There was someone painting.

On the hospital in the Bronx, there had already been murals. Those murals had been of saintly people in white, doing good things with their hands, making the world safe and helping people live. Those murals had been lies once the storm came.

He had seen the inside of that hospital. One night, long after all the patients who they thought they could save had been airlifted out and the rest of them left to rot, after the doctors and nurses were gone, after the people who had meant to do good and who had been brought to the position of only be able to do the least bad they could had left, he took a ladder and spray cans and paint tubes and brushes. He stood there all night in the dark. He climbed the ladder with his boot heels hooking over the rungs. He went up and down. The grays and blacks and browns and reds went up. He drew faces with bones showing, long strings of hair, sunken eyes. He drew soldiers with more machine helmet than flesh. There were horses that had lost all their muscle and sinew and carried riders into death on a mount of bone. Hideous insects marched along with the horses, all mandible and reaching legs, eating and tearing what was left. The buildings he drew in the background were sticks barely held together by blackness, destroyed by the weak power of skeleton fists. The sky above the scene opened into cosmos, and the stars were holes that the universe fell into. The planets were rubber bands stretched to the point of breaking. The moon gave off no light, was naught but craters and lonely mountain ranges.

He created the painting in the night. When the morning came, the people who were left behind, the people who roamed the streets in groups if they were lucky enough to find them and alone and furtive if they were not, stopped to see this looming battle scene. They saw what he had seen when he went inside the hospital and found the bodies cold in the freezing night with the life-saving beep of machines far away. The looked upon it and they thought, “death.” They thought, “This is what the city has come to.” Finally, they thought, “Someone has seen.”

Later, when the camera crews came, and the people behind the cameras began to find the bodies, the news anchors began to recall a time long ago when a cross had been found in the rubble of those famous buildings downtown that had been destroyed by that famous plane. They showed the picture to those who were far away. Those people far away thought, “art,” and they began to think again of return.

He heard of a place where an old woman had starved to death up in a low-rent high-rise. He walked until he got there. Over the city, through the broken streets, past parking meters fallen to the ground, past empty, looted newspaper stands, over and through the debris, down the alleys, over puddles with frozen edges. He walked through the night and through the day. He slept in alleys and building doorways. He found supplies along the way. Who would stop for a can of spray paint but him?

He went to the high-rise and he painted a skeleton hugged by a suit. The suit was a picture of precise folds and creases and seams. It draped off the bones like it would on the gym-sculpted frame of a millionaire who intended on living forever. In front of the skeleton, he painted a banquet so rich and varied that the people left had only seen the likes of it in magazines, if there. He had never seen this kind of food in real life, either, but he knew it was good, so he painted it there. He painted the skeleton’s hand digging into it and bringing it up to his bare teeth.