The Painting of Porcupine City: A Novel by Monopoli Ben

Author:Monopoli, Ben [Monopoli, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
Publisher: Ben Monopoli
Published: 2011-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

P A R T

T H R E E

The Writing On the Wall

His fingers went: blue, orange,

red, purple, blue, green, yellow (a bright lemon, not the honey of his humans), red, pink, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, yellow, orange, green, green, lime, purple, red, blue.

As his fingers changed colors so did the trees, and soon at night we were spotting lumbering trucks and teams of men sucking up piles of dead leaves off the sidewalks with vacuum hoses as big around as barrels.

“Do you think people ever get sucked up into those?” I said.

“Definitely.”

The night workers were like wild animals, like something you’d spot while fishing, something coming down to the edge of a lake for a drink. And like woodsmen we walked among them in an unstated truce. Surely they knew what we were doing but it wasn’t their concern what walls got graffitied that night—they had a job to do—so the leaf-blowers, the street-sweepers, the electricians coming up out of holes in the street, they left us alone.

Sometimes being out in the wee hours doing what we did was exhilarating. Often it was. When he was suddenly grabbing me to run, when he most had that intoxicating, contagious thrill in his eyes. When we slipped into Cook in the morning and no one knew we’d spent the last hours of the night in his car, making space-constrained love in the backseat or just holding on to each other to keep warm.

But the weeks were creeping by and it was getting colder. One night in mid-November I noticed his typewriter-ribbon–dark hair collecting grains of white crystal. The first snow.

“Brrr,” I murmured, suddenly feeling colder. I looked up and saw snowflakes shivering in the glowing air around a streetlight. I could feel them on my face too, pricks of cold on my eyelids and nose. I stopped in the middle of an ARROWMAN, leaving ARRO, and capped my can.

“Not going to finish?” he said.

“I’ll come back to it.”

“OK.” He dragged a spray of paint across his fingers to mark a finished Fact. “Let’s go. You’re freezing.”

Winter that year had a premature climax, day after day in November burying the frosty city in wave after wave of snow. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs I started shivering at the first chimes of Mateo’s pitch-dark alarm-clock reveille. But by early December the winter was spent. Christmas decorations went up in lukewarm weather and lots of breath was expended on the subject of climate change.

The weather was killer for painting, though, that’s what Mateo said. But my nose was always runny, my lips were always chapped, my eyes always felt tired, and the days always began too soon. Too many afternoons I was falling asleep at my desk, slumped backward like a drunk or falling forward onto my keyboard like a dead drunk. One afternoon I woke up to find seventy pages of Y’s on my screen. An unrelenting question.

Why was I doing this every night? Why was I going out spraying paint on things

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