Things happen and happen and happen, and we only half the
time, less than half the time, hardly ever in fact, distinguish things we’re
doing from things that are happening around us. Until something wakes us up on
the cusp of a choice or a eucatastrophe or the reverse, and we think:
What brought me to
this point?
This wasn’t the choice
I wanted to make!
None of these
possibilities reflects who I am or what I want in any shape, form, or fashion!
The train turned away
from that track hundreds of miles ago, and I hadn’t noticed til now.
Gospel was in the process. She wasn’t making decisions. She felt,
mostly, joy — joy upon joy. And sometimes: There
isn’t time. I’ll never do it. I won’t learn fast enough. So much inside, and I can’t
get it out fast enough.
She felt like she was splitting at the seams. She was
exhausted. She worked for hours, painted for hours, fell into a deep sleep,
woke up and ate coffee and protein bars and started the process again.
Gospel kept taking long walks down past the painting as the
muralist blocked it out, filled it in, completed it. Sometimes she saw helpers
with the muralist, but mostly he worked by himself. She watched as a narrow
window reflected sunset and then, as she stepped sideways to get out of the
glare, revealed a young woman wearing an old-fashioned slip. The woman was
slender, dark-haired, olive-skinned. She was looking away from the window at
something out of the frame. She turned and stooped —
But of course she didn’t. Nor was the window any more than a
vertical splash of sunset orange and another, near-vertical slash of viridian
shadow.
“Do you use drafting paper?”
“Not so often,” says the WHLHSE architect.
Gospel assumes he’s an architect. The receptionist hasn’t
been willing to answer her questions, possibly because she’s only wearing a sports
bra under very dirty overalls. And because her hair is purple today.
“Well, what do you do with the used sheets?”
The man who is probably an architect leans in the doorway,
munching a ciabatta roll out of a red and white wrapper. He’s about as tall and
lean as the muralist, but fair, with the kind of skin that turns from porcelain
to ruddy with age. A crest of grayish hair stands up on his head. He has keen robin’s-egg
blue eyes and he looks steadily at Gospel’s face as he eats.
“Do you want to draw on the backs?” he asks.
“Oh — ” Gospel says. Of course she does. He understands. Oh,
yes.
He leads her to a big shred bin and unlocks it.
“Help yourself,” he says.
Later, when the mural was finished, the muralist moved on to
New Jersey. By now Gospel had tracked down his information — sparse, but he did
have a name, a web portal, a small online following, and a couple of part-time
academic positions a dozen years old. Gospel followed his work mostly through
collections compiled by his followers. She had been afraid to reach out
directly to him; not afraid exactly, but she wanted to wait for the right
moment. She wanted to have something to offer. She wanted to stand out.
Past midnight. Someone’s tearing up a strip mall along Brainerd
Road to make room for a data storage facility. But there’s no guard on foot
patrol. The only competition Gospel has to mind is from folks taking copper.
She wants plywood and even big unmarred pieces of sheetrock, when she can find
them. She has a grocery cart she’s swiped from Food Lion. She loads it up,
towering and tipping with free media, and trundles off up the sidewalk.
She discovered other muralists and street artists, too, and
through clicking links she came upon more traditional masters. She studied
webwise, like a spider, dropping from perch to perch, making a spiral of
connections, not staying anywhere long. Of course she couldn’t always tell what
things looked like from her phone, especially since the screen was cracked.
Besides drafting paper and plywood, she found unobserved
sidewalls and backwalls of buildings and dumpsters and more or less anything
left unattended and fairly well-lit after dark. She didn’t become a fan-girl,
not of the black-jeans artist (whose name was Desmond Whittaker) nor of the
others she found online, though she decided she liked Chagall and Basquiat. But
her own work matured, and the strange artist always seemed to be going the same
way she was, far far down the track ahead of her.
She stands in a shed out back of her mother’s house, doors
thrown open to illuminate a ragged-edged piece of sheetrock. She’s primed it
and rolled on a base of deep azure. Red fishes fly through the sky and hideous
mermaids play tag with the fish. The mermaids drop their tails into the
reflecting pool and take root and become kelp, become sinister strangleweed off
of a some early-2000s console game. It’s all very confusing.
Now she has her spray can out, outlining a few of the fish,
pointing out, even labeling, some of the action.
Don’t let the mermaids
get you down,
fuckhead.
Or:
Joy
starts at the root
of the tail
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