the painting in the house at all—not that I had any options unless I wanted to hide it in the dumpster a few houses down (which had never been emptied the whole time I’d lived in Vegas) or over in one of the abandoned houses across the street. Boris’s house was no safer than mine, and there was no one else I knew well enough or trusted. The only other place was school, also a bad idea, but though I knew there had to be a better choice I couldn’t think of it. Every so often they had random locker inspections at school and now—connected as I was, through Boris, to Kotku—I was possibly the sort of dirtbag they might randomly inspect. Still, even if someone found it in my locker—whether the principal, or Mr. Detmars the scary basketball coach, or even the Rent-a-Cops from the security firm whom they brought in to scare the students from time to time—still, it would be better than having it found by Dad or Mr. Silver.
The painting, inside the pillowcase, was wrapped in several layers of taped drawing paper—good paper, archival paper, that I’d taken from the art room at school—with an inner, double layer of clean white cotton dishcloth to protect the surface from the acids in the paper (not that there were any). But I’d taken the painting out so often to look at it—opening the top flap of the taped edge to slide it out—that the paper was torn and the tape wasn’t even sticky any more. After lying in bed for a few minutes staring at the ceiling, I got up and retrieved the extra-large roll of heavy-duty packing tape left over from our move, and then untaped the pillowcase from behind the headboard.
Too much—too tempting—to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved. A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet exhilarating, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable: wallpaper glowing, the old Rand McNally globe in half-shadow.
Little bird; yellow bird. Shaking free of my daze I slid it back in the paper-wrapped dishtowel and wrapped it again with two or three (four? five?) of my dad’s old sports pages, then—impulsively, really getting into it in my own stoned, determined way—wound it around and around with tape until not a shred of newsprint was visible and the entire X-tra large roll of tape was gone. Nobody was going to be opening that package on a whim. Even if with a knife, a good one, not just scissors, it would take a good long time to get into it. At last, when I was done—the bundle looked like some weird science-fiction cocoon—I slipped the mummified painting, pillowcase and all, in my book bag, and put it under the covers by my feet. Irritably, with a groan, Popper shifted over to make room. Tiny as he was, and ridiculous-looking, still he was a fierce barker and territorial about his place next to me; and I knew if anyone opened the bedroom door while I was sleeping—even Xandra or my dad, neither of whom he liked much—he would jump up and raise the alarm.
What had started as a reassuring thought was once again morphing into thoughts of strangers and break-ins. The air conditioner was so cold I was shaking; and when I closed my eyes I felt myself lifting up out of my body—floating up fast like an escaped balloon—only to startle with a sharp full-body jerk when I opened my eyes. So I kept my eyes shut and tried to remember what I could of the Hart Crane poem, which wasn’t much, although even isolated words like seagull and traffic and tumult and dawn carried something of its airborne distances, its sweeps from high to low; and just as I was nodding off, I fell into sort of an overpowering sense-memory of the narrow, windy, exhaust-smelling park near our old apartment, by the East River, roar of traffic washing abstractly above as the