You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  Missing a piece.

  June 13, 2016

  * * *

  From: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com

  To: GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu

  G, police inquiry was made. Museum staff reported that the Pollock work, One: Number 31, 1950, was cleaned and restored in 1998. Restorers definitely found pieces missing, other deterioration. Apparently the guy didn’t really know what he was doing, and he splattered with the wrong kind of paint. It was never meant to stick around forever.

  ABBY, JUNE 17, 2015

  I drove slowly, creeping along Monsignor Murphy Street, an obscure rhomboid angling through the northeastern reach of the borough. Difficult, these days, in Brooklyn, to find a spot disreputable enough for a meeting of antifa soldiers, but this neighborhood retained a whiff of bad old days, of undaunted rats and splintered plywood and abandonment. House numbers were sparse. I parked, then walked up and down the street. Really, there was just one intact row house, listing slightly to one side, missing some of its asphalt siding. Beneath the stoop, on the door to what one might have called the garden apartment, if one could imagine a garden here, I saw a red spray-painted slogan: NO PASARÁN.

  Stood there for a while. Thinking of my Pete, whom I had just dropped at an endodonist in Ridgewood. He was having a root canal, poor love. Another parental failing: we’d burdened him with weak enamel.

  Watched ants charge in and out of tiny hills in the sidewalk cracks. Far down the block, a trio of girls jumped rope, and I could just pick up snippets of their chants—nickel, pickle, kicks, tricks—and the smacking of the rope on cement.

  Finally, I gathered my nerve. I knocked, waited, then pounded.

  Tap, tap. Kicks, tricks. Then the door cracked. “Yeah?”

  “I’m looking for Dmitri,” I ventured. What was I so nervous about? These were children. I could hear pubescent tremoring in this voice from behind the battered door as it said, “Are you his mom or what?” It opened just a sliver more. I could see a squinting eye, a zitty forehead. “Anyway you can’t come in here.”

  “Do I look like a fascist?” I demanded.

  The eye scanned me. “You def don’t look like a soldier,” he said. “This is a battalion muster.”

  But then I heard words behind him, the door opened wide, and out popped Dmitri. As he stepped from the dark arch of the cellar entry, I was struck again by his elfin qualities, how he looked like a sprite springing from the heart of hollowed oak in a fairy wood, an impression furthered by his black wool stocking cap, cuffed across his brow and tapering into a point with a fat red pom-pom at its tip.

  “Abby!” he exclaimed. He grabbed my hand, pumped it, and urged me inside. “Come in, sorry about Babywipes—we call him that because, well, he is fundamentally opposed to public water systems—he’s just doing his job.” The boy scowled at both of us and slammed the door behind us. At first what hit me was the smell, truly overpowering, not just the smell of Babywipes, but also the funk of damp earth, the loamy Brooklyn underlayer I knew from my own basement at home, mixed with the aroma of human closeness. There must have been twenty-five people crammed into the low-ceilinged space. They collectively frowned at me. Except for the three large pit-bullish mutts, sleek urban swines accessorized with jaunty neck bandannas—they grinned at me, with malevolent enthusiasm.

  “She’s an ally,” Dmitri announced. “Pete’s mother.”

  “I can vouch for her.” This from Twiz. She was wearing a tank top that bared tropical flowers and revolutionary slogans inking up her arms.

  “The second I saw her standing at the door, I realized—she can contribute,” said Dmitri. “She’s an artist.”

  Fucking bourgeoisie, someone yelped from the back.

  “Hold up,” said a massive man whose bald pate was covered with tattooed tiger stripes. “We live in a visual culture, right? And have you seen our flyers? No offense”—here he turned to a kid with a halo of curly red hair—“but she could give us a better look.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Vincent,” said Twiz. She started talking about flyers, posters, stickers, and temporary tattoos for her after-school kids, banners, and I stood there, listening. I had come here to tell Dmitri to stay away from my family. To threaten to alert the crew if they didn’t steer clear of Pete. But I didn’t say any of that. I listened. When she stopped, they all looked expectantly at me. “I’m just worried about my kid,” I said, my voice choked. “I’m not here for any other reason than that. Now, Dmitri, please show me the way out of here.”

  Back at the endodontist’s office, I sat by the burbling turtle tank, blindly paging through a magazine called FamilyFun. That crowded cellar is where Pete wanted to be. Acting on hooligan-like, misguided impulses, certainly, running with people who espouse violence, or at the very least thuggishness. But acting, committing, diving in. And since this new direction of his had come to light, Dennis and I had made our objections clear, in many talks and arguments, pleading and thundering. But we hadn’t listened much. And now I wondered if our boy, through his stubborn silent actions, was pleading with us—drowned in our daily duties and our private dilemmas—to fucking pay attention to the bigger picture.

  ABBY, JUNE 19, 2015

  Dennis clearly found some sense of order and solace in packing lunches. Four days before the school year ended, in the kitchen in our all-beige room in the all-suites hotel, he slapped cold cuts onto white bread, and packed the sandwiches into bags along with sacks of cheese curls and bright pink wafer cookies. Dennis was a junk-food devotee, and the boys followed in his footsteps. I thought all of them ate horribly, but this was another battle I no longer chose to fight. Especially not at the moment, in the all-beige all-suites hotel.

  But after they’d cleared out and I was dressing for work, I saw that Dennis had left behind the lunch he’d packed for himself. I had no early meetings, so I decided to detour through Bushwick to deliver it.

  I hadn’t yet made it to the studio. In the tough slog since the house burned, the plates of our marriage had shifted again. Grief had risen up like magma, pushing us further apart. And, thinking of his studio, I also felt scouring envy, that he had found himself a place to make his work and was busily prepping for Vienna, while I was still spending my days in my skyscraper cubicle, and my easel still stood forlorn in the corner of our water-damaged bedroom, in the house where all my paintings had been destroyed.

  His studio was on the second floor, above a construction company’s storage area, where pallets of bricks and concrete blocks lay scattered around, and old discarded doors and windows leaned against the walls. At the back of the space, a dark passageway ended at a staircase, at the top a rusting toilet and a blank black door. Dennis’s name was written on a bit of painter’s tape. I could hear the crackling of the arc welder and see its flare, in a strip of quivering brilliance under the door.

  I knocked. Then a thought: Didn’t I fear that I might find some other person there, if I came this way, unannounced?

  He opened it with his hands still in bulky gloves, lifting the battered visor of his welding helmet to reveal his face shining with perspiration. He broke into a smile when he saw me there with his lunch bag.

  “I know you aren’t happy if you skip a meal,” I said. He led me into the space, about the size of a two-car garage, with a glass ceiling, half tarred over. A dozen pieces ranged around the space, tall swerving forms. They were new, aligned with his previous works but grislier, somehow. Writhing shapes with torn edges and burned spots. At the room’s center, rising up like a breaching whale, stood the largest sculpture, bristling with dozens of fins like knife blades, a contorted maw at its top, gaping open just beneath the skylights, as if it yearned to shatter them in its jaws.

  “That’s a bit terrifying,” I said.

  “Intended effect,” he nodded.

  “What does Mariah think of it?” I asked him.

  He frowned, pulled off his welding paws, then picked up a toothed steel disc—a blade for his circular saw—a
nd a pair of pliers. He began to bend its points. He had always manipulated his tools this way, to avoid straight cuts, to make every edge jagged and irregular.

  “You have not been yourself all year,” he said.

  “I just want to know.”

  He grimaced over his work, the powerful tendons of his forearms moving under his sun-browned skin, the beginnings of his summer tan, he’d been riding the waves without a wet suit since Mother’s Day. His eyelashes turned down, blond turning white.

  “I don’t know how we got here,” he said.

  “We capitulated.”

  “Maybe.”

  I ran a finger along a razor-like fin of the central monster, sharp enough to slice skin with gentle pressure. “Do you even see me anymore?” I turned to him. “Maybe I’m becoming invisible.” My voice cracked.

  “Abby,” he said, reaching for my hand. I pulled it away.

  “Can you remember who I used to be? The experience junkie?”

  He shook his head. “You may have been a junkie, but some of those experiences you had, they fucked you up. And there are many you didn’t tell me about too. I’m certain. You were like a shipwreck survivor, when we first met. Like you’d washed ashore without knowing from where.”

  “But I knew where I was headed. I was ambitious. Wasn’t I?”

  “Yeah, you were,” he said. “And so fucking good. Better than anyone.” He rubbed his jaw for a moment, staring at the floor. “So maybe yes, we capitulated.” He inserted the blade into the yellow handsaw. “I remember how we wanted to make something new. Instead we just made the same thing everyone else does. House, kids.”

  “Our kids are good, though,” I said.

  “Our kids are great.” He rummaged around in a box, extracted a pair of goggles. He turned to me, gently brushed my hair back and slipped them over my head. “I’m going to cut.” His eyes were inches from mine. Lit up leaves pierced by sunlight. “Are you going to leave me?” he said.

  “I guess I’ve been seeing someone too,” I said. “A bit.”

  He backed away, pulled his goggles down, the plastic scratched and blasted. His eyes disappeared behind whiteness.

  “Who,” he said.

  “Someone who came along.”

  He picked up his saw. Walked over to the breaching whale. Paused before it, looking up toward the skylights for a long moment. Then he pulled the switch to set the thing spinning, whining, and reached up and cut his creation in half, straight across its narrow middle, in one fluid motion. He hardly even looked at it as the top half twisted, pivoting on its last attachment point, then, just missing him, crashed to the floor.

  Dr. Tristane Kazemy, JUNE 30, 2016

  Le midi. The precise middle of the day, and on this day, the precise middle of the year. She marked this moment with a lunchtime run through the middle of Parque Mont Royal, her customary place, but rather than following the circuitous path to the pinnacle, she raced up a steep stairway through the woods, climbing skyward like the hands of a clock at the precise moment of le midi. Near the summit overlook, she flopped, winded, sweat-soaked, on a patch of lush summer grass. She stretched herself out flat, allowing the always-present breezes of this high place to cool her skin.

  She had a notion. The anomaly could have appeared on the site of a previous head injury—the late effect of an earlier insult. Perhaps that damaged tissue had morphed over time in unusual ways. She would have to ask the New York detective if he could unearth any additional medical records, from earlier than 2015.

  At the very least, the records might explain Mrs. Willard’s fog. Dissociative amnesia, a common aftereffect of trauma. And certainly, it was clear from her journals, trauma was part of her story.

  At the Club Sportif, near campus, she showered and changed back into her work clothes. By 13:00 she was again in her cramped office. Instantly she saw: someone had been there. A file had been opened. The scan—the essential scan of the essential slice of Abigail Willard’s brain—had been left exposed on the screen.

  She jumped up and peered down the hallway. Not a person in sight. But she knew. Returning to her desk, she could smell it. Suspended in odorant molecules in the airless cubbyhole: gin and unpleasantly musky cologne. The odor of the odious lab director. Eau du Laurin.

  7/7/7/7

  ABBY, JULY 1, 2015

  Layer cakes of T-shirts. It is a leitmotif, I thought, as I watched them fill their suitcases.

  My sons smashed the neat cakes. They crammed the folded tees into their bags, wedging them around their anti-boredom weaponry, plastic players of music and games and snarls of cords—plus assigned summer reading, Salinger stories for Benjamin, Beloved for Pete, and the jars of multivitamins I’d insisted they take along, since I knew very well what Dennis’s mother would be serving. Canned fruit cocktail, frozen fish sticks, and powdered lemonade. The thrifty convenience foods Marlene Willard had discovered as a young wife at the long-gone base PX. She’d raised five robust boys on the stuff and stuck with what worked.

  At the hotel the week before, Dennis pulled me out into the hallway. “We all need a breather,” he said. He wanted to take Pete and Benjamin to Tustin for a while. The tickets were booked. I was hardly in a position to disagree. Still, I felt like he’d just opened my chest and hurled acid over my heart. Yes, Dennis and I needed time away from each other, but I didn’t want the family torn apart. I hated the idea of being away from my boys, the sensory cyclone of them, their footfalls and barking laughs, the warmth of their hurried hugs. These utterly real beings. Without them, I’d be left with the ghosts.

  Dennis was still talking, softly, sadly. “Ben can go to surf lessons, and Pete, well . . . Maybe he’ll surf too.”

  “Pete won’t surf,” I said.

  “I need to get my head straight,” he said. “You do too.”

  A straight head. This had been repeatedly proposed. Did such a thing even exist? Was this a sensible aspiration?

  He and I embraced. Because what else was there to do.

  “I wish I understood what’s going on,” he said.

  “It’s like we woke up from a long sleep,” I said, pulling back to meet his overcast gaze. “And I’ve realized I’m strapped down, restrained. I woke up fighting and I’m still fighting. I want to stop, but I can’t seem to.” The words were spilling fast from my mouth now. “And I’ve been seeing myself.”

  He nodded. “I’ve been giving myself a hard look too. And I’m determined, we’re going to get past this,” he said. He placed his hands on my head, their weight like a heavy crown. He slid them slowly down, smoothing my hair.

  “No, I’ve been seeing myself, really.”

  He nodded, serious, sympathetic. “Time,” he said. “Just give yourself some time.”

  “Yes,” I sighed. “Time.”

  “And medical marijuana, maybe,” he said, releasing me with a last, reluctant, soft brush of his fingers at the base of my neck. “Since I’m going to be in Cali.”

  “I’ll stick with reality TV,” I said. “This room gets so many channels.”

  So the three of them packed up and fled, as if in advance of a storm or contagion. Benjamin did look as if he were evacuating from his Brooklyn teenhood, with his Mets and Nets baseball caps tethered outside his bulging backpack, two pairs of headphones around his neck, and his Coney Island hoodie pulled up over his head.

  After they’d gone, I sat in the silent ransacked room, again looking out over the endless static of the borough, bricks of light and dark that made no sense to my eye. Only one thing in this universe I cared to do. I drove to the burned house, to the master bedroom, where it all stood, a bit dirtied by the flames and the deluge, but ready for me. My easel. My tubes of paint, my brushes. I stood in the ruins and got to work.

  ABBY, JULY 2, 2015

  I painted for hours, fell asleep on the sooty sofa downstairs, and awoke remembering that I had a job. It now seemed like a holdover from a distant time. Without the ballast of my marriage, our home, what was I still
doing, I wondered, fiddling with the outlines of an esophagus for the packaging of sore-throat spray? It didn’t make much sense, but the bills continued to arrive through the mail slot, landing in the littered entry. Viennarte or not, Dennis wasn’t earning right now. Someone had to pay.

  So, Abby. Wear your yoke and be grateful for its sustaining weight. Without it, you might blow away.

  Through a cool summer morning, I returned to the hotel, showered off the soot, swept up in a hopeful spirit—just keep moving, Abby, answers will come! It was still early. I decided to walk to work across the great arc of the bridge.

  Bands of fog rose from the river and rested atop the towers like the bushy eyebrows of an old man. They reminded me of Bremer, my teacher, and, as I walked, I thought about him standing in front of my work in class, his belly drooping over his cracked leather belt, hands stuffed in the front pockets of a pair of voluminous brown tweed trousers. I recalled how his unlit cigarette bobbed in his mouth as he nodded at me and said, Best in show, Mrs. Willard. Very promising indeed.

  The memory made me smile. I felt another surge of optimism. Maybe it was all going to be okay. The boys would soak up some Western sea and sun. Pete might shake loose this dark urgency that had overtaken him. Dennis and I could start a new phase, after our adventuring. A second marriage, of sorts. We’d all come back together later in the summer, rested and ready to rebuild.

  Passing directly under the bridge’s old-man brows, I stopped short.

  An arm’s length away, leaning against the guardrail.

  Have you seen him? she asks. She stands on her tiptoes, scans the walkway behind me. I’ve been waiting a long time.

  I follow her gaze, glancing over my shoulder, but all I see is the bridge arcing away, toward a Brooklyn obscured by fog. Then I remember. He would run, and I liked to meet him here on the bridge, and tag along for the last mile, the downhill stretch.

  She has gathered her hair in a thick bunch on one side, an urban milkmaid. She reaches out and takes my hand. Her grip is cool and tight, and I feel the fine little bones, I know each one.