You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  I reached out and smoothed a lock of hair away from his eyes. “Don’t rule anything out.”

  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully for a moment. He stood again. “Are you OK, Ma? Really? You’re booking an awful lot of time in this bedroom.”

  This, from the boy who’d spent most of his teen years barricaded down the hall, made me smile. “I’m OK,” I said. “I just need to gather my strength.”

  I must have drifted off again. I woke to an empty house. I remembered Dennis would be at his studio. The Vienna art handlers would arrive tomorrow morning to crate his creations. The glass panes of the ceiling would be removed and the crates lifted out by crane, trucked to a New Jersey cargo dock, fitted into containers, and, by ship, then train, arrive at a palace on the famed Ringstrasse where I imagined cherubs and angels hovering mutely on the gilded ceilings as Dennis’s steel beasts reared up below. Now I recalled him saying that he wanted to recruit the boys, that he’d pay them a few bucks if they’d help with readying the studio for the packing crew and their crane.

  I wandered the deserted rooms. Egg-encrusted dishes rose in teetering stacks in the sink. Socks were everywhere, shed and left behind like limp snake skins. A vague aroma of unemptied trash cans hung in the air. Or maybe it was me—I’d been wearing the same leggings and T-shirt for two days, and they were speckled with cracker crumbs and patches of spilled juice. Still, I couldn’t be bothered to change. I found myself a pair of shoes and shrugged on a coat.

  Under a malfunctioning streetlamp buzzing on and off at the corner I parked. Wind whispered down Monsignor Murphy Street, which was as empty as an inhospitable planet. But there in the cellar of the boarded-up row house, I could see a square of light. Twiz and Vincent were leading the regular Sunday-night muster. The door was unmanned, security was lax, the mood subdued, depressed, really, in the wake of Dmitri’s betrayal and his abscondence with their bail fund. I inched around the crowd to a spot in a far dark corner of the room, getting my bearings. As my eyes adjusted, I picked out some familiar faces, and some unfamiliar faces too. Despite the setbacks, it seemed, the Brigade was still gaining recruits, a few people who’d raised their heads and heard this particular call. Twiz began to talk to the group about her Brigade-sponsored after-school tutoring center, which had finally opened its doors. Though I tried to stay in the background, Vincent’s hog-like pit bulls found me, snuffling my clothes furiously, as if I were a buffet of snacks. Then the redheaded boy stepped up to lead a brainstorming session about protests to greet the various fascist leaders who’d attend the next UN general assembly. I pulled Twiz aside. I pressed the wad of cash into her hand. “For the schoolkids,” I said. She stared at the fat bundle with astonishment, then wrapped me in a fierce hug, her locks brushing my face with the aroma of cannabis and soap. Then she stepped back, tilted her head, and said, “You don’t look so good.”

  But just as she said this—BOOM. With a single sharp crack, the door flapped open, the dead bolt tearing through the wood frame, one hinge giving way. Everyone in the cellar swiveled toward the noise. From my vantage point at the far corner of the room, I glimpsed only an inky shifting shape, shuddering and bellowing, pouring through the doorway. Then, like mercury beading, it coalesced into figures in police battle gear, bodies thick with padding and pockets and guns raised. One person hung a bit behind them, a rotund little man in an NYPD windbreaker, brush-cut hair stiff on his head. With his crossed black eyes, Pizziali scanned the room.

  Pandemonium broke out, the padded figures barking and yelling “to your knees” and “hands behind your backs” and people falling to the ground, and a few screeched words of protest and general scrambling around. A small hand snapped tight around my forearm. Another hand shoved hard against my back, sending me stumbling through a doorway and into a little alcove, where I banged my knees against a set of steps. “Up,” a voice hissed, and I knew it was Twiz, and she was right behind me, I felt her body pressed against mine as I climbed, a feather of her hair on my cheek, and her arms reaching around me and suddenly I felt a rush of night air and the coal hatch at the back of the house opened up to the dim desecrated yard, and we tripped through it into the next yard and the next and the next, thrashing at tossing nets of winter vines and chain link, and then I stumbled over a large plastic object and landed with my face hard up against a face, jolly smile and laughing eyes faded, but still Santa.

  Twiz hauled me up again and we stood there for an instant, panting. She patted her pocket. “At least we have a bail fund now,” she said, and, in the strange urban glow from an overcast sky, I could see her grinning. I nodded, breathless, and I thought of Mariah and I thought of my green painting even now hanging in that vast vaunted white mausoleum and I thought of how the marks we make upset repose, how they ripple away into the universe, how a creative act always contains consequences, and how these are always beyond our imaginings. Then I stopped thinking because behind us the curtain of tangled undergrowth began to rustle and Twiz’s head whipped around and we both saw the same thing, a tall man, on the move, a lanky human form, crashing through the twigs. It hit me: they followed me here. The cops. I’d led them here. The thought made me want to wilt, bow at last to fate. I felt my knees buckling.

  But Twiz. She grabbed me by both arms, hoisted me halfway up the sagging remains of a garden shed and practically threw me down the other side into an alley. Run, she said, and she darted away so fast I knew I would never keep up. My shins were banged and throbbing, my head swirling. Soon I lost her in the gloom and I thought I could hear her footfalls ahead of me, but then I realized they were coming from behind me, rapid crisp smacks on the broken tarmac and gravel. Then, dead ahead at the end of the alley, I saw a beacon pulsing in the darkness. It was the streetlight on the fritz and there underneath it glimmered my car and there in my pocket were my keys and I raced for it, punching my key chain to set off the car’s loyal beep and flash and I clambered in and rammed the key into its slot, tires screeching and crunching and the car jumped forward and I drove blindly toward where I knew I had been heading all along.

  THE COBBLESTONES RUMBLED under the wheels of my car as I glided slowly to a stop. Double-parked in front of number 268.

  In my rib cage, my lungs struggled, like feral little things in a trap, a pair of panicking mongoose or fisher cats. Sweat slicked my face and neck.

  A man in a bathrobe and plaid pajama pants appeared inside the glass door, in the brightly lit entry. He stood there for a moment, grinning down at his phone, his jowls shaking in amusement. At last he descended the front steps, dragging a log-like dog on a leash. I caught the door before it closed.

  Up the endless flights of stairs. My mind racing, the dizziness tugging against the climb, my body fighting back. Fighting all the way to the top. Fifth floor.

  I knock at the door.

  You? she says. I can’t deal with you now.

  Beyond her, I see him on the balcony.

  I see him out there, hunched on the bench with the portfolio, the lighter.

  He’s going to destroy your work, I say. And himself. And you, I say.

  I push past her.

  I feel her breath, ice cold, on my cheek. Wait, what did you say?

  Then there I am, out on the balcony. The five stories yawning under my feet. I’m fighting the vertigo. He gapes at me, confused.

  Please, I say, reaching for the envelope and meeting his gaze. Please come back inside.

  Who are you, he says.

  Recognition in his eyes. You? he whispers.

  I grip the portfolio. The envelope is in my hands.

  What happens can’t happen, I say.

  She stands just inside the balcony doorway, a shivery form against the light, edges blurred.

  He wanted to destroy my work, she says.

  He’s lost, I say. I hold the envelope out to her. Take it.

  Fury has turned her face into a mask. Her eyes are ignited, roiling dark to blazing to dark again.

  I’m not sure what he meant
to do, I say.

  I look over my shoulder at him. Tears soaking his face.

  It’s good, this life, she says. A half-question in her voice.

  Yes.

  And the work. Hanging there in the museum.

  So you saw.

  It’s good.

  Yes?

  Volition gathering, flashing across her face like heat lightning.

  Worth everything, she says.

  I feel the pure will, surging from the center of her being, toward me. I feel love surging from me, toward her, the same. I move closer, into the bright square where she wavers. I reach to take her in my arms and hold her forever. To keep her from the dark outside and below.

  She eludes me. I grab for her, but I am weak, and she is strong, and she pushes me away, then I’m on the floor, she has actually pushed me down. I see her barreling toward the balcony, where he stands, a dark-on-darker shape, watching us.

  She hurls herself at him, he is pedaling his feet backward and she clings to him and they collapse in a tight embrace onto the old railing and it buckles with an air-rending crack, I think I see her turn her head, her eyes meet mine, our gazes lock as the whole thing gives way and they are flying out into the night. They are gone. Both gone.

  The mailbox there on the street corner. Deep blue and solid, the last solid landmark on earth. Just steps away.

  A man, calling my name.

  The sense of something shattered. The order of the universe.

  That’s what I can recall. The doctors are in the hall. Falling back into black now. I will forget it all.

  12/12/12/12

  ABBY, MAY 3, 2016

  Turn the page so that the red circle is on the left.

  If we stare for half a minute at the red circle, focusing continually on the marked center, and then focus on the white center, we do not see white. The color we see there is the afterimage of red.

  Dr. Tristane Kazemy, DECEMBER 1, 2016

  The Abigail Willard of her imagination, crafted from bits and pieces and clues from the file, was nothing like the flesh-and-blood being in front of her, haloed in the winter light that poured through great glass windows on the tenth floor of Mount Sinai Hospital.

  Tristane had access to her for only a few minutes this first visit, and only with a team of her other doctors in the room. The woman was still in recovery, even, months later, a trip from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side was enough to tax her. Sitting amid the assembled physicians for just a short while, there in the sparkling examination room, amid the sunbeams, she appeared almost translucent. In fact, looking at her, Tristane thought, she is barely flesh and blood.

  But perhaps, when one has had an earthquake at the center of one’s existence, when one’s every notion about life is shaken and tossed, one looks like this. Evanescent. Like a being who has come to exist in the spaces between cells, rather than in the cells themselves.

  ABBY, JULY 24, 2016

  Turn the page so that the bright pink rectangle is at the left.

  It looks as if each of the outer colors are moving underneath the middle color and turning up at the other end—penetrating, or better, intersecting each other very softly.

  PERSONAL WORK LOG: Garrett L. Shuttlesworth, December 2, 2016

  * * *

  New York City is full of ghosts. I get that. I felt it this morning, myself, in the taxi from my hotel on East Twenty-Eighth Street to the meeting uptown on Lexington. For anyone who’s ever lived here, this place is a haunted battlefield. Your marriage died here, or your innocence, or your dreams. Maybe your great-grandfather died here, or maybe your youth did.

  Spectral, is what the interesting Dr. Kazemy, the forensic neurologist from Montreal, said about Abigail Willard today. She said she looked a bit spectral. It was the first convening of Jameson’s investigators, in a conference room at the Marriott East Side. Jameson’s choice, an odd one, given what’s in the woman’s journals, but okay, the whole atmosphere was odd. So we sat around one end of a ludicrously long table, the three of us—Dr. Kazemy, who yesterday examined our story’s central player at the hospital, and Jameson Leverett, the New York City detective, my long-ago freshman roommate, who recruited us for this inquiry and insisted on the black-box email and the confidentiality docs, which were spread on the table for signing when we arrived. Truly, odd.

  What’s driving all this? We know from the Willard diaries about the sexual relationship. The entanglement. Whether he cared for her, I can’t say. He was using her, that much seems certain, to bust a crime gang and earn his stripes. Which isn’t a shocker. Back in our Syracuse days, he was a dog. An operator. But then later in life he seemed to mellow. The wife and kids. So who the hell knows.

  I hadn’t seen him in years, and when he walked into the conference room, I was surprised to see how he’s aged. He was always a good-looking guy, but the last year took a toll on him, maybe. He has a kind of hollowness in his face. He doesn’t grin easily like he once did. I was expecting to see him strutting around in the navy blue uniform, but of course he’s way too high-powered for that now. Chief of Detectives.

  Anyhow, I told Jameson and Dr. Kazemy that I’m not going to let stand the notion that Abigail Willard imagined it all. Hallucinations of a diseased brain, or an overtaxed mind.

  That’s simply not a complete enough explanation. First, because of the contradictory evidence, and second, and much more crucially, because I think this case could be the key to everything.

  Then I tried to explain the theory of everything. I think it went over their heads.

  ABBY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2016

  Eyes kind of tarnished bronze, tawny skin. A handsome face, but the mouth is too grim.

  This police detective who comes around to question me. We’ve been over and over 2015. I just don’t remember that much, from about January on. A few things. I tell him about how Benjamin dropped a basketball down the stairs and cracked a window, thinking it will make him laugh.

  But he rarely laughs. His eyes have a deep, lovely color, but they look very distressed.

  December 3, 2016

  * * *

  From: J.Leverett@deepxmail.com

  To: Tristane.Kazemy@montrealneuro.ca, GarrettShuttlesworth@physics.humboldtstate.edu

  Thanks for meeting yesterday. In a case loaded with so much ambiguity, we will try to stay grounded in the known facts. To set a baseline for discussions this week:

  Abigail Willard’s behavior began to change in January 2015.

  By August 2015, Mrs. Willard was participating in the violent protests of a Brooklyn-based antifascist group, a possible domestic terror cell.

  In September 2015, this antifa group mounted a street protest outside the home of the artist Mariah Glücksburg. An incendiary device was thrown, triggering a chemical explosion that resulted in the death of Ms. Glücksburg. Dennis Willard, spouse of Abigail, suffered minor injuries. Abigail and Pete Willard took part in the protest, as documented by security footage and eyewitness accounts.

  Police continue to investigate the connections between the protest, the fatality, and the theft of valuable artworks from the residence. With the help of Interpol, Brooklyn Criminal Enterprise division succeeded in apprehending Milo Petimezas, his parents Nikolas and Ariana Petimezas, the juvenile Dmitri, all persons of interest, found in hiding on December 14, 2015, in the Peloponnesian region of southwestern Greece. They were in possession of the stolen artworks along with illegal assault weapons and other items of contraband.

  On the night of November 29, 2015, Abigail Willard was delivered by an unnamed police detective to the emergency room at the NYU Bellevue hospital in downtown Manhattan. Medical records indicate that at the time of admission, Mrs. Willard was in a debilitated state, vomiting, apparently suffering shock and seizures. Mrs. Willard lost consciousness while in an examining room, after waiting 3 hours to be seen.

  Doctors determined she was in the midst of a traumatic brain event, possibly a bleed. They undertook emergency surgery to investigate and remo
ve any hemorrhage. As the patient lapsed into critical condition, doctors excised a small area of her brain. A tumor or other abnormality was suspected but not, as of yet, definitively located in the removed brain tissue.

  As a result of the trauma of the surgery, Mrs. Willard fell into a coma, which lasted 95 days.

  The final entry of her 2015 journal concerns an accident at 268 West 12th Street in Manhattan. A balcony collapse.

  There is a record of a balcony collapse. It occurred at that location 24 years ago, on the night of November 29, 1991.

  In Mrs. Willard’s final journal entry, she describes seeing two victims fall that night: a young man, Eli Hammond; and a young woman, known to her as A.

  City records contain note of the death of Eli Hammond, age 24, in the 1991 incident.

  Abigail Willard, age 22, holder of sublease on the apartment, escaped death but suffered internal injuries from the fall.

  Police logged a call from the same apartment on the night of November 29, 2015. Tanya Novakovski, a 26-year-old digital marketing manager, reported that a female intruder, in a state of some agitation, had gained access to the apartment. Ms. Novakovski locked herself in her bedroom. She added that she believed the woman had appeared at apartment 5B one other time, ringing the buzzer very early one morning. By the time the police arrived, the suspect was gone.

  Next meeting is tomorrow, 2 p.m. Same place.

  Dr. Tristane Kazemy, DECEMBER 5, 2016

  She at last met Abigail Willard one-on-one, again in an examination room in the Mount Sinai neurology department, but this one was cramped and windowless, tucked along a back hallway. The woman sat there alone, a blue gown tied loosely around her neck, her salt-white arms and legs goose-pimpled in the fluorescent light. She clutched a book in her lap. A bible perhaps? Christians were so prevalent and so observant in the USA, after all. But then she thought about the Willard journals, the episodes of infidelity and of course the radical activism. Not the actions of a Bible clutcher. Though of course one should never presume. When it was time for the examination to begin, she asked, May I set that down for you? She stole a peek at the cover: Interaction of Color by Josef Albers.