Painless//Part 2

Painless//Part 2

Time moves in a distorted fashion during excursions like these. Sometimes an hour will go by faster than I can swallow; other times I'll look at my watch after an eternity, only to find that five minutes have passed. Why? What are we doing that so disrupts the flow of seconds, minutes, hours—

"A human invention," Nolan reminds us when I note how it's somehow only twelve past ten. "For the purpose of keeping us sane. Linear time? No, everything's all happening at once. Past, present, future…it's all one and the same."

I hate it when he says smart things like that. It reminds me that he's more than some stupid scene kid photographer, with his eighty-dollar jeans and bright, layered t-shirts. Neo-Joan-of-Arc or not, I have a hard time liking Nolan. Respect is to like as tolerance is to acceptance—often mistaken for the same thing, but far from it.

"Yeah, well, we are human, aren't we?" I say, and a note of sarcasm creeps into my voice. I've never felt entirely human, not when words have flavors and voices colors, not when I pick up Geof's old memories from the seats in his car like discarded fast-food wrappers.

"Aren't we?" repeats Arc. With a wryly-arched eyebrow he sucks the last of his Slurpee from the green paper cup and tosses it in a nearby trash can. We've taken to foot now, padding along and exploring the dim-lit corners of the city at night. A group of six loud young men is likely to be left alone, but that doesn't lessen the thrill of Indian-walking through some abandoned pharmaceutical company, where the least we might encounter are crazed coke-heads or blinged-out dealers with AKs.

"Quit iiiit," whines Dan when Geof and I start making zombie noises. I do, but Geof lets out another long, particularly gurgling throat noise that makes even Tony shudder.

"Ugh, okay, that's starting to creep me out," he says, but he's grinning anyway, flashlight illuminating his face in a strange manner. His narrow almond eyes are nothing but dark slits, and I'm reminded of the comedy mask of traditional drama. In which case Dan might well be his frowning counterpart, lurking on the edge of the group and waiting for tragedy to strike.

I know how he feels.

We stop in a particularly wide hallway where one fluorescent light still shines dimly and a few others maintain a ghostly glow. The tile floors are scuffed and littered with trash, though not as much as most abandoned buildings I've been in. Apparently the squatters have a mind for zombies, too.

The main feature, though, is a long stretch of plain gray wall unbroken by doors or windows. Arc pulls the knapsack off his back and starts tossing around cans of spray paint. The one I catch is gold—figures—and has already been used at least once.

"I dunno, I still feel weird about this," mutters Tony, staring at the white-capped can in his hand.

"Nobody cares. This building is creepy and deserted. Who's gonna see it?" says Geof, uncapping his purple paint and shaking it with a characteristic metallic rattle.

"Isn't the point of graffiti for people to see it?"

"Erm, well," Geof says, pausing, "with this, I think—"

"The right people will see it," finishes Nolan. He trades his green for Dan's orange and gets straight to work painting something off to my right. Smug bastard, he's right, but that's not the only reason we're here. Self-expression is an art I've never been able to conquer, and yet I can feel my thoughts scattering across the wall with the paint as I

(pull the trigger)

press the nozzle down. The air fills with silence and then with the soft hiss of aerosol cans. The fumes make my eyes water and my lungs icy-hot but I bear it for the time being. We pull our shirts over our noses and breathe shallowly, brushing shoulders and crossing streams every now and then, smiling smiles no one can see.

In the end all of us are stippled rainbows. My arm is coated in white and blue, a sky to match the sunburst of yellow on Geof's back where one of Arc's cans exploded. Tony and Dan are fair coated in one another's colors, having had a minor spray paint civil-war of their own.

"You've got a ghost by your side," I joke with Tony about Dan's whitewashed appearance. He laughs and Dan smiles a weird smile.

"So he has."

With an unspoken consensus, we step back against the far wall to survey our handiwork. Among a cloud of personal sentiments, phrases, and song lyrics, sits the centerpiece around which all else revolves:

LIFE IS

JEALOUSY TRUTH
VICE LOVE
ANARCHY LIFE

IS DEATH

"'Life is Life is Death,'" scoffs Geof. "Hayden, what the fuck?"

"It's true," I say, "think about it."

Everyone falls silent, and I can tell by the looks on Tony and Arc's faces that they don't understand either.

"Makes perfect sense to me," says Dan.