It must seem natural to the people around her; she fits into whatever timeline she lands in. She’s probably seen all of history, she might have fended off the Spaniards with the Lenape Indians or been a Viking. But that kind of power must be taxing. I saw the rage she carries firsthand and it was like a jug of sand balanced on her head. But I never realized its vastness, and that in it was all the sand of all the beaches in the world. There’s gold buried in there, sure, but who would want to dig through all that despair to get at it? In that dangerous handbag, she lugs around suicides and murders and loss and sorrow. She must be terribly sad.
A car honks. Three deliberate honks. From my hunched position, I spot a sedan sitting behind me. I hop up on the sidewalk, wave and watch it pass. And there—did you catch the license plate, Watson? A vanity plate that says BEE-OCH with a sassy cartoon bumblebee on its frame. Everything points to Jill.
Here’s a truth: she thought my disease was her fault, that she triggered it. I never told her otherwise.
How much do you know about schizophrenia? Not much, probably. Maybe where you are, there is no word for schizophrenia, it’s just normal. Like asking the universe what it calls the universe. But don’t feel dumb—even the doctors in this dimension don’t know much, especially its origin. Is it hereditary? Unclear. Is it frontal lobal? Don’t know. How do we treat it? No clue! Even though we have neuroimaging now! All these generations of medication are guesswork.
One more stop: Bushwick. A detour to verify my previous conclusions, which could still be false. If Nicolette were just avoiding me, it would be simpler. She wouldn’t be in danger.
The apartment building—the address the jerkwad posted online—is an old tortilla factory, or maybe it was pencils, not meant to be residential. You can smell the asbestos and other things that could kill you, seeping from the mortar. Apartment fourteen—but the buzzer doesn’t work. No choice but to try all the buttons then wish I could wash my hands.
A Hasidic man opens the door. “Can I help you?” he asks.
“No,” I say, about to turn, but I cannot let my fear get the best of me. “Yes. I mean. I’m looking for Nicolette.”
“Hm. Are you a relative?” he asks.
“No.”
“Lucky you,” he says. “She owes me rent. I haven’t seen her since spring.”
“Oh,” I say. All I want to do is leave. “Maybe it got lost in the mail.”
“If you see her,” he says. But he doesn’t say what I’m supposed to do.
It’s all coming from Jill. He’s the one who told me to read about the bees, and all this talk of disappearing names. Since Jill works in the gallery building, it follows that he works for the Hasids, but he’s never mentioned them, and is that a clue in itself? Jill is either my friend or foe and I must find out which to move forward with my plan.
I figure there can’t be many male Jills running around New York City. Back at home, I run a quick search for “Mr. Jill” NYC law, since he said he did some law work. And what do you know—there’s article after article about him breaking the law. Jill Hayes, the anarchist. Jill Hayes, the draft dodger. I follow him from one protest to the next. He’s easy to spot in the Village Voice archives even though he’s since acquired forty years of wrinkles and weird facial hair. He was at nearly every draft-card-burning rally ever and went to jail like six times—which is, for some reason, exciting to me. There’s a great picture of him in handcuffs, looking like he’s about to bite the camera. He probably keeps that clipping with him. Another photo has him holding up an anti-fascist banner with three other boys and a woman under the Washington Square Arch. The woman’s face is blurred in an attempt to escape the picture. There’s also a small article in a local paper from Rochester, Michigan, of all places, about Jill and a cleaning company being accused of robbery in the eighties, the charges dropped. Unless there’s another Mr. Jill Hayes floating around, exactly the same age.
There is so much information. And it’s all mine, only a millimeter or millisecond away. It makes me euphoric. It almost makes me feel like I’m in love. When I get incredulous about information technology, I imagine myself in a period film, and that period is now, and people in the future are watching and I’m voicing my incredulity in dialogue, and they laugh because it will be an inside joke with the audience because yes they do have cell phones that work underground but they aren’t called phones anymore because they’re implanted in their brains.
But then sometimes, there’s so much information I feel nauseated. I can’t differentiate the vital from the trivial. Like the consumer reports I read every day: it’s all there, on the same plane, equalized, and how should I presume? How should I know what to read? Who am I? I am no one. I am only a consumer, a ragdoll sponge of language.
And the National Geographic that Jill gave me? Turns out there’s some mite going around and whole hives are disappearing around the world. That’s the gist of the first couple paragraphs anyway, but it’s hard to concentrate with letters coming unglued from the page.
And in the gallery, the Hasidic man said, “We are disappearing.” Who is “we”? The Hasidim?
My phone chirrups on the table. It’s Jules, as if she’s listening in on my thoughts and is trying to interrupt them. Could she be? But she wouldn’t understand. Jules never knew Nicolette.
“Jules, quick, tell me how big the Hasidic population is.” I hope that Dan isn’t there but I’m afraid to ask in case he’s listening in.
“Hello to you, too.”
“How many people you think?”
“What? I have no idea.”
Calmly, slowly, I say, “Hello. Isn’t there a census number you know or something?”
“No one I know fills out the census. Are you all right?”
“Why?”
“Why are you all right?”
“Why don’t they fill out the census?”
“Because. We’re Jews. Bad things happen when you count us. Think what happened the last time.”
“What happened last time?” Google search: Hasidic population.
“The Holocaust, dummy. The last time we were thoroughly ranked and recorded, who do you think was doing the counting?”
She’s right. There’s no solid number that’s easily searchable. “So?”
“So. Even for a minyan you’re not supposed to count with numbers. You use a ten-character word instead. And you can’t point fingers.”
Quick search for the Holocaust and Mussolini’s name pops up almost as much as Hitler’s. Why did Jill mention Mussolini and Hitler earlier? And now Jules, too. Old Benito did help Hitler try to wipe out the Jewish population. But what does that have to do with Nicolette and the Hasids at the gallery? Wouldn’t it be great if it were some kind of intricate revenge plot? Maybe they want to commission Nicolette to paint Hitler out of history. No, that can’t be it.
“West? Are you there?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you on the computer?”
“No.”
“You are. You’re using your Internet voice. Stop that when you talk to me.”
Maybe the way we use the Internet is an appropriate metaphor for the way we truly move through time—the expansiveness and invisibility. We experience position and time as discrete markers of identity. I am right here and right now. Later, I will be right there and right then. But in space-time, we are four-dimensional creatures. The physics says that I am neither here nor there, neither now nor then; I am a continuous four-dimensional instant, curving through space and time. We think of people and things as having temporal ends—a person dies, they are ended—but that’s misleading. People only end the way a yardstick ends and the way a road ends. They stop in space. We cry.
But is it a tragedy that a yardstick does not extend forever? No! Its utility is derived from its limitation!
“Jules, think carefully. Have you noticed if there’s been fewer people lately? At synagogue and stuff.”
“A couple women stopped coming. Everyone’s
moving upstate. What if I moved to Poughkeepsie? Elaine loves it. Not that Dan would ever leave the city.”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you’re so curious, why don’t you come to an event tonight?”
“Services again? Don’t you ever do anything else?”
“I do lots of things.”
“You used to try to make me go salsa dancing. You’re not allowed to dance anymore?”
“Total freedom isn’t always a blessing, West.”
“Yes it is.”
Jules sighs. “Like at a diner, like at Neil’s over on Lex, don’t you have a moment of panic looking through that menu? Page after page, having to read every item to make sure you’re making the best choice. And then you get your usual tuna sandwich and you’re no happier than if you had chosen something from a list of five items. You’re less happy, knowing there are all those other meals you never tried. Or at the supermarket—”
“Okay, I get it.”
“And you have a hundred choices of cornflakes? It’s suffocating. There is such a thing as too much freedom.”
“I get it,” I say, clicking to another website quietly so she can’t tell.
“I make choices within a particular path. We all have our restrictions and disciplines. Mine is faith.”
“What’s mine?” I say.
“I don’t know, West. Your disease?”
There’s a moment of static and I’m not sure if she’s hung up on me or if I should.
“I didn’t mean that,” she says. “If you want to know, the population is growing. Because of the Lubavitch movement.”
I can time travel, too, sort of. I pull up photographs of Mussolini and his mistress hanging from the Petrol station for public viewing. His demise on display.
I wait to feel something about it. I wait and wait.
It’s like the way empathy works, neurologically speaking: when you see a spider crawling up someone else’s arm, you feel as if the spider is crawling up your arm; that feeling is as real as that experience, the same neurons really do fire up. It’s hard for most people to empathize with the abstract—genocide, war. But since I am able to feel other people’s brains as if they’re mine all the time, then maybe I truly can time travel, too. If I just imagine hard enough
I hear someone laughing in the background. “Is someone else there?” I ask quietly.
“No, just Dan. He’s watching some stupid show about tricked-out cars.”
“Dan’s there? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told him it was killing his brain cells. You would never watch that, would you? You have better taste. I told him that, too.”
“I have to go.”
“But what about dinner? That’s why I called. Tuesday?”
Dan just happens to be within hearing distance of every important conversation. I hang up.
It’s all connected to the Hasidim. And Dan.
The Hasidim know the painting was created in the 1950s because they had it dated like the gallery-sitter said. But they still believe it’s Nicolette’s—they said so at the landmine house. And they know that Nicolette created the landmine house this year. So, and therefore:
P5: THE HASIDIM, WHICH INCLUDES DAN, HAVE ALSO CONCLUDED THAT NICOLETTE CAN TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.
What are they plotting? What could they possibly use this information for?
P6: THE HASIDIC POPULATION IS SECRETLY ON THE DECLINE.
Let’s just say that my sister’s Lubavitch movement is a desperate response to this decline, recruiting less religious Jews as quick as they can. If the Hasidim are disappearing—like the bees, like the names—they would, naturally, want to know how one might stop from disappearing. You can’t hold that against them, because as we all know:
A3: ANYONE ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION IS BOUND TO TAKE DRASTIC MEASURES TO PUT A STOP TO SAID EXTINCTION.
They must have decided that if Nicolette can paint a woman’s suicide out of existence, why shouldn’t she, or they, be able to paint their own extinction out, too? If only they could harness that power themselves, they could paint away their own demise and time travel to who knows where! But to harness it, they need Nicolette to teach them, or force her to paint it for them. But the only way to locate Nicolette is through the painting, the last tangible link.
C4 (FROM P5, P6, & a3): the hasidim will stop at nothing to track down nicolette.
I write a letter to Jill that I plan to leave at the first-floor gallery in the building asking him to meet me at a certain location four days from now. I try to sound friendly so I won’t scare him away. Four days to prepare my thoughts. I haven’t told anyone, really, about Nicolette—I haven’t wanted to give her away like that. I don’t know if Jill is working under the Hasidim’s spell or if he’s a free agent, but time is running out, I can feel it. Nicolette is in danger and I must protect her. Without knowing where she is there’s only one thing I can do. I have to tell Jill:
C5: I MUST STEAL THE PAINTING.
Every city has a suicide bridge: Golden Gate Bridge Jacques Cartier Bridge Aurora Bridge Coronado Bridge Sunshine Skyway Bridge Cold Spring Canyon Bridge Nusle Bridge Van Stadens Bridge Humber Bridge Hornsey Lane Bridge Duke Ellington Bridge Villena Bridge Foresthill Bridge Grafton Bridge.
Here I am, five o’clock on Thursday, standing in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and not a bird in sight. Jill’s tromping up from the East. It looks like he’s carrying Brooklyn Heights on his shoulders. Four days since our last encounter and he hasn’t changed a bit.
I did all my homework, memorized a speech to give him about Nicolette and the painting. I will be the curator of this conversation.
The footpath is full of commuters. Walking and biking, idling. I know where they’re headed. I can feel desperation in their bones, the tremor of doing things they don’t want to do—a general yellow-level danger. Standing above the river, suspended between decision and indecision. Between two visions of themselves. New Yorkers—always more there than here.
I must have gone to work the last few days and done a hell of a job because I’m great at what I do. I must have eaten cups-of-noodles for lunch and fried egg sandwiches for dinner. But it’s more like I’m remembering a movie and imagining a scene that wasn’t really in it. An angled view from above. Where was my mind? Perhaps this is in itself a form of time travel. I must have brushed my teeth and taken a dump; I must have showered once and jerked off twice and rewatched Unforgiven on my computer.
Jill is quiet and forlorn as he approaches. Just nodding and humming on the swaying bridge, which isn’t actually swaying.
He shakes my hand. His is calloused, carrying beans under his skin.
“Lucky we’re here,” he says. “I only got your note when I went by work to get my stuff. Quit a couple days after I saw you.” He smiles between his gray, downy parentheses, but on his forehead is the memory of a frown. “But you got me here. So out with it. What’s this urgent business?”
Each time someone passes us on the bridge, they turn just before they’re out of earshot and look at me over a shoulder. Jill doesn’t see because his back is to them. Their footsteps are as loud as Jill’s voice, and it’s hard to figure out which sounds to pay attention to.
“It’s about the painting,” I say slowly. This is where my speech is to begin. I practiced the lie all week so it feels true. “She says the Hasids, they don’t get her work. Her intention. They don’t deserve it. But they won’t give the painting back. She told me that.”
“Who deserves it then? You?”
“No, not me. No one, maybe. Except maybe the woman in the painting. Whoever she is.”
The lines in his forehead disappear like they’ve been airbrushed away. He laughs out loud. “Whoever? But I know her.”
I close my eyes and listen to the traffic humming below.
“Knew her, anyway.” His words are pinched, like it’s causing him physical discomfort to remember. “I used to live with her. On Sullivan.”
; I tie my voice up with ropes so it will not shake. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You never asked.”
This is true. Even with my eyes closed, I can feel him smiling. I throw up my hands. “Well.” Well someone very powerful is moving the pieces around, I want to say. This is divine intervention. This is God or something. This is Nicolette. “Is she alive?”
“Of course she’s alive,” he says defensively. “But real sick. Real sick.”
“You still see her?”
“I keep track.”
“So that’s why you got the job at the gallery?”
“That was just a coincidence. One of those great mysteries in life.” Liar. Eyes shut, I hear him smacking his cigarette pack against his hand. “Like how you know the artist, and I know the subject. Funny, don’t you think? You can open your eyes now.”
I open them. He sounds angry, like he blames me for it. But I wasn’t the one who sent him! The wind blows his silvery hair and lets off sparks. Maybe he doesn’t even know; maybe he’s an agent of the Hasids but his memories were erased. In either case, I act like I don’t know anything fishy is going on. I suck in the smoggy bridge air and ask, “What’s her name?”
He tells me her name like he’s sad to give it to someone else, the way I feel about Nicolette. I hold it in pursed lips, let the name melt beeswaxy around my tongue. Nowhere to go, the name is a trapped bee pinging around inside my head. I watch it struggle in there a while. Claire. Claire Bishop.
I feel I need to give him something in return for her name. “I have to tell you something about the artist,” I say. But I feel so urgent the words come out: “Something I have tell artist.” I have all these wet lumps of clay in my brain that used to be my speech and my fingers are shaking too much to re-mold them. Touching my brain is the weirdest thing.
“See, you are, and I am, we all are snake-like time creatures whose circumference is the shape of our bodies. Like one of those children’s toy tunnels that stretch out and accordion back in. Those weightless nylon ones?” I pull my hands apart as wide as I can to demonstrate. “We think we’re moving in one straight line, because that’s how we think of time, from point of birth until your spatial and temporal endpoint. Then you fall out of the tunnel of yourself, kaput! But if you see it another way, zoom out, my tunnel is draped all over New York, crossing over itself.”
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 16