to think of a tactful reason to limit my nights out with Mateo, to stay in bed when he got up. It wasn’t long before I got one. Unfortunately it happened by accident. And it was anything but tactful.

  Outside a post office hub,

  in a fenced-in lot where they keep the postal trucks parked at night, we were doing the back doors of two trucks side by side. He’d gone over the tall chain-link fence with an ease that was always a pleasure to watch—the sight of his nimble acrobatics was worth a few hours of runny nose—and from the other side opened a gate for me to slip in with his backpack. But when he headed for the trucks I felt queasy. I already had more of a problem with vehicles, for reasons he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. Vehicles felt to me more tangibly property than a wall or a bridge did, more owned by some particular person who wouldn’t be happy to discover our handiwork, even if it was a public vehicle like a bus or a T car or these postal trucks.