Which is completely wrong. Are they testing me? And what if she’s in earshot?
“You’re wrong,” someone says.
They all turn to a small man in the middle of the pack with a mole on his cheek. “Don’t you see?” he asks excitedly. “She hints at that unbridgeable gulf between the artist and the consumer. Between conception and experience.”
“But she says nothing of interest about that gulf,” the other says. “It is just vague enough to seem thought-provoking. But I am unmoved.”
The small, moled Hasid turns to me. “You agree with me, don’t you?” They are testing me. What do I say? Yes? I try to read the unreadable words. I touch the barbed wire. And then he grabs onto my shoulder. They yank me back and I’m cast to the ground, flailing at their feet. They kick me with their leather shoes, kick in my sides. Their beards shift and move, made up of a thousand black, vibrating bees.
I stand with them, the man’s hand on my back, motherly. “What are you doing?” they ask, a chorus of concern. “You aren’t supposed to touch. It’s art.”
“And it could be dangerous,” the small Hasid says. “You see, don’t you?”
It’s my duty—especially if Nicolette is nearby, listening in—to make them see. “We all put up wires and go to extremes to hide who we are. We don’t know our neighbors. We never will. And we’ll never let them know us. There’s no such thing as community.” I say this in a neighborly voice, trustworthy. A voice that does not sound like it belongs to a man who is somewhere he shouldn’t be. And then I add, “She’s putting up landmines to protect herself. But she’s lying. It’s all a lie. But the truth is here somewhere.”
I understand now what those microscopic words are for, and I must have them. They are instructions. I just don’t know what to.
“You like her art, you will come by our gallery.”
“You have her art?” I say, letting slip a bit of panic. How could I not have known she was showing work in the city? I would have heard about a gallery show.
The small Hasid pinches the other’s arm. “We don’t know that yet. There’s a small, quite negligible dispute over attribution,” he explains to me.
Still no sign of Nicolette. Did she forget? But she couldn’t have, this was important to her. Do they know where she is? Have they done something? Of course they haven’t done anything. “Where is she?” I ask the men.
“Here is our card. Take our card,” the others say as if handing me a Band-Aid or a ransom note. I take three. Someone laughs. And then I turn and run.
———
I’ve gone the wrong way on the subway again—or they changed the signs. I stay in the same car, waiting for the train to return south, a sitting duck above ground. I gave too much away. I shouldn’t have spoken to those men at all.
First item of damage control: send a text to Nicolette: r u ok?
The Bronx is a sunken ship. That’s another truth for you. There is something drowned, underwater about it. We’ve stayed out of water so long we’ve forgotten we’re fish. But we’ll be underwater again soon enough. The glaciers will melt and the ocean will run us down.
There are always others who spend their days riding the train to the end and back again. People who don’t have to check the time—no one’s expecting them, no one cares where they are. The odyssey of the underground transportation system but no Penelope waiting at home. Take that fat white man in the suit, resting one chin on the other, dozing. Or the strung-out girl making pictures with her finger on the dusty window. She sees the fish too. She’s watching the mackerel fight for a bit of food, the osprey spying from above. Across from her, a woman who’s just come from a job interview and knows she didn’t get it. She has that look people perfect for the subway. The one no one will ask you about.
If Nicolette were here she would argue that this woman wasn’t coming from some boring interview. Why would she go to an interview when she just found out her husband was dying and she’s been riding all day to avoid the pain of it? And I would say, actually she hates her husband and got a voicemail saying the operation was a success and now she’s pretending she didn’t feel that pang of disappointment, and she’ll lie and say she didn’t get the call, no cell service. Then Nicolette would say that I can’t see the magic and beauty in life because I want another magic that doesn’t exist. And I would try to say something about her being beautiful, but I would fail.
I want that argument.
I check my phone. I check it twice. And then we’re underground and out of range. I’m afraid something horrible has happened.
It’s true I have a love for the secrecy of the world. Even on 10mg of Zyprexa, everything is infected with secrets. And Nicolette is the biggest secret of all.
Everyone has an origin story. Everyone but Nicolette. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t even know how old she is, but when I met her she was twenty-six and acted as if she’d lived a century—she was wise enough. I think she let herself fall in love with me because she knew how I was and maybe she felt like she owed something to the world. She wanted to save me. Cheers to that ill-conceived good intention.
But all I added to her life was trouble. When I’m interviewed for her biography someday, I will color it with idiosyncrasies like: and then she fell in love with a boy who went schizo on her.
I loved her so much I could rip out my collarbone.
When I get to my Chinatown apartment, it’s thick into dusk and I have mail. I take my little stack of bills and reminders of bills from the entranceway mailbox and sit out on the stoop. The day is a deflated balloon. New York in summer: shriveled and sexual. I feel scattered. The street gives off its street smell: three parts fortune cookie from the factory next to my apartment, one part leather soles, ten parts piss. The Bowery is breaking down. All the shops selling restaurant supplies and lighting fixtures, I’m worried they aren’t long for this world. Across the street, the red neon sign flashes—Psychic Open—which I can see without fail from my apartment and which definitely means nothing but makes it very hard to sleep. There’s old Tachi with his remote-controlled car—the balding Chinese man is never without it. I don’t know his real name, so I gave him one: Tachi. There hasn’t been one night this summer when he hasn’t been racing his car, holding it all together, surveying the neighborhood with his little monster truck the size of a human head. Tachi is out of sight, but his car bounds toward me down Broome Street, heading for Bowery. It sounds like it needs a tune-up. Bowery is a big street and this little truck could easily be crushed. It bounces over the cobblestones, digs into dips and comes up soaring, louder than any real car, piercing and monotone. But the humidity drowns it out, the weight of the air is deafening. It’ll rain soon, there’s no way around it. A hot summer rain.
My cell vibrates—finally Nicolette. She apologizes, says she’s very busy. But the way she says it nearly gives me a heart attack. “_____, _____ busy.” The two blanks? Words that are seemingly normal. But they aren’t normal at all. They are lost words. How could she know them again? I hate those words.
Dear Courteous Voices: Won’t you be less courteous and interrupt once in a while? I could use a little help. I’d like to know if you’re out (or in) there. I can only assume you are with me and listening, though I can’t hear you. Which I attribute to Zyprexa interference. Like duct tape over your mouths. Riding along in my brain like a person trapped in the trunk of the car.
I cannot repeat the words to you, but I will write them down as anagrams, to be safe, in two places: in my little notepad with the spiral on top and lines too faint to use, and on my left palm:
RAZOR SCRYY
My skin is very moist and no one but I will ever be clever enough to read the blurry letters.
Another text: not safest idea 4 u or me. better this way.
Not safe how? Before I can reply she texts again: some other time.
And I text back: when?
Here is another truth: someone or something is always trying to block Nicole
tte and me from coming together. But this time, I won’t let them.
You see that girl shaded in the front seat of that parked car? I think she’s crying, her head bobbing that way. The shadows of a sidewalk tree dance on her little face in a hot breeze. No, a reflection that looks like a shadow. I’m afraid she’ll be swallowed by it. If Nicolette were to place landmines around New York, they would take the shape of shadows like that. Sinister, bloodless. Everything would be the inverse of itself. But not everything is a Nicolette installation—an easy thing to forget. All the overweight men stand in front of their shop fronts, hands on their bellies. They look worried and Tachi’s car is still missing down Bowery. Somehow. Sometimes I’m the only living man. Everything is in its place, laced and placed, old Tachi outside searching for his car, and the vendors all talk and no sale, their coats blazing in the wind, and there are cars but they aren’t driving. No one’s buying. The girl crying in the front seat of one, and a kid standing by the door of another waiting for someone, but they aren’t coming. Hey, I want to say to him. Hey, get out of here, they ain’t coming. No one’s coming, no one’s buying. And still no monster truck. Sometimes I feel that way, like telling everyone how it is. Their suffering is mine. And then I think of Nicolette and I’m confused because there’s this little fleck of hope in the back of my throat choking me. Hope for the little kid staring at his reflection in the empty car, hope for Tachi’s truck, hope for the cobblestone that isn’t pavement yet and with any luck may never be, and I think then, I think I’ll say to them, “Don’t worry, you’ll get to your plane on time, you’ll get a seat on the bench when you’re tired, you’ll find the words to ask forgiveness, no one dies during childbirth, no cancer, no famine, you’ll get another chance, there will be another, hope that the weather is just kidding and your parents will remember you and someone will remember you and pick you up and take you home, we’re all okay, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right, all right?”
The stairs count me. Two at a time up five flights, my breath a pendulum, and I’m sweating. The stairwell is known for being dangerous. Orange-level-terrorist-threat-o-meter dangerous. Today, however, it’s green. I’m about to turn the key in my lock when I remember, the thought coming at me like a draft under the door: dinner at Jules’s, and I’m late. Back downstairs, the night is an old dog pressing into me.
But what am I doing! I forgot my meds.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m an idiot at times. But I don’t have time to go back upstairs now; Jules lives all the way in the Upper East Side, Yorkville. One pill at lunch and one at dinner each day. But being off a couple hours won’t kill me. I’ll take it later when I get home, if I think of it. In my messenger bag, my other equally important belongings are all accounted for: wallet, keys, Xanax for just-in-cases, stack of café drink cards with almost-free tenth items, and a copy of A Brief History of Time, as many pages ripped out as dog-eared.
As if berating me for my forgetfulness, the smell from the Golden Fortune Cookie Corp. next door drifts after me as I speed-walk to the 6 train. I plug my nose in order not to think of my father.
There I go thinking about him. He wins every time just because I’m trying not to think of him. All because of one measly joke he told whenever we had Chinese takeout. My sister and I would ask what his fortune said and he’d look up at us, surprised. “No, it can’t be, I can’t believe it.” Our mom would yell preemptively from the kitchen, “Don’t you get them wild.” And we’d pretend to fall for it, colluding with our dad to rile our mom, shouting, “What? What does it say?” and he would fall back, feigning heart attack and gasp, “It says…it says here…” We’d dance around his chair and try to snatch it from him, but he’d hold it tight to his chest. “It says, right here in plain letters: Help, I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory!” And we would die. The last time I heard the joke, before the split, we rolled on the floor in hysterics, forced laughter until it was real and my mom was irate. “You’re teaching them it’s fun to laugh at sweatshops,” she yelled. And Dad yelled back louder, “Better get off that high horse or someone might think you like animal husbandry!” He rose from the table like he’d have lived in that chair if she hadn’t maddened him so. Shoulders bunched, he stormed outside for a smoke, leaving the door open so one of the foster cats escaped. My dad could never keep them straight, since we had ten cats at a time sometimes, and he called them all Bernie. That night, I remember, my mom, close to tears, punched him in the shoulder over and over, then they stood on the porch side by side, my dad calling for Bernie, my mom calling the real name.
The only thing my father ever said about my illness was, “You’re lucky you’re a handsome guy.”
Waiting for Jules to answer the buzzer, I ready a list of excuses for my lateness: stuck on the subway, heatstroke, piano falling from third-story apartment, short-term coma. Julie, Jules, my little sister. I let her think she takes care of me instead of the other way around. She likes to think she has some control over the whole thing, even though she’s only twenty-eight, four years younger than me. She’s always been four years younger, but now I don’t know—it feels like maybe she’s catching up.
Jules grew up convincing me that God didn’t exist and then three years ago she went and married a Hat. I mean a Hasid. She’d get very angry if she heard me say that. A Lubavitcher Hasid, it’s called. She only knew him a few months.
And then the first time I met him—all right, he was a nice guy. I don’t want to say otherwise, but there’s something about him I still can’t grasp. He has a spy’s eyes. His motives are beyond me. But he says Orthodox Jews don’t marry for love, they marry for respect, and, without fail, love blooms from respect. He calls her his ba’al teshuva. She introduced me to him as a computer artist, even though I just make nothing collages on Photoshop for fun, and he always asks to see my stuff but I haven’t shown him anything. I don’t want to scare him. I’m not much of a collagist these days, anyhow.
“What’s for dinner?” I say in the doorway.
“West.” Jules shakes her head as she says my name, they’re the same gesture. “We weren’t supposed to have dinner.”
“What are you talking about? We made plans.”
“Really. I haven’t heard from you in two weeks. How could we have made plans?” She puts her hands on her hips like a mom, but not like our mom. Jules would make a good mother.
“Are you kidding? I got home and freaked out I was going to be late and made up all these excuses on the way up here. Do you want to hear them?”
“Lies, you mean?”
“Well, there wasn’t anything to be late to, anyway.”
Jules just looks at me. Something is off with her. Something has changed.
“So, no dinner.”
“I’m on my way out,” she says, turning around. She does look nicer than usual, though shorter. But that’s not the change I mean. Jules shows no skin even in the dead of summer. I follow her into the main room, where she picks up her hat from the back of the couch. A large, felt purple thing, as ugly as it sounds.
“Don’t say a word,” she says. She knows I hate all of her hats. And her wigs.
“Where’s Dan?”
“He ran out for something at the pharmacy.”
“What did he run out for?”
The brim of her hat curves up into a smile, and locks of her wig curve up at the ends too, mocking me, dozens of fake little smiles.
“I don’t know, he always has to have his seltzer water. I’m supposed to meet him downstairs with the car in a minute.” She’s not telling me something—I can tell by the way she pinches her mouth, locking it inside. Jules has always been a terrible liar. She adjusts her hat in front of me like I’m a mirror, then stops and finds my eyes. “Why do you have to do these things?” She breathes out audibly from her nose. In another world she would have been a dragon, without secrets. “You’re taking your medicine?”
“I’m not stupid,” I say softly. “I went to see an
installation today. You should go see it.”
Jules says, “You know what I have to say about that. What do I have to say about that?”
“Where are you going?”
“West, what do I have to say?”
“That I shouldn’t have gone. And she’s not good for me.”
“You shouldn’t have gone. It’s not good for you,” Jules repeats.
“Where are you going?”
“There’s an open memorial service. One of our members’ sons passed away yesterday. A veteran. And another congregation lost two soldiers in Iraq this month. Two young boys. Anyone can come.”
“You’re always going to services.”
“I’m always running late.” She adjusts her hat again and sighs. “It would be nice if you joined us. Since you’re here.”
“You look different. Your face or something. What’s different?”
“Nothing. What? You haven’t seen this wig is all.”
Whatever she’s hiding, I won’t find out with her around.
“Can I stay here and watch TV while you’re out? Don’t make me get back on the train yet. I’ve been on the train all day it feels like.”
Then Dan walks in with his black fedora and a white button-down shirt, carrying a plastic bag, box corners angling through. Dan is a big-boned guy, and he always looks to me like he’s still growing. He’s growing and my sister’s shrinking. “West!” he booms. “What are you doing here?” He says this all jolly-like, even though I know he’s annoyed the second my name comes tripping out of his mouth. But he does a decent job of not showing that he thinks I’ve screwed up his night. Jules pokes me with her purse.
“I thought we were having dinner,” I say down into my neck. Sometimes I pretend I’m embarrassed, mumbling like that so he doesn’t feel bad for treating me like a kid. And I have to be nice because he got me my job. He’ll never let me forget it.
“Did you find everything?” Jules asks, gesturing at the plastic bag.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 6