Chapter Three
THREE
So Louisa gets thrown out. That doesn’t happen very often, actually, because most people who get “thrown out” are in fact led out, or perhaps dragged out. But Louisa isn’t like everyone else, so she leaves the church in the air.
Right before the out-throwing in question, she paints a guard, which doesn’t mean that she paints a guard on a wall, but actually paints the guard himself. Unfortunately, of course, the guard does not give the impression that he is the sort of person who appreciates symbolism of that sort, he just rushes over, as angry as a wild boar that’s been given a habanero suppository, and grabs her so hard that she screams. Shortly after that he screams too.
Because Louisa really, really doesn’t like it when adults touch her, so she panics, and that’s when she paints the guard. In her defense, it’s self-defense, because the only thing she has in her hands is the pen she used to write on the wall, so she stabs the guard’s lower arm with it. He has an impressive scream, somewhere between a five-year-old who’s fallen off a swing and an opera singer who’s found a snake in her car. He doesn’t at all appear to appreciate the irony of the fact that the pen is red and that arm is covered in the sort of cool tattooed words that guards love, so that now it looks like an angry teacher has discovered that one of those words is spelled wrong. The guard, three hundred pounds without an ounce of fun, tries instead to grab hold of Louisa again, so she jumps out of the way and snatches up the first thing she finds in her backpack: a can of spray paint. It happens to be white, and the guard happens to be dressed in black, so once she’s painted him from top to bottom, he looks like a really angry highway.
When his fists finally close around her arms and lift both her and the backpack up into the air, the brutality is so abrupt that it feels like her collarbones snap like matchsticks, but that isn’t what frightens her. It’s the fact that he yells, “CALL THE POLICE!” to another guard that leaves her terrified. The police scare Louisa far more than violence, so when the guard carries her toward the exit, she does what every rational person would do in that situation: she bites him on the ear.
They are right by the door at the time and the guard lets out a howl, the three-hundred-pound crybaby, and throws Louisa and her backpack away from himself with such force that she actually flies out across the sidewalk, like the building is spitting out a watermelon seed.
The last thing Louisa hears is the old woman inside crying: “Did you see? She was trying to vandalize the painting! I said so the moment I saw the backpack: she’s one of those activists! They only want to spoil things! Like nasty little cockroaches!”
The last thing Louisa yells back is: “It isn’t a painting of the SEA, you stupid…”
She has a whole series of really solid insults ready for the end of that sentence, but unfortunately she lands on the pavement and has the air knocked out of her. It hurts badly, but she doesn’t have time to feel how much, because the guard is already on his way after her, three hundred pounds minus half an ear.
“Call the police!” he yells to the other guard again, so Louisa snatches her backpack from the ground and runs. He runs after her, but of course he doesn’t stand a chance, he’s a grown man and they don’t have a clue about how to run. Grown men don’t have enough things they’re afraid of on this planet to become good at running.
She races to the end of the block, then turns right, goes around a corner and thinks about the sea. She always does that when she’s frightened, so she’s thinking about the sea almost all the time. It might seem strange for someone who’s seventeen and can’t swim, and actually has never even left this city, because it’s the sort of city that feels like it’s closer to outer space than the sea. She’s never even seen it. But she’s memorized every inch of blue on that painting. It’s her happiest place.
The postcard is in her backpack, but she doesn’t need it anymore, because she will never forget what it was like to see the painting in real life. Because what all the stupid adults think is a painting of water is actually a painting of a fishing pier. It reaches out from one corner, like an outstretched tongue of concrete beneath the sky, and at the far end sit three teenage boys. They are so small that adults hardly ever even notice them. The artist called the painting The One of the Sea , so that’s all anyone looks for. The boys in the middle are hiding in plain sight. Who can paint like that? Who can punch the lungs of someone who merely sees three kids hanging on a wall? Who can make you smell the salt water and weep over someone else’s childhood?
Louisa has never met those boys, but they’re her people, the only people she has left on the planet. They’re maybe fourteen in the picture, possibly almost fifteen, no longer children but not yet grown-up. They’re painted as if the artist saw them so intensively and dreamed them so beautifully that he learned how to whisper in color. Painted by someone who must have been completely beaten to pieces inside, because no one could hold a brush so carefully otherwise, no one could paint friendship like this without first having been a completely lonely child. It is a perfect summer day and they’re sitting so close to each other, and if you look really closely you can see that they seem to be moving. They’re vibrating with laughter, as if one of them has just let loose a really, really good fart.
They don’t get any of that, the ignorant, useless rich people back in that old church, because they aren’t in enough pain. They walk around in there, happy and content and pleased with the way the world works, so they think it’s a painting of the sea. But any idiot can paint the sea, even a happy idiot can paint the sea! This is a painting of laughter, and you can only understand that if you’re full of holes, because then laughter is a small treasure. Adults will never understand that, because they don’t laugh at farts, and how the hell are you supposed to trust the judgment of someone like that with something as important as art? They’ve never loved anything so much that it’s worth being beaten up by a guard just to get to see it once in your life.
Louisa’s face is cold with tears as she runs, but every other part of her is on fire. At the bottom of the painting she saw the artist’s signature, and next to it he had drawn tiny, tiny skulls. She would never have known that if she hadn’t been able to stand really close to it, just once in her life. No guard would be able to beat that out of her memory even if they tried, because now she has skulls in her whole heart.
She turns right at the next corner too, so that she ends up at the back of the old church she was just thrown out of, because the guard chasing her is just stupid enough not to think of looking there. That too is actually a completely perfect plan. She really is a genius. Except perhaps for the small detail that there’s a homeless man standing by a trash can whom she doesn’t see, so she collides with him at top speed and falls headfirst to the ground and knocks herself unconscious.
So okay. Maybe not a completely perfect plan.