Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  Oliver seemed torn between laughing and rolling his eyes. Laughing won out in the end. “You seriously need some help, my love.”

  Jacob shrugged. “I don’t want to know anyone who doesn’t.”

  They shared one last embrace of the old kind.

  JANUARY

  The year had passed, and Jacob went to Manhattan and walked into a synagogue. He took a yarmulke from the wicker basket. He put it on his head as he had, as a boy, on countless torturous Friday evenings, which stretched a dotted line back to some of his earliest resentments. He took a prayer book from the woman, and in minutes he was in the back of a big blue chamber, singing along to the same songs his Hebrew school days had tattooed onto his brain stem. The Jews of the Upper West Side were assembled around him—Jacob had expected them all to be old. He was surprised how many people his own age were there, and how many children, some dozing and some stretching and some turned around in their seats to stare at him with their big dinner-plate eyes. And, too, there were old men and ladies who could hardly heave themselves up when the time came to rise.

  Jacob only mouthed along at first, not sure he wanted to pray, not to this God who’d taken Irene, and who’d taken over for all those other gods. But if once there was a god of the sun and a goddess of harvest and a god of war and a goddess of wisdom, then maybe this Consolidated Entity was still all those many things. Within this One Him, capital-G God, all the lowercase ones still existed. There was still a grim god of the underworld in there, and a tempestuous god of thunder. A sprightly messenger god and a raucous god of wine. Maybe He was still squabbling amongst Himself, still getting drunk and cheating on Himself (with Himself) and messing a thing or two up. So maybe He didn’t always wind up rewarding the best or punishing the wickedest. So maybe sometimes He took the wrong ones and let the right ones stay long past their due. Jacob could forgive Him for that. After all, it was a humongous world, and there used to be twelve of Him. Even then it hadn’t ever gone smoothly.

  The rabbi and the cantor stood up in the front of the room and led the congregation in songs written nearly as long ago as the epics of Homer. They stood in front of the lighted closet that held the ark. Jacob remembered how much he liked that—the centrality of this document, the most sacred thing in the building, adorned with gold and readable only read by those who’d mastered the long-forgotten languages. It was what tied them all together.

  When they read the Mourner’s Kaddish and called on those who knew someone who was seriously ill, or who had lost someone in the previous week, a dozen or more people stood up all around the crowd and spoke the names of their departed or their departing. Then the rabbi called out the list of congregants’ names who had passed away in that week in years past, and as their loved ones heard the names, they stood for a moment and then sat down again. There were so many.

  “Are there any names that anyone would like to add?”

  Jacob stood up, and he wasn’t alone. Three people came up on his left and four to his right. He said Irene’s name out loud, and the others spoke their names, and the rabbi asked them all to sit down again. Jacob felt scared and warm all over. He was both emptier and more satisfied. More alone and less, as if he’d just said goodbye and hello in the same breath.

  The service ended, and various board members began making announcements about food drives and outreach programs, and Jacob found himself thinking about an article Ella had recently posted to his Facebook wall. A scientist had a semiridiculous theory that as clay was being shaped on a wheel, it absorbed the sound waves of the people speaking around it, and these vibrations were then trapped within the earth and air and water. And this terrific madman thought he could figure out how to play this record back again, even through ancient ceramic vases and urns, and hear the conversations of people who had been dead and gone and forgotten for five thousand years. Perhaps, Jacob thought, the scientist would find a way. He wished there had been a potter making a vase in Irene’s hospital room, so the vibrations of his last words to her would have been caught in its wet clay, and that this scientist someday would queue up his machines and point them at the little vase. Years from now someone else would hear him whispering the words that had made Irene smile in that last minute.

  When you get there, just let me know you made it, all right?

  WILLIAM ON THE BRIDGE

  1

  Exiting the gallery doors, William saw the Brooklyn Bridge: two mammoth trunks straddling the East River, water blacker than the sky above. Over the surface a second, silver river of reflected light flowed the opposite way. Pale yellow headlights crossed the bridge’s span, departing Manhattan at the end of a long, cold Tuesday, while Brooklyn issued her own red taillights back against the tide. From where he stood, they were all just little points of light, proceeding and receding toward friends, meals, televisions, sins, solitude, sleep.

  The bridge appeared to dwarf the skyscrapers on the far shore. Aortal and ventral, a pair of vaulting, twinned cathedral arches, roped together by a drape of cables. Slow troughs and sharp peaks, like a heartbeat on a monitor. True, William didn’t know much about architecture, couldn’t tell a keystone from a cornerstone. But he knew it was extraordinary. Particularly after what he’d seen inside the gallery, and after having just finished the second half of a joint he’d begun before arriving.

  Particularly with the little piece of Irene he now carried in his jacket pocket. After a year in her wake, he felt her close again, hovering over his shoulder, two or three steps behind. Everything was louder and brighter, as if some knob on his dashboard had been cranked up after countless months on low. Living back at home, in his same old bedroom, smoking in the same old bathroom with the same old shower on, having the same old dinners and listening to his parents have the same old arguments. But now all the lights burned brighter, and he loosened his favorite red scarf, despite the chill in the air.

  Hearing a sudden whoosh, William wheeled around to see a passing tour bus. The sightseers leaned over the railing to photograph the bridge, their flashes firing off uselessly in the dark, the glowing of their phone screens glowing back onto their smiling faces. He was glad to have someone to share the moment with, but even after the bus rolled away, he didn’t feel alone. Who was out there?

  Sara and George and everyone else were still at the opening. Irene Richmond: The Disappointments. It was an awful title—she had never decided on one herself. But no matter. BOMB and Artforum were calling it one of the biggest shows of 2011 (even though it was only February), and thanks to them it was a mob scene. Juliette and Abeba had organized it with Sara, who was treating it like a rehearsal for the upcoming wedding. The same lighting designers, the same printer for the programs, the same caterers, who were now bringing around chocolate mousse served in marzipan-speckled eggs. Special Ethiopian coffee had been roasted. George had selected five North Fork wines.

  The soon-to-be-married couple were the only people William had really known inside, and they were circling around like guppies, too quick to be caught. George was asking everyone if they’d seen Jacob, unclear if he was simply late (as always) or not showing up. The ironic thing was that William had actually mistaken George for Jacob at first. He didn’t look well. Heavier set, hairline receding. All the wedding planning, George had joked, fully aware of the looks he was getting. Sara, too, looked altered. Impatient. Missing twenty pounds she hadn’t needed to lose in the first place.

  Everyone was giving toasts and making a big show of looking at the show. William didn’t see anyone else looking as he was looking. For the past two hours, he had religiously documented every sculpture, painting, and sketch, using his phone to record every inch from every angle. Already private dealers were bidding through back channels (or so Juliette and Abeba claimed). By week’s end, the pieces would be dispersed across America, maybe the world. Stationed in collectors’ foyers and bedrooms and on mantels above fireplaces. Tying rooms together. Creating atmosphere.
Disappointment everywhere!

  The proceeds were going to the Richmond Memorial Fund—an art school scholarship that Sara had organized. (Never mind that Irene had gotten her education gratis, sitting in the backs of lecture halls.) She was talking about getting into nonprofit work full time if this got enough attention from the right sorts of people. Certainly there had been a few photographers, snapping away. William had deliberately avoided their flashes and, once he could, ducked away before Sara or George could introduce him to anyone. They hadn’t spoken to him more than a few times all year, and he was surprised to have even gotten an invitation to the show. When he’d called Sara to accept, she’d acted as if they’d always been old friends, but he knew they hadn’t been and soon wouldn’t be again. Quietly he was editing himself out of their story.

  He hated everything about it. He hated that Irene wasn’t at her own show. He hated that he kept thinking she was around the party somewhere, trying to pretend she wasn’t nervous about the coming reviews. Certainly there was buzz—possibly too much. Abeba seemed to fear there could be a backlash because people tended to think anything they’d been hearing a lot about was overrated. Better to be the underdog, to be plucked from obscurity. No, Juliette argued, because then why had you been so plucked and not them? They’d hate you worse for that. It was all a big catch-22. No way to win. Sell too little, and nobody cared. Sell too much, and you were a sellout. Unless you made selling out part of your shtick. But it didn’t really matter, William supposed. Irene’s show was a one-shot affair. First and last. By a dead girl, about dying. It was both unusual and confusing, two things that typically sent buyers reaching for checkbooks. But William didn’t care about that. As far as he was concerned, the work was perfect in and of itself.

  Who else could have come up with something like Patient R5691414510? Irene’s last known sculpture, a life-sized effigy constructed out of the clear plastic bags the hospital gave out to hold personal items. Irene had entrusted the assembly instructions and sketches (all scribbled down during her last good days at Mount Sinai) to Sara, along with an inventory of the parts she had piled up under her red coat in that tiny closet, so that the cleaning staff wouldn’t discard them: bags stuffed with used gauze from her surgical dressings, tissues covered in other unidentifiable fluids, empty IV bags, balled-up pamphlets that the nurses left behind to advise on wound care and whatnot. She’d even salvaged an old PEG tube, and there it was in the gallery, running right into the “torso” and off toward an IV stand that Juliette and Abeba had set up alongside the piece. (The bag had been filled with neon-pink acrylic paint, meant to resemble a strawberry-flavored Assure milkshake.)

  By Irene’s instructions, Juliette and Abeba had suspended Patient R5691414510 in the air with a series of clear fishing wires, so that she appeared to be levitating or maybe lying in an invisible hospital bed, her left arm dangling off the side, with Irene’s actual patient ID bracelet delicately looped around the “wrist” of an inflated rubber glove. Abeba was running around telling everyone what a challenge it had all been to preserve, and the headaches Irene had caused them all with the permits needed to present these potentially unsanitary items in public. William wondered who the new assistant was, who’d actually had to deal with all that, as Irene once had. The real purpose of the little narrative was, of course, all about stirring up some controversy and tacking another zero onto the price tag. Irene had never cared about that, and neither would he.

  What he cared about was that she’d made a dozen intricate pieces in the year following the diagnosis. It was remarkable what she’d been able to do with the little she’d had on hand. Sculptures made out of glued-together orange prescription bottles and empty Assure bottles and Chinese food containers studded with little colored pills. There were several sketches she’d done after moving in with William, when she didn’t have access to her supplies. Stricken City II was the view out of his old apartment’s window, done in sumptuous simple charcoal. As in briquettes from a bag in his hall closet. “Stark and serene,” the critic at BOMB had written. The Times had preferred the three-dimensional Portrait of a Profound Disappointment—fashioned from chicken drumsticks (courtesy of Hill Country delivery), which Irene had Mod Podged and which did look eerily human when draped in a tweed that was clearly meant to resemble Jacob’s coat, though it was actually fabric taken from an old hat of William’s that he had only just then realized was missing. Artforum had deemed it “hauntingly decayed” and complimented the “blooms of rich, saturated pigments” in West of Eden, with its unreal landscape of seashells and vineyards and trash. Someone at Salon had felt this piece was “anodyne and dogged” and that the whole show was a “sheer visual confusion” full of “mundane flotsam and jetsam,” which was “erratic to the point of solipsism.” To each their own, he thought.

  William remembered how Irene and her friends had made fun of the “so-called art” at the Christmas party the night they met. He wondered if, to someone else, the moldy yam had meant as much as all this did to him. Maybe. But he wanted to believe that there was something here that would carry these feckless people inside Irene’s heart and guts. That it would be—how had Jacob put it?—metamorphic. Not just fucking television.

  There was a crowd around Ms. Daphne, a painting of a transvestite reclining on a waterbed à la Modigliani, with startlingly hideous wallpaper in the background. This hung beside Man in Crooked Necktie, a portrait of George in a suit, holding a vanilla cupcake in one hand. And of course William recognized his Christmas gift to her (formerly his own Christmas gift to his mother), now unraveled and carefully molded into the stunning Kimono Cocoon.

  Certainly the most popular piece in the show was the I-beam from the World Trade Center. The Iron Queen. She had done nothing whatsoever to the steel itself, leaving every bit of rust and dirt that had accumulated along its length, but through some alchemy William didn’t quite understand, she had affixed seventy-seven nude Barbie dolls to it. Beige plastic crawled, climbed, and sprawled all across the girder, in places so twisted up on top of one another that you could barely see the metal underneath. Something about seeing that same, painted-on smile over and over was tremendously unsettling. From certain angles William thought it was some kind of Elysian orgy. From others it seemed like a hellscape worthy of Hieronymus Bosch. This had been, apparently, the piece that she’d been sneaking off to work on at the gallery right up to her collapse at the museum last summer. As far as he, or anyone, seemed to be able to tell, it was finished. Every strand of fake hair harmoniously and horribly in place.

  William kept thinking about that last day. The day before the end. She had been pretty drugged-up. But she had asked about the birdcage. And she had tried to say something else after that, but it hadn’t been clear—these, her last words to him. He told himself that they had just been nonsense, pointless pain-killer koans. But he couldn’t shake the thought that maybe she had been asking him to do something for her. He wasn’t sure at first, but the more he’d thought about it, he was convinced that she’d said the words “Tell my father.” William had been thinking of how to find him, and now he had finally come up with an idea.

  William looked up as Sara called the crowd over to Patient R5691414510 so that she and Juliette and Abeba could thank them all for coming. He had quietly headed the other way, toward the “piece” that he had been eyeing all night. Jewelry Box, Bird Cage. It was hanging in the corner exactly as it had hung in Irene’s apartment. Had she intended it to be sold as a piece of art? Unclear, and possibly irrelevant. As Sara began to retell a story about meeting Irene while they’d been interns at the university press (Sara had been charged with finding out if Irene was stealing toner—she was), William got up on his tiptoes and reached his slender fingers toward the thin bars of the birdcage. This time he found the hidden door that he’d seen Irene open to retrieve a necklace before leaving for William’s apartment. He opened the cage and grabbed the little black address book that he’d first seen th
ere more than two years earlier. Then he’d shoved it into his breast pocket and stepped out into the night, where, after lighting the other half of the joint, he’d caught sight of the bridge.

  He knew the fastest way home was on the subway. But instead he trudged up the icy lanes to the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge and thought back to the morning, a year ago, when he’d left Irene’s hospital room. Typical William. Early exit. He just couldn’t handle the very end. He’d needed to walk up that corridor toward the elevators knowing she was still alive. Out on the street, and later on the bus, he hadn’t been sure one way or the other. By the time he got back to his apartment, he reasoned that it was probably over. But he still didn’t know. He’d felt so numb and yet not nearly numb enough.

  That was when he’d dug out the shoebox where she’d been keeping the last half ounce of Northern Lights premium indica that she’d bought from Skeevo. He’d never tried it before, but now he did, in the same careful way she’d taught him to roll it for her. With each hour that passed, he figured the likelihood was a little less that she was still alive. The probability approached zero, but even the next day and the day after, it didn’t reach the asymptote. It felt instead like those months when they’d been broken up. Weeks went by, and then months. In the rational gray matter of his brain, William knew she was gone, but there was no convincing the irrational spaces inside it. Little sparks flew from synapse to synapse carrying the words She Is Dead across the gaps that kept insisting She Is Here.

  The pathway over the bridge was steeped in soft tea-brown light. He felt Irene as a gambler feels his luck at a certain seat at the table. The way a sculptor feels something besides her own will moving her hands. It was like seeing out of a second set of eyes and hearing with another pair of ears. Walking a hundred feet above the water, between two worlds that were also one. He didn’t know how else to describe it, except to say it felt as if she were walking just behind him.