He put his hand on the granite, feeling the words he would coax out with paint, practicing the strokes in his mind. He pressed the valve. The wind affected the release of the paint but after a few strokes he learned to compensate. The paint took hold, the letters grew.
He could feel his city rumbling beneath him and through him. Tears came to his eyes. He cried Wooooo! and made a cautious hop with his fist raised high. He could feel the Acela slipping through Jamaica Plain, past the concrete wall where he and I painted that very first time. He could feel passengers helping each other out of stranded aboveground T cars. He could feel wheezing tourists dragging themselves up the last few steps of the Bunker Hill Monument, oblivious still that the city had gone dark. He could feel pizza shops in the North End being bombarded by commuters with nowhere else to go; the wheels of baby strollers in the South End. His blood ran with the sound of sirens and horns and satellite radios and the thump-thump of heavy bass idling in the stalled streets.
The letters went on.
He looked out. There was the Prudential Building conducting the skyline like a maestro. There was the Charles River lapping the edge of the Esplanade. There was the Citgo sign on the edge of Fenway Park. Sailboats dotted the river and he could feel those too. There was the Longfellow Bridge and Old North Church. Below him, hundreds of feet below him, the tail-end of an Orange Line train peeked out from beneath the bridge. In the distance Mass. Ave, measured in Smoots, reached across the river into Cambridge, quivering with the movement of tiny pedestrians.
And on the other side was the rickety Charlestown Bridge, where he and I once stood and where he’d pointed to the Zakim and told me, “Someday, Arrowman. Someday.”
That day was today. It was now.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone but he had no signal, not even here. Then he got one bar—maybe some tower in Cambridge—and tried a second time. He was kicked directly to voicemail, and the recording that answered was full of static.
“Fletcher,” he said after the tone, “I’m at the Heaven Spot. I’m here!”
That was all he needed to say. Anything more would’ve been superfluous; everything he could say about its beauty was implied in the simple, single fact that he was here. He pressed END and looked at the phone and let it fall from his fingers. He put down the can and rooted for yellow, popped the cap, pressed the valve. He outlined his words.
He could feel his city rumbling beneath him and through him. Alive, more alive powerless than usual. He laughed.
“Is this your first time in Boston?” Marjorie had asked him when they were leaving the airport.
“We came once, for July Four. To the Cap Shell. Hat Shell?”
“Hatch Shell. There’s lots more to see than that. We’ll get you a subway pass. And the city will be your playground. How’s that?”
He reached to point the can and felt a tickle roll across his ribs. If he’d stopped to wonder what it was he would’ve decided it was a drop of sweat making its way down his torso. But he didn’t, he swatted it with his free hand and kept working.
When he reached down to take another can into his empty hand he found that hand covered in red, red that exploded against the blue already there. Frantically he searched for a wound under his arm but found none. When he looked closer he saw it wasn’t blood, it was paint. If he’d thought more about it he would’ve suspected a can had exploded somewhere in the pack for all the jostling of his earlier running—but he didn’t. He started painting with both hands. His left hand seemed to know the can even though he’d never used it for painting before.
A coolness, licked by the wind, spilled from the corner of his eye, pooled in the slope of his cheek, and then rolled down, leaving behind a trail of blue. It hit the dark scruff along his jaw and spread out, lacquering the stiff hairs and reaching from hair to hair up to his ear and across his sideburn and on to the other side, around past his chin. When the hair could hold no more it released blue down the curves of his throat. Blue gathered again in the nook of his clavicle before continuing down his chest.
Yellow came from the hair on the back of his neck and traced bright lines, zigging and zagging across his back as he moved, soaking his shirt and the stretchy white band of his boxers.
Purple came from the back of his knee, making its way down his calf, dripping around to the shin when he knelt. It traced the curve of his ankle, slipped along his heel and disappeared into his sneaker. He hadn’t worn socks today.
The hips of his jeans turned orange, moving into the pockets and toward the fly.
He pulled off his shirt, swiped at the colors on his chest, mixing them on his belly. He marveled, all his excitement turning to wonder. Laughing, he dropped the other can. Colors were running down his face now and he could feel them between his toes. He kicked up a leg and tugged off a shoe and his foot was pink and yellow. He pulled off his other shoe: white and green. He stood holding one shoe, looking out, colors dripping from him, pattering like raindrops on the balcony. Clutching the handrail behind him with both hands he pressed first one foot against the wall and left a footprint there, then lifted his other foot and stepped one small step, then another, up the granite, leaving a trail of dripping footprints. Then he dropped back to the metal grating. He stood and touched the bridge, dragged his hand across it, leaving a fiery smear of red and purple behind.
“É verdade,” he whispered, pressing the sole of his foot once more against the granite. It’s true.
At the bottom of the
bridge a crowd had gathered of commuters more interested in what was going on at the top of the bridge than anxious to get over it. Something was falling toward them and they looked up and it was pants. Jeans. They caught on one of the bridge’s white suspension cables. A t-shirt made it to the ground and a man picked it up and looked up, shading his eyes, before dropping the shirt again and not knowing what to do with the colors on his hands. Then two things hit hard, clump clump—they were shoes, a pair of sneakers—sending outward a splattery circular rainbow where they hit, one on the asphalt, one on the windshield of a Volkswagen Golf. A pair of multi-colored underwear surfed on the wind. At last a watch exploded against the bumper of a pick-up. All of these things soaked through and through with colors.
The people—the drivers, the walkers—looked up and saw the blue words at the top of the bridge, and something else too. But in that moment the power returned, and with it the lights, and with those the order, and suddenly they were moving, they were moving, and Boston crept back into rush hour.
Everyone clapped wildly and
for a pleasant moment we all seemed like friends.
“Here we go,” said the key-touching guy as the train took its first lurch forward. “One big happy family for a change.”
At the next station tons of commuters, impatient to be off the platform and on their way home, piled in with us.
The key-touching guy and I stood squished together with Caleb hanging off my chest like a chubby gargoyle. He reached out and pulled at a button on the guy’s shirt. I rotated to put him out of reach.
“I’m the next stop,” the guy said. “I guess I should start making my way down.” He meant to the door; the crowd was tight enough to make it a journey. He stood on his toes to peer above the passengers’ heads.
“Good luck,” I told him. “It was nice spending the blackout with you.”
“Same,” he said. “Would you, heh, be interested in grabbing a coffee sometime or something? You could bring your little friend here.”
“That would be cool. Yeah, I’d like that.”
“I think I have my, uh, card around here somewhere. That sounds so pretentious of me.” He sunk his hand into his shirt pocket and then into each of his pants pockets and I thought, Yeah, this is him. He withdrew a bent white card, flattened the crease with his thumb, and handed it to me.
“Ollie Wade,” I read, thinking it was a good name. “Oliver?”
“Only legally.”
�
��Freelance photography, huh?”
“Hah. Well. No. Formerly freelance. Recently downgraded back to hobbyist.”
“I’m Fletcher. This is Caleb.”
“Fletcher. Do you make arrows? Ohhh. Zing! Sorry, I bet you get that all the time.”
I smiled. “Just once before actually.”
“Then I’m not quite as embarrassed.” He tilted his head to listen to a muffled loudspeaker announcement. “Uh-oh, this is me. So I’ll talk to you later?”
“Yeah, definitely.”
“Cool. Call me. Normally I’d say don’t forget, but if you remembered me after a year, I don’t guess you’ll forget me by tomorrow.”
“I won’t.”
“I bet you get a kick out of this fate type shit, huh?” He smiled.
I watched him push his way through the commuters with a series of Excuse me’s and Coming through’s, and then he was off the train and we were pulling away.
Midnight, and on the other
end of the world, where July is the dead of winter, Vinicius da Cunha Bittencourt felt like he was falling. Since sundown he’d felt restless, nauseous, had gone to bed early. Now he lay on his back with his palms pressed flat against the mattress and the Toy Story sheets, trying to slow what felt like a frictionless, airless tumbling, like falling down on the Moon. He snapped open his green eyes and sat up, mouth dry, skin clammy. He looked at his hands in the dim light. No Moon dust. He looked down at the floor beside the bed. Nothing there. No one there.
He got up.
The sidewalk was cold on his bare feet. He zipped his hoodie, pulled his hands into his sleeves, looked around, not even sure what he was looking for.
“Primo?” he whispered, and felt silly. But of course it wouldn’t have been the first time his cousin showed up unexpectedly.
Vinicius took a deep breath in and out. And again.
A step down off the curb and his bare foot touched cobblestone wet and slick. He hopped back and kneeled down and found his toes covered with brown sludge. If it was something truly gross he would’ve smelled it already, so he touched his toes, examined the sludge between his fingers. It was paint, but old paint, stripped as with thinner. He looked up. From the wall on the other side of the street this sludge was dripping, and from the wall behind him, too—dripping from specific places with unique shapes. Clean lines, defined curves. Letters.
He crossed the street, sludge sliding between his toes like thick gravy. After tapping the wall to make sure it wasn’t hot, he smeared clear an area of sludge with the palm of his hand. Under the sludge was an early Fact, one of Mateo’s first. Vinicius turned and looked down the street, and understood: Mateo’s old paintings were ridding themselves of all the layers they’d acquired over the years.
It wasn’t just on Rua Giacomo. It happened that way all over the city, the cities—not to everything Mateo had ever done but to all of the special ones, all of the ones his heart had been in and now was in again. Tomorrow Vini and Olivia, Aline, Tiago, Edilson and Olive would spend the entire day looking. But tonight— Tonight Vini sat down on the curb, his feet in the street submerged to his ankles, and he cried.
“Jamar,” I said, my heart
pounding. “Come here. Come look at this.”
“OK.” He sipped the last of his morning coffee and slowly rinsed the mug in the sink. “Have you seen my keys?”
“Now, Jamar! My god!”
I pushed the laptop over so he could see. On the Boston Globe website I’d followed a link to a gallery of photos about the biggest story of the day, the story that had pushed the blackout way off the front page: the sudden, overnight appearance, or reappearance, all over Boston and beyond, of a vast number of graffiti paintings.
Jamar leaned down and looked over my shoulder at the photo on the screen.
“This was him,” I said. “This was his heaven spot. His ultimate goal. He did this one yesterday.”
“Well I’ll be. How’d he get all the way up there?”
“I don’t know. Patience.”
“What’d he write?”
“I can’t see. It’s too small.”
“Drag it to your desktop and enlarge it.”
I did and the image was still too pixelated to read, so I paid a visit to the Zakim later that day to confirm it. From where I stood on the shore of the river the sun was too bright and the obelisk too tall for me to make out anything clearly. As I was walking along the shore to put the sun behind the obelisk, I spotted, lying in the gravel, a thin leather band the circumference of an ankle. It was covered in dry colors, and it was still tied. I picked it up, squeezed it in my fist. With the sun out of my eyes now I looked up at the obelisk. In blue letters outlined with yellow, tall and proud because they were true, were the words CALEB IS LOVE. And beside those words on the white granite was a series of colorful footprints that seemed to lead right into the sky.
It took me a week
to find the gray Civic, driving around all the places I thought he might’ve parked it. I finally found it shackled on its front driver’s-side wheel with a bright yellow boot. I was lucky—it was in the kind of neighborhood where the sidewalks glitter with window glass and when someone sees a car being broken into, they keep walking or close the curtains.
I went back that night with Jamar. He paced on the sidewalk while I peered in.
“Come on, Jamar,” I whispered. “You’re black, don’t you know how to break into a car?”
“Bradford, why don’t you stuff the car up your homo butt and we’ll take it home and deal with it later?”
“Heh.”
“Heh.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “You’re positive this is his?”
“Yeah.”
“Then let’s get this going. If we get arrested we’re going to owe Marcy a fortune.” Marcy was our babysitter, a highschooler who lived below us.
“OK, here goes— Ow!” My elbow bounced painfully off the window.
“Oh goddammit, Bradford. You’re sure it’s not alarmed?”
“He never had one when I was—”
“OK.” He pulled loose from the broken retaining wall behind us a crumbling piece of concrete the size of a softball and thumped it against the window once, twice. And coughed to mask the sound of tinkling glass.
“You do know how to break into a car!”
“Hurry up. I’ll be at the car.”
There were two blankets on the backseat. I shook them to knock off the glass, climbed in, sat down and closed the door.
The Zakim had gotten some attention because, of all the paintings that appeared that day, the one on the Zakim was the only one people saw being done. At and around the bridge the authorities found a complete set of men’s clothes—t-shirt, hoodie, jeans, boxers—belonging, they said, to someone around five feet ten inches tall—all stiff with dried colors. A pair of size-ten sneakers. A backpack containing six cans of spraypaint, none of which were empty and which did not appear to have contributed to the condition of the clothes. And pieces of a phone so smashed to smithereens in the 270-foot fall and further decimated by traffic, they could barely tell the brand.
Thank god that was all they found.
Me, I pulled his wallet out of the glove compartment. Opened it, gazed at his license photo, pushed it into my pocket. Ran my hands under the driver’s seat and then under the passenger seat, crinkling PowerBar wrappers and water bottles. I turned up his sketch book and his black book, a new volume—there were only a few pages filled with what must’ve been recent stuff. But no laptop yet, and I had come for the laptop. My worry was that it would be in the trunk, and that was looking more likely.
There was nothing under the backseat among the snaking seatbelts except his winter jacket and snow pants and boots. I pulled them out and balled them up.
The laptop must be in the trunk. How would I get it?
Think, Fletcher. Think.
I spread one of the blankets open on the seat and started piling things on it—the black book, th
e clothes. If I was taking some stuff, where did I draw the line? If I took some I had to take it all. There would never be anything more. I leaned forward to the glove compartment and pulled out its entire contents—registration, insurance info, phone charger, napkins and ketchup packets—and added that to the pile. I gathered up the clothes on the floor and added those too. Then I pulled the corners of the blanket together and tied them like a hobo’s luggage. I shook open the other one for the rest.
Still thinking, How can I get in the trunk?
With bundles on either side of me I slunk down in the seat and opened my phone.
“Jamar,” I said. I asked him.
“Minus a crowbar or something?”
“Yeah, minus a crowbar. Unless you have a crowbar on you.”
“Um. No. But you can— Jeez, Bradford. Hold on.”
Moments later we were both in the back of the Civic, ripping off the back cushion. It came apart with ease but the fabric behind it was thick. Three kicks and a push was what it took to get through. The tearing and the clink of a staple sounded loud in the car.
Jamar twisted around. “Are we taking these—parcels?”
“Yes.”
He grabbed the sacks off the front seat and pulled them onto his lap.
“Be careful with it,” I said.
“I know. I hope you find what you’re looking for. I’ll be in the car. I’m cramping up.”
I hadn’t wanted to turn on the ceiling light but I couldn’t see into the trunk without it. The light was bright; the car battery was pretty new. I thought of that first day and had to stop for a minute with my hand over my mouth. My shadow covered the plywood shelves and the cans sitting neatly in them, still neatly. Here was the maintenance of all the order he cared about.
“Oh Mateo,” I whispered.
Here at last were his important things: a backpack, his camera, his laptop, and the first two bulging, heavy volumes of his black book.
I tucked this all into his backpack and then I reached back in and grabbed can after can and a box of markers. I couldn’t leave anything. Vinicius would want some. And I had to make sure I had enough to pass down. I took it all.
The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel Page 35