It’s easy for a nonprofit administrator to lose touch with her purpose. Life can become nothing but grant applications and payroll problems, supply orders and fund-raising schmoozes, if one isn’t careful. Bronca’s an artist, so she takes pains to keep art foremost in her routine, if not her mind, every day.
Today she heads for their newest and most interesting exhibit. This one is a kind of summons, she’s always thought—and before yesterday at around noon, she didn’t quite know what she was trying to summon. The room contains photographs of graffiti found around the borough—graffiti by a very particular artist, whose work is distinctive, yet curiously eclectic in its composition. Bronca’s made out spray paint and house paint amid his materials, along with a little road tar and the occasional handful of natural pigments. (She hadn’t realized there was any indigo growing in the Bronx, but the university analysis she paid for is probably correct.) Whatever the artist could find, in other words, or buy or steal or make on a tight budget. His themes are strange: a giant howling mouth with two teeth. An enormous brown eye, giving a sly side-eye to the generic glass-and-steel condo being constructed next door. A strangely plain mural of sunset over a meadow, painted onto the side of an old twelve-story derelict factory, which somebody really needs to knock down before it starts killing people with falling bricks. There’s an arrow painted into the middle of the idyllic meadow scene, wide and bright red, pointing down at a ledge underneath the meadow. Bronca was confused by that one until she finally had an epiphany. The meadow is a red herring; what matters is that the ledge is a handhold. A convenient place for something enormous to grab on and steady itself. What? Who knows. But it fits a pattern.
The same artist, Bronca suspected before yesterday—and knows with certainty now. The same unseen ear, which hears the city’s song so clearly. Yes. This is the work of another of her people. Another of her, part of New York. She’s collected these pieces because the work is amazing, and because bringing them together is a kind of call-out to him. (Somehow she knows he’s a him.) Photos of the works, life-sized where the photographer got the right shot and poster-sized otherwise, now dominate Murrow Hall, which is the Center’s largest and best display space. BRONX UNKNOWN is the show’s title, hanging from the ceiling on a placard suspended by fishing line, and it’s almost ready to go. Maybe, when they get some media coverage at the July opening in a couple of weeks, her artist will come to find her and become less unknown. Since she’s not planning to go find him.
Bronca stops short, however, at the sight of someone in Murrow Hall. She only just unlocked the Center’s doors, but already there is a woman in a white pantsuit and matching CEO heels examining one of the photographs. It’s certainly possible that someone could’ve entered the Center while Bronca was getting coffee, but usually Bronca hears anyone who comes in. The Center is old, and its hardwood floors creak. The woman is carrying a clipboard, her back to the hall’s door. Is she some kind of inspector?
“Powerful, aren’t they?” asks the woman as Bronca stands there staring. She’s looking at Bronca’s favorite piece, although it’s also the one that feels as if it has a slightly different eye. In the image, seen from above, a body curls sleeping atop what looks like a bed of old newspapers—not just Village Voices and Daily Newses, but really old stuff that Bronca barely remembers from her childhood, like the New York Herald Tribune, and obscure stuff like the Staten Island Register. The papers are in bundles, still wrapped with twine or plastic. The figure atop them is centered and almost photorealistic amid a pool of light: a slender young dark-skinned Black man in worn jeans and a stained T-shirt, asleep on his side. His sneakers are nondescript, canvas, dirty, and there’s a hole in one of them. He can’t be much more than twenty years old, though it’s hard to tell because his face is turned into the papers, hidden except for one baby-smooth cheek. There’s a little meat on him—wishful-thinking biceps peeking from the sleeves of his shirt, a suggestion of deltoids underneath—but overall he’s skin and bones, to the point that Bronca’s tired maternal instincts make her want to just feed the poor child ’til he fills out.
The framing of the painting is the really interesting thing—as Bronca has tried to capture by having the photograph cut into a circle. The whole thing is circular, positioned above the painting’s subject, as if the painter is gazing down at him from the top of an open well. Bronca thinks there is adoration in this framing; it emulates the gaze of a lover, looking down upon a sleeping partner—or a parent, watching over a small child. She has seen the same tenderness of positioning, the same lighting, in classical painters’ depictions of the Madonna. But then, she knows why this painting is different. It is a self-portrait, but the boy didn’t paint it.
“This one especially,” says the woman in the white pantsuit. On a whim, Bronca walks into Murrow Hall to stand beside her, looking more at the woman than at the photograph. She’s almost as pale as her outfit, Bronca sees, though this is exacerbated somewhat by her tawny, near-white hair. She doesn’t look at Bronca, keeping her avid gaze on the image of the boy. “I feel like it’s trying to send me a message.”
It is, but not to some random stranger. Bronca folds her arms and decides to play along, though. “We’re all big fans of Bronx Unknown here,” she says. “What message do you think he’s trying to send?”
“I think it’s saying, ‘Come here,’” the woman says. “‘Find me.’”
Bronca stiffens and turns to stare at the woman, who grins. In profile, this makes Bronca notice the woman’s canines before anything else. They’re badly proportioned, out of alignment with the rest of her upper teeth and slightly too big. The white suit looks expensive. Anyone making that much money ought to be able to afford custom orthodontics.
And that is completely beside the point, Bronca realizes, as a ripple of unease prickles over her skin. Unease and… recognition? If something so atavistic can be called that. When a mouse that has never before seen a cat spots one for the first time, it knows to run because of instinct. Something in the bone knows its enemy.
Not that she’s a mouse, though, so Bronca only regards the white-haired woman evenly and says, “Maybe so. But I’m getting a lot of warning vibes off it, too.”
The woman frowns a little. “What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s subtle. All of this is conjecture given that we don’t know anything about the artist, but I’m thinking Unknown is homeless, or in such precarious circumstances that he might as well be.” Ignoring the woman for the moment, Bronca steps forward and points at the unfashionably torn jeans, the dirt on his plain white T-shirt, the worn-out, generic shoes. “These are the kinds of clothes you get out of a Goodwill pile when you’ve only got a few dollars to your name. And he’s not wearing anything that would make him stand out. No hoodie. No colors or accessories. White folks will call the cops on a Black kid for wearing just about anything, but he’s dressed as down as you can get without going naked.”
“Ah, the better to go unnoticed. You think he’s hiding from something?”
Bronca frowns at the photo, startled to realize it’s a good question. But he’s supposed to be fine at this point, isn’t he? The city is alive. Then again, Bronca’s supposed to be fine, too, and she’s been seeing too many signs in the past day that something is very wrong with the city.