Warnings from the Future

by Ethan Chatagnier

  “I’m offering you a fairly big job. Ten pumpkins, five across, two high. A real panorama of Boston: the skyline, Back Bay, the Hancock, the Pru, the Charles with maybe a sailboat or two. But a knockout job.”

  “You realize Halloween is this Saturday?”

  “Let’s be honest. I really want to kick Newburn’s ass.”

  “You want to kick his ass … with art?”

  “Art’s got to have some utility, right?”

  “You know I charge five hundred for a pumpkin? Ten pumpkins is five thousand dollars.”

  “Do I get some kind of bulk discount?”

  I looked around at the rich accoutrements of his condominium and took another sip of his cognac. “No. Do you know anyone else who does this?”

  He smiled. It was the answer he’d been looking for. I told him I’d draw up a contract, but that I’d need enough up front to cover the cost of the pumpkins themselves. He fished his wallet from his back pocket and handed me twenty-five hundred in cash. “Half now, half on delivery.” He noted that I’d seemed interested in the painting in his foyer and encouraged me to admire it for as long as I liked on my way out.

  Like every Durant since 1996, it was a painting of a crowd, this one a Tokyo crosswalk at the end of the workday, thousands of identical black suits approaching each other and passing like the densest school of fish. It was painted from the perspective a few feet above, as if someone had stood on a ladder to view the scene, and the style was almost photorealistic—in fact, it appeared photorealistic from more than five feet away, and all the Durants we’d seen in class had seemed that way on the projection screen.

  A fellow student had derided Durant as Where’s Waldo? for grown-ups, and the rest of the class, myself included, had lazily agreed. Professor Wei said we’d have to stand in front of one to understand, and he was right. From afar it looked simply like a picture of a crowd taken without any regard to composition, the entire canvas filled with people. “There’s no central focus, no subject,” I’d said in class. But in the foyer, as I stepped closer, I saw that each face was a focal point, that everyone in that crowd, maybe two hundred people within the frame, had a unique expression. I first looked at a young man glowing with ambition. He’d done something praiseworthy in his office that day. Another owed money to a friend, and another was drunk already, leaving work. I went from face to face, gleaning their stories. Preoccupation, delight, every state of humanity perfectly rendered. Each visage could have been a painting in its own right. As Professor Wei had said, “Every face is in the crowd, but no face is the crowd.” No wonder a new canvas only hit the market every few years.

  I walked through Beacon Hill back toward the T station, sure I was going to be robbed. I squeezed the lump of cash to make certain it didn’t slip out of my pocket somehow, fearful that if I took my hand out the wad of bills would come out with it and fall directly into a storm drain. Such are the puckish proportions a critical mass of hard money can take on to one underfamiliar with it.

  Beacon Hill was beautiful, and it made me angry. It was postcard Boston, with rows of red-brick condominiums with quaint porches, strung in places with ivy, narrow cobbled streets, and little walkable alleys. I’d seen a news item the year before about a parking spot in Beacon Hill selling for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. John Kerry had a house there, and Uma Thurman. Daniel Webster and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had lived there. The people making art in this city did not: they lived in Jamaica Plain, Chinatown, Dorchester, Roxbury, and Somerville. Their apartments weren’t made of brick, and there was no hint of ivy. It wasn’t fair that everyone in the most beautiful part of the city was a moneymaker, that one had to buy his way in. The rest of my walk to the station, I thought of how different a world it would be if that Durant lived instead with whoever loved it the most.

  I began as an undergraduate at Boston University in 1996, and moved into a three-bedroom apartment in Allston with four other guys. Coming from a suburb of a suburb of Champaign, Illinois, I thought Allston was the heart of the city. With Korean restaurants and record shops and Blanchards liquor (even though I was too young to shop there), how could it not be? And since my friends had gone to UIUC, if not community college, if not no college at all, I saw myself as a grand adventurer, as a very rare individual. My four roommates and I were the type to migrate from the country to the city.

  On move-in day Commonwealth was clogged with station wagons and U-Hauls, the sidewalks impassable, and bodies in the B Line trolleys were crammed against the windows. It was a bit harder to see myself as very rare after that, but a kid can do much to restore his illusions if he sets himself to the task. The city was like a contest to see who could make it and who couldn’t, and my major in art was a constant competition, one in which I acquitted myself well.

  For graduate school I moved to Chinatown. Professor Wei’s family had just moved an aunt out of a tiny studio, and they were renting it for five hundred. A twin bed wouldn’t fit, so I made use of the cot the professor’s aunt had left. That October, in an attempt to fool myself that the cramped space could be made homey, I carved a pumpkin like we’d always done in my home growing up. As an art student now, though, I thought I’d better do something more than a squiggly smile and two round eyes, so I set out to see if I could make a pumpkin look like the Mona Lisa. I threw out the first two drafts, though the second was passable. On the third I found I was able to carve a pumpkin that didn’t just look like Mona Lisa but projected the same feeling as the painting, the haunting smile and the wandering gaze. It went up in my window, the only jack-o’-lantern in Chinatown.

  A few days later, a man in a neatly tailored suit knocked at my door. I thought I was in trouble for something. He introduced himself as Juan Pacheco, a venture capitalist who happened to like the pho joint downstairs from my apartment and had seen my handiwork. When he asked how much I’d charge to do a pumpkin of Bob Marley, I told him I was too busy with a class project to take on anything else. He leaned in to take a quick survey of the size and condition of my apartment.

  “Look,” he said, “what’s a month’s rent for you?”

  That was two days before last year’s Halloween. I didn’t pick up any more clients then. Really, I didn’t think of Pacheco as a client but rather as an eccentric windfall. But the following October I started getting calls not just from Pacheco but from his friends and from other acquaintances who’d been to his Halloween party last year. “Can you do Charlie Chaplin?” they asked. I did Picasso’s Guernica and a Dali clock. I did the Yosemite Valley for a homesick Californian.

  A kid carving a pumpkin sees two media: the pumpkin and the empty spaces. As I settled in I learned how many more there were: the orange of the outer shell; the creamy yellow of the rind, which on its own could be carved into intricate designs; the empty spaces; the shadows created by carefully placed recesses; areas of the inner cavity lit by the candle flame; areas through which the flame could be seen directly; effects that could be created by the placement of multiple candles. By the end I could create warmth or silence, movement or stillness, and I could make the eyes of a portrait twinkle. Most pumpkins I could finish in a half a day. The Laocoön took two.

  I had three days to carve Deckinger’s ten-gourd skyline, two of which I was scheduled to work at the art supply store. My manager was furious that I called in sick for two shifts directly preceding a holiday, but as my pumpkin income meant I no longer had to steal my painting supplies from the store, I felt karmically balanced about it. I’d had thirty-three sales that October. To manage all those jobs, I’d been carving three or more pumpkins a day for the last ten days. I’d developed a preservation regimen as well. With a bleach bath, a coat of petroleum jelly, and a sprinkling of silica beads, I could get a carved pumpkin to last two weeks. That work had netted me seventeen thousand dollars, which was almost as much as I made per year at the shop. The Deckinger commission would put me up to twenty-two.

  I walked down Newbury Street to find a model for the
panorama from one of the watercolor artists who hawked their paintings of Fenway and the swan boats and Faneuil Hall to tourists. I picked out an eight-by-ten of the Charles with the Mass Ave Bridge and Back Bay behind it. Like all watercolors, let alone all street art, it was lacking in detail, but it gave me the bones, and the rest would be easy enough to embellish.

  “How much for this?” I asked. None of the pictures had a price tag.

  “Forty,” said the man wearing a black pageboy hat and cheap button-down. He was making a show of blocking in the marina.

  “For an eight-by-ten?”

  “Don’t try to haggle for it. Buy three or more, you get twenty percent off.”

  It was a brisk evening with lots of traffic on the commercial lane. A street musician’s impoverished guitar provided the soundtrack to matrons in military-style coats walking eastward toward the park hotels and girls in ridiculous high-fashion outfits prancing by on their way to cocktail hours. The painter watched the hems of their skirts as they passed, and even as I felt disgust for him I realized I had been doing the same. I drew up closer to watch him work. He was competent, of course. He painted quickly, each scene a repeat of a scene he’d done hundreds of times before. I was getting quick with my carving knife, though each image I did was new, and even though my pumpkins were admittedly not real artwork, I disliked the feeling of a parallel thread between me and this hat-wearing amateur.

  “You sell many?”

  “Summers? A ton. Fall and spring, enough. Wintertime I gotta play mall Santa.”

  “You’re not even fat.”

  “Try and find a fat guy in Boston without an Irish accent.”

  He said he’d taken some community college classes before going to study with a few seascape painters up in Maine. He listed a few names I’d never heard of, names unknown outside the newspapers of the little communities they lived in, probably selling their paintings of marine rocks to the elderly via mail-order catalog. I told him to thin out his brushstrokes if he wanted to add more detail.

  “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, kid. I think I’ve got it down.”

  I figured he would be doing it fifteen more; in fact, I’d passed a sixty-year-old art hawker on my walk down Newbury whose paintings were nearly indistinguishable from these.

  I gave him forty dollars. I had about two hundred with me, having deposited the nerve-wracking balance under my mattress at home. On my way back home from Back Bay, I stopped in a liquor store and spent most of the rest of what was in my pocket on a bottle of Paul Giraud. I had two leftover uncut pumpkins in my little studio, but the remaining eight I would need to bring home one by one, so I stopped next in a Back Bay grocery, though I could get them in Chinatown for half the price. The rest of the walk was a struggle, with the eight-by-ten tucked into the back of my jeans, a large pumpkin under my right arm, and my left hand wrapped around a bottle of the most expensive alcohol I’d ever bought, but I enjoyed the comic figure I cut as I waddled through downtown Boston like some overloaded Russian peasant.

  There was no heater in my studio, but it was directly above the kitchen of the Vietnamese restaurant, and that heated my space quite well. Steam smelling of beef stock fogged through the gaps in the old hardwood flooring. I was obliged to do my carving, as well as my painting when I had time for it, in the corner by a window that I cracked open a few inches. It was the one place in the apartment I could keep cool, and I didn’t want too much heat to set any of my carvings prematurely to rot.

  I had just the key lines down: the bend of the river; the diagonal cut of the bridge; select trees along the bank; the squat outlines of the Back Bay condos; behind those, the tall silhouettes of the Pru and the Hancock tower. I set electronic tea lights inside them so I could see how the cavities would look illuminated, but I had to imagine the flicker, the movement, that actual candles would provide.

  I kept a few fingers of cognac in my glass while I worked, and sipped at it when I stepped back to assess my progress. My carvings didn’t typically require such a stock-taking, but I did so, outwardly, because this was a panorama, and one needed a little more distance to see the full scope. Inwardly, I did so because the rain-wet street outside the little window, the savory steam rising from below, and a glass of such a fine spirit were almost enough to make a pumpkin look like a work of art.

  Deckinger called me at three thirty on Saturday, wanting to know if I was going to make his deadline. I told him I was putting the final touches on the last one and that I’d start hauling them up within the hour. I’d be bringing them one by one, I said, walking through the Common rather than taking the T, and each trip would take about twenty minutes.

  I put aside what I’d actually been working on that morning: a new painting that had been occupying more and more of my brainspace since I’d stood in front of Deckinger’s Durant. I always did my best work when I was neglecting something else important; I could channel the pressure of a deadline into an artificial deadline for myself.

  Durant saw all the faces in the crowd, but my project was to see the crowd in a single face. I had a huge self-portrait going, divided into little rectangles like the index guides in an atlas. Eventually the guides would fade into the paint laid over them, but each little box would have distinctions both in a slightly different undertone and a slightly different cast of feature—that is, one corner of the mouth would be playfully smirking, the other turned down; one eye would appear to be the eye of a hero, the other the eye of an old woman on the subway. The trick was getting them to conspire to create one cohesive face, one only slightly fractured, able to draw the viewer closer to observe each panel and examine the infinite parallel versions of a single human countenance.

  But that would all have to wait. I quickly fine-tuned the last of the pumpkins and stuck it under my arm. Outside, I was surprised to find a black car waiting for me, and a chauffeur holding a sign with my name on it as if I were being picked up at the airport. So I loaded all the pumpkins into the trunk, cushioning them with some Styrofoam blocks I had in my apartment, and we drove the short trip up the hill to Deckinger’s condo.

  The foyer looked the same, but the rooms beyond were decorated with framed posters for dozens of old horror movies: Poltergeist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and so on. A rented bartender was setting up his table, and Deckinger sat on the corner of his sofa trying to connect his laptop to what seemed like a very complex stereo system. He was not impressed with the first pumpkin I brought in, decorated only with the tail of the river and a few trees. Nor was he happy when I told him I’d deviated from the specs he gave me, forgoing two rows of five pumpkins for a triangular design with just one pumpkin on the bottom left, rising to three high on the far right.

  He studied the first one, his face looking something like a TV judge when he threatens to hold someone in contempt. That expression eased toward neutral as successive trips to the car filled in the tableau. The driver offered to help, but I would not have anyone else handling the delicate pieces. It took about fifteen minutes to come together. When they were all arranged Deckinger looked at me, shrugged, and said bemusedly, “What did I expect from pumpkins?” He counted out the balance of the commission from his wallet.

  I wasn’t worried. I took his money, crouched to a knee, and used long matches to light the eighty-two candles I had glued into position inside the cavities. I did the river first, in the foreground, and with only it and the silhouettes of trees illuminated it recalled the untouched landscape here before Boston. Then I lit the buildings, carefully carved with a pattern that showed certain offices still lit but others darkened for the night. For last I saved the lights of Fenway and the landmark Citgo sign on the right of the panorama. I had used cardboard cutouts and four different colors of candle for the Citgo sign so the triangle was separated into orange, red, and maroon just like on the sign itself, and the CITGO letters glowed blue and bold. Making it all come together had at first felt like I was fashioning the land with my hands, then like I myself had
built the city on top of it, like I could conjure whole civilizations.

  I stood back and observed it with Deckinger. Lights blinked on and off inside the buildings. The currents and eddies of the Charles moved and swirled in the magic of the candlelight. It was hard to believe this real bend in the Charles was just outside, less than a mile away, when it seemed to be living for the moment in this parlor. I looked over to Deckinger, but he didn’t take his eyes off what I’d created.

  He went to his kitchen and started polishing a lowball glass, which I think he did for show. He poured himself a dram of something darker than the cognac. There was no glass for me this time. “Well,” he said. Then again, “Well. Isn’t that fucking something?” He got out his wallet again and counted out more cash, still watching the river dance. He’d tipped me five hundred dollars. Yet I found my own eyes now settled on his glass of that mystery spirit, thinking I might trade the whole tip for my own glass of it and for the name on the label.

  In November I conferred with Professor Wei, and I found myself rushing through an explanation of my work—the painting I’d brought and the sketches I’d done for a few more—in order to tell him about Deckinger, his Durant, and my pumpkin-carving adventures. I lowballed the amount I made by several thousand—studio art professors brought in less than the cost of living in the Boston metro—and still I raised his eyebrows. I told him I had stumbled into a Beacon Hill client base, and he said, very pointedly, “A-ha.”

  My ideas for the Christmas season were still in development: intricate wire wreaths speckled with mirrors and candles; nativity or festivity mosaics; huge panels of holiday scenes constructed out of Christmas lights, like a Lite-Brite on crack, I said.