A strangely plain mural of sunset over a meadow, painted onto the side of an old twelve-story derelict factory, which somebody really needs to knock down before it starts killing people with falling bricks. There’s an arrow painted into the middle of the idyllic meadow scene, wide and bright red, pointing down at a ledge underneath the meadow. Bronca was confused by that one until she finally had an epiphany. The meadow is a red herring; what matters is that the ledge is a handhold. A convenient place for something enormous to grab on and steady itself. What? Who knows. But it fits a pattern.
The same artist, Bronca suspected before yesterday—and knows with certainty now. The same unseen ear, which hears the city’s song so clearly. Yes. This is the work of another of her people. Another of her, part of New York. She’s collected these pieces because the work is amazing, and because bringing them together is a kind of call-out to him. (Somehow she knows he’s a him.) Photos of the works, life-sized where the photographer got the right shot and poster-sized otherwise, now dominate Murrow Hall, which is the Center’s largest and best display space. BRONX UNKNOWN is the show’s title, hanging from the ceiling on a placard suspended by fishing line, and it’s almost ready to go. Maybe, when they get some media coverage at the July opening in a couple of weeks, her artist will come to find her and become less unknown. Since she’s not planning to go find him.
Bronca stops short, however, at the sight of someone in Murrow Hall. She only just unlocked the Center’s doors, but already there is a woman in a white pantsuit and matching CEO heels examining one of the photographs. It’s certainly possible that someone could’ve entered the Center while Bronca was getting coffee, but usually Bronca hears anyone who comes in. The Center is old, and its hardwood floors creak. The woman is carrying a clipboard, her back to the hall’s door. Is she some kind of inspector?
“Powerful, aren’t they?” asks the woman as Bronca stands there staring. She’s looking at Bronca’s favorite piece, although it’s also the one that feels as if it has a slightly different eye. In the image, seen from above, a body curls sleeping atop what looks like a bed of old newspapers—not just Village Voices and Daily Newses, but really old stuff that Bronca barely remembers from her childhood, like the New York Herald Tribune, and obscure stuff like the Staten Island Register. The papers are in bundles, still wrapped with twine or plastic. The figure atop them is centered and almost photorealistic amid a pool of light: a slender young dark-skinned Black man in worn jeans and a stained T-shirt, asleep on his side. His sneakers are nondescript, canvas, dirty, and there’s a hole in one of them. He can’t be much more than twenty years old, though it’s hard to tell because his face is turned into the papers, hidden except for one baby-smooth cheek. There’s a little meat on him—wishful-thinking biceps peeking from the sleeves of his shirt, a suggestion of deltoids underneath—but overall he’s skin and bones, to the point that Bronca’s tired maternal instincts make her want to just feed the poor child ’til he fills out.
The framing of the painting is the really interesting thing—as Bronca has tried to capture by having the photograph cut into a circle. The whole thing is circular, positioned above the painting’s subject, as if the painter is gazing down at him from the top of an open well. Bronca thinks there is adoration in this framing; it emulates the gaze of a lover, looking down upon a sleeping partner—or a parent, watching over a small child. She has seen the same tenderness of positioning, the same lighting, in classical painters’ depictions of the Madonna. But then, she knows why this painting is different. It is a self-portrait, but the boy didn’t paint it.
“This one especially,” says the woman in the white pantsuit. On a whim, Bronca walks into Murrow Hall to stand beside her, looking more at the woman than at the photograph. She’s almost as pale as her outfit, Bronca sees, though this is exacerbated somewhat by her tawny, near-white hair. She doesn’t look at Bronca, keeping her avid gaze on the image of the boy. “I feel like it’s trying to send me a message.”
It is, but not to some random stranger. Bronca folds her arms