The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  I told the woman I was here to see Mateo Amaral, who’d been arrested. She was not unfriendly but had the air of a government employee with no need to satisfy me because I needed everything from her and she needed nothing, not even money, from me.

  “Mateo Amaral,” I repeated, wanting to give her his full name just to prove that I knew it. Mateo Vinicius Armstrong Amaral. Then she asked my name and I gave her that too.

  “Have a seat,” she told me. “We’ll call you. Could be a while.”

  I settled onto a wooden bench. The woman with the kid was reading a magazine. Not flipping through a magazine like other people were doing, but actually reading it. She had the attention to spare. She’d definitely done this before.

  Eventually they called my name.

  Again I imagined a dungeon and again it was more like the RMV: fluorescent lighting, glossy gray tile floors, walls of that rough brick with shiny pale-blue paint like in elementary school cafeterias. We went up a rubber-treaded ramp and around a corner and another waiting area and here, like some kind of zoo, were the bars.

  “Do not touch the bars, do not pass anything through the bars.”

  “I won’t,” I said in case I was supposed to respond.

  My god, he looked so small in there. Like a caged bunny among bigger beasts. One flinching glimpse of him was all it took to make me take back my earlier thought—no way could jail ever be good for him. I somehow knew without doubt it would kill him. He was sitting on a bench with his colored fingers clasped between his knees, the toe of one shoe crossed over the toe of the other. His head was hanging and his hair covered his face.

  “Teo,” I said, and he looked up. The bright eyes popped against the darkness of his hair and his glossy, month-long beard.

  He smiled. It broke my heart. It filled me with rage. I lifted my hands to touch the bars, to fucking rip them apart, to grab him and hold him and carry him away from here.

  And on the heels of that fantasy came the realization, with surprise, with a gasp, with perfect clarity: I love him.

  He stood up. “There you are. You got my message.”

  “Of course. I came right away.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  “What happened, Mateo? When are you getting out of here? Do you have a lawyer? I can try to get you a lawyer. Jamar’s dad would know—”

  “...One will be appointed to me,” he recited in monotone.

  “A public defender? No. You want someone good, goddammit, Mateo.”

  “He’s nice. Young. Cute. You’ll like him.”

  “This is serious.”

  “It’s going to be OK.”

  “Mateo.” I didn’t know how much I could say here. Certainly I couldn’t risk revealing to anyone nearby that Mateo wrote the Facts. “When do you get out?”

  “Oh, won’t be long.” He scratched his beard and pushed his hair up away from his face. “Before night, I think.”

  “What do you want me to— Jesus, Mateo, you’ve got paint in your hair.” Running along his hairline was orange paint, dried and flaking like neon dandruff. I reached through the bars and touched his forehead with my thumb.

  “Hands, please!” an officer shouted and I looked at her, confused, and withdrew my hand. What the hell did she think was going to happen?

  I was ready to cry. I wanted to scream. “What do you want me to do, Mateo? You called me and I’m here and now I don’t know what to do.”

  He seemed to be thinking about it. “There’s only one cure for me.” He raised his finger and pressed an invisible valve on an invisible can, and smiled.

  “No no no. You need a break.”

  “No breaks.”

  I sighed. “Do you want me to wait for you?”

  “You don’t have to wait. Thank you for coming. It was good just to see you. I’ll be OK. I’ll call you.”

  I looked again at the paint on his forehead, wondering how you even get paint on your forehead. Had he been kissing a wall? Would I be surprised if he was?

  I turned the ignition and

  started to back out of the space. I stopped. Stared for a long time at the police station doors. Turned off the car. Pulled out my phone and called Jamar. And sat.

  When a parking space opened near the main doors I moved so it would be harder to miss him when he came out. Twice I went back inside to the vending machines for soda and Snickers. I listened to the radio long enough to hear the popular songs three or four times. I would’ve thought that if I had to kill an indefinite amount of time in a parking lot, a police department lot would be a good one to do it in—the foot traffic would be entertaining, right? Cursing pimps in feathered hats. Stumbling drunks. Murderers bathed in their victims’ blood. Prostitutes calling officers sugar. But there was none of that. While I watched, two men and one woman were brought into the station, all three with that perturbed air of being under arrest, but one of the three wasn’t even handcuffed.

  That I was afraid Mateo would sneak out of the station and slip past me is perhaps a sign of how far I thought he had gone. But after all, he’d called me—he didn’t have to. And he did wake me up, did reach through my open window and gently touch my hair when he finally came out and I was asleep.

  Night had been going on for hours and he looked shiny in the glow of the station floodlights. I opened my door, got out, stretched my legs. I wanted to hug him but didn’t.

  “Thought you were going home,” he said.

  “I started to.” I stomped the blood back into my legs. “I didn’t want to leave you here.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah, I’m OK.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “My stuff.” He tore open the heat-sealed plastic and pulled out his phone, wallet, keys—it made me think of the key-touching guy, even here, even all this time later. “They kept my paint, though. Evidence.”

  “Well, you have more where that came from, I’m sure.”

  He smiled.

  “So what are you doing now? You said in your voicemail that Marjorie moved. Where are you living?”

  “Boston,” he said, gesturing east, and he smiled again. “Boston!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do.”

  “Are you—homeless?”

  “No. Homeless is one thing I’m definitely not.”

  “Are you houseless?”

  “What do I need a house for, Fletcher? A house is a place to be when I’m not painting. And I don’t want to ever be not painting.”

  Suddenly I felt scared for him again. “Get in the car?” I asked, not thinking he would.

  But he did; it felt like a miracle. I waited for him to put on his seatbelt and then I started for my place.

  On the phone he’d sounded sad, and he still looked sad, but his sadness had a veneer of betrayal too. He truly didn’t understand.

  “I always thought of it as kind of a game, you know?” Driving down Route 9 toward Boston, his Facts blinked by here and there on billboards and retaining walls and bridges. “The cat would chase the mouse and that’s what makes the mouse the mouse. I mean I can’t imagine doing what I do with their consent. Wouldn’t be the same. But it’s a game. The cat isn’t supposed to catch the mouse. Why would the cat want to catch the mouse? Even Lex Luthor always gives Superman an out.” Then he shook his head. “Newton. It’s because I was in Newton, that’s why. Boston wouldn’t have done this to me.” He shook his head again. “Boston wouldn’t have done this.”

  He’d gotten caught while

  painting on the back of Sunfield Hall a life-size mural of Kupono, Phoebe’s favorite dancer, doing a back-flip. A gift for her, a birthday present. A neighbor spotted him doing it and called the police. The piece was very lifelike so Phoebe would recognize the dancer—not in Mateo’s usual stylized style, not yellow—and this was his saving grace. Otherwise the police would’ve known right away that the guy they cornered against a garage and a swimming-p
ool fence was the guy and not just some random vandal. The women of Sunfield watched from the windows in varying states of interest—Phoebe was the only one crying—as Mateo was handcuffed and led, book-ended by officers taller and wider than him, to the cruiser, and put inside, and driven away.

  I looked over and he was rubbing his wrist. He had a court date. Would probably have to pay a hefty fine. But it could’ve been worse.

  “Can you imagine what would happen if they knew you write the Facts?”

  “Three years in jail, a fine, and millions of dollars in cleanup fees. I would imagine.”

  I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out. I just kept looking at him. He looked back at me and shrugged.

  “Almost home,” I told him.

  It was starting to feel like a routine: he would arrive at my apartment smelly, scruffy, looking slightly bewildered, and I would find him soon afterward clean, fully Mateo, in my bed. As though my apartment restored him. As though my bed brought him back. It was nice to believe that. I wanted it to be true.

  He was thinner; the

  baby fat I knew before was gone. But his mouth was still smooth and sweet and his hands went right to the places I liked to be touched. He pressed against me as though he couldn’t get close enough, his toes pushing off against the tops of my feet. And when he was inside me I held the back of his head and pressed his face to my neck, felt his lips on my throat. He’d looked so small in the holding cell, but against me he felt huge, a city-size giant capable of surrounding me and filling me all at once, capable of picking me up and carrying me in any direction he wanted. I whispered into his hair, in a voice he could hear only if he wanted to, I love you, I love you, and meant it.

  “Arrowman,” he said.

  It was May and not since before Valentine’s Day had we done this. I didn’t know when it would happen again, or if it ever would, and because of that I wanted it all, as far as we could go, and because of that, I hated the presence of the condom. I hated it even more than I’d hated the glove I was wearing on the first night we painted, on that wall outside Jamaica Plain, when he put his valve-finger on mine and helped me to paint. I wanted him to come inside me, to fill me. I wanted to feel the heat of him course through me. I had never wanted that from a guy before, had thought of condoms as happy facilitators of the life I wanted to lead, like bicycle helmets and boxing gloves, not a hindrance. But here I felt hindered. I wanted to feel him.

  I thought: Cara, I understand.

  He stretched his legs out behind me and heaved me up so I was sitting on his lap with my legs locked around his waist, our bellies and chests together as we moved. I slipped my arms under his and clasped my hands against the small of his back to hold myself up. His back was sticky there, wet—wet with sweat. No, something more slippery than sweat. I raised my hand, expecting to find my fingers shiny with lube, and gasped when they came up purple. The edible body paints? When had he gotten them out?

  I put a purple finger on my tongue. It tasted of salt.

  In the morning when Jamar

  woke me up I was surprised to find Mateo still in my bed. I sat up and Jamar retreated to the door. I showed him a finger to tell him one minute. He nodded and disappeared into the kitchen. I got up, pulled on shorts and a t-shirt. It was normal to be getting up at this time on a weekday but today my alarm hadn’t been set. From now on I was on Jamar’s schedule.

  I closed my door behind me. Jamar was standing at the sink rinsing one of Caleb’s bottles. There were baby food jars scattered on the counter, some with rubber-coated spoons still sticking out of them. The kitchen was kind of a mess.

  He turned off the water and put the bottle in the rack. “Mateo, huh?”

  “You could tell?”

  “By the hair. So you sprung him out of jail?” He said it and smirked and then we both laughed. How silly it sounded.

  “For now.”

  “Well. Sorry to wake you up. I have to go. We need to perform the Caleb switch.”

  “Of course, yeah. Where is he?”

  “My room.”

  I went in. It was a mess in there too and I had to kick aside shoes and laundry to wheel the crib out to the kitchen. Caleb was contentedly sucking a pacifier (Jamar and I agreed to call them that, not a binky or anything even worse).

  “He just ate,” Jamar said, “so he should be good for, oh jeez, probably five minutes!”

  “Haha. OK.” I put my foot against one of the wheels, spun it against the slick linoleum. “So today’s your big day, huh? First day back.”

  “I’m a little nervous.”

  “Don’t be nervous. It’ll all come back to you.”

  “I know.” He dried his hands on a towel and tossed it on the counter. “I need to go.”

  After re-confirming that I had all necessary phone numbers (numbers ordered by urgency from idle question to life-threatening peril), he leaned into the crib to kiss Caleb on the head, squeezed my shoulder, jingled his keys, and headed out. It was Jamar’s first day. It was mine too.

  “It’s you and me, kid,” I told Caleb. “Crazy as that sounds.”

  I took a deep breath and blew it out full of disbelief, and wheeled the crib into my room.

  Normally what I would’ve done

  while I showered was roll Caleb’s crib into the bathroom, but because Mateo was there—amazingly still there, all these hours later—I asked if he’d keep an eye on him for a few minutes. As far as he knew, I was babysitting.

  He agreed, and I left Caleb in the crib and Mateo sitting in his boxers on the edge of my bed. When I came back twenty minutes later he was lying on his back on the bed and Caleb was now lying in the center of the bed. There was a large space between them but Mateo’s arm was stretched out and one finger, colored blue, was touching the bottom of Caleb’s bare foot, as though maybe Mateo had been tickling him.

  I secured my towel around my waist and entered the room.

  Mateo sat up.

  “Thanks,” I told him. “Hopefully someday I won’t feel like I need to keep an eye on him every single second.”

  “Yeah. Hey. This boy’s white.” He said it matter-of-factly and cocked his thumb down at the baby.

  “What?”

  “He’s not mixed. Brazil’s like the most mixed-race country on Earth. I know what mixed-race kids look like.”

  My heart was pounding. “So what?”

  “Nothing, no, I’m just saying. Jamar know?”

  “Yes.”

  He shrugged. “Well, he’s cute, that’s for sure. Hair reminds me of my cousin.”

  To that I said nothing.

  “Do you know what happened?” he asked. “Was there a screw-up at the hospital? Or was Cara—?”

  I scooped Caleb up off the bed—he felt like a wiggling sack of potatoes—and returned him to the crib, popped the pacifier back in his mouth. I pushed the whole crib over to get it out of the sun. For a minute I stood there bent over it. Caleb’s brown eyes followed mine, almost expectantly.

  I had never come out of the closet—I’d never been in. When I started having crushes on boys I let the world know it. I told my mom. I told my friends. I told the boys. I never had anything to hide. It was no cakewalk, that’s for sure, but indecision and pretending had never been part of the difficulty. But now I felt like I was in a closet, one where indecision was everything, where pretending was key. A closet full of what-ifs and fears for how things might be, and how things might change, if I were to come out with the truth. A closet based on what the people around me might think and might say, and about what was best for the people I cared about. I felt like a teenager, a common type of teenager but one I’d never been. A teenager struggling to become a man in one instant, with one breath, with one sentence of words.

  I felt my pulse throbbing, as though I might pass out. I sat down beside Mateo.

  “You look nervous,” he said, putting his hand gently on my leg.

  “A little.”

  “It’s OK. You can te
ll me.”

  “I don’t know how to start.”

  I saw him look at my lips—they must’ve been trembling. Then his face opened up with sudden realization and he hugged me. His hands were cool on my bare back, refreshing, like ice on a fever.

  “Oh my god, Fletcher, it’s you!” He laughed into my neck. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

  I pulled away from him just a little, keeping the side of my face against his cheek, and he left his hands clasped against my spine. In this huddled embrace I told him the story from Cara’s journal, almost word for word what she’d written. I told him what she found. And what she did. And then I said, “But that’s not what really happened.”

  “OK. What really happened?”

  “It was last June,” I whispered. “When we were going out.” My lips felt dry.

  “You and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “OK.” Against my cheek I could feel his brow crinkle as he wondered how he factored into this.

  “It was the night you snuck over.”

  “Snuck over?”

  “The night I was stoned and you snuck into my room.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “You were horny.”

  And then, with a twinge, transmission—an idea conveyed. I felt his skin go rough with goosebumps and then get smooth again. His hands unclasped and slid down my back. “And you weren’t,” he said.

  “OK?”

  “You left it in the bathroom. She thought it was yours?”

  I nodded against the side of his head; his ear brushed my lips. “OK?” I said again.

  For a long time he said nothing and I didn’t breathe, and then, finally, he laughed. There was such relief for me in that sound. He pulled his arms back and his hands lay on the towel stretched across my lap. He had tears coming down his cheeks. He rubbed them away with the heel of his hand.

  “I have to figure out what to write about this,” he said.

  He got up, beautiful in the morning sun, and walked over to the crib and stood over it, looking in. Again he wiped his eyes. Suddenly I felt very afraid. What would I do if he wanted to take Caleb? If he picked him up and wanted to leave? But he didn’t pick him up, merely reached down and cupped Caleb’s blond head in the palm of his painty hand. “Well Vini,” he whispered, “maybe you weren’t adopted after all.”