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Marie is already dreaming of the shower she’ll take when she gets home. She supports anti-graffiti measures in theory, but everything about this is terrible. Their equipment is substandard, the paint fumes are probably carcinogenic, and the overalls they’ve been forced to wear make her feel like— well, like some common criminal. They might as well be an orange jumpsuit. Her partner, a scrawny twenty-year-old thug with a beanie hat pulled down over his ears, is irritatingly unfazed, probably because he refuses to pay attention to any one thing for more than a few moments at a time. In fact, the absolute indignity of the situation troubles him less than the quality of the graffiti they’re covering up in this miserable inner-city underpass.
“Who’d want to paint stuff like this in the first place?” Jesse complains, dragging the sponge roller up and down the concrete. “We should be doing, like, graffiti improval…”
“I don’t think that’s a word.”
“…put something better on top of these crappy old tags…” he continues, gesturing at some imaginary artwork he’d like to sketch out on the wall. “Yo, whatever happened to originality? If I was going to get my ass busted for tagging a place up, I’d put some effort into it.”
“You know, it looks like your ass is already busted,” Marie says, after taking a deep breath and counting to ten, “so maybe you could put that effort into what we’re meant to be doing right now.”
Jesse’s not listening.
“You could paint a whole bunch of, like, superheroes right here… and the other wall could be the monsters they’re fighting.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like Captain America versus Godzilla.”
“You should write in to the county and suggest that.”
“This place is like something out of Half-Life 2, yo. They shoulda given us crowbars. You ever played Half-Life 2?”
“I don’t believe I know what that is.”
“It’s got some bomb-ass physics,” Jesse comments, thirty seconds of scrubbing later. “For its time, anyhow. The zombies — well, they’re not actually zombies, it’s sort of a parasitic-type thing… least, that’s what my friend keeps telling me, but he’s one of those dudes who gets all uptight about video games, and I’m like, same difference, man. Whatever.”
“So Half-Life 2 is a video game,” Marie clarifies, “where the object is to fight zombies with a crowbar.”
“Yeah,” says Jesse, completely straight-faced.
By the time he starts swinging an imaginary crowbar and accidentally sends paint spattering across Marie’s overalls, she’s so irritated that she’s reduced to flicking her paintbrush at him. He just laughs.