Graffiti Palace

by A. G. Lombardo

  “As in bees from Africa?”

  “Back in ’57, this biologist in Brazil was crossbreeding African and European bees to make a bee that was tougher and could survive the jungles. The African bees escaped, of course, and bred with every other damn bee in South America, creatin’ this killer bee hybrid. About a month ago, LAMA brought in some of these hybrid hives for a secret experiment. Bees pollinate plants, and we want more plants instead of weeds, which crack our sidewalks and freeways and in general fuck up the infrastructure. More bees, more plants, just control the queens so they don’t breed with our American bees, a simple plan except—who could see this coming—the queens escaped.”

  M.T. snaps open the barrel of the pistol. “Their escape is the subject of some interesting although unfortunately classified memos.” He slides a copper lozenge into the chamber, locks it. “Memos rumored to outline their aggressiveness and uncanny, you might say unnatural, intelligence in a kind of hive thinking to learn how to unlock their apiary cages…”

  “You’re gonna shoot them?”

  “Incinerate ’em. A very powerful charge of plastic explosive.” He trains his headlamp on the quivering hive. M.T. hands Monk the flashlight. “Keep her steady on those mutherfuckers and don’t make any hostile moves.” He aims the pistol at the gray hive humming in its halo of wavering light.

  The hive is vaporized in a cobalt ball of flames: perhaps a little too much C-4 here, as the entire wall explodes, shards of brick and metal pipe whizzing through the night. “Fuck and duck!” M.T. dives to the ground as Monk drops behind a block of rubble. “You okay?” M.T.’s voice somewhere in the rising dust and bits of weeds floating down. Monk raises an eye above the concrete block: gooey bits of hive and bee thoraxes mottle his face and hair. Beyond the smoking ruins, a giant shadow rises from the blown-out wall. “Oh my god.” M.T. stumbles back, kicking up on his feet, the hard hat toppling to the ground, its light beam etching his face in horror. “The queen … run!”

  Scrambling past a rusted-out car, Monk cuts across the lot, past teetering sentinels of old tires. Along a mangled fence, tripping through a torn curtain of chain link, he’s on Hillford Avenue. On the corner, standing in its feeble nimbus of pearl light like an inanimate savior: a phone booth.

  Monk slams shut the booth’s door, afraid to look back. Catching his breath, he hears nothing, he’s safe for now. He jams a nickel in the slot and dials home; the rotary wheel clicks and spins counterclockwise in agonizing slow motion with each number. The receiver buzzes with the terminal metallic pulse of a busy signal. Shit. He slams down the receiver. Rent party: some deadbeat always on the phone, running up his bill, he’ll never get through. Is she all right? He pulls out the notebook, sets it on the wedge of metal shelf. Thumbs through the pages to the number graffito. The nickel tinkles down the slot and his index finger slowly circles around the rotary dial, spinning out the number like a wheel of chance: 714 … 733 … 9969. Monk’s eyes scan the graffiti etched everywhere on the booth’s glass like spidery translucent script. A tin ringing in his ear as somewhere out in the remote desert far from the city another phone rings: a desolate moonscape of sand and yucca trees and bottlebrush. A dirt road scars into the sand, far from all vanished highways. Let it ring a long time. Crooked birch telephone poles loop black wires above the sand, paralleling the road, then finally descend to the phone booth, dark beneath its smashed-out light, only starlight shining on its metal and pulverized glass panes: forgotten, forlorn, the last booth on the grid; it is the terminus of communication on the very edge of nothing. Let it ring a long time, she said. This outpost is all that remains of—nobody really knows—a remote World War II secret base, or a forgotten Prohibition prison, or an old uranium mine that bodes slow death for any trespassers, or an Old West ghost town not found in any history books, or a shantytown of desert misfits called Bone Beach or Flat World or Bad Locus or Omegaville. The rings pulse out into the night like the lonely call of some metal cicada: a shadow hobbles toward the glimmering steel stand. International Telephone (IT) should have dismantled the booth by now, but somehow it escaped the auditor’s files, and now it is a secret nexus, where any human voice anywhere in the world might connect with the strange nomads who haunt this desert crossroads: mystics, travelers, drifters, gangs, madmen, the lost, pilgrims, and all disenfranchised sojourners of wastelands. The shadow passes into the booth’s feeble, reflected starlight: an ancient man hunched, enveloped in a long, filthy blanket, dark as the night skies above. The smashed glass and steel is tattooed with multicolored layers of graffiti and signs and tags, like some Rosetta stone awaiting an urbanologist’s deciphering book. The black telephone—a vintage, early ’50s sculpted rotary machine—rings into the warm desert silence. The old hermit crooks a bleached white cane in the booth’s corner. His gnarled fingers brush lovingly down the metal face of the phone; he knows this booth, all of these way stations along the grid, like a father knows his errant children. He slowly lifts the receiver from its rusted cradle—

  Monk: “Hello? Hello!” A silence except the faint electric hum of some alien static. “Who’s there? Hello?”

  “You are my eyes.” A deep, grizzled whisper as if the voice is transmitted not across miles but the gulf of infinite space.

  “Who is this? What do you want?”

  “Remember the shoe shine? We will speak again—”

  “Wait!” The dial tone whines like an angry metal insect. Monk bangs down the receiver. Stuffing the notebook in his pants, he pushes open the door and walks into the warmth of the sirens and the night. Shoe shine? He shakes his head.

  7

  At the corner, a huge mob suddenly undulates down the street, overflowing onto sidewalks, pushing east. That shoe-shine stand. What was it called? Monk follows, keeping his distance; they’re looping back toward Central Avenue: police cars glower by, bathing mobs on the sidewalks in blood light. Voices shout and chant: “No more Selma! Burn the fuckers down! Three for one!” Storefront windows are smashed in, looters crisscrossing the street with armfuls of bottles and bags and shopping carts heaped with swag. That Muslim Oasis shoe-shine stand I passed on Avalon. Monk remembers now the strange old man who seemed to glower at him, across Avalon at the shoe-shine stand, his woolly beard and duct-taped glasses, a blind man hunched over his white cane. She knew I had the number, Muhammad’s girl, what’s her—Nefertiti … Maybe that number’s Nation of Islam, some kind of trap … They want the notebook, fighting for power like the rest of them … and that shoe-shine stand, that’s called Muslim too.

  A strange bicycle tries to avoid the crowd but a bottle explodes across the rider’s face and the bike clatters to the ground. The cyclist, a Chinese man, holds his head in a daze and staggers away from the crowd. It’s a delivery bike, a big gold-painted tricycle mounted with a large white box proclaiming GOLDEN PAGODA CLEANERS. Monk rights the bike, wobbles on the seat, then pedals down Central. Bolted to the handlebars is a friction lamp in the shape of a golden oriental shrine, gold tassels whipping in the wind, this amber light beam bouncing ahead, casting a strange copper halo as he threads into the night.

  Perhaps it is only the tricycle’s bent handlebars but it seems to push left. Monk grips the handlebars, pedaling, fighting to keep the trike southbound, but it sways and pulls left … maybe a wheel is bent. Bumping off the curb, Monk almost knocks over two yellow candles that drip and pool into the pavement, the candles fixed between two crossed matchsticks and three pennies: these signs of devotion, magic talismans, seem to be more common at the city’s crossroads now as the fires and the terrors conflate across the night, descending block by block. He’s stopped, glaring down at the candles and matchsticks and pennies, these spells cast on the streets, on the city, against unseen enemies … or maybe signposts to protect and guide. He’s on the opposite side of Central now, facing north. Monk slowly pedals, the tricycle gliding easy and straight, its inanimate lurching vanished. “You know something I don’t?” Monk stares down into the amber light of the l
ittle shrine-lamp glowing on the handlebars. “All right, fuck it, let’s go, Golden Pagoda.”

  Monk weaves the gilded tricycle in and out of looters, knots of drinkers, crowds hurling bricks and bottles. Each block takes him farther from the harbor, from Karmann: What the fuck am I doing? Four police cruisers block the street, doors open, a line of cops with batons and riot masks marching toward the mob. Past the police blockade, the great bleached dome and ivory plaster arches of the White Front Department Store: the building is on fire, flames licking up the arches like some ancient Roman siege, looters scattering across the parking lot as a fire truck tries to brake into position. Monk grins, pedaling past: a karmic debt now being repaid for opening a store in the ghetto called White Front.

  Streets blur past in darkness and flames. Turn around, what the fuck are you doing? Monk clatters by geysers of foamy white water blasting into the darkness from monkey-wrenched open hydrants. Is he fleeing from her, from the baby? The water rises, seeping over curbs and gurgling into flooded drains. The bicycle tires splash through the pavement, past throngs of black children, shirtless, some naked, squealing, playing in the thundering fonts. These street kids, chasing through the torrents, flitting across the golden beams of Monk’s pagoda light, look like black sprites materialized from some watery lair.

  He steers the bike north, up Hill Street, in and out of shards of glass that twinkle iridescent rainbows from the cascading water—no pressure when the fire trucks finally arrive, firemen retreating under barrages of bottles and bricks, waiting for police escorts that will never arrive, their hoses limp and dripping impotently. Let these fuckers burn their own shit down, nothing to stop the flames as they search out tonight’s victims.

  The tricycle lurches right, down Gin Ling Way, as if pulled by some secret feng shui under the great arch of red-tiled pagoda roofs, Chinatown’s West Gate; carved into its pillars, strange gods and dragons seem to watch him pass. Monk looks back: smoke and flames billow from the city’s hazy silhouette, sirens and helicopters fan through the darkness. He shakes his head. Looks like Godzilla got tired of Tokyo and decided to give the ghetto a good ass kickin’ …

  He pedals past ramen shops, apothecaries, souvenir booths, market stalls piled with fruit and fish, the Lucky Bean Cake Factory. Red lanterns, strung across the narrow street, sway and glow. The tricycle veers into the curb in front of twin gilt-lacquered Buddhas and a blinking incandescent sign: GOLDEN PAGODA CLEANERS. Above the shop, a ramshackle restaurant extends for half a block over the storefronts, its dark windows and chestnut camphor wood peaked with a red tile roof and arches like a shrine: a great pale willow tree towers through the center of the mansard roof, up into the night, its boughs gnarling out over the rooftop in a huge, shaggy canopy of bearded moss. A blue neon sign crackles beneath the gossamer willows: LOTUS PALACE RESTAURANT.

  Monk glides the tricycle into an iron rack in front of the cleaners. “Hope you didn’t steer me wrong.” Its amber pagoda headlamp dims, flickering as if winking at him, then sputters out as it rolls to a stop. An old Chinese man with thick glasses in a white uniform gestures wildly from the doorway. “Where you go? You filed!”

  “Filed?”

  “Filed! No job!”

  “You got to hire me first. Just returning your bike.”

  The old man squints up at Monk. “You not Lee! What you do with Lee!”

  “I don’t know no Lee. Just found your bike,” turning to leave.

  An old woman standing behind the counter squeals out in rapid Chinese. “Wait!” The old man touches Monk’s elbow. “You give back bike. We give you something to thank,” sweeping his hands toward the laundry.

  “That’s okay, I have to go.”

  “No! Vely bad luck. Please!”

  Inside the shop: racks of clothes suspended from the ceiling, a gold Buddha in the corner, smiling above a sign chained around his thick neck: NO CHECKS! Steam billows from hot presses in the back. The old woman crouches like a shriveled chestnut behind the counter, huge scissors in her hand, needle sticking between withered lips. “Eat dinnah, drink beeha, no charge,” gesturing toward a staircase in the corner, sign above on the wall: LOTUS PALACE RESTAURANT. The old man shouts Chinese up the staircase. A waiter appears, wearing a gold brocade coat and bow tie, waving Monk to advance. Monk shrugs: hot tea sounds good, he’s exhausted. He ascends creaking wood steps.

  The old man turns and walks back into the steamy shop to work in hermetic silence next to his wife, only the soft swoosh of steam until the old man pushes a button under the counter and chains clink from suspended racks above: the clothes slowly revolve, ratchet down tracks, descending out of steamy banks like disembodied ghosts. There are pants, suits, shirts, gowns, uniforms: they pass along the grinding chains, rolling back into the steam, but sometimes the machine is stopped and the old man grabs the hanger from its hook and places the clothes on the counter before the old woman; this teal dress belongs to that snob Mrs. Chang (who always insults them behind their backs), and the old woman opens a jar under the counter, fingers a dab of invisible powder across the back of the dress—mandrake extract, to ensure Mrs. Chang is afflicted with horrible diarrhea. A white shirt, Mr. Sing—who insulted their daughter—is treated with a pinch of pig’s liver under the starched armpits, which will cause him to constantly sweat. Her lips curl as he lays the cop’s black uniform on the counter. The department’s litany of crimes against Chinatown is legendary: graft for every opium den and whorehouse in town; beatings, rape, extortion; murder and terror to clear shanties for Union Station back in ’39, the great terminal that brought Pullmans full of blacks from back east and the South, though they never saw the magnificent station, all coloreds were forced to detrain at Central Avenue—no blacks in the Union unless you were pushing a broom or shining a shoe. Negroes to rob Chinese of work in the new war plants; brutal enforcement of the Exclusion Act, which stripped away all human rights; back a century when this cop’s Irish forebears were cruel Pinkertons overseeing the Coolie slave labor, building iron train rails in the days of the pueblos. Now, cop by cop, the Chinese laundries across the city exact ancient revenges born from the mystic chi arts of the motherland: a snuff of Forsythia suspensa on this starched collar brings terrible neck aches … a little Datura metel inside Sergeant Armstrong Trench’s uniform shirt and his breasts will burn and grow … a spritz of Tintorius notorious on this rookie’s shirttails precipitates horrible stomachaches … a dusting of tiger penis on the zipper of Officer Napoleon Wilson—from Precinct 13—has the unfortunate effect of arousing uncontrollable tumescence accompanied by homoerotic urges …

  Monk slouches in a shadowy booth. In the center of the restaurant, a great willow tree rises through a hole cut in the floor, its trunk disappearing through another hole in the ceiling: branches twist out against the ceiling’s exposed beams, straining across the room, lime tendrils of willows hanging down like mossy curtains. Just some green tea to fortify him, then he’ll be on his way. The walls are designed with interlocking golden lotus petals; a fountain tinkles in the corner as he sips hot tea. He gazes at the great willow, which seems to be growing into the camphor walls. The waiter sets a plate with a small, round green cake. “Ah, that is the pride of Chinatown, the Anna May Wong Tree, donated by Paramount Studios in the thirties. Isn’t it magnificent? Moon cake, Mandarin delicacy, on house,” bowing. “The tree is at one with the architecture. Amazing, isn’t it? This restaurant was designed by the great Frank Lloyd Wright. Oriental organic.” The waiter disappears beyond the mossy willow tapestries. Monk eats a spoonful: mint, ginseng, faint almonds. A Chinese girl appears in a long gold brocaded robe, smiling, setting a fortune cookie before him. Her eyes linger, then she glances away, disappearing beyond the suspended fringes of willow. Monk sips tea, feels warm. A groaning sound, muffled somewhere above, like distressed wood. The golden-petal lotuses on the wall seem to shimmer and vibrate.

  He peels the cellophane from the cookie, unfurling the fortune’s tiny paper: You are in dang
er.

  Standing, he sways, pulling the white cloth from the table, green tea spilling across linen, plates clattering to the floor as he crumples to the red carpet.

  * * *

  “Wake up!” Faces slowly sharpen into focus. Two Chinese men frowning down at him: an old man wearing round glasses and a lemon-shade suit, the other middle-aged in slacks and T-shirt, thin mustache, chain-smoking. “Who sent you?” blowing smoke in his eyes.

  “What, ah,” trying to move his wrists: they’ve tied him to a chair. He gazes around, head filled with cement—a long dark room lit by two dim orange paper-shaded bulbs. A gagging, sweet stench cloys the stale air, the room filled with iron clouds of smoke. The walls are lined with rickety wooden bunk beds, emaciated old Chinese men and women slumped in rotting blankets on torn, stinking mattresses, clutching long white clay pipes, vacuum eyes staring into banks of smoke. “No one sent me, man,” shaking his head: What is this, some kind of Asian nightmare? So much for that don’t-sell-the-mystic-short bullshit.

  “You spy for Yang, huh!” More smoke in his groggy face.

  “You like cookie, perfect, huh?” The other interrogator holds a fortune cookie in front of Monk’s nodding head. “Maybe too perfect … Yang send you!” crumbling the cookie in his face. The old man turns to his companion and hisses out a barrage of Chinese. The other inhales his cigarette and fires a guttural torrent of Chinese back. “What? I can’t undahstand you! Cantonese is foh dogs!”

  “Your Mandarin sounds like monkey’s fart!”

  “Enough! What is your name?”

  “Americo Monk. Would you please not blow smoke in my face?”

  “Amelico Monk! Bullshit! We see! We make you talk!”

  “What?”

  “Lotus-eaters!” the other barks, exhaling smoke in Monk’s face. “Shen Shen!” A diabolical grin that reveals, well, yes, yellow teeth, then they’re gone, a bolt thrown behind the closed door.