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Danil

September 4th

High clouds, a distant rumble. A shout-out from a storm on the approach tonight, a summer storm pushing its way into the crowded Brooklyn streets from beyond some border, like an audacious illegal immigrant or a country girl thumbing her nose at the pretensions of civilization. Danil had maybe half an hour before it broke, and he planned to use the minutes well. His right arm blurred as he shook the can so energetically it made his whole body bounce. If some half sleeper a few stories above the street in the Albany House II projects were to pause on the way to the toilet, bladder full, eyes bleary, and glance out his apartment window to the empty lot below, Danil would seem an unlikely dancer responding to absent music, a drunk or whack job ripe for the Kingsboro Psychiatric Center. The can's rattling seemed magnified in the night air, resounding off the concrete around him. The corner of Bergen and Albany remained sunk in postmidnight somnolence, the darkness gobbling up noise and movement and regurgitating them as indistinct fragments of dreams. In this space of relative obscurity, he began.

As if in a private ritual of nightly prayer, Danil's holy paint met the sanctified wall. He moved his arm in graceful waves. After several minutes, he lowered the spray can to his side and then touched a corner of the paint with the tip of his left baby finger to test for dryness. He pulled off the paper, refolded it quickly, and extracted the next layer of stencil from where he'd stashed it under a parked car. With painter's tape, he put the new cutout in place, holding his flashlight in his mouth so he could see to line it up properly.

As he worked, he sang "Mr. Tambourine Man," just loud enough to make the back of his mouth vibrate. Dylan had been Danil's quirky brother Piotr's favorite singer, and just a few weeks ago, Danil had heard that song covered by a gutter punk band whose name he couldn't remember in the Rock Star Bar under the Williamsburg Bridge. A dive with a great view of the span over the East River, a neon air-hockey table, and two carved ship figureheads that hung above the liquor shelves, the bar was an odd place peeled off an earlier, rougher time; Danil liked it mainly because of the layers of scrawled tags that covered every inch of the bathroom, which was often where people gathered to talk, smoke, share drugs. And when the band of forgotten name performed, the Dylan song was etched onto the night like a Sunday choir's hymn by a rope of a man with tattoos running up both arms. The singer forwent the harmonica, and his voice was raspier than Dylan's, but it made Danil wish he could call Piotr. And it planted in his brain lyrics perfect for a street artist hoping to be immune to the night.

Danil killed the flashlight, dug in his backpack for the can of white, and silenced himself in concentration. This was the most important coat, the detail layer, full of fine cuts. It would take him a few minutes longer than the others, but it was manageable, assuming no one came strolling down the street. In this neighborhood at this hour, he was less worried about being arrested than being jumped.

As he moved the can back and forth, he felt awake to the blood flowing in his arms, to the white paint as it spewed out, and to the goose-bump quality of the brick wall coated with a thin, patchy layer of cement. This was what it meant to be alive. Near the edges of the paper, he shortened his swing to avoid overspray. His mind was doing double duty, checking the coverage while listening so intently for any unusual street noise that he imagined his ears turned inside out. He glanced over his shoulder and then turned back to the wall, conscious of the cool night air sailing over his arms.

Danil was thirty-one, too old for vandalism, maybe too old for all this shit, even in the name of protest art. But nothing beat the feeling he got when painting the street. Only then did he feel light, an organic part of the world around him, yet disconnected from the dark thoughts of Piotr or his mother. Piotr, younger and so much more talented than Danil, had been drawn to bugs and small creatures, a collector of butterfly wings and ladybug shells, and such an easy target for grade school thugs. Where the older brother was mild, the younger veered all the way to timid, and bullies sensed this. "It's your job to look after him," their mother used to tell Danil. "You are four years older, and so much stronger, and not so dreamy. You've got to take care of him when I'm not there."

And he had, for years. Though he was thin and quiet, Danil didn't mind using his fists against anyone who tried to torment his brother. When they were both in high school, Piotr started calling him a "golden toad," a reference picked up from one of the nature magazines he loved. He said he meant that Danil appeared gentle but could turn aggressor when needed. Danil always laughed and said anyone who talked about golden toads and ladybug elytras and brush-footed butterflies clearly needed a protector. Still, somehow it was mild Piotr who had been persuaded after a single year at college to go help fight a war, some damn unfathomable idealism kicking in. And somehow it was Danil who found that fight foolish.

These days their mother, who ran her used bookstore at the edge of Cleveland, Ohio, had grown thick with refusal, dodging the truth about Piotr and writing long letters to Danil. One of the last ones he'd read included a snapshot, tattered at the lower left corner. "A photo of me and my two boys. Can you tell me why . . ." When Danil and his mother were together, her confusion deepened and their sorrows seemed to multiply. When they were together, they could neither deny Piotr's absence nor ignore the distance left between them by his death. So Danil never answered the letters, never called home anymore.

Instead, he stenciled on crumbling brick walls of deserted buildings, on rusting metal factory doors, and once on the side of a van abandoned in an empty lot. While he was working on the sketches, cutting the stencils, he thought about Piotr. He remembered some things, he realized others about his brother. But while he was actually doing the work in the middle of some half-blind night, the anguish finally settled. There was no past, no future to concern him, only here and now, and him alive, the sound of paint misting from an upright can.

When he finished with the white, he waited again, testing for dryness. Then he quickly removed the paper and backed up next to an abandoned car seat. He checked the street to his right and left— still empty— before turning on his flashlight.

Sometimes he practiced on one wall in his run-down studio apartment. He'd tried out this stencil there, painting over the remnants of other projects, a trial run to make sure the layers came together as he'd hoped. He'd felt fine enough about the results. But the outcome always looked different on location. When he planned it right, the environment— fading tags on marred cement walls, straggly weeds fringing tall buildings— multiplied the meaning of the image. Now, something nearing satisfaction swept through Danil's body, not pride exactly but a kind of certainty that this work was deeply moral. Ephemeral art, echoing ephemeral life, and randomly finding its temporary partners.

He thought of people seeing the piece in the morning as they headed into the bodega on the corner or the high school across the street. He imagined a couple of kids sitting on the grounded bench seat, facing the wall, studying his work, really seeing it: a life-sized woman with a serious expression, dancing on top of an oversized clenched fist, and wearing a black dress with red teardrops falling from the hem.

His brother's body had arrived home with a medal attached, but Piotr was not a war hero, not in any traditional sense. Instead, he'd become a victim of a creative effort to rewrite the present. To sanitize it. So Danil had become a Reminderer; he considered it his unpaid, untitled job. Dear passerby, plugged into your smart phone, lost in one form of oblivion or another: if you focus on a middle distance, you will remember. Ravenous war is upon us still.

He was not yet finished. One more plastic piece taped on the wall. One more can of paint, a pale yellow. On the black of the dress, he painted the flag's stars, meant for irony. And beneath the stencil of the coffin, four capital letters, about five inches tall, the sole bit of obvious, if destructible, ownership he allowed himself. IMOP. His tag.

He stepped back to examine the piece again and felt his shoulders drop slightly in relaxation. It was as he'd hoped; it was good. For tonight, there would be no nightmares to jar him awake, no shout climbing from his throat. For tonight, sleep would be restorative enough, fueled by this moment, his toe-dip into a well of fulfillment, an emotion surely as transient as street art itself, yet nonetheless valuable. Here lay the lesson for him, he thought, in both what had happened to his brother and the work he left on the street. In everything, temporary is inevitable; the wise accept it as enough.