I grabbed my bag, filled with posters, and we got into my car. And we just drove, up and down streets with rows of sad, plain houses with maybe one or two that were nice. You could imagine the town going one way or the other so easily, that the crappy houses would get torn down and new ones put up, or those fancy houses would fall apart, would fade, and then all the houses would be empty. I told Zeke to get out the map from the glove compartment, and he did, reluctantly. He was suddenly treating everything as evidence now. He didn’t say it, but I knew he was thinking about fingerprints, which was laughable to me. We were ghosts. No one could see us. Why did it matter if they found little swirls on a poster? Who cared about fingerprints? Focus on the shantytowns, you morons. Look at that.
And we ticked off spots we’d hit. Some were still there, which was one of the most satisfying feelings you can imagine, but others were gone. I wanted to replace them, but Zeke said it was too soon, that someone might be watching. He had one of the posters in his lap, and he started folding it and refolding it. I thought he was doing origami, that soon he’d be holding a little swan, but he really was just reducing the poster to the smallest possible square that he could, as if, by the force of his anxiety, he could fold the poster so many times that it simply disappeared, ceased to exist. I stopped the car at a car wash and made sure that no one was around.
“Do you feel bad about the poster?” I asked. “Why are you so upset?”
“It’s not the poster. Like, well, you know, I love the poster. I think it’s cool. It’s just, I’m really scared because nobody else seems to understand it.”
“I guess I kind of thought that we didn’t want anyone else to understand it, right? Like, it’s just us. We’re the only ones who know what it is.”
He thought about it for a second. “I mean, yeah,” he continued, “but, like, I kind of wanted other people to not understand it in ways that they assumed a really cool artist had made it. I didn’t want them to not understand it in a way that they think we’re devil worshippers who abduct kids.”
“But it’s not that. Whatever they think, we know what it really is,” I told him.
“I’m just—” he said, but then started staring out the window. I thought maybe a police cruiser had pulled into the parking lot, but the coast was clear.
“Here, just, like, give me that poster,” I said, and I took the folded-up poster he was still holding. I smoothed it out on my lap. “I’m just going to hang this up. We’ll feel a ton better if you can see me hang it up and, you know, we don’t get arrested on the spot. And then maybe I’ll put up a few more. There’s a lot in the bag, and we’ll just see where that takes us.”
“There’s one up,” he said, now pointing at the change machine built into the brick wall at the front of the unmanned car wash station.
“Well, like, we can put up more,” I said. “That’s no big deal. Or somewhere else. Whatever.”
He grabbed the map and held it up for me. “We never put a poster here,” he said.
“Yeah, no, I think we did,” I said.
“No, we never put one here,” he said, pointing at the spot on the map, pristine, unmarked.
“Maybe I did?” I offered.
“Did you?” he asked, his voice cracking just a bit.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember doing it. Maybe in my sleep?”
“Frankie, seriously, did you put up that poster?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
We both got out of the car and walked over to the change machine. The edge is a shantytown. The hands. Our blood, speckles of it. It was our poster. I stared at it. But it wasn’t our poster. I pulled it off the machine, and I noticed immediately that the paper was not the crappy discount copy paper we had in the garage. It was nicer. Fancier. A little more weight and heft. The color was pristine white, too, not the yellow tint of our posters. We walked back to my car, and I checked it against the copy I’d taken from Zeke.
“Oh, well, okay, that’s . . . it’s not ours,” I finally said.
“Then whose is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Somebody took one of our posters and made more copies, I guess.”
“They made copies?”
“I guess, Zeke! Jesus, I don’t know.”
Zeke thought about this for a second. The idea that someone else might get credit for the poster seemed to alarm him, but the idea that someone else might get the electric chair for making the posters seemed to temporarily assuage his anxiety. “So they stole it?” he finally asked.