The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  “I did, no thanks to the cashier,” Dan says. “They ought to have IQ tests for these types of jobs. A black man with this Afro-type beard. Avoid that one next time you go in there.”

  “That’s racist,” I say.

  “Being specific does not make me racist,” Dan says. “I’ve come across plenty of idiotic white cashiers in my day. More idiotic, in fact.”

  “Jews and blacks hate each other,” I tell Jules.

  “Only Long Island Jews,” says Dan.

  “West wants to know if he can stay here a bit and watch TV,” Jules says.

  Dan coughs. “We’re getting home kind of late…”

  “I’ll be gone by the time you’re back,” I say sweetly.

  Dan grunts a begrudging approval. Not that he should care. It won’t affect them unless I eat their food.

  “Help yourself to the fridge,” Jules says.

  Did I project that thought by accident? But I know I didn’t, because projecting thoughts is not a thing. Being around Dan, I slip sometimes. He has this way of sucking away my power from the inside out with an invisible straw. Whatever Jules is hiding, Dan is behind it.

  He leans down, not touching Jules in front of me, and whisper-mumbles something. Jules nods and says, “But not the whitefish salad. That’s for Dan’s lunch tomorrow. The front door locks when you close it, but check to make sure. And, West?”

  The strands of her wig wave toward me in snaky smiles. I glare at her. I know what she’s about to say.

  “Call Mom? She’s worried, like always. It won’t kill you to talk to her.”

  “It might,” I say. Jules never tells me to call our dad.

  “We can have dinner for real sometime if you call me, too.”

  “He’s a grown man,” Dan mutters as they head out the door.

  “I will,” I say. “How are you anyway?” But they’re already gone. I always miss the closing of doors.

  The light echoing against the sleek brown of their furniture makes me nervous and I turn the dimmer down. I’ve never been here alone before. It’s like the parents have just left and I’m the babysitter, but there are no babies. Mom is always bugging everyone, me included, about if and when she’ll get to be a grandmother. Jules won’t talk about not having babies yet, but I’m glad they haven’t.

  No new text messages or voicemails. Not a peep from Nicolette.

  Just in case they come back in to check, I flip to the middle of a sitcom about doctors. The laugh track doesn’t make sense when it happens, like they made a mistake at the studio—but I know it’s just me. I waddle around the perimeter of the room looking for clues. The sound of my feet swishing on the wood gets mixed up in the low volume of the TV. Canned laughter coming from my shoes.

  The only framed photos in the room are wedding pictures, as if Dan and Jules had no lives before they met each other. As if they’ve had nothing to take pictures of since. There’s one of me between them, smiling sideways, my suit a little too big.

  When Jules told me they were engaged, I told her, “You can’t marry Dan, you don’t even believe in God.” And she said, “I believe in Dan, and I will grow to believe in God.” You can’t grow into belief, I insisted. But I was wrong. Now she believes. “Where’d you find God?” I once asked meanly. “In the laundry hamper?” It’s something Nicolette might have put into my head to say. But Jules only touched my forehead like I had a fever and said, “You’ll never understand, will you?”

  What I want to know is why doctors never diagnose religious people as delusional.

  We aren’t even really Jewish. My great-grandmother was a forced convert during the Pogroms, so my grandma was raised Catholic, my mom in turn, and Jules and I were raised some version of fundamentalist-atheism. So you might say Jules felt it was on her to make up for this forced loss of faith, identity. Once she learned about it, it took over her life. It was all she read about and talked about. She got the paperwork to prove she was really Jewish. She is what my great-grandmother could never be. She became the thing we lost.

  Some people might call that overcompensation, but you didn’t hear it from me.

  There was even something different in the way Jules smelled tonight. But there’s always a clue in the things people buy. It doesn’t count as snooping since Dan left the plastic bag by the door, the contents nearly tipping out anyway. I nudge it open a little more with my foot and peek in: scent-free lotion, scent-free soap, hand sanitizers, a king-size bag of cotton balls, magnesium and calcium supplements, and a box of cinnamon hard candies. I smash the bag of cotton balls against my head.

  It can’t be true.

  I bet you’re thinking a couple items from the pharmacy aren’t enough to prove Jules is what I think she is. Well, if you don’t believe me yet, there are bound to be two more clues lying around here. Clues come in threes. Always.

  There’s a stack of ads and bills on the coffee table, but one person’s junk mail is another’s evidence. And just as I suspected, next to ads for an umbrella and a portable power tool set, there’s clue #2: an ad for a white noise machine and electrical outlet safety guards—all intended, nay, calculated, for Jules. These companies don’t want you to know how much they know. They’re just as good at spying on you as pretending they’re not. They slip in ads that seem random and unrelated, making you think everyone in the building got the same coupons. Think again, buster. They’re running your purchases through statistical algorithms. They’ve got you pinned down to the week. Sometimes they know before you do.

  In their bedroom, the laundry basket is clean of clues. The only outof-place item is inside the top drawer of the dresser—lacy underwear!—I hide it from myself quickly. On Dan’s nightstand are piles of spreadsheets and papers that look familiar, from the same database I use at work. On the wall is a photograph of a rabbi. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson—Dan has told me about him a dozen times. This photograph in place of a mirror, Dan says: “To reflect back my potential instead of the nincompoop I am!”

  I throw myself on their bed and lie on my stomach, curling myself over so I can see into the dark underneath. The blood rushes to my eyes. Upside down, I rummage under the bed for more clues. Beside stacks of photo albums and an old tattered briefcase, there’s a tin box. Right-side up, I set it gently on my lap and lift the lid. Inside is something dark and dead. No, not a rat, don’t be gross. It’s a piece of hair.

  I cried when Jules cut her hair so short. I loved her hair. I miss her hair. I was mean to her hair once, but that’s a truth for another time. It was thick and molasses-colored and sometimes stuck up all over the place enough to make her scream that she hated herself. When she cut it I was there and picked up a piece from the floor, and I tucked a lock of it into my pocket. I didn’t know she’d done the same, saved a lock for herself. I still carry mine around in my wallet. It’s old and knotted now, like a dreadlock.

  But that’s not the third clue. Without it, there’s still a chance I’m wrong about Jules. The bathroom is immaculate; I can almost see my face in their floor tiles, though my glasses slide down my nose when I peer into them. I don’t look at myself in the mirror while I sift through razor attachments and make-up removers.

  Finally, on top of the toilet tank, is the mother of all clues, excuse the pun: a book called, Nine Jewish Months: How to Keep Gestation Holy—a Halachic Guide to Pregnancy.

  My sister is pregnant.

  And she didn’t tell me.

  Did you know I would brush her hair when we were growing up, and she’d know exactly what that meant—Mom wasn’t coming home that night from one of her animal-rights protests—but at least Jules would get something good out of it. Except for that one time when I was mean to her hair. Which I never apologized for. And I can’t say it yet.

  But I know why she didn’t tell me the big news: Jules is afraid of me.

  I get the feeling I won’t be seeing much of her for a while.

  I was walking along a narrow path toward the bluff—this was years ago, back at hom
e on the West Coast—when wildflowers on either side caved in toward my feet, trapping me. A dozen yards away was the edge of the bluff, then the sea. The gangly grass in my foreground.

  And then there was the girl. She was standing on the overhang, wavering like the tall grass I saw her through. She was leaning over, looking down at the sea and rocks hundreds of feet below. What was she doing so close to the edge? But I wasn’t afraid. I knew there must be a reason and that the wildflowers knotting near my feet were trapping me where I was for my own protection. I felt a kind of kinship with the path, like it was my brother, or it was me. Since I couldn’t go any farther, I admired the view and the girl from where I was.

  I couldn’t see who she was from the back, but something about her was familiar. Her dark hair whipped in the breeze. My chest pounded double-time. But the wildflowers would not let me move to her. I didn’t call out. I couldn’t, though she probably wouldn’t have heard me over the wind anyway. The wildflowers dripped from my brow. Something inside me was rousing from a long sleep, awakened by a twang that said home. And then she jumped.

  I told Jules and my mom, and they made me tell the police. The entire town was watching as the boats trolled the waters by the bluff, searching for the remains of the girl. A man, scrubby and worn down with booze, came forward saying he couldn’t find his daughter—a girl from my school whose name I can’t remember—and I was questioned some more. What did you see? A girl with black hair. What did you see? Nothing! I missed school and spent days at the police station, an officer with eyes the color of the shaded sea, leaning his face so close I would have thought he was trying to kiss me if it had been any other room or reason. They felt sorry for me, or they didn’t believe what I saw. No one ever found the body. Washed out to sea, I guess. Or maybe she flew away.

  And that’s when I met Nicolette. I wasn’t there, on the Puget Sound in spring, but I was in the moment of that memory when I met her in New York, on Clinton Street, next to the car lots. She’d busted the front tire of her bike and was frowning over it. The chain gates and barbed wire that kept the towed cars caged did the same work the flowers did on the bluff. They made me feel safe, kept from danger. I knew where I was stepping. The world was ready for me.

  “Look at me weeping over my tire like this.” She spoke softly but assuredly, smiled when I asked if she needed help. She looked directly in my eyes. “I know you,” she said.

  My chest opened like a pair of oiled gates and wildflowers came pouring out. I know she felt it; she was swimming in my flowers.

  She said, “Walk with me,” but I didn’t know where we were going. I was nervous and happy. I sweated. My hands ran waterfalls; I almost drowned us. But I walked with her, rolling the bike for her. She smoked a hand-rolled cigarette she’d plucked from her jacket pocket, soiled and foreign-looking in her mouth. And her mouth gaped, the smoke escaping, the same smoke from the fires I’d lit in my childhood bathtub—it was an extension of myself, an extension of the sulfurs from the earth. She was so strange, her face shifting in the light from young to old and back to young.

  I remember then we walked by a man who was talking to himself—gibberish about the sky and the smell and how they were the very same thing. She said, “You never know if people are nuts anymore or not. Everyone talks to themselves. Blue-toothed.” And I said, “Guess it never mattered who’s what anyway,” because I couldn’t think of anything smarter to say.

  Now that I think about it, maybe that didn’t happen on the same day.

  She tried to take her bike back but I kept a hold until she gave in and let me keep rolling it for her, not knowing where she was leading us, having to trust her. An insufficient gesture to say I knew: I knew she was the one who would listen to my story, my illness—even though I didn’t know my illness then. She wouldn’t dismiss it or say, “That’s invisible.” She wouldn’t question me because telling my story is survival.

  And I could always tell her my story anew. Because I was always meeting Nicolette for the first time.

  Look at me being so serious!

  But it’s true, it was a serious day. Right there, where we parted in the middle of the sidewalk, I almost swallowed the sky. I felt, meeting her and leaving her, that if I wasn’t careful, I could open wide and the world would suddenly and violently fill me up, and I wouldn’t survive to feel it withdraw.

  Mr. Fox, my supervisor, calls me in for a meeting. I stare at the empty chair across from him. It sends a low pulse, but it’s not dangerous. I sit. He smiles at me, condescending. He thinks I have no social skills whatsoever, so I make sure to meet his expectations. Mr. Fox is a bald crocodile of a man who won’t hesitate to use my problem against me. “I need to talk to you, West.” I need to talk to you, West.

  Three months ago, Dan got me this job as a data miner for a predictive market firm. All day I sit in front of a computer screen, digging through other people’s virtual trash. The things they didn’t know they never properly threw away. When I lost my last job, I would have done anything. I would have organized and sold someone’s real garbage on the street if they paid me to. Anything not to depend on Jules. That was part of my exit strategy.

  And so I search through charts of digital exhaust, consumer behaviors and cross sections of behaviors, frequent buyer purchases at major grocery and department stores and online conglomerates, probing for patterns. Patterns within patterns. Or rather, I tell the computer to do all that. Then I double-check the data and weed out the irrelevancies, making the spreadsheets shine with pure meaning that will predict our consumer future. Then we sell our findings to clients, who in turn determine what next to market. They predict, or decide, what’s to come from the trash I filter. Which means that I am responsible for the future.

  And yet the web-based social computing software can do all of that without me. I am redundant. Which no one else knows. Don’t tell. I cannot let Mr. Fox find out. I cannot lose another job.

  “I know you’re a smart guy, that’s what everyone says,” Mr. Fox is saying. He waits to see how I’ll react to this news. In reality, the other guys in the office resent me—it makes them feel stupid that a lunatic can do their job. “How have you been lately?”

  “Fine, I guess. Great.”

  “I mean, how have you been feeling?”

  Sometimes, the search goes deeper. Like spying on eighteen-year-olds posting on MySpace about whether or not they like Pizza Craver–flavored Doritos. Their preferences can be linked to their status in life and therefore other purchasing habits. We know if a consumer is going through a breakup or if they recently switched careers based on the amount of ice cream or ramen purchased. But my bosses are particularly interested in pregnant women in their first and second trimesters, like Jules. It is, hands down, the most profound period in a person’s life—for marketers. It’s when people are most likely to switch brands, vulnerable to any ad campaign you throw at them. Hormones and routines all in flux.

  “Your work’s gotten sloppy,” Mr. Fox says. “I don’t want to have to call up Dan and tell him we may have made a mistake. Your sister wouldn’t be happy.”

  I think I’m supposed to feel guilty for data mining, but I don’t feel anything about it at all.

  “I don’t want to see here what happened at your old job,” he says.

  Mr. Fox doesn’t understand that my last employer and I simply had different priorities and I was fired for doing too beautiful of a job. I was a network setup technician, and I can’t help it if the most aesthetically pleasing connection topologies aren’t the most efficient. I once linked up a partial mesh to a distributed bus network, all within the macro topology of a ring network! Arranging a conversation between computers is as delicate as any social interaction. There are always at least three players, never two, even if that third player is an Ethernet hub or an ex-girlfriend or a baby between a married couple or, say, an illness that both expands and distorts communication.

  I nudge Mr. Fox’s wastebasket with my toe. It’s filled with em
pty cans of mandarin oranges, which he eats every day at his desk. I want to ask if he believes in God like Dan and Jules. But he’s not the same kind of Jewish.

  Mr. Fox also knows the system is irrational. The problem is that the patterns are not really patterns. Which, in and of itself, is a pattern. As a hive we follow trends, but if you zoom in on the micro level we’re unpredictable, erratic. What sense does it make for a person to one day want pants that are comfortable and roomy and then wear tapered things that pull at the ankles? To want a little yappy lap dog and then a Labrador Retriever? There is little logic behind our consumption. I search out patterns that are not there.

  Mr. Fox picks up a pair of scissors from his desk. Opening and closing them, steel scraping steel. They’re big and industrial. He looks at them, hungry; he runs his hand over them.

  So that’s how I’ll die. That’s how they would have me killed. At the bitter, shining end of Mr. Fox’s office scissors.

  “I’ve had a lot on my mind,” I say. “I’ll try harder.”

  He puts the scissors down, smiles. “That’s all I want to hear. Let’s see what you have by the end of the day.”

  Looking at him, I think of a zebra being chased by a lion, the kind of quick scene you’d catch flipping past the Discovery channel, but I’m not sure which animal he’s supposed to be. Mr. Fox is sometimes afraid I can read his mind.

  • speak to someone when my listeners start interrupting

  • make a list or catalogue in your head of real things around you

  • hum or sing quietly to yourself or listen to music

  • count your breath

  • repeat a mantra to yourself: I AM OKAY, I AM SAFE, I AM A GOOD PERSON

  • read out loud

  • do a task that requires your full attention such as housework, reading, busywork

  • change your environment, if inside go outside, change rooms, if outdoors take a walk

  • use an earplug in one ear, then take it out

  Sometimes, Dear Listeners, you have been mean to me. I keep this list in my drawer for those moments. But it’s not that simple: music listens to me instead of me to it. I wonder what people like me thought about before technology. What were they scared of before radios and speakers and computers could eavesdrop in?