Jessica Z

by Shawn Klomparens

  That’s my left arm, slightly bent, at the crease inside of my elbow.

  There are maybe twenty-five or thirty prints hanging around the walls of the gallery, and many, many more people. The room is filled with a general talky hum, bits of laughter and conversation rise from time to time punctuated by occasional flashes from a camera. Just at the edge of the crowd I see Gert, smiling and taller than everyone around him and looking handsome in a dark coat and shirt with no tie. Angie stands next to him, her arm looped through his injured wing, and when she sees me she smiles and beckons me over.

  “Hi, hi,” she says. She has a glass of white wine and Gert, who doesn’t stop his dorky grinning, holds a cocktail glass.

  “Jess,” he says.

  “The prints are incredible,” Angie says. Then she leans close to me and speaks softly in my ear. “No one knows they’re you. The secret’s safe with us.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Gert, good work.”

  “Thank you, Jess.”

  I walk around and look at the prints. They are incredible. They are me too, and as much as I want to look at them, I also want to look away.

  The sound of voices gets louder as I make my way around the room; I see Josh talking to some people with notepads and cameras. He looks great too; clean shaven and bright eyed in a coarse-yarned charcoal colored sweater. His face lights up when he sees me, and he walks away from the interviewers to come and put his arm around me.

  “Jess,” he says, squeezing me. His cheeks are red like the glass of wine in his hand. “Jess! Do you like them? What do you think?”

  “They’re terrific, Josh. They are, really.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing, what?”

  “You just seem…”

  I look at him, and then I lean in and crane my neck up and talk into his ear. “I don’t want people to, you know, know that I’m the one in the prints.” It’s true, kind of.

  He takes his arm from my shoulders. “So you don’t want me to be close.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I completely understand.” He smiles. “Completely.” I draw in a breath to begin the inevitable “hey can I talk to you later on” bit, but he nods at me and raises his eyebrows in a way that’s not subtle at all because he’s drunk, and he turns back to a woman with a notepad.

  There will be time for that talk, I’m sure. So I look for the bar, and as I make my way through the too-close people I pause and look at myself on the walls.

  In one print, my lower back is bisected by an interstate highway and a network of bright red and blue roads.

  In another, the bumpy margin of my nipple has become a national park.

  Here’s another, my shoulder, with a cross-hatched trapezoid marked “Restricted Entry—Government Research Area.”

  I look at another as I walk by, just a glance. There are more roads, maybe on my stomach, the upper part? I go past, and then I stop and go back. There’s something about it, something that brings me back, and in a rush I look from side to side and think and gasp—that’s it that’s it!—the blue line curving up the middle of my rib cage is identical to the interstate that goes to Spokane, the line Katie and I traced a hundred or more times through our atlas to the dot we made with the neatly lettered words: “Grandma and Grandpa Mason’s Farm.”

  I’m smiling at this. When I look up, I see two men have joined me to look at the print, but they quickly turn and head toward the bar, as if they realized they were interrupting something.

  “Wait,” I say. I’m pretty sure these are the same two guys from the studio, the day Gert cut himself. “Hey?”

  I follow through the crowd, and when I finally get close to the bar the two men are not there. I do want a drink, though, so I ask the bartender for a glass of whatever red wine he’s got. He tells me the apple martinis are very good, and since I have orchards on my mind now, I say sure. The drink is kind of green-colored and has a pretty, thin slice of apple floating in it. It’s delicious too, in a candied, drink-it-too-fast sort of way.

  I wander around, looking, getting used to my close-up, listening in on people’s conversations. There’s a couple talking next to what looks like a map of a lake.

  “It’s her navel,” the girl is saying. She draws out the first syllable, like naaayvel. “He filled it in with the blue color. You can’t see the actual belly button part.”

  “Navels are symmetrical,” the guy says. “That is a seriously asymmetrical lake.”

  “Most navels are symmetrical. But not all. Some are not.”

  “Yeah, let’s check,” he says, and he makes a joking grab like he’s going to lift up her shirt and she laughs.

  “Stop it!” she says.

  I make an orbit of the room, then another. I say hi again to Gert and Angie. Hoffman shows up and doesn’t say a word to me. I’m standing by the print of my lower back when he sees me; he looks at the print and looks at me and nods like he understands that I don’t want to be recognized, and he makes no acknowledgment of me again after that.

  I stop at the bar again to trade my empty glass for a full one. The voices in the gallery get louder; there’s more laughter, more noise, more bared teeth. People are getting drunk and having a good time. I’m getting drunk and not having a very good time at all. Gretchen and I had talked, earlier in the week, about her coming with me, but today I called her and told her she shouldn’t bother, the opening would probably be a bore. I didn’t tell her the real reason: I was afraid she would somehow make me lose my nerve.

  On my next lap, it looks like Gert is being interviewed. He has to lean down so the woman can hear him, and he holds his cast across his chest while he gestures with his good hand. Angie stands next to him with a look of supportive false interest, but steps over when she sees me hovering.

  “Having fun?” she asks. “Don’t lie.”

  “Are you?”

  “I was, an hour ago.” She brings the back of her hand to her mouth to hide a yawn. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. I have to work tomorrow.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a high school teacher. Physics and math.”

  “A girl geek,” I say, and Angie smiles, so I know I haven’t offended her. “Summer school?”

  “Private school. Goes year round.”

  I’m tired too, and it shows as I stand there with my paper-thin apple slice, completely unable to come up with any additional chitchat. It doesn’t seem to bother Angie, though.

  “Are you staying for the whole thing?” she asks.

  “I kind of have to,” I say, and Angie says “ah” like she completely understands, even though she doesn’t understand it at all.

  “Do you want another drink?” I ask. “I’m going to break the martini rule.”

  Angie starts to ask about this rule, but just as she begins to speak there’s an abrupt change in the sound of conversation in the room; people are suddenly quiet, they look back and forth to each other and there is murmuring and a repeated sound like, “Miami, Miami, it happened in Miami, what happened in Miami?” And, just as quickly, it seems as though half the people in the room have taken out cell phones and flipped open glowing displays; breaking news, news alerts, news by text message, text from my cousin who lives in Miami, it was Miami.

  Angie looks at Gert and then back to me. “What happened?” she asks. Gert leans down to see the reporter’s phone; she holds it to her side to share and he squints to read it.

  “Car bomb in Miami,” Gert says to Angie, and the taste of bile and sickly sweet apple comes up in my mouth. I glance around for a bathroom.

  A man with a goatee and a tight black shirt looks up from his phone. “Nope, backpack,” he says. “It was a backpack in a club. Possibly two backpacks. Many casualties.”

  Everyone’s an expert. My mother, I’m sure, is right now in front of a television in her robe and slippers.

  The buzz goes out of the room like water draining from a bathtub as people start to leave the gallery. They stop to
talk to Josh before they go and he nods in an understanding way and shakes their hands, one by one, as they leave. I go and stand by Josh at a discreet distance, listen to the early-departure apologies mixed with declamations of his brilliance. He understands, he understands, thanks so much for coming, thank you.

  “What can I do, Doc?” Gert asks. He’s come over too.

  “Nothing, I don’t think we need to do anything.”

  “Same plan for tomorrow? Will anything change?”

  “We’ll still set up. Go ahead and pick up the truck in the morning.”

  “Alright, Doc. I’m getting Angie home.”

  “Good night, Gert. Thank you.”

  I wait with Josh until the last people are gone. We aren’t far from the bar, and I’m startled when I hear the shattering sound of the bartender dumping a bus tub of ice into the sink; I’d figured he’d already left, but he’s got a cell phone to his ear and is urgently speaking into it.

  “You try Dannica again, and I’ll try James,” he says as he loads some bottles into a box down at his feet. “I don’t know if they go to that club. I don’t know.”

  “Hey,” Josh says to the guy. “Any chance I can get something before you leave?”

  The bartender looks annoyed at this. He crouches down and comes back up and puts a half-filled bottle of vodka on the bar, followed by a full one. “Take care of yourself, dude,” he says. “They’re yours anyway. I have to get out of here.”

  Now it’s just us, and I’m trying to keep the feeling of sickness from rising up in me. I wait for Josh as he hunts around to find the light switches for the gallery, I wait while he looks for the keys, I wait while he fumbles with the keys in the door. There is still fog in the dark as we walk back to the Academy. It’s not even midnight yet.

  “I’m sorry if that was boring,” Josh says.

  “No, it was—”

  “It was turning into a good party too.”

  “There were—”

  “There’s a satellite show this weekend, private show tomorrow.” Josh has his courier bag, and he lifts the flap with a Velcro rip and pulls out the half-full bottle. “I’d like you to come to the private thing tomorrow. Here, have some.”

  “No thanks, Josh, I’m really—”

  “People seem surprised, or something.” He drinks from the bottle. “At this Miami thing.”

  “It’s always a surprise,” I manage to slip in.

  “It’s never a surprise. This is here, Jess. It’s forever. Wake-up call.”

  We’re on the campus now, and we pass a group of people talking under a light. “Miami, Miami, Miami,” they say.

  “They’re surprised. Like it’s a surprise.”

  “Josh, can I talk to you?”

  “These people need to wake up. Wake up!” he yells, and I wrap my arms around my stomach.

  We climb up the stairs in the studio building. Hoffman’s door is wide open and his TV is on, but he’s not there. Josh walks in and I follow because I’m too scared to do anything else.

  “Look at this shit. Look at it!” It’s cable news; an aerial shot of a building. Flames shoot from the windows and police lights flash around it.

  “Thank God for helicopters,” I say, but he doesn’t hear.

  Josh holds the bottle to his mouth and tips it up and takes one gulping swallow, and another.

  “This is forever!” he shouts.

  “Josh.”

  “People need to wake up. Wake up! Wake up!” He jumps up and sits on one of the tables next to an amorphous sculpture. I take a couple steps backward toward the door. The text crawl at the bottom of the screen says sixty plus dead, many missing. Many unaccounted for, and I blink and try to focus on the words. Josh slouches, holding the bottle between his knees. He shakes his head and holds his hand out in the air, out toward the TV screen.

  “Look at this shit. It’s about time people…they’re, they’re surprised by this?”

  I take some more steps, quietly, and I’m in the hall. I’m bordering on drunk, and I’m crying. I’m scared. I go down to Josh’s studio and the door is unlocked; maybe seeking refuge here is crazy but I go in. I can’t handle a bus ride now. Will the buses even be running? In the fog-light oozing in through the windows I see Gert’s cot, and I sit on it and dig for my phone. Katie will know what to do.

  All circuits busy. All circuits busy now. Circuits are busy.

  Of course all the circuits are busy, Jess.

  I really, really need to go to the bathroom; I run in and hitch up my dress and sit in the dark with my knees tight together and my hands full of dress and I pee quickly because I’m worried Josh will come in and who knows what? I’m an idiot for coming here. I turn on the light and the faucet and splash cold water on my face, and when I shut off the water my attention is caught by something shiny on top of the medicine cabinet; it’s a key on a leather fob and when I take it down to look at it there’s just something about it that makes me start to shake. I get my own key from my bag and I know even before I line them up that the little valleys and ridges are identical, but when I see it for sure I feel like I can’t breathe.

  How did he get this? How?

  I throw the keys—both of them—into my bag and flip off the light and try to compose myself. I’m tired and drunk and scared. I go back to the cot, the cot feels safe, there’s a blanket folded on it and I pull it over myself and lie down with my knees pulled up. I can’t go anywhere else. I can’t face going outside. It’s an hour—maybe two, maybe three—before I hear Josh come in and my skin goes cold with sweat; I see his shadow stagger and bump hard into the table and he goes “uh!” like the wind is knocked out of him. He goes into the bathroom and I close my eyes against the shock of the bright light, he doesn’t flush and the light goes out and I hear him haul himself up to the loft. I hear his body hit the bed. I hear his breathing, steady and nasal.

  With this sound, I force myself to calm down.

  And somehow, I sleep.

  20

  In the bare dawn, I wake to the sound of snoring. I have to think for a moment, process the snoring and the cot and why I’m wearing a fancy black dress, and it’s several minutes before the flash comes and I remember everything. And I think maybe I could leave now, but I don’t. I’m not ready to go outside by myself, not ready to go home and pack for Katie’s party. And I still need to talk to Josh.

  I must fall back to sleep, because the next thing I see when I open my eyes is that it’s much brighter and Josh, with wet hair and wearing a robe, is standing next to the cot.

  “Why did you sleep down here?” he asks.

  “I was drunk? You were still at Hoffman’s when I got here, anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  I sit up and pull the blanket around my shoulders. “What time is it?”

  “Quarter ’til eleven.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He holds his watch in front of me so I can see it.

  “Do you want to take a shower before we go?”

  “Before we go?”

  “Set up at the Fay Gallery. It’s across town.”

  “Josh, look at me. I need to get home. I need to clean up. I need to talk—”

  “You have clothes here. Jeans and a couple shirts. Take a shower, and we’ll go.”

  “Can we get lunch? Can we talk?”

  “There isn’t a whole lot of time.”

  “I’m starving.”

  “We can pick something up. Take a shower.”

  Josh gives me a stack of clothes I didn’t even know I had here, and I go in and lock the bathroom door and sit in the bottom of the tub with the shower on. I try to remember everything I had scripted for myself for this “talk” everything that seemed so clever I can’t recall, and what I do remember just seems dumb. I want to ask him about the key, but even thinking about it makes me afraid. The hot water feels good, though. There’s one good thing today, at least.

  Gert is in the studio when I come out of the bathroom. He says hello
, but nothing else, and he gets to work packing things up for the show. He and Josh look over some papers spread out on one of the tables, the same one that Josh slammed his hip into last night.

  “Okay, Doc.” Gert nods. “Okay. I see you there.” He picks up a big flat box, supporting it from underneath with his cast, and leaves without saying anything else.

  “Are you ready?”

  “I’m…Josh, I’m going to die if I don’t get something to eat. And I need to talk to you.”

  “Alright, we can get something. Where should we get something?”

  “What is the gallery? Where is it?”

  “It’s on Taravel. We’re taking the 54 bus. Taraval and Fourteenth.”

  Mario’s is on Taraval. “I know a place,” I say. “We can take the bus all the way there.” I get my things and put them in my bag, and when he isn’t looking I grab the canvas grocery bag I got for Josh that, to my knowledge, he has never used. If he won’t use such a nice bag, I’m going to take it back.

  “You can leave that stuff here,” he says. I don’t think he noticed me stuffing the grocery bag in with my dress.

  “I need to do laundry. What are you doing with that pack?” Josh has Gert’s trendy backpack on his shoulders, and he looks ridiculous.

  “Gert left this. He needs it.”

  On the bus, I almost say something. Almost. A couple times. My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. This bus is packed, people are close, and it feels like the wrong time. Josh just faces forward with the hip leather pack in his lap, and I have to tug his arm when we get to the stop for Mario’s.

  The lunch rush hasn’t quite started, so it doesn’t take us long to get through the line to the counter. I order a chicken salad sandwich, like I used to with Patrick, and I ask Josh what he wants.

  “Just get whatever,” he says.

  “Well, what do you like?”