Works/The Tag

The slope up the bridge over the train tracks was steep enough, especially in winter when the wind always tried to blow him backward, that sometimes he had to stop at the apex and catch his breath. He would stand and survey the backs of the warehouses and dubious auto repair shops and look out across nothing in particular.

Graffiti was normally beneath notice, but this tag stood out because, for one thing, the wall had apparently been recently repainted, blank beige, and there were no other tags marring it, and also because someone believed his mark should be writ large. It covered nearly the whole wall.

The letters were so stylized and puffy that they were nearly impossible to read. The first was a G, but the next could have been an X or maybe a K, and he couldn't decide if the third was a V or a very short-stemmed Y. The last could have been a D or an O. It didn't parse, but you didn't expect that sort of thing to. He continued home.

The next day, coming home from work, he saw that the tagger hadn't been finished. Now the letters had been filled in with various colors. On the third day, even more so - each letter awash with multi-colored patterns, still constrained by the firm black outlines, but swirling and undulating in such a riot of conflicting colors that he felt it would give him a headache if he stared at the shapes too long.

He continued home.

Apparently the artist had finished, or had tired of climbing a nearly vertical right-of-way embankment in the dark, and nothing further happened. As most things did, it passed out of his attention into the commonplace, became a fixture and thereby unimportant - until the day he stopped for breath again and looked down at the warehouse wall and realized that it hadn't changed, that not only were the colors still dizzy bright after what must have been several weeks, but that no one had defaced it with a competing tag, nor had the owner come with more of his dull beige eraser.

The next day he slipped his small camera into a coat pocket, and on the way to work, took a photo. It came out very nicely in the early light, and when he got to work, he posted it on a photo-sharing site and forgot about it in the events of the day.

A few days later he happened to post some other photo, or went to the site for some other reason, and he saw the photo of the graffiti had gained a comment:

Hey, I got one like that too.

and a link. He followed the link and there, on a different wall a different beige in a different place, was the very same tag, identical down to the slightest curve in the O (assuming it wasn't a D), down to the last snippet of pulsating color.

Two days later:

Your tagger gets around!

and another link. Same to the last detail. Thousands of miles away.

After that he made sure to check that photo's page every day. Every two or three days, someone would find it and add a sighting of their own. Ten, then fifty, then two hundred. One was near enough that he was able to visit, and one day he drove down and had a look for himself. Only the walls were different. Five hundred. A thousand.

No one ever painted over them. No one ever defaced them. Taggers who were asked about it said they just didn't think it was a good idea, but could never say why. It didn't seem to be any sort of big joke, no group effort - but how could it be someone acting alone? Some tireless person with an unlimited travel budget and no day job, who was never seen in the act? Was it a message? Was it a political symbol? Was it a portent? Weblogs speculated joyously and endlessly.

One night, they all disappeared. Everywhere at once.

He looked down from the bridge the next morning, the cold light on pristine beige, and felt loss, but also something he couldn't quite put his finger on. Expectancy perhaps, or something similar. The suspicious sense of a too-abrupt ending.

He checked for news of the world. The owners of the various buildings and subways and so forth denied any mass cleansing. (Most of them had come to regard the tags as publicity. He himself had more than once encountered others on his bridge who were clearly there just to have a look at it.)

He walked home that day, more morose than usual. The sky was doing that yellowing around the edges which said that an electrical storm was approaching, and a big one. He looked up to see how soon it would begin to darken abruptly, the sign to find cover wherever you might be. He saw darkness, but not that sort of darkness. Thick smoky streaks, like jet contrails - but dark against the sky, not white, and much bigger.

Then, solving the puzzle, he realized the lines could resolve into outlines of letters, of a sort. Puffy. The first one was almost certainly a G. The next one could have been an X.

The next day the colors began.

Copyright © March 2010. Do not distribute or reproduce.