The high beam picks out isolated graffitos on the rough walls; they’re spaced out, here, and seem to have been made with greater care, as though this was the place for the really serious vandals to follow their muse, hidden from the world and the BART police. How did it feel, she wonders, when that farmer first saw the horses in the cave in Lascaux? The dim tunnel recedes in the distance before her.
As she goes on, the graffiti gets less frequent and more baroque; the avant-garde of urban art in this waste below the world. There’s a sort of rebus that might be a manticore made out of indecipherable, almost Arabic calligraphy, the monster’s smile idiotic and baleful. She almost misses a tessellation of UFOs on the ceiling. There’s the story, written in careful lowercase letters bounded by an intricate knotwork, of a maintenance man taking care of his dying and increasingly senile mother.
When she finds it, she thinks at first that it’s a water stain running from floor to ceiling. Homogenous from a distance, on close inspection it’s a mat of minutely interlocking blue and green spikes, suffused with vital energy, as though it were about to burst apart. The fugue hits her then—she sees desert, empty highways, shallow seas—and then vanishes as she drops her light.
She sits there, rapt in the image, hugging her knees to her chest, scarcely breathing. The stillness is broken only by the Doppler rush of distant trains. The flux in air pressure looses a fine grit that floats down through her high beam as though she were in an undersea abyss. The fugue comes and goes as the light moves with the tremor of her hand; the graffito is a flawed image, but behind the errors, the limited resolution of narrow-gauge spray cans and epoxy pens, the glyphs are discernible, and it has nothing to do with theorem or proof or the AIs’ usual concerns but is something like a story. Her other memory flickers with images of wastelands as she takes in the graffito inch by inch, careful not to touch it. She shines the light up and down the pitch-black tunnel, looking for some context or explanation, but besides a tiny line drawing of stylized abstract clouds there’s only the bedrock’s lunar surface.
It’s the voice of the girl, the one on the road, the one who was the focus of the AI’s concern—it has to be. She tries out various translations, still bemused to find it translatable, turning and polishing sentences until she gets it right:
… and the last night, driving through the desert. Empty, there, nothing but the cone of light before me, the dust in the light. Deaf to engine’s roar, my velocity such that I felt like I was floating. I was out of money, so I didn’t look at the fuel gauge, just floored it, red-lining. No one cares what you do, out there. It was like waking, when I rounded that bend, saw the city open up below me, just like that, with the lights of all its highways, right there, finally real, in all its possibility. At sunset, I’d heard, if the light’s just right, you can see the reefs, the old city’s outline under the water. The car’s windows were open, the air-conditioning having died before my boyfriend stole it, my ex-boyfriend by then, I guess, since I’d left with his car, but it hardly mattered, since I wasn’t going back. As the road fell toward the light the air changed, sage and dust giving way to something burned, chemical, notes of salt and maybe ether, and I knew that this would be the smell of home. There was moon enough to reflect palely on the loops of road incising the miles of hillside below me, and it was like gravity and momentum were drawing me in, welcoming me, would carry me the rest of the way, like the city wanted me.
I thought of my mother then, the gin empties like votive offerings around the TV, always tuned to the channel of Loving Christ Victorious, and her week-long stupors, and her hysterical prayers. The dust-occluded, fire-colored skies, out there, the shattered skylights in the endlessly branching terminals that used to be an airport. Making love on the cracked tarmac, in backseats, on the floors of boys’ squats, once even in the middle of the street, the broken windows of vacant houses staring blindly.
I steered into the first turn and the emptiness, which had always been there, rose up in me, pressing against my skin, burning where it touched, but there was nothing to go back to, and it was the next thing or nothing at all …
*
She emerges from a service corridor into the disinfectant reek of Powell Street Station, joining the damp and dark-coated throng around the escalator, trying to present a semblance of composure. It’s raining, outside, and harder than ever—it must be the monsoon.
What, she wonders, is Cromwell’s interest in this strangest of artworks, and what, if anything, does it have to do with her? In her preoccupation she almost walks into a cab, one with a driver who gesticulates and abuses her in Arabic as he peels away in a fantail of water.
Dazed, she stops at a window display of Japanese prints, tries to collect herself. Peasants in wide hats bent under their loads, struggling over cold shingle through driving diagonals of rain. A fisherman and his son haul on a taut net, Fuji looming across the water. Hokusai, she thinks; the prints’ names and histories, glimpsed once in a book, flashing to the surface, drifting away. There’s an erotic print—shunga, they’re called—showing a samurai grappling with a lady-in-waiting, their kimono fallen open. Another print shows the face of a woman, probably a geisha, white-cheeked and doll-pretty, her black hair precisely coiffed.
A light clicks off inside, the prints disappearing, leaving the reflection of a woman peering in, her hair glinting wetly; behind her the passersby are bent against the wind, the sporadic diagonals of rain. She squints, and the image becomes as abstract as a floating world print. As always, helplessly, she tries to find a loveliness in her own image, and when she does to believe it’s unillusory. In Hokusai’s time, the season of beauty would be passing, would have passed long since, but now, with the Mayo, there’s no telling, for her money will get her time, is the key to the kingdom of life and death. She once met a regenerative surgeon, drunk in the bar of the Chelsea Hotel, who’d insisted he was an artist, literally an artist, volubly scorning the mid-market hacks in the strip-mall plastic surgeries; there’s always an elegance, he’d said, in the givens of bone structure, cartilage, the chemistry of skin, one that he, and here his hand had brushed hers, would not let fade.
A flash of dread, sudden and staggering, for no reason she can see. She looks back at the last few seconds, and there it is, in the reflection in the window, the lights of a hovering drone, and then another, and her adrenaline spikes as she sees the wet gleam of their lenses, focusing on her, and they then shot up and away, and now an unmarked van with tinted windows is pulling up beside her.
18
Essential Hardness