“West,” Jill says. He seems about to stop me but then, “Never mind. Go on.” I know that most people would be getting a little frantic, trying to make eye contact with a passing stranger as if to say, Can you believe this guy? There’s always a hint of fear in their faces, real fear that I’ll flip out on them or hurt them—but that’s absent from Jill’s face. He looks at me like I’m nuts, sure, but he’s not afraid. He sucks on his cigarette then realizes he never lit it.
So, I tell him about Nicolette and time travel. Give him a first-class education on logic and argument while I’m at it.
I tell him how Nicolette understood return. She had me repeat those stories again and again—about the girl on the bluff or my mom’s anarchist jail time or my dad leaving—listening for what she called the “original pain.” We repeat those moments throughout our lives without knowing it. If she could return to it in this piece of art, outside of me, or Claire, maybe she could end the cycle. Turn pain into beauty. Her paintings were acts of salvation, not malice!
I admit to Jill that though I haven’t yet deduced the physics of how Nicolette travels through time, we know that she can. We’ve all had a taste of that power. We just don’t know how to sustain or control it. The power lies in our perception, has a tangible effect on time itself. When we’re bored and time feels like it’s moving so slowly, we’re moving slower through our fourth-dimensional selves. Alas, our linear perception of time is too ingrained and even if we could alter it, most of us would stick to the straight and narrow—it’s easiest, and we’re not the brightest species in the universe. “Can you imagine being with her?” I say in conclusion. “It’s like being with a ghost.”
Jill looks at me like he’s just woken up from a coma and doesn’t know it yet. He didn’t even hear me. I gave away Nicolette for nothing.
I am weak. I am not even human. I am mouse.
“So what you’re saying?” Jill says. “The whole name thing, it’s not a coincidence? There aren’t just two artists that go by Nicolette?”
What would it mean to jump? With my eyes, I follow the wires and the shapes of the wires, touch the nearest one, thick wrapped around each other. Are they hundreds of separate strands braided together, or one wire made to look that way? I grip it with both hands and pull as hard as I can, lean my full weight back—nothing. And yet they sway in the breeze like hair.
“I’m an open-minded sort of guy,” Jill says. “Never been spiritual or any of that, but—you know how that sounds, right? I just want to make sure you know how it sounds to a guy like me. Who’s not into the whole metaphysical thing.”
Don Quixote knew himself even though he was mad. And he slept in his helmet and never left his vigil or his quest. What conviction do people have today that even comes close? If put to the task, we’d all leave our armor unattended. I want to say, yes, I know what it sounds like to all the sad, blind people. The normal people with their normal briefcases and lunch bags. They have no idea who they are. They don’t want to know.
I crane my neck over the railing and watch the cars and feel them reflecting on the underside of my chin like I am water. “I don’t know how you would jump,” I say conversationally.
“What?”
“I’m just saying it would be hard. You’d have to really want it. You’d have to get down to the car level, or heave yourself far enough over the lane below.”
“Real nice, kid.”
“I need the painting.” I turn to face him. “Even if I’m playing right into their hands.”
There is a lull in foot traffic. Suddenly it’s just us.
“It’s too expensive. You said so yourself.” He tries to light up but the wind won’t let him.
“I know.”
He tilts his head back, looking at the nothing-blue sky like something is going to fall out of it any minute now. Avoiding my eyes at all cost. “If we do this,” he says, “you’ve got to be the one. I’ll organize everything, I’ll be there with you, but I can’t—” He throws his hands up as if to say he’s innocent. “I can’t do the actual deed. You got to know your limits. And I’ll be a suspect right off since I quit. I’ll have to be scarce after. But I can help get it to her.”
“To her?”
“To Claire. It’ll be a waiting game till it’s safe. Understand?”
“I thought we were giving it back to the artist.”
“And I thought we determined the person who deserves it is the nice lady in the painting. Am I wrong?”
“No.”
“So that’s the deal. You in or not?”
I look along the cables for cameras or microphones with wires leading somewhere unknown but I am not so stupid as to think they would leave loose wires for me to find. If they’re easy to see, I know they mean nothing. I look Jill right in the eyes and say, “Yes.” I meant to say it tough and low, but it’s more of a breathy, “I guess.”
And I did not feel the need to elaborate what parts of the deal I was saying yes to: no one’s getting the painting but me until it leads the way to Nicolette. Then I can help her. And she’ll see how much I love her.
Jill grins and slaps my back. “Who would’ve thought in a million years? What a pair.”
Of course, he’s lying.
Then Jill asks, low-voiced, “How much cash you got?”
“For what?”
“Occupational expenses. Like any job.”
I tell him I just got paid and could give him that but it wasn’t much. And then he says it will take a grand. He says this very confidently, like he’s done this before.
“Of course, a grand,” I say, and add, “I have to pay rent soon.”
“Takes capital to keep mouths shut. You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done. Plus storage. And if there’s trouble? I quit my job for this. I’m taking a lot of risks here.”
The word “liar” won’t leave my throat, so I tell him my landlord is usually okay if I’m a little late, and we walk east off the bridge, goodbye for now, bridge.
Thinking of the word “painting,” over and over, painting, painting, painting, stuck in my head like a song, and there’s this group of middle school kids coming toward us down the footpath, four of them, and just as they pass me, one of the kids says the word “painting” just like that. He says, “I took the painting,” or something like that. Most kids don’t walk around talking about paintings or taking paintings, do they? I put that word in his mouth. But at the same time, even though I know what I heard is true, I also know that truth is wrong. Something is wrong with me feeling that. I turn to look at him as he walks away and he looks right back at me and holds my eyes until he’s several feet away and then turns to his friends and starts laughing.
“So.” Jill laughs a little as we walk. “Guess you’re kind of different. What, um?” He fumbles his hands around in front of his mouth like he’s trying to catch a dropped bite of stroganoff, then leaves the question sitting there.
At the ATM, I take out five hundred, the most it will let me withdraw. Eight hundred seventy-six dollars left, which won’t cover rent, even before I give him the next five hundred, but fine, it will be fine. I hand it to him fast and glance around. But Jill doesn’t blink, like it isn’t strange at all for me to be handing him a wad of twenties. We must look like high-flying drug dealers. Sherlock Holmes did a lot of drugs—I wonder who his dealer was.
Only after I’ve given him my livelihood do I get up the nerve to say, “But you quit your job before we made this plan.” He doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe I spoke too quietly.
Jill is my Sherlock.
“Sunday, then. Bring the rest.”
I am his Watson.
“Six o’clock,” I say, and wonder if we should shake on it.
9 pills left, new regimen of 1/2 pill a day starting today, 157.5 lbs., 1 pair smudgy glasses on my nose, no time for lunch, 10,662,359 windows in Manhattan (+/- 50,000 to account for ongoing vandalism, construction, repair), 3 days until Sunday.
Winding my way
east in the last of the light. My legs feel weak, like I’ve been walking for years. In the middle of the bridge, I wave to all the walkers and bikers, saying goodbye. One waves back—a nice old lady. She would never jump.
Buckminster Fuller’s story started the day he didn’t die. He was going to throw himself into Lake Michigan after his daughter died of meningitis because he blamed himself—his shabby apartment, his inability to provide for his family—but he had a spiritual moment. Some say he levitated. Same say it was the day he went mad. Others say that day didn’t happen at all.
I want to enter the bridge, and then I do. I become it. Feel the terrible everything people carry from one side to the other. I’ve been here before. The stories press flat on my cement. To my west, the piano keys of the city skyline, changing and decaying, growing up; to my east, the shrunken toughness of Brooklyn, industrial shapes like children’s blocks. Shoes tumble across me, their gum sticks to me, their cigarette butts and spit, I have no words, me looking like I’m hurrying the opposite way beneath them—But I don’t have room inside me for all of their sorrow. I can feel how big it is, this deep-ocean pain, how much space it would take if I let it in, barely leaving room for the guilt I feel for not having room. Barely leaving room for my mind.
I know what they need, New Yorkers on the bridge. Give them a tent lit from within. Give them a bucket of quiet.
Things will be fuzzy, changing my dosage, and that’s okay—worse before better, as they say. When the Zyprexa leaves my system, will I hear you, Idle Voices, banging to escape the trunk of my brain? Will I hear you whimper through your gag? It helps to talk to you, even if you can’t yet talk back. Helps me hold it all in my head. I’ll make a song up about it if I have to, or a mnemonic device. In the spider web of myself, I am searching. I want to seize my true form. I (the imperfect I) am floating just beneath it all the time, reaching up like a child for a lost balloon.
Moon lighting me, the bridge, like an ocean. Which I can hardly believe!—how it finds its way through the maze of buildings all the way to my feet. I can barely hold myself in my own form, I’m so moved and don’t know why, heartsick for moonlight. There is so much moon.
Along the dark moon bridge, I walk toward Manhattan, half expecting to see the Hasids marching at me. Staring, waiting, where bridge meets city.
But they aren’t there. Not even a sign of them. Not a stray hat.
PART V: THE BRIDGE 1967
“Here I am,” Claire said to Mary in the doorway. Her chest was full of fish and brine.
“Here you are,” Mary said, kissing her on each cheek. She closed the door behind Claire. “You must be freezing.” It was chilly, but it seemed like the last cold night.
Claire dropped her small suitcase by the entrance, not knowing where she was expected to sleep. On the couch in the main room? On the floor in Mary’s? In the nursery? After months of grappling across long tables with Freddie and his lawyer, Claire had finally lost the apartment. Mary had decided then, no arguments, that Claire would stay with her in her East Village apartment, insisting she needed help with the baby, nearly a year old now, in order to meet her next deadline. Claire had agreed, but only as a temporary situation until the manuscript was complete and she wasn’t needed anymore.
Mary took Claire’s arm and led her into the living room. “I built us a fire, see?”
A candle was lit and sitting on a dish by a stack of books in the center of the floor, a few feet from the real fireplace that had been bricked over. The living room bled into the kitchen; the furniture was sparse, only one couch against the wall, and a small table in the corner that served as dining table and desk. But Mary made the room feel bigger than it was.
“Research,” Mary said, gesturing to the pile of books on the floor. “I’ll clean it up.” Instead, she went to the record player and put on Simon and Garfunkel. “It won’t wake Leo. Nothing wakes him, except his own crying.”
“You should work if you need to,” Claire said. “I can entertain myself.”
“No, I want to talk. I need a break. I haven’t seen you in years.”
“It’s only been a few weeks. You must miss me.”
“It’s the only emotion I’m capable of anymore. I’ve been trapped in here for centuries. I feel like a cavewoman. I thought it would get easier after ten months. But look at me.”
Claire did. Mary looked far from a cavewoman. “How’s Leo?”
“I feel like half the time I don’t know where I am. Eating, sleeping. Those words don’t have the same meaning anymore. I mark time by Leo’s bowel movements. I’m already scaring you away, aren’t I?” Mary sat on the floor by the candle. “I’m glad you’re here. And not just because you’re saving my life with this deadline. I can’t believe it’s next month!” She cupped her hands over her eyes and groaned, then smiled at Claire. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“You said that already,” Claire said.
“Oh, shush. I don’t smell that bad, do I? Come sit with me.”
But Claire’s muscles were wound so tight. She walked around the perimeter of the room, looking at Mary’s photographs instead of Mary. The prints were mostly from antique stores and flea markets, old passport photos and yellowed family portraits from nameless people who probably died in the Great War. Had they made it to America? Or were these photographs sent by ship to those who’d gone ahead of them? What would it mean to be an old photo found by Mary picked from among hundreds?
One photograph stood out to Claire from the rest, large and crisp. The man’s bald skull shone out almost three-dimensionally. His nose was owl-like and handsome and his ears were too big, which made his scowl charming in a way. This was a member of Mary’s genuine family, not her anonymous vintage one, though they were all mixed together on her wall, no pattern to discern who was who.
“My father,” Mary said, watching her.
“He looks like you. Or you look like him. Has he met Leo yet?”
“I should hope not. I’d have to reevaluate my atheism. It would be too embarrassing to start believing in ghosts now.”
Claire closed her eyes. “How could I have forgotten? I didn’t forget. I just wasn’t thinking. Why did I say that?”
How many of Mary’s stories had slipped her mind? There should be a word for the fear of forgetting a story.
“It’s fine,” Mary said. “I rarely talk about him. It was so long ago, before I met you. I probably only mentioned him to you once in all these years.”
“And your mother passed just a year after him.”
Mary nodded.
“And why did I say that? I’m sorry to bring it up. I should have asked about them more. What a terrible friend I am.”
“Claire! What’s the matter with you? Come sit down. And bring the picture.”
Claire sat and they leaned over the frame together in the candlelight.
Mary laughed softly. “Look at those ears. That’s what Leo inherited. And that big bald head. But my dad never liked having his picture taken. He used to say you should be able to rewrite memories, that’s the fun of them. Photographs ruined his fun.”
“Where did they emigrate from? Poland?”
“I don’t care.” Mary rested a hand on Claire’s knee. “I’m sorry, dear. I want to talk, but I must change.”
“What?”
“I can’t be in these real clothes anymore. Ever since Leo was born. I only put this on so you wouldn’t think I’d become a hobo.” Mary laughed briefly with her whole body—Claire had never noticed that about her laugh before. “I’d spend my life in pajamas if I could. Do you mind? You can use the bedroom to change, too.”
Claire followed her to the bedroom, where Mary grabbed her clothes from a pile on the floor and disappeared into the adjacent bathroom.
Claire went back to the front door and brought her bag into the bedroom and dug through it, hoping she’d packed something that wasn’t completely unflattering. But why would she care what Mary thought of her nightclothes? It was just Mar
y. Mary, whom Claire had known since she first moved to the city. Mary, who’d taught Claire to dance and dress and talk without ever letting on she was teaching. Mary, who had taken her out those nights Freddie didn’t come home, pretending to match his recklessness.
But the fish in her stomach were on a feeding frenzy, and some had minnowed their way to her throat. Claire undressed slowly at first, then hurriedly, afraid Mary would come out of the bathroom before she’d finished. But then this thought caused her to slow again—as if she wanted Mary to walk in on her. She checked herself once in the mirror and shook her head: her cap-sleeved gown had a hole by the armpit.
In the living room, Mary opened a bottle of wine. “Tomorrow I can start living like a normal person again, using dishes and glasses and wearing clothes. Since you’re here to remind me what the outside world is like. People drink wine from wineglasses! What a thing! But, for tonight—” Mary lifted the bottle toward her lips.
Claire bounced slightly on her toes. This small idea excited her. Indeed, she felt excitable watching Mary drink. “I don’t even own glasses anymore, so what do I know?”
Mary passed her the bottle. “I feel young when you’re around.”
“I haven’t a clue why!” Claire laughed and drank. “I feel the same with you.”
They drank Pinot Noir, the bottle a gift from the subject of one of Mary’s ghostwriting projects. Claire couldn’t help but wonder if it was from Leo’s father, the congressman, if they were drinking that man’s wine. Mary had barely told her a thing about him. Claire would have to read the damn book if she wanted to know more.
They lay on the carpet in thin nightgowns, candlelight; the room seemed to mold around them. When Mary lifted an arm, the light lifted with her. Mary had always been pretty, but she had grown so much into her own beauty. At forty-three she was shocking to look at, with her long, black hair that seemed wet in the low light. Her hand, as if of its own accord, lifted towards Mary. But Claire stopped it, and took off her own earrings instead.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 17