The Great Project’s Serendipities

He walked for most of a day. The city had changed since he'd last come into it, in ways the radio had not prepared him for.

On East Eleventh, the brick wall of the Victory Grill was covered floor to roofline in trumpet vine and passionflower, and a hand-painted sign said BLUES TUESDAY, with the date, as though that had never stopped. A man on a stepladder was tying back a runner that had crept over a window. Eli stood and listened to someone inside running scales on a guitar, and the vines took the edge off the sound of the street, so that the scales seemed to come from farther away than they did.

People called it the Great Project, half joking and half not. Nobody he met could say exactly when it had started. A woman selling tamales from a cart near the Mexic-Arte told him the museum's walls had gone green the summer the power went down for three weeks, and that the building had stayed cool enough inside that the old people from her block had slept there on cots, under the paintings.

"They had the electric bill framed in the lobby for a while," she said. "Zero dollars. People came to look at it like it was art."

He bought two tamales and ate them walking.

At the State Cemetery he stopped at the fence. The old limestone wall had been planted along its whole length, and among the headstones the grass had been let go to bluestem and Indian blanket. A doe was standing in it, up to her shoulders in flowers, chewing, regarding him. Behind her the names of governors and their wives went on being carved and weathered, and nobody, it seemed, had thought to mind.

Somewhere down the block, through an open window, Bathroom Plants' "New Unity Dawning" was playing on somebody's speaker, a little too loud.

Eli’s steps felt lighter as he journeyed towards Central.

He didn't know if the city had become better or only more alive. He thought, maybe, at his age, that was the same thing. He walked on, toward the confluence, the bird log heavy in his bag, each page a little world he was carrying in to be counted.