The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [100]
Another key, and then they walked through a door and into a massive space, forty feet high and nearly a block long on every side. Patrick paced the room, staring at the floor and occasionally looking up to get his bearings. Nada followed steps behind, falling off balance every time he reversed direction. Guided by some internal sextant, he at last found the spot and set the tile on the floor and gestured for her to follow.
Up a set of open aluminum stairs to a small office where some foreman once monitored the trucks and forklifts and long stacks of merchandise. He pointed. “See it.”
The tile was a speck on the concrete below, barely differentiated from the countless oil stains and sinkholes and pockmarks. “See what? The tile?”
He shook his head in a wide berth and spread his hands. “It!”
She understood. “The whole thing. The mural. You see it here. On the floor.”
He nodded.
“You put one tile on the floor and you can see the whole thing. Where every tile fits and will fit.”
He nodded. “Do you?”
She looked again. She did not. Burning Patrick nodded, disappointed. “I thought maybe you could still see it. I can only remember it.” Nada was afraid he might cry, and then, studying his dirty, hairy, pinched face, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to tell if he did.
“That’s what you’re painting. Something you saw when you had the spider.”
“Everything I saw.” It sounded like a correction.
They walked back down to the empty floor, to the tile he had painted that morning. He lifted it up and presented it to her again.
It’s beautiful, she thought. A tiny head covered in hair like black wire. Hundreds of strands, each differentiated by subtle light and expert brushwork. Hair on edge, hair coarsened in anger, hardened in fear. The hair of what? In one corner were three beautifully scripted letters in lowercase: a s s. Patrick clearly liked to juxtapose the vulgar and the sublime.
“I can’t,” Nada said. “It’s too valuable.”
From inside his parka he produced the newspaper he’d been using to protect the floor of his studio and he slipped the newsprint between the tile and the palm of her hand.
34
SOMETHING ABOUT the configuration of bodies in the front and back seats told Wayne not to climb inside the old maroon Cadillac. A black guy and a white guy in the front seat. A white girl and a black guy in the back. I’m not a racist, he kept telling his exhausted, hallucinatory self, and he knew it was true. Still, something told him not to get in.
Except it was the only car that had stopped in hours, so Wayne thanked them and pushed the thumb button on the door handle.
“We got room,” the girl said with a grin.
With some effort, Wayne wedged his sunburned, tired body into the backseat. The guy and the girl pressed themselves against the windows, forcing Wayne’s large frame absurdly into the middle. “You look like hell,” the black guy in the front seat said.
“I’m Ginny,” the girl said. She looked about mid-twenties but could have been younger. She was tall and skinny. Wayne was carrying his wrinkled blazer—his phone and earpiece having been transferred to his pants pocket. He had tossed his tie and ID badge into the roadside brush. His black Colossus golf shirt—which he only now realized was a dead giveaway, one of those mistakes Peter would never forgive—was smudged with red clay handprints. His khakis and shoes were covered in dust and Amoyo’s dried blood. He pulled his hat down over his eyes.
“And you stink,” said the black guy in the backseat, who hadn’t given his name. “That’s all right, though. So does James.” He laughed.
“What happened?” Ginny asked. She was wearing a sundress and had a lot of stuff in her blond hair—barrettes and plastic butterflies and toy jewels.
“Long story,” Wayne said. He coughed.
The white guy in the front passenger seat laughed. “Oh yeah. I got those. I know all about long stories.”
Wayne looked at his phone. As he’d squatted or walked along the roadside, backward