Soon Ritter turned to his Los Angeles Times.
Only a week ago, the anarchy in southeast and downtown L.A. had subsided. What a time to bring a kid into the world. Bad omens. The worst civil disturbance in United States history, they’d called it. Virtually every hour, images of the chaos had monopolized the airwaves.
The main section of the newspaper offered full of coverage of the riots. The beginnings. The hellish middle. The aftermath. Scattered uplifting stories about what various communities and organizations were doing to help the affected areas. The pages checkered with pictures taken by freelance and staff photographers. So much energy and movement captured there. So much rage. Sadness. Figures running. Fires. Bloodied faces. Destroyed storefronts. Smoke billowing. Something out of an apocalyptic science fiction film. Terrible to say, but it was.
One blurb noted an African-American photographer named Gregory Wesley, whose work was featured in the pages. Next month, Bergamot Station was setting up a small exhibition of his riot-born images, which Ritter admired: stark contrast, dynamic angles. Poignant and provocative. Taking a bite from reality. Art from tragedy, a colorful bud sprouting up through a skull’s eye. Art the ultimate healer, diagnostic tool, and prophet—if folks paid more attention.
Somewhere in the middle of all the coverage, between the articles and photographs and editorials, was a full page of thumbnail pictures depicting various faces, their names and ages captioned under each one.
Toward the top of the section:
Missing
Those lost, slipped through the dark ruptures. There had to be more, many more, in fact, than were shown. Too many younger faces, children and teenagers. Many minorities, Latino and African-American the most represented, some Korean.
Ritter noticed one face. Recognized one face. His breath stalled.
Max Higgins, 28
***
VI
He walked from the convenience store, munching on a Snickers bar. The Arizona heat so thick, like being wedged in a dry armpit. He supposed it was better than Florida, which he’d heard was rather like being squeezed in a wet armpit. But how about just staying out of the armpits?
He slid the change into his wallet. As he was about to return it to his pocket, a thought struck him. He reopened the wallet, unfurled the accordion string of card-sized prints of all his work, then took one out—Angel Grass—went to the nearest parked car and slipped it under the windshield.
Emerging from the store, Karen saw him.
“What are you doing?” she asked, watching him as they returned in tandem to the van.
Max shrugged. “Sprinkling breadcrumbs?”
He dropped two more toward eastern Arizona, another not far beyond the New Mexico border. A belt of his work across America. He liked that. Drops of him over the landscape.
Come Georgia, he’d left behind all but one.
He looked at it. Where to leave it. The last bit of the parent universe, saying goodbye. Baby universe awaiting. Forged in the heat of multiple forces, the fruit of him and of fate. All those—what was it?—all those creators, destroyers, collectors, teachers conferring, tinkering, ever-crafting, ever-creating. Tearing down, compiling, building, spreading the word.
Spreading the word.
He turned the last card over and wrote on the back. A day later, he slipped it into the mail.
Mr. Ritter,
Teach them well about me.
Or not.
Dot-dot-curve. Smiley face.
The van trundled on. The shimmering Georgian hills, a bright and vivid fairy tale green. Pregnant rolling pastures. Max stared at it all, turned to his sketchbook, new and blank, recently purchased in Oklahoma. Some loose doodles and lines and nothing else.
“Still nothing coming, Maximo?”
He met Dwayne’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Not yet,” Max said.
“You’ll come upon something. Just a dry spell.”
Speeding ahead, farther. The sun edged cautiously down toward the hills, lending highlight to their already beautiful melodrama.
In the passenger seat Karen stirred from a nap.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Almost to Atlanta,” Dwayne said.
“We can go wherever,” Karen said. “I’m really not in any rush to go back to Baltimore.”
“You don’t have to,” Max said. “At all.”
“I know,” Karen said, picking at her fingernails. “But it’s...me there. I can’t just drop it totally. I feel like I split myself in two, and that I need both versions of myself. Where you come from—you forget that, you forget it all. I don’t know.”
“Can’t get to high school without grade school,” Dwayne said.
“What?”
“Never mind.” Again, Dwayne looked in the rearview mirror. “Hey, Max?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you get me a cola? Out of the cooler back there?”
“Sure.”
Max crawled over the backseat bench, tossed aside loose papers and a blanket, and opened the cooler. Sitting inside next to a can of sliced peaches was the vial Karen had stolen from Feldman. He stopped and picked it up, jostled it. Then he popped off the cap.
He sipped.
Salty, for sure.
“Everything okay, Maximo?”
His answer delayed. “Yeah, fine.”
“Cool. Then what’s taking so long with that soda?”
Max grabbed the can and one for himself, then shut the cooler.
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CHAPTER 1
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In coming into this world, he became aware that he was aware, that he was a thing, an
