The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(53)

“Tell me if anyone’s coming and hold this,” Jack said, and before I knew what was happening, he’d handed me a heavy flashlight and—dear God!—was prying open the door to the enclosure … like cars weren’t rushing by, and like a couple of vagrants weren’t huddled inside a closed store entrance half a block away.

He got the door open in a few seconds. “Flashlight,” he said, as if he were a doctor requesting a scalpel. I handed it over. We waited for headlights to pass, and he cracked open the door and shined the flashlight inside. Satisfied, he gave one last glance around the area, rushed me through the door, and quickly closed it up behind us.

Trying not to inhale the unpleasant, dank smell, I surveyed the dark area with Jack while he beamed the flashlight around. We stood at the top of the subway entrance. A set of stairs on the right was marked for entering the station, and a nonworking escalator on the left was marked as the exit. Dull fluorescent light blanketed the bottom of the stairwell, glowing from behind locked scissor gates that blocked the station entrance.

“It reeks,” I complained in a whisper.

“Have you never used this station?” he whispered back. “It’s way better than usual. When it’s not closed up, homeless people go down there to the bottom”—he beamed the flashlight over the station gates—“for some primo private restroom time. The BART workers have to clean up shit and piss every morning. If they don’t, when they turn on the escalator, it gums up the works. That’s why half the escalators in the stations are always broken.”

“Vomit.”

“Right? My dad told me about it. Instead of spending money to have gates built up here to block off the escalators when the station’s closed, they just keep funneling nickels and dimes into repairing them. This one got so bad, they had to replace the entire escalator motor. That’s why it’s boarded up.”

“And it reopens tomorrow.”

“It’s already tomorrow.” He shined the flashlight under his chin, looking like an old-school monster-movie actor, with all his beautiful bones casting eerie shadows. “It opens in three hours, so let’s get to it.”

Jack had every detail planned: a small head-mounted camping flashlight that lit up the area directly in front of his face; a portable airbrush system preloaded with metallic gold paint; three cans of the fancy spray paint I’d spied the first night we met; a small plastic container filled with exactly five extra nozzles (because he had to occasionally swap out nozzles so the paint wouldn’t clog, he kept track of the number he came with—couldn’t leave any behind or the cops could trace the paint brand); folded-up hand-cut stencils and masking tape; and, lastly, two masks to filter out the paint fumes, which we each donned. We were ready.

He pulled his mask down to talk. “If anyone dangerous tries to get in here, jump the handrail and get behind me.”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got pepper spray.”

“Terrific, but I’d rather defend you, if you don’t mind. I have a modicum of male pride that needs feeding on occasion.”

“Fine, but what about cops or people patrolling the station down there?”

“They don’t patrol the station. They don’t even monitor the security cameras—not in the budget. But if a cop comes from the street entrance, he’ll likely have a gun. So just put your hands up, and I’ll do all the talking. Hey, you okay?”

“I’m not built for a life a crime.”

“You want to bail? Say the word. I won’t be mad in the least. I’m serious, Bex.”

“No way. Let’s do this.”

“Aye, aye, getaway girl. Mask down.”

While I stood across from him on the stairs, holding his backpack and handing him supplies, he started painting at the top of the escalator. It was hard to see much at first, because he was mainly spraying the escalator steps solid gold. But as he switched back and forth between the cans and the airbrush, the grated silver tops of the steps became gilded, and on the vertical planes between the steps, in a contrasting flat gold, the top of an R took shape.

He moved down as he worked, step-by-step—because once he’d painted, he couldn’t go back up and fix anything without smearing wet paint. And I followed his slow path on the stairs, handing him supplies on the way down. The farther we descended, the less we heard pedestrians and cars passing, and the more it felt like we were headed into a hellish pit, where the devil himself would appear behind the station gates.

Fear and excitement clashed inside my chest, churning up the same kind of eustress I felt on amusement park rides—only, when I was riding the Grizzly roller coaster at Great America in Santa Clara, I didn’t have to worry about getting arrested or being stabbed by a dangerous vagrant.

Nearly two hours passed. I spent most of that time memorizing the way Jack’s long arms and fingers moved as he painted. How his eyes crinkled in the corners as he squinted at his work, and how he rolled his shoulders to stretch out the tension in his sleek body.

We could break your record with Howard Hooper in less than a week.

And that. I thought about him saying that. A lot.

By the time we got to the bottom, I had a headache from the paint fumes, and Jack’s fingers were cramping. But when we met by the gates, pulling off our masks, I beamed the flashlight up the escalator. It was something to see. RISE. Each letter was elongated and multiple steps high. The font looked glamorous and sleek, like the titles on a 1940s Hollywood movie, and he’d tweaked the perspective so that the R was smallest and the E was biggest, making the whole thing look even grander and more epic than it was. When the escalator was switched on, Jack explained, the word would float up the stairs, one letter at a time, like movie credits.