The Vanishing Mural
I should warn you upfront: this is a story about Seattle. If you've never been, Seattle is the kind of city that holds an annual parade in which people ride bicycles in the nude, considers this perfectly reasonable, and then argues passionately about the correct way to recycle the flyers advertising it. I love it there. Nobody is normal and everyone means well, which is about the best you can say of any place.
The two neighbourhoods at the centre of this story are Fremont and Wallingford, which sit side by side like mismatched socks on the north shore of Lake Union. Fremont is the artistic one. It has a giant concrete troll lurking under a bridge, eating a Volkswagen. This was considered a community improvement. Wallingford, meanwhile, is the sensible one. It has a ladybug painted on the road at a traffic circle, which residents repaint every year with the kind of devotion usually reserved for religious observance. They also hold a baby parade. Traffic is diverted. Nobody complains. This is Wallingford.
These two neighbourhoods share an underpass at 46th Street and Aurora Avenue. Or rather, they shared a problem at 46th Street and Aurora Avenue, which is a different thing entirely. The underpass had become a reliable destination for vandals, drug dealers, and people of what the local newsletters diplomatically called 'uncertain circumstance.' Something had to be done. In Seattle, when something has to be done, someone calls a meeting.
* * *
Linda was the one who called it. Linda was one hundred percent Wallingford: front yard, back yard, red square-framed spectacles, and hair like a white dahlia that had decided to take matters into its own hands. She had the bearing of a woman who had once been a police detective and hadn't entirely let it go, which turned out to be more relevant than anyone expected.
Her housemate John came too. John had a snow-white beard, a ponytail, and the quiet confidence of a man who knows that if he just waits long enough, someone else will volunteer first.
Together, Linda and John patrolled Aurora Avenue weekly with their neighbours, discouraging car theft, drug deals, and other inconveniences. They were the kind of people who actually do the things that the rest of us mean to get around to. You know the type. Slightly exhausting. Completely indispensable.
The immediate cause of the meeting was a pile of large stones that vandals had dumped in the road beneath the underpass, presumably in the hope of causing a serious traffic accident, which is the sort of hobby that gives vandals a bad name. The road crew removed the stones. Linda called the meeting. Four people showed up, which in Seattle community organizing terms is considered a promising start.
* * *
The plan, as it emerged from that first gathering, was to paint a mural on the underpass walls. Studies had shown that community murals reduced graffiti, discouraged vandalism, and made neighbourhoods safer. In Fremont and Wallingford, studies showing this kind of thing were taken very seriously. Someone probably had a spreadsheet.
Audrey, who represented the Wallingford Neighbourhood Council and appeared to represent it at all hours of the day and night, laid out the strategy with the efficiency of a woman who also organized voting at elections, served on the School Board, and fed the homeless at the food bank. One wondered when she slept, or whether she had simply decided sleep was an inefficient use of community resources.
'First,' said Audrey, 'we attract attention. Then we use all available media to build interest. Then we recruit up to three hundred local residents, get the Mayor's blessing, and secure a matching city grant.'
Greg, a noted artist and organizer from Fremont, listened to all of this and asked who was going to bell the cat. Everyone laughed. Then everyone had ideas. Then someone made a work-plan. Then someone made a budget. Then someone made a timeline. By the end of the evening they had produced enough paperwork to wallpaper the underpass, which would have been faster but is not really the point.
* * *
Word spread the way word spreads in neighbourhoods where people still talk to each other: by email, flyer, phone call, news release, TV interview, and a seaplane that flew back and forth at sunset towing a banner reading '46th Street Mural at Aurora.' This last item was either deeply Seattle or deeply unnecessary. Possibly both. A musical parade followed. Volunteers arrived daily. The project manager began to look slightly haunted.
By the third meeting, dozens had volunteered. By October, over a hundred and fifty residents of Fremont and Wallingford were involved, spending weekends on bicycle trips and potluck picnics, developing friendships across three generations and at least seventeen nationalities, some of whom actually spoke English. There was talk of forming an exclusive club limited to those who had donated materials or at least ten hours of their time. In any other city this would have seemed eccentric. In Seattle it seemed overdue.
* * *
The artists chosen to design and lead the mural were Curtis and Luciano, the kind of Seattle gay couple who fit every expectation while simultaneously defying them. Curtis was tall as a periscope. Luciano was round as a beach ball, with Santa Claus eyes and a ponytail, and the permanent expression of a man who has just remembered a very good joke and is deciding whether to share it. They were, in short, ideal.
Their design pleased everyone, especially the smallest children, which is the hardest audience to satisfy and therefore the most meaningful endorsement. Cupcakes flew beside seagulls. An elephant appeared. Mysterious abstract images peered from behind redwood trees. The lake was green. In a less confident city, someone might have questioned the green lake. In Fremont, nobody batted an eye.
The debate about who should actually do the painting was settled under Debbie's plum tree one afternoon, with lemonade, the ripe fruit, and the particular kind of polite disagreement that Seattleites conduct with a smile while meaning every word.
Audrey favoured professional artists. She had a photograph to prove her point: extraordinary detail, subtle shading, the kind of work that justified a budget line.
'What about the children?' asked Linda, with what she probably imagined was a neutral tone.
'Kids get bored,' said Greg. 'They need to paint, not fetch.'
'The neighbourhood expects—' began Audrey.
'We are the neighbourhood,' said Debbie quietly.
This is a sentence that ends arguments. Audrey held up the sketch again. Everyone looked at it. Everyone agreed it was beautiful. Everyone then agreed, by the particular consensus of people who have run out of counterarguments, to let the kids do it.
George, who was retired, pragmatic, and reaching for his walker, summed it up neatly: 'At least you don't have to pay them.'
* * *
And so they did. Teenagers and elementary school children formed the painting battalion through the long warm months of June and July, while mothers and aunts prepared sandwiches nearby and exchanged recipes in seventeen languages. There was a great deal of laughter. There usually is, when people are doing something real together.
Week after week the mural grew. By the time Curtis and Luciano arrived on a hot Friday in late August to apply the finishing touches, the underpass had been transformed. The last step was a thick transparent coating, hard as glass, that would protect the colours from weather, graffiti, and the general ambitions of the unkind. Scaffolding came down. The ice cream vendor packed up. A security guard named Gloria settled in to watch the mural through the night.
Now. About that coating.
Thanks to what the press release called 'nanotechnology and advanced plastics,' the protective film was not merely protective. Embedded within it was a network of solar cells, invisible to the eye, which collected energy all day and released it as a soft luminous glow after dark. The mural lit up the underpass from dusk to dawn. It also generated enough electricity to power most of the street lamps in both Fremont and Wallingford.
I am aware this sounds improbable. I am simply reporting what happened. Seattle is that kind of city.
* * *
It was well past midnight when Curtis and Luciano returned to the mural. Gloria, the security guard, had never met the artists. She straightened her cap and badge as the tall one introduced himself.
'I'm Curtis. This is Luciano. We need to install a protective cover for the unveiling tomorrow.'
Luciano produced what appeared to be a dark gray tennis ball with a few loose threads hanging from it and the general air of an object that was up to something. He showed Gloria a small plastic tab, like a guitar pick, attached to one of the threads.
'We just need you in the middle,' he said. 'When Curtis shouts Now, give the tab a good pull. It won't break.'
Gloria was a professional. She took the tab. She watched the thread unravel in both directions along the mural wall. She heard the shout.
She pulled.
And the mural vanished.
* * *
Frank the maintenance man was passing through the underpass shortly after, on his way to the apartment complex he managed, preoccupied with the rising cost of sponges and the toy situation on the garden patio, which had become untenable. He noticed it was darker than usual. He looked at the wall. Where the mural had been there was now an opaque gray surface, floor to ceiling, end to end, as though someone had painted over the entire thing in the night.
Frank began to run.
By the time he reached the apartment building, residents were already pouring out. By the time anyone thought to call the police, they were already on the way. By four-thirty in the morning, a crowd had gathered at the underpass, staring at a blank gray wall with the mournful collective expression of people confronting an injustice they cannot yet explain.
'This is outrageous,' said Audrey.
'It's impossible,' said Greg.
'Sit down,' said Linda. 'Have some tea.'
Linda had her flashlight, magnifying glass, fingerprint kit, and handcuffs. She also had her former career as a police detective, which she had been waiting patiently to deploy. She examined the edges of the gray wall with the focused attention of someone who has been mildly hoping for a crime scene all evening.
Two sets of fingerprints. She lifted them on clear tape, transferred them to a white card, and handed them to Police Chief Washington.
'Email me the results,' she said. 'I already know who it is.'
The Chief smiled the smile of someone who has learned not to argue with Linda.
* * *
The email arrived at seven in the morning. Linda read it, said 'Aha, Watson,' in a tone that suggested she had been waiting to say that for some time, and asked John to rev up the motorcycle. By nine o'clock, they were back at the underpass with two men in handcuffs and paper bags over their heads.
The Wallingford Big Band Orchestra was warming up. Donuts were circulating. Children were chasing each other around the bandstand. Mayor Dimes arrived in his limousine at precisely nine fifty-five, threading through the crowd with the practiced timing of a man who knows how to make an entrance.
Chief Washington removed the paper bags.
The culprits were Curtis and Luciano.
The crowd went quiet. Then came the murmuring. Then came the catcalls. A man near the back said it was all a hoax and suggested going home. People began to turn away. Babies, sensing the shift in mood, began to cry.
And then Mayor Dimes spoke.
He thanked the neighbourhoods. He described the mural in the present tense, which was confusing, given the gray wall behind him. He listed the contributors: seventy-two teenagers, thirty-five elementary children, six babies, and over a hundred adults. He said the word togetherness without apparent embarrassment. He said Seattle.
The Big Band Orchestra burst into music.
The school chorus burst into song.
And the gray wall disappeared.
* * *
The nanofabric, it turned out, was the tennis ball. One tug on a thread at each end had drawn a gossamer-thin cover across the entire mural, hiding it overnight to protect the final coating while it cured to its full glass-hard finish. Curtis and Luciano had left for Orcas Island immediately after, where cell service is, at best, a rumour. They'd returned that morning, exhausted, to find themselves under arrest.
'But why didn't they tell anyone?' I asked Linda afterward, when the dancing had settled down and the donuts were gone.
Linda looked at me over her bifocals with the expression she reserves for questions she considers beneath her.
'They probably thought it was obvious,' she said.
I thought about this. Curtis and Luciano had stretched an invisible fabric across a city-block-long mural in the middle of the night using what was essentially a very sophisticated ball of string, returned from an island without phone service, been arrested on arrival, and were apparently surprised that anyone was confused.
In any other city, this would be a cautionary tale.
In Seattle, people were hugging strangers and dancing in the street.
'Maybe it is,' said Linda.