The only places Engales could think to go, the places that had been the map of his life for the last six years, sounded awful if not absurd to him now. The squat would be not only freezing and loud but rich in the currency that he could no longer deal in: art and the artists, paint and glue and wire, ideas that could be turned into realities and dreams that hung on shoestrings, like the bare lightbulbs from the wood beams. The idea of seeing Toby or Selma or Regina, of relaying the dirty story of the guillotine and the morphine drip and his timely release—just when he was about to make it—made him sick to his stomach, and right then he vowed he would not go back to the squat ever again.
There was Arlene’s place on Sullivan, filled with hundreds of plants and the smell of incense and Egyptian musk, her six cats rustling in the leaves, some African or French or Sicilian song playing on the record player. Engales had always loved Arlene’s place — it was homey in its eccentricities and always warm, and he knew Arlene would invite him in, make him yerba maté, and hold his head against her breast, sing him to sleep with some New Yorker voodoo song. But it would not be comforting; it would only make things worse. Someone who knew you as well as Arlene knew him could only reflect his pain, magnify it.
And of course he wouldn’t dare go back to his own apartment, the place where his unfinished paintings lay in stacks and where Lucy would surely be, pouting on the bed in one of her big T-shirts, waiting for him. Stop fucking waiting for me, he wanted to yell to her from across town, just as he had wanted to yell across the Americas to Franca so many times. Everyone stop waiting for me.
Cigarette.
It was four avenues to Telemondo’s, but tobacco was a dollar cheaper there than anywhere else and what did he care about time? Time was the only thing he had. He walked and time passed or didn’t pass, how could he know. He walked and his body moved or didn’t move, how could he know. He couldn’t know because he was no longer in his own body; he was above himself, watching, and what he saw was a freak on the loose, in a city that was no longer his home.
At Broadway and Eighth: TELEMONDO’S / BEER / CIGARETTE / MAGAZINE / EGG CREAM SODA / ON SALE NOW. Bright lights and the Telemondo guy, who always said the same thing: That will be one hundred and twenty-two pennies. Engales counted on him saying the stupid penny joke; it would mean things were in some way how they had always been. But the Telemondo guy didn’t say anything. He handed Engales the pouch of tobacco sullenly, and when Engales tried to pay, he waved away the money.
Engales stormed back out into the night, once again incensed. Was this how it would be from now on? More handouts? Free cigarettes? No jokes? The only thing that could infuriate him more was what happened next, which was that he tried to roll a cigarette and found out that, with one hand, he couldn’t. Tobacco fell like snow to the ground; the paper crinkled and stuck. He had to go back into Telemondo’s, tell the guy he wanted to exchange for prerolled cigarettes, whose taste he didn’t like. “Those ones cost more,” the Telemondo guy said. Engales glared at him, as if challenging him to ask for money from a cripple, and took the pack without paying him a cent.
Cigarette.
Its bad taste made him feel only very slightly better. He smoked with his left hand (which canceled out the slightly better), and kept walking toward nowhere. It was fully dark now, the sort of early dark that haunted the fall months, a thin blanket thrown over the city’s head. Pink neon buzzed above him, and then the rustle of pigeon wings, and then the rude rumble of a garbage truck, on its Tuesday-night crawl. How could one man be shoving garbage into the claws of a garbage truck and another man be showing paintings in the Winona George Gallery? Another man who had just happened to get lucky; a slot had opened up just for him, when the slotted artist lost his hand. Engales watched as the garbage man leaped from the side of the truck and grabbed four huge black bags at once. He shot Engales a toothy, genuine grin.
One man would be grinning while the art lovers toasted in his name. Another man would never paint again.
Without painting, transformation was not possible. Without painting, the real world was only the real world: an impossible place to exist.
And so why did he have to exist at all? he thought, as he headed south now, down the black river of Broadway, toward a sign in the distance that read: GET BAILED OUT! When existence, from here on out, would just be one long ugly moment? Could the blade not have killed him? Could Arlene not have done what a real friend would do and snapped his neck? Could she have seen, as he did, as they careened out into the street, negotiating the streams of sewer water and arm blood, the street sign, once Mercer, which had mysteriously morphed to Mercy? And that begged her, or someone, to deliver one last morsel of that mercy? To bail him out? Could he not have bled out into the studio until he could bleed no more, so that he would not have to be existing now, on the way to nowhere, on the slow track to dying a nobody?
At Bond Street he found himself stopping at the sight of the street sign.
Bond Street: printed in sparse Helvetica on the postcards he’d sent out a few weeks ago, the invitations to his first real opening.
Bond Street: where some of the best painters of the decade had shown their work, and where he was meant to have shown his work tonight.
Bond Street: where the Winona George Gallery sat primly halfway down the block, a little beacon of white light in a tunnel of industrial dark.
He had not meant to walk this way. He meant to walk no way, to nowhere. But then, he had. And now he could not help but be curious. Curiosity about the man who had taken his spot in the spotlight, whose paintings hung where his should have, whose beautiful girlfriend or wife was lifting her face up to his in a congratulatory kiss. And if curiosity would kill him, he would take it. He would die of curiosity right here, right now. He would step, despite himself, onto the wonky cobblestones of Bond Street. He would gravitate, despite himself, toward the voices, coming from the crescent of light that streamed from the gallery’s door. Get in here, you hussy! One hell of a show. I could give a shit about your mother’s diet, Selma. Did you live the dream down there or what? You’re just another one of those Basel bitches now, aren’t you? Don’t lie.
Despite himself, he became moth-like, moving toward the light, thinking it was the sun. Despite himself he began to believe that the light was the only way up, no matter that the light itself would singe him.
PORTRAIT OF AN ART SHOW BY THE ARTIST WHO IS NOT PRESENT
EYES: A show that’s been hung by a blind man. A man who doesn’t know shape from shape, dark from light; composition eludes him. The paintings are all wrong. They’re the wrong ones and in the wrong places. What blind man had gone to Raul Engales’s apartment and fetched the wrong fucking paintings and hung them in the wrong fucking way? It is this sight — his own heinous paintings, some still unfinished, that were never meant to see the light of day, at least not like this — that makes him wish that instead of losing a hand he could have lost his eyes.
HEART: His own. Thwup thwap. Paintings. Thwup thwap. Hanging. Thwup thwap. Here. Thwup thwap. Without. Thwup thwap. Him.