The racist graffiti no longer dominated downtown, though I did see some, with half of it partially painted over or altered. Many of the people who had lived and thrived in Brockton Bay had made their way here, after all. An attempt had been made to use wall space, to give the tenements-and-factories color when mirrored windows on skycrapers didn’t steal it from the sky or water. Murals now decorated many of the walls and building fronts, no doubt an attempt to leave less open wall space for the gang tags and symbols. Animals and symbols of humanity like clasped hands covered residential areas. Green trees, branches, and lush mountains painted almost ironically on the sides of factories and power plants.

There were places that mirrored home, in layout and the buildings that had been placed. The area that had been the Towers at the southwest corner of the city was still the Towers. Downtown was still where Downtown had been. A Lord Street stabbed north-to-south through the settlement. Despite the attempts, it wasn’t home. It came from something different.

Such was the counterpoint: in attempting to paint a picture of home, we might distort or create a caricature of that picture. If we rushed it or forced it, we risked making some of the same fundamental mistakes we’d made before, building on cracked foundations.

Seeing the murals, the directions I’d received started to make sense. The path was byzantine. Go the way the wolf and his cubs are looking. A wolf and three cubs that looked like they were made of white smoke were painted on a concrete wall. They stood facing one way, but their heads were looking back.

Walk beneath the leaping rabbit. A rabbit decorated an arch at the edge of a children’s park. The park felt small and lonely amid larger, taller buildings, partially fenced in, with room for two swings, a slide, a sandbox and one basketball half-court that would have to be vacated if a car came through to use the parking garage or if the dump truck came for the dumpster at the back of a building.

Follow the snake.

If I hadn’t known it was a snake, I might not have realized what it was. It was sectioned off, the skeleton of a winding serpent with each vertebrae several feet from the other. Three white pieces along one wall, a white-painted drain cover, then more segments on the wall opposite.

The painted lines of a crosswalk took me across the street. I followed more segments of the snake to reach one of the larger apartment complexes, four identical L-shaped buildings framing a plaza. The bottom floors of the buildings and the lowest floors along the inside of each ‘L’ had some basic stores.