Night, Neon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Though much has changed, she senses that the old city remains beneath the surface just as tissue, blood, and bones lie beneath skin.

  And now traffic is moving again. Approaching the exit for Tiger Stadium.

  Amid the ruins of the old inner city are dilapidated buildings upon which local artists have painted murals in bright, savage colors. The murals are primitive, powerful: gigantic portraits of glaring Aztec faces, cocoa-gleaming bodies contorted in ecstasy, fingers outspread in appeal or in warning, outspread arms and legs, cascades of rippling dark hair, newborn brown babies attached to bloody umbilical cords and floating like milkweed seed. The shell of a burned-out structure festooned with heraldic black panthers, shrieking eagles, crosses oozing blood. Water tanks atop buildings, covered in Byzantine graffiti and scowling black faces. On a wall of an abandoned tenement building an astonishing mosaic-mural in mimicry of a medieval vision, an ascension of angels to a robin’s egg blue heaven: muscular dark-skinned angels with wide, feathered black wings and mask faces like the crude female faces in Picasso’s Guernica. Below, these mounds of corpses out of which jungle flowers spring.

  The corpses are an untidy pile, like debris washed up on a beach. The hue of their skin not white exactly, but a pasty beige. And the faces smudged, indistinct.

  L.K. tries not to feel shocked, wounded. She tries not to think—But I am not “white”—not like that …

  The race hatred in this vision, so casually displayed on a tenement wall facing the John Lodge Freeway! Disgust, loathing, murderous fury from which L.K. turns her gaze, shaken.

  At the height of the riot of July 1967 she and her husband had cowered in their house near Seven Mile Road. Hearing fire engines, sirens. Hearing shouts, screams, gunshots. Silently pleading—But I am not “white”—not like our neighbors.

  Electric power was out. Phone lines were inoperative. No TVs, radios. Martial law had been declared. Inside their darkened and barricaded house they’d been spared as marauding packs of young black men and boys surged in random directions like a furious stream overflowing its banks. What spared them: there were too many houses, too many buildings for rioters to trash and burn. Their most terrifying moments had been when Michigan National Guardsmen fired shots at looters in front of their house, chasing them down the street.

  In a state of suspended emotion, she remembers now.

  (Had any of the young black looters been shot? Killed? She and her husband had no idea; it was their own safety of which they thought at the time.)

  Her face is wet with tears. Oh, that was—awful … And yet, how her young husband held her hands tightly to console her.

  She’d loved him! His concern for her, his wish to protect her.

  No one now in her life who would care for her like this. Who would wish to protect her.

  “I am so lonely. I miss you, darling. I am so, so sorry.”

  Sometimes when she is alone, especially when she is driving a car, L.K. will speak in this way. It is a rare luxury she allows herself, knowing that no one else can hear, no one will know.

  And she herself will forget as soon as she reaches her destination.

  Exiting now at City Center, where (white) corporate America reasserts itself: banks, municipal buildings, the “heroic” statue known as the Spirit of Detroit, a fountain gushing water. A few blocks away, the city’s showcase: a high-rise dark-tinted glass and aluminum monolith of swanky hotels, business and professional offices, and condominiums, quaintly called the Renaissance Center.

  The Chateau Renaissance is not a hotel she knows. At least the pretentious name is not familiar.

  Soberly she recalls her younger ghost-self, rising in one of the silent glass elevators of the previous hotel, on this very site.

  Up, up, up—white numerals blinking above the elevator’s door.

  On the twenty-third floor, offering herself to the man who opens the door to her after she’d timorously knocked once, twice, a third time.

  The affair had been deeply wounding to her, humiliating. Thrilling, profound. Scars from those perilous several months abide with her still, in obscure parts of her body.

  The affair had not precipitated the end of her marriage. (Her husband had never known.)

  Of course, the affair had precipitated the end of her marriage.

  It is at the Chateau Renaissance that L.K. has made a reservation for just two nights.

  Glittering opulence on the surface, the old structure beneath.

  Yes, she is sure. It is the old hotel renamed, refurbished. Here is the old high ceiling of gilt squares, the old, quaintly trickling fountain, the row of gilt-embossed elevators.

  On the twenty-third floor, the identical room awaits. Repainted, refurbished.

  Except the Chateau Renaissance has made a concession to “resurgent” Detroit: in a corridor is an exhibit of paintings, collages, sculptures by local artists. Judging by the predominant imagery, most of the artists are African American. Many are female. This is not a subtle or meditative or minimalist art, but an art in the visually aggressive manner of Rauschenberg, Oldenburg, Warhol. Paint applied with a trowel, collages of Pop Art iconography, sculptures slung together out of scrap metal, plastics, Styrofoam. One of the sculptures is a pair of parted crimson lips, many times enlarged, on a phallus-pedestal; another is unnervingly realistic-looking hands and feet, with spikes hammered through them, on a primitive cross.

  L.K. peers at the finger- and toenails on this sculpture, which are discolored with blood. Surely these artifacts are made of plastic and yet, how convincing …

  The most lurid artwork, as it is the most riveting, is a collage titled Blond Venus. On a crude canvas sticky red paint has been smeared, and on the paint little black (plastic?) flies have been affixed; falling over this in a cascade of springy hair is an ash-blond ponytail of about thirty-six inches.

  Is this human hair? L.K. knows better than to touch art, even such crude art, yet she can’t prevent her hand from reaching out to caress the dry, brittle hair. Synthetic, she thinks.

  Peering closely, she discovers that there are tiny roots to the hairs—stippled with blood. She stares, shudders, and backs away.

  “Ma’am? May I help you?”—a uniformed hotel employee has been watching and quickly approaches.

  Feeling faint. For a panicked moment, no idea where this terrible place is.

  Then—of course. She has a reservation, she has come to check in.

  Thinking—If I vanish and am never again heard of, my signature here will be proof that I existed.

  4.

  His name, he tells her, is Vann. He signs his work Vnn.

  She tells him a name. It is not precisely her name, but the initials are identical to her own: L.K.

  He is surprised (she thinks) that she has accepted his invitation to see his studio. Indeed, surprised and pleased.

  A woman who looks like L.K.! In the company of Vnn.

  In a bright, assured voice that suggests not the slightest unease, L.K. tells Vann that she has walked from the Renaissance Center to Belle Isle, she hasn’t brought her rented car. She is happy to walk back with him.

  Gusts of wind whipping her hair. Wind-roiled waves.

  Crossing the bridge, L.K. sees in the river myriad scintillating eyes. Winking, glittering. In rough waves apparitions of swimmers, the agitated motions of their arms. It is painful to witness such struggles to keep from drowning …

  Thinking—Is not all of life a struggle to keep from drowning?

  “Vann” continues to eye her curiously. Greedily.

  He asks: Is she (possibly) a journalist writing an article? A photojournalist?

  No. She is not.

  He’d thought (possibly) she had a camera in her bag.

  But no. She does not.

  Not with me. Not here.

  L.K. is not a photojournalist, but she is a photographer, or has been a photographer. To be a photographer is not a matter of taking photographs but of having hope, purpose.

  Her ca
mera is back in the hotel room, unpacked. She has not yet had the energy to lift it in her hands.

  Vann is telling her that she looks like the kind of person who is photographed.

  She laughs, for this is flattering. It does not seem to her that this calculating man is likely to flatter without cause.

  She says, “And you, too. You look like a person who is photographed.”

  This, Vann accepts with a shrug. (What does a shrug mean? Yes? No?) If L.K. is speaking ironically, Vann chooses not to notice.

  Now he asks her, is she visiting someone in Detroit?

  She doesn’t reply at first. She has not intended to speak of herself except in the most impersonal terms. In her relations with men it is wisest (she has thought) not to give the adversary, that’s to say the newly encountered man, any firm grasp of her. (The blunt image is of thumb and fingers thrust into a bowling ball, for a firm grasp of the ball.) Yet L.K. hears herself tell the man that she has come to visit a friend who is very ill. A friend she has not seen in years. A friend named Mia—they’d been college roommates, as close as sisters at one time.

  Gravely, Vann nods, listening. She likes it that she can so easily control the man’s emotional connection with her by uttering the proper words in the proper tone of voice.

  In this case, she is telling the truth. Nearly.

  “ … Mia has been in remission, but now it seems that she is not in remission and chemotherapy doesn’t seem to help any longer. And now—and now, it’s—which is why I—we were very close once … It was awkward to decline the invitation from the family, not to stay with them, for I’d stayed in their house in the past and they have a big house—in Grosse Pointe … I couldn’t bear it, staying there. Mia’s terminal illness will pervade the household, there would be no escape.”

  Vann listens, his head inclined in sympathy. Gusts of wind stir the graying hair straggling from beneath the baseball cap.

  She thinks—Of course I know him! He is my friend.

  She thinks—All a woman wants is for a man to listen like that. Any man.

  “I haven’t—yet—seen much of the city. I want to see more. All I’ve done is drive from the airport and out to the hospice. I was so afraid, going into the building … I saw Mia this morning, and I stayed until the nurse asked me to leave so that she could rest. I’ll see her tomorrow morning. Today I had to get away to Belle Isle. I didn’t know how Belle Isle would be—if it would be—deteriorated and dangerous … Remember what they’d said, speaking of the ‘race riot’ in the 1940s, the ‘grass of Belle Isle was red with blood’ … I’ve always remembered that—those words. Maybe it isn’t even true. Wasn’t true. ‘The grass was red with blood.’ I feel that time is slipping from me. Through my fingers.”

  Why is she telling this stranger these wayward, rushing thoughts? She has not the slightest idea, except (perhaps) she wishes to throw herself upon his mercy.

  A Detroit Police Department cruiser passes, headed out to Belle Isle. If she were in trouble, at risk, she had only to lift her hand, to wildly wave her hand to attract the police officers’ attention; at once they would brake their vehicle, they would come to her assistance. A well-dressed (white) woman on the Belle Isle Bridge summoning help from Detroit police officers would not be ignored.

  The fact that L.K. merely glances at the police vehicle, that she does not lift her hand, would seem to be evidence that she is not at risk.

  Indeed, Vann and L.K. comprise a couple. To the casual eye, a slightly mismatched couple strolling together on the Belle Isle Bridge.

  With a sudden thrill of happiness she thinks—Now he will take my hand. He will hold my hand tenderly.

  Vann doesn’t take her hand. Perhaps Vann would like very much to take her hand, but he does not.

  And when he walks close beside her, close enough to nudge against her, by accident or by design, L.K. eases away, clutching her canvas bag.

  Halfway across the bridge. The police cruiser has vanished. Few pedestrians are crossing now. L.K. remembers: it is not the Belle Isle Bridge, but the MacArthur Bridge. Yet no one who lives in Detroit and visits Belle Isle is likely to call the bridge the MacArthur Bridge.

  Vann is telling L.K. that he doesn’t believe in extrasensory perception—“whatever the hell that is”—but he’d had a dream the other night in which there was a woman—“a woman like you, who came to my studio and wanted to see my new work and so I showed her …”

  L.K. takes exception—A woman like you. How condescending! Insulting! Doesn’t this arrogant man know that there is no woman like her, there is only her?

  “Really. And what did ‘this woman’ think of your art, Vann?”

  L.K.’s voice is so cold, Vann understands that he has blundered.

  She is thinking she won’t accompany him to the Durant building after all. She will say goodbye to him when they’ve crossed the bridge. She will walk away, quickly. He will not follow her. He will not dare follow her. She feels a wave of sexual disgust, repugnance for the man: the fleshy face, stained teeth, sour breath, layers of fat carried above his belt, misshapen toes. Who does he think he is, daring to approach her.

  A would-be predator. Certainly a failed artist. A marginal figure in the no-man’s-land of Detroit, Michigan, to which she has come by the sheerest chance and to which she will never return.

  5.

  Gently he takes her arm. “Here. We turn in here.”

  It has been a surprisingly long walk to a block of warehouses on the river east of Grand Boulevard. L.K. has not remembered that the Durant building is located on a short, stubby block called Durant, which intersects with Grand Boulevard.

  She is feeling apprehensive. She could not have said why she has come into this desolate part of Detroit with an unkempt man who is a stranger to her.

  In the distance are high-rise office buildings, incongruous in this setting. Smudged-smoky glass of the dagger-shaped Freedom Tower.

  The April sky, so promising earlier, has turned gray and glowering. The temperature is plummeting. Yet L.K. begins to feel exhilarated, reckless.

  He will offer me a drink. I will not accept.

  The renovated warehouse to which Vann leads her is teasingly familiar to her, though it has been lavishly adorned with quasi-primitive mosaics. Here are the Found Object Sculptors League, the Blue Boar Gallery, the Durant Artists Coalition. Positioned on the roof is a triumphant mythological creature—part winged lion, part demon—a chimera with a fierce expression, bared teeth.

  Your gaze just naturally lifts to the winged lion. Only belatedly do you see that the lion is surrounded by mounds of skulls amid crimson flowers shaped like tongues.

  “ ‘To create is to destroy,’ ” Vann says, as if translating for L.K., “though to destroy isn’t always to create.”

  Whom is he quoting? Is he quoting himself? L.K. supposes this is a remark she should know, attributed to Picasso, Kandinsky, Goya, Man Ray, she has no idea.

  In the grassless front area is a ten-foot wind sculpture, whose blades, adorned with wan (white-skinned) human masks, are turning erratically.

  Proudly, Vann tells her that the wind sculpture is his.

  L.K. is subtly offended by the (white-skinned) masks. She wonders if Vnn is not himself “white,” but a person of color, though light-complected.

  L.K. tells Vann that the wind sculpture is “very striking”—she says nothing about the (white-skinned) masks, wanting to turn around and flee the warehouse even as she enters the building with Vann and feels a sense of immediate vertigo, as if the floor is tilting beneath her.

  No. This is a mistake. Go back.

  Recalling revelations of asbestos in many of the older buildings in Detroit. In the Durant and other waterfront warehouses, surely.

  Recalls: asbestos fibers are thinner than human hairs. The cause of deadly cancers of the lungs, blood. Commonplace in buildings of a certain era, of a certain type. Roofing, insulation. Its lethal effects can take decades to emerge.

  There�
�d been massive removals of asbestos-contaminated materials in the city, she recalls. Campaigns to clean up the despoiled environment. Raze the worst of the buildings. Local businesses had resisted initially. There had been litigation. Settlements. Numerous deaths.

  On one side of the Durant is an abandoned warehouse; on the other, a rubble-strewn vacant lot.

  Inside the Durant is a raw, open space, as if part of the ceiling has been removed; skylights let in glowering-pale light through panes of glass speckled with seeds and other debris. There is a second-floor balcony on which neon-flashing sculptures are displayed.

  Interior entrances to the Blue Boar Gallery, the Durant Artists Co-Op, the Detroit Sculptors Coalition, Dequindre Rouge. Smaller galleries that open onto the foyer, exhibiting weavings, pottery, paintings, knitted things. Most of the galleries are closed, darkened. There are virtually no visitors or customers. Their footsteps echo distractingly. Yet, through the doorway of the Blue Boar, L.K. sees a woman—not young, though not exceptionally old—so familiar to her, she stops dead in her tracks, trying to recall the woman’s name …

  But she isn’t alive now—is she?

  The woman she’d known, the woman whom this woman resembles, had died years ago of breast cancer. L.K. is sure.

  No. Whoever she imagines the woman might be, this woman could not possibly be.

  And again, as they pass another small gallery in which wheat-colored macramé sculptures are displayed, L.K. glances inside to see a figure—a white-haired woman—from just the back, who seems to her startlingly familiar …

  “Is something wrong, dear?”—Vann asks, concerned.

  Quickly L.K. tells him no.

  “Is she someone you know, dear? Would you like to go inside and say hello to her?”

  “N-No. Not now.”

  The very prospect frightens her. No!

  In this place they are preserved. What is this place!

  The Edelstein Gallery is a larger gallery that exhibits more sophisticated art, including even, L.K. sees to her surprise, lithographs and woodcuts by Rockwell Kent, Ben Shahn, Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Philip Guston, Marsden Hartley. Hadn’t the Edelstein Gallery once been located in the old, elegant Fisher Building?