Chapter Thirty-Two
Losing every friend you’ve ever made is not the “Complicated” by Avril Lavigne song it’s made out to be in Bottoms, one of my favorite sapphic movies. There is nothing complicated or layered about being abjectly despised—it’s just unequivocally awful. Zero out of ten, do not recommend.
This is exactly how I feel on the bus ride to the Legion of Honor museum on Friday after school.
I’ve never been to the Legion of Honor, not even for a school field trip.
When the bus first dips into Lincoln Park, where the museum is housed, I’m actually surprised by how expansive all the trees and hills are.
Golden Gate Park is a total giant, but all the parks in downtown San Francisco are like tiny dots in comparison.
I sort of figured Golden Gate was the one exception.
But as we zigzag down the winding road filled with green, I get the uncanny feeling of driving through actual woods.
I mean, I can see a sheared golf course in the distance, but still.
This is nice. The perfect place to bury a treasure, really.
The bus pulls up in front of the museum.
The building looks like an actual palace, with two statues on horses guarding the entrance and an open courtyard behind the front gate.
I get off the bus and take out my phone to look at the fuzzy picture from the San Francisco Chronicle article.
Maybe if I hold it up at just the right angle over the surrounding park, I’ll figure out exactly where the clock installation was.
It can’t be that hard, right? This was the kind of shit yearbook worked on for months.
Yearbook.
My heart flinches.
The moment I begin zooming in on the picture, I realize that, actually, this might be insanely hard.
The digital image probably would have turned out a lot clearer if Gabriel had been there to capture it on one of our official cameras.
But, I remind myself, the picture was pretty blurry to begin with.
Even on the microfilm reader, the clock installation already looked like a giant sepia-toned pizza.
I sit down on a stone bench and pull Julia’s notebook from my backpack.
It feels wrong to be taking over the official role of notetaker.
But it would feel even worse to leave all her work behind.
I turn to a blank page and set my phone down to one side.
If I can sketch out every blurry outline I see in the background of this photo, maybe that will help me figure out where the heck this clock once was.
The more I sketch, the more I realize that the clock in the photo isn’t on flat ground. It’s on a hillside, facing out. This is good. Promising, even.
There’s also a shape that looks like a small boulder to the left.
I can see a tall pole at the top of the hill in the background.
I’m not sure if the pole is something man-made or just a long, skinny tree in the distance.
But either way, it’s good to note. I jot it down in the picture.
Only when I look up do I catch sight of the exact same object across the road.
A golf course flag.
The installation was on the golf course! That would make perfect sense, really. The hills would be smooth. The grass would be short.
A niggling thought worms its way into the back of my head. I can hear Gabriel’s voice from Wednesday.
What about everything else from the puzzle?
Where is all the Pride history here? The Greenwich Steps and Union monument from the scroll at least made some sense. But why would Gilbert Baker have us learn all that, have us solve the clues about Harvey’s birthday party and Naval Station Treasure Island, only to lead us to a golf course?
I check the time and stand up. I need to get inside the museum before it closes.
I want to see The Three Shades sculpture for myself.
Maybe I’ll feel something when I see it in person.
Or, better yet, maybe I’ll find some clue in the context, in the placard next to the art or something, that will make everything else make sense.
I turn and walk along the pathway between the two statues on horses. They each raise their swords at me—either in salute or in warning, who can tell?
As I walk, the clear ocean breeze from over the cliffside washes over me.
A medley of birds crowded in a nearby tree chirps and hops gleefully.
I’m hit with that overpowering feeling of love I get when I’m in a new part of the city.
Like, if San Francisco were a person, he would be the type to have a totally different outfit for every occasion.
Cold, gusty beaches with views of the bridge.
Warm, open fields in the middle of downtown.
Hills and mountains to hike. Art pieces around every corner.
Giant buildings that chip away at the clouds.
He could change again and again and again, and I would still love him in every form.
There’s just something about his bones, I guess.
Whether it’s smack in the middle of the city or tucked away out here in the woods, he’s the same person.
And…I’m leaving him.
At least, that’s what I want to do, isn’t it? The whole point of finding Gilbert Baker’s treasure is to impress the art school in Paris. So I can leave San Francisco and never look back.
Why did I not realize how messed up that whole objective was until now?
I walk through the museum’s courtyard, past a larger-than-life-sized bronze cast of Rodin’s The Thinker, then make my way to the front doors.
The foyer is set apart from the rest of museum, so you can hardly see any of the art past the front room.
But the person behind the desk waves me right on through.
“Admission is free after four-thirty,” she explains. She makes a point of turning and looking at the clock behind her. “But the museum closes at 5:15.”
I look at the clock over her head. 4:50.
“Got it,” I say. “Thank you.”
I grab a museum guide, then realize I’m going to need some help if the museum is closing in less than thirty minutes.
“Could you please tell me where The Three Shades sculpture is?” I ask the front desk person.
“The Three Shades?” The woman pauses for a moment, blinking. She snaps. “Oh, you mean The Gates of Hell. Third room down that way. The piece is on your right, but trust me, dear, you can’t miss it.”
“Thank you,” I say again, placing the guide back on the desk.
I try to keep myself from running across the open hall. I make myself take in all the details—the lofty, vaulted ceilings and spiraling columns at every corner.
I step into the third gallery and immediately see a large bronze door towering against the wall.
There are easily over a hundred figures sculpted inside the door in bas-relief.
Figures falling, screaming, clinging to the edges.
The whole thing makes my insides shudder.
I find The Three Shades part of the sculpture at the very top, looming over the door itself.
The placard next to the door explains that the sculpture—another one of Rodin’s—depicts a scene from Dante’s Inferno.
The Three Shades represent the souls of the damned.
In the scene, they’re all pointing to an inscription over the door:
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here.
Immediately, my mind goes to Harvey and all the quotes and speeches I’ve ever read by him. If I had to associate his legacy with one word, that word would be “hope.”
You’ve got to have hope!
You gotta give ’em hope!
Hope will never be silent!
“Abandon hope,” I murmur out loud. Abandon hope. Abandon hope. There has to be something to work out from all this. I just don’t know what it is yet.
When I head to school on Monday, I have a fairly decent plan of what to do next.
I went back to the main library on Saturday—one of the people at the front even waved as I came in. I guess visiting three times in the span of a week does make me a regular.
The librarian in the basement helped me figure out the best way to digitize an image from a microfilm reel.
Turns out, it’s a lot like taking a screenshot.
You send the direct image on the reader as an attachment file to an email.
When I get the email and open it, I’m disappointed by how similar it looks to the crappy picture Cam and I took with our phones on Tuesday.
But I still have a few more steps to take.
If I can just get into the Bat Cave and log on to Gabriel’s computer, maybe I can use his programs to clean up the image the way he cleaned up the chapters from Gay Treasures that we found during the hunt.
Technically, any student should be able to log on to any computer—we literally just took over the old computer lab for our club meeting space.
But Gabriel’s downloaded a bunch of digital editing applications on this machine specifically, and I’m nervous they’ll only show up under his student account.
Fingers crossed I find Adobe Photoshop when I log in.
The plan, in short, is as follows:
Sneak into the Bat Cave.
Access Gabriel’s Photoshop program.
Fix up the photo from the Chronicle.
Go back to the golf course at Lincoln Park.
Dig up the treasure.
Obviously, doing all this on my own isn’t exactly ideal. But if I can just get to Gilbert Baker’s treasure, if I can see this full hunt through, I feel like—somehow—everything’s going to turn out okay. Like winning can push some sort of reset button on my life.
I leave for school with high hopes for the day. But not even a block later, I see something that ruins my mood entirely.
At the corner of the first intersection, right next to the bodega my mom and I go to all the time, is a makeshift bulletin board—a wall that everyone tapes flyers to for band events, craft fairs, and dog-walking jobs.
All those flyers look older and weathered now from the week’s past rain.
All except the one crisp white page taped to the center of the wall.
WANTED: TREASURE-FINDING ASSISTANT