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My sophomore year at Columbia was dominated by cold winds whipping down the Hudson – rain, ice, dirty slush in the gutters and slick paths across campus. I wrestled with comparative lit, anthropology, political science and second year Spanish. Garcia Lorca ran through my head like a summer dream. “Verde que te quiero verde,” I whispered against the storm. “Verde que te quiero verde,” I sang out across the great gray waters. And in my wilder moments, “verde,” conjured a personal fantasy – Fé Bonatti rising from the surf on a distant day in July. “Green, how I want you green.”
The last really warm day I could remember had been in September, when Fé and Karen Sinauer came by – two heart-breakers in light cotton dresses, hauling viola cases. They had come down from Sarah Lawrence in Fé’s Alfa for tutorials at the Manhattan School of Music over on Claremont.
I called them, “My All Girls Society String Duet.”
“String bikinis, I suppose,” Fé countered. “Dream on.”
“Not fair,” Sinauer said, draping her arm around my shoulder. “You know Charlie’s the stuff of culture.”
“What culture’s our boy genius into these days?” Fé asked.
“Anthropology with a prof obsessed by the Maya,” I said.
“My, my, Maya,” Sinauer sang it like an aria.
“Indians?” Fé asked. “The long-dead ones?”
“And I’m into some Vargas-Llosa right now,” I told her. “Especially a novel about a young guy falling madly in love with an older woman.”
“Sounds tragic,” Fé said.
“No, it’s slick comedy with a lot of lust. I recommend it to older women like you.” Fé was, after all, a senior.
“You being the horny young guy?”
We grabbed hotdogs off a Sabrette cart and walked aimlessly along Riverside Drive. It was bright and green with just enough breeze to ruffle the river. Grant’s Tomb loomed bone-white, awash in sunlight.
“Who’s buried?” Fé asked.
“Groucho,” I answered.
“You guys have been watching too many late night re-runs,” Sinauer laughed.
“Actually they say no one’s buried,” I said. “They’re above ground.”
“Tricky,” Sinauer said.
Now, on this first clear day in December, I was jogging up along the Drive alone, trying to clear my head from too much cramming. The backed-up traffic on West Side Highway filled the air with a cacophony of horns. By instinct or habit, I was drawn in the direction of Grant’s Tomb.
The base of the monument was covered by an ugly scrawl of graffiti, so I ran along its west side. That’s where I first noticed the glyph. The base was still pretty clean there, with the river light reflected off it, so the square emblem stood out, alone. It wasn’t large – perhaps a foot high – and I thought at first it had been carved into the marble. I probably would have looked right past it had it not been for my anthropology professor. But I had been primed. Just that week Sam Aguilar had been putting up slides in the lecture hall – Nineteenth Century Catherwood sketches of Maya ruins, those romanticized visions of shadowed walls rising from the jungle, covered in ancient script. I stopped, walked back, studied it a moment, and then jogged on. It paled next to the gaudy spray-paint graffiti, lacking the angry, in-your-face message. But it made its impression – a symbol so precise it looked like it might have been lifted directly off a Maya stele, a trompe d’oeil worked out in subtle grays. So I went back the next day and took a snapshot to show Professor Aguilar. He was the one who came up with the bright idea of my researching the emblem to see if I could decipher it. He was young and inspirational, dedicated to pre-Columbian civilizations. “Hey, it might get you some extra credit,” he offered not too subtly. Sure, Sam, just a little off-hand project, one that took me a slew of long days and sleepless nights, pouring through page after page of Maya script in obscure archaeology journals I had to sneak out of the library.
From my little third floor walkup I could hear the hours chime out from the bell tower of Riverside Church, and just after the strike of three on a chilled afternoon, Fé wrested me from my studies like a warm breeze.
I heard her before I saw her, standing in my open doorway with her beat-up viola case strapped to her shoulder, whistling something classical.
“Mozart,” I guessed.
“OK, Mr. Frank, for the entire sixty-four thousand, which one?”
“How the hell should I know? It’s got a number. One of those.”
She was in jeans and a little leather bomber jacket, her long dark hair tucked under a black-and-tan knitted Inca cap, her face pinched pink by the cold. The jeans were fashionably faded and tight, with just enough heel on her boots to make her legs look coltish, and elegant enough to make my pulse skip. She dropped her viola on my unmade bed, patted it once like a pet and sat down, studying me with those magic green eyes. Whoever wrote “Unrequited love’s a bore” obviously hadn’t peered into my private thoughts.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she drawled.
“Playing the subway circuit, eh kid?” I answered Bogie style.
“Yeah, chump change in the underground.”
“I had a dream about you,” I said. “Very sensual.”
“You sure you want to tell?”
“I think you’ll like it,” I said. “It was like a Chagall. You know, floating. You were playing your instrument for me, seated on pale blue sheets.” That made her eyes brighten.
“My instrument?”
“And I almost forgot – you were nude.”
“Really,” she tossed off casually. “What color was I?”
“A very passionate shade of pink.”
“You do have such an artist’s imagination, Charlie.”
“Leaning slightly toward cliché?” And before she could respond, “But what really brings you to this den of roaches?”
“I wish to consult.” She sounded serious.
“You want to probe my deeper feelings.”
“I wish your opinion on a question of art.”
“Art?” I had to laugh.
“Or graffiti. Is graffiti art?”
“Some think it’s more like dogs pissing,” I said. “One clown finds a virgin spot on a wall to mess up and the others rush in to piss all around it.”
“Is that all? Messing up space? What about Haring? How about Basquiat?”
“Have you been reading leaves, Fé? How’d you know I was whipping that horse?” I threw on a jacket, grabbed her arm and the review I had been studying. “C’mon, I want to show you something.”
The wind was gusting out of the west as we headed past the great church toward Grant’s Tomb. The white sepulcher looked lonely out there under heavy clouds. Fé grimaced at the ugly smear of graffiti along its base.
“OK, you proved your point,” she said. “It’s pretty god-awful.”
“But look at this,” I said, pulling her around to the river side. She studied the Maya script a full minute before saying anything.
“Well, yeah, that’s different,” she whispered. “I mean, really different. But what is it?” She reached out to touch what appeared to be an animal’s head – bird or turtle – within the emblem.
“You been to Chiapas?” I asked.
“Couple of times.”
“Palenque?”
“One of those – maybe Palenque.” She looked over my shoulder at the page I had opened to. “Hey, I didn’t know you were so into this stuff.” Was she putting me on?
“Remember Groucho?”
“Who’s buried?”
“Here’s one he probably hadn’t figured on.” I pointed to a symbol on the lower right side of the open page, flapping in the wind. “This says we’re looking at Hanab-Pakal K’ul Bak Ahaw, the Holy Lord of Palenque.”
“No kidding? Holy Lord.”
“Six hundred something A.D.”
Fé studied the emblem more closely, looked back at me, then swept into a deep bow, pulling the cap off her head so her hair streamed into the wind. “Goddamn, maestro!” she yelled. “I might have known you’d be so freaking clever.” She grabbed me all at once and kissed me hard on the mouth. It was quick, but it brought back memories. “You’re something else. You discovered this and figured it all out on your own?”
“I’d like to discover the guy who sent me on this fucking chase.”
“It looks just like the picture in your magazine.”
“Aguilar thinks it might be a student. Anyway, someone who’s really clued into the Maya.”
“But why?”
“It took me long enough just to figure out what.” Her eyes glistened a dark evergreen in the late river light, making me feel my discovery had somehow brought us closer. Our little secret, I told myself.
It was only later I remembered her question, “Is graffiti art?”
Friday nights I washed dishes at a Russian restaurant down on Morningside Heights, jammed in with the rest of the kitchen crew in a noisy, steamy room that reeked of borsht and boiled sturgeon.
“Charles Frank,” the owner called out above the clatter of pots and dishes. “You got a call.”
“Who?”
“Did not say.” It turned out to be Fé and she was pretty excited.
“You won’t believe this,” she said. “Bloomingdale’s of all places. I found one of your cartouches.”
“My what?”
“Isn’t that what they call them? You know, Maya emblems.”
“At Bloomie’s?”
“On the stairs to the subway. I saw it this morning. I thought you’d like to know.”
“Sure, but…”
“Well it’s right there. I think the same guy did it. Pretty cool. Maybe what’s-his-name will give you some more extra credit.”
“Aguilar?”
“Your prof.” And she hung up, leaving me wondering how she found out where to call me.
By the time I got off work, it was after one in the morning, the streets stood cold and empty, and all I really wanted to do was go home and get under a couple of blankets. But the excitement in Fé’s voice persuaded me to catch the subway to 59th and Lex. The show windows glowed Christmas cheer softly into the night and a solitary figure huddled by the subway stairs. He was short and dark, with a wool cap pulled down over his ears. Mexican or Guatemalan Indian, I thought, hugging himself to keep warm. Had I seen him somewhere before, working at a store or a coffee shop perhaps?
I spent over a half hour climbing up and down each stairwell before I found the emblem, because it was placed just above eye level. Like the one at Grant’s Tomb, it appeared at first glance to have been carved into the gray wall. But this one was more distinctive, easier to remember, because of what looked like cat’s claws curling from the bottom of its square. I even thought I recalled which journal I had seen it in. The Indian was standing alone on the platform when I caught the train home.
The next day I took some photos, had them developed at a quickie lab and within a couple of hours was able to trace the glyph to its journal – Toh-Chak-Ich’ak, True Great Jaguar Claw, Lord of Tikal. I thought about calling Fé, to let her know what it was she had discovered. But things quickly moved beyond the two of us. As soon as Aguilar saw the photos with my identifications, he offered the assignment to the entire class.
“Charlie’s uncovered a curiosity,” he announced. “An intriguing kind of graffiti. It seems the ancient Maya have arrived right here in our city, co-opting our own sacred temples, Grant’s Tomb and Bloomingdale’s.” When he projected my photos onto the screen, there was an undercurrent of mumbling throughout the lecture hall. “This is no idle scribbling. They’re the emblems of important rulers, great Maya lords of Tikal and Palenque.”
“What’s the game?” someone asked.
“That’s what we’d like to figure out. Maybe you can help us, find one of these glyphs and tell us what it means. Earn some extra credit.”
That afternoon, when I got back to my room, there was a note on the door. “Hey Charlie, I think I met your graffiti artist. Besos, Fé.”
Sam Aguilar looked young enough to be a student himself, with a round ruddy face, long reddish hair and the feeble attempt at a beard. But he was mad for his subject and it was infectious. When one of the guys in class commented that he didn’t look like any Spaniard he’d ever seen, Aguilar smiled knowingly and explained that his family had come from Galicia, Celts who lived right across the Channel from England. This particular morning, he was waxing poetic about the Zapotecs of Monte Alban, when a girl interrupted him.
“Hey, Sam, I see you’re in the Times.”
“Where?”
“Front page. This little ad down here at the bottom. ‘Professor Aguilar of Columbia, Rabbit is waiting at Astor Place.'” Aguilar’s face flushed. “Sounds pretty funky, Sam,” the girl said and the class let out a groan.
But Aguilar was staring at me. And as soon as the class ended, he grabbed my arm and we caught the first train downtown. All the while I sensed he was suspecting me. So even when I found the emblem on the wall in the uptown stairs under the old kiosk, I kept my mouth shut and let him discover it for himself. It took him a while, because he kept studying the Astor Place beaver emblems in the station.
“Beaver,” he mused. “Imagine, a dynasty built on beaver. I suppose this is another kind of American shrine.”
“Never could figure that whole beaver for top hat thing,” I mumbled.
“There it is,” he almost shouted, pointing out the glyph. “You know what it is?”
“No, but I’ll research it for you.”
“Never mind, I know it. It’s pretty famous. Waxaklahun-Ubah-K’awil, 18 Rabbit, Lord of Copan.”
Aguilar and I were nursing beers in a neighborhood bar on Amsterdam. He had drawn a quick map of Manhattan on a paper napkin, marking out the three spots where we had found glyphs. He was pretty excited, thinking he had figured out the game. He waved the napkin in front of me.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“I see a crude map of Manhattan scribbled on a soiled paper napkin.”
“Look, wise guy. Here’s Palenque, then southeast to Tikal, then south to Copan. It’s a double map – famous Maya capitals superimposed onto Manhattan. I can’t believe it’s accidental. Bet we’ll be searching Queens soon for Chich’en Itza.”
But we were distracted by the TV over the bar, where Dick Cavett was interviewing Andy Warhol about life at The Factory.
“Honestly, Dick, there’s just always something new and surprising,” the artist was saying. He reached into a shopping bag, pulling out a white tile and holding it up for the camera. “This arrived today, quite mysteriously. We were about to chuck it, because we get a lot of things like this sent to us. But someone thought it might be Aztec or something. And it is pretty unique. Not handsome, but odd. What do you think?”
“I’d say it’s a hieroglyph of some sort,” Dick mused.
“And down here it’s signed, Colón,” Andy pointed out on the lower right corner of the square. “That’s Columbus, right? I just don’t know what to make of it.”
Meanwhile, Sam and I had grabbed a couple more napkins and were madly sketching the glyph before it left the screen. We researched it that night. The next day, Aguilar called The Factory.
“Let Mr. Warhol know, the script is Maya, ‘Sak chuwen,’ which translates ‘pure artisan.’ You got that? SAK CHUWEN.” And he spelled it out.
The story appeared a few days later in the New York Post gossip column. Andy Warhol, overlooking the irony, was quoted as saying “Sak chuwen” was one of the finest compliments he had ever received and that the glyph was going to hang on his wall as a motto. Professor Aguilar was given credit as the Maya authority.
At first, the new entry upset Sam, who was convinced the game he identified had been headed in another direction. The fact that this glyph was portable and signed made it different. Who was this Colón anyway? Was he the same graffiti artist or some copycat? He pointed out that Colón was the least likely name a Mayan could take. It was like signing, Satan. But when Warhol’s glyph appeared in ARTnews, we could see that the trompe d’oeil technique was like the others.
Suddenly tiles began to appear mysteriously at chi-chi locations all over Manhattan – what Sam called our secular temples. More people were searching out Aguilar for translations, so he made it a regular class assignment, putting Xeroxes of the tiles on the class bulletin board. On the spiral ramp at the Guggenheim, an attendant discovered a tile with the glyph “Ya-aj-ji-ya,” and we translated, “Create.” “Na-wa-ja” was found below a smart little Calvin Klein dress in the window at Henri Bendel – “Adorn.” When Pavarotti sat down with Zubin Mehta at a table reserved for them at le Côte Basque, “U-wí-ya” was waiting for them, and Luciano was delighted to learn it meant, “Eat up.” At Elaine’s on the Upper East Side, “Ti-ka-la ka-ka-wa” showed up at the bar where George Plimpton was having a martini with Truman Capote – “Get drunk.”
No one had any idea where the tiles had come from, nobody knew how many had been lost or thrown away, but Colón’s name was tossed around more and more at cocktail parties, mentioned in gossip columns, praised and lampooned in art magazines. A New Yorker cartoon featured a fat lady wrapped in a towel saying, “I found this Colón in my shower.” He was being hailed as a rare kind of conceptual artist on the one hand and an immigrant protestor on the other. Our class was gaining its own prestige for Columbia and was suddenly considered the in place to be enrolled. Maya scholars called the university for information on the phenomenon.
Fé showed up late one morning in March as I was being driven into a deep depression by Franz Kafka. I was still in bed, propped up on a couple of pillows, and she stretched out beside me without taking off her jacket or boots. Her hair was messed and wet from a snow shower and she had a dank smell about her.
“God, I’m beat,” she sighed. Her face looked thin and pale.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Just frazzled.” I put Kafka aside and took her hand. It was cold and rough. When I kissed it, I saw how red and chapped it was.
“What have you been doing with these hands?”
“Ceramic class.”
“And where’s your instrument?” She smiled weakly and looked up at me with eyes the color of pale fern.
“Home.”
“You mean your folks’ place?” They had a flat on Fifth Avenue, overlooking the Park. “Aren’t you here to study music?”
“Following other pursuits right now,” she murmured. All at once, she looked terribly sad. “Please tell me I’m not just another dilettante.”
“You sure you’re OK? You look like shit.”
“You’re full of compliments.”
“Really, you have me worried.”
“I didn’t come to talk about me. I want you to tell me what you think of our Colón.”
“He sure as hell put Sam Aguilar on the map.”
“But what do you think?”
“Some say it’s just a game. But I’m waiting. I think this is just prelude, the bait. There’s got to be something else.”
“Who knew when you spotted that first one at Grant’s Tomb?” She was so tired, she had trouble focusing. “Now all our Joseph Campbell disciples at school are talking about the Colón hieroglyphs. What’ll he do next?”
“Aguilar’s betting on the subway. Maya loved the underground.”
“I guess it takes something like this to stir up New Yorkers,” she said, yawning. Then she fell into a deep, open-mouthed, light-snoring sleep. I marveled how she could look so lovely in that state. I slipped off her boots, unzipped her jacket, kissed her lightly on the cheek and then cut out for my comparative lit class. When I got back, she was gone.
As quickly as Colón had stirred up the art community’s interest, the glyphs stopped. On a chilly opening day at Shea, just as Tom Seaver was about to start his warm-up tosses off the mound, they discovered the last tile, “Pi-tzi-la.” And when the Mets found out it meant “Play ball,” “PITZAH!” became that season’s battle cry.
For a while, no one noticed that no new glyphs were appearing. Norman Mailer published his essay, “Famous Anonymous,” in Esquire, comparing Colón to B. Traven, the author of “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,” whose work gained world fame while he remained incognito in Mexico. An Indian group complained that the artist was stealing their sacred ancestral language.
I ran into Sinauer at a bookstore in May. She was worried silly, she said. She hadn’t seen Fé in months.
“She’s not at Sarah Lawrence?”
“Split in February or early March. And never came back after Spring break. School doesn’t know why. And she was so close to graduation.”
“They talk to her folks?” I asked.
“I did. The Bonattis aren’t your regular parents. Very laissez-faire.”
“But something might have happened to her.”
“She’s a big girl, they say, needs breathing room. And she’s still using her credit cards. They tracked her through American Express. Her mom even showed me some charges. The Chelsea Hotel, Umberto’s Clam House, Fanelli’s. Some place in Chinatown. Some clothes at Gap. Men’s clothes. Something from Dean & Deluca. Some paint and stuff at a hardware store. Maybe she’s doing up a loft in SoHo.”
“Jesus,” I said, thinking about my own parents’ need to hear from me at least once a week. “They probably figure she’s having a swell time shacked up with some rock star.”
“Hey, maybe that’s it.” Sinauer looked relieved. “You know Fé.”
. At least I knew how I felt about Fé. And that could be sometimes more depressing than Kafka. Jealousy drove me downtown, walking aimlessly around SoHo, the Village and the Lower Eastside, looking in stores and coffee shops, hanging out in bars. I didn’t like myself much.
I was in Fanelli’s, sipping a Bass, looking out onto Prince at the young girls passing by, wondering what kind of a loan it would take to support me through the next year, when I saw Fé cross toward Mercer. I’d been wishing her so long, I took her for a hallucination and by the time I got up and paid my bill, she was gone. But at the corner, I caught sight of her on Spring, heading toward Broadway.
“Fé,” I called. “Felicia. Hey, Bonatti!” She either didn’t hear or didn’t wish to hear, so I ran after her. She was with a guy – a short, slight, bandy-legged guy. When I caught up with them, they were about to go down into the Spring Street station. “Damn, Fé, you sure can give a guy the run-around.”
Her eyes widened in surprise, then she smiled warmly. “Hi, Charlie.” Her jeans were paint-splattered and threadbare at the knees. Only her T-shirt was clean and white. Then I noticed he was covered in paint specks too. Paint was even in his straight black hair. His nose, cheekbones and dark eyes were Indian. He looked late twenties, early thirties, but it’s hard to tell with those guys. His skin was “canela,” like in the Spanish song – cinnamon. “This is Colón,” she whispered, as if telling me a closely guarded secret. “He doesn’t speak English.” So I smiled at him, hesitant to use my schoolbook Spanish.
“Mucho gusto,” I murmured finally. “¿Como está usted?” He squinted up at me. He didn’t offer his hand.
“He doesn’t like to speak Spanish much either,” she said. We stood there a moment, studying each other. I felt as stiff as a starched collar.
“Well, great to see you, Fé. Everybody’s been asking. I’m glad to know you’re OK.”
“We’re fine,” she said. “Working hard.”
“Good. That’s good. Give me a call sometime. Let me know how it’s going.” It was like meeting a stranger.
“At the restaurant?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m there all week now school’s out.”
“Thanks, Charlie. Thanks a lot.” she said, touching my arm.
“For what?”
“For understanding.” I didn’t understand much of anything.
“Encantado,” I called after the man she had called Colón. He didn’t look back. Was he the same Indian I had seen at Bloomingdale’s with a cap pulled over his ears?
How did she look? I asked myself, really look. I thought about her pale face without makeup, the dark circles under her eyes, clothes worn without pretense, scuffed sneakers, calloused hands. I imagined her below the street somewhere in dark tunnels, working alongside the rats and roaches. I remembered an anthropologist who had lived a long time among the Indians, eating sparely and infrequently, sleeping on the hard ground. He wrote how the Indians had “toughened his meat.”
On the way downtown one afternoon, I saw a man photographing my subway car. “KOOL 131” had been spray-painted across the entire side, windows included.
“Interesting subject,” I said.
“I’m doing a book,” he told me.
“On graffiti?”
“New York Subway Art,” he corrected me. “It’s come a long way.”
“More of it, you mean.”
“More sophisticated. This is what they call a Top to Bottom. Tagging’s a lot tougher now. MTA’s buffing more, cleaning up the cars, guarding the yards. Kool probably hit this at a Pull-In Pull-Out.”
“What’s that?”
“When trains stop off for a layover – fifteen minutes or so. You got to be quick and nervy. It’s dangerous, with trains whizzing by.” I had time, so I rode with him into Brooklyn. “It’s not like Old School,” he said. “You know, Taki 183, that stuff back in the late sixties, early seventies. There’s serious competition down here now.”
“You heard of Colón?” I asked. His expression changed, his voice lost its enthusiasm.
“Yeah, but these guys don’t want to talk about him. They’re into steel, the trains. Even the Tunnel Bombers, the guys who do walls, won’t talk about him. Colón’s different. He spooks them. All I heard, he’s doing something north of 14th on the IRT. Up around where that old station used to be.”
He gave me his business card. Donny Massa. Very Professional.
Of course, she never called the restaurant. Sinauer called, said she’d like to see me, but I didn’t feel much like it. I really liked Sinauer, but I felt about as down as I could. And I felt like a jerk, believing I enjoyed feeling down. Summer and Garcia Lorca’s “verde” had arrived full force and I couldn’t even enjoy it. I was reading Sartre and Camus and Dostoevsky and Jaspers and Nietzsche and every other fucking existentialist I could get my hands on. Just to feel stupid and get more depressed. If they closed the restaurant early, I took the train down to 14th and wandered around Union Square, or sat in a bar and read. But really, I was just waiting.
A light rain was falling, so the pavement glistened like glass under the streetlamps. Even at one in the morning, a bunch of people were hurrying toward the round station canopy, shining like a beacon from the light within. She was carrying a backpack and a tube for maps or artwork, the man with her had a gallon paint can and a large battery-powered lamp. He looked particularly small beside her that night. I followed them into the entrance of Union Square station, down toward the maze of tracks that merge at 14th Street. But by the time I dropped my token in and passed through the turnstile, they were disappearing toward the uptown IRT. I hung back, afraid of being spotted, so when I reached the platform, it was empty, except for an old woman.
“You see a couple – short Indian, young woman?”
“There was lots of people here just before the Number 6 come through.”
“When?”
“Just left.”
I ran up the curving platform, cursing myself, staring deep into the tunnel. There was no train in sight. Far up the dark track, a faint light floated like a firefly. I studied it a long time, watching it sway from side to side, until it disappeared. Even work crews wouldn’t be out there at that hour.
In September, Sam Aguilar called me to his cramped office, even though I wasn’t taking a class with him that Fall.
“I wanted you to see something. I think of you as part of this. I’ve been sent something by a photographer. It’s pretty damn amazing.”
“Colón?” I guessed.
“A photograph of an underground mural in the subway system. The photographer believed our anthropology department might be interested. It features four great panels against a wall of hieroglyphs.”
“Massa.”
“How’d you know?”
“He’s doing a book.”
“This mural goes beyond glyphs,” Sam said. “It’s drawn from a group of four stelae in the city of Seibal. We didn’t cover Seibal in the course, because it’s smaller, a city south of Tikal obliterated by a great war. This mural is about regeneration, about a lord who was sent to rebuild the city thirty years after its destruction.” He went on to describe how Ah-Bolon-Abta Wat’ul-Chatel arrived one day before the end of the tenth bak’tun.
“Bak’tun‘s 400 years, right?”
“Which would put his arrival in 830 A.D. He built a great temple there, each side facing a cardinal point. And at each of the four entrances, he placed a huge godlike image of himself.”
“Jesus, Sam, let me just see the photo,” I almost yelled. “Please.” He smiled self-consciously, hesitated a moment and then pulled out a 16 x 20 print. It was amazing. There was no other way to describe it. Four great figures, each dressed in his own elaborate ceremonial costume, stood against a solid background of glyphs. All rendered in Colón’s trompe d’oeil technique. But across this entire work of extraordinary symbolic detail, Tunnel Bombers had scrawled their tags in a huge rainbow of abuse – T Kid, Spade 127, Airborn – a new generation of crossout warriors dissing their rivals.
When I looked up at Aguilar, he had tears in his eyes. “In the annihilation of Seibal by Dos Pilas, the victors gloated over their complete eradication of that city’s recorded history,” he told me. “They bragged on their own stelae, ‘ch’ak u tz’ibal pat k’awil. They chopped the writing of the statues that were made.'”
Later that month, a brief article appeared in the Daily News: “The grafitti artist known as Colón was found on the subway tracks south of 23rd Street station, apparently killed by a passing train. He was judged to be a Hispanic-American, approximately 60 years of age, carrying an expired Ecuadorian passport of one Herman Moreno. The body was identified by an acquaintance, Felicia Bonatti of 5th Avenue, New York.”
Of course, I saw the disparities. The age, the nationality. I wondered where the Colón I had met had gone. Did naming this convenient vagrant’s body “Colón” mean the end of the glyphs? Or would Massa and others find still more work tucked away in the secret recesses of the MTA?
With October, Indian Summer had arrived and a day that felt like Spring. My window was open and a fresh breeze passed through my door from the floors below. I was pacing around my room like a horse waiting to be let out to pasture, thumbing through Wordsworth and cummings, and reading this poem by Herrick aloud:
“When in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes
That liquefaction of her clothes.”
And when Fé walked in, she looked every bit as good as the way I was feeling. She looked so good, I was ready to recite something lyrical for her, but that’s when she let me know she was leaving New York. She was on her way to France, she said, or maybe Italy.
“Any old whistle stop,” I said, suddenly jealous as hell. “Any old place in the whole wide world. What a lark.”
“I’m going to miss you, Charlie.”
“How nice of you to say so.”
“Really.”
“Really, in passing.”
“C’mon, send me off nicely. Like you’re glad.”
“I think it’s wonderful, Fé. Great for you.” And I wished I could have meant it. But birds in flight tend to make those grounded mean-spirited.
“Please, Charlie. I don’t want to think of the sad stuff. Lift me up. I need to be lifted.” What a laugh. She wanted me – my spirit – to lift her. She, off to Paris or wherever the hell she wished. But just then the bells rang out at Riverside Church, marking eleven in the morning, giving me an idea.
“OK. Come with me,” I said, throwing in a little T. S. Eliot quote. “To lead you to an overwhelming question.” She loved that shit.
I took her to the church, straight to the tower elevator and up to the top, climbing the final steel steps to be among the bells. And we waited there. We were a half-hour waiting and I wouldn’t speak. I wouldn’t say a goddamn word. She was leaving and I felt like a fool.
But then came the first sound of the gears moving, the great machine searching out the hour. And when the bells began, she came to me amid the ringing all around us and a thin cold wind of coming winter winding in through the narrow windows. And I pulled her tight to me, feeling her excited breathing through her thin summer dress. Then came the booms of the hour – a dozen deep loud slow heavy tolls in the close room, pressing on us. And she was close against me, shaking. Shaking off the sadness of the subway, I was thinking, of darkness and lost art. And I thought I could feel her sadness touch me. But when I looked down at her, she was shaking with silent laughter. Laughter she couldn’t stop. Small and hysterical as a child.
“Wheee!” she cried out, the thunder in our ears. “You are a fucking marvel, Charlie Frank. I’m ready to fly.”
And below, after we’d kissed goodbye and she was walking away, I finally asked her what had been on my mind since the winter.
“Why Colón, Fé? Why the name, Colón?” She looked back at me with those great green eyes, smiling.
“Why not?” she said.
William Reese Hamilton left a career in New York advertising for a fishing village on the coast of Venezuela, where he now writes what he wishes. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, The North American Review, The 
Adirondack Review, Atticus Review, StoryQuarterly, Review Americana, Puerto del Sol, Front Porch Journal, Eclectica, FRiGG and elsewhere. “Glyphs“ is one of eight stories featuring the longings of Fé Bonatti and Charlie Frank.