But inside the room everyone was assembled, the large space suddenly feeling much smaller for all the new and different people; it was not just the other girls who were there but also Mala, and then Tico, who stood alongside a pair of EMTs almost as hulking as he; and to Fan’s particular surprise, and what must have been a small burst of happiness in her, there was also young Dr. Upendra, too. He had come back. He had not abandoned them. He caught her eye but just as instantly went back to Five. She was in distress. No one was making a sound, not even Miss Cathy, because it was clear there was not enough time to take her back to the medical center. And as we regard the moment and all and sundry gathered, we suppose that they must have figured the doctor would certainly save her, that this whole situation, if deeply fraught and shocking, was one in which a state of normalcy would prevail, or would at least be reverted to. That however stunted and peculiar these girls’ lives were, their days would inexorably string along, if only adding up to a thickening in the torso and the flowing colors of their intricate mural work that no one but they and a few others would ever see.
Five stirred in her bed, her feet finally moving, if in shivers. Then she hiccuped, or spasmed, pivoting onto her side, pushing out a sound that her dear sisters would later hear as something like I can or My Fan. Spent, she rolled onto her back. Tears trickled down her tensed-up cheeks. She was smiling widely and the tears seemed to be only those of joy. But Miss Cathy gasped, hands over her mouth. Upendra dropped onto his knees and listened to her chest. Then he used an air bag, next his own mouth, as well as compressions on her chest. Her pupils stretched wide, space black, the whole of her looking as if every drop of her blood were turning to plainest paint.
20
There is always something entrancing about an image on a wall. Perhaps it’s because it’s frameless, threatening to break wider, maybe free. From the youngest to the oldest we know its purpose, which is to inspire and incite and celebrate, maybe question and even criticize, and then, of course, simply to record a version of what has happened, or should have happened, were our world a more genial place. And seeing those splashes of color along with others (or the thought of onlooking others) is totally different from seeing the same images alone, the former sensation, when it is right, akin to sharing a long-harbored secret.
What we have perhaps not considered enough is the maker and why she’s done what she’s done, whether it was some unexplainable artistic urge or else an impetus of conscience, and then, most important, what the making made her think and feel, whether back in an alleyway of B-Mor or deep inside a Charter villa. For did it allow her to feel larger, more connected? Did it settle a self-quarrel? Did it offer her liberty from some private boundary that heretofore she had not understood or even noticed?
Because when we look at the final great work of Six, as well as the broader field-coloring efforts of the others, that ended up completely covering not just the white space of the partly finished wall but the entire blank run of the remaining others, we can conclude whatever it signifies is no more important than that they did it without pause, hardly eating or sleeping or much concurring with one another, caught up as they were in the virulent bloom of a fever. Yes, poor Five had nearly succumbed before their eyes. Yes, both she and Four would be hospitalized for more than a week. Yes, Miss Cathy had fainted from the shock, striking her head on the corner of a night table, her blood blotted all over Mala, who insisted on cradling her while Dr. Upendra stitched up the scary but luckily superficial wound. And yes, Fan had exited the house and climbed into the medical center van with Four and Five and Dr. Upendra, all in full view of Miss Cathy, who didn’t protest or say another word. These moments might have been rendered as always in the flow of connecting panels, with attendant realistic detail and texture, and maybe even in the larger scale of the underwater image of their pushing up Fan to the surface. Or they could have been depicted expressionistically, as was sometimes done before, some exuberant spray of spectral colors or surely, given the mood, a panel microscopically crosshatched in a dread hue.
What Six conceived instead was literally the biggest thing she’d ever done. In fact, it wasn’t a panel at all, but a panorama, the work beginning where she’d left off and stretching not just to the corner but onto the next wall and the next, wrapping the whole way around to where One and Two had begun the mural many years before. In a single immense stroke the project was complete.
And what was this last image? It was at first difficult to tell. Six started penciling the whole thing soon after the medical center van departed, working steadily and purposefully all night. The others even watched her, no one talking under the pall of what had occurred, though each wondering what it was they were seeing. Six was clearly energized by the work, rapidly mounting and dismounting her stepladder and shifting it by herself as she went along the walls; she refused any help. Her motions were unfamiliar to them, as they were accustomed to painstaking rendering, the scribing out of one tiny section at a time. Her hand now swept across the wall in wide arcs, slashes, the furious action of her arm looking like she meant to deface the surface rather than decorate it, the scrape of the pencil raspy and sharp. She labeled the colors to be done as she went, though in fact it was mostly just black, and some grays, and then a few skeins and patches of brighter colors here and there. These were filled in with the especially thick poster markers they already had on the racks but rarely used, the four others coloring while Six directed them from her perch atop the stepladder in the middle of the room. Then she’d come down and join in. By the end, they had gone through a half-dozen additional sets of the markers, their hands and fingers inked, their cheeks smeared by stray smudges and flecks, their lungs so numbed by the sweet vapors of the markers that they felt they were hollowed out, floating with the lightness.
What they made was a portrait. Or a portrait of sorts. Seven said she wished Fan could see it, no doubt assuming it was of her. And maybe it was. It did look like her or, at least, like the curtaining sway of her hair; there was great movement in the work. For what you saw was merely a swath of a much larger image, running the height and length of two and a half walls, a banded glimpse of a girl’s head angled up in quarter profile, such that only the ends of her black hair (flashed by electric glints of violet), a line of cheek, a nub of chin, could be seen. The full portrait, were it apparent, would have been billboard-sized, as tall as the villa itself. And while it surely could have been Fan — Six just shrugged when asked — when you stepped to one corner of the room or another and took it all in, you could also think to see Five’s fullish lips, or the most solid set of Three’s cheek, or some distinctive notation of each of the Girls, and maybe Mala, too. Naturally, Miss Cathy was a presence, if only in the watery rays of sunlight that the girl was craning up to and catching, the blurred streams of them the exact color of her auburn-dyed hair, a shimmering penumbra of the gray-green of her eyes illuminating the field.
That Fan did not see any of this is not so ironic, for all along her journey we’ve observed more of her than she’ll ever know. She moves on, she pushes forward, this her guileless calling, and we have to remind ourselves that it’s perhaps more laudable simply to keep heading out into the world than always tilting to leave one’s mark on it.