NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Humid air seems to cling to the trees or is it their breath? The sun is well above the tree line and does nothing to dry the atmosphere. Lou sits in his car outside the H Bar. It is not his old Saturn wagon with dog nose prints clouding the back windows.
“Why don’t we go in for lunch?”
“Not yet, Fred. Get in. I want to show you something.”
It is cool and dry inside. The warn red plush seating has lost some of its pile where years of but rubbing have left their mark.
“Just picked this up for $9K. with 95K miles.”
“Today?”
“About half an hour ago.”
“What year is it?”
“It’s a twenty eleven Hyundai.”
“You mean you sold the old Saturn?”
“The Light House Gas Station wants twenty-five hundred to fix it and clean all the tree sap off the paintwork, so I traded it in for this.”
“I didn’t know they were selling cars now.”
“Oh sure, they have a small lot full, outside one of Jake Trip’s warehouses.”
“Did they give you anything for the Saturn?”
“A handshake!”
We have stopped at yet another red light on Route One. The big, “Pollo A La Brassa” sign is gone along with the old strip mall that once housed a favorite Peruvian Chicken place. It is now a building site. About two stories of cinder block rise from the clay, plus future stairwells sticking up above the partially stick-built apartments to come.
“Imagine all the cars coming out of there adding to this traffic.”
Lou looks over.
“That’s growth and progress for you!”
“Enough to keep us at this light another ten eternal minutes.”
Something is pushing against my feet.
“Lou, did you know Mr. Liddell is under my seat?”
A white rabbit backs into view to the right of my feet.
Lou glances over and then accelerates as traffic moves on.
“That is not Mr. Liddell!”
“Looks like him to me.”
“I know. Remember when Diddlie’s carport was invaded by all those rabbits during a thunderstorm?”
“Oh yes!”
We have stopped behind a bus.
“I am in the wrong lane here but can’t get over.”
The bus moves a few yards and stops at the next red light.
“We have gone just over two miles in the last eleven minutes!”
“Why don’t you pull over up at that patch of woods up here?”
“No way.”
“Why not? We can release Mr. Liddell’s doppelganger and get out
from behind this belching bus.”
“You’ll soon see!”
The bus pulls over into its own lane to take on a passenger, giving us room to speed on to another red light at a full eighteen miles an hour.
“Wait a minute. Where are those woods?”
“You are living in the past Fred. That lot is a new shopping center.”
“Those were the biggest woods along here.”
“Somebody was feeding the rabbits, breading in those woods.”
“So that’s where they came from. It is a long way from here to Diddlie’s, though.”
“It is. I think they escaped from a van that crashed on Maxwell Avenue.”
“You mean they were trapped at the time of construction.”
“Something like that.”
“Diddlie told me there was a scheme to sell them as pets.”
“Where?”
“She didn’t tell me anymore.”
“Well, these woods were the last place for the homeless to camp out. I wonder where they went?”
“God help them. I don’t know.”
“So, what are you going to show me?”
“Right over here.”
We have turned into the van Ruijven Shopping Center that was the last forested island of nature on this stretch of road and parked facing the side of a new four-story building. We can see a plain cinder block wall. A number of plywood rectangles suggest future windows. Lou checks the clock and opens the driver-side window.
“Here they come, right on time.”
There’s a buzz of electric motors as the first drone passes in front of the wall and sprays it down the middle with a cloud of brown paint. Another comes along behind it and sprays a lighter tone next to it and then another.
“What is going on here?”
“These four-motor drones are painting a mural and I was hoping to get here early enough to talk to Alicia and watch them fill the tanks with paint.”
“Where are they coming from?”
“Look over on the right.”
Drones are coming out of a dark opening in the roof of a one-story temporary building.
They catch the sun as they fly out of the building like bees out of a hive with swollen bellies. Each carries a cylindrical tank of paint under its props. Others can be seen returning via another opening on the other side of the roof.
“I get it. Remember the old paint by numbers!”
“This is paint by computer code.”
“Someone still has to mix and load the colors.”
“I think even that has been programmed into a machine.”
“What? I mean how?”
“Every pixel corresponds to color information that can be combined with instructions to mix paint.”
“How about that! How do you know all this Lou?”
“The two women who designed it used to work with me at the Fib.”
“Don’t say they got funding from the Leiden Organization.”
“That’s right! It is called the Delft Project.”
“That private equity firm is ramping up its investments around here.”
“They would have to start with an original painting though.”
“That’s what I thought but the machine has learned to copy any image its camera sees.”
“Doesn’t look like they are spraying pixels to me. That is fluid paint!”
“Yup! This is just the underpainting.”
The underpainting builds gradually over about fifteen minutes as drones make countless passes at the wall in close succession.
“You think we will see a collision?”
“Not unless the wind comes up.”
Some drones pass close to the wall with a long proboscis quirting a thin jet of color in a well-controlled line of varying thickness. Those covering larger areas spray from further out. At one point we see two drones swoop in only a foot apart mixing their colors in the air before orange paint hits the surface in varying tones.
“Looks like this might be a Halloween picture.”
“Yeah, we have the makings of a huge doorway and I’ll bet those orange blobs are going to be rendered into pumpkins.”
The rabbit struggles up from the well of the floor and squeezes between the driver’s seat and mine to get in the back.
“What are you going to do about this rabbit, Lou?”
“After this, I’ll offer it to the folks in the paint shop as a mascot.”
“Looks like the gas station gave you a free bunny!”
“Look at that, Fred!”
A five-motor drone with a bigger tank hovers near the top of the wall. Spraying deep blue from three nozzles.
“It’s going to be a night scene.”
The rabbit has climbed up the back seat and settles under the rear window.
“It might have jumped in when I left the door open stopping by the house, on the way to meet you.”
The windshield is now covered in bright yellow paint. The errant drone has come in from the left. After spraying the front of Lou’s latest car, it crashes into the side of a silver Mercedes van only yards away. Yellow fluid runs down the side panel, partially obscuring the sign; “Vic’s Side Arms and Ammo” printed in black. Underlined by a line of script recalling that of the Constitution, “Serving Patriots Since 1976”. Lou is laughing. He taps his phone and I hear only his side of the conversation.
“Alicia! You guys just doused my car and did a bright yellow kamikaze on the van next to us!
Yeah, it is Vic’s.
Bright yellow, kind of early for sunset don’t you think?
Vincent, what do you mean?
Oh! the thing is named after Van Gogh!
Okay, I get it.
Have they all got names?
Rembrandt and Van Dyke sprayed the browns, okay.
Do you have Vermeer?
Fabritius, who is that?
Yeah, okay, I can wait.”
Lou taps his phone and puts it away.
“Alicia is going to send someone out to wipe off the window.”
“Who is Fabritius?”
“He was a student of Rambrandt’s. She says he was killed in a gun powder factory explosion.”
A teenage boy runs over to us from the temporary building with two buckets of water and rags. The sides of his head are shaved and a huge thicket of long black hair streams from the top. He wipes the paint off and then throws the second bucket-full across the front for a final rinse and rushes back to the drone hive. Tattooed drones fly up his bare forearm.
He comes back with another two buckets.
“Got to clean off Vic’s. I’ll hose the rest of your car after that.”
He points to the side of the drone hive.
‘That is Alicia’s son Zeno, a real Wizkid too. I think he did a lot of the coding for this project.”
No more drones have come in since Lou reported the accident. A row of sycamores along the lot line releases a cloud of seeds and they spin across the parking lot on a sudden breeze.
