The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel

by Monopoli, Ben

  I took it all and left one thing, on the back window, in bright green: ARROWMAN IS.

  Jamar helped me carry it

  all to my room and then left me alone while he went to pay Marcy.

  “It was an easy one,” I heard her say. “He slept right through. What’s in all those blankets, anyway?”

  I put the sketchbook and the three-volume black book under my bed and sat down at my desk, pushed aside my typewriter, opened the laptop in front of me. Whatever was on here was everything I was ever going to have. I hoped it was enough.

  It booted up fast and showed me his desktop. The wallpaper was the Zakim. I found hundreds of pictures of graffiti, arranged in folders according to artist. I found dozens of saved PDF files, all information about the Zakim Bridge, from scrapped plans to preliminary blueprints to photos of its progress that must’ve offered some glimpses inside, to photos of elephants making the inaugural crossing. I also found what I’d come for: his address book. It held all the connections I would someday use when I figured out what to say.

  While I was perusing through his hard drive an IM popped up. It was from ViniBitt. It said, “PRIMO!!”

  I took a deep breath. Felt myself shaking. I was now speaking for him.

  “Vinicius,” I typed. “This is Fletcher.”

  I went to Brazil to

  see and to ask, so I’d know the whole story, as much as could be known. I went to fill in the blanks, as much as could be filled. And maybe to fill in some blanks for his family.

  I went to the Brazilian consulate and got my visa and crammed a Portuguese for Dummies and Jamar drove me to the airport on a frigid afternoon in the middle of January.

  “I really wish you would’ve waited until I could go with you,” he told me as he pulled up to Terminal E. “You know this makes me nervous, you going there by yourself.”

  “It’ll be fine. Vinicius will be there.”

  “He doesn’t even speak English.”

  “It’ll be fine.”

  “No language. It’s your worst nightmare.”

  “It’ll be OK. Don’t freak me out.”

  “And if you do decide to tell them about Caleb,” he said, “and if it goes badly—”

  “Jamar, I told you, if any part of me feels like it might go badly, I just won’t tell them at all.”

  He sighed. “So you have your passport?”

  “I do. I need to go. I’ll call you when I get to Panama.”

  “Panama. Fucking-hell. These are places in high school textbooks. Be careful, huh? Pay attention to your surroundings.”

  “Oh Jamar.” I closed the door and slipped on my backpack. Caleb was strapped into the backseat and I put a kiss on his little pom-pom hat. He’d be turning one next month.

  As I was leaving Jamar lowered the window and said, “Bradford, come here a second.”

  “I’m going to miss my flight.”

  “Back, you know, right after Cara, when I said you were a guy and not a man. That was wrong and I was wrong to say it. It’s not about who you sleep with, or—whether you know about sports or tools or have a pearls-wearing wife or whether commercials make you cry. I think it’s about whether you step up. When something hard comes along. A man steps up. He doesn’t dodge it or run away from it or try to push it onto someone else. He steps up. Even if it isn’t his responsibility. And that’s why there are so many guys and so few men. Because stepping up is hard. And yet there’s never been anything in your life you haven’t stepped up to. I mean, from the time you were twelve, to moving in with Cara, to Caleb, to everything. To this.”

  When he was done I let it sit for a beat, just long enough so he would know I would remember this forever. And then I said, “Did you want to get that off your chest in case my plane goes down?”

  “I was saving it so I wouldn’t have to see you for the week it’ll take your massive ego to calm down now.”

  “Haha.”

  “Tell them I say hi. Or oi. Or whatever.”

  I traveled for almost

  a day, which felt like forever. I guess since São Paulo time is only one hour ahead of Boston, I imagined it couldn’t be that far. But it was winter when I took off, and it was summer when I landed.

  I walked into Arrivals drowning

  in Portuguese. It was easily the most afraid I’d ever been. It was as Jamar had said, one of my nightmares where I mysteriously forget how to speak. It was scary not only because I couldn’t communicate, but because it stripped me of everything I thought I was. I liked to consider myself a master of words—my job had been built around perfecting them, my hobby was about stringing them into stories. Words were my identity. And suddenly I couldn’t understand a single one. I was not a master of words, it turned out, but a master only of English. And here that was worth virtually nothing. I felt more isolated than I’d ever felt, and that’s maybe saying a lot.

  I followed the passengers exiting the plane and found my way through customs, showed my passport and visa. But when the crowd was no longer moving in a single direction I felt even more lost and I stumbled and gawked and felt the first stirrings of panic. I thought that if I could only find the ticket counter I’d book myself a seat on the next flight back to Boston.

  And then I saw him. My first thought was: Mateo. That’s how much alike they looked. Silly that Mateo ever joked about them not being related. He’d been watching for me and when he saw me he smiled and took off his sunglasses.

  We had talked so much, so tentatively and with so much effort, on the webcam and through auto-translated IMs for so long, that when I finally saw him it felt like I was dreaming, and not just because I’d been traveling for twenty hours. When Vinicius put his arms around me I didn’t know what to feel. It was so many things. Most of all I was thinking I loved him. Because he knew Mateo. Because he had those green eyes. Because I knew Caleb was going to look so much like him.

  “Welcome,” he said in slightly rehearsed English, and it made me feel suddenly at home in this place. “Welcome, Maker of Arrows, Fabricante de Flechas.”

  I rode a moto-taxi,

  Vinicius on one in front of me, looking back from time to time to make sure my young driver hadn’t lost his and to flash me a thumbs-up and that wide, white grin.

  I stayed at the Amaral

  house. Mateo’s parents and aunt and uncle were friendly and gracious but I think, when they understood I had no new information about Mateo, they didn’t know what to make of my presence. They treated me politely as a guest and didn’t know that in some weird way I was family—and I hadn’t yet fully decided to tell them or Vinicius. But I slept on the couch and woke up each morning to the cheeping of the two little birds in the cage across the room, and I felt content.

  I met Tiago, who was

  breathtaking and angry and wanted nothing to do with me. He did not shake my hand or even respond when I placed Mateo’s ankle band into his, and he withdrew into the crowd at Colonel Fawcett’s the moment Vinicius seemed willing to let him go. I think he still believed I was the reason Mateo rejected his gift of the Oliveira Bridge and returned to Boston. While I would like to believe that, I know it wasn’t true. Tiago hated me and didn’t understand we were so much the same.

  For most of the week

  it was just me and Vinicius. He took off work at the phone stand and we spent the days walking around the city. He showed me Mateo’s São Paulo Facts. He showed me photos from when Mateo was a boy, pictures from Framingham and then, when Mateo was a little older, from São Paulo. He showed me some of Mateo’s things and his old school books, and suggested I help myself to these. I took the dog-eared Clarice Lispector book Mateo had once mentioned, though it was a long time before I could read the words.

  And finally Vinicius brought me

  to the top of the Oliveira Bridge. Mateo had given him the key and he came up here from time to time, sometimes with Tiago, sometimes to make up with Aline, once or twice to get in trouble with Aline, but most often by himself. We slid as
ide the rumbling door and sat down.

  Looking out at the looming, colorful city, I wondered why Boston. Why was Mateo drawn so much to Boston? It was the one thing I wasn’t willing to take a guess at—it seemed beyond knowing, something where fiction may have been far from fact. What did Boston have that São Paulo, in all its immensity, did not? It wasn’t me, as Tiago thought. It wasn’t the chance to be a king, like Vinicius thought. Perhaps it was simply the place that called him home. And maybe these days I could relate to that. Maybe. Maybe yes.

  Vinicius was sitting beside me, his knees drawn up and his hands clasped against his shins.

  “I want to tell you the real reason I came to meet you,” I said to him in English and he looked at me, perhaps catching every second word. “I think I know enough words to tell you, Vini, but I don’t know nearly enough to explain it.”

  He pursed his lips. “Um segredo?” A secret?

  “Sim,” I said. “Um grande segredo.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder for encouragement and I told him, in halting Portuguese, the simple truth. I had nowhere near enough words for an explanation of it, even though he clearly was waiting for one.

  “How?” he said finally.

  I thought, trying to find the right words. «A lot of people,» I told him, «loved each other in a lot of different ways. So Caleb.» It was a simple explanation but it was perhaps the best one.

  «An accident,» he said.

  «A good accident. A happy accident.»

  Always when I imagined telling him, which I’d done daily for the better part of a year, I would tell him and without hesitation he would jump up, dance a samba or something, heels slapping the floor. That was the Vini Mateo had told me about and the one I had gotten to know over the computer. I would swipe a tear or two from my eyes and he would grab my hand and pull me up with him and show me how to dance and I would dance. And, feeling for the first time my favorite word, I would think of Mateo. That’s how I imagined this ending.

  But instead Vini slowly stood up. Wind through the open doorway rushed between us and flapped his hair against his cheeks. He wasn’t dancing, merely looking out. Above the favelas that sprawled over the land like rigid flora, the Moon was low and bright in a halo of yellow haze. I wondered if Vini was looking, as I always did when I looked at the Moon, for the sudden, wondrous appearance of one of Mateo’s paintings across the face of it, big and eternal as the Sea of Tranquility. But, as always, the Moon was a blank wall, a blank page, blank save for the tiny cluster of footprints that had been there since 1969.

  And that’s a fact.

  E P I L O G U E

  Facts and Fiction

  There are a lot of names

  for that day, none of which are very creative. But if you think about it, names for this kind of thing rarely are. When the Japanese attacked Hawaii, it was known simply as “Pearl Harbor.” When Neil Armstrong made his famous first step, it was simply “the Moon landing.” The day all the Facts appeared in Boston, most people call “Paint Day”—which sounds to me like one of the made-up holidays they’re always celebrating at Caleb’s school. The more skeptical among us refer to it simply as “the event.” None of them know what to make of it, still, though by now it’s a simple fact of city life. At first they thought some electrical currents during the blackout—either resulting from the blackout or caused by whatever caused the blackout—had reacted with a chemical in a particular brand of paint to melt off whatever other layers had accumulated on top of it. Perhaps that was how so many paintings overcame so many gray squares that day. That or else it was a gigantic publicity stunt by Krylon. Those theories quickly fell apart when it was discovered that the Facts could not be removed or ever painted over again. People fought against them with chemicals and sand-blasters but it was useless. Specialists were brought in to figure out what they were, research teams flocked to investigate—but it wasn’t anything magical, wasn’t any kind of new molecule or space-age technology. It wasn’t even all the same. Some was latex. Most was various brands of aerosol spraypaint. It was just paint. Very persistent paint. They shrugged and went away and searched for other things to explain.

  Two years after Paint Day, Boston’s Department of Tourism launched a nationwide campaign celebrating the Massachusetts capital as “the Painted City.” While somewhat controversial at first, that small action gave people permission to begin thinking of the paintings not as a pest but as a beloved celebrity. Street vendors began hawking t-shirts emblazoned with some of the most popular Facts. There are tours you can take. They’re a part of Boston now—the Red Sox, the Freedom Trail, and the Facts.

  Nobody calls it Beantown anymore. Or Porcupine City, for that matter.

  Some people think the Facts have religious significance, that the paintings have a collective meaning beyond each piece, that their presence in Boston is evidence of... you name it. A guy with a website painstakingly marked on a satellite map of the city the location of every single known Fact. That map has become like an ink-blot test or tea leaves in the bottom of a cup: everyone has their own theory about what shape this guy’s pushpins make. An animal rights group bought a giant pop-up ad on the Globe website making its case that the shape advocated veganism. For his part, this website guy sees it as a signal, literally a bulls-eye, which he speculates will mark a landing pad for extraterrestrial visitors. I like that one. There are a thousand other theories. Some are better than others. You can see whatever you want. You might see a horse with an elephant trunk. Me, I see Mateo. On every street, around every corner, on every wall. Everywhere. Always.

  My publisher wants more sex.

  “Don’t we all, Lou,” I say with a smirk. Lou is the woman behind the desk, my literary agent. We’re in a cramped office in her South End condo. I lean forward. “I’ve been married three years, you know. Don’t we all.”

  She laughs. “Well. They’re willing to pay for it.”

  “Touché. But I think there’s enough.”

  “In a gay book there’s never enough. You know that.”

  “Maybe they just don’t recognize the sex scenes because I haven’t likened genitals to any variety of fruit or vegetable.”

  Lou smirks. “So it’s a no?”

  “This one’s dedicated to my son. I don’t want it reading like a porno.”

  “How is Caleb, anyway?” Lou says. “School going well?”

  I lean forward a little more and smile. “School’s going lovely. And no changing the subject.”

  “Right.”

  “There’s already a blowjob. Heck, there’s two blowjobs.” I put my hand against my mouth and whisper, “I even threw in a rimjob—much to Ollie’s chagrin.”

  “All right, I’ll tell them we talked about it.” She jots something on a yellow legal pad and then taps the pen on the desk. “But you know, Fletcher, you’re not exactly Updike. They want to publish but we don’t have a super-ton of leverage here.”

  “If I were Updike I’d have spent more time contemplating anuses.”

  “The man was weirdly fixated on bums, wasn’t he?”

  I lean back in the chair. “I won’t get weird about it. Plane tickets to São Paulo don’t pay for themselves. If they want more sex I’ll take another look at it—but I’m too in love with these characters to make them skeezy.”

  “Good enough.” She smiles.

  “And anyway, I don’t want to be Updike, I want to be Steinbeck.”

  She laughs at our joke. “I’ll let them know.”

  “So that’s it? They’re good to go otherwise?” I drum my fingers on her desk.

  “Well, also....”

  “What?”

  “The ending.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “The other books in the Surfboy Forever series were realistic, and then this. They want to know what happens to Govinda.”

  “What happens? He catches the perfect wave. His heaven wave. It says so right in the book.”

  “Yes, but afterward. The salt, the
water. Jones finds Govinda’s swimsuit and his surfboard. And then—?”

  I shrug. “All I can say is the ending’s based on a true story.”

  “A factual story?”

  I don’t answer. She stares at me, a small smirk on her lips. I drop my eyes and examine my folded hands. There’s a flake of blue stuck under my fingernail.

  “Turn around,” I say finally. “Look out the window.” When she obliges, I add, “What do you see?”

  “Hm. A car with a parking ticket. A mailman.”

  “From this angle there’s at least two paintings visible.”

  “OK, sure, two of the paintings too.”

  “Not even five years and you already don’t see them anymore?”

  “Fletcher.” She can tell I’m lecturing. I tend to lecture on this topic, obliquely, careful never to reveal what I know—which I’m sure is perceived as obnoxious.

  “What are they? The paintings.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “No one knows.”

  “We live in a world where those paintings somehow exist, and they can’t accept what happens to my surfer boy?”

  She’s looking at me again.

  I put my hands on the desk and stand up, just enough to see past her out the window. Down on the street are the two paintings I knew were there. One of them had been finished in my presence—it was a stripe of green that went across his fingers that night.

  “I’ll add more sex,” I say to Lou. “The ending stays.”

  I stop at the supermarket

  on my way home—it seems like I’m always buying groceries—and in the produce section a woman with basket in hand is picking out summer squash.

  I reach for the broccoli and we see each other and pass between us what I’m sure is vague but mutual recognition. I know I know her but I don’t know from where. I smile. She puts a squash in a clear plastic bag, twists it and drops it in her basket. She’s turning and then I guess it hits her—she tilts her head and smiles and says, “Mateo’s friend.”

  And then I remember her too. Of course. His landlady. She’s wearing a floral cotton skirt with a purple streak on the thigh, as if from a stray magic marker. “Right.”