Calvin had been staring at his feet while this went on, a sad twist in the corner of his mouth. The boy disagreed, apparently, but knew better than to contradict. Not now, not here.
“What if it’s not for you in the first place?” Leo said. “What if it’s just for me?”
Willy shook his head again, as if he’d been pounding his skull against the wall rather than looking at it. “Just give it up, painter. You beat by something you won’t never understand. You beat before you even started.”
Leo stood mutely, watching as Willy tossed a friendly arm around Calvin’s shoulders and steered him away. Calvin managed one more quick glance at the wall, at the sweat and paint and hopes that brightened it, at Leo’s eyes. And then they were gone.
Along with whatever impetus Leo had to keep working.
He packed up and called it an early night.
*
Leo finished two nights later. It took him scarcely an hour, blending lighter and darker shades of green with touches of black until the second rose’s stem swept down to the foundation of the building. With neither run nor stray dribble to mar, to detract.
Then the calm appraisal of elation, standing in the presence of a work brought to completion. Brainchild’s maturity, left to stand on its own. There was no other feeling like that in all the world.
Still stung by Willy’s words from two nights ago, at heart Leo had to suspect Willy may have been right. But sense of duty was greater still, to contribute something to this blighted cityscape. If beauty was in the eye of the beholder, perhaps hopelessness was, as well. Even a fool had to start somewhere.
Leo returned the spray cans to his new nylon bag, then backed up for a broader view of the roses. Magnificent, his master work so far. Dawn was too far away, that first kiss of sunlight when this completed work might shine, and he wanted to be back here for the moment, so he could see, so they all could see.
Except…
They all were seeing right now. From the streets. From the sidewalk. From a scant few feet away, he noticed as he turned. Talk about losing yourself in your work — dozens of them had approached and he’d never heard. Standing motionless, staring. Young and ancient, black and white, Asian and Hispanic. Junkies. Winos. Mothers. Whores. A cop. Children. Dealers. Gangbangers. All of them half-lit by streetlights too few and weak to cut through much darkness on this edge of town.
Leo gave them a queasy, gentle smile, feeling sick within because no one seemed to appreciate his efforts. Feeling sicker still when the faces did not change.
Silence, except for the distant master mix of traffic and sirens, wailing babies and TVs blaring from open windows.
Someone in the street hit the play button on a monstrous boom box, speakers blasting gangsta rap, here’s life as we know and live it, brutal and dirty. The savage four-four rhythm prompted many, those who could, to dance. Whirling, contorting, letting themselves go with abandon, circling around a teenage girl who swayed and knelt beside a squirming cloth bag.
Leo, not liking this, not at all, saw no joy in the display. There was nothing of celebration in the movement, no release. It was darker, somehow, more elemental, obligatory. People in chains would dance this way.
From the comfort of shadows, Willy came forward to meet him. He looked much the same as the other night, gray sweats for black the only difference. The sad shake of his head was the same.
“Warned you once, cuz,” he said. “I told you you’s messing with shit you don’t understand.”
“I can’t understand what nobody’ll talk about!” Leo shouted. His only defense.
“Sometimes you got to take things on faith. I know you mean well, but you past the point of no return now, you know what I’m saying?”
Leo looked past him to the nightmare conga line out in the street. Dancers still caught in a frenzy of muscle and bones. The girl in the circle, still kneeling, swayed with lithe serpentine fluidity. Wild hair tossing to and fro about her shoulders, head thrown back in an act of perfect supplication. She reached into the bag beside her, drawing out its source of erratic movement: one of those plump rats so prevalent in the neighborhood. She lifted it to arm’s length above her head, and it squirmed like a worm on a fishhook, fat pink tail lashing at her wrist and forearm like a tiny whip.
Leo thought of films that he’d seen — strange rites born of Africa, of the Caribbean. Priestesses doing much the same thing with live chickens. Only now, rats were so much more in keeping with the locale.
“There’s a way things run around here,” Willy said. “We may not like it, but we understand it, and so we know how to live with it, you see what I’m saying? And we get by. Bricklord wants a building burned out? We give it to him. He wants to smell some food rot in the street? We give that to him too. He don’t never ask for life so long’s we keep him happy with all the other shit. Sacrifices, cuz. That’s what it’s all about. Keeping the place the way he likes it.”
Leo, shaking his head in numb refusal, Just who the hell is this Bricklord guy that’s got these people so beaten down?
“And then you come along with your spray cans,” Willy said.
Out in the street, the girl pulled a dagger from the folds of her dress. Within a tightening circle of dancers, she slashed at the rat with a deceptively gentle arc of the blade, then bucked beneath its all-but-severed head, catching the sudden dark drizzle on breasts and throat, forehead and tongue.
And everyone fell motionless. Waiting.
“Me, I think you do fine work,” said Willy. “But my opinion don’t mean shit. And Bricklord? Cuz, you done pissed him off good.”
Leo at first thought it was an earthquake. But it was too centralized. A low, subsonic rumble emanating from within the four-story building across the street, shock waves vibrating asphalt underfoot. Noise swelling like the approach of a subway train.
The maelstrom of sound reaching zenith, every window in the building blew outward with sudden fury, a rain of glass circling the foundation. Bricks rattled loose, tumbled free, hit ground in puffs of red dust. The entire structure sagged, like a balloon deflating of a few breaths of life. As Leo watched, the side of the building broke out in creeping webs of mold that filled in the cracks between the bricks…
And then the shape began to bleed through the wall.
It was gargantuan, immense. An amorphous, three-dimensional blackness taking form from the building’s structure like fog pouring through a screen. Its head reached midway between the third and fourth floors, featureless except for twin globes of eyes like harvest moons. Its hide reeked of rot, of despair. When its lower face split to reveal rusted metal teeth, its methane breath stank of the sewers.
Bricklord, behold his great and terrible majesty.
“Probably don’t mean much to say I’m sorry,” Willy said. “But you know it ain’t nothing personal.”
Even if Leo had been able to move his feet, it would have done little good. Bricklord crossed over to where he stood with three thunderous steps. As Leo stared aghast, numbly trying to fathom this apparition, its enormity and origins, it reached for him with one tree-trunk arm—
Then closed its hand around him. For something that had materialized through brick, it had gelled into something awfully solid.
He was lifted up, up, legs flailing and arms straining, and Bricklord aimed him at his own creation. Leo’s head was but a yard away from the roses, the only things in his field of vision, and with overwhelming sorrow he knew they would be the last things he ever saw.