Before I could schedule anything with Duke, he confronted me in the street. He was forty feet tall now, and though he was wearing an Arête frame with a flowing white shawl that I knew even better than he did, his growth still astonished me. Whatever it is you project in your mind, the future rarely obliges. Either what you had imagined would scale up grandly turns out mean and paltry, somehow smaller than before. Or else, as in this case, the new proportions radically alter the thing’s meaning. What had read as removed or distant, when I’d drawn it in my apartment, now appeared apocalyptically void. Duke’s simple cool had been replaced by a solipsism so powerful it threatened, through lips just barely parted, and a jaw only beginning to slacken, to evacuate everything around it of all significance, consigning it to a footnote to his own being.
He stood in place of a Pringles can that had struck me, when I’d first caught sight of it, as a watchtower or castle turret. Scale in that case made the thing garish, a sham, laughable in fact, showing only how slight an ordinary can of Pringles was, which was the great trick of Warhol and, after him, Koons: you could steal the gravity from things by magnifying them. The picture of Duke was of another order, though. He was quite grave in real life. At seven times the size, though, plastered on the building façade, he appeared metaphysically transcendent, anything but absurd. Very few, however, could possibly know who they were looking at. People like Duke were almost never turned into pictures like this; the economics didn’t make sense.
Whatever the case, the figure’s blackness, shrouded in white, felt perverse. Anonymous though Duke was, he seemed to carry some great covert meaning in the billows of his robe, or the mirrors of his eyes. My pastel strokes glowed, gold and white and silver, against that black, black skin. African black. The tunic had, on vellum, seemed only to represent a puzzling fashion sensibility, perhaps in the school of Dennis Rodman. Now, out in the Bronx streets, eccentricity shaded off into implied bloodshed: the garment summoned terror and dread, the Unabomber and ISIS, making the image genuinely harrowing.
I’d been walking down Seventh Avenue when Jihadi Duke, as Duke himself would call the image, first appeared to me, just above my usual bodega. He stood about one hundred feet back, across the street, at the intersection where the Pringles can had just recently covered the top half of the façade. Duke’s likeness, though, doubled the size of the can by descending all the way to the foot of the building. We’d used a kind of translucent print Karen had thought up, so that the brick behind him showed through slightly, particularly at his feet, where several locals were gathered, smoking cigarettes and pointing up at him, his arrival.
Paul and Garrett had actually informed me about this picture’s being released to the public. In general, though, after earlier omissions, I was becoming resigned to the fact that our clients were going to be sorting out some of the details of the campaign for themselves, without me or Karen; that there would always be a portion of their designs in which I wouldn’t participate, or perhaps even know of, never mind the lip service they paid to keeping me apprised. I’d changed, I suppose, or was shifting at least. I could recall being truly furious at not being told about the first of Karen’s taglines going up, and I was even angrier about the billboard with Daphne downtown. But now, I found myself less keen on the entire campaign. After all, Garrett hadn’t bothered to tell me about Antral’s or JG’s relationships with police departments, their provision of tools to intimidate the citizenry, to incapacitate it, and probably sometimes things worse than that. This, I realized now, would have driven his obsession with the police standoff we’d seen that night at Sanguina. Paul would have known this then; I could recall his shifty eyes, the way he wanted to move things along. What, though, was the point in confronting either one of them about any of this, if I did indeed want to (or need to) see the project out? They weren’t really going to change their ways, so why not just proceed carefully for now and see what still could be achieved through them?
There was something else I gained from this gap between my knowledge and theirs, and since it wasn’t going anywhere, I might as well enjoy it: the simple pleasure of jolts like this, being brought to a standstill, quite organically, by the ramifications of your own hand, gawking and shuddering at the picture’s terrible grace, just like anyone else in the street. I’d been on the lookout lately for Daphne-related iconography, too. Anywhere I went now, I kept one eye open for the two of them. But I’d not spotted her yet in the Bronx. Perhaps the feeling was that a woman like her would never be comfortable up here. Unlike Duke. Who knows what they were thinking. There was no point in asking.
My neighborhood was certainly changing in character, not via public sculpture, with its usual ostentatiousness, but trivially almost, within its mundane advertising spaces, like leaves turning color. If Jihadi Duke was here, I thought, he must be elsewhere, too, coming into being at all sorts of magnitudes, and always in a slightly different form. We’d decided—it had been Garret’s notion, actually, and we’d all liked it—that although we were involved in mass printing, we would also create singularity. There were, strictly speaking, no duplicates. There was always a permutation. It could be the particular support used, the sizing, the saturation or brightness of the colors, or frequently just the cropping. Family resemblance was what we were looking for, not mechanized repeatability and exchangeability, though frequently the tweaks were made by algorithms. (None of us bore any general hostility to machines, Garrett least of all.)
I began the walk back from the bodega, peeling the plastic wrap off the squishy bagel I was by now so familiar with—the cream cheese was a texture and not a flavor, while the bread was somehow neither—and pushing the soft mass into my mouth. I was on my way back to the apartment, a bag of loose licorice in hand, when Duke texted with a photo of my drawing of him at the door of his old New York apartment, taken from inside a subway car I didn’t recognize (it was part of the ‘L,’ it turned out—the campaign had already spread to Chicago). There was only one sensible thing to reply with, so I spun around, hopped out into the street during a lull in traffic, and took Jihadi Duke’s photograph.