“Tomorrow,” I say.
Alexa and Meg planned for us to explore the city during the day, not worry about getting anywhere on time. We’re going to have to say good-bye to Meg and leave the next morning.
I guess he hears hesitation in my voice because Jasper reminds me, “The tattoo is dope. My brother is straight talented, but this is a level all on its own. You’ll be missing out if you don’t go, man.”
“I’m gonna figure it out,” I tell him. “I just have to talk it over.”
“Don’t let them talk you out of it. I’m texting you his number as soon as we hang up. Peace.”
We slip our keycard into the door and enter an old classroom. Chalkboards line the length of the wall, scrawled over by the previous guests. The first thing Meg does is erase everyone’s messages and write The Disenchantments in huge block letters.
This time there’s one bed, a cot, and a sofa. I just set my stuff on the floor and decide not to worry about where I’ll end up.
“I’m gonna get the rest of my stuff,” I say.
Bev left some things in the bus, too, so we walk outside together.
“Jasper called,” I tell her. “I think I’m going to drive to Seattle in the morning.”
“It’s our last day, though.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But it’s just a three-hour drive. I’ll make it back before the show.”
I unlock the bus and we collect what we came for.
“But we found the tattoo,” Bev says. “We found Drew and Melanie and they were great.”
She’s right, but I know that Drew and Melanie aren’t enough. If there’s something else out there for me, I want to discover it.
“It’s important to me to see this through,” I say.
“But what’s so great about it? Driving all the way to Seattle to meet some random guy? So his tattoo’s cool. So what?”
I shut the bus and walk out to the street. And then I realize something.
“We always talk about everything but we never do anything,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean everything,” I say. I shouldn’t have to say more than that. Bev should know.
“We’re just talking,” Bev says, her voice higher pitched than usual, almost shrill. “It’s not a bad thing. Not everything we plan has to be about real life. You don’t actually believe that we were going to graffiti that building with The Disenchantments picture, or go live on that apple farm next summer, or take pictures of every single person we meet. All of that stuff, it’s just something to talk about. None of it is anything that people actually do.”
We’re on the sidewalk now, next to the street. The cars pass us, one by one, and years’ worth of conversations come back to me like flashes of light, all of these plans we made, all of the things we swore we would do but never did.
“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that we’ve failed at anything, it’s just that we’re people like everyone else. There isn’t some exception for us just because we feel different.”
Another car comes. The wind rushing by is enough to make me lose my breath.
“I just want a normal life,” she says. She’s looking at me with these wide, plaintive eyes, and when I look away she grabs my elbow so I’ll face her again. A normal life.
“What does that even mean?” I ask.
She’s looking at me like I’m supposed to understand something.
“It means that I want to go to college.”
She says this and everything around us fades. The trees in the distance become just black shapes on the horizon. The music from the school becomes the faintest murmur. The cars on the road vanish and all that is left is Bev and me in the dark, and after so many days of wondering why, all I can think or say is, “Oh.”
“It sounds like you figured it out already, back at the motel. It was right after I found out about my mom, and all I wanted was to get away. And we kept watching those movies and Paris looked so incredibly far away and I knew that if I said it, you would say yes. At first it was just something we were talking about, like almost everything else. It was a fantasy. Whenever I couldn’t handle real life, I could call you up and you would be ready to plan with me. And yeah, it was more elaborate than anything else we had ever talked about doing, but even when we were sitting at the computer for hours looking at trains and cities and drawing maps and researching hostels, there was always a part of me that knew I was just doing it to escape. And I know how that must sound to you and all this time I’ve been trying to come up with a way to explain it that doesn’t make it seem like I thought it was stupid or trivial because it never felt that way. It just felt . . .” She looks up the sky, and I follow her gaze to more stars than I knew could exist, stars you can’t see back home because of all the other lights.
She says, “It felt like preparations for an imaginary life.”
We’re quiet for a minute, and then someone walks past us and the trance is broken.
She takes a breath. “After a while I started to realize that you were completely serious. Everyone was thinking about college and weighing options and every afternoon when we got to your house I watched you throw your college brochures into the recycling. And then we told a few people and everyone at school started talking about it, and soon it was real. It was happening. And I know that it’s horrible of me, but I never actually wanted it to happen.”
She reaches out, touches my elbow again. I guess the darkness doesn’t matter: she doesn’t need to see my face to know how much this hurts.
“I love making plans with you because it feels like we can do anything. Like our lives are these amazing adventures where anything can happen and we’ll never be limited by stupid shit like jobs and student loans and, like, jury duty. Like we can just be spontaneous forever. And free.”
“But I think that can be true,” I say. “At least parts of it.”
We stand a couple steps from one another with our arms wrapped around our own bodies, trying to get warm, and I remember looking at ourselves in the mirror on the last morning of school and seeing how alike we looked. And now, it’s become clear, we couldn’t be more different.
“It might be true,” she says. “For some people. For you. But I need to know that I’m making the right decision.”
She’s crying now, shivering, headlights and starlight cast over her bare shoulders and arms.
“I almost told you a million times. Every morning, I woke up and told myself that that day would be the day. That I wouldn’t let another hour pass without telling you. But over and over I would start to tell you, and then not say it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how I could have done this. I knew that going to college was what was right for me, but this is so fucking scary, Colby, because up until now the rightest I’ve ever felt is when I’m with you.”
So here is her reason, what I’ve been waiting to know for the last five days and eight hundred miles. It isn’t complicated, it isn’t surprising. It is simple and sad. She told me thousands of lies, so many that it could take forever to forgive her, and there are so many things I could say back to her right now. About being cowardly. About being deceitful. About being reckless with someone else.
But I don’t want to say any of that. Instead, I step toward her and she drops her arms from over her chest. I hold her close and she holds me.
And it doesn’t take forever, all it takes is this.
Friday
Early in the morning, I climb into the bus alone.
I drive for what feels like a long time, listening to music and watching out the window as the road takes me out of the city, past cranes and water towers, a huge silver sign with a yellow outline of Oregon, letters spelling MADE IN PORTLAND with a deer silhouette leaping below it. Outside of Seattle, I hit morning traffic for a while. A family in another VW bus waves as I inch past them.
Halfway across a green metal bridge is the sign that tells me I’m entering Washington
. I drive farther. Out the window, I discover a field of small planes parked in dry grass. A huge granary. Casinos, a body of water to the left, ships, lumberyards. An RV dealership in a patch of wildflowers. Everywhere I look is blue sky, evergreens, metal.
And then, Seattle.
I follow my directions into a neighborhood overlooking freeway underpasses. I find the café where René told me to meet him when we texted last night. It’s narrow and long, set between a store with electric guitars hanging in the window and a trendy barbershop.
I take a parking spot on a side street. I’m an hour early, so I decide to walk around, but I don’t go far because an art store appears on the corner, and as soon as I duck inside I feel a little bit home. Here is my favorite brand of paintbrushes and the best colored pencils, a blank sketchbook that’s exactly like my almost-full one, the paint smell that reminds me of starting something new, of how it feels to mix colors until they are right, of the moment before I touch the canvas with the tip of the brush, when there is still a chance that what I create will match whatever image I’ve dreamed up.
I grab a basket and wander the narrow aisles until I have found what I want: a tube of silver acrylic paint, two paintbrushes, a new black pen, a sketchbook to replace my current one, and a roll of black butcher paper. I pay with what’s left of my road trip money and try not to worry about how little is left. I have a whole account full of money that was supposed to last a year in Europe. So when I hand the guy behind the counter most of what’s left in my wallet, I remind myself that cash is not the problem; the problem is the not knowing.
Back outside, under the sunshine, amid the bicycles, I head into the café and order a coffee. The barista grinds up beans, pours hot water through a paper filter straight into my white cup. I still have half an hour before René will get here, so I take my time drinking the coffee, sketching the people around me. A woman sitting in the corner of the room reads a book—John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which we studied in our senior thesis class—and takes the occasional sip of her coffee. She has long hair; I try to capture the way it falls over her shoulders. When I’ve finished with her I turn the page sideways and draw the barista in the white space above where I’ve drawn the woman. In life, and in my sketchbook, he waits behind the long, sleek espresso machine for the next customer.
I finish my drawing and go up to the counter to ask him if I can have one of the paper espresso cups. He says sure, hands it to me. Back at my chair, I fill the cup with silver paint and unroll the butcher paper, letting the ends hang over both sides of the table.
I want to re-create the design I made for The Disenchantments’ first show: the silver, crying eyes with the band name spelled above it. There is no reason that tonight’s show will be any different from the others, but it’s the last time they’ll play together—if not forever, at least for now—and after everything that’s happened on this trip, endings feel important.
I don’t have Bev here to model for me, but it hardly matters. I close my eyes and a moment later see her face.
I open my eyes to the sunny room and start painting.
At first, the eyes look almost exactly as they did on the shirts. The shape is the same; the shade of silver is the same. The makeup looks a little smeared; I try to make the lashes appear wet and stuck together, which is easier this time around because Bev’s eyes have been so sad. When I’ve finished it, I stand up to see, and though it still looks similar to the first version, it looks more real. I dip my brush back into the paper cup, and paint the words: The Disenchantments.
Every letter is perfect.
A man walks in, and I know, immediately, that it’s René. I also know that I recognize him from somewhere. He scans the room and I stand up and do this kind of half wave, and he heads over to my table.
“You must be Colby.”
I nod and say, “René,” and he says, “Yeah,” and sits.
And then it hits me.
“Oh my God,” I say. “You’re René Alvarez.”
“Yeah?” he says. He laughs. “You were expecting me, right? Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“No, I mean,” I shake my head, embarrassed. “I knew I was here to meet you, but I didn’t know that you were you.”
“You mean you know my work?”
“Yeah,” I say, “You’re Novio.” And for a second I’m starstruck but then I’m just excited, because when I was doing my senior project René was one of the artists I focused on. It was almost impossible to find anything out about him—he doesn’t have a website and he isn’t even close to famous like Banksy or Barry McGee.
“I saw your piece on Florida Street.”
“In San Francisco?”
“That’s where I live. Those trains that you did? Those were amazing.”
He looks genuinely happy to hear this, and we talk a little more about that piece before I ask him to tell me about the tattoo.
“All right,” he says. “It’s like this. Lawrence and I go way back. I was drifting for a while and he let me stay with him in Fort Bragg, and I was just hanging out in his shop one day, looking through the binders and found that little bird. It just made me laugh. I was like, ‘That’s one lucky little dude.’ And it was interesting because it wasn’t my style, but the content was the same. I had been doing all these birds, you know, and telephone wires.”
“I know!” I say. “There was that one you did in Mexico City with the birds and the wires and that creature—”
“The camazotz. Man, you did your research. So yeah, I was working a lot with those images. And there’s such a history, you know, of taking something that is originally someone else’s and making it your own. Like how sampling works in music.”
“Appropriation art,” I say.
“Yeah, well. I’m not the art school type but, yeah, I’m familiar with that term. So I thought, what if I take this little guy and put him into one of my scenes, you know?”
He pulls off his white T-shirt. Underneath is a white tank top and, covering the entire upper half of his arm, is the tattoo.
The bird looks identical to my mother’s original painting and to the bird on Drew’s back, but everything else is different. The rain clouds are more elaborate and foreboding, the raindrops luminous, the telephone wires tangled and thick. If the bird in my mom’s painting is lucky not to get a little wet, this bird is escaping some modern-day, Biblical-style flood. Before Meg and Jasper, I never cared that much about tattoos, but there’s no denying that this is a work of art.
I’m speechless, and then all I can do is laugh.
“Wait,” I say. “I can’t believe this. You’re fucking Novio and you have my mom’s bird on your arm.”
He joins in, bellows so loud it fills the café.
“Yeah, well, you must have quite a mother,” he says. “But look at this.” He checks out my Disenchantments painting. “This is not too shabby.”
“Nah,” I say. “It’s just something I drew one day.”
“That’s all you do, though,” René says. “You get an image going and you just do it. Lay it down everywhere you go. Get some stickers made and slap them on parking signs in New York and L.A. and suddenly you’re someone.”
He makes it sound so easy that I think that maybe I should do that, but I already know that that isn’t my dream.
“So what’s the story? You live in S.F. but you’re up here?”
“I drove up to Portland with a few people to drop our friend off at college, and then Jasper told me about the tattoo so I made the drive up here.”
“Hold on,” René says. “Are you headed back down to Portland today?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a friend, needs to get down there by tonight. You have an extra seat?”
“Sure.”
He pulls out his phone and keys something slowly.
Soon his phone buzzes and he checks the text.
“What time you leaving?”
“Pretty soon,” I say. “I need to be back by
, like, seven.”
He sends another slow-motion message.
“You sure you’re good with this? I mean, the dude’s cool. Part of my crew here.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Definitely.”
“All right.” He leans back, surveys me. “The camazotz? Shit. You really knew about that?”
I shrug. “It was great,” I say. “I’ve never seen spray paint used that way. In some places the style was almost, like, Fauvist.”
“Almost what?”
“Fauvist. You know, Les Fauves?”
He shakes his head. “Sorry, no.”
“They were cool. Matisse started it, but there were a bunch of other painters involved. Camoin and Rouault, and Braque, you know, before he became a Cubist.”
He cracks up. “Okay, Art School,” he says.
“Whoa,” I say. “Did René Alvarez just give me a graffiti name?”
“Looks like it.”
“That’s cool,” I say. “But I’m not going to art school. I mean, it’s possible that sometime in the future I might go, like, after I’ve worked for a while or something, but I’m not going now.”
“I’m not talking about what your plans are,” he says. “You’ve been sitting here schooling me about Les Fauves and Matisse and shit, right? I don’t pass out names everyday, son, the least you can do is accept it.”
“Okay,” I say. “Accepted.”
René and I drive about a mile through the city, to a strip mall with a Laundromat, a pawnshop, and a check-cashing place. He tells me to park and I follow him into the pawnshop and up to the cash register where it becomes clear that the dude in René’s crew is the five-foot-two girl flipping the pages of a gardening magazine behind the counter.
“Abbie, this is Art School, also known as Colby.”
She closes the magazine.
“This is my ride? Kid, how old are you?”
“Old enough,” I try. But she’s narrowing her eyes at me, and even though she’s cute and tiny and dressed like a boy in a loose T-shirt and skewed baseball cap, I can tell that she’s older, probably in her late twenties, or maybe even thirties, like René.