The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  Grid of light. Broadway. Times Square. I don’t know how long I searched for her on the street that night. I was certain she was lost in the grid of light. I must have walked eighty blocks. Maybe part of me knew I shouldn’t go home, would have died if I found her there packing her things. I am still on that street, looking.

  She left books. When I finally returned to the apartment, I went through each one, dozens of them, and ripped out every page that contained the two words, and when I got tired of that, I ripped blindly. The reflection men told me to, and I happily agreed. After the doctor and his dictionary, those words fought back, angry I’d tried to destroy them. And so I officially extracted them from the English language by throwing out those books. Words like rotten teeth.

  Paper cuts and raw palms. I carried the books like babies stolen from the hospital, like little porcelain clowns, then opened my arms and threw them out the window. The pages glistened in the faraway light, suspended momentarily in the air until they realized the pull and fall, and then disappeared into the dark tunnel of bricks. I never saw them hit the ground. I remember how the clock—which had been my sad soundtrack then and stayed with me like a taunting sibling—I remember how it seemed to pause as it rained Hawking, Kafka, Asimov, and Doyle on the alley off Broome.

  I didn’t hear those two words again until she texted me after her landmine house.

  When she left, she took all her paintings but forgot her paints. I would use one of her palettes and throw a few brushstrokes on an unstretched canvas tacked to the wall, not enough to see that I lacked her skill, then would leave the apartment. I don’t know where I went—for hours I was somewhere, because I could not have been nowhere—and when I returned home I saw the canvas and knew she’d been there while I was away, painting alone in the dark.

  That-time collides with now-time. I get confused. And I don’t blame her, then or now. It wasn’t just the theater where the stage gaped like her mouth. Not being near her and remembering that night makes all the blood burst from my spine. I’m a park fountain. And the theater seats, all 922 of them, are stacked precariously on my nose. The phone rings and rings and I always think it will be her, but no one is on the other end of the line. The hollow ocean sound of the empty receiver, like holding a conch shell to my ear.

  But I will remember her quaking bird hands. I will take those, those homing pigeons flapping in the theater, and send them out to find her.

  That night, after the books, I remember a big breeze swept through the open window and all the loose pages I’d strewn about the floor lifted like leaves and clattered in chorus. Applauding the end of the scene.

  Mr. Fox leaves before lunch for a meeting. Before he does, he’s all eyes. He waves an empty can of oranges and a plastic spoon in his left hand while he’s talking to us. He says he’s got spies in the vents and then adds just kidding, and there’s scattered laughter. He makes sure to tell me that he’s counting on me and then adds under his breath, “I’ll be watching you. Even when I’m gone, I have my ways. Not kidding.” The corners of the Fox’s smile stretch hideously up to his eyes—and then he’s gone. He doesn’t say when he’ll return, it could be any time. But I’m not scared.

  The air conditioner gives a perfunctory hiccup.

  Nicolette doesn’t pick up when I call her from the landline at work or when I route calls from various area codes via my computer. First try, it rings seven times then nothing. The other eight calls go straight to voice-mail. Of those eight, I leave three messages using different voices. One as me: “Nicolette, just calling to say hi, see if you want to reschedule, because, you know I get worried and I hope you didn’t not show the other day because something is wrong. Okay.” Stupid. Later, one as a gallery rep: “We’re really interested in talking to you, Ms. Bernhardt, very excited about your work. All of us here at Schmidt Wilson.” And one as her landlord: “You missed rent again, or did it get lost in the mail? Please call me to clear this up.”

  I google Nicolette—on a thread some jerkwad posted an address for her, requesting she get an egging for stealing an idea of his, which I know absolutely is a lie. But he’s good for something: I write down the address in my notepad.

  I realize all this sounds stalkerish, but what if she’s not merely avoiding me? I’m afraid her unanswered emails and calls from different people prove something far more sinister is going on. She’s avoiding everyone in the world? Even a potential solo show? I highly doubt that. Honestly, it would be great if she were avoiding only me. If she would call back thinking I was a gallery owner (in which case I’d hang up, satisfied she called at all), or even if she called to say, “West, leave me the hell alone or I’ll call the cops,” I would love that because it would mean she’s safe and here in the world where she’s supposed to be. But she’s not. See? She’s not. Because she’s gone.

  The guys start throwing the Nerf ball over the cubicle walls, playing an increasingly complex game of H.O.R.S.E. Off the door, off the monitor, into the waste bin.

  I google “1950s Nicolette artist.” Someone named Nicolette, who goes by just her first name, does pop up. But the record is spotty—it’s as if she were only there for a few months or a year. There are reviews and shows for a brief period—then nothing. Just like now.

  The ball bounces off Fox’s door, off the cubicle wall, into the waste bin.

  “You’re up!” Orange-Socks Dave says to me, juggling the ball.

  I spin around to him in my chair. “I’m working.” When I spin back, my foot kicks my messenger bag and out flops Nicolette’s old copy of A Brief History of Time. Of course I pick it up. I wouldn’t be surprised if she left a clue in there.

  “Come on. You’re not really working. What are you doing?” The way Orange-Socks Dave is pressuring me, it sounds like a test. Mr. Fox’s test, to see if I’ll screw around like they will. And hence lose my job. Or someone’s test, to sidetrack me from finding Nicolette.

  “I’m working,” I say again. He makes as if to throw the ball at me but doesn’t.

  Chapter ten, Wormholes and Time Travel, only takes me a couple minutes to read because that’s where most of the pages are ripped out. Hawking is smarter than I am but there are things he doesn’t even know he’s teaching. For instance: if there are societal laws and people who break those laws, it only follows that for the laws of the universe there may be atoms or even people who break those laws.

  Let’s think about stars. We impose constellations on stars because of our perspective, when in fact they are so far away from each other, the connection is false—those stars aren’t even next to each other; they’re behind or in front, we can’t tell. We have no depth perception when viewing outer space. But we are very good at constructing patterns where none exist—especially patterns resembling ourselves: Orion, a monkey’s face on the surface of Mars, the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.

  False pattern-making isn’t just spatial. Our word “time” is one way of denoting the linear movement through the events of the universe. One cannot experience two or more events simultaneously. But that doesn’t mean point A to point B is the only way to move. There are progressions more meaningful than that of second to second. But we must live as if time were linear.

  To get at the truth of Nicolette, we must think like a scientist, employing formal logic and deductive reasoning.

  PREMISE 1: NICOLETTE, THOUGH 26 YEARS OLD IN 2004, PAINTED “THE SUICIDE” IN THE LATE FIFTIES.

  I know what you’re thinking: no way. And I can’t expect you to feel it the way I do. But stick with me for just a minute.

  Where is Nicolette? I haven’t seen or talked to her in almost a year, except for texting the other day. At her big solo exhibition in Brooklyn this past winter, she never showed. I overheard the curator say they couldn’t get hold of her. And she didn’t come to the landmine house. And now I’ve called and sent her all variety of innocuous requests from a range of email addresses and phone numbers. No one knows where she is. Because she’s nowhere.

 
So and therefore:

  PREMISE 2: NICOLETTE DISAPPEARS FOR LARGE BLOCKS OF TIME.

  My cell vibrates—my mom.

  Of course she would interrupt when I’m on the verge of discovery.

  I have a phone voice for my mom, another for my girlfriends (real or hypothetical), another for the guys at work. I take the phone out into the hall.

  “Honey, how are you, are you taking your meds…no, that’s not why I called, don’t get upset, I know you’re smart…yes, you are not stupid, you haven’t called in weeks, honey, honey, listen, your sister, listen, I need you to come home.”

  I haven’t been home since before I was sick.

  “Not sure that’s a good idea, Mom.”

  She says it’s a great idea and that she has a surprise for me and not to come on one of her “mall days,” by which she means don’t come when she’s busy yelling at rich ladies in fur. “You can find a cheap last-minute flight. And don’t miss your plane.” That’s her attempt at a joke about when she missed her plane the one time she was supposed to visit me, which was when I got out of the hospital for the second time last year. She never rebooked. She’s always been afraid to fly. “What else? Are you seeing anyone?”

  “How’s Dad?” I ask. “You talked to him lately?”

  She answers by telling me about Cinder, her oldest foster cat. “She’s so sick, I don’t know what to do. Diarrhea all over the house.” When she starts crying I hang up, pretending the connection is bad. Cinder’s been with her a long time. But she can’t cry like that for every cat. She’s had at least fifty over the years. And anyway, Cinder might be okay.

  But maybe she was helping me get on track with Nicolette, asking if I was seeing anyone. Maybe I’m on the right track. I go back to my desk. I can’t find Nicolette just by thinking hard, which is how it used to feel. She could be anywhere. Maybe she’s in India. Or Israel or Home Depot. If I’m right, clap twice. I try to think straight into her mind. Maybe she joined a band of Luddites in the desert and stopped using language. Maybe she made it into the space program and now she’s on the moon. But that can’t be right. The truth is that I’ve looked everywhere. But not everywhen.

  Off the computer, off West’s head, into the wastebasket.

  Smack in the face. The ball falls to the floor, not the bin. Dave, in his terrorist-threat-o-meter orange socks, starts laughing. “You in or not?” he asks me.

  I don’t answer. I miss the time when Dave’s socks were yellow. But is that time gone or simply stuck in the blind spot of my brain?

  The laws of the universe are indifferent to the direction of time. Because we’re unable to measure the universe completely at any given point, and are therefore unable to perceive everything at once, it seems as if time moves in one direction. But that’s as silly as saying space moves in one direction. The math clearly shows time as a continuum. Time doesn’t move at all. It just is; we’re the ones moving through it.

  But even through is wrong. Through is only our perception; through wouldn’t exist if we weren’t here to perceive it as such.

  Nicolette knew all this. She painted with it in her heart.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Dave says. But I have nothing to say to these jerkwads unless they want to hear what is finally so clear to me!

  CONCLUSION 1 (FROM P1 & P2): NICOLETTE TRAVELS THROUGH TIME.

  Don’t freak out, I’m just putting it out there. At the very least, it resonates.

  “Nothing? Really?” he says. “You’re not going to stick up for yourself?” Then Dave doesn’t find this funny anymore and yells to the guys, “That’s enough.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. I watch him and take off my glasses to rub my nose, too. The game is over. I’ve passed the test.

  13 pills left, 157 lbs., cup-of-noodles for lunch plus bodega ice cream sandwich, 23 rings on office phone, 3 guys asleep at desks, 1 dreaming he’s a dog.

  The gallery-sitter taps his pencil like he’s keeping time, counting how long I’ll stay. He doesn’t seem to recognize me, which is ludicrous; I have a very memorable face.

  The Hasidim are right outside the door and I try to be quick about it; the last thing I want is them finding me in here with Nicolette’s art. But I’m a senile Holmes, scanning the painting for clues. What am I missing?

  Holding two warring truths in your brain can give you one hell of an ice cream headache. They—the truths—are pulsing and repelling magnets. How could Nicolette have time traveled in order to paint this? If I can just find out why she painted it. Or broader: why did she paint anything? Why did she paint me?

  The gallery-sitter’s antsiness takes up most of the room and I can’t concentrate. Each time he looks up from his computer to the window behind him, wishing the sun into setting, his face adds or loses decades. He’s in his twenties; a second later he’s sixty-something. He doesn’t know much about what will happen to him. He doesn’t know that in forty-two years, he’ll die from his third heart attack just after he’s mugged on Pitt Street in the Lower East Side. He’ll have lived in New York, and Jersey that one regrettable year, for most of his life and never have been mugged. When he first moved here after high school, he’d cross his fingers with one hand and held his keyring in the other like claws, like his mother showed him—but he’d stopped doing that years ago. So when this happens, this final event of his life, his body retaliates in disbelief. And since the mugger has taken his personals, including his phone and wallet with ID, days pass before he’s identified and his children are contacted, followed by his ex-wife who left him for a woman after ten years of marriage. You see, no one was expecting him. He never received an identification chip everyone will have implanted by then, tucked into the cleft of the wrist or behind the ear. He never wanted to be known like that, and this is what he gets. He’s survived by two children and four grandchildren, all of whom received their implants as soon as they turned fourteen, the new statutory age. Three of those grandchildren will turn out to be unimpressive citizens and nearly as miserable as their grandfather, but one of them, a red-haired boy named Albert, will be one of the first men to live on a space station for more than five years. And he will be lonely, but also very fulfilled by his work testing soil samples in space, and he won’t have any children.

  The gallery-sitter grimaces like he’s just heard his fortune. I don’t know for sure, I want to tell him. I’m just guessing. But I’m a very good guesser.

  And I’m imagining the gallery sitter lying dead on the street as an old man, and that’s when I really see it…in the background of the painting, just below the falling woman’s ribcage, on the street she lands on from the bridge, there is something so familiar, so common, I can’t believe I missed it: cobblestone.

  With this clue, I can find the location of the painting, which will lead me to Nicolette then and now. I touch the thick gold frame. I whisper to the painting: I will find you, falling woman.

  The other first time I met Nicolette, I remember she wore a bright red sundress peeking out from under a blue patient’s robe. This was when she came to paint me in the hospital. Her black hair was cropped short and greasy with summer and she didn’t belong there. We were in the activity room, the half-dozen patients who volunteered to sit for a portrait. She was whispering something to the art therapist when her eyes caught mine. She chose me first, you see.

  She set up her easel in the corner of the dayroom. As I sat, I tried to be graceful, a regular ballerina. She laughed. “You look like you have fishhooks in your shoulders. Sit normal. Go on.” Sitting normal, it turned out, takes a tremendous amount of energy. She said she was going to ask me some questions while she worked if that was all right with me and that she’d start with an easy one: “Do you want to be here?”

  The others watched us from across the room while the art therapist tried to draw their attention back to their pre-cut paper and popsiclestick collages. “No,” I said, “but you knew that. So it’s my turn to ask a question?”

  She pulled her chair an inch
closer to her canvas then pushed it away again. “Okay, why not? Ask me.” That was the only time I ever saw her nervous.

  “Why are you wearing that patient gown?”

  “I wanted to see what it felt like. Probably in poor taste. But so is the gown.”

  “We only wear those the first day,” I said.

  “Good, since it’s my first day. My turn. Why did you volunteer to be my subject?”

  “Because you’re beautiful.”

  She smiled and hid a blush and said, “Thank you, but that’s not—”

  So I asked, “Why do you want to paint us?”

  “Same answer as the robe. I’m trying on an experience that’s not my own.” She talked like I thought her paints might talk if given the gift of speech. She sounded British without the accent, old-fashioned without old jargon. “The hospital rejected my proposal for years. It’s like a fancy nightclub—you have to wait in line forever to get in.” With her left hand, she pushed her hair behind her ear two and a half times until it fell back toward her cheek and she left it there. “I’m sorry. That was—” Her right hand was meanwhile moving deftly across the canvas, which I couldn’t see. “Do you have visitors who come around?”