The Painting of Porcupine City (43 page)

“OK.”

“I’d ask you guys to come painting with me, but... kind of young.”

“Yeah. Hey. Before you go. I’m sorry I chose Jimmy over you that night.”

“I’ve made choices too, Fletcher. Things’ll end up OK.”

For a moment I looked at him. “I know you have stuff to do. I know there are a lot of blank walls still. But you should come back soon. Whenever you want a place to sleep or something. Or to see Caleb. You’re always welcome here, Mateo. And maybe eventually we could try to work things out between us?”

“I don’t think I ever told you,” he said, looking off down the street and squinting against the sun. “When I was in SP, I got to go up in this bridge that’s basically their answer to the Zakim. So I have an idea of how it works now.”

“That’s incredible.”

“So now I’m just waiting for the right time.”

“When’s that?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll let you know, OK?” He looked again down the street, and I realized it was the direction of downtown. From where he was standing he could probably see the tops of the same buildings that were tattooed on his arm. “Hey, maybe I’ll stop by, bring him some finger paints. That would be fun.”

“You should.”

“Maybe I will.”

“Mateo?”

Maybe he heard me wrong, maybe it was just habit—but he said it again: “Maybe I will.” And then he added, “See you, Fletcher.”

“OK.”

I watched him walk up the street and when he turned a corner I sat on the bottom step and watched Caleb watching a butterfly fluttering around overhead. I was going to shoo it away if it tried to land on him, but it didn’t.

“All right, kiddo, let’s go up.” When I reached down for the handle on his chair-thing I noticed, on the sidewalk where Mateo had been standing, a few small circles of paint. I kneeled down and pressed my thumb against one of the circles, an orange one, expecting it to be dry and smooth, but my thumb came away wet. “That’s weird.” But what was even weirder was that I then put my thumb in my mouth. Salt.

Maybe I will
, he told me. He looked like he meant it, he really did, but although I saw new Facts in new places nearly every day of the week, and although that meant he was OK, it was months before I heard from him again.

It took almost that long

for Jamar to start talking to me again. I totally deserved the fury he unleashed—for not telling him as soon as I knew, and then for telling Mateo first. “That,” he told me, jabbing his finger at the domestic partnership certificate that hung on our fridge, “that means you always tell me everything first!”

It was an anger I’d never seen him show before, especially to Cara. He screamed at me. “He asks for one fucking DNA test, Bradford, and I’m nothing!
One fucking test!
”

While he was yelling I felt two inches tall. I wondered if this level of anger was something he would only unleash on a guy, never on a girl, or whether Cara had just never hurt him, in all the years they were together, as much as I had on my very first day.

At the end of May

Mike graduated and moved out of his little apartment on Beacon Street. On the day he was leaving he invited me over one last time. I anticipated a little goodbye rumble, but instead we ordered pizza and I helped him move his mattress down out of the loft. Kneeling on the wood platform, ducking the low ceiling, we pushed it over the rail. It hit the hardwood floor with a slap and coughed up a cloud of dust, fluttering the pages of dog-eared textbooks. There was a stain near the top that was probably coffee or something but it reminded me of everything Mike and I had done together on this mattress and I thought,
One last time
. But he looked so young, had that fear in his eyes, that post-college void fear I filled with
Porcupine City
and felt so far beyond.

“Come on,” I told him, bending down, “let’s stand this up against the wall so you’ll have some room to walk around.”

And we did. The mattress looked funny there, vertical, no longer a bed but now more like a piece of art, like a canvas, a portrait of a time that was both more and less complicated.

We ate the pizza out of the box, then stood on the sidewalk near the place where, many moons ago, we made our little arrangement. His parents were on their way with a van. A summer respite in Bangor would be followed by a move to Irvine, California, where he planned to wait tables for as long as it took him to convince the creators of Warcraft to give him a job.

“You’ll be fine, you know,” I told him, “out in the real world.”

“You know, you should come up to Maine this summer...,” he said, using that tone people use to mean goodbye.

“Yeah.”

“If you’re not too busy being a dad.” He smiled. “Thanks for the lovin’, Fletcher Bradford.”

“Thanks for the friendship, Mike Stepp.”

After that life settled into a routine, albeit not the one Jamar and I anticipated. Crazy how naïve we were when we imagined our lives with Caleb.
You can write all day when he’s asleep
, Jamar had advertised when we were new at this. An infant left no time for writing! And even if I’d had the time to go out, as Jamar had suggested, I wouldn’t have had the energy. And money, too: Jamar’s paycheck wasn’t enough and we had to dip into Cara’s insurance money more than we liked, to make ends meet. It was hard. But we were doing the things that needed to be done, letting the big picture take care of itself.

And then things went dark.

The blackout happened on July 20,

and when it happened I was on the T, on the Green Line underground. I was standing inside the pivoting connector between two subway cars with Caleb hanging in the kid-pack against my chest, another backpack of his supplies hanging off my back. I didn’t like traveling with him on the T but I had to pick up some freelance work downtown and it was the easiest way. We’d gotten on at Park Street and were stopped somewhere between Boylston and Arlington stations, with either the Common or the Public Garden above us. There was no cataclysmic screech of brakes when the lights when out, just a quiet whoosh of powerlessness and the quick resumption of a dim, yellow light as the train rolled to a stop. I sighed and leaned against the wall, glad for the cushion of new diapers against my spine. This kind of delay was hardly unheard of, and I figured we’d be moving again in a minute. Then a passenger with a good cell signal reported that the entire city, not just our train, had gone dark.

Amidst the groans of other passengers I looked at Caleb and tried to send him telepathic signals.
Please don’t start crying now
, I told him.
And please don’t poop.

Above us in the sunlight

the streets were a mess. The power vanished right before rush hour, so within minutes buildings were emptying streams of commuters who had nowhere to go. Intersections with dark traffic lights became snarled with vehicles blaring their horns. Cars, buses, trucks. People on foot had the herky-jerk motion of commuters knocked out of routine, unsure where to go or how to get home. Horse cops had suddenly more to do than pose for tourist photos. In seconds the city was reduced to a giant web of parking lot. Rush hour all in one place, not rushing, not moving. Just waiting.

And out of this unmoving

chaos Mateo came running. From wherever he’d been he came running. Running, at last, not to escape but to chase.

It doesn’t matter what streets he used. There are a dozen different routes he might have taken but they all would’ve looked the same in that web of traffic. It’s likely that at some point he crossed through the Common to get there. Very likely he ran right over our heads. Backpack clinking like mad. Hair bouncing against his ears and face. Sneakers pounding the pavement as he dodged pedestrians, cars, newspaper boxes and push-cart vendors. And smiling. I like to imagine that when he ran over my head I felt him, that my heart made an extra beat for him. My god, he was beautiful. I wish you could’ve seen him. I wish I could’ve watched him, seen the smile on his face as he ran.

He thought, the moment he saw the lights were out:
This is my chance
. And he came running. A blackout was one of the scenarios he’d imagined and when he was presented with one he didn’t waste a second. He came running.

It called to him. Its bright blue lights were as dead as all the others in the city—but in his mind they were still flashing like a beacon, marking the place.

His heaven spot.

People were herding across

the Zakim Bridge, turning the highway into a footbridge and moving with the speed and steadiness of lava around cars paralyzed in traffic. He came out of the tunnel and made himself part of the herd for as long as it suited him, and then he separated himself. He stopped at the first structure, the one closer to Boston than to Cambridge—the forked obelisk, the gigantic divining rod, the perfect place.

He hopped a concrete barrier that at any other time on any other day would’ve marked the edge of the highway on which cars would’ve been barreling seventy miles per hour. At the base of the structure was a blank white door. He smiled, touching it. This was a soul in the moment it’s been waiting for. This was a heart on fire. This was liftoff. And hugely he smiled.

There was a guy standing

a few feet away from me—cute, short brown mohawk—and the realization came to me very slowly that this was the key-touching guy. Only when the guy actually touched his keys did I realize. Until then I’d been focused on Caleb. The guy had gotten up from his seat and was holding the overhead rail, stretching, head hanging between his arms.

Then he lowered his right hand and tapped idly at his pocket. My pulse quickened. Him.

The fuzzy sides of his head indicated that the haircut I’d seen last summer had been grown-out, and he did in fact razor them down.

He turned and kicked at the floor, and sighed.

Minutes went by. Caleb squirmed in the kid-pack and tried to put his fingers in my mouth. I spat them out.

The key-touching guy was looking and I saw him looking and he said, “Kiddo seems pretty content.”

“He’s a good kid.”

He smiled. I smiled back.

“Yours?”

“No. Yeah. Long story.”

“Sounds like,” he said. Then he put his headphones on.

Mateo closed the door, its

powerless lock clicking back into place with all the security of a pantry cupboard. It was smaller in here than he’d envisioned. Perhaps the dim emergency lighting made it look smaller. Unlike the Oliveira Bridge there was no room for equipment of any kind. He wondered in a panic if this bridge was different enough to render his lessons from the Oliveira moot. Maybe, but the biggest hurdle was already crossed: he was inside.

He pushed a chest-high stack of traffic cones against the door to keep it from blowing open. He looked up. The angled ceiling went up into space-like darkness that choked out the weak yellow lights that ran along the ladder—a ladder, not stairs. The ladder was probably meant as a back-up; beside it was the lift, a platform with a railing and a control panel with three buttons: up, down, emergency stop. He didn’t think it would work but he got on anyway, pressed UP with his knuckle. Nothing.

He rummaged in his clinking backpack and found a pair of old rubber gloves, which he pulled on over his fingerprints. Then he secured his backpack, gripped a ladder rung above his head, stifled a gigantic smile. And climbed. It was easier than climbing a normal ladder—following the angled wall, it was more like climbing a very steep slope. A tubular cage running the length of the ladder encircled him. But still it was difficult—twice his foot slipped past a rung and scraped against granite—and it was higher than any ladder he’d ever climbed. When he arrived at the landing where this angled prong met the vertical part of the obelisk, at around 175 feet, his heart was pounding—whether from exertion or excitement it’s impossible to say.

When he was ready he started climbing again, up into space. Tiny lights on the ladder above him glittered like stars. This vertical ladder was more difficult, but every fifteen or twenty feet there was a landing, which helped to lessen the abyss below. Finally, at 260 feet, the ladder ended at a steel floor bordered by bright yellow railings. He slipped off his backpack and lay down on his back, breathing heavy, imagining the air was thinner up here. He snapped off his gloves. He touched his face, felt his beard, wished he’d had a chance to clean up for this.

“I’m here to paint,” he said, an affirmation of purpose, and his voice sounded big and echoey in the capsule-like room.

The maintenance door was dark steel (on the outside it had a granite façade) that slid open on big tracks, very similar—virtually identical—to the one in São Paulo. He pushed it open, wishing Vini could be here to do this with him, to be his Buzz. Wind whistled through the crack and as he pushed it entered the capsule like a flood and made a breathy
oooohh
as it filled the hollow obelisk. He wished Tiago were here to hold him by the belt, to be his orbiting Collins.

The staging, a fancy hydraulic system, responded to his gentle push and yawned out like a drawbridge, raising a railing as it lowered. It clanked into place and became a balcony offering access to the big blue lights at the top of the obelisk.

It seemed to him like a portal to another dimension. Here he was in a tiny, echoey, dimly-lit capsule—and through the doorway ahead of him lay his entire city.

He picked up his backpack, slipped it on, and stepped outside.

The guy took his headphones

off and wound the cord around his hand, stuffed them in his pocket. “Color me curious,” he said.

I’d been sniffing Caleb’s butt; he had a look on his face that usually signaled pooping. Thank god it seemed to be a false alarm—there was still a chance I wouldn’t have to do a presto-changeo on the floor of the train. “Curious about what?”

He nodded at the baby. “His daddy issues.” He squatted down near me with his back against the wall. Sliding down, he stretched out his legs.