He laughs—it’s more of a wheeze—and my failure to restrain him suddenly seems merciful: I would have killed him. “We’ll see about that,” he says. “I am giving you babies thirty seconds to get out of my apartment.”
What else can we do? We run, again, past the stolen bag just outside the doorway—unopened, forgotten entirely—with less than we’ve ever had before, and when we’re midway down the stairs I realize that throughout everything, the figure bundled up behind us in my sleeping bag did not awaken, did not move or react even once. I wonder if their breathing was actually from the man in the chair, or something I imagined altogether. I tongue the seam of the cut inside my lips, relishing the pain, the minute warmth, evidence that I did not give up, wholly, without a fight.
When we hit the ground floor, we hear shattering porcelain from above. It’s enough to resolve us. I will not swallow this city. I’m turning the corner toward the basement when you stop me. “Wait. Let’s take the front door.”
We exit through the front of the building. We slam the door behind us.
There’s a collection of spraypaint cans just inside the gate, abandoned by someone caught in the middle of something. I wonder if they were dropped during the time that we’ve been here, if this conflict played out on the street outside the apparently empty building while we slept obliviously above. I’m about to pass them up, but you shove a few cans into my hands and tuck two more under your arms.
“Just so we have something,” you say. We open the gate, and here, too, we slam it as hard as we can, so the sound saturates the street, sends its stupid echoes everywhere.
At the bus stop, we shove the cans under our clothes. We beg our way to a free ride, going north; it feels terrible, even when the driver doesn’t seem to give it a second thought. Alongside the motion of the tireless bus in the night, I discern the indistinct, swarming movement of people in the opposite direction, the bus parting them like a sea.
*
Indoors again, back uptown, we move on to the next painting, scribble a giant cock across an immaculately rendered, classically proportioned, four-hundred-year-old face—as per the routine we’ve quickly established, you with the broad strokes, me with the line work—and you tell me there’s a class war coming.
The prophecy is a familiar refrain. I sit down on one of the little viewing benches and idly rattle a can of spraypaint, my ears still ringing with the sounds of the vase breaking, the weird composite of his speech. “Everybody is someone else’s pawn,” I say—one of my answers that is less an answer than a gesture or an abstraction, that ducks responsibility. I imagine our roles in such a war: the man in the apartment, the people camped out in the street, the crowd at the show, would they be our enemies or our allies? A distant alarm sounds, not because of our entry, but because it’s been doing that for weeks.
“We could have taken him together, you know,” you say. “That man.”
I don’t respond, which seems to admit that you’re right. How much less genuine was our poverty than his, because we rejected what we’d been given, because, if we’d wanted to, we could have taken it? We could have engaged that system. The next room over, on one of the famous French portraits of Greeks, I produce a token gallery-label factoid, this time about stoicism: “The Athenian government accused Socrates of denying the gods and ordered him to either renounce his teachings or die. He chose death.”
You tell me that Socrates, like the subjects of most of these paintings, probably never even existed, and before I can tell you how fundamentally wrong I think that is, how truly absurd a denial, the Athenian scholar vanishes before my eyes in a thickening haze of black so dense that it drips off the canvas. When I’d first laid hands on one of the objects in the museum, it felt like crossing a million invisible barriers, committing some unholy act; now, the paintings just mark the walls, they’re littered across the world. I worry that we’re doing someone else a powerful favor, the inevitable collector surveying value in negatives.
Just before, on a whim, you marched from room to room spraypainting a crude X over “every exposed nipple and twat” in all of the European nudes, and you’d already circumcised and de-titted about six Venuses before I caught up to tell you that it came off maybe a bit fascist to do that, maybe a little like the hand of censorship.
“If it’s indiscriminate, it can’t be fascist,” you said, castrating a cherub with a spurt from your spray can. I have no idea where you found that particular aphorism.
The first gallery we stopped in, I’d meticulously blacked out the eyes on a pair of Cot springtimes when you came up behind me and said, “No, no, no.” You took my hand and sprayed a wide, sloppy arc across the two lovers, then a vertical line, then a swirl. “There shouldn’t be any patterns—see? It’s supposed to look random.” As if the ultimate aim of this was to leave our mark as senselessly as possible, in the final tally our particular violence bleeding indistinctly in with the rest.
Currently, you spray a capital letter A on the flag in a Revolutionary War painting.
“You know, that could be misinterpreted,” I say, watching it bleed over the faces of the Patriots like it’s no texture at all.
“How?”
“A for America.”
I say it as a joke, but by the time you turn away the painting resembles nothing so much as a black scour on the gallery wall. Compared to the others, it positively screams with intention.
You cap the spray can with a clack that rebounds through the galleries like every door closing. “Just meet me by the Egyptian thing when you’re done,” you say, and disappear, a tinge of resentment in your wake, for questioning your radicalism—the temple to Osiris, relocated from other shores via freighter to the museum’s northern wing in the 1960s, has been a place of solace since we started coming here in daylight hours, when most of it was still encased in glass. The stone is now so thick with graffiti that it gives the entire monument a greenish cast, but there’s something comforting in the fact that it’s still standing, that despite best efforts no one has been able to take it down.
I walk through just the emergency lights like an ill-defined spirit of vengeance across beds of shattered glass. I pass a decapitated statue of Sakhmet, its head resting three feet away, one ear missing. Deeper within the museum crouches East Asia, Oceania, their pedestals empty, artifacts spewed across borders. I pause at each unmarked painting and object, unsure of how to proceed, as if totality had been something we intended when we arrived here, when I recognized the cross-streets and pulled the cord on the bus, saw the butt of a metal pipe against porcelain and knew finally where I was, as if this wasn’t ultimately the perfect example of just using the items we suddenly had in our hands.
By the time we leave the magnificent cavern, our heads are filled with paint fumes, outbursts of black.
*
The second-to-last phone call I received—on the bus, as we crawled across Pennsylvania toward the city, numbed now to the changing landscape—was from a high school friend I hadn’t talked to in three years, who told me that another mutual friend, close-knit into our group during school but, again, whom I hadn’t spoken with in years, had died unexpectedly, at twenty-one. The circumstances were mysterious and difficult for my friend to corroborate: he’d seen him the previous night, they’d hung out for a few hours drinking, went to a restaurant, and then parted ways and gone home (they were both on summer break from school). That morning, the morning we left Indiana, the mother of the mutual friend had gone up to check on him, but his bedroom door was locked. Eventually, they’d broken in and found him dead inside. There was speculation that he’d accidentally or purposefully mixed some kind of pills with the alcohol, my friend said, but they weren’t sure. People (he listed names) were gathering in Dayton for the funeral tomorrow, in case I wanted to be there.
I turned and told you what happened, about this friend who was dead (who I don’t think I’d mentioned before), and about the friend who called to give me the news (likewise). I left it dangling