Local Exhibit

      Through the dirt-smeared window, Mona could see the swirling graffiti zipping by on the cracking, crumbling brickwork that boxed Queens County in at the edges. White plastic fences, badly in need of a power-wash, marked with pseudonym symbols and false signatures capped with cartoon crowns; blacks and reds and blues. Something to stand out against all that gray in the air.

           The first time she’d ridden into the city, on this very same local line, although most of the trains had long since been updated with cushioned seats and coat hooks, her mother had tutted at the markings.

           “Not right,” she’d said, “to scribble all over something that doesn’t belong to you.”

           Mona liked it, though; liked the way the spray paint broke up the sameness of the narrow, stacked houses, the dilapidated chain links and green-brown patchwork of lawn grass. Gave the eye something else to focus on.

           She used to like to make up stories about the people behind the paintings. JHC, declared a chipping, wood fence—well known to her now that her train rides were near-daily—the letters smeared against it in a blast of black. They stood, she had decided, for John Harris Corona. Lovely, soft-spoken John, with dreadlocks down to the middle of his back, and a stack of records to reach Avalon in the corner of his studio apartment. He’d scrawled his initials there for his girlfriend to see on her commute into work in the mornings, so she wouldn’t feel so lonely in her little, solo window seat. They were married now, with baby number two on the way, and John—now known as Jack Crown—finally running his record label out in California. They’d moved out there just after the wedding—Seasonal Affective Disorder driving John to expand his horizons westward, but also the money and the music scene—and Mona smiled every time the train chugged past his fence, happy for him and his wife, and that a kind man had managed to leave his mark on an otherwise cold backdrop.

           Or so she liked to imagine.

           KING VULCAN, proclaimed an abandoned storefront, its real sign long removed, with the outline of the letters that once stood above the now padlocked door, marquis style, etched into the eggshell, concrete face of it with weather and dirt. She could hear the mischief in the voices of a sweater-vested trio, early teens—brace-faced and cratered with acne—as they snuck out into an early-October slumber-party night with an aerosol can, copped from their fearless leader, Travis’s, garage.

           “We never get up to anything,” he advocated, his eyes blue as the can label, and shining wild like wet paint. “Just once, I want to do something stupid.”

           Or something like that. Mona knew no one talked that way, really, outside of the movies. But still, it was nice to pretend, especially on the long, stock-footage-scenery ride into Manhattan.

           The train stuttered and shook over a bend in the line, and Mona’s backpack shifted on the floor between her feet. She grabbed it before it could slide forward beneath the bench in front of her, and the magnet clasp came undone, letting a tube of lipstick and a compact mirror escape. The mirror hit the lip of the seat beside her, opened, fell to the floor, and cracked, producing shattered little slivers.

           Mona jerked to snatch up the shards, and managed to send the lipstick tube rolling across the aisle, in her haste. The business man sitting catty-corner to her scooped it up before it could wander any farther, and scooted forward in his seat to hand it back to her. His tie was the same crimson as its contents—Rah-Rah-Red, said the label on the bottom—and the round silver of the casing made it a bullet in his hand.

           “Miss,” he said, and reached across the aisle. She reached back, the skin of her knuckles tight over the jagged shape of her bones and betraying blue veins, her black nail polish chipping away at the tips. Their hands were nearly the same size, she could see, as hers lined up over his to retrieve her warpaint. He saw it too, although his hands were the hands of someone better fed—still, wide palms and long fingers, both. Mona turned her gaze away, but not quickly enough to miss the way his brow furrowed with hesitant confusion.

           “Thanks,” she said, and tried to pitch her voice up as much as she could. It didn’t work. It was thick with nerves, and so, deep as ever—but if the business man had heard it, he chose not to comment. He leaned himself back into his seat and grunted, and resumed staring out the opposite window, pointedly not watching Mona gather mirror shrapnel and tuck it away into the front pocket of her knock-off leather bag. From the corner of her wing-lined eye, she could see that his expression had settled, finally, into decided, quiet disdain—but it seemed he wasn’t going to pursue the issue, and for that, she was grateful.

           Inside, though, she stewed.

           John Harris Corona, she said to herself, would not look at me like that. Not ever.

           He wouldn’t, she was quite sure. He’d make her a star out in California, like she was supposed to be. He’d come home to visit someone—a sickly grandmother, maybe, or a cousin—and wander into her club one fateful Saturday night. There she’d be on the stage, her sequined dress stopping just above the knee, shrouded in smoke and dim lighting. He’d settle himself at a table in the back, but she’d see him anyway, pick his face out from the faces in the crowd and sing right to him—something hushed, and jazzy, and he wouldn’t mind her tenor range at all. He’d love it, in fact, and tell her so when he’d come see her after the show, in her dressing room, her dark hair liberated from bobby pins and curling over her far-too-wide shoulders. He’d sign her right there, and whisk her away to stardom and money, and paparazzi yelling her name in the streets, and stadiums packed with people hollering, “We love you, we love you! We love you just as you are!”

           That’s precisely how it was going to go, she decided, and resumed staring out her own window, business men be damned. She was going to be something someday soon, and when people looked at her confused, they’d smile after instead of scowling, and it would be different. She’d be reborn—baptized in the glare of a spotlight and sent out into the world brand new.

           The train rattled to a stop in St. Albans, and a smattering of folks hurried on—worker bees and maître d’s, criminals and lawmen—and scrambled to find spots to claim, avoiding the little boxes where two sets of two-seaters faced each other, lest they should have to sit diagonal to another person close enough to talk.

Mona always picked a spot by the window in one of the little quads, herself, waiting for the day a stranger would amble in and settle down, and ask her what it was like to be living here, so close to this shining city, this testament to American excellence. She waited and waited, and sometimes even imagined that there was someone there, and she’d look him in the eye and stick out her tongue, and blow a fat raspberry in response to his questions.

But only, of course, in her mind.

           There was a new blotch of graffiti that Mona hadn’t seen before, slapped over a poster. She couldn’t make it out, and so trained her eyes on it, deciding she’d play her old story-telling game the rest of the way in. The train let out a tsk of air and started rolling slowly forward, past the billboard. The poster was for a play she’d never heard of.

The graffiti screamed FAG in Rah-Rah-Red.

           Mona waved at the sign as it rambled by. A small child on the platform, clinging to his mother’s leg, waved back.

           That was the whole problem with the place, she decided. No one but the kids to wave back. No one interesting or new in a place that practically made its name on new and interesting people. Just stuffy, disappointed business men, and hovercraft mothers with collar-choked children rambling around and never saying hello. No one like John Corona making moves, making art. All of them contained by the parameters of their own noses, like her mother used to say, or something like that, at least, when they were speaking, and by the tippies of their own damn toes, and no time to meet or greet or even say—

           “Excuse me, miss.”

           The feeling of the veins seizing. Shutting down. Frigid, like mainlining ice water. Mona almost didn’t look up, almost pretended not to hear, but she turned her gaze from the filthy window.

           In the aisle beside her stood a tall man, mid-twenties or less, with a shock of wavy orange hair, and the freckles to match. Connor was his name, she guessed, or Patrick, and he had a big, old-fashioned camera hanging on a strap around his neck, like a tourist.

           He’s not from here, she decided. He took a plane all the way from Belfast just to end up on this shitty ol’ line. Here visiting family, like John, or seeing the Empire State Building, or…

           “Is it cool if I, uh,” he started, with no accent at all to speak of, and she realized she hadn’t said anything. Just stared at him, like an alien. “Is it cool if I sit here?”

           He pointed at the bench across from her—frequently occupied by the phantom image of Travis and his friends, who would scurry on one of these days for an adventure, she was sure, and tell her all about it. But for the moment, the spots were vacant.

           “It’s cool,” she affirmed. He dropped down across from her, knocking their knees together.

           “Sorry,” he said, and took off his camera.

           “It’s cool,” Mona repeated. She turned back toward the window.

           The train bored beneath the earth, into a short tunnel. The lights cut out for a moment, and Mona closed her eyes, certain that when the train made level ground again and the lights came back, her new friend would be gone.

           She felt the train’s path lift. There was silence. The business man coughed. She let out a breath.

           “So, uh—”

           He was still there.

           Mona opened her eyes again and turned to face her guest. She did not want to be flirted with. Not in the slightest. Not, at least, by some gangly local without the common sense to buy one of those new digital cameras that fit in coat pockets and made a person seem significantly less rob-able. She wanted only to make it into work, and take her place on stage, and sing for the same old regulars, and make her dollars, and come back home on the train.

           “So?” she prompted.

           He blushed, and picked at the threads coming out of a hole in the knee of his jeans, and then she felt bad, a bit, for being dismissive. It was rude, in fact, and not at all like her. Or, at least, not at all like she wanted to be.

           “So,” he tried again. “I’m putting together a photo album.”

           He lifted his camera, by way of explanation, as if it wasn’t even more of a standout than his clown-head of hair.

           Play nice, now, she scolded herself. Play nice.

           “Oh? That’s interesting,” she said.

           It was, actually. It was something, at least. He straightened in his seat a bit then, and nodded energetically, and it struck her how young he was. Younger than she’d first thought, certainly. Not much older than Travis and his friends, in all likelihood. Three years out of school, and not a year more.

           “Thanks. Well, I hope it will be,” he said. “I’m trying to get pictures of women all over the city. Or—that sounds creepy. I just mean women who look interesting. Like they’ve got a story. Women who stand out. But I’m not, like, sneaking up on anyone or anything, y’know, I ask first. If I can take their picture. And then I want to, I don’t know, send it to a gallery, or a magazine or something. Some place to show, hey, these are the women of New York. Y’know?”

           “That sounds cool,” Mona replied, nodding, but not following really at all. It was enough for Connor Patrick, though.

           “So anyway, that’s why I asked to sit here,” he continued, “because I saw you sitting here, and you looked like an interesting woman.”

           Mona’s heart lifted, slightly. The businessman snorted. It nosedived.

           It was a joke, of course. Of course it was. Just like Alex Collins asking her to prom in high school. Just like her mother saying to her friends: “My son is the best daughter you could ask for.”

And now this. Connor was going to take his little picture, and then train hop back to St. Albans station and hang it next to the Broadway poster.

           “Really?” Mona asked. “What’s so interesting about me?”

           Connor shot her that same look of hesitant confusion, and she was starting to hate it. That look people got when she ended up being something different than they expected. Different than the story they told themselves when they saw her sitting in train cars or walking up Fifth Avenue.

           “I just meant you looked, like—I don’t know. Different, I guess.”

           “Like a freak,” she said.

           “No!”

           “No?”

           “Really, no,” he said. “Really, no.” He started picking at his jeans again, and his lips pulled into a tight line, and she believed him. His hand had a slight tremor, she noted, as it moved from the knee hole to his camera, and then up to sweep uncertainly through his mess of hair. The skin was pulled tight over the knuckles, just like hers.

           “I can just, uh. I’ll leave you alone,” he said.

           “No, it’s—I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it. He’d done nothing to her. He wasn’t a suit-and-tie or Alex Collins, or her mother. And it wasn’t his fault he wasn’t Travis either, or John Harris Corona. He was just some kid with a crappy camera and an idea, and he wasn’t pretending to be anything else.

           “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I just…”

But there were no words beyond that, so she simply shrugged.

           He considered her for a moment, then shrugged back.

           “It’s cool,” he said.

           Mona laughed. Connor or Patrick, or maybe even Ryan—she’d ask, at some point—smiled and looked out the window. They’d be in the city soon, and the unmistakable skyline would peek out beneath a screen of fog, waiting. It’d be night by the time she got in and crawled out into the street, and the people in the windows would be staring out at her instead.

           “What I meant,” Connor said, “was that I saw you sitting here, looking out the window, and you looked interesting. Like you weren’t really here. Like you were off somewhere else, but not spacing out. Just really somewhere else. And I thought, ‘I have to take a picture of that lady. She looks like someone in a movie.’”

           “Oh,” said Mona, quietly, pleased. “Like who?”

           “What? Oh. No, like, not like some actress. Like somebody that just walked off a movie screen,” Connor explained. “That’s what I mean. Like a movie character in real life.”

           “Oh.”

           “So, can I?” he asked. “Take a picture of you.”

           Mona sat straighter in her seat and ran a hand through her hair.

           “I broke my mirror,” she said. “I can’t see how I look. To fix myself.”

           “You look great,” he said, “just as you are.”

           She made to argue, ask if he had anything she could use, but she smiled instead, and settled for smoothing out her shirt.

           “Okay,” she said. “Okay, go ahead.”

           “Great.” He grinned and snatched up his camera, and Mona looked down the barrel of the lens.

           “Oh, no, not like that,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I mean. Just look out the window, like before, so I can get one like that. If that’s okay.”

           She obliged, and settled back down in her seat. She tried to keep still, tried not to blink, even. Her stomach felt tight, and there was heat creeping uncomfortably over her chest, and she waited.

           The East River gurgled a smog gray, far below the tracks. Lacking in color in an obvious but untroubling way, like something out of an old film noir. She could just make out a grouping of warehouses settled along the shore, and she imagined walking down one day, in the muddy-water stink, and hearing the dock men say:

           “Who is that?” and “She must be a movie star.”

           The shutter clicked. The release whirred.

           “Perfect,” said Connor, “I think we got it.” He reached out for her hand. “Thanks so much, uh—”

           “My mother named me Steven,” she told him. “But it’s Mona. My name’s Mona.”

           “Mona,” he repeated, and smiled. “Good to meet you Mona. Thanks for the time, and the picture.”

           “Sure,” she said. The train dropped down beneath the water and screamed into Penn Station. Her ears popped. The young man rehung the camera around his neck and stood, shuffling into the aisle.

           “What’s your name?” she called after him. “So that I can find your photo album, when you send it to the galleries and magazines.”

           “Connor,” he replied, with a final wave. “Connor Murphy.”

           Mona smiled, and waved back.