She steers them toward the service alley to the right of the factory’s main entrance, and when they swing around the corner and come to a stop in the mouth of the alleyway, Wylie finds it filled with the entire crew of child artists. There must be a dozen or more of them, ranging in age from maybe five years up through the late teens. They’ve erected a makeshift staging against the side wall of the Bardo, a monstrosity of fruit crates and fence posts, garbage tins and stacking pallets and broken street signs. The kids have fashioned the staging into platforms of varying heights, all of it connected with baling wire to the precarious fire escape.
There are children perched at every level, each equipped with a tin can of paint and some form of brush. They’re collaborating on a mural of some sort, an enormous tableau, a picture that when finished will cover the entire side of the building, transforming the sagging red brick into a hyperreal scene that appears to be constantly dripping. The essence of the mural is already roughed out in white and blue chalk lines and Kroger’s little slaves have begun filling in the outline with a variety of colors.
Mrs. Bloch turns her head from the building to Wylie.
“Du ahr laikink?” the voice seeming to edge close to threatening.
“Shouldn’t they be sleeping?” Wylie says.
Without moving the rest of her squat little body, the crone’s left arm comes up and a finger points out accusingly toward the mural in progress.
“Du laik der piktr?” she asks.
Wylie just nods and turns away from the pancake tumors to study the collaboration. And is horrified as it all comes together for her.
“Eet ist der kuvr,” Mrs. B says.
“The cover?” Wylie repeats.
“Uf der ferst issu.”
“Issue?” as she watches a child of perhaps eight years, kneeling on the top stair of a waggling extension ladder, filling in the pupils of the painting’s central figure. “I don’t understand.”
“Uf der neu buk,” Mrs. Bloch tries to explain. “Der neu komik. Der ferst issu. Eet vill bie vert der muni sem dei. Vot ist der verd?” straining, seemingly in pain with the rigors of pronunciation, “Col-lect-ors i-tem?”
Though Wylie has no direct involvement in the workings of Kroger’s publishing business, she hasn’t heard of any new projects being launched.
“There’s a new title?” she asks.
Mrs. Bloch nods.
“Another Menlo knockoff?”
“Dis ist aen urij’nul.”
Wylie is stunned.
“Mr. Kroger commissioned an original?”
Mrs. Bloch shakes her head no furiously. Her voice loudens up and she shouts, “Krueger haez nicht tu du vit dis!” Then she immediately gains back some control, lowers her voice and adds, “Aend Krueger ees naht hiz neim.”
The children all stop painting for a second and look down to the alley until Mrs. B makes a hand gesture and they return to work.
“Der piktr bilenks tu der kinder. Der chilten.”
Wylie finds this unlikely at best.
“The children did this? On their own?”
“Eet ees beisd an der ould mithus. Bet dei hev meid eet deir oun.”
Wylie stares at Mrs. Bloch, then turns and stares at the children working together perfectly like bees, fully synchronized, each concentrated on his or her own small task but conscious of and tied into all the work proceeding around them. She takes a step backward and tries to get a new angle on the mural. The wall is illuminated by the moon and the dim glow of one yellow street-lamp.
The painting is given a strange aura not only by the lighting but also by the children moving here and there in front of it, always some children blocking some section of the picture with their bodies. It’s a bit like trying to watch a movie with a swarm of insects hopping along the screen. Adding to the discomfort is the fact that half of the mural is done up in vibrant paint and half of it is still living in the ghost-lines of the chalk marks. As if part of the scene is forever fading even as the rest is being born.
But none of this obscures the subject matter. The mural is a depiction of a heinous act of barbarism, an inventive if sickening display of atrocity. One end of the brick wall sports a machine of some sort. It’s a worrisome apparatus, big and bulky and outfitted with engines and tubing and chrome valves. The artists have managed to present the machine as if it were in motion. It’s spewing gusts of steam and one gets the impression that it’s emitting a loud and grinding noise. But the focal point of the machine is the aperture at its front end, the mouth of the device. This portal is enormous, stretching out as wide as the body of the entire monstrosity. And the interior has been intricately rendered with the precision of an old-world draftsman, showing two huge rollers, two spinning drums fitted on axles and studded with cutting blades and hooks. The machine resembles a tree shredder, but a tree shredder as envisioned in the nightmares of a sadistic and maybe insane engineer.
Spreading out from either side of the shredding machine and eventually forming a large circle that runs the length of the entire wall, the children have drawn a net of wire fencing, a combination of barbed cattle wire and the cyclone webbing used around construction sites. And massed within the fencing the children have placed themselves. There are thirteen self-portraits, each done in a different style and yet all of them sharing the same posture — cowering in a crouch on the ground, squatting in place with arms raised in terror and attempting, futilely, to ward off an approaching danger.
But the showpiece of the entire mural, the eye magnet, the point of the piece, is not the shredding machine and not the fencing and not even the children’s self-portraits. The thing that demands the witness’s attention is the man shown standing on top of the shredder, drawn and painted in larger-than-life scale, made into a superfigure. übermensch. He must be the owner and operator of the awful machine. Perhaps the designer and manufacturer.
Not quite cartoonish and yet not completely realistic, the image is drawn out of proportion to the imprisoned and cowering children. The man’s head is made huge beneath a military-like cap. His body is infinitely muscled beneath a generic but sharply pressed uniform. And his face is that of August Kroger. The children couldn’t have created a more perfect likeness if they’d used a camera.
But it is Kroger as icon. Kroger as myth figure, elevated to a status where he is immune to death and the forgetting of history. It is Kroger depicted in the same manner that Wylie has seen Stalin and Mao and certain fanatical religious leaders depicted, as a kind of semimortal god, part man and part force of nature. Someone who could alter the course of the world a degree or two.
Wylie is looking at a mural in which these prodigies have imagined their own execution by industrial evisceration at the hands of their slaver and boss. And she wants to pull one of them down from their perch and ask why she has done this. Because there is something both more and less than metaphorical about this work of art. Even in its most expressionistic excess, there is something paradoxically mimetic at the heart of this painting. As if the children were working on a billboard rather than a brick canvas, something with a crude and immediate purpose. An advertisement rather than an interpretation of their deepest communal fears and hatreds.
And all at once Wylie is filled with a resentment that’s building fast toward a simple anger.
“You told them to paint this, didn’t you?” she says to Mrs. Bloch.
“Eet ist deir—”
“Bullshit,” Wylie says. “You told them to paint this thing. You’re a goddamn pornographer.”
“Der laibrerien ist anoit?”—a smile breaking underneath the tumors.
“You kept them up all night to make this thing.”