Black Wings IV

by Edited by S. T. Joshi

  The gray granite wall of St. John’s Cathedral was 200-plus years old, and magenta scribble bloomed beside a padlocked, weathered side door. When laden breeze shifted perilously, the onlookers backed further among the churchyard’s worn and broken gravestones, in even sadder shape than the cathedral. The property had been vacant for months, victim of shrinking congregation and untenable upkeep, a candidate for the wrecking ball. Preservation Commission gesture of solidarity with the mayor’s Graffiti Taskforce was a classic case of too little, too late.

  Too bad about historic architecture like this, but why get all sentimental? Progress and omelets alike demand some breakage, do they not? Meanwhile, the dapper, sopping idiot persevered with pneumatic blaster to laughable effect, and the photographer angled for a spray-free shot, like a jackal angling for one-eyed wildebeest’s blind side.

  Wandering attention led Ira’s eyes around the cemetery, in its artificial hollow bound south, east, and north by church wall, fieldstone retaining wall, and a nursing home. Atop seven-foot retaining wall was a railed promenade accessible to more active seniors, several of whom glumly surveyed the compressor-powered spectacle. A male orderly in turquoise was rubber-necking too, and over everyone’s shoulders peered a passerby from off Benefit Street, an artistic type, hardly unusual with RISD four blocks down. Detached, hipper-than-thou demeanor gave him away. In Ira he instantly triggered feelings of affinity and resentment.

  He could have passed for Ira’s prodigal self, dropping by from parallel universe to taunt him. Same rough age, height, photogray lenses. Skin-deep differences between them Ira chalked up to plein air versus deskbound lifestyles. Prodigal self, beneath brown leather jacket, was concave where Ira was convex. Prodigal’s sun-kissed tan in April made Ira self-conscious of year-round doughy white, and flippant silver forelock mocked Ira’s receded hairline. Hell, the teenage Ira had harbored decidedly artistic leanings, but nobody had to tell him he’d be a damn sight safer majoring in business.

  Impatient tap on the shoulder restored him to bleak reality. The two damp, fed-up newshounds were violating his personal space. They’d gotten what they came for, the writer mouthed over the roar of compressor. Goodbye! The so-called preservationist was still at it, venting mercifully private frustrations on unyielding spray paint. Ira signaled his crew to kill the noise. When high-pressure stream conked out, overdressed shoulders slumped as if a trance had lifted. Neo-yuppie turned stiffly, and fastidious beard sparkled with beaded-up water as he wailed, “I’m all wet!”

  And dude, you’re the last to notice, thought Ira, who said instead, “We’re parked in the church lot down on North Main. Should be a towel on the passenger seat.”

  Photo opportunist’s glower projected silent accusation he’d been tricked into dousing himself. Where was civilization headed, Ira pondered, with this level of chronic mistrust between private and public sectors? “Thanks. The Commission’s around the corner. I’ll change there,” the twit demurred in frostiest patrician monotone. Cloaked in bruised and shivering dignity, hands red and raw, he tromped up brick path to stone stairs up to the promenade and then Benefit Street.

  Ira beckoned at his Taskforce, lounging on tabletop tombs. “Let’s show our fans how it’s done.” During inch-by-inch erasure of “We are made of stars,” Ira puzzled at artsy sentiment’s appeal to a delinquent. The audience, including his bothersome, mismatched doppelgänger, had dispersed from the railing when next Ira checked.

  By the evening rush, smudgy column of smoke presiding over downtown would have apprised Commission twit his self-promotion had been wasted, even if he’d missed that thud like a piledriver impact, followed by sirens. Damn, it’s happened again, mulled Ira during ten o’clock news, not the least heartbroken that everyone would ignore the item about St. John’s, assuming the Journal ran it at all. Nor could he muster shock at latest attack, only bemusement at how readily citizens adjusted to a semblance of life in wartime.

  Third local pipe bomb this month had destroyed the gondola shed under the footbridge at Waterplace Park. And with what result? Expensive boats were reduced to toothpicks, concrete bridge over the lazy Woonasquatucket had withstood the blast handsomely, and several minor casualties were receiving treatment for lacerations and tinnitus. The park was usually depopulated past mid-afternoon, based on enduring rep as a good place to get mugged, except on WaterFire nights, when too many suburbanites clogged streets and parking facilities.

  Yes, the incident would wreak havoc with biweekly WaterFires, or Campfires on the Canal as Ira had it, when the gondoliers were busiest and stacks of hardwood in midstream rows of iron baskets went to blazes. City councilmen vowed on camera they’d approve special funds to rectify this cowardly act of terror. For prize tourist bait, Ira sourly observed, money always solidified up some magic sleeve, but termites were welcome to the 200-year-old wainscoting of historic landmarks.

  So in whose manifesto was bombing gondolas an ideological goal? And with zero body count and no serious disruption? Previous sabotage had been equally random, stupid, and thus far untraceable, and Ira was happier than ever to be out of the Homeland Security loop. He was unclear whether the mayor had dubbed him Graffiti Czar as an honorific or a joke, and didn’t care, content to rule his little roost of DPW loaners and two vanloads of cleaning equipment. Let more ambitious politicos risk fucking up where it actually mattered.

  In windowless excuse for a corner office, Ira slogged through morning review of voicemail, with near-even ratio of complaints about graffiti and misdirected tirades about potholes. Between peevish messages, he overheard coworkers beyond his partitions react to yesterday’s explosion. Their tone rapidly escalated from aghast to rabid, and he stopped listening when a proposal to summarily execute foreign agitators met with cheers.

  He’d plead guilty to his fair share of heated discussions, talking trash, around the water cooler. But outright bloodlust like this—no, never! This new conversational norm made him cringe, as if people were losing their inhibitions, their judgment, like a milder version of the impulsiveness behind cretinous trend to plant bombs. Or maybe he wasn’t exempt from bad graces on the rise. Maybe he could have offered that Preservation Commission clown some pointers on using a power washer. It just hadn’t occurred to him.

  Then again, absurd targets were blowing up daily in cities worldwide, as if terrorism had been dumbed down, rendered apolitical. That should have been enough to put everyone on edge everywhere, despite most sanguine adjustments to “life in wartime.” The mayhem hurdled national, cultural, and religious boundaries like wildfire over white picket fences, too scattershot to blame on copycats or any one organization.

  Given the global situation, Ira was grateful for an HQ on the sidelines and off extremist radar, by Allens Avenue waterfront south of downtown, in a city hangar smelling of gasoline, rubber, and paint. This was particularly okay because a faint, embarrassing air of naphtha always clung to him, and he was more at ease in pungent surroundings than at City Hall, regardless of loud maintenance on sander and street-sweeping trucks.

  Anyway, Ira couldn’t wax too pessimistic at grisly headlines. Every generation since Plato’s had proclaimed its officials most corrupt, its youth most irresponsible, its ideals most debased, its criminals most heinous. And how often have Jehovah’s Witnesses alone had to revise their date for doomsday? No sooner does prophetic handwriting on the wall fade from sight and mind than it reappears, as if for the first time every time, Ira concluded.

  He happened to be staring at the crappy linoleum, as if subjecting it to X-ray vision, probing into its past when dispatcher’s or mechanic’s station might have occupied this corner. The cracked and scuffed flooring was black, with haphazard off-white whorls and ripples like froth on a creek or cobwebs in a drafty cellar or gas clouds adrift in cosmic void. Yes, that was it. Such clouds, he’d heard somewhere, were the last gasp of defunct suns, or the first stirring of nascent suns, or both.

  What the hell were they called? Simple English escaped
him, even as the cracks and scuffmarks faded and a planetarium’s illusion of depth surrounded him. He tried to wrap his head around the enormities of distance he’d have to travel to float within that starscape, the enormities of time in which dust became suns and then dust again. Somehow it didn’t faze him to dwell on light-years and eons, nor was it strange that these spans weren’t intimidating. He felt at home, in fact, within this daydream of deep space.

  After a vacant while, the ringing phone brought him down to earth. He reached for the receiver slowly, dreamily, as if under the spell of lingering weightlessness. At the mayor’s voice he snapped to attention. His Honor ordered him to drop everything and skedaddle downtown to fix some goddamn graffiti on the Superman Building.

  Superman Building was an utter misnomer, but who cared? Since Ira’s boyhood at least, Rhode Islanders had cherished the myth of Art Deco skyscraper as model for one version or another of the Daily Planet offices, and nothing could disabuse them of it. Might as well try insisting “spa” didn’t rhyme with “star.” For eight decades, bigger and bigger banks had tenanted the state’s tallest high-rise, till the biggest bank in America pulled out and left it like St. John’s, derelict and ripe for demolition.

  Tagger had scorned unchallenging street level and bas-relief frieze (for which he’d have needed a ladder) of city founder Roger Williams befriending Indians and securing a charter and other iconic highlights. Rather, he’d made straight for the tippy-top, abetted by B&E or human-fly skills, and was obviously the same artiste who’d profaned empty church, because along the entablature below cylindrical cupola was scrawled, “We are made of stars.” Naturally the mayor was furious. The view of vandalism from his window would have hit him like a magenta slap in the face. Was that the artistic intent?

  With leaden heart Ira grimaced upward, deaf to schoolkids and geezers milling around, waiting for buses in scruffy Kennedy Plaza. To undo this product of daring, stealth, and spray paint, Ira had to requisition scaffolding, safety harnesses, netting, and how the hell much else? The mayor would have to cut a lot of red tape, fast-track a lot of permits. Still, based on His Honor’s displeasure, Ira was confident of men on the job by noon.

  Mayoral ego they could salvage, sure, but the outlook for Superman Building was more doubtful. For Ira’s money, graffiti on abandoned property always contained a subtext that solvent couldn’t remove. It marked a place as unprotected, vulnerable, the brick-and-mortar equivalent of a sick, lame critter ready to be culled from the herd. Sad it had to be the Superman Building, and the repetition of high-flown text irrelevant to the wall it marred was mystifying.

  As expected, fully tricked-out Taskforce was soon hustling to the twenty-eighth floor, and by 4:30 the masonry was verbiage-free. Funny how fast the wheels of power spun when self-image was at stake. His Honor, of course, was home long before then, and would mayoral short-term memory extend to thanking Ira tomorrow? In any case, the cupboard in Ira’s apartment was bare, so he scouted downtown for a menu within modest civil-servant budget.

  He paused at the corner of seedy Washington and Mathewson Streets, leery of presenting a stationary target to panhandlers or worse. Wasn’t some organic, local-ingredients eatery hereabouts? Down Mathewson, a mixed company of well-dressed thirty-somethings, with white collars or shiny necklaces, was filing through a doorway. That looked promising. The façade surrounding the doorway was of beige tiles with a sculpted row of blue cresting waves at tiptoe level, which Ira followed past the point of no return, to find himself gawking through picture window at a gallery opening, a.k.a. refreshments gratis. Why not?

  The stoop was surfaced in black marble, as was the length of the foundation. It caught Ira’s eye and induced brief vertigo. In the black were white veins, webbed and swirling like the linoleum in his cubicle, like the seething stellar gas whose glow wouldn’t reach the earth for a million years. Steady there!

  He wrenched his focus toward the unframed canvases beyond the glass. They only unsettled him further. The walls were like windows onto night skies, where stars clotted together as if between folded hands, or were strewn in irregular clusters, on the verge of resolving into patterns purely in the mind of the beholder maybe, like something by Jackson Pollock. These contorted heavens were somehow perverse, sinister, but mostly confounding because their exquisite stippling, their subtle infusions of red and blue and yellow, had been executed in spray paint. Ira would recognize that generally crude medium anywhere.

  Refocusing on plate glass an inch from his nose depressurized him till he discovered upon it the press-type lettering “Signs of the Times” above an illegible signature in presumably water-soluble magenta. Were all scribbles too alike to differentiate, or had he erased this one twice in as many days? Out the corner of his eye he glimpsed a pair of upscale hipsters smirking at him on their way in. He shut his gaping mouth and steeled himself. If the culprit was right here and Ira oafishly slunk away, he’d never live it down.

  The space behind the glass amounted to an anteroom with a massive reception desk, or did bank of shallow drawers for art-work make it a storage unit where an attendant sat? Anyhow, upon it stood an artist’s statement in a clear holder, and Ira skimmed as far as, “My true name is the unreadable name on my work. To reveal it would cede power to others, and moreover, the human larynx cannot pronounce it.”

  Yep, in each lower right corner was a unique miniature of the magenta squiggle, an insanely narrow-gauge use of the spray can, in keeping with that possibly calculated insanity of the artist’s statement. Through square arch was a windowless inner sanctum with more paintings and, with any luck, wine and food.

  First, though, title labels below each image might lend insights into the painter as madman, or better yet, as perp. Shuffling along, Ira crinkled despairing brow. “Pack Up Your Troubles”? “Everything Must Go”? “Game Over”? Names were as unrelated to compositions as graffiti had been to historic walls. “The Stars Are Soon Right”? Aha, connection with the subject matter at last, but as usual with modern art, Ira didn’t get it.

  “It Had to End Sometime.” That arrested him, that threw him, as when a passing stranger snickered at his orthopedic Crocs. It had preternaturally singled him out, a rejoinder to earlier musings on the countless postponements of doomsday. He shrank from the label as if that were the same as disowning his outbreak of magical thinking.

  Oops! How the hell had someone snuck up behind him, and he none the wiser? He recoiled from jarring contact, with the keenness of repulsion between like magnetic charges. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and turned to meet emotional short-circuit. Part of him was shocked and part was too ready to confront yesterday’s Bohemian from the parapet.

  Had the Bohemian bowed more curtly, Ira would have mistaken it for a tic, and he grasped whose reception this was even without benefit of introduction. “An honor to be in the crosshairs of my specialty’s most outspoken critic. Call me Ari, why don’t you?”

  Ira’s mental short-circuit sputtered on. How much, if anything, had this Ari just admitted, if that was his birth name? Ira fumbled for words like a skydiver for a misplaced ripcord. “What do you know about that graffiti you saw me erase?”

  “I know it was unimportant once it served its purpose.” As Ari shifted his blasé weight from right foot to left, tight leather pants squeaked. Ira hated leather pants. “I know you shouldn’t fritter away the time we have left.”

  Jesus, what to address first, the graffiti’s “purpose” or “the time we have left”? Ira was still foundering when a plump girl with armloads of jangly bracelets and blue streaks in blond dreadlocks steered the exhibitor away by the puffy sleeve, whispering about a buyer. She betrayed no awareness Ira existed.

  Stress was loosing that musk of naphtha from his pores, wasn’t it? No wonder gallery girl had shunned him. He’d learn no more tonight about tentative suspect. This had been a far cry from his scene, his comfort zone, for decades. Best to steal away, before he attracted further demoralizing smirks.

  On
the sidewalk, he glanced up repeatedly en route to his Civic. Providence was city enough that its skyglow made for mediocre stargazing. Big Dipper, Scorpio, Orion’s Belt, anyhow, looked no different, to his great relief. Had he really doubted they would? And remarkably, sense of kinship with smug painter had also endured, though morphing into sibling envy that yearned to put parallel self behind bars.

  Ira lost track of how many days plodded by without local disturbance. But they offered no respite. Spirits didn’t rebound, no hopes for lasting calm brightened, definitely not for Ira, and how could he be atypical? Nope, more mayhem had to be brewing, and the longer it held off, the tenser the citywide atmosphere grew. In others, moreover, Ira discerned unseemly, ill-harnessed anticipation, as if they were secretly eager for smoke and explosions, circus, a festival of calamity. Disappointment lurked under new workplace greeting, “Well, no bombs yet.”

  Ira deplored this ghoulish hankering, crediting strength of character for exempting him from it. Yes, for weeks he’d had crazy dreams, but how was he responsible for those? Actually they’d have qualified as nightmares, except he woke energized, elated, like Scrooge on Christmas morning. But upbeat mood wasn’t his fault either, was it?

  In fact, they only chafed because he couldn’t decipher the remembered chaos so lucid to his dreaming self. Ari’s jagged signature across chrome gate the width of a canyon had been perfectly legible, and Ira had blithely pronounced its chittering syllables. He was basking in the nuclear fusion at the heart of a sun, in teeming red bursts and eddies and vortices, and he beheld in it a parity with rioting mobs packed into malls and town squares, looting and torching and butchering, and both the solar furnace and the carnage filled his ecstatic regard as if he were in two places at once. The act of looking up had thrust him into black space among white maelstroms of gas broader than any planetary system, and had reminded him that everything material spent more eons inchoate than otherwise, that such was everything’s true and normal state, and squinting, he could comprehend the age of each atom as handily as reading a clock. But come morning, alarm clock dispelled any remnants of epiphany, demoting him to sad sack who’d absorbed too many bad vibes from the zeitgeist.