DANISH BLUE

Chicago hardly fit through the doors of Kraków’s No. 8 tramwaj, but the driver let me force it through and chip the corners where future suburbs would grow. He knew that the incredible level of detail would keep the kids from screaming for a few stops.

I couldn’t reach the timestamp to validate my green transit ticket. This happens every now and then. Jaka szkoda. If the ticket-taker ever catches me, I’ll just bribe him with a free tour of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. I don’t know what the Communists were thinking, putting Polish trams on the honour system. As if we wouldn’t figure out, after all these years, how to ride with an unstamped ticket.

An oak tree uprooted and fell off into a woman’s handbag without her knowing. She had such a stern face, I decided not to retrieve it.

I got off at Stradom station and paid some guy two złotych to help me carry the maquette to the nearby Człowiek Obcy Gallery. My original gallery—the one that had commissioned this doomed artifact— had gotten nervous about my plans for the exhibition. They said I was zwariowany, but you have to be that way to make art that plants razor blades in the gums.

That’s the thing. We all want art to hurt us, but only through the screams of others.

In the space behind the gallery, the director had thoughtfully erected four cinderblock pillars waist-high on which I could lay Chicago. I prepared the materials I needed for my performance, and by the time I was done, the wine-and-cheese was in full roar. Danish blue cheese and cheap, Hungarian swill for wine. Nearly everybody was dressed in Dolce & Gabbana, looking like appetizers. The Jagielloski University crowd never missed a show at Człowiek Obcy, though they couldn’t care less who the artist was. This was their social mandate— to support non-university trouble-making, no matter what it was, so they could criticize the akademia with some credibility.

They were most welcome to my show.

A girl—you know what I mean, a woman—was reciting Czesław Miłosz to her friends. It’s easy to appear pretentious when quoting this writer, but she was choosing unknown passages, or at least ones not repeated to death. Her listeners didn’t applaud; they fell silent.

Her hair was long and licorice black, her skin pale beneath the curls. Sarcastic eyes. Does that make sense? I liked her instantly.

Clap, clap, clap. The director wanted our attention. He was dressed in a bow tie and smoking jacket, hair flattened with Brylcreem. You could tell it was meant to be ironic. I was wearing my favourite pair of blue overalls. My busted lip had more or less healed.

“Uwaga, uwaga, panie i panowie! The artist is ready to commence the performance. Please give a hand to S. Mok Wawelski, and move outside to the courtyard.”

I use an artist name. Gotta problem with that? Radek Tomaszewski is as ordinary as kielbasa and ywiec beer, and not destined to attract attention, so I had to choose something flashier.

I stood on the east side of Chicago, where Lake Michigan would be, where many had jumped into the water to save themselves from the flames and smoke. The students gathered around, lazily drinking their wine and smoking West cigarettes.

“Thank you for coming,” I said. “This is what Chicago looked like on the morning of October 8, 1871. You’ll see that everything was made of wood. They ate a lot of ice pops.”

Laughter. Someone raised their hand.

“How many people died?”

“That depends on which account you believe,” I said. “Humans are always the most poorly documented factors in a tragedy. I could tell you three hundred, but that wouldn’t be counting paperless immigrants, the poor, or the homeless.”

“Or queers,” lit girl said, smiling. Her teeth were stained red by wine.

“True,” I said, and bookmarked her for later. This may sound strange, but I wanted to see her take a piss. I occasionally get curious about women, and it’s usually precipitated by quirky behaviour like hers. “Now step back.”

I picked up a can of butane.

“Where’s the artist statement?” someone said.

Sigh. Purists. I had been dreading this moment; I’ve never been comfortable summarizing my work. It’s so reductive.You can’t explain away a conflagration or what it means. Sky-high flames, searing heat, and suffocating smoke make different impressions on each of us. Fire alters your micro-climate in ways inexplicable to others.

For my statement, I chose to stick to the facts.

“Fireproofing is a myth,” I said. “The biggest one since ‘the immortality of the soul.’”

I squirted streams of butane over the Gold Coast, the Loop, Streeterville, and a bunch of other neighbourhoods. The Chicago Water Tower was one of the few structures in the burn zone that remained standing in the fire, and I was determined to change that. After all, this was my chance to tinker with history.

I lifted a fire extinguisher to the audience, who were getting noticeably nervous. Gulping their wine.

“Take note that this extinguisher has been emptied. The waterworks broke down during the Great Fire. We will deal with a similar disadvantage.”

Showtime. I stood back, lit a match, and threw it over the city. Orange and blue flames ignited in the downtown sky. Fire dripped down to the land and flowed like lava over the landscape until it was an even, vibrating carpet of light. Glue melted and poured into the streets, and popsicle sticks snapped and blackened. Wind blew the smoke northward into the faces of the guests, and many of them ran toward me where they could breathe. Some scampered into the gallery. The flames were almost as high as a nearby clothesline, three, maybe four metres, colouring the clouds from our point of view. It was a bit much.

In the crackling, whistling wood, I could hear the echoes of human screams from 1871, drowned out by primitive fire alarms, bells rung by hand. Some sounds just seem to go together, or maybe it’s just me.

“We have a problem,” the director called to me, emerging from the gallery.

He was followed by six straaków lumbering in Nomex and Kevlar suits and toting axes, fire hoses, and an extinguisher the size of a small beer fridge.

“Przenie si!”

We obeyed and moved out of the way while they blew dry chemicals over Chicago, clouding its skies and coating the streets with an eerie off-white powder. The fire was reduced to smouldering ash. A giant hole had burned away where City Hall was; municipal hell was a pit of blackened sodium bicarbonate that ended at the grass.

“Who is responsible for this?” one of the firefighters asked. The big one.

“S’il vous plaît n’hésitez pas à gouter le fromage,” I told him. “The grapes are good, too.”

“Your French is impeccable,” lit girl told me. “My name is Dorota.”

“The department never authorized this show,” he said. “We’re shutting you down.”

“What about you?” I said, showing him the stopwatch I kept handy, anticipating his visit. “It took you six minutes and thirty-two seconds to get here. That’s far past the national average of five minutes.”

“I could have you arrested for public endangerment—like this.” He snapped his fingers.

He looked peeved and maybe a little horny. I detected vapours of potato and bison grass on his breath; bootlegged vodka almost always means “party-time.” I pictured the gang of them punishing me by stuffing a fire hose up my ass. The fantasy was all right, as long as they didn’t loosen the valve ...

Dorota stepped through the ranks of the crowd—now shrunken to a gossipy whisper—and moseyed over with her glass of wine. Swish. She was mesmerizing.

“You know, Radeki isn’t the only one who broke the rules. You entered what you knew was a burning building without attaching a lifeline to your belts.”

“Radeki.” My birth name is Radosław, though I use the diminutive form “Radek.” She had just made my name even more kid-like.

The straaków looked down at their waists, dumbfounded, except for the boss. He stared straight at her and smirked.

“That is not your business, woman.”

“Listen, we didn’t mean to cause trouble,” I said. “There will be no more fires.”

“Radeki, don’t be gutless. This man is a nincompoop, an idiot, a bestia. He didn’t even bring floor plans of the building. If we were all dying and choking in smoke, these supposed ‘firefighters’ wouldn’t have been able to save us.” Now she addressed them, her eyes showing contempt. “Go home, and don’t tell anyone what happened. You will be too embarrassed.”

She was the ideal warrior: knowledgeable, fearless, an ass of sculpted glass. I realized on the spot that we could accomplish great things together, as long as I didn’t ruin it by requesting a blowjob.

The big firefighter poked my forehead with his finger. “You are a marked man.”

The straaków left and so did about half the crowd. My true fans remained. The shaken director handed out plastic glasses and opened a bottle of champagne.

“Gratulacje!” he said. “I’ll probably get an official reprimand for this, but it was worth it.”

“Applause for Dorotka,” I said, returning the diminutive.

Later, after she and I had downed a few bottles of Veuve Clicquot and piwo jasne, and had talked about school, art, politics, the Pope’s floundering white blood cells, and the dark days ahead, she pulled a sheet of paper from her pocket.

“It’s by Czesław Miłosz.” She read it to me.

At the entrance, my bare feet on the dirt floor, Here, gusts of heat; at my back, white clouds. I stare and stare. It seems I was called for this: To glorify things just because they are.

“What is that from?” I said.

“Fucked if I know ... but the old fart just died, so I figured it was appropriate.”

“Harsh.”

“His work is good, but I’m sure he was a rat, like the rest of us.”

Just so you know, Człowiek Obcy, the name of the gallery, means “outsider.” I know Polish is confusing, but please try to keep up.