I’m wearing the button. Famous one from the 70s with the black block letters. “I AM NOT PAUL AVERY,” it says. I flash it by sticking my chest out at every person with shiny charming eyes. Because that’s what they say killers have. Charm. Charm like a flare gun up your ass. Just like this guy here strutting towards me in his sharp wool suit. I stick out my chest. You’re not getting me, you bastard!
After getting back from the lab in Minnesota, I don’t know who I can trust. The Zodiac Killer lives and he knows I’ve seen him. If ZK has found the ability to extend his life, maybe he thinks his nemesis, Paul Avery, has also found a way to keep the investigation going using a similar power. He’s clearly lost it, so anything’s possible. Maybe he thinks Paul Avery never really died in 2000 and that Paul is me. I am a journalist, in a sort of way.
When I turn left on Flatbush Ave., two people with their shirts off are screaming at each other from opposite edges of the sidewalk. I duck and go under their rainbow of spit. I just need to get to the bus stop in one piece. The Q is down and it’s the only way to make it to Atlantic to get into the city. Tonight, I am covering the debut show for my painter friend, J. Zakoor, at one of those small galleries in the East Village. I call him John.
The bus comes and it’s crowded. There’s a group of kids at the back who just learned how to curse and so they’re inserting “shit” and “fuck” in unnatural places. I look out the window. All the signs are buzzing yellow and blue and red. Hair shops. Bars. Weeping pillars standing guard at the fronts of banks. Everything inside each of these places it’s fluorescent and still. It’s all empty. The shops have spilled out into the streets and everyone in the streets is gouging and smoking and scraping.
I wonder how all these stores stay open. Why? Whole industries seem to be running for no one down here in Brooklyn. It’s become a giant movie set where all the actors have been on break for twenty years and now they just walk around in their costumes and do whatever to takes to survive. As the bus moves on, I see men in three-piece suits playing dice. I see ballerinas eating a dog, the slick gristle in their teeth. When we pass Doughnut Plant, warlord kids with painted faces dance around a crystal sculpture of Johnny Thunders. Around liposuction fountains of Neruda. Hey-ya-oh-oh!
“Glad you could make it,” John says when I finally walk through the door at Turn Gallery on 2nd Ave. and 1st Street. He’s a lot sturdier than most painters. He’s got a beard like a biker’s and he wears tinted glasses.
He starts to show me around. Ever since he won the scholarship, his work has really come together. The subjects of his portraits are all segmented and twisted up into abstract forms. People melt into amorphous distortions, becoming icons to fit in our icon-obsessed reality. It looks like it hurts.
“What’s this one called?” I ask pointing to a painting of a man in a suit and tie. He seems to be half-splicing into the wall of pink behind him.
“Untitled 19,” he says. Then his eyes dart to the sides to make sure no one is listening. “But I didn’t bring you here tonight to talk about my art,” he whispers. “Recently, I found something big.”
“Oh?”
“Come with me.”
In the back of the gallery, there is a small cluttered office with a bank of about twenty phones. I don’t have time to ask what they are for, because by the time I’m sitting down, John has placed a magazine in my lap. It’s the Christie’s catalogue.
“Page 26,” he says itching the back of his head.
I turn to the page and see a piece listed, an all-white canvas with only one symbol drawn in the center. The Zodiac Killer’s icon. Black cross inside a black circle.
“What the fuck?” I ask. “How did you? Did you know I’ve been worried about this guy?”
“I read your last article, yea. Then I started to notice things. Something strange about the recent Christie’s catalogs and the big-dollar art scene. It just doesn’t add up, the hype. A bunch of these guys are coming out of nowhere.”
“So. Couldn’t it be considered outsider art?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but then I noticed the price,” he taps his finger on the bottom of the page. “All these new artists on the scene have had no sales and are already going for over a million each. Flip the pages. Keep going.”
I do.
“See anything?” he asks. “Every one of these new artists going for big money all have that same symbol incorporated somewhere in the piece.”
I keep flipping and see bronze sculptures of lions with Zodiac Killer icons for eyes. I see renaissance-style paintings of naked Madonna’s with Zodiac Killer icons over the nipples. In every piece, the icon is branded somewhere.
John explains to me that all Christie’s art has now become a tax scheme for the rich. That’s not to say that the good stuff isn’t good, just that the more money valued to it, the more it’s likely some guy who owns sweatshops needed to buy it so he can keep all that sweaty bloody money. And, he gets a pretty rectangle to hang in his shitter.
“And what does this have to do with the Zodiac Killer?” My world seems to be getting a little too coincidental. Like everything is folding in on itself, all janky.
“You say you’re a journalist,” he says. “You figure it out.”
I go back home to concentrate, let the isolation give me a second to do it properly. I go over it. ZK and his cuttlefish experiments. The fake sets of industries. Icons and art and symbols and tax havens. Visions inside cracks in the sidewalk. Craziness. Things all seem to be connecting lately, but I can’t see exactly how. Maybe the cuttlefish hypnotized me back in Minnesota and I’m going crazy too. I take off my Paul Avery button. I look out the blinds.
The van that has been parked on the street for three days now is still there. Blacked out windows. Green light inside like hot mint.
And then my phone rings.
