When James spots her — sitting at the Binibon diner on Second Avenue, in one of the red booths, alone — he will realize, instantly, what he has done. Because when he sees her there behind the glass, no color will appear. She will just be a regular girl, awash in regular diner light. And he’ll know right then: they’d met among the paintings. They’d fucked among the paintings. Lucy’s yellow had enveloped him, tricked him into thinking it was all he needed to survive. But it hadn’t been Lucy’s yellow at all. It had been Raul Engales’s.
No matter how too-late he was, no matter two whole weeks — an eternity, in art time — were lost. No matter that he’d probably gone too far down the path of Lucy to find his way out with any grace. No matter that he’d lost his way, taken the detour of this absurd, obscene affair. He would see it clearly then, while walking away from the diner and from Lucy. He should have been trying to find Raul Engales the whole time.
PART FOUR
PORTRAIT OF THE END OF AN ERA
EYES: Toby, in a Peruvian poncho, trudges up to the squat with a giant chandelier on his back. A crystal falls from one of the chandelier’s many hands, hits the pavement, tinks, rolls. Magnificent! says Regina, who’s come outside in her nightgown to greet the chandelier. Noose it up and light the thing, till the windows of the squat twinkle like the pupils of a man in love. I’ll do anything I want to, says the twinkle of a pupil of a man in love. And I’ll keep doing it until my heart’s broken. Till someone holds a gun to my back.
LIMBS: Two red streamers, left over from a weeks-ago party, have pushed through the sleeves of the second-floor windows. They wave at the naked lindens, the sky, the cops that have just pulled up across the street.
MOUTH: WE’VE GOT A TYPICAL SITUATION HERE, JIMBO. WHADDAWE GOT, CLEM? BUNCHA THOSE ARTISTIC TYPES. STAY CLEAR A THEIR GLUE GUNS THIS TIME, EH, JIMBO? EH? KEEP YA MOUTH OFFA THOSE GLUE GUNS?! SHOVE IT UP YOUR HAIRY ASS, CLEM. DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.
STOMACH: Rumbling as things are knocked and gathered. Emptied.
CHEST: Those are my tits! yells Selma, from behind the thick, unopenable window of the police car, at a cop who’s exited the building with a plaster statue of a pair of breasts. You can’t take that! Those are my fucking tits! The cop studies the sculpture, then sets it on top of a rusty garbage can. He has sausagey fingers, which he uses to grab the breasts, then squeeze. Oh, really? the cop says. Oh, really?
BODY: It’s just plywood and brick. It’s just brick and mortar. It’s just nails and sheetrock. It’s just concrete and metal. Tell yourself these things, like little prayers. Whisper them in hushed tones that sound like the round brushes on the bottoms of trucks that clean the streets at night. We can get more plywood. There is always more brick. Mortar, we hear, is in high supply. If we wanted concrete and metal, we could just go to jail. Don’t think of the street sweeper whose brush is humming over the sidewalk, just steps from where you’re trying to sleep. He’s almost done with his shift; he’ll park his truck in Queens, fumble through the city back to his apartment in Chinatown. He’ll flick on and off his light, boil water for no reason, turn on a television. You, on the other hand, are homeless now, mumbling about construction materials under the eave of a depressing dental office on Seventh Street with your ten law-breaking comrades, wondering where you might go tomorrow, if you’ll have to split up, thinking about how you miss the piece of plywood that was drilled above the squat’s bathroom sink, where your toothbrush sat, ready to be used whenever you wanted to feel clean.
MOUTH: Though they’ve never done so before, Toby and Selma grab each other’s faces, kiss. When tragedy strikes, Toby whispers into Selma’s ear, which has plaster stuck in it, from a mold she’s made that hasn’t even begun to dry.
THE RISING SUN
When the squat got ransacked and shut down unexpectedly, on a Tuesday morning just after breakfast, Raul Engales and James Bennett saw the whole thing from the south-facing window of the Rising Sun Rehabilitation Clinic, where Raul Engales had been admitted three weeks ago after failing to die. High on the list of unfortunate things about the Rising Sun, to say nothing of its bright pink walls and lethargic nurses, was its regretful location — on East Seventh and Avenue A, right across the street from his old stomping grounds. High on the list of unfortunate things about Raul Engales’s life was that he was living it.
James had brought coffee — since he’d started his daily visits a week ago, Engales hadn’t had to drink the crap they served in the Rising Sun’s cafeteria; a small but significant relief. The fact of them sipping the hot, delicious stuff while watching the cop cars — three of them now — pull up and then empty themselves of beefy, navy-clad law enforcers gave the scene a removed sensation, as if they were watching a movie or a television show, whose characters happened to have been the cast of Raul Engales’s previous life.
“They’re your friends in there?” James asked, worried. He was always worried, Engales thought. One of those people who was always worried.
“Only a matter of time, I guess.”
There was the blip blip blip of the siren used halfway, then the sagging clangs of key rings and the thick thunks of heavy boots. They watched the cops bang with their mad hands on the squat’s blue door — the door Selma had painted at 7:00 A.M. one morning because she had dreamed of a blue door and had to realize the dream immediately — then kick through it. With his left hand, Engales struggled to pop the window open; at the Rising Sun, you were only allowed a crack, lest you lose your shit and try to jump out.
“BAD DAY TO STEAL A CHANDELIER, BUDDY.” Engales could hear the cop’s barrely voice, perhaps genetically modified to sound like asshole, all the way from here. “REAL BAD DAY.”
“Crap,” said James Bennett. “Will they go to jail?”
“You’re the type who’s scared of cops, aren’t you?” Engales said. The cold air slithered all over them.
“I had a feeling about today,” James said. “I woke up to purple.”
“When you talk like a crazy person,” Engales said, eyes on the cops’ backs as they filed in the door. “It’s hard to be around you. It really is.”
“Did you know they’re putting Jean-Michel in a movie now?” James said, turning to look at Engales pleadingly.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Engales said. He did not particularly want to think about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cinematic debut, or his rising fame, or anything happening out in the world that did not include him.
“I’m saying that this”—James opened his hand toward the window—“is going to happen everywhere. To everything. The buildings, the artists themselves, everything is going to be stolen, or at least bought. The money’s coming downtown, and it’ll be this, over and over again. Everything’s going to change, is what I’m saying. Just watch.”
They watched. The blue tarps from the squat’s second-floor windows puffed in the wind. The cops had gone inside now, and left the front door open behind them, and Engales imagined the cold air blowing into the squat’s common room, the chill that outdid the space heaters and crept under sweaters, no matter how many you piled on. When it was cold like this, back when Engales spent every spare moment at the squat, they’d have the Swedes build one of their massive fires on the concrete slab in the back; outside with fire was warmer than inside without. Not that warmth had mattered much to them. They had had one another, and they had their projects, and they had this space they could make their own — these were the things that kept them from freezing.