Painted Cities

SUPERNATURAL

Only a miracle could draw people to that canal. It has been forgotten about, shut off from the main river years ago, left as a depository of dumped appliances, cars, street-gang hits.

It’s the perfect ghetto miracle. The toxic haze glowing bright green as if its light were filtered through emeralds. Maybe the years of dumped chemical solvents from the factory alongside it have finally yielded the kind of catastrophe scientific experts have anticipated for years. But this catastrophe is beautiful. A fluorescent haze that comes into sight each night, deepening as the heat of the day settles around the neighborhood.

They’ve been coming here for a week, the crowds, getting larger each successive night. The canal banks can barely hold the masses of people now. The spectators have begun spilling over into the factory’s gravel parking lot, onto the bridge that spans the canal, onto Thirty-First Street, filling it in for blocks, as if in exodus.

Word has obviously gotten around. Probably passed along the front stoops of the neighborhood like hot merchandise. Down Twenty-Sixth Street, past the Cook County lockup, past the taco stands, the corner taverns, the story indulged a little more with every pass and reception: The glow’s deep, man, I mean deep. People are being cured and shit. Lil’ Ralphy can walk again.

The words would have sailed over the junkyards, the sleeping drunks, the trade school, the abandoned drive-in. They would’ve come to rest at Cicero Avenue, where the ghetto stops and a vast field of open prairie spans from there to the next neighborhood. The words would’ve mixed in with other marooned statements, the old news that had come to rest there, no one left to listen: Crazy Frankie shot Player. Got me some wicked shit. The bitch is dead.

Memo, everyone agrees, should’ve been the first to appear, charging money for canal-side seats, a dollar a pop, like he charges for his snow-cone raspas, his cucumber pepinos, every time there’s a police investigation. With his nose for disaster, kids spend their summer days following him around the neighborhood, cheering when he starts his sprints, which sometimes last for blocks, ending at the next brutal event. His swift parades flash between buildings. His handcart bells jingle. His red baseball cap beckons the kids to follow. Eventually they stop at some place where there’s blood in the street and Memo starts to call out, “Raspas! Pepinos!” not even winded. The kids, panting, lean up against each other and savor the carnage. Sometimes, if they have money, they pitch in and actually buy something.

But Memo, even with his nose attuned as it is to moneymaking opportunities, couldn’t detect the event, didn’t. And the brujas didn’t either, the back-alley witches of K-Town, where all the witches are said to live, drawing power from the uniformity of the street names — Karlov, Kedvale, Keeler. And maybe, at the heart of it, this is the appeal of the green glow. How those normally attuned to the supernatural, those who seem to have a “sixth sense,” seem dumb-struck, as if it were beyond their comprehension.

The event has taken on an air of revival. Estranged family members are reunited, quarreling relatives embrace, old partners, gangbangers, are brought back together as if their differences, their knife fights, their nights spent hunting for each other with baseball bats, had never occurred. “Just like old times,” they say to each other. And this phrase permeates the crowd. Husbands are reunited with the mothers of their children. Boyfriends hug ex-common-law wives. The night becomes one big flashback. Everyone sliding one step back to a time when they were happy, or at least thought so.

Around nine o’clock, when the buzz of the insects turns to a strong throb, and the sun, somewhere behind all the haze, the buildings and church steeples, starts to set, the crowd quiets, and a flicker of green starts to snap at the center of the canal, just above the water. The flicker jerks and twists, then explodes into an opaque globe of light, strong, like a spirit, like you expect it to talk — but it doesn’t. It just hovers there, casting a white light that passes into green as it reaches the crowd. The pulse of the insects fades, conversations, thoughts, movements stop, and a dullness takes over.

A freeze-frame, a wide-angled freeze-frame showing the long expanse of Thirty-First Street, its corridor of streetlights stretching into the horizon, would show the crowds en route. It would show them all staring up, pointing as if at fireworks, a glaze across their eyes as if they were under mass hypnosis. Some would be caught with their mouths open, black gapes, white teeth catching the light, streetlight maybe, but maybe the light of the glow as well.

Young women would be caught looking innocent. Those with tattooed tears, those holding babies, would be caught looking like their children, sharing their defenselessness, their vulnerability. And the young men too would be caught smiling the way gangsters do when some truth is revealed — innocently, giving one the slightest hope that they could be reasoned with, “saved,” as some of their mothers might say. Of course, they never can be. Gangster faces change like masks. They’re defense mechanisms. But in the freeze-frame the gangsters would be caught red-handed, smiling like bashful teenagers, as if they’ve suddenly found the right answer to a math problem on the blackboard before a class of schoolmates raised from the dead.

In the freeze-frame, Thirty-First Street would be crowded, ready to burst its sides and collapse the walls of the abandoned buildings that line its sidewalks. The exodus might be confused with any other pilgrimage, quests to view saints, kiss the feet of monks, to discover the meaning of life in deserts in Saudi Arabia, atop mountains in South America.

At the bottom of the freeze-frame, those closest to the glow have begun to take seats, resigned to the thought that they won’t get any closer, overwhelmed by whatever the green glow holds.

And this goes on all night, through the heat. The drunks stay awake. The clergy from the local churches lead prayer sessions. Memo, the vendedor, stands there, his band of children crowded around him. The witches’ assistants scan the crowd for more faces, those of the dead, the forgotten, more of whom seem to appear each night.

As morning comes, the very first tinges of light sliding up the horizon, the green glow begins to fade, and so does the mystery of whatever brought the people here. Shadows give way to starkness, reality, and slowly the people begin to move, some slower than others, embarrassed by their own gullibility. As they make their way back up Thirty-First Street to their sweatbox apartments, they crowd in closer, like cattle, seeking safety in numbers. They avoid eye contact, slouch as if hung over. They carry their sleeping children, the mothers following the fathers, everything in reverse. There is an aura of defeat to the crowd. Truth becomes apparent. There is only heat to look forward to, days spent at work, in factories, as secretaries, days spent in bed, days spent watching Memo charge up and down side streets, days spent believing in God, witches, prayer, the coming of another night.