Picture Us In The Light(13)

The light turns red and we stop at the corner. A pungent, earthy smell that reminds me of my mom’s pantry wafts toward us from an herbal shop behind us, sandwiched between a souvenir store and a produce market. I think about what to say. Having to work this hard around them is so foreign to me, like landing in a country I’ve only ever heard people talk about. A taxi goes by.

“Here’s the thing,” Harry says abruptly, and we both turn to him. “I—”

But before he can finish, Regina says, “What’s that?”

We look where she’s pointing. It’s a corner of a building painted all black with giant windows that’ve been elaborately tagged over, and there’s a hanging sign labeling the place as NEIGHBORHOOD: A GALLERY.

“You want to go in?” Regina asks me.

I spend a pretty significant chunk of my time following art galleries online and browsing museums’ virtual collections, but I hardly ever get to go in person these days. I don’t want to drag them, though, if they’d rather not, feel their polite impatience hovering in front of the paintings. “Oh—we don’t have to if—”

“No, let’s go in,” Harry says. And I can feel their earlier tension evaporate; I feel both of them swivel instead toward this thing they know will make me happy. “This totally looks like your kind of thing. Let’s do it.”

There are more people inside than I would have expected, probably forty or fifty. It’s small, not in a way that makes you feel crowded but more that makes you feel a part of the surroundings. And the installation inside—everyone has those moments, I think, that take them out of themselves, when something you come across makes you see everything around you in a new way. Maybe this is how Regina always felt in church.

Whoever the artist is paints on overhead projector sheets and then casts them all over different parts of a room so they overlap and they look different, mingling differently, depending where you’re standing. I could stay in here forever, possibly, looking at the way the images layer on each other and also watching people take everything in, watching the projections flash across them. It’s a kind of living exhibit, all these real people sliding in and out of the projections, all these lives twined and tangled. The contrast between the physical people and the shaky, flimsy images stirs something in me—lifts from the private recesses of my heart and gives shape to what it feels like to walk with ghosts.

I can feel my mind expanding, all the possibilities filling new crevices in my consciousness. But then I also feel kind of frantic and awful in a way it takes me longer to pin down: it makes me feel desperate. He’s done what I always wanted to do and he did it first, and probably better. In fact, standing here, the three of us experiencing this together—this feels like more of me I could show Harry than anything I could ever draw myself.

Harry swivels his head around slowly, then motions toward the wall. “This is really cool.”

There’s a white guy dressed all in black opening the door for people who I assume works here, and I lean toward him. “Excuse me,” I say. “Who’s the artist?”

“Her name is Vivian Ho.” He points to the other side of the gallery. “She’s here today for the opening.”

I shouldn’t have assumed it was a guy. And I definitely did not expect her to be Asian. I know most of the prominent Asian artists these days because I collect the knowledge of them, imagine myself among them, and I’ve never heard of her. She’s in her midthirties, probably, stocky, with spiky, blue-tipped hair and black plugs in her earlobes, attractive in a guyish kind of way, and she’s ducking her head toward a few women who are saying something about one of the projections.

“You should go talk to her,” Regina says.

“Nah, she looks pretty busy.”

“No, you’re into this, right?” Harry says. “How often do you get to meet actual artists? Go say hi. Oh, look, she’s coming over by here.”

“That’s all right. We should keep going.”

“Excuse me, Vivian!” he calls. I elbow him and hiss, “What are you—”

But Vivian Ho is coming over and saying, with a friendly smile, “What’s up?”

“Hi,” Harry says, “my friend is an artist, too, and he wanted to tell you how much he likes your work.”

“Oh yeah?”

I can feel my face turning red. “Ah—it’s really—”

“He just got into RISD,” Regina adds. “On a scholarship.”

I hate them both. “Your installation is incredible,” I say.

She smiles and crosses her arms over her chest, then leans against the wall. “Hey, thanks for coming. What do you do?”

“I like to draw.”

“What do you draw?”

“Ah—portraits, mostly.”

“Yeah? The gallery’s doing this 30 Under 30 installation next month. You should apply.”

“We’re going to go find a bathroom,” Harry announces. I glare at him. He smiles and waves.

“Nah, I haven’t even been to art school yet,” I say to Vivian Ho. “Thanks, though.”

“So? I never went to art school.”

“No?”

“No. I came up in street art.” She laughs. There’s a warmth and a generosity pulsing from her, which seems about right; I don’t believe you can put anything meaningful into the world without having a kind of innate generosity, something of yourself to give. “And I remember what it was like when everyone would preach you that life experience bullshit and I was like, fuck that, I have things to say now. You get a lot of that?”