Jill’s beside me, he grabs the painting. We run up, up. I swear he’s grinning. My cell phone flies out of my pocket and knocks against the wall when I trip over a step. I snatch it up.
We burst up to the open tar roof. “They’re coming,” he says. “What took you so long?”
“They’re coming,” I say.
He digs out a box cutter and cuts the canvas from the frame, smooth and precise, like he’s done it a hundred times. He’s done before I can react and by then what’s the point of punching him in the nose. He hands me the wood frame. “Break it up,” he says. I smash and pry and stomp the frame against the roof until it’s in pieces while he rolls the canvas neatly. He whips out the garbage bag. It puffs up with wind and he stuffs the painting into the bag with the frame like so much waste. “Give me your mask.” Without looking at me, he flutters his hand about for it. “And the bowls.” I remove the damp bowls and the mask and he throws them in the garbage bag, too. We lean against the roof ledge, the bag between us. “You tripped an alarm in the gallery. A motion detector or something. It’ll be fine. We got a couple minutes. It’s almost over.” He looks a little pale and his eyes flick every which way. “You’re red as a rose, kiddo. Are you ready for this? You’re the diversion. They got nothing on you. You slipped in because you saw the door was open. You might be stupid, but you’re no criminal.” Then he adds, “To them you might be stupid, I mean. Not to me.”
It will be fine. Why wouldn’t it be fine? I paddle my collar open and closed, trying to cool off. “What if they question the gallery-sitter and he recognizes me?”
He says to stop freaking out, and even if they do question the guy, visiting a painting’s not a crime. “Too late for doubts.” Jill peeks inside his Marlboro pack at the money. “But our crime is not victimless. You got to understand the outcome of your decisions. These old widows crying to a newscaster over some heirloom portrait of a duke—it hurts me to see that. And you know me, I don’t give a rat’s ass about rich bastards who can go out and buy another blasted portrait of a duke. But I tell you we are hurting someone, no way around it, even if it’s just that gallery-sitting jerkoff.”
Then I turn to him fast and grip the garbage bag, stretching the plastic. “But you planned this. You knew I was coming. You planned all of this. Didn’t you?”
He’s quiet a moment. “I didn’t plan it to happen like this. Maybe I got the job here because of the painting. I shouldn’t have lied about that. I thought about stealing it, but I couldn’t. For personal reasons. Then you came along. I knew you’d do it. But we’re on the same side. Okay? We’re a team. You’re all right.”
He waits for me to say something, but I can’t.
“Anyway. You saw me through my last lift. This was it.”
He turns his ear to the street. The siren grows louder, then stagnant for a moment, stuck in city traffic. Why does the police siren get dibs on that word, when the original siren was the sweet sound of fatal desire? But the Doppler effect sometimes sounds like longing.
Then we see a police car pull up near the building, the slamming of doors.
“That’s our cue,” Jill says.
I let go of the bag.
“You remember what I said? You can handle it from here. They’ll try to bullshit you and say you’re trespassing, but you’ll get around that. Play it cool.”
“I didn’t like the gallery-sitter anyway,” I say.
“That’s the spirit.” He backs away to the fire escape on the adjacent ledge.
“Jill. Watch out for the Hasids.”
“Why? They can’t fire me. I already quit.”
“Just watch out for them.”
For the first time, Jill seems scared. “All you got to do is nothing. Don’t try to find me. I’ll find you. Okay?” He nods at me, and as if with gratitude says, “Take off your gloves.”
And I watch him disappear over the far side of the building, garbage bag full of beauty slung over his shoulder.
3 pills dropped, accidentally, from roof, lost sight of after 6.5 feet; 2.5 pills remaining; 2 helicopters, 1 police blimp over my head.
———
“Okay!” I yell at no one, then pull my gloves off and throw them into the alley below. They flutter down like two black birds. One lands in an old crate. I lose sight of the other.
Straddling the ledge, half of me is on the brink of falling, the other half is not. I could fall, if I wanted, just tip the scale a microscopic amount. But I know I will go another way.
The men are coming up the stairs. I try to stay calm, like you. Maybe there’s still enough time to get away.
The blast of the roof door banging open and shut. At least a hundred pairs of feet readying their attack. The Hasidim, on me in hordes.
Every time I think of doing something but don’t, there is an echo. A hologram of myself that did do that thing or make that decision, and that self disperses into the ether, winking away into some other dimension. That’s what I’m hoping happened this time, that this me will disperse. But no, the me who did not break the law and steal a painting is hanging out in the ether, relaxing on my ether-stoop, maybe with some Chinese dumplings, safe and out of trouble. Everything’s fine over there. Maybe over there, I’m a famous underground hacker, and maybe I’m not sick. Or maybe I never met Nicolette or maybe my sister dies giving birth.
There are only two of them in blue uniforms, not much older than me.
“Hey, buddy,” one says. The other stretches his rubbery neck to see behind me, looking for the painting. “This building’s closed. How’d you get up here?”
“The door was open, so I just—”
“The door was open, huh? See anyone else when you came in?”
They’re close enough to push me off the ledge. “Anyone else? No.”
“You realize you’re trespassing. We’ll have to take you in.”
“No, I didn’t realize. The door—”
“The door was open. Got it.” The first one has me turn around and pats me down. It makes me feel like I am, in fact, hiding something under my shirt.
He says, “I don’t suppose you know anything about a stolen—”
“Stolen?”
“A stolen painting.”
I shake my head no. And the second one says, “We could charge you for trespassing and hold you ’til you remember.”
“Okay,” I say.
The first one stays with me, lighting a cigarette while his partner looks around the roof. Out across the city, bouquets of smoke escape from buildings. And here on the roof, bouquets of smoke escape his mouth—but this guy can’t see the beauty in it.
“How’s the sunset, lover boy?”
“Average,” I say.
They lean over the edge, peering into the alleys, talking on their radio to someone scanning the area. One of them bends over and picks up a nail from the tar roof. I try to think if I touched the nails on the wood frame. Jill’s voice is coming from the radio telling me to run, but that can’t be right. Then one of the men slaps me on the shoulder and laughs. “Come on, lover boy. Look, he looks ready to cry. Why the long face?” He throws his cigarette and leaves it on the roof. The three of us walk down the stairs together, since Jill isn’t here to operate the elevator. The second cop hums Buddy Holly and by the time they put me into the back of the police car, he’s hummed it through, Peggy Sue, three times. One of them says, “Nothing on him, we’re bringing him in.” From the back, I can see the web of their skin through the dividing grate, the heat radiating off of them at the sad end of the sizzling day.
They take my fingerprints and eye my emergency card with numbers for my doctor and Jules, but they don’t call. When they question me, I say the door was open, maybe left that way by the thief. You have my true remorse. I’ve never done anything of the sort before and I never will again, Officer, it was such a nice sunset, and I have a thing for sunsets over the Hudson.
They can’t hold me for anything, and they’re mobbed anyway. All these
kids from the protest in booking, yelling “pigs” at the cops. Can’t even bear to fine me. You got lucky, the pigs tell me. They roll their eyes at me and say, tell us if you go out of town.
Halfway out the double doors, I hear the Buddy Holly cop say behind me, “Found a set of fingerprints, boss.”
Another dagger of a day. Some people call it Monday.
All I can do at my desk is look at police beats. You know Jill’s been fingering the painting. Probably he’s groping it like it’s her naked body. Could he be licking it? He might be licking it. There’s nothing online about if he’s been picked up or not. The only thing I found was a message in a Disappearing Bees forum that said I should “keep my ears open for any change.”
“Hey, Westeroo.” Orange-Socks Dave is calling to me from the front door to our offices. “Some weirdo left a package for you.”
I trip over a chair leg on my sprint over to him and nearly ram Orange-Socks Dave in the gut with my head. “Where is he?”
“Left already.” He holds out a cardboard tube. “Guess he didn’t want to see your pretty face.”
I shove past him into the hallway—no sign of Jill. I open the door to the stairwell.
“Hey, where you going?” Dave says. “You won’t catch him. Don’t you have to work?”
I stomp back over to Orange-Socks Dave and snatch the tube from his hand and that’s when I catch a glimpse of his feet. I ask slowly, “Why’d you change your socks?”
“They raised the terrorist threat level. You didn’t see?”
Walking backwards, not taking my eyes off Red-Socks Dave, I go back to my desk. He’s seen Jill’s face. All it would take is a little bribe and the Hasids would pull him too.
With more care than I’ve ever used with anything ever, I open the plastic top of the tube. There’s the canvas. I close it tight again.
Mr. Fox has closed himself in his office, blinds slightly parted like many lips. Did he see me get the package? What’s he doing in there? His office is sort of not really on the way to the lounge, so, with the tube, I creep along the wall with the pretense of getting a Vitamin Water. As I pass his door, I hear my own voice. The voice is on speakerphone. “It’s too much,” I hear myself saying. Then I hear another voice, “I guess you’re kind of different.” And I hear, “They don’t deserve it.” Snippets of my conversation with Jill on the bridge. There must have been a microphone after all and I’m not surprised I didn’t find it because I am inadequate.
And then a new voice I don’t recognize. “He’s falling behind. He hurt someone.”
The door flies open and there’s Mr. Fox in his pleated pants, mandarin orange can in hand. I hide the tube behind my back.
“West. Good. I’m off. Taking my wife to the Bahamas tomorrow.” His mouth is full of canned oranges. “Promotional thing. Put some color on this gut. You won’t recognize me Monday.”
But Mr. Fox hates beaches. I remember him saying so. He’s lying so I won’t think he’s gone in pursuit of Nicolette.
“One day there won’t be computers, Mr. Fox.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind. I have to throw him off. “Zero, zilch-o. No chips in brains, no consoles hidden under the earth’s crust.”
“And why’s that? Let me have it,” Mr. Fox says.
“It’ll all happen after a century-long cold war tech race during which we’ll be forced to consolidate then rid ourselves of technologies to prevent intellectual leakage. I’d like to be around to see that. Companies like this will be long gone.”
“Yes. Well. Me going on vacation doesn’t mean you are. You’re still on thin ice.” He heads to the lounge.
How did he get those tapes? It’s nonsense, thinking that Mr. Fox could know anything about the painting—except that it makes perfect sense. Mr. Fox knows the Hasids well, he and my brother-in-law being old playfellows, which is how I got the job to begin with. And Mr. Fox’s superiors? Well, I’ve never met them. Fishy, isn’t it?
Shaking and sans Vitamin Water, I turn around, walk straight past my desk and out the front door and down the stairs. It’s only three o’clock and who does it matter to? Not me.
I should have been fired long ago. So why haven’t they? Because they’re waiting for something. Waiting on me to do something. Now that they no longer have the painting to help them find Nicolette, they’re after me. I’m supposed to make a great discovery—I’ve always felt that—but about what? About the painting, and Nicolette, and maybe the bees and the missing words and maybe the Hasidim and maybe Mussolini? The data patterns have been coming more easily now, too easily, as if I’m creating them as I see them, projecting patterns from my movie-reel forehead. Have I been plotting out the physics of Nicolette’s power for them? Is that the reason I’ve been kept around? My deduction itself is leading them straight to her. All my searches and charts of Nicolette, all the activity I’ve snuck into the boring workday: it was all for them and I didn’t see it. Idiot! Lameboy! And Mr. Fox, that two-timer, has access to all my files.
But here it stops. No more digital footprints. Or fingerprints. From now on it’s the old-fashioned notepad. I will shed technology like I warned Mr. Fox about.
This is bigger than the next consumer trend. Forging the future as well as the past, that’s what I’m doing. The bosses upstairs would have a field day with that data.
Outside, the sun blasts. For a moment I can’t see anything but the gray-green memory-shapes of buildings in my eyes, superimposed over the real buildings. And when that clears away I see, so clearly, ten floors up and huddled around a long table in an ill-lit room, maybe wearing little green visors over their wide-brimmed black hats: the Hasidim. They’ve been the bosses all along. I see that now. My bosses.
———
2 pills left, none ingested for 22 hours; 1,000 police cameras in dragnet over 5-mile Iraq War protest; 972 hours of surveillance footage; 1 Republican National Convention.
At home on my laptop, the sun pastes my reflection squarely on Nicolette’s website in front of me. But reflection-me in the screen keeps grimacing at the me sitting outside it. The me in the screen is moving his lips like he’s trying to talk, but there isn’t any sound. I’m trying to tell me something. But the me outside isn’t grimacing or talking back—which is wrong, a reflection doing what it wants.
The tube is on my lap, never more than two inches from my body. Now I pull the painting all the way out and unroll it. A sticky note flutters to the floor:
KEEP SAFE UNTIL WE CAN GET IT TO HER.
That’s all he says. Not how to reach him, or where to meet, or what the hell to do if my boss is working for the Hasidim and knows everything and we’re all doomed!
I spread the painting on the wood floor then lie down next it. At least now I can try to get it straight to Nicolette without Jill tagging along and making me feel bad for lying to him about giving it to Claire.
I feel hungry in different parts of me. My arms are hungry. My hands flop on my chest like dropped food. My legs ache to kick out like my skin isn’t big enough for me anymore. I want to punch the wall. I’m not angry, it’s only that my bones are anxious. My friend Miles back home, he used to punch walls. There were holes all over his mom’s house from when he got drunk. His dad was an alcoholic who left him and his mom when he was little. I remember he punched two holes in his closet doors that he said were his dad’s eyes watching him.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and would you look who it is, it’s Miles. Lying here, thinking of punching a wall in honor of him, and then he calls. It isn’t fair. I shouldn’t be able to affect the universe this way.
I try to push the talk button, but my thumb has other plans, punching a bunch of numbers, and I’m afraid I’ve hung up on him, then it vibrates again to tell me I have a voicemail. Miles says he saw my mom in the grocery store today and that it’d be cool to talk to me. I can’t tell from his voice how much she’s told him, if he knows I’m sick or not, if she put him up to calling me. Of course she failed to comply with my one
teeny request for secrecy. For all I know the whole town is on speakerphone every time I talk to her.
Do you hear that buzzing? I’m not expecting anyone and I wish I had a butler. The door buzzes again. I get up and press my face to the window, which is forever stuck, and try to get a view of who’s downstairs.
Tachi’s remote-controlled car runs into one of the policeman’s heels on my stoop. The cop turns around, shields his eyes searching for the driver. But Tachi’s somewhere unlocatable, probably controlling it from his window across the street, laughing out loud to no one.
The same two cops from the roof of the gallery.
Now they’re buzzing all the other tenants but no one in my building would ever open up for the police. The next apartment over buzzes, I hear it through the walls, but the cops are still stuck outside. A dead bee on the sill twitches with each buzz, close to my face.
Dan answers the door.
“I know you want to get rid of me, but I need to stay here for a couple days. Then I’ll be out of your hair for good, capisce?”
Into the lion’s den. The last place they’ll look for me.
Jules comes out of the bedroom in her nightgown, tying a scarf around her head, a question on her face.
“We have a house guest,” Dan says to her.
“What’s wrong?” She drops the scarf to her side and she’s nearly bald and I look away.
“Finish with your scarf,” I say.
“West, what happened?”
“Nothing happened. They’re fumigating is all. The neighbors have bedbugs.”
Dan straightens up. “You better not bring them here.”
“What is that?” Jules points to the tube with the painting, which I wrapped up in Christmas paper, the only kind I had in my apartment.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 21