as if in support of what I’ve said, demonstrating reasonableness, that no one wants to die here, and I’m angry at you for it.
“I don’t think so,” the ageless man says. “Everything stays here.” The knife still tipped at us, he kneels down to the newspaper at his feet. His eyes drop from us for a second. Your fingertips brush mine and startled fear pours adrenaline through my body. I throw myself forward and plow him into the wall. Dust and displaced plaster burst around our shoulders. I shove my forearm against his throat above the ragged collar, where the skin feels like it’s barely intact, has ebbed away around the muscle, and I use my other arm to pin his knife hand. He seems to lean into the blow, to buckle around me as if for support. With my weight pressing into him, beneath the baggy clothes, his frame is wasted and crackable, bends to my will. His heart beats in its rickety cage. I imagine you behind me, floating like a planet.
The victory is short-lived. He wrenches his arm free and shoves the knife up through the gap between our bodies, into my face. The rubber handle jams against my mouth and smears it open, digging into my gums and teeth while the very edge of the blade slowly splits my top lip. A metallic chattering fills my ears; the taste spreads like a disease. “I will shove this piece of metal down your throat and I do not give a shit who hears the screaming. Stand down.”
I stand down. My lips curl into my mouth. I’m amazed by how far I have to draw back until our bodies are no longer touching. I back into you, this time desperate for the contact.
He steps forward from the wall. An angry, body-sized patch of material has shaken free from behind him; the stirred dust lends the impression that he is stepping through a veil. His person clarifies: his eyes are vaguely familiar, dark and acquisitive. In his other hand, he un-crumples the newspaper, smooths it on one dusty thigh, and then raises it to his head—it’s folded into a crown. “This city belongs to the kings now,” he says.
My mouth fills with blood for the second time in hours. It stings wildly. I swallow in one gulp, the taste so strong that I feel dizzy. I take your hand again. For some reason, I’m not considering how many more arms we have than he does, that there are two of us against one of him; the darkness around us seems invisibly filled with others, pressing inward, damping our potential. The man, insane-looking, motions to the overturned Satsuma vase. “What’s in the vase? Is that where you keep your stash?”
You answer, which makes it sound like a cover-up. “There’s nothing in the vase.”
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
