The Painting of Porcupine City (44 page)

“His daddy issues...,” I said. “OK.”

I was careful about what I said but I kept talking because I couldn’t believe I was talking to the key-touching guy. I ended up delivering some approximation of the truth.

“Quite a story,” the guy said. He stuck out his finger and Caleb’s hand bumped against it. “Hey kid.” He took out his keys and jingled them at Caleb, who no longer seemed interested. “I have one of my own,” he said.

“How old?”

“Four. She’s biologically mine but they live near Seattle. I donated to my friend and her
lesbian lover
.” He said it with aplomb.

“Wow.” A kid. The fact brought with it the realization that a year ago it would’ve had me running for the fucking hills. “That was cool of you.”

“Well when they put a cup in—uh—well.” He smiled. “Never mind.”

“I—saw you,” I found myself saying. “I think. About a year ago, I guess. On the T. Around Brighton? It was a really hot day and I was grouchy and I saw you check your pocket to make sure you still had your keys. It was a little thing but for some reason I’ve always remembered it.”

“Just me checking for my keys?”

“It sounds weird when I say it.”

“I do that a lot,” he said. “Compulsively. I’m always nervous about losing them. It would be so difficult to replace them and meanwhile, how would you get into your house?”

“That’s what I thought.”

“It’s a little piece of metal that stands between you and the place you belong.”

He touched the valve,

rubbed his finger against it. The can was cool in his hand.

He turned, too fast, felt the spinny disorientation of extreme height. Then turned more slowly, put his hand on the rail, looked out. It was beautiful. This should’ve reminded him of other places—other places this high, other places this windy, Bunker Hill, the Citgo sign, the Oliveira Bridge—but it wasn’t like anyplace else.

It was silent, too. All he could hear was the rush of the wind, the air filling his hood and banging his hair against his ears.

“
Are you ready for this, Boston?
” he yelled happily, the wind swallowing his voice. “
Are you ready?
”

When he felt steady enough he kneeled down, knee clunking the platform. The wind was blowing his hair in his eyes and he pushed it back and pulled up his hood. He reconsidered his color, because what he had planned to write wasn’t what he was going to write. He unzipped the backpack, rooted around again. The cans clinked but the sound was muffled here. He chose blue. The words would be blue.

He stood up with the can in his hand. The hood keeping his hair out of his eyes also cut his peripheral vision, disrupting his view of the city, so he pushed it back again. It, too, blew against his face, along with the strings, and the zipper bit against his belly. He shrugged out of the hoodie and set it down on the metal grating, but in seconds the wind sent it flying over the edge, out and away. Barely noticing, he picked up the can, popped the cap.

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.