Heroes of the Orange Skies

Part 4

At the Italian restaurant on 4th street, The Bird, as Louis has come to call the mysterious author of the responses, has responded to another note of his. Louis wrote it a few months ago, went back a few weeks later and scratched it out, because he no longer felt like the world is crumbling but he didn’t scratch it out all the way, because maybe the world will crumble again one day. Louis likes to leave room for possibilities. He doesn’t know the future after all, even if he’s maybe an angel.

But regardless of Louis’s own scribblings on the wall, there is another note underneath it, signed with the bird symbol. This one doesn’t look as fresh as the last one that Louis had found. So build it up again, it says.

**

And so it goes.

I have just begun, says The Rogue, in the bathroom of the old Catholic church on Kennedy Avenue. I look forward to the rest, responds The Bird.

Can anyone hear me?, asks The Rogue, in the bathroom of the club where Louis sucks off some older bloke in the stall and then stares at himself in the mirror for a good 10 minutes while the guy goes back out to the dance floor, probably to pick up another twitchy, neurotic drunk kid. I can, replies The Bird.

There are too many directions, states The Rogue, scrawled in huge letters across the wall of the bathroom of the art museum where he used to work, written the day he quit. The Bird says, you only need one.

**

Louis has to sneak past the front desk of the art museum to get to the third floor where the museum’s Romantic collection is. Nick is standing behind the desk, surveying his pride and joy, the lobby of the museum where he rules over all the people who come in and out of the museum every day. His hair is tall as ever, Louis notes bitterly. He’s facing the wrong way, though, and Louis slips into the museum behind a giant gaggle of kids that look like they’re on a school trip. They all look bored out of their minds, and Louis wants to hit them upside the head and enlighten them about all this museum has to offer.

Louis likes art museums. They’re quiet, peaceful. Sometimes he doesn’t even look at the paintings, and instead sits on one of the benches intended for people to rest their legs before trekking off to see Modern Art or Ancient Greek. But Louis likes to sit there for hours, watch the people look at art. Louis thinks there’s nothing as beautiful as watching someone fall in love with a piece of art, and he could sit here all day and if he could just see one person’s face light up as they walk up to their favorite piece of art, or a brand new one that mystifies them, he would be happy. Sometimes he even takes pictures of people as they look at art.

Today, he sits in the Romantics hall. It’s his favorite hall, his favorite artistic period. There’s this painting, right, by David Friedrich, Monastery Graveyard in the Snow (Cloisters in the Cemetery). The title is a bit of mouthful. Louis likes to visit it sometimes and imagine how the painting would be different if the cathedral in the painting wasn’t in ruins, if it was golden and domed and had arching windows, tucked in among the deadened trees. It’s his favorite painting in the hall.

Louis sits near it now, as if drawing energy from it, but he’s already looked at it enough today. There’s something else that catches his eye.

There’s a boy standing in front of a Turner painting. His feet are together, hands clasped behind his back, and head tilted. He’s been standing like that for ten minutes now. He’d walked into the hall with shuffling feet, pulling his bottom lip with two fingers like the hall before this one had presented him with the utmost of difficult universal problems to solve. He had done a full lap around the room, stared at each painting like it held the answers to those difficult universal problems. He came back to the Turner though, eventually, and Louis doesn’t blame him. It’s a lovely one, maybe his second favorite in the hall.