The lighting in the gallery had a crisp, but not overbearing, quality. Alejandro paused before walking through the door and took one last look at his reflection in the glass door. He straightened his tie and brushed nonexistent lint off of his dark suit. These sorts of events always made him nervous, made him remember the small boy in raggedy clothes that he hadn’t been in many, many years. He wondered if anyone could still see that boy but him.
Reaching his hand in his pocket and touching the ancient cell phone he carried there, he walked through the glass door. The room was full of beautiful people, all dressed as well as him, all talking around glasses of champagne and laughing short, clipped, polite laughs. Against the white walls were familiar images, many of them reaching up to the vaulted ceiling, and a few that were small but bright. Some of the images were still on the brick that they had been painted on, but others had been removed and transferred into canvases. Alejandro had more than a nodding acquaintance with these works of art.
Across the room, he heard a laugh louder and more confident than the rest. He smiled and spotted her—a woman in her forties with long, sun-bleached hair, a trim body, and a black eye patch over one eye. The last bit was an affectation. A bionic had been fitted shortly after the explosion, after the shock had abated, after she had befriended Alejandro in the hospital, after she had convinced her father to take the homeless boy with no family into their home. But in the time between the explosion and the surgery, Evann had decided that the patch gave her a look of distinguishment and singularity, and had since never left her home without it. Wheeling around the gallery was her ancient dog, Pollock. His back legs has been lost at the same time Evann’s eye had, but his modifications were more functional: wheels that spun behind his still-working front paws.
There she was, holding court, talking about the individual works, their relation to what had been happening in the city when they were painted. Her knowledge on the topic was encyclopedic. There had been little codified information to be found, of course, with New York in such a shambles in those days. Evann, after things had settled down after the explosion, had traveled all over the city, and to many other places, tracking down people who had lived in those streets, speaking to them, recording them, hearing their stories. Alejandro hadn’t know her before, but he suspected there had been something like ennui radiating through her life. After she left the hospital, after she and her father took Alejandro in, there had been nothing like that. Her life had had purpose. She wanted to become, and eventually succeeded in becoming, the biggest collector of and expert on the artist that had sprung up in New York City in those months after Superstorm Bernice.
Evann and an older woman fell deep into conversation, separating from the crowd around her and the light talk it inspired. The woman was in her seventies or eighties, an age that, in the current conditions, spoke of the wealth needed to withstand all that had come. Alejandro couldn’t judge her. After he’d moved in with Evann and her family, he had had all the luxury he’d ever dreamed of having. He had been bought new clothes and electronics, had servants, been doted upon, spoiled. He’d been sent to prep school inland, then college, then medical school. The tall, well-groomed, perfectly coifed man that he caught the reflection of in the glass doors was a product of privilege, no doubt.
As was this older woman dripping ostentatiously with jewelry. Her glasses hung on a jeweled cord that was pure affectation—no one of her background would have anything less than perfect eyesight, even at her age. She probably only wore those glasses for the excess of the cord, for the chance to position diamonds at the outer edges of the cat-eye rim. Alejandro listened as she leaned in close to Evann and spoke.
“Dear, I am quite interested in The Artist’s last piece,” she said in a voice that creaked at the edges of words.
Evann smiled, though, well as Alejandro knew her, he could tell it was insincere even if no one else suspected.
“Of course none of them are for sale,” Evann said. “The purpose of this show is to let others view the collection, not the sale of any of the pieces. And, of course, that piece is particularly dear to me.”
She looked up briefly and met Alejandro’s eyes. Memories passed between them, blurry images in his mind of that day he could hardly recall from sickness, but would never forget, either. Being cradled in Jesse’s arms when the building exploded, the way it hurt his ears, bodies pressed on top of him for safety, the hospital, when they told him about Makayla.
“You were there, weren’t you?”
“It’s something I don’t really speak of,” Evann said. And for all her showmanship around The Artist, for all her expertise and knowledge, she never did. She and Alejandro had, a few times, spoken of that day. But never, ever like this. Never for others, and never for show or sale.
Alejandro’s eyes looked up to the final piece now. It was huge, taking up most of the wall it stood against. The piece was scarred, destroyed entirely in many places. After the explosion, Evann and her father had hired art preservationists to pick through the wreckage of the building, drawing out what remained, slowly piecing it back together. He remembered the day that he and Evann had been called to see the finished product. It looked much as it did then, but that day, her larger hand had slipped over his smaller one, and they had both wept.
“How was anyone ever sure it was his last?” the woman asked. “With the chaos in the city then, couldn’t more have gone up unnoticed?”
Evann smiled, and this time it was not her perfect, yet insincere version. Alejandro could tell the conversation was making her emotional, and he began quietly to move closer toward her.
“No, he never painted again, we’re sure of that. I believe—everyone believes, who I’ve spoken to about the time—that when he saw what happened, when his reaction to the beauty of what had happened in that building became what it became . . . everyone believes that at that moment, he lost the hope that had propelled the art in the first place. It was certainly his last piece.”
Alejandro stepped next to her then, and reached out to take one of her hands firmly in his. His other hand moved into the pocket of his coat, to touch the ancient phone he carried there.
“My brother, Alejandro,” Evann said, by way of introduction. She kissed him lightly and with obvious happiness on his cheek.
“But the hope was there,” Alejandro said, even though no one had asked him, even though he knew it wasn’t exactly his place. “It existed. And that is why this art existed, and still exists.”
“Are you a collector, too, dear?” the woman asked.
Alejandro smiled, not to be put off. “I’m a doctor.”
The older woman smiled, her eyes crinkling behind her cat-eye glasses. “Perhaps a different kind of expert.”
Evann bristled in her mannered way. “Alejandro gave up his private practice and travels to areas ravaged by the Neo Water Wars with Médecins Sans Frontières. He . . . he has a special knowledge of the sort of situations that produced this art. He is an expert.”
Her hand squeezed his. There was so much both of them couldn’t say, would never be able to say in a situation like this. The small boy in raggedy clothes asserted himself in Alejandro’s head once again as he smiled and excused himself.
He stepped out of the gallery and into the bathroom down the short hallway. He locked the door of the single-stall restroom, washed his hands, and looked in the mirror. No one could see the boy but him. No one could see the scars that still ran up and down his arms from self-injury, no one could see the scars from the blast. No one would ever see how much he had loved all of them, all of those people who were no more—Jaden, Makayla, Jesse, José, Sebastian. No one could see how that building had saved him and made him the person he was as much as any luxurious house inland or prep school.
Checking once more to make sure the door was locked, he removed the ancient phone from his pocket. He hardly kept it charged anymore, never used it for anything. It was virtually unusable now, anyway. But on nights like tonight, he plugged it into a power socket just to be sure it would be there if he needed it. Like he needed it now.
He turned on the phone and swiped the geometric shape that was the passkey. He opened the videos and pressed play. He saw a man waving to him in a dark room while he held the phone. It was his father, the man he had called Papi. He remembered him still, even though it had been many years. He was tall and smelled like pipe tobacco and gave wonderful hugs. Alejandro the adult watched as Ale the boy in raggedy clothes held the phone, and his papi rushed around the room, heading for the door. It was the night of Bernice.
Then, the video became blurry, and then it focused outside, out the window. On the video, he could see water coming up the street. He could see his papi struggling with a car door outside the window. Then he was gone. And he never came back. Alejandro the grown man, the respected man, turned the phone off as Ale the boy began to sob. The video was all he had left of his father, of his life before the storm. He put the phone back into his pocket and left the restroom.
He walked back into the sparkling gallery with the bright, joyful people out for their night of culture. He had never pictured himself here, and sometimes it felt odd. But here he was.
Alejandro stayed for another hour before leaving with the excuse that he had an early flight the next morning. It was back into the field, back out of his expensive suit and into his doctor’s scrubs. Back to tending those sick with easily treatable diseases that they had little access to the cure for, back to the endless cycle of rehydrating those with no access to water who would show up back in the hospital in a week or less, on verge of death from dehydration again.
Outside the gallery, Alejandro hailed a cab and climbed in. He turned on his wristscreen and began to doodle pictures as the car ran through the night. Faces. Makayla, Jaden, Jesse, José, Sebastian. A word. Hope.
Alejandro the man had and had not become what Ale the boy in raggedy clothes had wanted. He was not a great artist like that man who had carried him up the ladder outside the building that Makayla had blown to pieces. He forgave her, he really did. And he forgave himself. And he understood why the artist had never painted again. Beauty was beauty, hope was hope, but there was then, and had been ever since, so very much more to be done.
The car rolled through the darkness. Alejandro looked up and out the window as they moved away from the part of town that held wealth and excess into the part where fires burned in garbage cans and people huddled on the streets. He thought back to a painting in the gallery, the brightly colored fruits and the word “hope” hanging beneath them. He wondered if the people he saw now, warming their hands over the fire, would ever see it.