You are not God. But you lift off the ground. Clear twilight sky for miles, but fat clouds are approaching like bums. The engines and the wind throb in your ears. The air pushing past you is so loud your head is underwater, the drum and rush and echo of being submerged. Your forehead feels clammy, you touch it. You could push your forehead in, clay. You could push in and the skin would give and break and you could push past all the mush and touch your brain, if you want. You leave your fingers on your skull. The buzzing keeps on. No one seems to notice that the wind is rotting away the plane’s steel exterior, and now the sides are gone, stripped off, and you are left sitting in the open night air with your seatbelt still fastened and digging into your stomach, flying over the Rockies.
Alone in the open, the multitude of voices die off until there is only one: an old woman. Her words are nebulous but they are undeniably words. Spider-thread voice. She says: it’s time.
But up ahead is a storm. There is a seam opening in the universe too big to mend itself. It is open because of your failures. This is where things enter and escape, and when they escape they are gone forever, they never existed.
The plane rematerializes around you, and the old woman’s voice is drowned out by the others’. Everyone else is asleep and everyone has the painted, open eyes of chipped, porcelain mannequins. You do not let them know you can hear their thoughts. You put in your earphones and pretend nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Quietly, so no one notices, you wonder: what would it be like to jump?
The clouds are teeth out there in the dark. The man next to you says in his sleep, Jump off the plane. It would be so easy, door’s open. Jump off the plane. You see the man’s mouth moving. Jump before they all die. Jump through the open seam of the universe and erase yourself. Maybe then it will mend. The cabin lights dim and the crystal floor lights guide the way to the exit. And there is a new sound, thunderous. The storm is worsening. You lift your feet to your seat and hug your legs, bury your head behind your knees, glancing over them at the thunder pulsing down the aisle. Jump off the plane, stupid. Jump off the plane or Jules will get hurt. Jump off the plane to reach Nicolette. Jump jump jump jump jump off the plane.
And who are you to argue with logic? This is the jump you’ve been preparing for all your life.
And it isn’t thunder at all. It’s the bees. Out of the crystal aisle lights rise hundreds, thousands of lost bees.
The seconds slow to minutes, to days. There are whole years between moments.
The bees swarm.
Sunrise. The plane hovers over Manhattan. The stewardess hovers over you and says, “Here is your water, sir. Thank you for your patience, you may jump now.”
You try to rise but you’re buckled in. You throw your hands over your belt, finally get it loose. You stand quickly and your shoulder knocks the cup of water onto her skirt. She screams as you shove your way toward the exit.
THE SORRY MANIFESTO1
BY NICOLETTE BERHARDT
ANNOTATED BY WEST BUTLER
“It is not the fear of madness which will oblige us to leave the flag of imagination furled.”
—Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism
“When you’re an artist, you’re searching for freedom. You never find it ‘cause there ain’t any freedom.”
—Alice Neel2
1. Movements in art today are so numerous they negate each other so that in the end there are no Movements. But there is movement, change, impermanence. In this system of movements as illustrated in this manifesto, we consider ourselves a bridge, of sorts, between desired aesthetic and actual aesthetic, between what we wish our art to fulfill in us, and what it does fulfill. We attempt to reattach what is desired to what is actual. What if we saw them side by side? What would it do to the balance?
2. Once, we slept with a subject’s husband, but only because we could not have her.
3. It is easy to think of the image as timeless. Stilled. No beginning, middle, or end, no linearity, except that which we impose through language. But this is not entirely true. There is no separation between images and words. One cannot look at a painting of a dog on a deck of cards, and not think the word “dog,” or “that is an image of a dog on a deck of cards.”
4. Our father died in the war and his body walks into our dreams every night.
5. Someone once said that in a painting, “you are seeing time happen, not time frozen. Painting contains duration.” It contains time. It contains energy. An image is always changing, as the ocean is always changing, as the mountains. It is unknowable because we try to know it as fixed.
6. We wear strange clothes so people notice us. We leave spots of paint on our pants on purpose, so people will know who we are.
7. A portrait of Stephen Hawking represents Stephen Hawking. But Stephen Hawking himself does not represent a portrait of Stephen Hawking.
8. We are not double-jointed. Can’t whistle. We have never learned a card trick.
9. We just want someone to touch our neck.
10. Breton says, “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments.” The triumph of analysis over sentiment is, to us, a triumph. But what if nothing is knowable or classifiable, not even the self?
11. We should get peculiar when alone in our studio.
12. We orgasm very easily.
13. We don’t like sex.
14. We must get close to our subject’s devils. When we paint something, it must become real on its own account; it must stand alone as more real than the subject ever was. This energizes us enough to move beyond the image (and in turn provides the viewer with energy); we can free-float, transcend the subject in the world, so it is as if we are creating another dimension, another timeline, in which all of this is happening inside the painting.3 Another us exists in there—perhaps the us we desire to be.
15. There is one hair that grows from our back, invisible, that we pluck once a month or so.
16. We have never read all of Anna Karenina, but if you ask if we have, we will lie.
17. In our first art class, we put a booger on the canvas of the girl next to us when she wasn’t looking.
18. We have only taken one art class.
19. Once, someone loved us enough to hurt themselves.
20. We have the right to paint. We have the right to paint. We have the right to paint.
21. We stole earrings from a department store so our French roommate would think we were dangerous.
22. We have a terrible memory. But we can remember the color of any carpet of any room we’ve ever entered.
23. We have never cut ourselves, but once we told a boy we had.
24. We should have been a dog.
25. Our father, before he left for the war, touched our breast. Just once, softly.
26. Sometimes our very presence in someone’s life can cause a greater absence. We stirred up something dormant. It isn’t our fault. It is our fault. We are such a selfish bitch.
27. When we were eight, we made a friend put her favorite doll in the oven and bake it to prove she loved us more.
28. It is very important that we are who our friends tell their secrets to. We want so badly to be this person that we will let a friend hurt themselves in order for them to have a secret to tell us.
29. We are seduced by the mad ones. We speak in metaphors that become real. We want that magic. (If we steal thoughts, it is only as anyone has ever stolen a thought. We cannot read his mind.) We belittled him by romanticizing him.4 What have we done?
30. We did not ask for this. We asked for this.
31. We want someone to see us crying and forgive us. At least we want someone to see us cry.
32. Sometimes we have to leave.5
____________
1 This is what Nicolette left when she left me. Instead of a goodbye note or an apology letter or a phone number. This.
2 Her favorite painter. Nicolette would spend lo
ng hours hanging around outside Neel’s Spanish Harlem apartment to see if she could spot her sons and make friends with them. Or paint them. They ignored her.
3 I didn’t understand this clue until now. Another time traveling tip.
4 After she left, we talked on the phone once, the only time she picked up before she changed her number, so I made sure to record it:
W: I’m looking at your picture. You’re staring right at me. Can you see me?
N: No, I can’t see you.
W: I feel like a retard.
N: You’re not a retard.
W: Are you eating? Sometimes you forget to do that.
N: I’m fine. Thanks for checking.
W: I feel like a child. Nicolette? You weren’t trying to read my mind, just then? I know you weren’t, but you should tell me.
N: I can’t read your mind. I promise.
W: But we’re connected. You and me. We still are. (Silence.)
N: I ripped up your books.
N: I was leaving them for you.
W: I can feel you. Like my face is really close to a fire. Is that you?
N: I don’t know. I don’t think so.
W: Does that freak you out? I don’t feel like I can tell anyone else that. I feel like I can ask you if you are reading my mind and you might freak out but at least you’ll let me ask.
N: You can ask me. But you have to tell your doctor. West. Do you promise?
W: Are you stealing my thoughts from my head? I’m sorri.
N: No, no. Stop saying sorri.
W: Sorri. If you can read my thoughts, which you can’t, don’t be scared of what you see.
N: I’m not. You can’t scare me.
5 False.
PART IX: NO WEATHER LASTS FOREVER 2001
There was a clamoring above her, followed by rough voices. It was very distracting. She stood in the center of the narrow landing between the first and second floors, where she’d paused to catch her breath. A dime-store watercolor hung slightly crooked on the wall in front of her. It was a prairie scene with gray-green hills, a tornado in the distance. No place she’d ever been, and the dreary landscape made her tired. She was on her way to check her mail. Or had she just returned from checking it? Her studio apartment was a half-flight up and she wanted very much to sit down in her big padded rocking chair. She was very tired—from either going to or coming from checking her mail.
Two men in gray jumpsuits and large plastic gas masks appeared on the landing above her, carrying a bulky crate. They were advancing down on her quickly. Was she under arrest? But it felt more like another dime-store painting than an attack. “‘Scuse us, ma’am, coming through,” one of them said.
She now carried two great and corresponding packages in her mind. First, the decision about which direction she should go to get out of their way. (She had no mail in her hands, which meant one of two things: that she had not yet checked her mail, or that she had checked it but had received nothing, which was often the case—no one even sent her bills anymore.) The second was a package of thought she did not wish to open: doubt that there were men with gas masks at all.
The men slowed as they neared her. They tilted their crate carefully, but between her and the banister there wasn’t room to pass. Something fragile-sounding clinked around as they leveled their load. “Careful,” the man in back, two stairs taller, said to the other.
“Is there a problem?” she asked. “Are there roaches again? I cannot allow those in my apartment. Which floor has them?”
“Ma’am, can you move?” the man in back said, his voice muffled by the gas mask but clearly annoyed.
“I live here and will stand where I choose,” she said. “Now tell me which apartment is infested. Is it 2R? I always thought they were unkempt. They travel to Thailand. They could easily have brought bugs back in their luggage.”
The man carrying the front of the crate lifted his mask and smiled at her kindly. “We’re sorry, ma’am, but that’s confidential information. We can get your info, though, and come by tomorrow if you—”
“Claire.” It was the man holding the back of the crate. “Claire Bishop.”
Claire strained her neck forward and peered at him. “Who wants to know?”
He glanced to his right and left as if looking for the one who wanted to know.
“Let’s get this to the van,” the front man said to the back.
The man who knew her name puffed into his mask. “Just give me a minute.”
“Let’s shake a leg,” the first one said.
“I said give me a minute.”
The man in back must have been the boss because the other, grumbling obscenities, obliged. They backed up and set the crate on the second-floor landing. The first man huffed off past Claire and down the stairs, but only as far as the front door. From where she stood, Claire could see the bottom half of him, framed by the glass, still within hearing distance.
The masked man walked down and stood very close to Claire on the landing, bouncing from one foot to the other. His breath came loud and thick from the plastic. “How the hell are you?”
Claire took a step back from him. “Take that off if you’re going to talk to me.”
He cracked his neck several times as if preparing to jump into a boxing ring. “All right,” he said finally. He removed the mask. She squinted at his red, sweaty face, creased from the rubber. He was a middle-aged man with graying hair and a skinny moustache that wrapped itself around his mouth. He was handsome enough. But he was no one she knew.
He gave her a crackling grin. “It’s me. Jill,” he said, putting his hands up as in, ta-da, or, you caught me.
She didn’t know anyone who went by Jill, certainly no men. “Oh? Of course. Jill. How have you been these days?”
“It’s been a long stretch.”
“A very long time indeed.” Claire smiled vaguely. She had been rehearsing this lie of recognition for a year now with strangers on the street. Just because they were strangers to her did not mean she was a stranger to them, which was difficult to reconcile. She was a terrible liar, but she always had a few vague phrases at the ready. Luckily, she had very few friends left whom she could insult with her forgetfulness. “A very long time,” Claire said.
“I’ve thought about you,” the man said, examining a speck on the wall beside him with great scrutiny. “I never forgot.” He scratched at the speck with his fingernail.
“Well, neither have I.”
“How could I?” He searched her face, and she didn’t know what to put on it for him. Had they been lovers? He was much younger, but she wouldn’t put it past herself. She closed her eyes and sucked in her bottom lip, searching in that black pit of memory—it was like groping with the claw in those toy machines children fed quarters to in grocery-store entranceways. They never got the toy. The searching was painful, physically. She felt the tears only when they were nearing her chin, and her face grew terribly hot. She wanted to cry and to sleep. She wanted this man to leave her alone and to stop demanding memory from her like she was a soap dispenser. She opened her eyes.
He was looking at her with such horror you’d think she’d dropped dead at his feet.
“They’re just tears,” she said angrily. “It’s nothing to do with you. I have a condition.”
Ever since she went to the doctor with the first signs, she’d been a wreck. As if her diagnosis had added another symptom to the catalog: lachrymation, as her doctor referred to it. Once again she was reading about her own condition and future ailments in textbooks; once again she was her own favorite subject. Not that she needed to study up, having witnessed her mother’s descent. And it was a descent—a plummeting, a gaining of momentum down the rabbit hole that did not end with anything quite so magical as Wonderland, but did contain the ringing words, “Off with her head.”
“Oh, that’s, okay, good. Good.” The man laughed awkwardly. “Could we talk for a while? I’ll walk you upstairs. Do you live upstairs?”
“
I was about to check my mail.” She looked downstairs toward the mail slots. But she was too exhausted; it didn’t matter what order it happened in. “2L.” She gestured up.
“Let me take care of that crate. I’ll be back in a flash. Supplies, you know? Extermination chemicals and stuff. Vince over there will take it to headquarters. They won’t miss me. Vince, let’s get this thing in the van, what are you wasting time for?”
Vince jogged back up to the crate. She watched them converse for a moment in angry whispers, Vince saying he wasn’t getting paid enough for this bullshit and you better get another customer out of this. Both of them grimaced some more and that was that. Claire flattened herself along the wall as they passed with the crate and went outside.
In the gloomy watercolor, the tornado seemed to have moved closer to the foreground.
Was she supposed to wait for him? She needed to sit and rest and hide from the man. She could go up to her apartment and shut the door and pretend she didn’t hear him knocking. But it would be nice to be helped up the stairs.
She stayed as she was, pinned against the wall for what seemed like many minutes, still as a statue. If he didn’t hurry up she might become one. What kind of statue would she become? Something Victorian, both arms intact. Revered by tourists and cleaned when shat upon. To be a monument to a war would be nice enough, if it was the right war. Or to be trapped behind the eyes of a Madonna figure. What a hoot it would be to have people pray at her sandaled, limestone feet.
At the bottom of the stairs, the too-bright sun adhered itself to the man’s face like a jellyfish, and Claire had to look away. Her eyes were terribly sensitive lately. He walked up to the landing, darker now, carrying his gas mask under his arm—just in case, she supposed. He smiled softly. Her feet felt frighteningly light with him fairly lifting her up the stairs, as if her arms were handles and her body a worn grocery bag, too many holes and leaks to count.
As they made their way slowly up the last steps, he muttered her name and soft phrases about how good it was to see her. Claire let him go on. And why shouldn’t she allow someone to regard her with joy even if she didn’t know this man from Adam. It gave her a small thrill, though it felt rotten to lie to such a kind person.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 30