Warnings from the Future

by Ethan Chatagnier

  Professor Wei had an impressive slouch. His shoulder blades and sacrum were the only points of contact with his chair, his feet extended far in front of him, giving the impression that his body was the hypotenuse of a right triangle. It was more work, I was certain, than sitting straight up would have been. He did it when he was concentrating. He was also steepling his fingers, which signaled concentration squared.

  “Hand me your sketchbook,” he said. He flipped through it several times, taking so long on each page that I was sure he was preparing a scorching critique. The ambitious students flocked to his classes and the sensitive ones flocked away, for he was not one to mince words. In turn I began composing a mental apologia, though I never planned on using it, because while the professor never raised his voice, he never lost an argument either. When he finished he closed the book gently and slid it across the desk to me. He tapped the front and asked, “Why would you work on anything but this?”

  Those were just ideas, I told him, ideas too derivative of Durant to be worth anything on their own. The carving had netted me my living expenses for most of a year, and hadn’t even monopolized my time—half of this painting had been done during my busiest days of carving. If I could come up with another moneymaker for the holiday season, I could set myself up for the next two years and have half my student loans paid off by the time I graduated. Remembering the Jewish neighborhood down the street, I started extemporizing: artisan menorahs, micropainted dreidels. Only later did I realize how stupid this all sounded.

  “But what you are talking about is craft, even if you are very good with these pumpkins. Tell me, how much would you pay for one of those?” He laughed. “I wouldn’t buy one, no offense. I don’t think you would, either. Not because they’re not good for what they are, but because of what they are. Now tell me, how much would you pay for this Durant you saw?”

  “I’m not talking about giving up painting.”

  “Did Evan Durant spend his time carving jack-o’-lanterns? A craftsman can schedule his time. An artist has to dive in. These are the best things I’ve seen in my classes in a long time.”

  At that hint of praise my argumentative tack dropped, and I lapsed into full-on therapy mode. I said maybe that was true, but what about the other classes at the school? What about all the classes at the handful of other art schools in Boston, or all the classes at the hundreds of schools across the nation? What about New York? What about people like Durant, who dropped out as undergraduates and painted under the radar for years? What about time, about multiplying the competition by each entering class of the future, filled with new prospects? Was it so bad to hedge my bets a little when some college dropout in a basement in Peoria was potentially doing the same thing I was doing but better?

  I caught my breath and began to apologize. Professor Wei’s slouch had intensified. He was staring up at the ceiling, and he looked like a plank that had been tipped over onto the office chair. I wasn’t sure his butt was even in contact with the seat cushion. He asked to see my notebook again, and I waited while he looked through it in much the same fashion as before.

  “You’re right about the odds. But you’ll have your whole life to sell pumpkins to rich gentiles and menorahs to rich Jews if this doesn’t pan out. As a professor my job is to spot talent and nurture potential, not to make any promises, but I will make you one promise regarding your potential: a friend of mine runs a gallery out in Brighton. If the rest of your series comes out as well as that one, I’ll help you get your paintings in it.”

  So I forwent any holiday-themed business ventures and instead dove in, as Professor Wei had suggested, to the work. I had to start transporting the finished works to a storage closet at the school because there wasn’t space in the unsteamed corner of my studio and I was worried about the canvases warping or taking on a beefy smell. A few times I asked the professor to take a look at them, but he refused, saying this was a personal project and I shouldn’t let anyone else in just yet. He was right again. I had something I wanted to say to Durant: that I was not just one face in a crowd, that some people deserved to be the focus of their own painting. It was a personal project, and thus it was different than anything else I had created. Before I had always gauged my work by how closely it approximated the work of established masters and contemporary upstarts, but an internal metric had sprung out nowhere for these paintings, offering me intense joy when I felt I was hitting that shadowy goal and despair when I wasn’t. When I couldn’t get a detail right, I would feel the whole series was doomed.

  I worked away through the coldest months. Snow was on the sidewalks and piled in the gutters outside, and little breezes blew the frigid air in through the little gap I left open at the window. I learned to calibrate it, two inches on cold days, one inch during the freezes, closed at 9 p.m., an hour before the kitchen below shut down. I imagined being interviewed one day in Aesthetica or Juxtapoz and telling stories of my early days painting above a Vietnamese restaurant, drinking from a bottle of cognac I could not afford.

  After the fragmented face I’d started in October, I worked on a crowd much like the ones in Durant’s paintings, except every face in the crowd was my own, every expression a variety of expression I actually made. In another the faces of everyone in a crowd were blurred beyond recognition, except for one face (not mine—too obvious, of course) in high focus. I replicated the famous photo of Muhammad Ali towering over a downed Sonny Liston, but each of those faces in the background, those heads sticking up behind the ring, was Ali’s as well, sharing his cock-headed moment of triumph, his dare to Liston to get up again. I became hyperaware of crowds when I was in public, aware of my place in them, whether I was dead center or on the fringes, where I would be if the crowd were composed and framed. I even sought some out: the game-day commuters at Kenmore, the new-exhibit-goers at the Museum of Fine Arts.

  When May came, late in the semester, I had a twelve-painting series, and Professor Wei finally let me show it to him. We lined them up, five around the walls inside his office and the other seven in the hallway outside. He walked from piece to piece, examining each with his trademark silent-concentration face. It was not a good sign. In class he was effusive about the work he liked. He had sung Durant’s praises for two hours, though no one in the class was interested. Watching him apply his critical eye made me reexamine the set from the perspective of an independent viewer, and the stress of his silence suffused me with doubts not about my technique but about my choices. I knew what he was going to say: the choices were wrong. The only portrait they showed was a self-centered pretender.

  I realized I had never been taken apart before. I’d had no reviews in papers, little or big. My work had not been on any sites and had not been subject to angry comment threads. I’d exposed myself so far only within the womb of the academic workshop, where most of the students were middling and the professors paid to be gentle. As blunt as Professor Wei was in class, I sensed his workshop was a soft territory compared to where we were heading now.

  He was steepling his fingers again, tapping the two index fingers together. When his response finally came, it was less thorough than I’d come in hoping for, but a much easier escape than I had been anticipating. “Well done,” he said, and dialed a number on his cell phone.

  “David, I have something to show you.”

  At that time I thought expectation was the hardest state, that I couldn’t bear the waiting. When I think back to that summer, I remember doing a lot of walking around town. I’d walk north through the cobbled brick streets of Beacon Hill, cross the Longfellow Bridge into Cambridge, then cross the Harvard Bridge back to Back Bay. Other days I’d walk through the Fens and down to Jamaica Plain. My spurt of inspiration had played out, and I was eager for the next one to catch me, but so filled with ambition I was in no state to be caught. Halloween was around the corner, and I could once again bankroll the rest of the year, but I was reluctant to begin what Professor Wei had dismissed as craftwork when I had actual artwork ha
nging on the walls of that gallery out in Brighton. Only in retrospect can I see what a joy it should have been, feeling like I only had to choose what I wanted to become and it would happen.

  On a Saturday in late September I took the T out to Brighton to begin collecting my paintings, none of which had sold. I was going to have to bring them back one by one and find a place to store them; I had graduated and no longer had access to the school facilities. I was an artist on my own now, and no one owed me anything. I’m sure the professor would have met with me to give me advice, but it was no longer his job, and I was embarrassed to visit him because it would have felt too much like begging. I went in and took the first canvas off its hooks, my self-portrait divided into every self I thought I could have been, my favorite to look at when I was composing them, the most painful to look at now.

  Outside I leaned it against the wall to give Deckinger a call. I had a spreadsheet of all my clients from the previous year, and the plan was to start contacting them the first of October. I called Deckinger so early because he was my biggest ticket, but more so because I hoped he might buy one of my paintings, even if only out of nostalgia, even if only to have a story for his friends: “I bought this from the kid who carves my jack-o’-lanterns.” If he only gave me eighty dollars for it, if he hung it in his walk-in closet, the sale would mean more to me than another five thousand dollar commission.

  He answered, and I told him who was calling.

  “Never heard of you,” he said.

  I repeated my name and reminded him of the pumpkins from last year. “That’s right,” he said. “They were a big hit. Everybody loved it. Thought you should know. It’s the way the world works, right? You pay an artist for work in your home and manage to steal all the credit.”

  “I don’t need the credit,” I said. “I’m glad they went off well.”

  I told him about my ideas for his pumpkins this year, that I could do a Sistine Chapel that would blow his mind, or a crowd of horrormovie villains. Sales weren’t in my blood, but I thought I was coming on smooth. I was aiming for bigger spreads, more pumpkins, more cash in my pocket.

  “I haven’t thought much about what I’m doing this year, but when I do I’ll have my secretary get in touch. Look, I’m getting on the bridge. I’ve got to go.” He hung up before I could renew my pitch. From that point on, I knew the score. I knew there would be no call from any secretary. I even knew Durant no longer graced his foyer, now that Guy Bonner was the soup du jour. I took my painting and got on the train.

  In Allston, though, I had to get off because the train became too crowded. At each stop, at the usually empty stops after the line turned left off Commonwealth, new people poured on. What had been a ghost train in Brighton was now full of elbows that did not bode well for my canvas. At Packard’s Corner I made the decision to walk the rest of the way. It would take a lot longer to bring home all the paintings this way, but it was a walk I enjoyed, down Commonwealth right in front of Boston University, with the river peeking from behind in the gaps between buildings.

  At first I’d been unable to figure out what drew the crowd that day. It was too early in the morning for a Red Sox game, too early in the week for the Patriots. Even in the “Athens of America,” as a few old-fashioned folks still called Boston, plays and museum openings didn’t draw like this. The traffic was backed up as well, at a complete standstill in the eastbound lanes and not much better westbound, and even the sidewalks were overwhelmed with a mix of the young and old.

  When I got closer to the center of campus I saw pavilion tents and young women in scarlet polos ushering about young people in backpacks. It was Boston University’s move-in day, and four thousand new students were swarming east Allston with their parents in tow. There was music playing; there were games, festivities, booths, all signaling the commencement of a new age and new possibilities for the arriving students. Along the street, buskers and artists had come to take their tithe, selling Citgo signs and Fenway Parks and paintings of the Common. I even saw the street artist—the one who’d sold me the panorama for Deckinger’s pumpkins that day in Back Bay—hauling in hundreds with his infinitely replaceable work.

  I leaned my painting against a garbage can and walked on without it. It could decorate a dorm room or migrate to the dump, but that was no longer my concern. As I trekked farther up Commonwealth, I saw what was stopping traffic. A clumsy U-Haul driver had driven his truck through an underpass without enough clearance, shearing off half of the overhead storage compartment and wedging the vehicle in so tightly that two parallel tow trucks were trying to pull it out together. A piece of wooden furniture too mangled to identify lay along the line between lanes, surrounded by a smashed TV and scattered boots and dresses. A girl in a tube top berated her father on the sidewalk. The foot traffic swarmed around it all and walked on unaffected, and the subway cars rattled by, and the river flowed on as always.

  At home I poured myself a small glass of Paul Giraud and drank it slowly. I had a few inches left in the bottom of the bottle, and when I was done I hid it away in the back of a cabinet and never touched it again, because I know that when it’s gone, it’s gone.

  THE LAW OF THREES

  They roll out at 10 p.m. with the radio crackling. Whit tries to keep his mind on the LSAT study books hidden in the book bag at his feet. The messages coming through the speaker urge everyone to be careful, to exercise caution, but the whole night-shift fleet is swirling around the parking lot like a cloud of energized bees. In the hallways of the station, the mood had been somber, almost silent. It was amazing to see grown, armed men feel so vulnerable in the guarded hallways of their own station. But now that each pair is wrapped in a cruiser, some doing donuts or fishtailing out of figure eights, the lot is a rave of red and blue lights. The men roll past Whit and Vargas flashing three fingers in the air, expecting to see them flashed back. Whit does not lift his hand. Though he’s always had the tendency to be carved by the expectations of others, he won’t celebrate this. He remembers this mood. High school. Homecoming. The radio says stay safe out there, but the body politic says be aggressive, B-E aggressive.

  Vargas rolls out plenty slow, the caboose of the train, steering with his elbows while he eats his nightly cup of chocolate pudding. He regards himself as some kind of sage or oracle, and Whit supposes anyone who’s been patrolling so long without being promoted out of it has to. He waxes his mustache, not with a hipster twirl but into a fat black slug that overfills the entire upper lip. Somehow he never gets his pudding in it, which does indeed feel like a mystical power. Vargas also thinks there’s power in moving slowly. Whit is not sure there’s power in anything the force does. But other times he thinks every one of his actions is a wasted act of power: resting a hand on a holster, speeding down an empty night street, or even stopping on a busy sidewalk to double-knot a loosened shoelace.

  When the cars come out of the lot, they split left and right into two trails, and from there into smaller and smaller groups until finally he and Vargas are alone headed southwest on International. You can smell the canal and the marshy coastline a few blocks away. The smell travels farther at night, a stink of plant matter ripening in still water. A few blocks more and they’re in what Vargas calls Zombieland: weak, irregular streetlamps illuminating now and then the dead souls pushing shopping carts full of obsolete VCRs, or walking that slow junkie waltz with the whole body rocking. Then there are the groups, the gangs, three or four or five teens walking abreast in the street, enlarged by their oversize athletic apparel. If there’s a pipe being passed or a gun tucked in the back of a belt, or anything else citable, Vargas likes to startle them with the lights and siren and watch them scurry, he says, like bugs.

  Whit’s foot nudges his satchel, heavy with two fat books of practice questions.

  “You know what the people who live here call it?” he asks Vargas. This would have been a good retort if he’d said it months ago, when Vargas had first claimed the naming rights. He’s thought of the wor
d often since, but not until tonight has it seemed important to point out. Vargas raises his eyebrows, waiting to be amused.

  “Home,” he says.

  “Not as catchy.”

  They pass a bum toting an out-of-season Christmas tree over his shoulder, nearly dragging a soggy-hipped basset hound behind him; a ten-year-old weaving down the street on a bicycle with a basket full of groceries; a donut shop they both choose not to mention tonight, the only lit storefront on an avenue composed of security-gated laundries, vacuum repair shops, ethnic groceries, and massage brothels.

  “Besides,” Vargas says, “you’re assuming their view from the inside is more accurate than ours from the outside. Those uncontacted tribes in the Amazon—you think they can see themselves more clearly than we can? You think you see yourself more clearly than I do? You think those law books say the same thing to me?”

  Vargas has dropped hints before that he knew what was in Whit’s bag, but this is his first direct statement about it. Whit has broken new ground, perhaps, with his challenge to the Zombieland moniker. The exchange feels, in a sad way, like something that could pass for closeness.

  “What do my books say?” he asks.

  “My mother taught me about when you can’t say anything nice.”

  At eleven thirty, they see a kid holding ground on a known corner. Vargas tells Whit to shake him up a bit and parks across the street, where he has a good line of sight.

  “Be safe,” he calls as Whit gets out of the car. “Exercise caution.”

  Whit walks over to the darkened corner: a minimart porched by a single concrete step, on which the kid stands, leaning back against the crosshatching of the door gate. He’s a teen, by his size, but more is hard to tell given the scrawny, loose-limbed body and the incongruous baby-fatted face. Whit shows his badge and says his name. The kid says nothing. Whit asks his name. He says it’s Gino.