The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  “My sister Jules comes to see me every day. She’s Jewish now.”

  “But you aren’t?”

  I told her how my mother’s religion was cats and Nicolette asked what I meant by that and I said, “That’s three questions in a row.” But I told her anyway about how my mother helped start the first covert cells of the Animal Liberation Front of the Puget Sound. “Those people in shopping malls who spray fake blood on fur coats? That’s her.” And how, in our feline foster home, my mom used to call me by the cats’ names by accident. Once, I was Piper for a whole week.

  As I spoke, Nicolette put down her brush and paints and closed her eyes and swayed a little in her chair. Which, to be one hundred percent truthful, gave me just enough wood that I had to cross my legs. She was hungry for my past. I saw that in her again and again. That’s when I first realized what fueled her: other people’s stories, unfortunate stories more often than not. Only I didn’t know then what exactly was being fueled.

  So I told her about the girl who jumped off the bluff, or what little I could remember—because I had to keep Nicolette just the way she was, eyes closed, lip bit—how I watched her body swing into the abyss like a dandelion seed.

  Later, when I got out of the hospital, she started coming to my apartment to continue our sessions. I would do anything she told me to. She had me naked a lot of the time. I was cold, sprawled on the kitchen floor, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t care what I looked like down there. She’d handle me, touch me, moving different body parts around as if adjusting objects for a still life. Sometimes she put me in women’s clothing. Or on all fours. There was a cat series—I was the cat. She said I fell asleep once, lying supine on the wood floor beneath my south-facing window, limbs in the air. I was her best model. And her most difficult. She said so.

  Nicolette was always listening. She’d ask me questions to get me talking about my family or my job or my reflection men and before I knew it the sun had set and she’d finished another painting. There were therapists and social workers and doctors who asked me questions, too. But no one listened like Nicolette. There was anguish in her listening. There was fear.

  And even though she told me very little about herself, I listened too. I knew more of what was going on in that head of hers than anyone. No one will remember my name. No one ever remembers the name of the model or subject. But with her, I was part of a greater whole. A very important link in the infinite chain of her. Without me, it would all fall apart.

  In the hospital that day, as she painted my fish-hooked shoulders, she finally looked up and said apologetically, “I think I have to stop.”

  “Why?” I said, standing so she’d see how tall I was. Which wasn’t much taller than her.

  She stared up at me a long time like I’d spoken another language and she had to translate it into her own, and she swayed back and forth a little, between the two poles of some decision she was silently making. I swayed too. Finally, she said, “I’m afraid I’ll fail to paint you.”

  I hold my precious clue in my head as I leave the gallery. The cobblestones can lead me straight to the setting of the painting if I can find out more details about them. And wherever the cobblestones are, there must be another clue to finding Nicolette.

  In the hallway, a group of Hasidic men huddle together. They are whispering, heads bent low, prayer fringes swaying at their waists as if to music. They’re the same men I saw at the landmine house, but they don’t recognize me. One of them says, “Something and something we are disappearing.” Obviously, they didn’t say the “somethings.” They stop talking as I approach. But stoic me, I smile, friendly and polite as can be so they don’t guess I have any inkling that they’re in on “something” here. “Killer day out there,” I say to them. They nod and wait for me to pass.

  I hurry down the stairs away from them and burst out the metal doors into the bright killer day, and who is there but Jill, the elevator man. Placed there to make me forget the cobblestones. I will not forget the cobblestones. There he is with his parenthetical mouth settling into a smile, leaning against the building with his knee bent up and his foot resting on the wall like a flamingo. Him and his old face smoking in the sun.

  He sweeps a hand through his thick manly gray hair in a nervous gesture. It makes me want to say the word lightning! Luckily he talks first.

  “Smells like shit out here.” And the air suddenly feels like a flooded basement.

  “Worse,” I say.

  “It’s rich people. Rich people shit smells the worst because of all the exotic things they get to eat. Little do they know,” he waggles a finger, “stomachs don’t accept major credit cards.”

  “You remember me?” I ask.

  “Sure I remember you. Kid with the painting.”

  “Not really with it.”

  “How about that article? Did you read it?” Jill frowns. “You didn’t read it.”

  I don’t tell him I forgot all about the National Geographic he gave me, but somehow he knows. I say I’d been planning on reading it today, I swear, I’m really interested.

  He says, “You should be. Those bees, man. Something weird is going on. Bees disappearing all over the world.”

  It is weird, I have to admit, especially since the Hasidim were just talking all about disappearing. But then Jill isn’t talking, just smoking, and I want to keep him here, so I look around for something to talk about and point to the small security camera above the door and tell him how they’re filming me all the time. So they’ll have the specimen someday in the future, to study a life like mine, like Buckminster Fuller created a specimen of himself before they had cameras everywhere.

  Jill says, “And what’s a life like yours?”

  There’s always the moment when I have to decide if I should tell someone I’m sick or not. It’s usually best to play it safe. There’s danger but I don’t know how much or what color level and it all looks gray-scale, like his hair. “Just a normal life,” I say.

  He thinks about this for a moment. “We’re all under surveillance, kiddo. Don’t go thinking you’re special.”

  Smart, but false. “You think they’re watching now?”

  “Not with that one.” He points to the camera above the door. “I know all the security in this building. Half the cameras are fakes. Floors two, four, and five—fakes. The three cameras on floor eight? All real. They got some honest treasures up there. And one real and one fakeroo on the ninth floor with your painting. It’s all up here.” He taps on his skull with his index finger. “What’s your name, kiddo?” When I don’t answer, he says, “I can keep calling you kiddo if you want.”

  “West. West,” I tell him.

  “West-West. What are your folks, a flock of geese?”

  “Then I’d be named South.”

  He likes that. Then he asks what’s the deal with me and my painting.

  “Mine?” I say.

  “You want it, don’t you?”

  “No!” I say in my best abashed voice. “I can’t afford it.”

  He leans forward. I can feel the heat coming off him. “You could always steal it.”

  I laugh, but he stares at me steadily. Then I have a very good idea. “To tell the truth, the woman who painted it, actually, she told me she wants it back.”

  He looks surprised. “Why doesn’t she come and get it?”

  “Can’t.”

  Jill opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but leaves it swinging there in the hot breeze.

  “She doesn’t want people to know it’s hers,” I say. “She took her name off it. They won’t let her just have it now.”

  If he knows I’m lying, he doesn’t show it. I can be a very good liar when I want to and I was wondering just the other day why I never pursued a career in acting. (Not that I would ever lie to you, because I promised you the truth. All truths.)

  “So, if we all want the painting so bad…” he says.

  “You want it?”

  Jill grunts. “I d
on’t know what I want. Who does?” Then he stubs his cigarette out on the wall and grins at me. “You ever stole anything?”

  I shield my eyes from the sun-charged windows across the street and tell him how once when I was little, I stole a baseball mitt from a neighbor kid, then gave it to my dad as a present.

  “He know it was stolen property?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He didn’t make you give it back?”

  I shake my head. “You ever steal anything?”

  He licks his fingers, pinches off the end of his cigarette, then slips it into his shirt pocket.

  “What I want to know,” he says to a space past my shoulder, “is who would paint something like that? Why would someone paint a person jumping from a bridge and dying? That would fuck a person up to have that painted of you.” He takes in a clunky, orange-level-threatening breath. “That artist must have been a real bitch.”

  That’s when I ram my head into the wall. I say the word lightning to myself. Lightning. Lightning. Light-n-ing. This way I won’t smash his face into the wall.

  AXIOM 1: NICOLETTE IS NOT A BITCH.

  “Hey. Hey, are you crazi?” Jill grabs my shoulder and spins me to face him. “Are you nuts? What the hell are you doing?”

  I can feel the stucco imprint on my forehead but from the look on his face I can tell I’m not bleeding. He lets go of my shoulder and says, “I’m sorri, man. I wasn’t thinking. You knowing her and all.” He sounds careful. I’ve scared him. “Hey, are we cool? I shouldn’t have said that. Are we cool, man? West?”

  So he’s gotten hold of both words. He thinks he can just spit them out and everything will be okay. Well he’d better be careful.

  But I don’t tell him that. The words won’t come, which is always or usually a sign that they shouldn’t. Nothing yet has fallen out of the sky. Now that these words are back in the language, they are neon arrows pointing to the mission. Pointing to my form above me.

  “West,” he says slowly, rolling my name around with his tongue, examining it in there like an expensive piece of sushi. “That’s a real good name. Maybe your folks didn’t want the West to die.” Then he tells me about people in Africa who name their kids after the last names of American presidents. Everyone’s first name is Kennedy, he says. “And once I actually met a kid named Hitler, first name, but that was years ago. Well, I didn’t really meet him, but a friend did. Well, he wasn’t really a friend. More like a traveler.” And he says that now the Italian government is paying Italians to name their babies Benito, not in honor of Mussolini, but because it’s a nice historic name and they don’t want it to disappear. His wrinkles catch the sweat rolling down his face. “What if I’d been named Benito? History is full of dead names.” Bees, names, something disappearing. He scales the building with his eyes, searching for the sky. “I should get back to work.”

  But I don’t want him to go just yet. “Have you always been a custodian?” I ask quickly. Then I try to roll my eyes up hard enough that they slap my brain.

  “Used to be a lawyer,” he says. “Did some law work, anyway. Then I was sort of an art dealer for a while.” Jill nods towards the door. “But I needed more job security.”

  He makes himself bigger, shoulders hunched yet tall, like a bear over his prey, and pushes through the big metal door. But then he looks back over his shoulder like he’s running from someone. I want to ask him: What are you hiding from? I want to tell him: You can stop running now.

  The horse cop on the corner of Sullivan keeps squinting at me like I was joking with someone about stealing a painting not forty minutes ago. Up and down the block, old women emerge from narrow doorways where they’ve always lived, and I wonder if they knew Nicolette. Hating them and wanting to grab their ankles and beg them to give me answers. Maybe they saw her around when she painted here decades ago. I need someone to rub my ideas against. I need a Sancho Panza. A Watson. Or maybe I need a Sherlock Holmes and I’m the sidekick. If it weren’t for my meds, I could be both. I am following myself blindly.

  At the library, I posted a cropped image of the cobblestones in the painting in a cobblestone forum. And this is where HstryNick04 led me. HstryNick04, facing his own glowing rectangle in New Jersey, or New Zealand, the New Jersey or New Zealand that exists only microseconds away, said that there were only two streets in the city where this kind of Belgium brick had been laid, and one was Sullivan. Somewhere HstryNick04 knows exactly where I am right now.

  I stand where there were once Belgian bricks and hold up the image of the painting on my phone to compare. Sketch and write down all the numbers and signs and addresses that are visible from the angle the painting seems to have captured, and other angles just in case. If I can find the street in the painting, then I can find the falling woman, and if I find the falling woman who I feel in my bones is still alive and breathing, then she can lead me to Nicolette.

  Have you ever noticed that if you stare at bricks too long, they begin to move? There’s something in the street that I can’t see. I look both ways then get down on my hands and knees in the middle of the road. Pressing my face to the grimy street, how the asphalt shoots off pinpricks of light and the whole city is vibrating against my cheek. Somewhere down here there is a clue.

  During our sessions in my apartment, Nicolette painted picture after picture after picture of me. Dirty, grotesque images—empty crab shells and deer decaying on the side of the road. She said all of them were me. A rat in a sewer nibbling at a book. A pile of manure with a white chicken on top, pecking. The apartment was filled with me. Paintings of all the abject corners of my life. She spread my dirty face everywhere.

  Of course Jill would think the painting was cruel, since he obviously senses the woman in the painting is alive, too, not just an object of Nicolette’s imagination. How hurt the woman must have been upon seeing her suicide. I would like to revise my first axiom.

  AXIOM 1: NICOLETTE IS NOT A BITCH. BUT SOMETIMES SHE DOES THINGS THAT MIGHT SEEM HURTFUL TO THE UNINITIATED.

  But over and over again she said she failed to paint me. That was her word—failed—not mine. I told her she never failed at anything, that it was all right. I had to remove the brush from her hand and say, stop, you’ll hurt yourself.

  But why did she think she failed? Nicolette could only have thought herself a failure if she was trying to do something beyond the physical paint on canvas, because she certainly didn’t fail at the act of rendering. Perhaps she meant she failed to capture it all. To capture. Some think photographs capture a soul—why not paintings? And she couldn’t paint without a story—stories about my mom, hallucinations, the girl on the bluff. Sometimes stories I’d told her a thousand times already.

  PREMISE 3: NICOLETTE LISTENED TO MY STORIES, PAINTED THE EVIL AND DISGUSTING SIDES OF ME, THEN SAID SHE’D FAILED.

  She painted hurtful images, but because of Axiom 1, I know she wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to help me. So why would she paint the ugliness she saw to help? Maybe she was trying to paint it away. If she could just paint it, secure it to canvas, if she could transcribe me, maybe she could steal my disease.

  CONCLUSION 2 (FROM A1 & P3): WHEN NICOLETTE PAINTS, SHE CAPTURES THE BAD ELEMENTS OF HER SUBJECTS’ LIVES—PAST, PRESENT, OR FUTURE—THUS REMOVING THEM FROM REALITY.

  And of course! She painted that woman in order to save her, too! To keep her from jumping. She took away the possibility of suicide, plucked the event right out of her timeline! Like a common pickpocket, no, like a fruit picker—she yanked it like a grapefruit from a tree of possibilities and stuck it into her own timeless handbag of unfortunate events.

  But if she does have this power, she could steal any potential event from the life of her subject. She could do unspeakable harm. But she doesn’t! She takes only the bad. Poor, poor Nicolette. What a burden to take on those evils. I have to tell Jill/Benito! The painting wasn’t an act of malice. It was an act of salvation.

  But then how did Nicolette time travel to paint the woman
in the first place? According to Hawking, you’d need to implode stars to get enough energy to create a wormhole. As we all know:

  A2: ENERGY CAN NEITHER BE CREATED NOR DESTROYED.

  So, and:

  P4: TIME TRAVEL WOULD REQUIRE A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF ENERGY.

  By painting that unfortunate event and trapping it in the image, Nicolette must have found a way to harness said event’s potential energy and use it as time-travel currency. Before it burned a hole in that sad but nifty purse of hers.

  C3 (FROM C1, C2, A2, & P4): NICOLETTE USES THE ENERGY SHE CAPTURES FROM PAINTING TO TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.

  I must find the falling woman, who is now most certainly alive—for the painting is keeping her from jumping. Because if one of those unfortunate events, for instance the suicide, were to actually occur—well, it’s impossible according to the logic, but if it did, it might, mightn’t it, rip a hole in something important.

  With my glasses off, it is much easier to press my cheek firmly to the street Nicolette painted in the fifties. But the fifties mean something different to her than they do to the rest of us. They might, mightn’t they, be tomorrow from her perspective!

  There is no reason to assume that the way we experience time and space says anything about the way it actually is—the math shows us as much and so does literature. Western stories rely on linearity, but some African storytellers will tell multiple stories simultaneously and one story will trip into another, entwining past and future. They’re on to something true and here’s that truth: there are many more dimensions than we can possibly imagine. Our inability to experience them only goes to show that our experience isn’t sufficient to say anything about anything!

  A young couple passes me and points. From where I am, pressed to the ground, the bottom halves of them edge quickly around the corner. I feel terrible for them. They have no idea what a beautiful, magical world they live in.

  The saddest part about all of this is that Nicolette will never experience her own end. She’ll never be her own old woman. She pops up here and there, reappearing and disappearing without a trace—which explains her absence this past year, and why her phone stopped working.