Alexis Latner - Threat of Stars at 912 Main

Tam banged on the glass. I thought she meant to break it. But old plate glass can be pretty tough.

On the fire escape, Mixed Media jiggled as if doing a dance. It waved something that it held up by its very own little tentacle. “My shoe!” I glared, distracted from the locked window by outrage. “It’s got one of my Italian loafers!”

With a startling rasp, the window behind us opened. Tam seized me by the shoulders and flung us both backward. Grazing a knobby radiator, we fell in a bruised tangle onto a linoleum hallway floor and the toes of a uniformed security guard.

Tam scrambled to her feet. I sprang up too, so wobbly that I had to prop myself on the window sill. We stared out at the fire escape, but it was empty. And all we could hear was a faint and dwindling clatter.

“Now, what in the heck were you two doing out there?” asked the security guard, a determined-looking old guy whose hand hovered in the vicinity of his pistol holster.

Tam and I assessed each other. Her hair was in disarray, her dress wet and littered with feathers. Damp from head to toe, I smelled like a pigeon coop. My shirttail hung out of my slacks. I selfconsciously wiggled the toes of my loaferless left foot and drew a complete blank on what to say.

Tam drew in a breath, like a pitcher winding up, and let fly. “There was a gang of hoodlums after us!! They snatched my purse—” What purse? I thought distractedly. I hadn’t seen one on her all night. Then I noticed that the pocket of her dress discretely bulged with essentials. “And they meant to do something bad to us both, so we ran up the fire escape to get away, but they ran after us all the way to the top and we couldn’t get in through that window so we jumped over to here!”

The guard’s face furrowed in an expression of skeptical, laborious thought.

“I sure am glad I saw you down the hall and you heard me pounding on the glass, or I don’t know how on Earth we’d have gotten away from them!”

“That’s right!” I seconded with fervor.

We must have convinced him. “The streets are getting meaner every day,” he said, shaking his head, and escorted us to the first floor.

As we rode down in the elevator, Tam caught my eye and told me, “You were wonderful! You are just like a brave, pretty little bantam rooster.”

“Is that good?” I asked, just as the elevator opened onto the first floor, stopping several inches below floor level, and I exited, tripping on the unexpected difference.

She held on longer than she had to just to help me get my balance back. “It’s very good.”

At the security desk on the first floor, I called Annika at the gallery. She sped over and gathered us into her Volvo, shocked at our dishevelment.

Back in her apartment in the second story over the art gallery, Annika gave us peppermint tea and, equally soothing, credibility: she believed us. But she added, “I hope you two realize that I’m the only one who will. I did see the thing carry away the painting.

The nerve! Hiding in my gallery camouflaged as bad art! I bet it was waiting for its confederates to arrive and force the front door open.”

“Instead, I let it get out with the painting,” I said ruefully, meeting Tam’s brooding brown eyes. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t blame you for what happened,” Tam said. “Annika, don’t you think anyone else at all would believe us? Artists? Cops? The mayor?”

“Not a chance, hon,” said Annika.

Triptych stood in Annika’s lap. The cat purred raggedly, still unnerved, with tail hairs all standing at attention.

I knew how the cat felt. “Let’s just hope the aliens don’t show up again to steal something. Or—” I added with a retroactive shudder, “—somebody!”

“I don’t think you have too much to worry about,” Annika tried to reassure me. “They don’t sound too smart, they’ve got no taste in art, and what do they know about this world?”

“Their taste is getting better,” Tam said dejectedly.

I thought about her wondrous “Tech 7” and its exact depiction of the high points of high technology, and the way—with even more accuracy, just on a different plane—it summed up the artifacts as a portrait of a human being. Then I realized that “Tech 7” might tell aliens more than I wanted them to know about our world and our humanity.

I park my brush in its glass of water before the acrylic paint on the bristles can dry. Stepping back from the canvas, then up close again, I study the new painting.

Above the city, the night sky is faintly washed with light and speckled with the few brightest stars. A glass skyscraper lifts its beveled crown into the sky. One facet of the tower gleams, reflecting the sodium glare of streetlights from below. Another side of the huge structure is shadowed, darker than the sky, black. The black isn’t uniform pigment and it convinces the eye precisely because it isn’t. There are other colors mixed in, tinges of red, green, and purple, so the effect is blacker than monochromatic black.

Art should be truth. For example: the feeling of dread is very much like painting black. Dire, this-is-it-for-me dread isn’t a solid black feeling, because it’s laced with other emotions—red anger, green nausea, purple absurdity that complete the awfulness. I didn’t understand that before but I do now.

Working with nervous energy, I touch the dark side of the skyscraper with the tip of my brush, adding points of titanium-white paint, like reflected stars. The long, narrow configuration of the misplaced constellation suggests downward motion. An ominous intrusion…

I can tell when my pieces are done, as final and perfect as they are ever going to be, when a title pops into my head. Standing in front of my painting, spattered with bits of acrylic, I feel a grin unfurl across my face as I admire the finished work, “Threat of Stars at 912 Main.”

I realize I’d better come out of the creative trance and check the time. Sure enough, my paint-speckled watch says Tam will soon arrive with the carry-out Thai we agreed on earlier. I am achingly tired—I worked for nine hours on the painting today—and I’m hungry. And eager.

For the past week, Tam and I have been watching out for each other. Just in case the aliens decide to pick up where they left off. We haven’t had any problems with them so far, but we hear that a piece is missing from the student art show at the University of Houston. So we’re not letting our guard down yet. Tam and I plan to have supper here in my studio, and then we’ll guard each other all night tonight.