Carmiel Banasky

The Suicide of Claire Bishop

Things not yet happened are already here!

I feel that. They’re just out there:

a murmuring mass outside the barrier.

They can only slip in one by one. They want to slip in. Why? They do one by one. I am the turnstile.

— Tomas Tranströmer, “Guard Duty”

On the surface of the table his index finger, as though it were a pencil, moved back and forth across the shiny Formica with the insistent gesture of drawing. His eyes no longer appeared to focus upon any particular object, but rather to see beyond the present place and time. Through his finger as it moved, his entire being seemed to flow from him into the ideal void where reality, untouched and unknown, is always waiting to be discovered.

— James Lord, A Giacometti Portrait

~ ~ ~

PART I: THE ESCAPE 1959

1

Claire could not look at herself. She was not allowed. The artist had forbade it, touching the top of Claire’s hand with her own.

“Not until it’s finished.”

And it nearly was. The portrait was on the easel in the corner of the den, covered only in a purple, velvet drape cleverly propped out two inches so as not to touch the wet canvas. Claire stood in the center of the room, facing the back of the easel, tapping her fingers on her leg as if counting the seconds until she could look. The portrait had been Freddie’s idea of a gift for her thirty-fifth birthday. She’d hated him for it, until the painter arrived that first day.

Now the painter was in the kitchen, cleaning her brushes. Most nights the artist concealed the painting by knotting the gold-fringed drape tightly to the bottom of the easel. Tonight it hung loose. It was childish, this great pulse toward the painting. Come look at me, look at me. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes but now. It was a giddy desire. Desire for the forbidden, yes, but it was more than that. There was a secret in it, the way trees held secrets or the rusting fire escapes in the alleyways she rushed passed on Bleeker. The gleaming drape beckoned — just as the young painter always seemed to, though Claire must be mistaken about that: what could the girl possibly want with her? But Claire was a woman of restraint, respect for rules and boundaries. She would not look. She would look.

She circled the easel, circled it twice — a tiger. She glanced out the French doors into the hallway. She whispered the artist’s name to herself once: Nicolette. Something inside her could have pirouetted out of control.

She held the gold fringe of the drape. She lifted.

Nicolette entered with a fistful of brushes. Baby oil dripped from the bristles, greased her fingertips.

Claire dropped the drape, having seen nothing. Was she disappointed? Only, perhaps, at being caught. She wouldn’t want Nicolette to think her disrespectful. She knelt on the blue drop cloth below the easel, straightening it, looking busy. She billowed the pale blue sheet and it swelled with air. Her own private ocean.

“I think I’ll head to the roof for a smoke before I go,” the painter said, smiling down at Claire.

Claire, on all fours in her wool pencil skirt, looked over her shoulder. Nicolette held the light from the hall like a shawl draped across her arms. It was how light should work on a woman. She was beautiful, but she held herself protectively under that smile, as if no one had ever told her so.

Claire, certainly, was not going to be the one to break the news. She rose hurriedly, her wool skirt sticking to her stockings. “I’ll come with you.”

Claire hastened the artist down the hall, past the vintage settee they weren’t allowed to sit on and from which Nicolette grabbed the coat she’d thrown across it. Claire was terribly embarrassed of her wealth under Nicolette’s gaze — the native masks on the wall, from her and Freddie’s brief vacation to Cuba years ago, the glass case in the den full of priceless Italian porcelain clowns. Claire had the urge to throw the whole lot of them out the window. Nicolette, with her tight black pants and cropped dark hair — she could have been one of the Village Beatniks squatting in the next building over who always glowered at Claire as though she didn’t belong a toe below Thirty-Fourth Street. They knew, the all did, that she and Freddie had the means to live anywhere in the city — moving to the West Village had been an experiment to indulge Claire.

On the roof, the water tower hung in the dusk air above them, a suspended animal skeleton. A zebra, Claire decided. She’d only seen a zebra once, in Cuba, in someone’s yard. She sometimes found she missed that zebra. By the time she’d pointed it out to Freddie, it had disappeared — he’d called her crazy and hadn’t believed her. Just as well, she’d thought then, the zebra is mine.

The rusted iron hummed and swayed in the breeze. Claire had the sudden impulse to tell Nicolette about the zebra. Nicolette would believe her.

“To tell the truth, I don’t smoke,” Claire said. “Freddie hates it.”

The artist was busy rolling her own cigarette on the ledge, shaking loose tobacco from a small pouch like a regular dockworker, trying not to lose it in the wind. “What Freddie doesn’t know,” Nicolette said. She licked the paper, handed the finished product to Claire, and lit it for her. Her hand grazed Claire’s cheek. Nicolette smelled dangerous. They stood close together, facing north, peering over to the street nine stories below, sharing the cigarette. Rebellious. But the wind stole her smoke so quickly, it was as if she’d let nothing out.

“I was up there last week. Uptown,” Nicolette said, gesturing north toward the high-rises, “doing a portrait of this blubber-man. I was up on his roof, smoking, when I realized — I was in the view, I didn’t have a view.” Nicolette held Claire’s gaze. “Not here though,” she said. “Here I have the perfect view.”

“I love it up here.” Claire averted her eyes, blushing. “It makes up for everything else.”

“Even Freddie?”

What a question to ask! She should be furious. Why was she not furious? “I wouldn’t have this view without him.”

The wind grew louder than their voices. It hit Claire’s ears rhythmically, beat her clean like a rug.

“I don’t know why,” Nicolette said loudly, “but I used to imagine all the skyscrapers were ladies waiting to go dancing.” She laughed into the wind.

“I like that,” Claire said. “Ladies waiting forever.”

The last of the setting sun charged off the west side of the buildings and they let it blind them.

“Don’t you want children, Claire? Since that whatever disease isn’t hereditary. It’s terrible when the smart ones don’t.”

It was a wonder, the information Nicolette had extracted from her during their sessions. In order to paint Claire, Nicolette had said she had to know her. There were people Claire had known for years who knew nothing about her parents or her childhood. But to this perfect stranger, Claire had found herself describing her grandmother’s operatic voice, the disease Claire once believed she’d inherit, the grounds of the asylum. There was something thrilling about the interrogation. No one had ever demanded Claire talk about herself. And yet the conversation had felt natural, or at least as natural as posing for a portrait; both were made of the same intimacy. She’d let Nicolette crack into her like a crab shell.

And in return, Nicolette had listened. The artist had closed her eyes and listened. She’d seemed, almost, to swoon.

But Claire wasn’t posing on the couch anymore. “Why don’t you have children then?” Claire said in answer.

In the settling dark, it seemed Nicolette was pushing something over to her with her eyes, but Claire didn’t know what, or how to receive it. Then the painter looked away.

“It’s getting late,” she said. “I’m expected.”

Who would be expecting Nicolette? Did she simply want to leave? But it was none of her business. Nicolette was hired as a painter, not a confidante.

Claire nodded. “I think I’ll stay up here a while.”

Nicolette shrugged and turned to go. As she was about to exit through the large metal door, the superintendent, Tomasz, appeared in the lit threshold. Claire saw him turn and watch Nicolette’s backside as he held the door for her. Striding across the tar rooftop, Tomasz tipped his hat at Claire, or perhaps he was only holding it against the wind. She pocketed Nicolette’s matches, left on the ledge.

“Mrs. Bishop.” His Polish accent was curt. He winked as he shook a cigarette from his pack of Golds.

She felt he’d caught her in some illicit act. She blushed crimson as she always did in his presence; it was out of her control. On more than one occasion she’d sensed Tomasz watching her. When she was above him in the stairwell once, she swore she caught him looking up her skirt. It was shameless, but she didn’t mind; she was still doing something right.

Months ago, when Freddie was away on business, the shower had started leaking from the valve. She’d called Tomasz to take a look, thanking him profusely. Both of them angled together in the cramped powder room, but when he’d tested it, the shower no longer leaked. “I tried it myself before you came,” Claire insisted. He said there were easier ways to get him up to her apartment. The nerve. She’d demanded he leave immediately and had been too embarrassed to ask him for anything since.

His match went out with the wind. She hated him for his shoulders, his handsome face. She tried to hide her red cheeks with her hair. She would tell him proudly that she could not stay to chat, that she must retire early to prepare for yet another day of sitting for her portrait.

Instead, she pointed uptown. “I sometimes imagine the skyscrapers are ladies waiting to go dancing. Isn’t that silly?”

She laughed and looked away, afraid he’d catch the lie. Then she struck one of Nicolette’s matches and cupped her hands around his, nearly singeing his fingers. Tomasz held her eyes, nodding to the beat of the wind. “What stiff ladies,” he said.

She laughed as if she cared. Her stomach hurt.

Claire tried to go about her evening as usual. She fed the cat, made herself a martini, dusted the breakfront, polished her silver and fork collection. She tried reading from an art history book she’d checked out of the library for Nicolette’s benefit, but knew she’d nod off if she read another page.

She tried to push the painting, unlocked, untied, from her mind. But then she found herself sitting again on the couch in the den, as if still posing, facing the back of the draped canvas, and beside it, the blank wall above the mantel where it would hang. Claire tipped back the last of her drink and was feeling terribly light. Had she forgotten to eat supper again? Freddie was dining out, as he often did, with a colleague from work. Or someone. That woman from work. Claire worried he might be meeting Nicolette. It was a stupid worry, she knew, and yet she wouldn’t be surprised. But Nicolette had such a queer nose. Freddie could never love a girl with such a queer nose. And even if he could, Nicolette didn’t seem keen on him, or any man. Claire, however, could appreciate the queerness of the nose. It was exotic. Ethnic, even.

Claire steadied herself and edged toward the painting. She tiptoed to the front of it, where Nicolette had sat for three days, staring at her. Could she have left it untied on purpose?

On that first day, as Claire sat rigid on the couch, she had asked Nicolette what, exactly, she was doing with her charcoal fragments and sketch board. Nicolette replied that she wanted Claire’s face in her muscle memory, so her likeness would become subconscious. The idea was outlandish, until it was not. To be memorized, to be known like that, had made Claire feel skittish and elated, dizzy.

She smoothed out her skirt. She wanted to see herself like that too, to know herself.

Claire lifted the drape.

There Claire was, and wasn’t. Her body was severed across the canvas. Severed and repeated. Repeated and mutilated. A woman, and the body of a woman. Claire at every moment of her life: a young girl, then elderly, then her current self with dirty blond waves done up in rollers — all unmistakably Claire. Claire falling from a bridge.

It was a portrait of a dead woman. Nicolette had killed her.

She pressed her fingers to the windowpane. Three floors below, children were running between lampposts just lit, a stray dog barking madly at them, though Claire could only see the barking, not hear it. They shuffled around an old man who stood very still in the middle of the sidewalk. An umbrella spidered out of the bushes beside him. The man looked at it, and she at the man, and the treetops in Washington Square moved to a breeze she could not feel. She swayed with them. She leaned on the wall behind her for support. The floor swayed like some long forgotten ocean wave. She felt seasick. She dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand until it throbbed.

When she returned her gaze to the canvas, it hadn’t changed.

It was not a portrait, but it was of Claire. There was Claire, fixed to canvas many times over. Claire falling. Again, Claire falling. Claire falling from a bridge.

It was not nice to look at. It was almost ugly. Or maybe it was beautiful. Avant-garde. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough to understand. Freddie had told her as much. That was years ago at the gallery opening of a friend of his — she’d embarrassed him, saying loudly, drunkenly, how awful the paintings were. Like children’s drawings, she’d said. The artist had as little taste in color as he did in propriety. It simply wasn’t her cup of tea.

But this was another matter. So what if it was art? Claire was smart enough to know that a person should not paint this instead of a portrait when commissioned to paint a portrait. This was something else. It was Claire falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. It was Claire dead on the street below, her very own street — not the East River, but the cobblestones of Sullivan. What did that mean? Who was Nicolette to paint her this way? Whatever it was Nicolette had seen in Claire was obviously a mistake. Nicolette was mistaken.

Claire slammed her body into the wall behind her. She was made of rubber.

She wanted, with a sudden and foreign fury, to hit herself.

2

When Nicolette had asked Claire to talk about herself during their sessions, Claire had spoken about her father.

Ernest Gabelmacher stepped off a dewy boat named the Susquehanna in June 1922. It was the wettest crossing in a decade, or that’s what the captain, who’d taken a liking to Ernest, had told him portside on their one dry stargazing night. Ernest was likable in any language and was aware of this fact, but that did not mean the captain could help him find a job; it was not a good century to be German in America. But, the captain reminded him, there were steps one could take. “Soon you won’t be so German.”

Ernest had ten thousand Papiermark to his name — five thousand in his pocket, five thousand sewn into his suit. This, he learned his first night in Albany, rounded out to just over two dollars. He arrived in time to hear Warren G. Harding deliver the first ever presidential radio transmission. In a deli, customers gathered around a homemade crystal receiver. Ernest pretended his English was solid enough to understand, applauding when the others did, jeering when they jeered.

This was also the day Ernest met Elsa, the girl working the counter. A transplant herself, she could spot one of her own a mile away. She laughed loudly. “You cannot understand one word,” she said to him in English fringed with a southeastern German accent. The other men turned to Ernest and play-punched him in the gut. Ernest had no choice but to burst out into the only English song he knew: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie,” beginning to end, making Elsa out to be the liar.

Elsa was seven months pregnant before Ernest had scrounged up enough money to rent a room in a farmhouse in Ovid, New York, a small town proud both of its working-class bent and newly built theater with a quaking chandelier. The owners of the farmhouse were off on fishing boats most of the year, and Ernest promised Elsa that someday the whole house would belong to them, maybe even the whole street.

Later, Ernest would tell Claire these stories while she did her arithmetic on scraps of wallpaper in the evenings. She knew his life by heart. But it was difficult for Claire to speak to Nicolette about her mother. Elsa was always closed and private, and Claire never thought of her outside of the confines of Claire’s own life, with brief cameos in her father’s. Elsa seemed not to exist until Claire was born.

For most of Claire’s school years, Ernest was out of a job because of one war and then another. He took work as a traveling salesman — trousers door to door — and as a talc worker until it proved poisonous and he watched his friends die. He couldn’t serve in the military with his talc-weakened lungs, and no one would hire him once tensions in Europe rose. He was naturalized, and all of his savings went to war bonds to prove his loyalty. They changed their name from Gabelmacher to Gabler. But none of it helped or hid his accent at job interviews, and the dream of the house, and the street, evaporated in the night. Elsa took the reins and found work as a silent seamstress, playing mute so no one would know she was German. When she came home each evening from the small factory, she would yell just to hear her own voice.

Every Sunday of Claire’s childhood (while Ernest got to stay home and listen to Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy), Elsa took Claire, dressed in their Sunday best, to visit her grandmother at the Willard Asylum. This was, to Claire, the opposite of a church. Claire’s grandmother had Huntington’s, or that’s what she’d been told — a hereditary, degenerative disease with the power to change your personality, to rob you of motor control, to riddle your mind with hallucinations. Black magic, she thought as a child. Her grandmother would often mistake Claire for Elsa. Whom she mistook Elsa for, Claire would never know. During each visit she would tell stories about training as an opera singer and she would sing an aria or two for Claire. On laundry duty, she would get into trouble for writing lines of poetry on the bands of other patients’ undergarments.

The hospital was a large site not far from Ovid, with Gothic-style buildings as old as any in this country but which somehow felt slap-dash, fake. Grass green enough it seemed painted on. While her grandmother’s personality changed shape, the hospital never altered. Time was different there. The grounds didn’t change with the years. There was no progress, no war.

When Claire was thirteen, she came to understand what the word “hereditary” meant. She began spending her days in the public library, missing school, hiding away in the stacks with texts on lobotomy and psychosurgeries newly discovered. It was at least warmer there than her classroom, where they couldn’t afford to fill the potbelly stove.

According to Elsa, Claire’s grandmother had her first hallucination when she was twenty-four. This was what Claire decided she could expect as well. Elsa had not inherited it, and so it must have skipped a generation, making Claire an even more likely candidate. She imagined she would suffer doubly so. She would hear voices. She would be locked in an asylum, visited by people she didn’t know. She was the author of all the odds.

One very sunny day, when every book glinted back at her like tin, Claire realized how much time she’d wasted sitting inside a library. And how little time she had left. Time with her mind, before it became unrecognizable, before she was someone else, like her grandmother.

That was when Freddie, the golden-haired entrepreneur, came to town on business. Not quite seventeen, Claire would have been drawn to anything polished in her ashen little Ovid. She liked the way Freddie leaned forward, intimate with anyone who spoke to him. How he loosed his shoelaces rebelliously when he thought no one was watching. How he took the matter of making Claire smile very seriously and wasn’t afraid of the volume of his own laugh. When the draft call came, it did not take much convincing for her to make a home with him.

In this way she left her family for a man she was forbidden to marry before she turned eighteen. Her mother grew silent even at home. Her father was so hurt he fasted the day Claire left and refused to see her off. He blamed Freddie more than her, saying the boy should know better and that Freddie had a spoiled face. But Claire was intent on growing up then and there, wed properly or not. When her mother asked why—why so foolish, why so young—Claire could not tell them. None of them knew the fear whipping around inside her. She never knew how to explain.

They took a one-bedroom bungalow in Croton-on-Hudson, hemmed in by manors overlooking the river. Such urgency shaped their short time together before Freddie’s deployment, and he only knew the half of it. They were so new then, getting to know one another as quickly as two bodies could. She wanted him always, the thought flitting in the forefront of her mind, written across his arm as she kissed the length of it: would she still recognize him when he came back? Would she still be here?

Claire turned eighteen the week before Freddie was deployed and they married in a rush. “We’ll last through this war together,” Freddie said in his vows. “What more do we need to know?”

Claire did not tell her parents of the marriage until after he’d left.

Freddie’s yearlong service morphed into four and no one voiced any resentment. Armed with Ladies’ Home Journal, she made a home for the two of them by herself. And, like other women, Claire found work during the war. She was a bus driver, transporting men too old to serve from their bedroom community down to the Bronx, where they caught the train to the city. Her cheeks, and other parts, were raw from pinching. But she liked her job well enough. She wore a transit company cap that was far too big. She was quite a good driver.

The war was there, in the bus, because she was there. But the rides were jolly and no one ever spoke of what was happening abroad. If anyone questioned her, Claire was prepared to say her maiden name — Gabler — was English, not German. But no one ever asked. She played music in her bus on the transistor, never the news. She tried not to listen to the reports unless her friends, also military wives, told her she must hear a certain story. She frequented the movies and became a master at bridge. The war was an interruption to everyone’s plans, but Claire never had a plan. It had nothing to do with her — Freddie’s absence and her new job seemed somehow far removed from invasions and sneak attacks.

Freddie’s letters were full only of jokes he’d learned from the other boys. He spent most of the war in India. When Claire asked him about the war, he said sharply that he wasn’t allowed to talk about it. This would have made sense to Claire had it not been for the defensiveness in his voice, as if he were protecting himself from being scolded. It gave her the feeling that Freddie didn’t understand what he’d been doing, what he’d been fighting for.

When Claire had to give up her job, she thought of taking work elsewhere. But Freddie held her close and said she’d only been playing a role while he was away and now he wanted her home where he could find her. “Working seems unnatural, don’t you think?”

Through the war, Claire had lied to Freddie that she could not bear children, that she’d been warned it would pose terrible health risks and might even kill her. She did not tell him her real fear, that she would pass on a monstrous gene, and worse, not be around for her children, the way her own mother had been alone.

But Freddie was determined they visit the best doctors to see what could be done. Claire obliged, and in the course of discovering that she was perfectly healthy, it became apparent that Freddie was not. Trauma he’d suffered during the war — in fact, a wrestling match with one of his Army buddies — had caused groin damage far worse than he’d previously thought. All of this, of course, came as a relief to Claire.

The closer Claire came to the dreaded age, the closer she grew to Freddie. She’d never felt so powerful as she did in bed with him. She moved as if she owned both their bodies. She loved sitting beside him in the cinema, the smell of his collar, how rare he liked his steak. But mostly, she loved doing nothing more than lying in bed with him and wasting the day away unclothed. She ignored the thoughtlessness of his late-night work meetings, how cold he could be, how forgetful of the parties she planned. How was he to know that her time was running out?

Every day after her twenty-fourth birthday, Claire performed a mental tally of her faculties. Everything was in working order. In fact, she was much quicker than Freddie at learning Spanish for a business trip to Cuba she didn’t have the heart to tell him they’d never take. But no initial signs presented themselves.

Though Claire assumed that the symptoms would appear soon enough, she thought it prudent to ask her mother, as nonchalantly as possible, to repeat the details of her grandmother’s health. The trip home would also be a chance to say goodbye. While Freddie was staying in the city on business, Claire returned to Ovid for the first time in many months.

Her father had never completely forgiven her for leaving against his wishes. Since the war, he’d managed to open his own woodworking and restoration shop, and when Claire returned, he spent most of his time there, away from home. Still, she visited him, and made a game of heckling the one old Irishman who still protested outside the shop. Ernest’s only response to him was to hang a sign in the window that read, “I’m an American-German so I know my wood,” even though Germans weren’t particularly known for woodworking.

When Claire asked Elsa how her grandmother was fairing, Elsa said, “She died. While you were busy.”

Why hadn’t her mother told her? Instead, she asked, “Was it her Huntington’s Disease or something else?”

Her mother gave a strange laugh. And then she said, “She never had Huntington’s.”

Apparently, they’d lied to the authorities so her grandmother would be allowed to remain in the hospital, a loophole for hereditary diseases. In fact, her condition was the result of a head injury she’d suffered on the ship that brought her to America. She died of pneumonia in the end.

Claire didn’t say a word. She walked over to Elsa. And she slapped her.

How quickly it all changed. Now she was frozen in Freddie’s arms. What was supposed to have been a fleeting handful of years was now a life.

Here was the man who didn’t move her. The transformation was like a loss of consciousness, but Freddie didn’t notice. She hated the smell of sweat under his collar, the way he sniffed his food before he ate it. She hated the way he moved against her, clammy and rough. His attraction to Claire petered off as well, connected as it was to hers. Now she turned a blind eye at how often he missed the last train north, stayed late at the office, slept weekly in the city.

Twice, Claire was caught shoplifting from the grocery store in Croton — potato chips, a magazine, peppermint-flavored chewing tobacco. Once, Freddie caught her skinny-dipping in a creek by their house. Claire splashed him as he stood on the bank in his suit.

“Why don’t you come in with me? Or are you scared?”

“Get out of there, Claire. You look mad. You’ll catch your death.”

“You’ll catch yours first,” Claire said. He turned to go. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“I’m going into work.”

“It’s Sunday.” Claire climbed out of the water. She was shivering. Freddie took off his jacket and draped it around her.

“I think we should move,” Freddie said.

Claire dropped his jacket to the dirt. “Because I’ve embarrassed you?”

Freddie sighed. “Where, tell me, will you stop acting like a child?”

To her parents, the city might as well have been another country. She spoke to Elsa and Ernest less and less, and only about the weather or Ernest’s health, resigned in the knowledge that her parents and Freddie would never know why she was the way she was.

But Nicolette knew. Humming over the portrait, the artist had said, as if diagnosing Claire, “You lived your life afraid you’d go mad.” She leaned in close to the painting. “And now you’re disappointed.”

3

The sound of coming home and shutting doors. Freddie taking off his coat. Freddie standing mockingly in the kitchen doorway. She mixed herself a drink like she was mixing herself.

“Is that for me?” he said, eyeing the drink in her hand.

She took a sip. Of all the nights for him to return at a reasonable hour.

He started toward the den. Claire tripped after him into the hall, splashing gin on his suit.

“What in the devil, Claire?”

“You can’t look at it,” she said. Another sip.

“Look at it?”

“The painting. We’re not allowed until it’s done.”

“I was heading to the shower. What’s gotten into you?”

Claire lifted her glass to her lips in answer. The handsome, stupid man. Eyes like steel ball bearings.

Freddie grinned. “You’ve seen it, haven’t you? You little cheater,” he said, so pleased with himself to have figured her out. “If you can look, I sure as hell can. I’m the one paying.”

“We’re not allowed,” she said again, lifting her hand as he brushed passed her to the den.

“Oh that’s garbage, not allowed. It’s our painting. Yours. We can do what we like.”

She followed Freddie to the corner near the canvas. Claire faced the back of the easel. He lifted the drape by a gold tassel.

“What’s this?” he said.

“That’s it.”

“That’s it. This is not it. What is this? A prank? Did she say anything?”

“Say anything?”

“To explain it.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so.”

“I don’t think so.”

They stood facing one another, the painting between them. She set her empty glass on the coffee table and straightened her back.

“I think you should apologize to me,” Claire said, surprised as Freddie by the words.

“Apologize.” Freddie grinned again. “Apologize for what?”

Claire didn’t know. Her own head was stamping down her neck. She straightened her spine again. “Were you sleeping with her?”

Freddie stopped grinning. “Don’t be stupid.” Nearly a whisper.

Claire’s eyes started to prickle. She would not cry. “What does she mean by it?”

“Don’t ask me. How should I know?” He looked at her shoulder instead of her face.

“Fine. I’ll ask her. She’s coming back tomorrow.”

“The hell she is.”

“We’ll have her back tomorrow and see what she says,” Claire said firmly.

Freddie squinted at Claire like he couldn’t quite see her. “Do what you want. I won’t be a part of it. And I’m not paying her, either. This is not what we’re paying her for.” He paused, softer. “You’re already pale as a feather. I mean ghost. I don’t know what I mean. You should eat.”

Freddie let go of the drape, brushed by Claire, and sank into the couch where she’d posed only hours before. It was dark now and Claire saw she’d forgotten to shut the curtains. She pointed, and Freddie leaned over the arm of the couch and closed them quickly. At least he still had that kindness left in him. She was afraid to leave the windows open at night. He always said her fear was irrational and she said it was her grandmother’s fear — unexplainable, and deeply, deeply German. You look out the window on a moonless night and see what your grandmother saw.

She sat down beside Freddie on the couch and let him run his hand up and down her arm. She imagined it was black and moonless outside and the neighboring buildings were crumbling floor by floor. She didn’t look to find out.

Nicolette kissed Claire’s cheek as she stepped through the door at exactly eleven o’clock on the morning of their fourth session. Claire felt the autumn cold on Nicolette’s lips. She stood stiffly, not leaning in to return the kiss. She wished she’d formed a plan before being bombarded by Nicolette and her lips, parading in as if nothing were wrong, as if she hadn’t painted a devastating, insulting — but perhaps it was best to wait.

Nicolette rolled and lit a cigarette, then set to work at the easel, barely acknowledging her. The painter hadn’t smoked in the house before, but perhaps Claire telling her Freddie hated it had changed that. She wore tight black pants and a black blouse tailored just above her waistline. When she reached up, the pale skin of her waist showed. She was so tiny. Claire was not large by any means, but she could squash her.

“I’m going to get us something to eat,” Claire said through a clenched smile. “You don’t need me here.”

“I need you,” Nicolette said absently. She held her cigarette in the same hand as her palette. The room hummed with tobacco and turpentine.

Claire fetched a tray of seasoned carrots and a pimento cheese log their girl had fixed the other day, then mixed herself a drink, early as it was. She opened the breakfront to choose from her collection of forks: at least half a dozen from every restaurant in the neighborhood and several from farther uptown and other boroughs entirely. It was very simple: after finishing a meal at any given café, Claire would wipe her fork with her napkin and slip it into her purse. She did not consider this stealing. Stealing had a damaging connotation. No one was hurt in these small exploits, and she never once helped herself to a spoon. All these years and no one had ever noticed, especially Freddie, who couldn’t tell the difference between china and glass if his life depended on it.

Claire was stalling, and hated that she could let herself be afraid of Nicolette. She chose two hors d’oeuvre forks once belonging to a bistro on Fifth Avenue. Carefully, she set the tray, the forks, her martini, and a glass of lemon water for Nicolette on the coffee table in the den. She added a vase of cut flowers. The stamens dusted her fingers and clothes, leaving a trail behind her. Finally, Claire settled back on the couch, holding the stem of her glass as if an extra finger would shatter it.

The artist was not looking at her, or her forks. Nicolette could have been painting in any den, in any city or decade. She really did not need Claire.

The painter poured more turpentine from a jug into a dish set in her easel and some of it splashed on the carpet. Freddie would be livid. Freddie would say that was the last straw and throw that jug of turpentine in Nicolette’s pretty face.

But he wouldn’t, and Claire sat perfectly still on the couch, as if posing, flexing and unflexing her fingers.

Nicolette smiled at Claire. “You seem more relaxed today.”

How comfortable Claire had felt in this very room only yesterday; she could have been sitting with an old friend, someone who had seen her naked. But now, Claire’s shoulders had shoulders. She was aware of every muscle in her face. But she was proud to learn that she could act, that she had the power to fool even Nicolette.

“Did I ever tell you about my father?” Nicolette said more to the canvas than to Claire. “You remind me of him. But then, everyone does.”

Claire said nothing, glared without glaring. How dare she finally give Claire something in return. She should tell her to leave now, that she never wanted to see her again. But even now, perhaps that wasn’t true. Claire held her tongue, wishing very much she didn’t care what Nicolette had to say.

“I lost him in the war,” Nicolette said. “They brought his body home, but they wouldn’t let me see it. They wouldn’t tell me exactly how he died. We only saw him in uniform, in the open casket. But it was a private viewing area. So when it was my turn, I unbuttoned his shirt and peeked. I’d never been so afraid. I thought he would wake up right there and grab for me. But I had to see.” She said this unapologetically, rather obstinately, like she was still that little girl at the casket. “There was a giant red slit down from his right shoulder across his torso, nearly splitting him in two. I don’t know what weapon would have sliced him so precisely. I never asked.

“I shared that story at an opening once, and now every critic reads that into my paintings, especially my last show. Did you see it? Every time someone has something wrong with an arm or there’s a body in the landscape, they say it represents my grief.” Nicolette wiped her black hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. “I hate their explanations.”

“They’re wrong?” Claire asked.

“Like all neurotic artists, it’s my own death I’m obsessed with, not his. There are so many ways to die, and even more ways to imagine it. For that reason alone I’ve never understood boredom.”

Nicolette smiled slightly and moved her brush over the lower portion of the canvas. Claire could almost feel the paintbrush on her own neck — no doubt that was the part Nicolette was detailing at that moment, where Claire came to lay dead on the street below the bridge, her neck exposed. Claire ran her fingers over the small imperfections on her throat, the nearly imperceptible bumps rising from her skin like Braille.

“Do you ever imagine dying?” Nicolette asked without raising her eyes or her brush.

Claire chose a carrot slice from the tray, held it aloft like a wand. “We’ll see it today, won’t we? Freddie nearly peeked last night.”

Nicolette shrugged and mumbled an answer.

“What?” Claire said, a little too loud.

“It’s not quite ready,” Nicolette said. “It’s always more difficult than I remember. It is difficult to finish anything. And to start. The middle doesn’t exist.”

“Oh? I thought you were on the last touches.”

“I can see now how it might never be finished. Even the last touches could take weeks. I could take it—”

“What?” Claire said. “I can’t hear you.”

“I said I could take it with me to my studio to finish. I don’t need you to pose after today. It’s all detail work now, which could take a very long time. It will be worth the wait.”

“No,” Claire said. “We don’t want that. No, we must see it today.” Her voice caught.

Nicolette closed her eyes. Barely above a whisper: “You’ve seen it.”

Claire bit quickly into the carrot. She chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed and all the while felt the girl’s eyes burrowing into her cheeks, X-ray vision spying the pulp in the cavities of her teeth. It took her forever to chew that carrot.

“You were supposed to wait,” Nicolette said.

Now the painter was telling her what she should and shouldn’t do? Claire stood quickly, swallowing with difficulty. “Excuse me?”

Nicolette pushed back her stool and stood as well. “I wanted to give it to you.”

Claire pinned back her shoulders. It hurt to stand so straight. “I’ve never been so insulted,” she said. “You cannot come into a person’s home — you cannot come into their home—”

“It’s not an insult,” Nicolette said.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s a gift.”

“A gift?” This, more than anything, made Claire so hot in her anger she could have peeled off her skin and hurled it at the girl. “You are mad. You have to leave now. Or I’ll — yes, I’ll call the police.”

“Try to understand.” Nicolette’s voice contracted. She seemed on the verge of tears. “I only painted what I saw. I took this notion of your death — your suicide — and I gave it to the work. So it can’t happen. Do you see?”

“Suicide!” Claire tried very hard to laugh, but it came out like twigs breaking underfoot. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Maybe to you, but since I believe it deeply, it’s true. It’s very true.”

Claire closed her eyes. Light happened in there. But when she opened them again, both Nicolette and the painting hadn’t disappeared. “You need to go,” she said again. “Take it with you.”

Nicolette stepped around the canvas. Claire glanced about for an escape route — she could duck behind the couch — but she remained still. Nicolette walked to her slowly, one hand out as if Claire were a stray dog caught in headlights that might easily scare off with sudden movement.

“I understand you’re angry,” Nicolette said. “I wish I could stop painting forever. I would stop for you.”

And then they were so close and Nicolette grabbed Claire’s fingers with one hand and brought her other hand to Claire’s face, ran her thumb under her eyes, as if measuring her features again. Then down, her fingers creeping over her cheeks, her ears. Again Claire shut her eyes, but this time she did not wish her gone.

“You’re so beautiful, Claire,” Nicolette said. “You act like you know, but you don’t.” She slipped her fingers along Claire’s lips, her chin and neck, her lips again. The heat of Nicolette’s face, closer now, Nicolette’s hand on her hair.

She felt incapable of stopping this. Did she want to stop this? Nicolette was in charge, as she was of the painting, as she was of how Claire was seen.

Claire opened her eyes. “Freddie will not pay you,” Claire said. She felt a century older than the painter. She turned and walked away from Nicolette, locked herself in the bedroom until she heard the girl leave.

They waited until after midnight to hide the painting in their basement storage unit, avoiding their neighbors — Freddie had told everyone about the commission, even crazy Wilma Meyer upstairs who made her own straw hats. They would keep it for legal reasons, perhaps take Nicolette to court. They took what used to be the old servants’ stairwell, and at every floor for three floors, Freddie yelled, “Hey,” at Claire above him. But she didn’t have the energy to ask why he was yelling, or to change whatever it was she was doing wrong. In the storage gate, she insisted they position the painting on top of two large boxes — the contents of which she no longer knew — upright and eye level to allow one last look.

The Brooklyn Bridge, from which the woman in the painting had jumped — rather, the bridge from which she had jumped, for she was the woman in the painting — glistened like barbed wire. Each moment or fragment was a bit of a mosaic spliced together from the same broken material, a Roman torso that had been smashed and glued back together wrong. In one fragment, she was a teenager; in another, gray-haired and gray-eyed. Falling, every moment of her life. Each was undoubtedly her as she had never seen herself, or had never been. She was beautiful. She was dead.

But the sky behind her broken body was bright — a perfect, sunny day. Everyone outside of the frame was laughing, jeering at her, she just knew. The street below the bridge — so strange, a street, not a river — rang with children’s summer laughter and all the lives that crossed it. But then there was something dark that she couldn’t grasp. Some wildness in the brushstrokes. Heavy strokes. An image of an ocean appeared to her — a vast, violent, deep-night ocean. She’d never seen an ocean like that. No land anywhere, known only to itself.

4

Claire had promised to meet her friend Mary for an event at the Reuben Gallery and she couldn’t come up with a decent excuse to cancel. Already running late, she hailed a taxi going south instead of north. Her dress, cowl-draped black satin, caught in the car door as she slammed it shut behind her on East Tenth, and she had to beat on the passenger window to get the driver’s attention. He almost pulled away with her — she could have been dragged for blocks through city traffic with her dress around her head and it would have hurt and would it have killed her?

Mary was waiting in front of her building. She pouted at Claire’s tardiness and pretended that kissing both her cheeks was a very big chore. Claire was so nervous she barely said hello. What could she talk about when all that ran through her mind was an open ocean, the painting afloat like a life raft? What if Mary asked about it?

Mary had obviously been drinking before she arrived. This didn’t stop her from looking sternly at Claire and asking, before anything else, “What is it? Who died?”

Since Claire could not say, “Me,” she said, “What? Why?” and attempted a laugh.

“You’re all right, then? We don’t have to go,” Mary said.

“I’m perfectly normal. I would tell you if I wasn’t. Stop asking please,” Claire said as lightly as she could.

She couldn’t fool her friend, but at least Mary knew her well enough not to press. Mary, willingly, did most of the talking. She was a ghostwriter for little-known politicians’ autobiographies and she profiled larger personalities for the Village Voice. Mary always wanted an ear for whatever new person or project she was working on.

“Buckminster Fuller,” she said, linking arms with Claire as they walked east. “He’s staying in the Village. I’ll be in your neighborhood for the next week following him around. We should get lunch and you could meet him. He always wants to meet new people. I thought he was only interested in meeting my women friends, but men, too. He wants to know everyone. It’s part of his work, knowing people. He’s trying to save the world, and how could he save the world if he doesn’t know the people in it?”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Claire said.

“Of course you haven’t. You live under a rock.”

“That’s why I have you. Without you, I wouldn’t know Elvis.”

“You know I love feeling important. I asked him to come tonight. Bucky, I mean, not Elvis. But I doubt he will. He doesn’t like this kind of art.” Mary smiled at her, shimmering under the street lamp like her black jacket was covered in dew. Only Mary could pull off toreador pants and that ruffled blouse.

“Are women allowed to wear pants here?” Claire asked.

“They wouldn’t care if you came nude.” Mary laughed with her mouth wide open. She looked fantastic.

“You look fantastic,” Claire said out loud.

Mary hummed, so easy to please. “So do you.” But then she stopped smiling, stopped walking, and twisted her mouth. “Well, no, Claire, you don’t. Really, what’s wrong? Is it Freddie again? You look like you haven’t slept in days.”

“I can always count on you—”

“To be honest? Yes. And happy birthday,” Mary said, kissing Claire’s cheek before they started walking again. “Your thirtieth.”

“Thirty-fifth,” Claire said.

“Shh.”

The wind ripped through their coats and they laughed at it. Claire hadn’t laughed in so long; she almost forgot she was upset. Mary was a giddy drunk. She said she felt like taking off her shoes and skipping, but she didn’t. She put her arm around Claire and squeezed her shoulder and Claire felt like crying.

The gallery was on the ground floor of a loft on Tenth Street. The people spilled out onto the sidewalk, swimming in a pool of yellow light. Claire was overdressed, she could see that immediately. Most of the men were in jeans or trousers — the women too. Claire was surprised, though she tried very hard not to be, by how many American Negroes were present at an art gallery. “This is quite the eclectic crowd,” she said to Mary.

“Oh, Claire! I can’t take you anywhere.” Mary guided Claire inside by her forearm, then immediately recognized someone and flagged him down, leaving Claire alone.

The gallery was crowded and everyone looked horrible in the bright light. Sheets of stiff, semitransparent plastic hung from the rafters like laundry, sectioned so they formed smaller rooms. Red, yellow, and green paint was scratched across the mock walls. The word Fluxus rotated around her, painted or scribbled along every surface. Plastic fruit littered the ground. She stepped over fake bananas and kiwis to get to the drinks in the back. Just a glass or two of the sweet brandy punch. She poured generously.

Rows of folding cane chairs faced a screen in the front of the room. Projected on the screen were the words Escape Velocity. Big, black block letters. The words sounded like a magic incantation to Claire. A code to nothing, yet Claire wanted it. She wanted to own those words and use them, do something terrible to them.

She downed her punch.

At the corner of the table, tacky cocktail forks were spread beside a plate of cheese loaf and celery stalks. Claire looked around. Then she slipped a fork into her purse. At that moment, the music rose. She started, felt she’d been caught.

“You look lost.”

Claire turned to find a man a decade younger than she and a full head taller staring down at her eagerly. Acne scarred his upper lip, which he tried to hide with a thin moustache, but he had a confident air.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Claire said. “How could I be lost?”

“May I?” He gestured toward her empty cup, and she handed it to him. “Are you an artist?” he asked. “It seems like everyone here is.”

“Yes,” Claire said quickly. “Or, I used to work in film. But I gave it up.” It was not hard to lie to this man she’d never see again. And she had, years ago, appeared in one film.

“Why’s that?” He filled her glass and handed it back.

“Oh, a number of reasons. This painter I know thinks I want to jump off a bridge.” She sipped her punch quickly.

“Thrilling. Don’t you? Most people I know do,” said the man.

“That’s awfully flippant,” Claire said.

“You’re right,” he said. “It’s no laughing matter.”

“Do you? Want to jump off a bridge?” she asked, cup half empty.

“Sometimes.” The music rose and he had to lean in close to her ear to speak. “Perhaps this is an odd question, but did I see you put a fork in your bag? I’m just curious.”

“That.” Claire felt herself blushing furiously. “That is for an art project.”

He had a kind smile. “I thought you’d given up on all that.”

Something was about to begin, it was brewing in the air. She quickly poured herself a third glass of punch before the man walked her to Mary, who’d saved her seat, but there was no free chair nearby for him. It was a relief to see him go. What a stupid thing, her forks. What a lie. And not only what she’d said to the man. She felt embarrassed of herself in front of herself.

Mary had called this night a Happening. “Visual poetry,” she’d said. Over a hundred expectant faces surrounded them, and more people were milling in, late and chairless. The crowd was still rustling and mumbling when a woman in the front started reading in a loud monotone. “A Hart Crane poem,” Mary said. A woman dressed all in black and wrapped messily head to toe in white gauze bandages stood up from the middle of the audience. She also started yelling the poem loudly, competing with the other woman. A third player yelled at the spectators to take the programs from beneath their seats: they were to do as their card said when a bell was rung. Claire’s card had a different number than Mary’s but Claire did not tell her so. She followed her friend like a child. She was too old for this. And overdressed. She stumbled over a chair leg. The chattering of the crowd, shouts of the performers, music clawing its way out from a radio — each noise continued to cover itself with another, layer after layer.

She scurried to refill her cup — the punch was very easy to drink — before men in butcher jackets covered in fake blood ushered them around the gallery. Others wore football helmets and tried to sell them bottles of water owned by the US government. Astronauts danced the hokey pokey. Someone yelled, “Duck and cover, the bombs are falling, duck and cover!” It became a song, a chorus lilting over the mock walls. And they ducked, people were actually ducking and covering all over the place. Something pulled at the hem of Claire’s skirt, it was Mary on the floor, grinning, and Claire knelt, too, but not all the way, and tried to smile, bent her arms around her head.

Above the noise, above all that current, Claire heard a name. Whipping around, searching the crowd, the confusion of faces, desperate. Nicolette. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? Of course Nicolette would come to an event like this. She was everywhere.

And then there were chicken feathers falling through the air — hundreds and hundreds of chicken feathers. They fell on her hair, her dress, on her wool coat that she’d draped over a chair somewhere. She tried to brush them off. But they wouldn’t unstick themselves, each feather coated in a drop of glue. A foot away, a woman popped, popped, popped open umbrellas. One flew open right beside Claire, swiping her cheek. Someone laughed.

Claire pushed her way to her coat, her cheek burning. She could hardly see the exit through the crowd spinning around. Her chest rubbed against strangers’ backs, her back against their chests.

Outside, in the streetlight, she tried to pluck away the fluff, but it only stuck to her fingers. And that’s how she walked home — covered in chicken feathers.

She trudged nearly twenty blocks in the new cold, the smell of damp wrought iron and Sunday garbage cooling. She’d have to explain her abrupt departure to Mary, but she’d worry about what to say tomorrow. Claire could hear herself clicking down the pavement. Then, a heel caught between cobblestones. She stumbled forward. People might think she was drunk. She was. It made her feel vulnerable. The streetlights hummed, accompanying her home, except for the dark corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue — had it burned out or was there never any light? She looked around, expecting every shadow to morph into a predator. She held her bag tightly. There were footsteps behind her, but when she turned, there was no one.

Safe in her elevator, she remembered Freddie for the first time that night. He would be home by now. They hadn’t seen much of each other since the painting. And she missed him. Did she miss him? She avoided him at home now, running errands in the evening so she was gone when he came back from work. He said he was coming down with something, wasn’t feeling himself. She was afraid he’d be too sick to go to the office and would be home all day.

She pushed the button for the ninth floor, though she’d already pushed her own. The doors opened on the third, but she stayed where she was. The elevator moaned, as if it were some great annoyance to carry her up again.

On the roof she could see her breath, it led her to the edge. She stumbled over the big bubbles of tar roofing rising like waves. Claire bent low and leaned her hands on the cement ledge, noting the path she had just taken. A movement in the shadows. Dark shapes. There were men out there after all. Tipsy still, it was possible she could fall from the ledge and land on her cobblestone street, just like in the painting. Was there courage in falling? Was that what Nicolette had seen in her?

Claire pushed herself away from the ledge, as if pushing away the thought, and stood erect. It was a childish notion, selfish. Did she take pride in her own misery? She certainly did not want to die — if she felt otherwise, it was only pretending. She loved tromping around town with Mary. She loved her martinis, and her view, and her street. It was such a nice street, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t want to ruin it, and it would be terribly gauche to have people see her body splattered over the cobblestone. All those people who would stop to whisper and point, long after she was scraped away, saying proudly because they were in the know, “Remember how that simple woman jumped?” Claire hated those whispering, hissing women gaping over her remembered body. She hated them. She leaned again over the ledge and spit wide, spitting on those women. She could give a damn what they thought. It was her choice. If she wanted to fall, she would fall.

At any rate, she knew she would be the best at it. You could always be the best at something, even if it was at falling. Falling fastest, falling farthest.

Freddie was asleep by the time she entered the bedroom, the cold still on her. There was a brandy-induced sway to the darkness. She crept toward her side of the bed. He coughed in his sleep and she stopped.

With the smallest movements, she climbed into bed beside her husband, careful not to disturb him. She watched closely to see that his chest rose and fell — he was alive.

In the dark, looking to the ceiling, she made a face like she had just been told Freddie had died. She flattened out her expression, then molded it again — the devastating news rushing over her features, crinkling her brow, an open frown, but not too quickly or it would seem she’d been expecting it. Often, when Freddie left the house, Claire imagined a phone call from his sister or the hospital. Some horrible accident, carelessness on the verge of suicide. She would say it was her fault, for the sake of the family. She saw herself mourning in a tailored dress of black AlenÇon lace at the edge of his grave, wearing that face, and she tried to gauge what she was thinking based on that expression alone.

When she found herself imagining the details of Freddie’s death, it came as a headline reel at the cinema — Adulterous Husband Struck By Fluke Airplane Crash On Riverside. She was ashamed of these thoughts. But, she told herself, it was fear that compelled her to fantasize over his death — if she articulated a given scenario, it would not happen. It could not happen. She was protecting him. That was the magical thinking Nicolette had said she used with the notion of Claire’s suicide: she’d painted it out of being.

Claire remembered her own juvenile sense of power clearly — hiding in a closet, thinking up all the horrible things a boy she loved might do — spit at her, call her names, always blocking from her mind his kiss, the stolen words he’d whisper in her ear: You’re beautiful. To think them was to erase them. Though perhaps Claire had performed these rituals for the opposite result — thinking up misfortunes not to dispel but to conjure.

And if it were real, if Nicolette had saved her, without her permission—

A wave of gratitude shook Claire so fully she could have cried. A supreme gratitude like nothing she had felt before. It flattened her.

She covered her head with her pillow and closed her eyes. It wasn’t real. Nicolette was a fool, clinging to a weak childhood magic. It was pretend. Nicolette was nothing more than a schoolgirl hiding in a closet. She simply never grew up. Perhaps there was something admirable in that; it was somehow better than the mere hot air of an artist. In the cradle of her pillow, Claire rebreathed her own breath, damp and very much there.

Freddie’s shuffling and blanket-pulling and showering — it was morning already, but Claire kept her eyes closed and willed herself back to sleep. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone.

Her head rioted against last night’s sweet punch. Lying in bed, she distracted herself from her headache by making up shapes from the paint and shadows on the ceiling — sailboats and rabbits and the Empire State Building. And then Claire saw how terribly the paint was chipped and she marveled that she’d never noticed before.

The spare paint was in the basement storage. She didn’t bother getting dressed, just threw on her robe, a short silky wrap, because who would be in the basement in the middle of the morning? And barefoot, why not? The stairwell was the color of an old bruise. She wrapped her body about the turns, almost enjoying herself, her speed. As if she couldn’t get there fast enough. Just before she reached the basement, something sharp pricked her foot. She yelled out, quick and birdlike. She looked at the arch of her foot, and at the stair, but there was nothing.

The basement cement was cool on her feet. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling — dull fists of light. The radiators whistled off-key — a wet, demanding cry, shushing her. Through the high, street-level windows at the end of the hall she could see the scuffed shoes of a man pause on the sidewalk. Both sides of the hall were lined with storage lockers, and every wall a gate. If she stood inside her own, she could see into her neighbor’s, and her neighbor’s neighbor’s — every forgotten possession.

She tucked the purple drape up and over the canvas in her locker. There she was again. Claire stared at her image under the shadow-swing of the bare bulb. She studied her own repeated and fragmented face, stroke by stroke, as if for a clue, and again found herself, to her great surprise, beautiful.

She could not hate it, not the way she wanted to. But she could destroy it.

There are moments when the skin is a circus. When the skin serves as warning. Tightening, loosening, grabbing hold of the muscles. She heard footsteps, a voice on the stairs, a song obscured. The clang of the metal gate.

Tomasz.

First his shadow and then him entering the dank hallway of storage units, stopping short when he saw Claire standing mutely in her cage.

“You look like a canary in there, Mrs. Bishop. A very cold canary.” He eyed her in her thin robe.

She did not drop the drape over the painting. She opened the gate as if ushering him into her home and Tomasz brought a warmth to the cramped space. She blushed. She kept her eyes on the painting. He stared at it and said nothing. Claire looked at him looking at her painting. This stranger staring at her painting, all that exposed flesh. It made her own, real flesh buzz and heat.

“Don’t,” she said.

It hurt her, physically, to be seen like this. It felt raw and true and laughable, the way she felt in the painting. She wanted desperately to make him stop looking.

She didn’t know Tomasz. She didn’t know if he had a family in Queens or Poland, an ex-wife or a wife waiting for him at home or what home meant. But she’d watched him sitting on the stoop during his lunch hour, fastening a piece of felt to the bottom of a chess piece he’d carved himself. She wondered if he spent his free time at the chess houses down the street, the all-night men battling one another with wooden queens and coffee mugs. He was just a stranger.

She touched his arm. “Please.”

He turned to her briefly, then back to the painting. His lips parted. He was trying to say something. “What is this?” Looking down at her hand on his arm. “The painting.”

Now she touched his shoulder. This is my storage and this is my hand. She looked at her hand. Was it hers? A surge inside her, something old, tapping. The ocean. Tapping inside her like water against the side of a glass. Her stomach ought to ache, but it didn’t. She reached and touched his face, his beard, and he flinched, looked at her confused, and she reached again. The bare bulb magnified his brooding face. He was full of shadows, his arm was strong. “Tell me what you want,” he said. His accent was thick on her face and his big hands were dirty. What she wanted? He touched her neck and rolled his fingers over her eyes to close them. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said as if she were crying but her eyes were so dry they stuck and burned. She forced them to remain open as she kissed his mouth. Her hands were ice against his chest. Her jaw was tight. He said no, and she said yes and he said yes. They did it all while standing and leaning against the stack of suitcases and boxes, and when that didn’t work he pushed her against the gate and she felt the metal shapes of it pressed into her back through the silk robe. Then beside them the painting racketed against the metal. She did not say a word. She flattened her palms on his back, felt his muscles slip along them. She did not want to move them. As he finished she pushed him out of her. She was angry and didn’t know why and then she calmed. Calm, she watched as he mopped up after himself with the rag that was always in his back pocket, but a dark spot remained on the cement. She laughed curtly at the thought that perhaps this had always been the purpose of the rag, the other married women in the building.

“I’m sorry,” he said — rising, buttoning.

He was about to leave when Claire called his name, almost a whisper.

“Yes?” There was — wasn’t there? — a hint of annoyance in his voice.

“I’ll pay you to destroy it.”

He raised his eyebrows, then nodded. He did not have to ask what she was referring to.

“I don’t want to know how you’ll do it, but you’ll do it,” Claire said, surprised by her businesslike tone. “Bring me proof? I have to know for sure.” It was crazy, he must think her crazy.

But Tomasz did not roll his eyes. He nodded dutifully, as if she’d asked him to replace a light bulb, then he left her standing there, staring at the wet mark on the cement.

5

If Claire didn’t know better, she would have felt she was the source of Freddie’s illness — a cause-and-effect manifestation of her deception.

It was five in the morning and Freddie wanted water. He had woken them both with his coughing. She could hear his chainsaw breath cutting through his chest. It was probably a simple cold but he called it bronchitis or maybe, just maybe, tuberculosis. He wouldn’t be going into work.

She’d formed stories about Tomasz and the storage locker. Myths growing inside her head, stories that would explain all this. She told them to herself over and over again, as a child begs to hear the same story every night. Yes, there was a man, a fatherly type with an endearing brow and a speckled, trimmed beard, and he was the only one who heard the woman trapped in the basement. He rescued her. Also, the story of a man who’d tell all his friends that he’d fucked the married woman from 3B. I screwed the rich bitch. A notch on his belt. Rumors flying like ghosts through the old building.

“The sheets are too stiff,” Freddie said without opening his eyes.

And yet she couldn’t imagine lying beside any other man’s back but Freddie’s.

Claire rolled out of bed to get Freddie a glass from the kitchen.

When she’d come upstairs yesterday, after Tomasz, it was just before noon and she’d had nothing to do but wait stupidly for Freddie to return home. Her mind spun through the details on repeat. She listened to three radio shows and watched Young Dr. Malone on the set. She called Mary but hung up before she answered. She made herself a martini, then another. Finally, she took a bath, but not until she’d sat on all the chairs and lain on all the couches with a strange man’s smell still on her. Why had she done that?

She was tipsy when Freddie arrived, and he chuckled at her dozing on the sofa. But she hardly had time to say hello, and off he went to meet a college friend for drinks. Or someone. A woman. She later woke to Freddie’s raspy breathing — he’d been out all night, and must have returned around three a.m. She imagined the odor of Tomasz traveling through the house, sucked up through Freddie’s nose, swimming down to his intestines. He would know.

And then he woke feverish and full of phlegm. How could she not imagine her betrayal was the cause?

By the time Claire returned with water, Freddie was asleep again. She’d failed at her negligible task. She stood over him in the dark, the glass in her hands. He was so far away from her. She had the power to dump water over a sick, sleeping man, but what else?

He couldn’t even bother to feel jealous, while that was all Claire bothered to do. If he found out, he would build up stories around it, as Claire had, thick as a fortress, walls and walls of stories. What evidence did she have for her own life?

She couldn’t believe the thing she’d done to him, couldn’t believe it with such urgency that she didn’t believe it. It hadn’t happened, it was a daydream or someone else’s memory. Unfaithfulness did not belong to her. It had always belonged to him.

Still holding his water glass, Claire coughed loudly. She whispered, “I brought you some water.” Nothing. She nudged his shoulder, coughed again. “Are you thirsty?” Still nothing. “You look very, very thirsty.” Then she dumped the whole glass of water onto Freddie’s face.

He shot up in bed, looking around, blinking at her. “What did you? What’s wrong with you?” He wiped at his wet face with his hands.

“What woman was it this time?” Claire demanded. “Was it Nicolette?”

“What time is it? What are you talking about?”

“How many others have there been? Can you even count?”

“I’m sick, Claire. I have bronchitis.” Freddie threw his legs out of bed and pulled his wet shirt off, patted his face with it. He glared up at her with dim and tired hatred. “You’re a child. I don’t know who you are.”

She was too exhausted to meet his eyes. What little nonsense she’d said had sapped every reserve. He flipped his soaking pillow over, lay back down, and shut his eyes.

She could never beat his silence. So she jostled over him, to act like the child he said she was, then watched him as his feigned sleep became real. He looked younger than her, though he wasn’t. Freddie carried nothing with him that tugged his shoulders low.

Was that what had first drawn her to him? She studied the shadow shape of his body for an answer. When he resolved to have a dance after dinner, whether she would join him or not, was that it? Was it the way he fluttered about if she refused, batting his arms to make her laugh? The way he played characters at parties, the vapid aristocrat, the lovesick professor. He carried his voices around in his pocket and he always donned — needed — one mask or another. He was everywhere, a jittery reflection of a watch face on a wall. She could never quite catch up to him.

Claire used to fancy she was the only one who knew him through his guises. She thought he needed someone to know, to remind him which was the real Freddie, unmasked. But he didn’t want her to know him. He didn’t want her to know there was nothing to know. He didn’t need anyone.

She closed her eyes but couldn’t sleep. It would be a miracle if she didn’t catch what Freddie had. There was the ocean and there was the night. Her father’s jawline, then the back of his head. A big gray dog. She heard a noise, a crush in the darkness. She woke in a panic. Something was on her mouth, a vise — afraid, so intensely afraid she would die, and the dog and her father a mile down the beach. Freddie’s hand was cupping her jaw. He said she woke him with her grinding teeth. This had happened before but each time was new. She was scared of waking in his grip.

Both of them only half awake, he pulled up her nightgown. He climbed on top of her, his head buried in her hair. But she saw, briefly, how tightly his eyes were closed. He smelled wrong. She didn’t want him in her, but how could she say no after what she’d done. She wanted desperately to overwrite it, to erase it with Freddie. Without even touching her, he tried to push inside, and she tried to let him.

“We can try again,” she said. But he rolled off, mumbling he was too tired and sick anyway.

In the dark shadows of pillows, she covered her ears and heard only the inside of her cupped palms and the inside of her head, a storm system of silence. Claire imagined what it would be like to go mad — her old inventions. The voices she would hear, like a light drizzle all around her.

They drove north in midday traffic, Claire resting her forehead on the cool glass of the passenger window. Freddie had said he needed fresh air and that he knew how badly Claire wanted to see the leaves turn. He wouldn’t want her to miss that confetti ground.

Central Park. Then the Bronx and the Bronx Zoo, the children standing on street corners in thin coats, their fists hidden inside sleeves, sleeves holding radios. She caught pieces of songs. At a stop sign she heard Ray Charles, his bent-branch moan. She nodded her head to it and they drove on. An hour upstate they reached a dirt road and a small patch of trampled grass. They’d been here once, long before. They congratulated one another on finding it again.

The lookout point was a mile from the car, a view of the Hudson waiting there. The short walk proved difficult for ill Freddie, and he stubbed his toe on a rock. Nevertheless, he said he felt invigorated. He wandered off to the edge on his own, and she watched his back. He’d worn his gray trench coat and struggled to take it off. It swashed and moved with his body; it seemed too big for him now. Ahead of her, in the light and shadows, he was nearly camouflaged. But a moment later she heard his voice calling to her. “Get over here. It’s beautiful.”

Claire lagged behind along the path and the loud leaves sounded like cracking joints. She breathed the cold air into her lungs. It felt good. A cigarette would also feel good. A hand-rolled cigarette. She reached Freddie, leaned against him and looked at the river not so far below, the water shimmering in the breeze.

“We haven’t done anything like this in ages,” Freddie said.

“Why is that?”

“We could try. We should try to be good.” Freddie made her look him in the eyes. “I want to be good to you, Claire.”

She pulled away slightly to look at him better. “Is that so?” She tried to sound light, and thought: how funny that I do not feel a thing.

“You know you’re very hard to please,” said Freddie.

“And you’re so easy,” Claire said. She was smiling, wasn’t she?

“We should take a trip. We could go back to Cuba for our anniversary.”

“We could go to Ovid.”

“We’ll talk about it.” Freddie leaned in, spoke into her hair. “We’re all alone up here. No one around for miles.”

Claire turned from the wet of his breath, his arms around her waist.

He grinned. “You know I could kill you and no one would ever know.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I could, and then leave you here. Who would know?”

Claire did not answer.

He laughed sharply. “But I won’t. That’s the point. That’s how much I love you. I could, but I won’t.”

He took her silence to be anger — how would he know it was indifference?

He said, “It’s a joke, Claire. Come on. Come here.” He pulled her closer and tried to kiss her mouth, but she turned and he settled for her ear. The Hudson moved beneath them.

“You could barely walk up that hill, let alone fight me,” she said.

“It was a mountain,” Freddie mumbled. He let go and walked farther along the path, into the woods. She could not say out loud that she did not love him, because then it might be true.

I could kill you, you mean.

6

Freddie was on his way out to see the doctor when Tomasz appeared in the open doorway of the apartment. Claire stood by as Freddie shook his hand heartily. “Good to see you,” Freddie said.

Tomasz smiled. “You don’t look well, sir.” He wiped the hand Freddie had shook on his pant leg.

“That’s what she tells me.” Freddie waited. “Is there something you need from me?”

“Just here to have a word with your wife.”

Freddie glanced at Claire, who hadn’t let out a breath. But he didn’t pause on this long. “About the building board?”

“Yes,” Tomasz said.

When the elevator doors shut on Freddie, Tomasz reached for Claire’s hand and she pulled away from him with the pretense of searching through her purse for her powder. She could not feel her own face.

“Well?” Claire said, not meeting his eyes.

He stood there with his hands in his pockets, a smirk on his face.

“I’m very busy,” Claire said.

“You are a funny woman, Mrs. Bishop,” he said. Then he shrugged and handed her a stiff, charred piece of canvas: it was from the bottom right corner of the painting. Claire could make out the last of Nicolette’s signature, missing the N. He showed her a blister forming between his knuckles. “I forgot to cut it out until I’d already lit the fire. I burned my finger.”

“I told you I didn’t want to know.” She was surprised by the anger in her voice.

He took off his hat and bounced it in his hands.

Claire forced a smile. “Thank you, Tomasz.” She slipped the proof into the pocket of her suede coat. Again she unclasped her purse. “I’m sorry, I’m not carrying much on me now.” And she continued to dig for the money she knew she’d somehow have to get from Freddie.

Claire stood in the doorway of her empty bedroom and looked in, like it was a museum installation and she was on the other side of the velvet rope. The king-sized bed, the paperbacks on the nightstand, Freddie’s filthy socks draped over the hamper in an attempt at tidiness — everything in its place, as if people lived there.

And then the bedroom was not empty. There was Freddie, lying in bed, and she was in the armchair in the corner of the room, her art history book face down on her lap. He was re-reading his signed copy of Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. The doctor had diagnosed some kind of respiratory ailment with syllables that were new to her. She felt she could see his infection writhing in his lungs.

There was a space of carpet between them that seemed to help her. She was wide awake. The room drenched in lamplight, soft, yellow. She hadn’t planned to speak but then she was saying, “I don’t really care that you’re sick.” The bedside clock ticked and she looked over like it had whispered something she had not quite understood and needed repeating.

He rolled on his side and propped his head on his elbow to look at her.

“I think we should separate.” She said that. She did.

A hesitation, very small. “You don’t mean that.” He didn’t sound surprised or hurt, merely pragmatic. But perhaps that was another mask Claire could no longer penetrate.

“I do mean it.”

“Prove it.”

She braced the plush arms of her chair. “I slept with Tomasz.”

Freddie coughed. “Tomasz. The super?” His coughed and laughed at once. “That’s ridiculous. That is so ridiculous it’s embarrassing. I don’t even believe you.”

“That’s fine, don’t believe me,” Claire said.

“What’s gotten into you? Is this about yesterday on the river? It was a joke. You can’t honestly be mad about that.”

“You know that’s not it,” said Claire.

“What is it?” Then he laughed. “Is this about the painting? It is, isn’t it? Jesus, Claire.”

“It’s not about the painting. I had it destroyed anyway.”

“Destroyed? What do you mean?” When she didn’t answer, he stood with more gusto than she’d seen in him for days. “Let me know when you’re done feeling sorry for yourself and maybe we’ll have some fun again.” His nose was running and he wiped it with the back of his hand. “What do you plan to do for money? Where will you go?”

Claire put down her book and looked him in the eye. “I’ll live here. You’ll move out.”

“Is that so?”

Claire held her stare.

Freddie stumbled toward her and pulled her from the armchair and held her forearms tight, as if he planned to shake her. She didn’t fight him. “It’s just a painting, Claire.”

“I know it’s just a painting!”

Freddie let go of her and stood with his arms at his sides like they were someone else’s arms. Claire knew that if she walked into those arms, they would embrace her and all of this would go away, and the painting might be a painting.

She flew from the room, down the hall to the den, and lunged for the glass display cabinet. She grabbed as many plates and porcelain clowns as she could hold against her chest with one hand. With the other she grabbed the wooden case that held her fork collection and wobbled to the window. Freddie was behind her, catching his breath. The window would not magically open, and she tried to tuck the case under her arm to manage a free hand. Only then did Freddie snap to and say her name.

It was exactly the way her mother said her name when Claire first returned home after marrying Freddie: Claire had changed, and her mother was betrayed by that.

Freddie reached around and opened the window for her.

“Do it,” he said, smiling.

She turned to him, at once horrified and furious. Then she chucked every last trinket out the window. She would have liked to have laughed. Giddy desire. A string of deadly, smashing clowns.

Claire stood in the hall, wool coat in hand, facing the front door. If she could stand still forever, nothing would happen to her, nothing bad, and the painting would not mean a thing. It struck Claire that she could have lied to Nicolette — she could have told someone else’s story, and would the portrait have changed? Would it show a different fate? Or wish?

She could hear Freddie packing, huffing and shoving his illness into a few tired suitcases. She imagined his mean laugh and the whole circus of Greenwich Village calling her a fool for thinking she could survive alone. Panic began to swell in her stomach, her chest. She tried to tamp it down with the simple task of slipping her arms through her coat sleeves. She felt sorry for Freddie. It was a thrill, a rush of heat to say, even as she only half-believed it, “What do I care what you all think?” This was her town, her circus. In the back of her mind was a faint singing, the choir of anticipation — that cocktail of dread and hope all flattened into one note.

She opened the door.

PART II: THE FUTURE IS FIXED, THE PAST AMBIGUOUS 2004

And that’s why I’m telling you all this truth stuff, Dear Listeners, partly because I have no clue what you do or do not already know. Maybe you know everything I do. Maybe you’ve been with me since I was born a squirming baby boy, or, who knows — before. But I’m not interested in objective Truth with a capital T. I’m talking about truth, subjective and hairy. And here it starts, because today I’m going to see Nicolette.

Truth: My name is West Butler and I am not like most people. I’ve worked as a data miner and network engineer in New York City for the last ten years, ever since I left my home of Port Townsend, Washington (a little Victorian thing on the Olympic Peninsula), and I am in love with an artist.

But that is not the whole of why I’m not like other people.

The last time I saw Nicolette, nearly a year ago, she said it would be dangerous for me if I tried to find her. But that doesn’t stop me from getting on the 1 train to the Bronx. I have the whole orange plastic row to myself until a woman sits down beside me. At first I want to pull her hair, but I’m not willing to give up my seat. And I don’t mind it after a minute, being that close to someone, sharing space and time. She sees me looking at her but I don’t look away. I’m trying to remember her face because there’s something odd about it — she has large pores, a map on her skin. There’s a message I want to memorize, there’s a clue to find. But her face doesn’t stick. If I look away, she’ll disappear.

I tracked down Nicolette’s new number from a gallery that used to represent her, and we made plans via text message (though she’s not very good at it yet) to meet in public at her current installation — what bloggers call the “landmine house.” She said she had to go there anyway to fix something that got knocked down in the wind, and we could grab coffee and talk after — because I’m healthier now, and we’re both ready to see each other again.

Do you remember how, when she left, my heart crawled across the floor like a crab? At least I could find it again if I needed it, follow those tracks behind the bookshelf.

Something is about to change. And not the way something is always about to change. I feel it in my toes, which have turned to ice chips. The melting and melding of seats and bodies in the humid underground.

I feel like I’m about to meet Nicolette for the first time again. This is her first installation in over a year. She painted dozens of portraits of me back when we were together, but I haven’t seen them since she took them with her when she left, back when I was in the hospital.

I don’t blame her for that.

What if she doesn’t show? What if the landmine house isn’t even up anymore and I can’t find her? I waited too long to reach her. Not that I haven’t tried before.

I dig out my little pad and pen. The woman next to me tries to look over my shoulder to see what I’m writing, so I write messier than usual.

All thoughts are potential clues. Pebbles dropped along a path of pebbles leading back to my true self fixed high above me. I must document these clues or they will be lost, forgotten, unwritten from time. My love will never have existed.

In this particular subway car, two clues shine out: 1) the woman’s map of a face and 2) the graffiti. Riding the 1 train feels like stepping into a child’s drawing: the windows are covered in scratch graffiti and the floors in loopy black, and every advertisement has at least one moustache penned across a model’s lip. And, like a child’s drawing, the train doesn’t quite make sense: who’s that guy in the seat across from me with the top hat, and why does he have no shoes? I wish I were a graffiti artist, here but not here, shouting out my unknowability. I am unlocatable! Just try to find me.

Not unlike Nicolette, who so easily slips away.

But what if it’s awkward, because we’re not supposed to see each other and everyone knows that? What if I see the installation and don’t get it and can’t fake it?

All fears are clues. I write them down. Like Buckminster Fuller, who archived his life, organizing every slip of paper, every bill, every letter, every idea into clues and proofs as evidence for his existence. Forty-five tons of material. He couldn’t judge what was valid, so he included everything, what he ate then what he shat. He didn’t know MySpace was coming. He wasn’t trying to write a book. He was trying to tell the Grand Story, and not for us — for people or aliens to dig up a hundred years from now, to see how much changed in one lifetime, how the world could go from genocide to civil rights to genocide. How one person could change everything. Or not.

Personally, I keep records of what I ate and shat only if there is a disparity between the two.

But even as he archived every detail, I wonder if Bucky really knew himself. Maybe he wrote to get to know himself, and he was afraid he never would. Maybe he was like me. If you’re like me, everyone thinks they know you better than you know you.

I am a detective in search of myself.

The streets are strangely empty. Except they aren’t empty at all. They’re filled with so many shadows there’s barely room to walk. The street signs, the whites of them like the white of an eye, pulse electrically for my attention. The stale breath of traffic outside the 231st Street Station. Someone’s hand-held radio jibes at me. Something old and jazzy. It pushes out a tune that reminds me of a man hunting buffalo. But the hunter is blind and wrongly aiming at me.

I should turn back now — it would be safer than shuffling around the booby-trapped shadow of a sidewalk tree. The landmine house is a block away, off Tibbett Avenue, but there’s a train grinding in my head — are you driving it? I rub at my temples, try to scratch graffiti on it, vandalize it, hide it away.

On the corner, a gray-haired woman with peach fuzz on her chin rummages through a garbage can, organizing aluminum cans and bottles into two sections of a baby stroller meant for twins. She is listening in on my thoughts even though I know she’s not. Someone is not always watching me. She is not watching me.

The landmine house is situated in the middle of the block. Just one house in a row of houses. White with green trim. Barbed wire runs chest level along X-shaped crossbeams around the manicured lawn. I’m as close as I can be without touching the wire. There’s a sign sticking up from the grass in Nicolette’s handwriting: danger: live minefield, keep out. And beside it — a crater she caused by an explosion.

No sign of Nicolette, but she’s always running late.

When I was released from the hospital, there were puddles all over the street but I’d missed the rain. Big dazzling eyes staring up at me from the ground. They weren’t so different from Nicolette’s eyes.

But that was last autumn and this is summer, in the Bronx between the projects and the wealthy Jewish neighborhood.

It’s only me here, and I press in closer, until I feel the prick of the barbed wire through my shirt. I have to get closer because the whole trim of the house — do you see it? — is made up of words. Microscopic negative spaces between the letters. Tiny green inscriptions that hold some inviolable meaning that no one will ever get close enough to read. Except me.

Nicolette cannot scare me. I make my fear whimper at my feet. I want to kick it. It’s just like her to give me something only if I’m willing to die for it. The unreadable word.

I duck under the wire and inch along the grass. Just a little. The barbed wire glistens around me. I listen to the summer heat buzzing in the wings of insects and I hear footsteps reverberating in the wings and I stare at the words that will never be mine unless I move now, I have to move now, and my feet begin to sweat and burn and I start to feel real wild and hot inside like my body is picking a fight with me, and I look up and down the street and something is coming or has already come and I edge closer to the house — am I not afraid to die? Do I need her words that badly? Would I risk my life for them? Or would I risk knowing there are no landmines at all?

Footsteps, voices in the distance, and I duck back under the wire, but it’s not Nicolette.

Men in black hats are coming around the corner. They’re approaching like B-movie monsters — slow and in packs. They could be on their way to shul, someone might say. But I know better. No one goes to synagogue in the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday. They’re marching. I can feel the street vibrating. It rings up and down my body. I turn and stare at their leader, the man at the head of the pack. He’s looking right at me. He’s a few feet away but his eyes catch the sun like tin and glow through the distance between us.

Of all the hours and days they could have visited and here they are next to me. They pant dangerously in the heat, but I can’t get a read on their threat level. It’s hard to tell how many there are out of the corner of my eye — there could be five or twenty men. They are one blob, one giant black-suited being. Do they mean to keep me from her? Of course they don’t, why would they care?

“What is this?” one of the Hasidim exclaims in disapproval. His face is tree bark. “It is like a box you cannot open. Call it art if you want.” The others send out a low hum of agreement. Even their throat clearings are layered in decades of Eastern Europe. “And the tiny words — a cheap trick. She absolves herself of having to say anything real.”

Which is completely wrong. Are they testing me? And what if she’s in earshot?

“You’re wrong,” someone says.

They all turn to a small man in the middle of the pack with a mole on his cheek. “Don’t you see?” he asks excitedly. “She hints at that unbridgeable gulf between the artist and the consumer. Between conception and experience.”

“But she says nothing of interest about that gulf,” the other says. “It is just vague enough to seem thought-provoking. But I am unmoved.”

The small, moled Hasid turns to me. “You agree with me, don’t you?” They are testing me. What do I say? Yes? I try to read the unreadable words. I touch the barbed wire. And then he grabs onto my shoulder. They yank me back and I’m cast to the ground, flailing at their feet. They kick me with their leather shoes, kick in my sides. Their beards shift and move, made up of a thousand black, vibrating bees.

I stand with them, the man’s hand on my back, motherly. “What are you doing?” they ask, a chorus of concern. “You aren’t supposed to touch. It’s art.”

“And it could be dangerous,” the small Hasid says. “You see, don’t you?”

It’s my duty — especially if Nicolette is nearby, listening in — to make them see. “We all put up wires and go to extremes to hide who we are. We don’t know our neighbors. We never will. And we’ll never let them know us. There’s no such thing as community.” I say this in a neighborly voice, trustworthy. A voice that does not sound like it belongs to a man who is somewhere he shouldn’t be. And then I add, “She’s putting up landmines to protect herself. But she’s lying. It’s all a lie. But the truth is here somewhere.”

I understand now what those microscopic words are for, and I must have them. They are instructions. I just don’t know what to.

“You like her art, you will come by our gallery.”

“You have her art?” I say, letting slip a bit of panic. How could I not have known she was showing work in the city? I would have heard about a gallery show.

The small Hasid pinches the other’s arm. “We don’t know that yet. There’s a small, quite negligible dispute over attribution,” he explains to me.

Still no sign of Nicolette. Did she forget? But she couldn’t have, this was important to her. Do they know where she is? Have they done something? Of course they haven’t done anything. “Where is she?” I ask the men.

“Here is our card. Take our card,” the others say as if handing me a Band-Aid or a ransom note. I take three. Someone laughs. And then I turn and run.

——

I’ve gone the wrong way on the subway again — or they changed the signs. I stay in the same car, waiting for the train to return south, a sitting duck above ground. I gave too much away. I shouldn’t have spoken to those men at all.

First item of damage control: send a text to Nicolette: r u ok?

The Bronx is a sunken ship. That’s another truth for you. There is something drowned, underwater about it. We’ve stayed out of water so long we’ve forgotten we’re fish. But we’ll be underwater again soon enough. The glaciers will melt and the ocean will run us down.

There are always others who spend their days riding the train to the end and back again. People who don’t have to check the time — no one’s expecting them, no one cares where they are. The odyssey of the underground transportation system but no Penelope waiting at home. Take that fat white man in the suit, resting one chin on the other, dozing. Or the strung-out girl making pictures with her finger on the dusty window. She sees the fish too. She’s watching the mackerel fight for a bit of food, the osprey spying from above. Across from her, a woman who’s just come from a job interview and knows she didn’t get it. She has that look people perfect for the subway. The one no one will ask you about.

If Nicolette were here she would argue that this woman wasn’t coming from some boring interview. Why would she go to an interview when she just found out her husband was dying and she’s been riding all day to avoid the pain of it? And I would say, actually she hates her husband and got a voicemail saying the operation was a success and now she’s pretending she didn’t feel that pang of disappointment, and she’ll lie and say she didn’t get the call, no cell service. Then Nicolette would say that I can’t see the magic and beauty in life because I want another magic that doesn’t exist. And I would try to say something about her being beautiful, but I would fail.

I want that argument.

I check my phone. I check it twice. And then we’re underground and out of range. I’m afraid something horrible has happened.

It’s true I have a love for the secrecy of the world. Even on 10mg of Zyprexa, everything is infected with secrets. And Nicolette is the biggest secret of all.

Everyone has an origin story. Everyone but Nicolette. I don’t know where she came from. I don’t even know how old she is, but when I met her she was twenty-six and acted as if she’d lived a century — she was wise enough. I think she let herself fall in love with me because she knew how I was and maybe she felt like she owed something to the world. She wanted to save me. Cheers to that ill-conceived good intention.

But all I added to her life was trouble. When I’m interviewed for her biography someday, I will color it with idiosyncrasies like: and then she fell in love with a boy who went schizo on her.

I loved her so much I could rip out my collarbone.

When I get to my Chinatown apartment, it’s thick into dusk and I have mail. I take my little stack of bills and reminders of bills from the entranceway mailbox and sit out on the stoop. The day is a deflated balloon. New York in summer: shriveled and sexual. I feel scattered. The street gives off its street smell: three parts fortune cookie from the factory next to my apartment, one part leather soles, ten parts piss. The Bowery is breaking down. All the shops selling restaurant supplies and lighting fixtures, I’m worried they aren’t long for this world. Across the street, the red neon sign flashes — Psychic Open — which I can see without fail from my apartment and which definitely means nothing but makes it very hard to sleep. There’s old Tachi with his remote-controlled car — the balding Chinese man is never without it. I don’t know his real name, so I gave him one: Tachi. There hasn’t been one night this summer when he hasn’t been racing his car, holding it all together, surveying the neighborhood with his little monster truck the size of a human head. Tachi is out of sight, but his car bounds toward me down Broome Street, heading for Bowery. It sounds like it needs a tune-up. Bowery is a big street and this little truck could easily be crushed. It bounces over the cobblestones, digs into dips and comes up soaring, louder than any real car, piercing and monotone. But the humidity drowns it out, the weight of the air is deafening. It’ll rain soon, there’s no way around it. A hot summer rain.

My cell vibrates — finally Nicolette. She apologizes, says she’s very busy. But the way she says it nearly gives me a heart attack. “_____, _____ busy.” The two blanks? Words that are seemingly normal. But they aren’t normal at all. They are lost words. How could she know them again? I hate those words.

Dear Courteous Voices: Won’t you be less courteous and interrupt once in a while? I could use a little help. I’d like to know if you’re out (or in) there. I can only assume you are with me and listening, though I can’t hear you. Which I attribute to Zyprexa interference. Like duct tape over your mouths. Riding along in my brain like a person trapped in the trunk of the car.

I cannot repeat the words to you, but I will write them down as anagrams, to be safe, in two places: in my little notepad with the spiral on top and lines too faint to use, and on my left palm:

RAZOR SCRYY

My skin is very moist and no one but I will ever be clever enough to read the blurry letters.

Another text: not safest idea 4 u or me. better this way.

Not safe how? Before I can reply she texts again: some other time.

And I text back: when?

Here is another truth: someone or something is always trying to block Nicolette and me from coming together. But this time, I won’t let them.

You see that girl shaded in the front seat of that parked car? I think she’s crying, her head bobbing that way. The shadows of a sidewalk tree dance on her little face in a hot breeze. No, a reflection that looks like a shadow. I’m afraid she’ll be swallowed by it. If Nicolette were to place landmines around New York, they would take the shape of shadows like that. Sinister, bloodless. Everything would be the inverse of itself. But not everything is a Nicolette installation — an easy thing to forget. All the overweight men stand in front of their shop fronts, hands on their bellies. They look worried and Tachi’s car is still missing down Bowery. Somehow. Sometimes I’m the only living man. Everything is in its place, laced and placed, old Tachi outside searching for his car, and the vendors all talk and no sale, their coats blazing in the wind, and there are cars but they aren’t driving. No one’s buying. The girl crying in the front seat of one, and a kid standing by the door of another waiting for someone, but they aren’t coming. Hey, I want to say to him. Hey, get out of here, they ain’t coming. No one’s coming, no one’s buying. And still no monster truck. Sometimes I feel that way, like telling everyone how it is. Their suffering is mine. And then I think of Nicolette and I’m confused because there’s this little fleck of hope in the back of my throat choking me. Hope for the little kid staring at his reflection in the empty car, hope for Tachi’s truck, hope for the cobblestone that isn’t pavement yet and with any luck may never be, and I think then, I think I’ll say to them, “Don’t worry, you’ll get to your plane on time, you’ll get a seat on the bench when you’re tired, you’ll find the words to ask forgiveness, no one dies during childbirth, no cancer, no famine, you’ll get another chance, there will be another, hope that the weather is just kidding and your parents will remember you and someone will remember you and pick you up and take you home, we’re all okay, it’s going to be all right. It’s going to be all right, all right?”

The stairs count me. Two at a time up five flights, my breath a pendulum, and I’m sweating. The stairwell is known for being dangerous. Orange-level-terrorist-threat-o-meter dangerous. Today, however, it’s green. I’m about to turn the key in my lock when I remember, the thought coming at me like a draft under the door: dinner at Jules’s, and I’m late. Back downstairs, the night is an old dog pressing into me.

But what am I doing! I forgot my meds.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m an idiot at times. But I don’t have time to go back upstairs now; Jules lives all the way in the Upper East Side, Yorkville. One pill at lunch and one at dinner each day. But being off a couple hours won’t kill me. I’ll take it later when I get home, if I think of it. In my messenger bag, my other equally important belongings are all accounted for: wallet, keys, Xanax for just-in-cases, stack of café drink cards with almost-free tenth items, and a copy of A Brief History of Time, as many pages ripped out as dog-eared.

As if berating me for my forgetfulness, the smell from the Golden Fortune Cookie Corp. next door drifts after me as I speed-walk to the 6 train. I plug my nose in order not to think of my father.

There I go thinking about him. He wins every time just because I’m trying not to think of him. All because of one measly joke he told whenever we had Chinese takeout. My sister and I would ask what his fortune said and he’d look up at us, surprised. “No, it can’t be, I can’t believe it.” Our mom would yell preemptively from the kitchen, “Don’t you get them wild.” And we’d pretend to fall for it, colluding with our dad to rile our mom, shouting, “What? What does it say?” and he would fall back, feigning heart attack and gasp, “It says…it says here…” We’d dance around his chair and try to snatch it from him, but he’d hold it tight to his chest. “It says, right here in plain letters: Help, I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory!” And we would die. The last time I heard the joke, before the split, we rolled on the floor in hysterics, forced laughter until it was real and my mom was irate. “You’re teaching them it’s fun to laugh at sweatshops,” she yelled. And Dad yelled back louder, “Better get off that high horse or someone might think you like animal husbandry!” He rose from the table like he’d have lived in that chair if she hadn’t maddened him so. Shoulders bunched, he stormed outside for a smoke, leaving the door open so one of the foster cats escaped. My dad could never keep them straight, since we had ten cats at a time sometimes, and he called them all Bernie. That night, I remember, my mom, close to tears, punched him in the shoulder over and over, then they stood on the porch side by side, my dad calling for Bernie, my mom calling the real name.

The only thing my father ever said about my illness was, “You’re lucky you’re a handsome guy.”

Waiting for Jules to answer the buzzer, I ready a list of excuses for my lateness: stuck on the subway, heatstroke, piano falling from third-story apartment, short-term coma. Julie, Jules, my little sister. I let her think she takes care of me instead of the other way around. She likes to think she has some control over the whole thing, even though she’s only twenty-eight, four years younger than me. She’s always been four years younger, but now I don’t know — it feels like maybe she’s catching up.

Jules grew up convincing me that God didn’t exist and then three years ago she went and married a Hat. I mean a Hasid. She’d get very angry if she heard me say that. A Lubavitcher Hasid, it’s called. She only knew him a few months.

And then the first time I met him — all right, he was a nice guy. I don’t want to say otherwise, but there’s something about him I still can’t grasp. He has a spy’s eyes. His motives are beyond me. But he says Orthodox Jews don’t marry for love, they marry for respect, and, without fail, love blooms from respect. He calls her his ba’al teshuva. She introduced me to him as a computer artist, even though I just make nothing collages on Photoshop for fun, and he always asks to see my stuff but I haven’t shown him anything. I don’t want to scare him. I’m not much of a collagist these days, anyhow.

“What’s for dinner?” I say in the doorway.

“West.” Jules shakes her head as she says my name, they’re the same gesture. “We weren’t supposed to have dinner.”

“What are you talking about? We made plans.”

“Really. I haven’t heard from you in two weeks. How could we have made plans?” She puts her hands on her hips like a mom, but not like our mom. Jules would make a good mother.

“Are you kidding? I got home and freaked out I was going to be late and made up all these excuses on the way up here. Do you want to hear them?”

“Lies, you mean?”

“Well, there wasn’t anything to be late to, anyway.”

Jules just looks at me. Something is off with her. Something has changed.

“So, no dinner.”

“I’m on my way out,” she says, turning around. She does look nicer than usual, though shorter. But that’s not the change I mean. Jules shows no skin even in the dead of summer. I follow her into the main room, where she picks up her hat from the back of the couch. A large, felt purple thing, as ugly as it sounds.

“Don’t say a word,” she says. She knows I hate all of her hats. And her wigs.

“Where’s Dan?”

“He ran out for something at the pharmacy.”

“What did he run out for?”

The brim of her hat curves up into a smile, and locks of her wig curve up at the ends too, mocking me, dozens of fake little smiles.

“I don’t know, he always has to have his seltzer water. I’m supposed to meet him downstairs with the car in a minute.” She’s not telling me something — I can tell by the way she pinches her mouth, locking it inside. Jules has always been a terrible liar. She adjusts her hat in front of me like I’m a mirror, then stops and finds my eyes. “Why do you have to do these things?” She breathes out audibly from her nose. In another world she would have been a dragon, without secrets. “You’re taking your medicine?”

“I’m not stupid,” I say softly. “I went to see an installation today. You should go see it.”

Jules says, “You know what I have to say about that. What do I have to say about that?”

“Where are you going?”

“West, what do I have to say?”

“That I shouldn’t have gone. And she’s not good for me.”

“You shouldn’t have gone. It’s not good for you,” Jules repeats.

“Where are you going?”

“There’s an open memorial service. One of our members’ sons passed away yesterday. A veteran. And another congregation lost two soldiers in Iraq this month. Two young boys. Anyone can come.”

“You’re always going to services.”

“I’m always running late.” She adjusts her hat again and sighs. “It would be nice if you joined us. Since you’re here.”

“You look different. Your face or something. What’s different?”

“Nothing. What? You haven’t seen this wig is all.”

Whatever she’s hiding, I won’t find out with her around.

“Can I stay here and watch TV while you’re out? Don’t make me get back on the train yet. I’ve been on the train all day it feels like.”

Then Dan walks in with his black fedora and a white button-down shirt, carrying a plastic bag, box corners angling through. Dan is a big-boned guy, and he always looks to me like he’s still growing. He’s growing and my sister’s shrinking. “West!” he booms. “What are you doing here?” He says this all jolly-like, even though I know he’s annoyed the second my name comes tripping out of his mouth. But he does a decent job of not showing that he thinks I’ve screwed up his night. Jules pokes me with her purse.

“I thought we were having dinner,” I say down into my neck. Sometimes I pretend I’m embarrassed, mumbling like that so he doesn’t feel bad for treating me like a kid. And I have to be nice because he got me my job. He’ll never let me forget it.

“Did you find everything?” Jules asks, gesturing at the plastic bag.

“I did, no thanks to the cashier,” Dan says. “They ought to have IQ tests for these types of jobs. A black man with this Afro-type beard. Avoid that one next time you go in there.”

“That’s racist,” I say.

“Being specific does not make me racist,” Dan says. “I’ve come across plenty of idiotic white cashiers in my day. More idiotic, in fact.”

“Jews and blacks hate each other,” I tell Jules.

“Only Long Island Jews,” says Dan.

“West wants to know if he can stay here a bit and watch TV,” Jules says.

Dan coughs. “We’re getting home kind of late…”

“I’ll be gone by the time you’re back,” I say sweetly.

Dan grunts a begrudging approval. Not that he should care. It won’t affect them unless I eat their food.

“Help yourself to the fridge,” Jules says.

Did I project that thought by accident? But I know I didn’t, because projecting thoughts is not a thing. Being around Dan, I slip sometimes. He has this way of sucking away my power from the inside out with an invisible straw. Whatever Jules is hiding, Dan is behind it.

He leans down, not touching Jules in front of me, and whisper-mumbles something. Jules nods and says, “But not the whitefish salad. That’s for Dan’s lunch tomorrow. The front door locks when you close it, but check to make sure. And, West?”

The strands of her wig wave toward me in snaky smiles. I glare at her. I know what she’s about to say.

“Call Mom? She’s worried, like always. It won’t kill you to talk to her.”

“It might,” I say. Jules never tells me to call our dad.

“We can have dinner for real sometime if you call me, too.”

“He’s a grown man,” Dan mutters as they head out the door.

“I will,” I say. “How are you anyway?” But they’re already gone. I always miss the closing of doors.

The light echoing against the sleek brown of their furniture makes me nervous and I turn the dimmer down. I’ve never been here alone before. It’s like the parents have just left and I’m the babysitter, but there are no babies. Mom is always bugging everyone, me included, about if and when she’ll get to be a grandmother. Jules won’t talk about not having babies yet, but I’m glad they haven’t.

No new text messages or voicemails. Not a peep from Nicolette.

Just in case they come back in to check, I flip to the middle of a sitcom about doctors. The laugh track doesn’t make sense when it happens, like they made a mistake at the studio — but I know it’s just me. I waddle around the perimeter of the room looking for clues. The sound of my feet swishing on the wood gets mixed up in the low volume of the TV. Canned laughter coming from my shoes.

The only framed photos in the room are wedding pictures, as if Dan and Jules had no lives before they met each other. As if they’ve had nothing to take pictures of since. There’s one of me between them, smiling sideways, my suit a little too big.

When Jules told me they were engaged, I told her, “You can’t marry Dan, you don’t even believe in God.” And she said, “I believe in Dan, and I will grow to believe in God.” You can’t grow into belief, I insisted. But I was wrong. Now she believes. “Where’d you find God?” I once asked meanly. “In the laundry hamper?” It’s something Nicolette might have put into my head to say. But Jules only touched my forehead like I had a fever and said, “You’ll never understand, will you?”

What I want to know is why doctors never diagnose religious people as delusional.

We aren’t even really Jewish. My great-grandmother was a forced convert during the Pogroms, so my grandma was raised Catholic, my mom in turn, and Jules and I were raised some version of fundamentalist-atheism. So you might say Jules felt it was on her to make up for this forced loss of faith, identity. Once she learned about it, it took over her life. It was all she read about and talked about. She got the paperwork to prove she was really Jewish. She is what my great-grandmother could never be. She became the thing we lost.

Some people might call that overcompensation, but you didn’t hear it from me.

There was even something different in the way Jules smelled tonight. But there’s always a clue in the things people buy. It doesn’t count as snooping since Dan left the plastic bag by the door, the contents nearly tipping out anyway. I nudge it open a little more with my foot and peek in: scent-free lotion, scent-free soap, hand sanitizers, a king-size bag of cotton balls, magnesium and calcium supplements, and a box of cinnamon hard candies. I smash the bag of cotton balls against my head.

It can’t be true.

I bet you’re thinking a couple items from the pharmacy aren’t enough to prove Jules is what I think she is. Well, if you don’t believe me yet, there are bound to be two more clues lying around here. Clues come in threes. Always.

There’s a stack of ads and bills on the coffee table, but one person’s junk mail is another’s evidence. And just as I suspected, next to ads for an umbrella and a portable power tool set, there’s clue #2: an ad for a white noise machine and electrical outlet safety guards — all intended, nay, calculated, for Jules. These companies don’t want you to know how much they know. They’re just as good at spying on you as pretending they’re not. They slip in ads that seem random and unrelated, making you think everyone in the building got the same coupons. Think again, buster. They’re running your purchases through statistical algorithms. They’ve got you pinned down to the week. Sometimes they know before you do.

In their bedroom, the laundry basket is clean of clues. The only outof-place item is inside the top drawer of the dresser — lacy underwear! — I hide it from myself quickly. On Dan’s nightstand are piles of spreadsheets and papers that look familiar, from the same database I use at work. On the wall is a photograph of a rabbi. Rabbi Menachem Schneerson — Dan has told me about him a dozen times. This photograph in place of a mirror, Dan says: “To reflect back my potential instead of the nincompoop I am!”

I throw myself on their bed and lie on my stomach, curling myself over so I can see into the dark underneath. The blood rushes to my eyes. Upside down, I rummage under the bed for more clues. Beside stacks of photo albums and an old tattered briefcase, there’s a tin box. Right-side up, I set it gently on my lap and lift the lid. Inside is something dark and dead. No, not a rat, don’t be gross. It’s a piece of hair.

I cried when Jules cut her hair so short. I loved her hair. I miss her hair. I was mean to her hair once, but that’s a truth for another time. It was thick and molasses-colored and sometimes stuck up all over the place enough to make her scream that she hated herself. When she cut it I was there and picked up a piece from the floor, and I tucked a lock of it into my pocket. I didn’t know she’d done the same, saved a lock for herself. I still carry mine around in my wallet. It’s old and knotted now, like a dreadlock.

But that’s not the third clue. Without it, there’s still a chance I’m wrong about Jules. The bathroom is immaculate; I can almost see my face in their floor tiles, though my glasses slide down my nose when I peer into them. I don’t look at myself in the mirror while I sift through razor attachments and make-up removers.

Finally, on top of the toilet tank, is the mother of all clues, excuse the pun: a book called, Nine Jewish Months: How to Keep Gestation Holy — a Halachic Guide to Pregnancy.

My sister is pregnant.

And she didn’t tell me.

Did you know I would brush her hair when we were growing up, and she’d know exactly what that meant — Mom wasn’t coming home that night from one of her animal-rights protests — but at least Jules would get something good out of it. Except for that one time when I was mean to her hair. Which I never apologized for. And I can’t say it yet.

But I know why she didn’t tell me the big news: Jules is afraid of me.

I get the feeling I won’t be seeing much of her for a while.

I was walking along a narrow path toward the bluff — this was years ago, back at home on the West Coast — when wildflowers on either side caved in toward my feet, trapping me. A dozen yards away was the edge of the bluff, then the sea. The gangly grass in my foreground.

And then there was the girl. She was standing on the overhang, wavering like the tall grass I saw her through. She was leaning over, looking down at the sea and rocks hundreds of feet below. What was she doing so close to the edge? But I wasn’t afraid. I knew there must be a reason and that the wildflowers knotting near my feet were trapping me where I was for my own protection. I felt a kind of kinship with the path, like it was my brother, or it was me. Since I couldn’t go any farther, I admired the view and the girl from where I was.

I couldn’t see who she was from the back, but something about her was familiar. Her dark hair whipped in the breeze. My chest pounded double-time. But the wildflowers would not let me move to her. I didn’t call out. I couldn’t, though she probably wouldn’t have heard me over the wind anyway. The wildflowers dripped from my brow. Something inside me was rousing from a long sleep, awakened by a twang that said home. And then she jumped.

I told Jules and my mom, and they made me tell the police. The entire town was watching as the boats trolled the waters by the bluff, searching for the remains of the girl. A man, scrubby and worn down with booze, came forward saying he couldn’t find his daughter — a girl from my school whose name I can’t remember — and I was questioned some more. What did you see? A girl with black hair. What did you see? Nothing! I missed school and spent days at the police station, an officer with eyes the color of the shaded sea, leaning his face so close I would have thought he was trying to kiss me if it had been any other room or reason. They felt sorry for me, or they didn’t believe what I saw. No one ever found the body. Washed out to sea, I guess. Or maybe she flew away.

And that’s when I met Nicolette. I wasn’t there, on the Puget Sound in spring, but I was in the moment of that memory when I met her in New York, on Clinton Street, next to the car lots. She’d busted the front tire of her bike and was frowning over it. The chain gates and barbed wire that kept the towed cars caged did the same work the flowers did on the bluff. They made me feel safe, kept from danger. I knew where I was stepping. The world was ready for me.

“Look at me weeping over my tire like this.” She spoke softly but assuredly, smiled when I asked if she needed help. She looked directly in my eyes. “I know you,” she said.

My chest opened like a pair of oiled gates and wildflowers came pouring out. I know she felt it; she was swimming in my flowers.

She said, “Walk with me,” but I didn’t know where we were going. I was nervous and happy. I sweated. My hands ran waterfalls; I almost drowned us. But I walked with her, rolling the bike for her. She smoked a hand-rolled cigarette she’d plucked from her jacket pocket, soiled and foreign-looking in her mouth. And her mouth gaped, the smoke escaping, the same smoke from the fires I’d lit in my childhood bathtub — it was an extension of myself, an extension of the sulfurs from the earth. She was so strange, her face shifting in the light from young to old and back to young.

I remember then we walked by a man who was talking to himself — gibberish about the sky and the smell and how they were the very same thing. She said, “You never know if people are nuts anymore or not. Everyone talks to themselves. Blue-toothed.” And I said, “Guess it never mattered who’s what anyway,” because I couldn’t think of anything smarter to say.

Now that I think about it, maybe that didn’t happen on the same day.

She tried to take her bike back but I kept a hold until she gave in and let me keep rolling it for her, not knowing where she was leading us, having to trust her. An insufficient gesture to say I knew: I knew she was the one who would listen to my story, my illness — even though I didn’t know my illness then. She wouldn’t dismiss it or say, “That’s invisible.” She wouldn’t question me because telling my story is survival.

And I could always tell her my story anew. Because I was always meeting Nicolette for the first time.

Look at me being so serious!

But it’s true, it was a serious day. Right there, where we parted in the middle of the sidewalk, I almost swallowed the sky. I felt, meeting her and leaving her, that if I wasn’t careful, I could open wide and the world would suddenly and violently fill me up, and I wouldn’t survive to feel it withdraw.

Mr. Fox, my supervisor, calls me in for a meeting. I stare at the empty chair across from him. It sends a low pulse, but it’s not dangerous. I sit. He smiles at me, condescending. He thinks I have no social skills whatsoever, so I make sure to meet his expectations. Mr. Fox is a bald crocodile of a man who won’t hesitate to use my problem against me. “I need to talk to you, West.” I need to talk to you, West.

Three months ago, Dan got me this job as a data miner for a predictive market firm. All day I sit in front of a computer screen, digging through other people’s virtual trash. The things they didn’t know they never properly threw away. When I lost my last job, I would have done anything. I would have organized and sold someone’s real garbage on the street if they paid me to. Anything not to depend on Jules. That was part of my exit strategy.

And so I search through charts of digital exhaust, consumer behaviors and cross sections of behaviors, frequent buyer purchases at major grocery and department stores and online conglomerates, probing for patterns. Patterns within patterns. Or rather, I tell the computer to do all that. Then I double-check the data and weed out the irrelevancies, making the spreadsheets shine with pure meaning that will predict our consumer future. Then we sell our findings to clients, who in turn determine what next to market. They predict, or decide, what’s to come from the trash I filter. Which means that I am responsible for the future.

And yet the web-based social computing software can do all of that without me. I am redundant. Which no one else knows. Don’t tell. I cannot let Mr. Fox find out. I cannot lose another job.

“I know you’re a smart guy, that’s what everyone says,” Mr. Fox is saying. He waits to see how I’ll react to this news. In reality, the other guys in the office resent me — it makes them feel stupid that a lunatic can do their job. “How have you been lately?”

“Fine, I guess. Great.”

“I mean, how have you been feeling?”

Sometimes, the search goes deeper. Like spying on eighteen-year-olds posting on MySpace about whether or not they like Pizza Craver — flavored Doritos. Their preferences can be linked to their status in life and therefore other purchasing habits. We know if a consumer is going through a breakup or if they recently switched careers based on the amount of ice cream or ramen purchased. But my bosses are particularly interested in pregnant women in their first and second trimesters, like Jules. It is, hands down, the most profound period in a person’s life — for marketers. It’s when people are most likely to switch brands, vulnerable to any ad campaign you throw at them. Hormones and routines all in flux.

“Your work’s gotten sloppy,” Mr. Fox says. “I don’t want to have to call up Dan and tell him we may have made a mistake. Your sister wouldn’t be happy.”

I think I’m supposed to feel guilty for data mining, but I don’t feel anything about it at all.

“I don’t want to see here what happened at your old job,” he says.

Mr. Fox doesn’t understand that my last employer and I simply had different priorities and I was fired for doing too beautiful of a job. I was a network setup technician, and I can’t help it if the most aesthetically pleasing connection topologies aren’t the most efficient. I once linked up a partial mesh to a distributed bus network, all within the macro topology of a ring network! Arranging a conversation between computers is as delicate as any social interaction. There are always at least three players, never two, even if that third player is an Ethernet hub or an ex-girlfriend or a baby between a married couple or, say, an illness that both expands and distorts communication.

I nudge Mr. Fox’s wastebasket with my toe. It’s filled with empty cans of mandarin oranges, which he eats every day at his desk. I want to ask if he believes in God like Dan and Jules. But he’s not the same kind of Jewish.

Mr. Fox also knows the system is irrational. The problem is that the patterns are not really patterns. Which, in and of itself, is a pattern. As a hive we follow trends, but if you zoom in on the micro level we’re unpredictable, erratic. What sense does it make for a person to one day want pants that are comfortable and roomy and then wear tapered things that pull at the ankles? To want a little yappy lap dog and then a Labrador Retriever? There is little logic behind our consumption. I search out patterns that are not there.

Mr. Fox picks up a pair of scissors from his desk. Opening and closing them, steel scraping steel. They’re big and industrial. He looks at them, hungry; he runs his hand over them.

So that’s how I’ll die. That’s how they would have me killed. At the bitter, shining end of Mr. Fox’s office scissors.

“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” I say. “I’ll try harder.”

He puts the scissors down, smiles. “That’s all I want to hear. Let’s see what you have by the end of the day.”

Looking at him, I think of a zebra being chased by a lion, the kind of quick scene you’d catch flipping past the Discovery channel, but I’m not sure which animal he’s supposed to be. Mr. Fox is sometimes afraid I can read his mind.

• speak to someone when my listeners start interrupting

• make a list or catalogue in your head of real things around you

• hum or sing quietly to yourself or listen to music

• count your breath

• repeat a mantra to yourself: I AM OKAY, I AM SAFE, I AM A GOOD PERSON

• read out loud

• do a task that requires your full attention such as housework, reading, busywork

• change your environment, if inside go outside, change rooms, if outdoors take a walk

• use an earplug in one ear, then take it out

Sometimes, Dear Listeners, you have been mean to me. I keep this list in my drawer for those moments. But it’s not that simple: music listens to me instead of me to it. I wonder what people like me thought about before technology. What were they scared of before radios and speakers and computers could eavesdrop in?

But I haven’t heard from you in a while. I wonder where you are now. I wonder about you a lot. For instance, are you omniscient? Do you have an all-encompassing calendar for a brain? Some people, I know, would call you a part of me, but it’s more complicated than all that.

I’m unsupervised most of the day, and that’s when I make things. I write lists and construct shrines. I drew a visual list of the organs in my body and called it “Ten things I hate about myself.” It made me think about what I actually hate about myself. And I make shrines for my brain. Two of them side by side, right and left. And a third shrine to be placed between the two hemispheres, for the disease inside.

Or I see how few clicks it takes to move from one site on data mining to one about Nicolette, only following hyperlinks. I start small, browsing sites that could be considered relevant to my job, the newest software, consumer reviews. Which lead me to technological design, graphic design, industrial design, industrial art, site-specific art and, finally, Nicolette.

Last week I graphed out my first meetings with Nicolette. She always seemed to appear out of nowhere, like she truly hadn’t existed before. There were so many first meetings — the hospital, the car lots, my apartment, another time in line for standing-room-only opera tickets. Normally, when you first meet and learn about a person, it’s like the way you learn to see a painting — all the information is available from the very first sighting, but the significance and interconnections only become apparent by registering the data over time. First meeting a person is an influx of this data (i.e. how she wrinkles her nose, her favorite band, childhood traumas). But the rate of new data acquisition about a person is a limit approaching infinity towards zero data-influx.

But in charting Nicolette, you’ll find that her line doesn’t decrease and level off at all. Every time we met I learned it all new! Starting and staying at maximum data influx.

But Mr. Fox found the chart and I had to convince him “Nicolette” was a scenario. None of that today.

But none of that today. Mr. Fox watches me through his office window. It is rare, and almost comforting, to not have to convince myself that no one is actually watching me.

The card the Hasidim gave me is tucked into the corner of my monitor. Google says the gallery is in Chelsea, a good walk from work. I compose an email:

Dear Nicolette, I am just checking in. I hope you are all right. Gimme a call.

Dear Nicolette, I’m sure you’re fine, of course you are, because there’s no reason you wouldn’t be, but just in case

Dear Nicolette, please know I’m here for you. You know where to reach me. But if not, here is my number and address.

Where is she? I used to be able to time-travel by conjuring her body. But now I no longer feel her. Maybe she’s in India. Or Israel or Home Depot or the moon. If I’m right, clap twice. I try to think straight into her mind. All I find is an ocean empty of her.

She never texted back or answered my calls. I tried her six times — five if one doesn’t count the number four, which I don’t sometimes. But whatever art is hanging in Chelsea has to be a clue as to what happened to her that day. A clue leading me (to me to me to me) to her.

There’s the breath from the AC coating the office; there’s the secret calendar of naked girls in the men’s bathroom; there’s the powder soap dispenser and fingers that smell like powder soap clacking away at keyboards; there are the keyboards clicking like hundreds of watches all going at different times.

Lunch by myself in the break room is as quick as I can slurp my cup-of-noodles. Food with more hyphens than nutritional value.

I spend the rest of my forty-five minutes, like any genuine loser, hiding in the bathroom. It’s quiet in here except for some people fighting somewhere about their marriage. I can hear them through the vents. I’ve spread my pills out on the little metal shelf attached to the mirror above the sink. One pill twice daily, by mouth, 5mg apiece. I’ll have to refill my prescription soon. Without even looking, I know there are sixteen pills left. I’ve been thinking about that number a lot, and I’ve been thinking even more about cutting back. I’ve been feeling good. Really good. Last month, the doctor said that eventually I could lower my dosage, that we’d talk about it, but I haven’t seen him since. I’m one of the lucky ones, he says. I’ve taken to the medication and have been doing well for eight months mostly symptom-free. Really well.

I might drop all my pills down the drain right now, because accidents happen. In the mirror, the pills are doubled. All lined up in salute, they spell ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ. I pluck one from the middle and pop it. Now they spell: ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

The door opens behind me. With the side of my palm, I slide the pills back into the bottle, but one slips off and bounces on the tile floor.

It’s Orange-Socks Dave, looking at me in the mirror. I turn to him, the bottle in my fist behind my back. The pill landed just a few inches from my foot but I can’t pick it up with him here.

He smirks at me. “Making yourself pretty for date night?”

The other eight guys in their cubicles don’t bother about me too much, unless they’re trying to scare me about the Homeland Security Advisory. They keep a live color-coded Terrorist Threat Level on a few of their monitors. They think it’s funny. When they raised the Threat Level from Yellow to Orange the other week, Dave started wearing only orange socks. He either has a bunch of pairs or wears the same ones every day. I made my own Sesame Street version of the threat level system, Big Bird for yellow, Oscar, etcetera. The guys liked that.

“No.”

He stops smiling. “It was a joke,” he says. “Because you’re looking in the mirror?”

“Okay,” I say and leave the bathroom, the pill still resting on the floor. One obvious point in the category of lowering my dosage.

A decades-long plunge. The woman falls elegantly. Each frame, a segment of the woman’s fall, disconnected like a shattered mirror. She changes as she falls, but not in any pattern I can discern. She is old in one frame, young in the next, echoing, perhaps, a life flashing before one’s eyes — if a person’s whole life is one giant fall.

I can tell it’s Nicolette’s immediately. The hogs-hair brushstrokes. The untrimmed fan brush edging the faces. The faces. So many faces of the same woman, unknown to me but familiar.

In the gallery and the hall outside, there are no Hasidim in sight. Their absence makes me nervous. Are they trying to stay scarce?

The gallery-sitter — not a Hasid — stands behind me. I fiddle with my camera phone and put it back in my pocket and he glares at me.

The woman, dead in the street, stretches her head toward me; she is spilling out of the painting. Her chin and chest pushed out, her eyes closed, sensual even in death. She’s so close to me I can almost touch her, catch her. Her left arm is outside of the painting, unseen, reaching above her, maybe reaching for her true self — though if you’re dead, there ends truth.

A piece from the corner of the painting is missing. The line is careful, like it had been deliberately cut out. Only the N of her name remains.

The gallery-sitter sees me looking at the missing corner. “The integrity of the painting remains intact.” He sneers in a way that makes me want to flick his ears. As if I’m not good enough to be in his gallery. He’s trying to seem Yellow-level dangerous but he’s not an inch above Green. He’s afraid of me.

I want to ask him where the Hasidim are. “What’s it called?” I say.

He walks around the big glass desk in the center of the room and pushes a three-ringed binder across it. Then he sits down in his big ergonomic throne. In the binder, one laminated page is dedicated to each of the six paintings in the room, all by different artists, with little blurbs and photos of the painters next to thumbnails of their work.

Nicolette’s is aptly called The Suicide of _____. But there’s no photograph of her, no artist name. The blurb says the painting was donated anonymously, and that mystery shrouds the painter. It says the work had been wrongly attributed to a contemporary artist, but it has since been dated to the late fifties or early sixties.

“But Nicolette Bernhardt wasn’t born then,” I say.

The man raises his eyebrows, shrugs. “She came in herself and made a big event of denying it was hers. It’s an impressive work with or without her name attached.” And he nods like that’s the end of the discussion.

Truth encroaches like a shadow. What if I became the inverse of myself? What would I look like? What would become of Chinatown or the Bronx? Or my sister?

“There’s been a mistake.”

He grits his teeth. “Okay.”

It’s hers all right. Doesn’t matter what they say or what she said. She was always protective about what she put her name on. She’d say that her masterpieces weren’t hers all the time, that they were another Nicolette’s — the Nicolette she was six months or a year ago.

But this feels darker than that. Could she be in trouble? The painting is a link to her, and disavowing it severs that link. It is hers. I can tell by the way it looks at me. And speaks to me with this controlling voice just like Nicolette’s. By the softness you could mistake for cruelty. Someone could be after her, and she’s gone into hiding.

But the 1950s. It’s not possible. Tapping my finger on the desk, I ask, “Who was the anonymous donor?”

He grins. “I have no idea. It was anonymous.”

He knows.

I want to talk about the wilderness. Negative space would turn solid. Solid would become open. I would walk through buildings but not on the street. I would sit inside a brick. My insides would float around me in orbit. My muscles on the outside of my skin and my brain the center pulling like the sun.

“Who’s the lady in the painting?” I ask.

“An invention of the artist, most likely.” So quick to answer. Almost rehearsed.

“You know, it’s called The Suicide, but it could easily be called The Murder. Who’s to say someone didn’t push her off the bridge?” But the gallery man is shrugging over his cell phone, a little sad at some call that never came, probably his girlfriend ditching him for someone more attuned to an artist’s intentions.

Nicolette never painted from her imagination, and she certainly never invented a subject. When she painted, she painted what was there but lost to obscurity. That’s what she always said. Everything is what it is, not what it symbolizes. There are no symbols. “No ideas but in things.” I am me, but I am also a thousand things behind me. The falling woman existed, exists. But is she alive or dead?

I tell none of this to the gallery-sitter, who sits on in his cushy office chair, looking at me askance. I don’t tell him that they’ll come to me someday to help write her biography. And I don’t tell him this painting is the only thing I don’t know about her.

I get out my camera phone and pretend he’s not the only one waiting for a call, and I take three photos of the painting, and then I leave the room. I don’t say goodbye because I promise myself, and the painting, that I’ll visit at least once a week like it’s a sick old woman.

The stairs are at the end of the hall, but the elevator opens just as I’m walking past, it knew I was coming. It’s a service-type elevator and I step inside beside a man, in his sixties maybe, with a funny moustache and thick gray hair, and the ground-floor button is already lit. The doors close. A black garbage bag leans against his shins, blending into his black pants. And he has on a janitor-type blue button-up open at the neck so some silver chest hair shows. The old elevator eases down from the ninth floor.

That’s easy enough information to break down. I know this man in a split second, have him figured out. Still, my deductive skills have been off. I have always been a skilled detective, but I can’t draw connections like I once could. Ever since I started the pills. I don’t want to see all connections because sometimes I make them up and can’t tell the difference, I have learned that. But I’m always missing something now. Zyprexa blindness.

The man’s graying moustache wraps around his mouth. He has a soft, chubby face. Maybe he was okay-looking once but it’s hard to say. The veins in his forehead come together just above the bridge of his nose in a V. It seems to me like he must always be frowning, that his mouth can’t do any other thing, until he smiles at me, big and joking, and then it seems like he can’t do any other thing but smile. He shows me his yellowing teeth. He must smoke a lot. Then his face is softer, melting as if in recognition. Does he know me?

The elevator halts with a jerk.

I’m not scared. Elevators get stuck every day, somewhere. I look at the man.

He starts jamming the heel of his palm into a lever beside the buttons. The V of veins deepens. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “Happens all the time.”

I try to say, “I’m not worried,” but the words get stuck in my throat like phlegm and I can’t spit it out. I’m chewing on it. He bangs on the lever again and a bright shiny brick of gold falls out of his back pocket. But it’s not a brick of gold, it’s a National Geographic that’s been rolled and bent and loved. There’s a huge macro photograph of a bee on the cover.

“Bee,” I say and point. There was a sentence that went around that word in my head.

He bends down to pick it up, forgetting the lever. “They’re disappearing. Did you know that?” He shakes the magazine and I shake my head. “A friend got me interested. She keeps a hive in the city. Totally illegal. They’re just vanishing. Poof.” I shake my head again. He hits the magazine against his palm a couple times. “Here, take it.” He shoves it in my hand. “I’m finished with it.”

There’s a groaning noise, the elevator is talking and jerking and I let my mouth hang. But he just smiles wider and we start moving down, slow and smooth. It takes forever, actually. And when it seems we’re almost at the bottom, I say, “Hey, thanks.”

And the guy keeps smiling and says, “No problem.”

But we’re not down yet like I thought. I look at the doors. “So, is this your building?”

He looks at me like he’s never been asked that before and shrugs. “Something like that. Custodian.” I can’t help staring at his thick head of hair while he talks. It’s wavy and gray, short but not too short. Exactly the kind of gray I want to have. It seems to light up when I look at it and is so full I almost touch it. Then, as if he can read my thoughts, he runs his own hand through his hair. “Yeah. It’s all right. Just started a few weeks ago. I can get into any gallery. I can look at art in the middle of the night if I want.”

“Do you?”

“No.”

“I went to see The Suicide. The painting called The Suicide.”

He stares at me for a moment, nervous-looking, his face shining with sweat, giving off light like his hair. He takes a breath like someone trying to not get angry. Then he reaches out his hand. “My name’s Jill.”

I give him my hand but I can’t give him my name. Not until I know it’s safe.

“Yeah, yeah. My folks wanted a girl, I guess.” Jill laughs at that, then says, “I guess you like her art?”

“Yeah.” My best nonchalant voice, juggling the magazine in my hands. “Don’t you?”

Jill shakes his head. “Can’t say. Can’t say I do.”

“I know her,” I say. And then we hit bottom and I want to pull my ears out for telling him that. Jill doesn’t even respond. Actually, and this can’t be right, he looks ready to cry.

I mumble thanks and hurry out into the street and the stupid day without her painting.

In the hospital last year, my psychiatrist asked what words were the most hurtful. He called it a wellness strategy — to pick the words that I found the most harmful concerning my disease, and to take them out of my vocabulary. He was a young guy fresh out of med school and had the weekend shift. Bursting with unconventional ideas. They’d just switched my diagnosis from schizophreniform to schizophrenia. And I felt kind of at a loss. They could just take away or replace.

We settled on the two words. “Let’s rip them out of the dictionary,” he said excitedly, “to make it official.” He brought over a big old Webster’s, its hard cloth cover frayed at the corners. “It’s okay. I got it used.” Scissors weren’t allowed, but the pages were thin enough I could use my fingers (though there may have been some extra, inadvertent victim words). He sat back with his hands clasped behind his head and watched me flip first to the S’s, then to the C’s. I extracted those two normal-seeming words. The ones that had disappeared until Nicolette texted them the other day. The ones she shouldn’t have. All it took was a thumbnail.

The Chelsea lofts are gray clouds against a gray twilight sky. Far away, black birds drift like a man’s stubble. If only I had the painting under my arm.

The 1950s. How can it be hers? Had I not held her just a year ago? But it is her painting. It doesn’t matter if it was painted in 1952 or 26 B.C. It is possible. No one will believe me, not the gallery sitter or the Hasidic owners or her fans on her guerilla art website. But it is hers.

A bee buzzes near my ear and I flick the National Geographic to shoo it, but when I look around I don’t see anything.

I have a talent for memorizing the weather. I get real cold and can feel the sleet in my hair when I think about the day my mom forgot to pick me up after a chess tournament in Tacoma. Or I sweat when I remember Jules’s wedding day three summers ago in a synagogue without air conditioning. I memorize weather like I’m cramming for a test, but maybe more like recalling the taste of grapefruit when you haven’t had one in months, tongue puckering. As for today, I’ll never shake the humidity.

It’s not dark yet, but the sun is down. Dusk is the truest time. All that ambiguity freshly unmasked from the seeming certainty of daylight. The certainty the sun imposes on lines. At dusk, lines meld together, you can’t tell the beginnings or ends of things, buildings melt into streets melt into telephone poles melt into my body. And the reality of the physical world, the day, it says, So long, Chelsea town, so long.

I walk down Eighth Avenue until the sky is the color of the street. Past the nearest subway stop, down on to the next. I want to walk. I want to feel the bones in my feet, because she’s here, she’s out here. I pause as a few notes drift out of a lit-up shopfront, trumpeting the sidewalk, looping in and out as if the night were at moments muting the music, at moments inviting it to move in and rise, like a fellow player at a jazz club, taking a solo, giving one. The repeated phrase takes a turn and it’s coming for me, violent for a moment, but the crescendo relaxes, sinks a bit in on itself. And there, in the display case of that shop window, is a large vase, and the design on that vase is exactly the visual representation of the song being played. It is blue and white with loops along the top, dots in the center, loops again below, a Dutch pattern but it’s all jazz. Art and intention all around — that craftsman knew I’d be looking at that vase at the end of dusk with jazz in my ears. How all things, all senses come together — when that happens I fill up and am so grateful for the pulse and life of the city.

I must lower my dosage. One pill per day instead of two and we’ll see how it goes. How else will I be able to find the truth? It all makes sense. But the sense of it is so heavy. I can barely hold it in my head. It makes so much sense I’m scared of it. But I will find the truth. I will find Nicolette. And you’ll help me, Loyal Voices.

I spread the magazine over my head. A light drizzle starts, and tonight will be wretched. All the summered people in the street, we all watch the city through a thin screen, gray and lit from afar like a movie, but the screen is also touching all of us, connecting us. Threading us through with water from the same cloud. This is what I’ve missed. Monday almost over. Tonight it will rain. Tomorrow the street will be different.

PART III: THE PROTEST MARCH 26, 1966

1

The marchers came in small groups. Countable, until they were no longer countable. Police appeared on cue. And suddenly the street was blocked to traffic and Claire couldn’t cross Eightieth. In a matter of minutes she could hardly see the ground. Thousands swarming from the north, and Claire found herself — of all the places and days — in the heart of a protest.

She was making her way north on Fifth Avenue to a lunchtime lecture at the Goethe Institute, something about a German-American artist. She’d spent the morning poring over the legalese of her six-year-old divorce settlement. This was a much deserved lunch break; there would be a reception after the lecture — an hour or so until she could eat. She could hold off until then, but not much longer. Her staples: reception cheese, wine, crackers. Pinot Noir. Smoked Gouda. Over the sudden swell of heads, she could make out the wrought iron jutting from the windows of the Institute. She could see exactly where she needed to be and had no way of getting there. Her stomach growled.

Claire nearly slammed into a plywood coffin. Right here in Jackie Onassis’ neighborhood. The two men and two women carrying it had painted their faces white, as if they were dead. The dead carrying the dead. She didn’t know what to make of that. They were in her way.

“Excuse me,” she said, but they didn’t.

“Excuse me,” she said again, and the coffin was gone, buried in the wash of color that was now Fifth Avenue.

Excuse me.

Drums and feet. The grinning winter wind. So many faces they were faceless. Chants she couldn’t understand until she read their signs: don’t walk. bring the boys home now. make love not war. peace begins at home. And then a rusty voice above them all, a crazy man in their midst yelling, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,” even though it was mid-March.

Claire threw her head back in frustration and caught sight of a city seagull circling above her. She glared at it suspiciously. Who would eat the cheese? Someone else would drink the wine.

Shifting from foot to foot, the hint of pain. She was already running late, and her only good shoes were in the Macy’s bag she was carrying. She would hardly have time to change into them. The soles of the green flats she wore now were so thin she could feel every shard and crack of pavement and old hard gum.

The smell of dust found her. Something about her father. She wanted a warm summer day in the country and the smell of dust. She felt like singing, or at least having a reason to sing. Her father, though he would never allow himself to articulate anything but kind and trusting thoughts toward his country and president, might be proud of her for being here, even if it was an accident. She missed him.

The peaceniks, the beatniks, the families with sons and daughters. Teenagers, the clean-shaven, the homeless. People shouting, people chanting together: Peace Now. Old men, children, everyone full of the same rage. Fists in the air. The sidewalks too were filled with onlookers — boys in brown uniforms and green berets jeering at the marchers, jeering, we’ll kill you, you fags. Two thousand down, one million to go. Frantic, waving signs: traitors should be shot. Fists in the air.

The protest was moving south. She would certainly be late if she tried to take another route. And she had errands to run later in the day. Replace the eyeglasses she’d broken last night, if she could convince the store they were still under warranty, buy a gift for Mary’s baby shower, maybe have her green flats resoled. But then she’d have to wear her good shoes outside and she couldn’t risk that — they were the only decent pair she’d kept after selling the rest. Errands like receipt paper scrolling in on itself. The wasted day, the wasted life. And all these people thinking they were better than her for supporting a cause, protesting the war. Looking at her standing there idly with her shopping bag.

What did the war have to do with her, or with any of them? She was hungry, that’s what mattered. She was always hungry. And it was embarrassing to have a whole train car of people overhear her stomach grumbling. Maintaining balance was hard enough without involving herself in foreign politics. The balance of riding the subway but looking too elegant to be there; the incredible energy it took to postpone divorce proceedings because she couldn’t afford representation; to put on appearances that a life alone was better than a life with him. There weren’t enough hours in the day to learn how to present her own case, plus the odd jobs she picked up. Sometimes her friend Lynn would hire her as a buyer for her decorating company. And sometimes Mary would have her do research for one of her books, though not lately. Mary hadn’t been returning her calls.

But Claire scraped by with the rent the artists paid her. She’d converted Freddie’s den into a studio and she’d need to find a new renter soon. Paintbrushes clogged her sink. Picking up after the artists was a full-time job — they were like children. Freddie’s lawyer had dropped in on her once and it wasn’t fun to make up excuses. To pretend that she — that she—was the artist.

A man named Avery had been the first. He’d moved his film equipment into the den to do a day shoot, and when they were done, he didn’t leave. He gave her a little money for the storage space and the few roles he had her play if he couldn’t find anyone else. But it wasn’t long before he tired of her. She didn’t have the range, he’d said. But he was just the first of many.

It was only when Mary teased her that all her renters were handsome, talented bachelors that Claire thought this arrangement at all strange. Was the room all they were paying for, Mary had baited? Mary guessed, but Claire did not admit that, if they stayed late working in the den, she would often let them into her bed. A night or two per week at most.

Claire would have to fight her way north on Fifth, against the onrush. Two blocks to the Goethe Institute, and she could make it. She would mingle at the reception. She would try not to stand too near the food table for too long; she was as proud as she was hungry. She often decided not to drink the free wine, but felt she deserved the cheese. Sometimes she thought there were others like her, though she could never be sure. Sometimes she met men.

Claire held her chin up like she was wading through high water. Salmoning up the street. No one gave her a second glance. She could get lost in here. She could disappear into it, unable to recognize herself from the crowd, swallowed whole. The smell of sweat under tweed coats.

And then she was moving south, being moved, the Met and the Institute falling farther and farther away. She turned and walked with the crowd to keep from being trampled. Someone stepped on the heel of her shoe; she wasn’t walking in rhythm. She couldn’t do anything right. More policemen lined the streets like hedgerows, or barbed wire.

Next to her, a group of doctors wearing lab coats. Ahead of them, women with a banner strung between two poles; on it was a crude reproduction of one of Goya’s Black Paintings. A teenager tried to scamper up a telephone pole and a policeman raised one arm to pull him off by his collar. He went down, beneath the crowd, but Claire didn’t see him resurface.

It seemed theatrical. She was walking in the middle of a movie set, everyone an extra from a different film, only half-hearing the same direction, trusting the feet in front of them. Everyone with the same angry smile and wind-ripened cheeks. The end-of-winter streets dreaming of a better time. All the people, together and dreaming.

These people weren’t cowards like the newspapers said. The headlines, anyway, as Claire never read the full articles. Look at them, look at them saying what’s in their hearts. Look at them with tears in their eyes. Had she ever once cried over anything so outside of herself? She could take a cue from them, the way they stood strong against the slaughter, against the onslaught of words from the boys in berets. The very boys the marchers were trying to protect, singing out for their safety.

Now she walked beside a man carrying a little girl on his shoulders. The child smiled down at her. They looked to one another from time to time to make sure they were doing all right — an unspoken pact. And yes, yes, they were doing all right.

She was in the protest now whether she liked it or not, so she might as well like it. She should join the cause. She should better herself. She should stop biting her nails. Yes, she’d plan a course of resistance and break habit. It was all about breaking habit. Feeling new again. She would shout out with the people. She would volunteer. She would find a hobby.

At Seventy-Second Street, the shouldered child screamed and pointed straight up in fear or in jest of fear. Claire followed the girl’s finger to the interrupted sky. Above, the seagulls squawked and circled like scavengers, as if the protestors were their midday meal. The birds glared in the sun and Claire had to squint in order to see: one bird was attacking the other mid-flight. Directly above the antiwar demonstration, a battle was underway.

Claire looked back at the girl and thought a terrible thought—

Whose thought was that? It couldn’t be hers. It must, absolutely must, belong to someone else.

Abruptly, she stopped walking as if she’d left something behind. Thrust forward, chest out and neck whipped back, she was on the ground. She looked up into the face of a man some hundred pounds heavier than her. “Watch it,” he said, not helping her up.

The image was of the child, Claire’s companion, taller than she. And a knife, which appeared in Claire’s hand. With it, she cut the child in two from top to bottom. A clean cut, like cheese. There was no blood. It did not belong to her.

The asphalt printed her hands. Her leg throbbed. She said nothing. Her safety depended on her silence. She would not be trampled. She would not be trampled. Her Macy’s bag was still on her, twisted around her shoulder. But her purse lay on the ground and there were so many feet and shins in her way. A large pair of patent leathers walked right over it like it was nothing. Claire risked a shout. But she couldn’t hear herself, even down here. She looked up for help. The child, high above and further ahead, reached down as if to catch Claire, but the shoulders walked on.

Claire was not a bad person. She was good, thoughtful. Every time an ambulance passed by on any street, she would pause and think — not pray, but think—“I hope they are all right. I hope, I hope.” The thought could not belong to her.

By making herself small, Claire managed to edge her way to the sidewalk, half crawling, crouching low. Her leg was crying out for attention but she couldn’t tend to it yet. She yelled at anyone who would listen. “Stop. My bag. Please stop.” No one stopped. There was a break, a hiccup of space. She limped in front of a group of old men, veterans from another war. She grabbed the purse wrong side up, felt her possessions falling but what did it matter now, back to the sidewalk, inching between two cops to a small safe space close to the buildings.

Her chest was in knots; she was alive. She’d nearly forgotten about her leg, and it throbbed as a reminder. Her stockings were ripped in a wide oval and there was a long scrape down the middle, following the line of her bone. Blood sprang new to the flesh, as if her acknowledgment of the wound drew it out.

Claire began to lower herself to the ground against the building but a policeman caught sight of her, motioning with his hand, up, up. “No one allowed on the sidewalks.”

“But my leg.” She tried to smile at him, but he’d already turned around and she must look awful anyhow. She searched the numbers of the apartments around her. Jackie Onassis was supposed to live somewhere very near. If only she could knock on Jackie’s door.

But there was someone whose door she could knock on. Her sisterin-law. Ex. Her soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law lived on this block or the next, or was it the next? Samantha and her near-penthouse. A little wobbly, Claire squeezed north behind the backs of policemen, past the first two apartment entrances, and stopped at the third to scan the names. She did her best to ignore the hard stare of the doorman who wouldn’t open the door and had her stand outside like a lout, an outsider, thick glass and mahogany wood between them. The doorman and his doorman’s cap.

She found the name: not Bishop, but Ebert, Samantha’s deceased husband, already an old man when she’d married him. Claire pressed the buzzer. It was as if she’d released a valve; her whole body begged to cry, but she refused it permission. She would not walk into Samantha’s apartment a bloody mess and weeping too. Not in front of Freddie’s sister, who had always been civil with her and gave her knowing glances concerning the separation.

There was the doorman’s desk, and there the stairs. “Ebert,” she said to him brashly. She didn’t want him to call the elevator for her — she couldn’t wait in the lobby and risk breaking down in front of this man. Despite her leg, she took the six flights up the narrow stairwell, each step mechanical, a service her body did for her. Her mind didn’t move until her nose was nearly touching the brass plated 6R and she had already knocked.

The door opened and Samantha stared blankly at the red-nosed, wind-beaten Claire. “Can I help you?”

Samantha didn’t know her.

She couldn’t stop it: right on Freddie’s sister’s doorstep, big tears fell as if of their own agency, as if they weren’t even hers.

“Oh Claire!” Samantha said. “It’s you, I hardly recognized — what on earth? Come in, oh dear, my poor dear, what happened to you?”

Claire indicated downstairs as her sobs shook her whole form.

“I should have known. How did you get caught up with all that? What did they do?”

Samantha led her by the wrist to her living room on the west side of the building. Four long windows faced Fifth Avenue, overlooking the people below and the park beyond. It was a large, clean room that Claire felt unbearable in. Filthy Claire against the beige carpeting, the textured eggshell walls.

“I must look frightful,” Claire said finally. “I am so embarrassed, barging in like this.”

“Don’t be silly.” Samantha sat her down on the crisp white sofa. Claire made sure not to let her battered leg touch it. Seeing this, Samantha hurried out of the room to get “the fixings.”

Claire patted her eyes with the heel of her wrist as if she was done crying, but she wasn’t. There was a glass bowl of chestnuts on the coffee table in front of her. She reached for them, stopped, her grimy hand midair. She listened for Samantha, reached again. She brought a handful to her mouth and chewed violently as she cried.

Then silence. She thought she could hear the marchers from the street, but it was so far away. Like a memory of voices. She couldn’t be farther from it had she been on the moon. It made her miss being down there. She scanned her new surroundings, this immaculate egg of an apartment.

Through wet lashes, she saw it. Directly across the room. Above the mantel. The only piece hanging on the expansive wall.

The painting hadn’t changed since she’d last seen it, save for the missing corner. The sky was still that laughing shade of blue. She was still falling in pieces from the bridge. She was still dead.

She leaned back on the couch, closed her eyes. She wasn’t asleep, couldn’t have fallen so quickly, yet she was consumed by the briefest nightmare: the little girl — the two halves of her in either of Claire’s arms. Claire tried to comfort her.

She clicked open her eyes. The light was different. But no time had passed, had it? Samantha rustled in with a wet rag and a bandage and a noose. No, she wasn’t carrying a noose.

The change in Claire must have been glaring and Samantha stopped short. “What’s wrong, dear? Does it hurt?”

Somehow Claire managed to say, “Where did you get it?” She pointed at the painting, arm extended, a rope pulling her taught, keeping everything in place.

“I don’t know?” Samantha answered before she registered what exactly it was Claire was referring to. With her eyes, she followed Claire’s finger. “Oh. That. Yes, in your basement. Yes, that’s right. It was in Freddie’s things when we moved him out. Hidden behind boxes like it was junk. I figured he wouldn’t mind, but I never asked him, exactly. Not directly. Was that bad of me? It was too strange and rare to keep locked away like that. It’s by that portrait artist, you know, she’s quite a name now—”

Claire stared her into silence. Samantha stood with the rag and bandage, waiting. The stupid woman. “Can’t you see it’s me?” Claire said desperately.

“What do you mean?” Samantha’s eyes moved up and down the painting. “No. Stand next to it.” Claire obeyed, rising and walking slowly from the couch, but both women knew it was unnecessary. Samantha’s lips parted, moving her gaze from Claire to the painting and back again. “It is you. Where has the corner gone?”

Claire moved to the window. She stared out at the seagulls, now at eye level, still dancing, or mating, or fighting. “It’s mine,” she whispered to the window, the seagulls. Seagulls, ocean-tugged. And the ocean was calling her, too. She thought, for just a moment, that one bird paused to look in her direction, an acknowledgment.

Below. Claire looked below to see that the world was still throbbing. It hadn’t stopped at her departure. Like the sea, she’d drown in it if she let it in. She barely knew. She barely knew anything about the sea, as she barely knew anything about what she’d been protesting. She felt faint, uncertain how she’d gotten here. The marchers on the street flooding the pavement and rising high, the sweaty glass playing tricks on her eyes, the strata of shadows. All the people fighting. Fighting with police in riot gear who had appeared on the sidewalks. From here they were like rows of toy soldiers aligned by a boy’s small hand. Fighting for room to walk. Fighting with the day, the cold sun. All these people fighting. All these people dreamed at night.

She turned back to Samantha and said, “It’s mine.”

Samantha tensed. She made herself tall and spoke slowly. “Freddie must have paid good money.”

Claire peered at Samantha as if for the first time that day. She was stunning with her bouffant hairdo and Grace Kelly pout. Brilliant, too, though she rarely let that on. No wonder she had everything. And she never seemed afraid of losing it all, though the possibility perhaps had never crossed her mind. Claire hated her for that.

She smiled sweetly at her ex-sister-in-law. Nothing Claire could do would truly hurt Samantha, so she didn’t feel bad saying, “You’ve filled out since I last saw you, dear.”

Samantha smiled back. “Only where it counts.”

Claire made for the painting, two long strides. She ripped it down.

But she failed. It hardly budged, trapped in by nails. It hung crooked and heavy.

Samantha was still speaking. About laws and theft and morality. Unclear, like she or Claire were underwater.

Claire took the canvas on either side with both hands, lifting it calmly now, releasing it from the wall. The pain in her leg was gone. The painting was heavier than she remembered.

“You can’t do that. You can’t just take a painting from someone’s wall. It’s stealing. A thief. You’re a thief,” Samantha said, as if pleased with the conclusion she’d reached. But she didn’t move to stop the thief. Still standing in her place in the middle of the room, her hands full of bandages.

“But it’s mine.” Claire walked the painting to the couch and grabbed her bags. She headed for the door. In a way, the interaction was all very civil.

“I’ll call the police,” Samantha said behind her. “I will.”

Claire didn’t respond, she was outside the door, down the first flight of stairs. The radiator whistled a catcall. The clatter of her thin-soled shoes. Her Macy’s bag and purse cut off the circulation at her elbow and thumped against her hip. Holding the painting in front of her with both sore hands, like a wall always in close proximity.

Samantha was above her, leaning over the railing. “You’re mad, you know that?”

Claire broke out into the street, barely noting the doorman, a blur in a cap. The chanting hit her; it seemed violent now that she was no longer a part of it. But it was a gift to not hear her own thoughts. She walked south in the small space between the buildings and the backs of policemen, the canvas nearly scraping their backs, but none turned her way.

Nicolette would be proud of Claire for taking what was hers. For taking what she wanted. Perhaps the artist was here, somewhere in the protest. What if Claire ran into her? Carrying the painting like this? The thought of it made her tired. Over six years now since she’d seen Nicolette, and still Claire thought of her from time to time, thought of looking for her.

Left onto Seventieth. Ungainly with the painting, stumbling over nothing down the street, she almost fell in front of a group of schoolchildren. They stared at her and sniggered, she must look drunk to them. She tripped off the curb, not looking where she was going. She could die this instant. She could get run over by a taxi.

The fact of her body became an afterthought. If she was forced to think about it, she might forget how to walk. Old shoes, green like moss. When you cannot feel your own feet on the ground. And you feel you’ve dropped something, but know for certain you had nothing to drop.

Down Madison, mirrors and shop windows clicking by. She was walking alongside her reflection. Do not look at yourself or you will disappear. Each storefront marked a passing moment, as if the day’s clock were a straight line, slipping through another minute and another. Time passing as slow or as fast as she walked down the block.

Claire froze. To her right, a shop with display cases of blown-glass clowns and dolphins and children with balloons. Then she saw what had caught her attention: a woman was staring at her from inside the shop. Darting eyes that found and pinned her. She registered nothing but those eyes. Still familiar, still knowable after all these years. Nicolette.

A man nearly ran into Claire from behind, his briefcase scraping her buttocks then knocking the corner of the painting. She wasn’t feeling quite herself. Claire snapped her head south and walked briskly, the frame jolting against her shins. The man was tall and she followed him down the block as fast as she could. It couldn’t have been the painter. Though Claire had heard Nicolette had been involved with the Freedom Riders. Claire tried to reconstruct the face around those eyes. The woman she’d seen was older, who might have been Nicolette if Nicolette had aged twice as fast as she should. Who might be Nicolette in the future. Those lips, those perfect imperfections.

The man turned right on Sixty-Seventh, so Claire turned right as well. She was almost back at the protest on Fifth Avenue. And then the man was gone. She lost the man and her stomach sank. You lose a stranger on the street and you feel your heart break. On the corner, a group of young men were yelling at the cops, and a moment later they were gone, shoved in the back of a police van. There, the street, just two footfalls from her. There was the van, she could throw herself under it.

“Excuse me, miss.”

Claire stopped and turned to the officer who had pulled up beside her, lifting himself sluggishly from the police car.

“Where’d you get that there, miss?”

She nodded. He walked up to her, took the painting from her hands like she was a child or a mad woman, and leaned it against the dirty passenger door of the car. Claire stared down at the back of the frame. She did not feel any sense of surprise. What should she feel?

He was looking at her. “That artwork belongs to someone else, doesn’t it, miss?”

He turned her around, clipped the handcuffs on her loosely. The cold metal on her wrists was heavier than she’d expected. The swipe of his fingers, skin on skin. Her red, beaten palms. An old woman stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared.

A flash of wings. Birds going insane in the gutter. What was down there? So strong they rattled the metal grate. The sound of birds fighting, the sound of someone getting arrested. Replace eyeglasses, buy a present for Mary. The times you stare and think of birds. It’s all the time. It’s happening now. Again she heard the man yelling, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. Nearer now. She was not unstrung. She was not mad. It’s only the circumstance of the city smothering what’s important and there are too many people making too much noise and you can’t even hear the list of errands in your head replace the glasses or the list doesn’t make sense. She had taken what was rightfully hers.

He opened the back door and lowered her in. She watched him through the spotted window as he set the painting in the front seat, treating it with more respect than her. The painting faced the road; it could see what was coming. He walked around and got in beside it.

The first time she’d heard her own voice in so long:

“Aren’t you going to read me my rights?”

2

“No room in the precinct. Going to the Tombs.”

Claire didn’t know if he was talking to her or his radio. She hadn’t a clue where that was, the Tombs, and she was afraid to ask. Her tomb? They were driving now through Chinatown.

“We’re putting men in the women’s cell,” the cop said, catching her eye in the rearview mirror. “You might like that.” But his smirk disappeared and he said, “They’re not too scary. You’ll be safe.”

It was her own painting, that’s what she’d tell them. Why shouldn’t she have taken it back? All she would have to say is that it belonged to her, it was simply a misunderstanding.

Central Booking, stuffy and hot. She kept her eyes on her painting dangling from the cop’s hand. He didn’t even look at it. And if he did, he wouldn’t see its beauty.

They asked if she had any drugs on her and seemed not to believe her when she said no. They spread her bags and their contents across a desk. Her painting was being taken somewhere.

“What are you going to do with it?” Claire tried to sweeten her voice, but it came out shrill and childish.

“We’re calling Inspector Picasso,” the cop said. “He’s on it, don’t worry.”

She was taken down a cement hall and three flights of stairs. A frightening version of her basement and storage unit. An officer was walking behind, one hand on her shoulder, another on her back. She couldn’t see the face of the man who touched her, but she could feel the heat of his hand through her blouse. They’d taken her coat. She hoped it was draped over her canvas.

“Please. What about my painting?” she asked again.

“Ma’am. He’s lost his beret, he’ll be here soon.” On her back, she felt his hand shiver as he laughed at his own joke.

In the cell, gym mats were scattered on the floor, covered in half-eaten sandwiches. She saw the sandwiches before she saw the faces. Nine other people. But she didn’t register much more than a number, her mind jittery, bouncing to the next thing before landing completely on the first. There was an old pair of pants in the corner. Beside them, liquid that might have been urine or juice. The overwhelming smell of bleach made everything indistinguishable. There was one bed with a metal frame and a blue-and-white-striped mattress not an inch thicker than the gym mats.

A bench ran along the three walls. Claire sat down immediately, but the bench was so skinny she barely fit. She had to sit very straight, hands folded in her lap, legs closed, a well-to-do lady in a jail cell. She touched her scraped leg, her ripped stockings.

The nine faces hardly glanced at her. There was a pale, skeletal woman, wearing surprisingly few clothes for winter, sitting cross-legged on a mat, staring at her hands like something was wrong with them. A young boy rested his head on a girl’s lap. The boy was white and his girlfriend was black. This would have surprised Claire, and she would have hidden that surprise, had it been any other day. The boy’s eyes bulged and he melted as she stroked his hair. There was a love between them, neither over sixteen years old. A middle-aged woman cried softly in the corner. An old man, Russian maybe, slept on the bench. And four young men — three white and one black, all with dirty, disappointed faces — conversed quietly in the center of the cell. One had a broken nose, dried blood caked to the lower half of his face.

Claire desperately wanted to be invisible. If she didn’t hear them or see them, perhaps they wouldn’t see her. She breathed shallow through her mouth to block the stench. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw something scurry past, but when she looked, there was nothing. Her arms itched, and she imagined spiders and rats under the bench and in the walls. She felt she was going mad, and for a moment — oh she was so tired — for a moment she thought that was why she’d been locked away.

A sign on the wall read, water available upon request. Below that, another: sanitary napkins available upon request. Claire went to the bars and reached her arm through. She couldn’t be sure how long she stood there like that, waiting to be noticed. Her arm began to ache. The light was constant, the cruel desperation of ceaselessly buzzing fluorescent tubes.

Her favorite role that Avery had given her was for one of his silent films. She was a scantily clad bar wench who’d lost her lover in an unnamed war and who grieved by bombing City Hall. She ended up in jail, fell in love with another woman who had also lost everything to war, and together they broke free into a night without consequences.

This cell was not made of cardboard.

An officer finally approached.

“The sign said to ask for water,” she said.

“No cups,” he said, about to walk away. She pouted her lips, and could tell her lipstick had worn off long ago. After studying her face a moment, he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

The officer never returned with water. When another guard walked by she reached out again and said, “I didn’t get to make a phone call.”

He laughed. She didn’t know what he found funny. “Sure, you can have a phone call. If you ask nice.”

“I can be nice,” she said. “But where’s the fun in that?”

He grinned then coughed to hide it. He called down the hall to someone. They yelled back and he said, “You’ll have to wait, sweetheart.”

When it was her turn, the same man — or was it the first? — unlocked the cell and she slid out, but it didn’t feel like she was out. Her cellmates stared after her.

“The rich lady wants to make a phone call,” the officer said to another.

Was it the Macy’s bag that had given them the impression she was wealthy? She didn’t bother correcting them. She dialed Mary’s number. The phone rang with an accusatory tone. It rang and rang. Where was Mary when she needed her? If only she could call Tomasz. It was entirely his fault this had happened. He hadn’t destroyed the painting. He had lied to her. She would call him and tell him he had to clean up his mess with his stupid, dirty rag.

“Hello?” Mary said.

Claire was silent in the warmth of her friend’s sudden voice. Then she hung up. She couldn’t explain it all to Mary now, not like this.

“Husband not home, huh?” said one of the officers, softer than before.

“No,” she said. “No one’s home.” She asked for a glass of water and they let her use her hands at a sink. She splashed her face and stared at her fun-house reflection in the chipped stainless-steel mirror.

Back in the cell. The fluorescent light that never ceased. The payphone ringing. She sat on the bench and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, three more people had been put in the cell and had found a place on the floor or the bench. The one who had been crying earlier was missing. She’d been crying but never made a sound. How much time had passed?

She watched the old man on the floor, sleeping with his head tilted back on the bench, his chin in the air. She tried to breathe steadily like he was, matching his chest’s rise and fall. But he stirred as if he felt her gaze and met her eyes. “I was only drinking a beer on the street,” he said.

Claire said, “You should hold it in a paper bag.”

Two of the boys shuffled oddly in the middle of the room. Were they dancing? No one could possibly dance in here. And then one boy was on the shoulders of the other, stretching his arms above his head, holding a cigarette to the light fixture, trying to catch a spark.

“Unscrew the covering,” Claire offered.

“We know, lady,” said the boy on the bottom. He was older than the others and had been talking excitedly earlier, the other boys listening intently. Claire looked away. Why she was concerning herself with these people, she didn’t know.

The smaller one on top said to her, still straining up, “They took our lighters.”

The plastic covering fell to the ground. Someone yelled, “Watch out,” after it had already smashed into several large pieces.

Of course it wouldn’t light, they were only killing time. The boy on the ground lowered the other down safely.

Then he looked at Claire, a little sheepishly, and walked over to where she sat. A cigarette was trapped in his mouth, sticking to his dry lips as he talked. “Police did that to him,” he said, pointing to the boy with the bloody nose. Claire nodded and tried to look sympathetic. “Sorry for being testy. I need a drag and a cheeseburger.” He handed the cigarette to Claire, who wished he hadn’t mentioned a cheeseburger. “You gotta pretend,” he said.

Claire took it and smiled. “Thank you,” she said, but she didn’t bring it to her mouth.

In the center of the room, the other boys were growing excited and their voices carried.

“I heard fifty thousand,” the bloody one said.

“No way. A hundred thousand. It’s possible.”

“The radio said seven,” said the third.

“They’re liars.”

“They get the numbers wrong on purpose. And we can’t do anything about it.”

“Fucking yuppies is what they are.”

From beside Claire, the older boy flicked another cigarette at them. “Hey, watch your mouth.” He turned back to Claire. “Were you there? At the protest?”

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded solemnly, studying the bars. “That’s good. That’s very good.”

His eyes were tired and absent, two-dimensional like cigarette burns. She liked that he assumed she’d been thrown in here with the other protesters, something wild. He seemed to be their leader, confident but not arrogant, in his early or mid-twenties. His hair was shaggy and unwashed, and he wore a plaid shirt with a frayed collar and wide-legged slacks. Not a hippie, or a beatnik, nor upright. Claire liked that he didn’t appear to belong to any group. Obviously, he hadn’t had a mother picking out his clothes for some time. Even in here he smelled nice.

She nodded toward the other boys. “They listen to you.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “I quit drugs a while back, but once you realize that sometimes people actually listen, and you have this power to be heard and all — I can’t get enough of it. So, if I’m going to be addicted to something?” He shrugged. “You hear me?”

Claire raised the unlit cigarette to her lips and pretended to inhale. “I hear you.” She handed it back to him. “How long have you been in here?”

He looked at his watch very seriously. “Five hours, twenty-three minutes, seventeen seconds.” He grinned. He had nice teeth.

“How long have I been in here?” she asked quietly.

A faint V of veins rose from his forehead. He stopped grinning, stood up and announced, “It’s time for sleep.” His boys mumbled consent. The others in the cell seemed to agree, too.

But there weren’t enough mats for everyone. The boys rested their heads on each other’s shoulders or legs, and immediately started horsing around again.

“Don’t act stupid,” their leader said. “We have to speak up for ourselves and protest this bullshit, excuse my language. Are you going make sense at the arraignment if you don’t sleep? Are you going to convince anyone you don’t belong here?” No one answered. It was like he’d flicked out the lights, and everyone settled in, making a bed of the cement floor. He motioned for Claire to take the one bed. Stepping over the legs of children, she shook her head. “I don’t need it.”

He smiled so warmly she thought she could kiss him. He sat down and patted the ground for Claire to sit. They leaned their backs against the metal frame of the bed and their heads on the edge of the thin mattress. She watched the boys resting on top of one another. An unsaid trust. Somewhere, someone was screaming. But when she shut her eyes, it was a whisper.

The cement dawn smashed Claire in the side of the head. Dug its nails into her back and kicked her hips in. She was too old to sleep on the ground.

The leader was up, standing over her as if he’d been watching her sleep, waiting for her eyes to open. He reached his hand down. She took it, he pulled her up. She was taller than him.

Her throat was so dry no sound came when she opened her mouth. Her voice pulled out of her like knotted rope. “I still don’t know your name.”

He grinned. “Jill,” he said. “What’s yours?”

What an odd name; she felt the urge to tease him. She thought of asking how old he was, but she didn’t really want to know. She didn’t want to know anything more. She wanted to go home. She wanted to fall on her bed with all her clothes on despite their filth, kick off her shoes and not care where they landed. Leave the door open, let anyone see her sprawled across her big mattress, her down quilt. But who would come to find her?

Later they brought bologna sandwiches. Breakfast. One boy threw a piece of bread at the wall and it didn’t bend or crumble; it made a hard sound like a pebble.

The strung-out boy threw up in the corner and the teenage girl called out for help. The guards said they’d call someone, but no one came. An hour later? Was it more? The boy put his head on her lap and she moved her fingers through his hair and whispered to him. Finally a man in a different uniform entered. They had to wake him; he’d fallen asleep near his mess.

“Let me stay with him,” the girl moaned after them. No one answered.

At some early hour, an officer came and called Claire’s name. She was first, though she’d been there the shortest time. She was moved to a different cell, then there was paperwork. Carbon copies of everything.

This is my street and this is my door. She clutched the painting at her side as she dug through her bag for her keys and came up empty. Her keys were lying in the middle of Fifth Avenue, crushed by feet and wheels. Maybe her keys were in the gutter. Maybe they’d reached the Hudson. And no one was home, waiting. No one was ever expecting her. Perhaps that was why she’d left her address and number for Jill and his boys. She’d asked the lawyer to give it to them, ignoring his raised eyebrows.

The public defender still had acne on his face, but he’d held her painting like an apostle. He’d told her not to say anything, that she could trust him. Samantha hadn’t bothered to show and it was easy for the young lawyer to prove it was a property dispute to be dealt with in the divorce proceedings, that the theft charges shouldn’t stand. “As you can see plainly,” he’d said, pointing at each falling face in the painting, “it’s her likeness. There’s no question here.” The painting was restored to her. She was let off without so much as a reprimand. But, somehow, Claire felt she’d failed.

Claire would have to find a payphone and call Tomasz after all, or a locksmith. She leaned her painting against the railing and sat down. She hugged her legs and rested her chin on her knees, making herself small. In the cold, on her stoop, her whole body was finished. It was used, unfed, every morsel of skin and muscles exhausted.

During the three-minute arraignment, Claire had wanted to jump up, to cover what felt like a great exposure, something very private revealed to all these public people. The judge had leaned forward, sleep still in his eyes, and looked at the painting. The officer had looked at the painting. The court bailiff had stopped shuffling papers to look at the painting. The lawyer, he’d looked and looked at the painting. Everyone stared at her torn body falling through the air — but no one said anything to indicate that this was strange. That it was bad. That it was a bad painting, an evil painting, that it should be found guilty.

3

Claire balanced a tray with four glasses of Tang and four Wonder Bread sandwiches as she walked into the den. If she didn’t feed Jill and the boys they’d eat nothing but potato chips.

“Tonight’s about draft demographics,” Jill was saying to the other three — Lawrence, Carlos, and Bird — who were sprawled on the floor and couch. They’d been arguing over whose speech to use at their rally that night.

Lawrence plopped himself dramatically on the couch. “I worked hard on that speech.”

“Me too,” Bird said, pulling his long hair down so it shielded his eyes.

Then Carlos started dancing in the corner of the room. He did the Twist and the Jerk and the Mashed Potato. Often, when tensions rose, he would lie on the floor and wriggle.

Jill ignored him and said to Lawrence, “We’ll use your speech at the next rally. All right?”

They would go on like this until everyone conceded to Jill. But they were content in their roles: Carlos designed flyers and banners and called himself art director. He’d even created a logo for their collective: an outline of Cassius Clay’s head that he stitched onto each of their black masks. Bird was responsible for direct action, calling government officials at dinnertime, posting Carlos’s flyers. And Lawrence was on media, clacking away at his op-eds on a typewriter set up on the den floor.

Carlos was Puerto Rican. Bird was Jewish. Jill was Italian. Lawrence was a Negro. These boys could not have been more different from one another, but even now Claire had a hard time telling them apart. They were inseparable. She called them the Lost Boys in front of Mary. But they weren’t lost.

Her Village apartment had been transformed into the temporary headquarters of their small, rogue collective. She’d stressed “temporary” and had agreed to let them stay until the divorce hearing two months away, no longer.

Claire set the tray on the coffee table and the four said thank you in unison.

It looked as if a bomb had gone off in the den — clothes strewn over the couch, sleeping bags piled in corners. Large strips of fabric with black paint cloaked the backs of chairs. They slept through the afternoon, drank enough beer to sustain an army, and smoked marijuana and cigarettes all day, the windows shut against the cold — all paid for by Bird, unbeknownst to whomever sent him his allowance. But Claire imposed no rules. She wasn’t their mother; she wasn’t anything to them.

Freddie would have hated their cheap beer and smoke, draped as thickly as their rubbish over all the furniture. But she no longer linked the apartment to Freddie. She had re-associated every corner of it; her memories of him, even in their bed, had been overwritten. Claire could just imagine Mary stumbling in and thinking she’d mistaken the address, but Claire hadn’t had Mary over in many months. Her home may have been unrecognizable, but it felt more like home with the boys. There was movement; there was purpose in the air.

“Hey, Claire — you like Elvis?” Carlos asked between sticky bites.

“Yes,” she said, leaning in the doorway. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

All four burst out laughing. “Hey,” Bird said, “Claire likes Bubblegum!”

“It’s not Bubblegum. I like nice music. Like Joni Mitchell. And the Beatles. Not whatever you had on yesterday. The Jugs.”

“The Fugs,” said Lawrence.

They laughed again and she couldn’t keep from smiling. “I’m going to the library for a few hours. Don’t set the couch on fire.” She was a regular at the Sixth Avenue library, where she was attempting and failing to teach herself family law.

Jill raised his sandwich in cheers and grinned at her. “We’ll get to that legal stuff later this week, you bet,” he said, then turned back to the Lost Boys. “Make the poster say two a.m. in the park under the hanging tree.”

Claire left them then. The less she knew, the less Freddie and his legion of lawyers could hold against her if she was found out. And she didn’t want to hear the rest, who they were meeting, what plans. Other young men in black masks, illicit but harmless enough, draping peace flags from the rooftops of office buildings or rallying in front of a politician’s apartment. They always came home smelling of sweat and spray paint.

Jill was the oldest of their gang at twenty-four. He told her he’d flunked out of law school while he was getting high. “Harvard Law,” he’d said with what Claire swore was a touch of pride, despite his disdain toward that lifestyle. He’d offered to help with Claire’s divorce settlement but hadn’t yet found the time. He’d never taken the bar but advertised himself quietly in Village coffee shops as unofficial counsel for draft deferments. There was something thrilling about his confidence and the moodiness that seemed to accompany it. After yelling himself hoarse at a rally, or giving the boys one lecture or another, he would sometimes lock himself in the bathroom, first making sure the others didn’t need it. Claire tried not to imagine what he did in there. Perhaps he only needed the quiet.

The fact of his youth alone reminded her of the older man she’d met at the Goethe Institute: at forty-two, she was nearly right in the middle of both their ages, as old to Jill as the man was to her. Jill, a quarter the man’s age, had the same passion for dissent as the gray-haired man had for Wagner and Bordeaux. “You know nothing about your wine, do you?” the well-traveled gentleman had said at a reception. Claire pretended to be offended, then went home with him that afternoon, rubbed against him while it was still light out. Then he took her to the movies: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor was fat for it, and on her fifth husband. Claire said so and the man laughed. But with his hand on her thigh illuminated by the screen, nothing much was funny. She could see more clearly in that dark theater than she could in his uptown apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and all the sunlight money could buy. She could see so clearly in the dark: this is my life. She wanted to leave, but it was the middle of the movie.

He called her a thinner, better Elizabeth Taylor. She pouted and said most people thought she was a rather plain Lauren Bacall, which was partly true — though Freddie was the only one who’d ever said so, and only once. Claire lay naked on his sofa under a thin quilt not meant to be used. He cooked her dinner, which no man had ever done for her, borscht and brisket. And the next morning he woke her up with Wagner and danced her around the living room and said she made him feel young again. To which she laughed and said, “I’m not young.” And he said to her, “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know anything. Not even wine.”

She stayed with him for three days. He fed her well, as if he knew — a stray, a temporary home. Then he flew to Europe on business and the next time they saw each other nearly a year had passed, too much time, and they smiled across the room and that was all. A silent pact to erase a week. To disengage a memory, to unknow it.

The painting was under the bed. Most nights she would peek at it before going to sleep, a new ritual. It lay on its back, facing her back, and she could swear she felt it like a body, with arms and other parts breathing underneath her.

A week or so into their stay, Claire was walking past the bathroom door when Jill flung it open, startling her. She was terribly afraid he’d think she was spying on him, hovering there in the hall.

“Can I run something past you?” he asked, as if they were in school together, not the door to the toilet.

Claire cleared her throat. “Yes, of course.”

Jill glanced quickly up and down the hall, then grabbed her arm. “Come in here.” Before she could object, Jill pulled her inside and closed the door.

“Read this.” He shoved a copy of The Sad Gay Life into her hand, a paperback novel he must have taken from her bookshelf. His face was inches from hers. She could smell something like clove in his hair. She glanced from the cover, to him, back again. “No,” he said. “Not the book. This.” He flipped to a blank page in the front, now veiled in penciled script. She squinted at it, but could hardly begin to mobilize that portion of her brain. “I know, my handwriting. But I’ve been hammering out this idea,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m the right—” Claire tried.

“It’s like this. So what if I’m not an artist? I know art. At least, I know what I like. And you know how I feel about the war. And these rallies. We can really do something here.” He stopped talking and waited as if he’d asked her a question.

“Yes, I agree. But I don’t understand what…”

“Right. Sorry. I forget sometimes that you can’t read my mind. Feels like you could.” He smiled sheepishly at her. Claire hung her head over the book, shielding her red cheeks with her hair. “It’s like this,” he went on. “I think the real success of this movement has to come from art. That’s how we’re going to reach people. But not cheesy, obvious art like you see at marches. It has to be bigger than that. Like the Surrealists in France. A whole political movement that started with art. We’ve got nothing like that here. Just a bunch of freaks on the street. That’s how they see us, even the middle-class pacifists. They won’t join. They’re too scared. They think it’s just some drugged-out youth movement. It’s not. It’s a people movement.” Jill let out a breath, like he’d been holding onto those words for ages.

“So art could bridge that gap,” Claire said. “But I still don’t see how I would be much use. Have you talked to Carlos?”

Jill’s face sunk. Claire wanted desperately to say something smart and useful and unique. Something to meet the expectations that she didn’t know he had of her until now. He looked proud, and spent. She had to say something.

“I might know someone,” Claire said before she could stop herself. “An artist. She used to live in the neighborhood. Very influential. I heard she was a Freedom Rider.” Jill perked up a little. “But I don’t know that we’ll unearth her. It was a long time ago.”

Now when Claire sat with the painting each night, she dared herself not to think of Nicolette. Running her hand along the canvas, perhaps ruining the painting with the oils of her fingers, but she didn’t care. She laughed at her own strangeness. But she felt comforted by the painting, its new proximity. Like an old lover she didn’t know she missed until they were near once again.

Of course, as soon as she tried not to think of Nicolette, there was no stopping it. Claire often wondered where she was, what adventure. She seemed only to imagine Nicolette in exotic landscapes — beaches, old fortresses — never close by. Perhaps this kept Claire from looking her up, imagining she was unlocatable.

But as soon as Claire became aware of her own daydream, she would cover it with the drop cloth of a more immediate worry: whether she’d be able to pay the electric bill this month.

Bird was on the phone in the kitchen and his back was rocking. Claire paused in the doorway.

“I’m fine. Yes, I’m eating. Is Dad going to get the operation?” he said forcefully, as if he might lift off the ground had he spoke with less weight. There was a pause and then, “If you don’t tell me I’ll kill you.”

Claire had never heard Bird speak like this. He was always the playful follower. Being the youngest seemed to make him feel special.

“I won’t kill you,” he said, softer now. “I’m just mad. I want to know. Call me if Mom says anything. Promise…cross your heart…I don’t hear you crossing your heart.” A leaden sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too.” Bird set down the receiver, breathing shallowly.

So they had worlds outside of this apartment, this movement. They had problems and people and anger and other injustices to contend with.

Claire stood where she was, couldn’t make herself move toward him. She could so easily lie and say, “Little Bird, it will be all right. Nothing is so bad in the end.” But there seemed to be an invisible shield around the room. She couldn’t go forward. She couldn’t be good. Her bag slipped from her shoulder with a thud.

As Bird turned toward the noise, Claire slipped down the hall to her bedroom, away from him. She heard him call after her, “Who’s there? Carlos? Don’t be a jerk.”

Why couldn’t she be good?

Taking a cue from Jill, Claire found respite in the quiet of her bathroom. She needed to better herself, she felt desperate in that. Perhaps if she looked happier. In the mirror, she made a face like Julie Andrews dancing in the Alps, that doltish, open-toothed smile, those dewy eyes. But it wasn’t her face. Claire put on her rarely worn eyeglasses and studied herself. She’d always been told her eyes were beautiful, cat-like, until she was forced to hide them behind frames. When she noticed the lack of compliments, she’d stopped wearing them, only to get lost in her own neighborhood.

Still, something had shifted since Freddie. Around these boys, she could see the change more clearly. She smiled more freely, laughed at their impressions of LBJ, and of Claire, too — Bird got her pout right, and the way she said, “Be careful, use a coaster,” though she’d given up on that after their third day.

But it wasn’t enough. She was no good to anyone.

Claire went back into the kitchen and found Bird still sitting there, deeply concentrating on his Coca-Cola. “My father isn’t doing so well these days either,” she said from the door.

Bird turned to her and she sat down beside him. He played with the condensation on the bottle. “Does he need to have an operation, too?”

“No,” Claire said. “I don’t know what that’s like.”

Bird only nodded. Then he slid over his sticky, half-finished soda. An offering.

Whenever Claire walked home from the library in the fresh air with a touch of spring, only to enter the muggy dungeon of stench the boys had built up around themselves, this thought entered her mind: where were the women?

When she asked why they never invited girls around to help out, and that she couldn’t imagine none of them had girlfriends, Bird replied that girls were gossips and might spoil their covert missions. Lawrence flicked Bird’s ear and said that what Bird meant was they wouldn’t take risks if they cared about girls. “What if they got hurt because of us? Better to have just men,” he said. And Claire asked, “What does that make me?” Jill shrugged and said that if she wanted more women around, she should find that artist she’d mentioned.

“I’ve looked,” Claire said. “I can’t find her anywhere. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

Claire had, in fact, cracked open one phonebook. Nicolette wasn’t listed.

At the kitchen table, Jill’s toe touched the arch of her foot and stayed there and he gave no sign that he even noticed. Claire glared at the papers spread before her, smothered in legalese.

“If you don’t get some coffin-dodger for a judge,” Jill was saying, “it’s possible just to get your separation converted. Still, might be easier to go down to Mexico to get divorced. If your husband — ex-husband — if he can afford it.”

She moved her foot away, careful to make it seem as if she were not moving her foot away.

“With the apartment, you have a chance,” he went on. “You’ve been living here alone the past however many years.”

“Seven,” Claire said. The boys were playing the Fugs in the other room. Nothing, nothing, nothing, the lyrics rattled. She didn’t like this new song.

“He owns it nominally, but he’s got a new apartment—”

“Equipped with a new girl.”

“You haven’t met anyone?”

Claire stood and rummaged through the junk drawer, looking for a pack of cigarettes. “Can I borrow a smoke?”

Jill took out his pack, beat it on his palm, and handed her one from the middle. He lit it for her as he spoke. “He should be paying your legal fees, do you know that? You have to ask him for ancillary relief. You shouldn’t be representing yourself.”

Claire laughed softly.

“What?” Jill asked, as if she’d laughed at him.

“To represent yourself. You can only do it in a court of law.”

“If you get a lawyer, this could all work out for you, Claire. The wife’s usually favored. Unless there’s some scandal you don’t want unearthed.” Jill chuckled awkwardly.

“What about the painting?” Claire asked.

“What am I supposed to say? You won’t even let me see it.”

Claire walked around the table to close the blinds. It was getting dark.

“It was a gift?” Jill asked. “Allan commissioned it?”

“Who?”

“Your ex-husband. Allan.”

“Oh. He never went by Allan. That was his legal name. But, yes, he commissioned the portrait for my birthday.”

“A gift is considered personal property, not marriage property. So you shouldn’t have a problem. Taking it from someone’s wall like you did, I mean, that might be used to prove some sort of prior unstable behavior, but it shouldn’t mean he gets to keep the damn thing.”

Claire sat again, smoking quickly as if it would burn out. “I paid someone, a long time ago, right after it was painted. I paid someone to destroy it. Obviously he didn’t.”

“If you’d just let me see it, Claire.”

From the den, the lyrics drifted in, Nothing, nothing, nothing, lots and lots of nothing.

“How can I help you if you don’t tell me anything?” Jill stood and started pacing. “Maybe they’ll argue the painting reverts back to him, then. If they can prove it’s a gift you tried to get rid of. And,” he looked down at her, “who knows, Mrs. Bishop, they might hold your silence against you, too, because, because you’re too silent. To me.”

Jill stopped his pacing abruptly and headed out of the room. He paused in the doorway. “What did you call him? Your husband. Will you tell me that?”

“Freddie,” she said, looking down at Freddie’s handwriting.

Jill stood on a small stool under the arch of Washington Square Park. They’d managed a good turnout — three hundred people at least, Claire guessed. She stood on her tiptoes and saw Mary a few feet away and waved to her. They smiled and embraced, muscles rigid in the cold. Claire didn’t know how to hold her friend with that pregnant belly in the way. It was eight months large and it irked her. Claire pretended to listen to Jill with his megaphone, but she couldn’t force her eyes off Mary’s swollen profile, the loose white shirt that fell around her in a way that made Claire think: summer. Something about the scene made her want to flee.

“Dear, he’s talking about you,” Mary said.

“Don’t say that. He is not.”

“‘Anonymous women who give their souls to the cause?’ You’re right, that can’t be you.” Mary rolled her eyes. “You do know those boys are madly in love with you.”

“Oh please. I’m old enough to be their grandmother.”

“You spend an awful lot of time with them. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

Mary’s tone was arch, but she wasn’t smiling. Claire didn’t know what to say, except, “They live with me.”

Mary studied her, forming some conclusion Claire was certain she would have been insulted by. “I should leave,” Mary said.

Claire didn’t know why she had been avoiding Mary — ever since she’d started showing. Mary had only cared to share her pregnancy with Claire when she couldn’t hide it any longer. She’d waited so long to tell her. And that had hurt.

But Claire didn’t have room for it now, or time. She didn’t have what it took to simply stand beside her friend. Claire struggled to say, “So soon?”

“I thought it was going to be a small rally,” Mary said.

“It’s good, don’t you think? They need the numbers.”

“I don’t want the baby to get hurt at a peace rally. It would be too ironic to bear.”

As if to prove her point, a man leaned out of his fifth-story window overlooking the park and yelled, “Commie criminals!”

Claire grimaced. “Of course. They don’t need me here. I’ll leave with you.”

They inched out of the crowd. “Walk me to my place a ways?” Mary said.

“Oh, I would. I should go home. The hearing’s only a couple weeks away. I can’t tell you how much reading there is to do. Anyway, better if you take a cab.”

“That’s right. The hearing. I should have known,” Mary said. “And here I am, worrying about my baby.” She stopped walking and turned to Claire, one hand on her belly. “You haven’t even asked how I am, Claire.”

“I didn’t? I was going to,” Claire tried.

“Forget it.”

Mary turned north to hail a cab. Claire backed away, nodding stupidly, and walked into a group of pigeons — they flew up and toward her, too dumb to fly away.

The house was empty. She needed a few moments of quiet. But there was nothing quiet in her head, hunched over her divorce papers at the kitchen table. She was furious with Mary for her self-righteousness, for saying those things to her. None of it was true.

The door — she heard it open and close and thought, just for a moment, that it was Freddie. That was the life tucked inside these files, all those nights in the kitchen alone, hearing the sound of coming and going that had nothing to do with her.

She could feel him behind her but she couldn’t turn around. Jill stood for a while in the kitchen doorway before asking, “Are you okay?”

When she didn’t answer, he walked up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She imagined his hands moving up her neck, down again. She could imagine it all. How his skinny body would be clammy against her own, his freckled arms around her in her bed. He was so thin.

“I wrote that speech for you,” Jill said.

She opened another file. “I can’t understand this,” she said vaguely.

“I’ll help.” He was still touching her shoulder. With his other hand, he reached around her to close the file.

She turned to face Jill. “The man I asked to destroy the painting — he’s the superintendent here. We were involved.”

“I can help,” Jill said again. He hadn’t seemed to hear her. Then he leaned in and kissed her.

She did not move toward him or away from him. She stood perfectly still. His lips were sticky as he pulled away.

“I’m too old for you,” she said. “I don’t want you talking about me at your rallies.”

“That’s not true,” he said, taking a step back.

4

Something was wrong. She could tell the minute she walked into the den. The room was too quiet. And it seemed cleaner. Claire had just returned from a reception at the Goethe Institute, her first since before the boys moved in. It had felt good to get out of the house, to have a reason to dress up and carry her good shoes in her Macy’s bag, to look too decent for the subway. To be surrounded by esteemed scholars and art critics who would never suspect her of housing an antiwar collective. But she hadn’t talked much and had left early after pocketing some cheese, wrapped in a cloth napkin, a gift for the boys.

Jill was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What’s happened?” she said. “What is it? Tell me.”

Carlos held out a piece of paper to her from the couch. He was hugging his knees, wearing pajama pants and socks and no shirt. His eyes were red. “Greetings from Uncle Sam. Bird’s draft letter.”

She didn’t take the letter from him. Bird was standing silhouetted by the window, hard to see, holding his card. He was the smallest of all of them. “So he’ll burn it,” Claire said a little too casually, not addressing Bird directly. She threw her bags on the floor and gave an exaggerated shrug. “Or he’ll mail it back to the government and we’ll fight it in court.”

“We’ll burn it together,” Lawrence said from the arm of the couch. “That’s always been the plan, right? If one of us…”

“In the park. Tonight. For everyone to see,” said Jill. “Then tomorrow we’ll talk about our options. I’ve been doing it for everyone else. Just because it’s Bird, just because, it doesn’t make it any different. There must be something medically wrong with you. Maybe you’re a lunatic. Or depressed. Super depressed. Or homosexual. Hell, we’ve been living here together, all these boys in one room.”

“You crack me up,” Lawrence said seriously.

“Or maybe he’s just too dumb for the army,” Carlos said. “What’s your card say?”

“He’s 1-A,” Jill said. “What’d you think?”

“Let me see that.” Carlos moved swiftly from the couch to Bird and snatched the card from his hand. He pointed at it. “See, if we just erase this line here, and add a couple lines there, see, it says 4-F.”

“Give that back,” Bird said loudly.

Carlos jerked the card away, lifting it as high as he could above his head. Bird jumped but couldn’t reach. “You’re too short. Why would they want you? You’re too short, isn’t he?”

“Give that back, Carlos,” Bird said, kicking him in the shin.

Carlos hooted and laughed, but the others didn’t join in. Claire watched silently. Finally, he flicked the card down at Bird. It hit his forehead then fell to the carpet. Bird left it there. Watching it like it was a cockroach he wasn’t sure was dead.

“If you want to make a show of it,” Carlos said, “we could find enough lighter fluid to cover you, easy. I got some matches if you want ’em.”

“Not funny,” Lawrence said. “That’s not funny. Is it Claire? Why are you being such an asshole, Carlos?”

Claire shook her head. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t cry. She tried to say, “No,” but nothing came out. Nothing, lots and lots of nothing.

“Leave him alone,” Jill said half-heartedly. “We’ll do what we have to do. We’ll go to jail with him, if it comes to that. We’ve been there before.” He started quietly singing the Draft Dodger Rag, “I got eyes like a bat and my feet are flat.”

Carlos sat back down on the couch and hugged his knees again. “We could get him off to Canada. Couldn’t we, Claire?”

Claire was still standing. She didn’t know what to do with her hands.

“He might never get to come home,” Lawrence said. “Or he’ll get canned. Five years.”

“Same if we burn it and so what?” Carlos’s chin was on his knees, trapping his words. “Jill said it, we’ll do what we got to. We could go disappear to Mississippi, even. What’s keeping us here? There are other fights, important fights. Hide him down there where no one would think to look. We could go tonight.”

“We could do nothing.”

It was Bird. They all turned to him.

“What do you mean, Bird?” Jill said slowly.

“I mean I’m going.”

Jill stood up from the floor. “What do you mean, Bird?”

“I mean my family,” Bird mumbled.

“What?” Lawrence said. “What are we?”

“My mom. She’ll disown me if I dust off.” Bird looked at them, and then he looked like he swallowed himself. His body crunched in on him and it seemed like he knew it and was trying to stop it, holding his arms defensively, fists and face clenched. “I’m going,” he said.

So they had mothers. It was something Claire had to continuously remind herself: that they weren’t lost boys. They were boys with mothers.

“He is a lunatic. If he wants to go. You don’t need a shrink to prove that,” Carlos said.

“I’m going,” Bird said again, and then, with the same intonation, “I’m sorry.”

Then Jill was walking across the room toward him. They were only a few feet apart, but it seemed to take forever for Jill to get there. So much time and Bird was shrinking and saying, “I’m sorry. You got to understand. Maybe I can do more from the inside. I’ll send you coded letters. You need a man on the inside. You need me.” Shrinking while he was talking until Jill was over him, so much taller. Then Jill slapped him across the jaw.

Claire saw the slap, but the sound was delayed. She thought of lighting and thunder.

Bird began to cry. Jill leaned in and embraced him mightily and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, man, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he might have started crying, too, their faces in each other’s shoulders. Until Jill leaned back and cupped the jaw he’d just hit, cradling it just long enough to show Bird how he felt. They loved each other. They all did.

What was she supposed to say?

Claire stood in the doorway, watching the scene like a home slide-show of someone else’s family. Was she supposed to act the part of the mother? She, who’d never been one?

Claire had slapped her own mother, once.

She would not let them see her cry. This handful of sadness was not mysterious. It was not God. It was overly human. It was a boy. It was lying on her couch. It was eating from her refrigerator and gumming up her floors and needing her.

Without a word, she walked out, locked herself in the hallway bathroom, and undressed. She let her skirt drop to the floor. She studied her figure, still under her control, though her hips had filled out. As if now, after all this time, they had something to say. Her bones groaned like an old house — small internal shifts that only she could hear.

She ran her hand down her sternum, her breasts, her stomach. She found herself thinking of Mary’s pregnant belly, and what her own body might look and feel like if she were pregnant too. Did Mary worry her child would grow up to join the army and fight a faraway war? She imagined Mary must look beautiful naked at almost nine months. She thought of Nicolette and did not try to cover the image this time. Imagining her made Claire feel less lonely. As she slid her hands over her body, she let herself remember how Nicolette had touched her so many years ago, but now recalled that moment as a ghost touching her, the cold fingers of empty space. She’d pushed Mary away and who else could she talk to about this? About what? Losing a boy who wasn’t hers, who she barely knew and couldn’t help? She couldn’t help a soul and why should she care. She hated that she could feel sorry for herself at a time like this. But she was losing herself. And she had to flee.

She touched herself, she couldn’t not. Thought she heard a knock at the door — had she locked it? — and continued to touch while she looked in the mirror as if it were the last time she’d ever see herself. As if she were saying goodbye, her reflection flying off to Vietnam to die. Goodbye, me. Say hello to the president.

Bird would stay with his family — his other family — until he was deployed. The night before Bird went home, they got drunk. At first Claire stayed in her room, reading her used American History textbook that she hid from the boys. But she could hear their laughter and music, the linty edge of Miles Davis coming through the wall. She went to get a glass of water from the kitchen. An excuse, she wasn’t fooling anyone. But when she was at the sink, she decided to make herself a martini — with lesser gin than she used to drink. It had been a while since she’d had a cocktail.

When she stepped into the den, Jill stood up from the couch and made her take his seat. Beside her, Bird was so drunk he couldn’t sit without swaying. He looked at her, but his eyes kept shifting to her shoulders and sometimes, she noticed, to her chest. He grabbed her hand with his grimy one and talked about basic training. “I’m going to come back and kick all your asses.” His eyes drooped now to Claire’s lap. “But not yours,” he said. “You could kick my ass any day.”

“You’re not joking,” Claire said. “I’m all muscle.” And she flexed a bicep for them.

Lawrence laughed. “He almost failed his physical. Carlos told him to rub his own leg a lot. They almost thought he was a fairy.”

“Carlos tried to sabotage,” Bird slurred. “But I told them I drink lots of Kool-Aid.”

“‘Kool-Aid saves lives,’” Jill said deeply in his best ad-man voice.

“Will you write to us?” Claire said.

“If you write to me,” said Bird. “Will you write to me once a week?”

“Of course, if that’s what you want. Though I’m afraid I’ll run out of things to say. It will be terribly boring here without you.” She thought to herself that she was not lying, she would try to write every week.

“You can send me your picture,” Bird said.

“All right. I’ll send you a picture.”

“Don’t do anything nasty with it,” Carlos said to Bird.

“Shut up,” Bird said. “And maybe send some bubblegum.”

“Check. Bubblegum,” said Claire. “Is that what you’ll miss the most?”

“No. I don’t know why I said bubblegum. I don’t like it that much.” He lifted his beer. “To bubblegum!” Everyone cheered to bubblegum.

Claire sipped her martini and glanced at Jill, who was smiling at her.

Bird said, “You’ll be here when I get back. You’ll take care of us.”

“No,” Claire said. “I think you’ll have to take care of me.”

“You’ll keep ending the war while I’m over there and then I’ll come back and join”—Bird hiccupped—“and join you. I won’t be gone that long.”

“We’ll still be here when you get back,” she said. She looked to Jill and this time he stopped smiling.

Bird threw up in the bathroom, and when he was in there too long, Claire knocked quietly on the door to see if he needed help. He came out with a runny nose and tear-stained face, but he grinned at her.

She took him back to the den, laid out his sleeping bag and pillow, and helped him get into it without falling. He said, looking up at her from the floor, “There’s two of your nice face now.” He reached for her ankle and held it with his eyes closed, then opened them quickly. “It’s dizzy in there.”

“You’ll just have to sleep with your eyes open,” Claire said, reaching down to peel his fingers from her leg. She squeezed his hand until his eyes closed again.

After they’d gone to sleep, she packed Bird a turkey sandwich and an apple. She threw in a roll at the last minute. No, too much bread. She took it out. He would need vitamins. He’d need to stay healthy. She would tell him that. She put the wrapped food in the refrigerator.

They were running late, seven-something in the morning. Jill was taking Bird to the bus station. He held his bags by the door, tapping his foot. It was all too fast. She was so tired, too tired to think straight. In the hall, she watched Carlos and Lawrence and Bird slap shoulders. She watched them nod and say, “I’ll write you, man. Stay good.”

She hugged Bird lightly. It was like saying goodbye to an imaginary friend.

She let go and her childhood walked out the door — her childhood, riding an elevator to Vietnam — and she went back to her room and fell asleep.

She would wake up later in a panic, remembering the lunch she’d packed and thinking in her dream state that she could run and catch him.

Then there were three. And Claire. Carlos and Lawrence lay around, lethargic. Jill started organizing a new rally, making calls, writing letters, keeping himself busy, all with a scowl. Had he thought he could stop the war before it took his friends?

Jill tried to motivate them. He delegated small jobs. He said he understood. He said they couldn’t give up now, they had to act, they had to work harder on Bird’s behalf. He told them horror stories of soldiers who came back, but never soldiers that died. Still, they weren’t moved.

Claire was leaning in the doorway and the totality with which Jill refused to acknowledge her made her feel like she was eavesdropping.

“He needs us,” Jill was saying. “You don’t want him to come home all homicidal, do you? That’s what the Army does to you. They replace all of your emotions with one: anger.”

Lawrence shrugged. “That’s not special,” he said. “Haven’t you ever felt like killing someone? You know you’d never do it, but. You feel that rage.”

Jill stared at him a moment, hard-eyed. He’d lost them. “No,” he said, “I haven’t.”

Bird’s real name was Alexander Montrose. Claire only thought to ask after he left. He was Jewish and his parents lived in Rochester and he had a younger sister who sent him cards with flowers made of glue and glitter. When she later found one he’d forgotten to pack, it let loose its dust which sparkled on her floor.

——

They were using the painting against her. Freddie’s lawyer informed her of this at a meeting Freddie conveniently missed. The lawyer’s bald head gleamed in the overhead light. Claire had stolen it, he said. It was Freddie’s, and Freddie had gifted it to his sister. “What my client is offering should be considered very generous to an art thief.” It wasn’t legally hers, and the theft, he said, demonstrated she was unworthy of financial support.

Freddie met her on the front steps of the uptown office afterward. He was out of breath. Sweat sprung from his temples. He looked old. Is that what she looked like to him?

“Was that some kind of underhanded strategy?” Claire asked. “Not showing up for the meeting? I looked pathetic in there, fighting against no one.”

“I was held up at work. What do you want me to say?” He took a deep breath, paused and spoke calmly, as one does when dealing with a misbehaving child. “I don’t want any hard feelings. You’re upset about the painting, I know. We’ll talk about it. But maybe it’s best for you if you don’t keep it, don’t you think?”

“Such sudden interest. Do you have a collector looking at it? You must think I’m such a fool. You’re probably laughing with your friends at that dolt who doesn’t know the worth of art. Well, that dolt used to be your wife and knows you better than you think.”

Freddie shook his head ceremoniously. “Why do you think I’m out to hurt you? If you can’t trust the man you were with for eighteen years, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“What about the apartment?”

“We’ll talk about it with our lawyers present.”

“I deserve ancillary relief,” Claire said as confidently as she could.

Freddie smiled at her. “You look nice today. Is that new?”

He wasn’t asking about anything in particular, just saying words. She wanted terribly to hurt him. But she lowered her gaze. She felt defeated. “When will this be over?” There was nothing she could say or do to injure this man.

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Trust me.”

——

Jill and Carlos and Lawrence were in the kitchen, mixing a strange dough of all the ingredients they could find in her cupboards, making a mess. The phone was ringing.

“I need to speak with Jill,” said Claire. They looked at each other and Carlos gave a low whistle. “I’m not kidding. Out.”

“Just joshing around.” Carlos lifted his hands in defense and he and Lawrence went to the den. Claire waited until she could hear them laughing and scrounging about for a misplaced joint. She looked at the phone and it stopped ringing.

“Bad meeting?” Jill asked. He reached for her shoulder but Claire moved away. If it was impossible to hurt Freddie, it was sickeningly easy to hurt Jill.

“I need you to leave.”

“What? The kitchen?” She waited quietly until a look of understanding pulled down on his face. “Now? You can’t mean now.”

“I think it’s time. It’s been time. You’ll find another place.” Claire eyed the tile floor, scuffed and stained almost in a pattern.

Jill, nodding. “Hell, I dig it. After everything. After Bird and everything.”

“We always said two months, and it’s nearly been.” Jill said nothing. The phone began to ring again. “Freddie’s people are coming by the apartment tomorrow,” she lied. “I need to clean up by then. I only just found out.” Jill pursed his lips, still silent. “But we’ll still see each other. I’d still like to help out when I can. The cause, the boys. I mean it.” He roamed around her face until he caught her eyes and wouldn’t let go. Still he said nothing. She threw up her hands. “I don’t know why I’m arguing with you — it’s my home.” She let the phone ring. “Jill, please.”

He moved to the window. “Sure,” he said nonchalantly, fingering the blinds. “We have lots of other options. Other dens. Other women’s homes.” He turned to her. “Let me see the painting.”

The phone stopped ringing.

“That’s my father,” Claire said, gesturing toward the phone. “He calls to tell me about my mother losing the car keys.” He had called twice in as many days, always about Elsa, but Claire didn’t have time for that now.

“I know you, Claire. You don’t tell me a thing, and I know everything about you.”

“Then you’d know nothing if I started talking.”

Claire stood over the couch, watching Jill sleep. His forehead furrowed even then. But he breathed steadily, unburdened, and his lips, every now and again, would open and close as if he were giving a speech.

She didn’t want to lose him. She’d felt panicky as the boys had packed, her skin, her fingers buzzing like she were about to drop a vase from a great height.

His eyes opened softly. She gasped, couldn’t think of an excuse, and whispered, “I do need your help.”

He sat up raggedly. “What’s wrong?”

“They’re going to take the painting.”

She headed to her bedroom and he followed her down the hall. Her neck felt hot. In the dim light of her bedroom, they sat on the edge of her bed.

She did not tell him about her grandmother. Didn’t tell him about her mother or her father, who Jill reminded her of a little. Or that the painting appeared to have triggered all of it — even events that occurred before it was painted.

She did tell him about her time with Nicolette. How she had trusted and admired her, how beautiful she was. She told him how she and Freddie had hidden the painting in the basement and she tried to have it destroyed and somehow it ended up in the wrong hands. Jill listened to the silences — as if he knew what she was leaving out.

But she did not feel better afterward. She felt, in fact, cheapened by the telling.

“Show me,” he whispered, not purposefully, but as if she had taken his voice. He was so earnest. It made her dislike him.

She knelt down and felt for it under the bed, felt him watching her. She pulled the painting out and laid it on her mattress. Standing at the foot of the bed, Jill looked at her likeness lying there in the yellow light. She let him move a hand over the canvas, touching her face as an old woman, a child, the dead one on the street.

Then, without moving his eyes from the painting, he said, “I’m in love with you.”

“No, you’re not,” Claire said.

“I could be.”

He turned and took a step toward her, and then he cupped one breast in his hand. He looked straight in her eyes. They stood there.

She stepped around him, lifted the painting, and slid it back under the bed.

“You can’t let them take it,” Jill said.

She stood, straightening her nightgown. “It’s late.”

And he went back to the den, and she slept alone, which is how it had always been.

The hospital called the following morning to say Mary had gone in for an emergency C-section — a premature birth, but not to worry. Claire was, apparently, Mary’s emergency contact. On her way out the door, she wished the boys good luck and said they could let themselves out. They pretended they would see each other again in a few days, that this wasn’t goodbye. That they wouldn’t forget her. Claire kissed all three of them on the cheek, including Jill, no different than the others, then lowered her eyes and walked out.

When she saw the infant in his little ventilator, Claire cried and let Mary think she was crying with joy for the baby. Claire forgot she was angry with Mary for getting pregnant, for not telling her, for deciding to keep it. And Mary forgot to be angry with Claire.

When she got back, the lost boys were gone. She opened a window for the noise, the honking, the comfort of the city. To fill up the empty spaces. But the house wasn’t as odd without them as she thought it would be. Nothing else had changed.

Later, she would clean; for now she fell on her bed, spent. But it was she who was empty, not the apartment. She felt, instinctively, that looking at the painting would lend some comfort. Kneeling down, she reached her arm under the bed. She couldn’t feel it. She reached farther, her arms disappearing up to her shoulders in the dark. Nothing. She flailed her hand about, desperate now for the rough edge of the canvas, withdrew her arm, crouched low so she could see, flat on her stomach. Nothing.

She’d been robbed. The boys must have left the door unlocked and some vagrant had stumbled in off the street. She stood and ran through the apartment to see what else had been taken, ended back in her bedroom, breathless. But nothing else was missing, and she knew better. She didn’t want to know.

Jill had stolen it. But why — for money? He knew the artist’s name; he might have figured it could be worth something. But he had wanted to help her, to listen. That’s what he’d said. That’s what they’d all said.

She felt as if he’d taken her and she didn’t know where she was. Squatting with his friends somewhere, maybe Alphabet City. Alone and alone.

She felt she might vomit. She ran outside, down the street to the park, throwing her body ahead of herself. As if she were running after Jill in the early evening belly of Washington Square. “Nickel bag,” the men offered under the arch as she brushed by. Air was what she needed, but she felt instead that she was breathing in car horns. It was foggy, the last light barely shining through, which gave the sky a desolate look, like cement. A man, drunk perhaps, shouldered past her, though the park was nearly empty. It was no one she knew.

PART IV: THE TIMELESS HANDBAG OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS 2004

The day Nicolette left me, I’d been seeing the reflection men for a week or more. They look how your face looks warped on the side of a shiny mug. Bottle-necked, hourglass, fun-house. They visited my room and sat farting on my pillow, telling me secrets. They had vague red eyes with which they read my books. They had no noses.

But I don’t blame her.

Those weren’t you, Dear Voices, surely. You were still inside of me, muttering quietly about pancakes and the Pope, and they were outside. They could not have been you or you them.

My own danger level was on the fritz. I hadn’t been sleeping, afraid they’d tamper with me if I was out of my own sight for too long, but I hadn’t gotten out of bed for days, in case I might do the things they told me to do. That morning Nicolette coaxed me with pancakes. I touched her face to make sure she was real. She was, but her pancakes tasted like a trick.

“Why won’t you look at me?” she said.

I bulged my eyes at her in response.

“You’re a child,” she said.

She let me read while she mixed paints across the room. On her palette they sounded like spit in her mouth. She was wearing bright blue plastic gloves. The letters flitted on the page. She tried to nuzzle me and I pushed her away.

She said I was cold to her. She asked, “What’s wrong with you?” Then she was quiet for a while. She scraped and cleaned her glass palette with a razor. “Maybe you should go back to the hospital.”

It was very dark even though it was day. She said, “There’s a man looking at you,” but she said she didn’t say that. She cleaned her special sable brushes with baby oil and set them to dry in empty chickpea cans. “You’re freaking me out,” she said matter-of-factly, and came to sit beside me on the couch. “I could try to paint you again.”

I rattled my head. She rubbed baby oil on my neck to make me laugh. The laugh was razors in my torso. The room smelled of turpentine. “You’re trying to kill me with that stuff,” I said. She started crying. To make her feel better, I said, “I’ll let you hit me in the head with a glass ball.”

She dried her eyes but then there was baby oil under them and it looked like movie tears. “What we both need is some fresh air,” she said, her cheery voice a mask.

And so we went to the theater. A Chekhov play and we got cheap seats the hour before.

All the people were fuzzy and I was seeing everything through a thick sheet of music. The usher showed us to our seats in the center of the mezzanine. The red plush tickled me through my shirt. I could hear my organs giggling like schoolgirls. I held her hand. Then in the second act, when Masha ran across the stage, I had to pee badly. But the reflection men wouldn’t let me go, wouldn’t let me miss the transition into Act Three, and the usher stared at me, choking me with that look, squeezing my bladder. Then the shuffling dark moments behind the curtain. I concentrated on those sounds because if I missed anything a crack would appear and Masha — no, the actress — she ran across the stage and looked straight at me to let me know I would fall through it, so don’t try anything funny. I thought I could hold it, I was determined to hold it — but then everyone in the audience began to whisper. They said, you are such an idiot. They said that I would lose it, that I deserved to lose it, and then the usher’s voice rose above the taunts and jeers. Pathetic, he said. Pathetic, ugly killer child — then she saw the warm wet patch on the front of my pants. Or maybe she smelled it first and she turned and found the source. She was so embarrassed she flapped her hands around, but low, no one saw those hands flapping, mimicking her disgusted heart, those hands that had touched me everywhere. She started crying. I saw a wet cheek gleaming in the dark, sun through fog, and then suddenly she stood up and left. She left. She left me there and ran in silence out of the theater, which caused a bigger scene than it would have otherwise, no one would have noticed if she’d only kept still, and there I was alone. I ran after her, a crack forming behind me, chasing me up the red aisle, and everyone stared — of course they stared. I ran wet and feet sinking. I ran and ran and ran right into the usher. He growled two words, those two words, in my ear, his teeth gnarled and jagged in the red glow of the door.

Grid of light. Broadway. Times Square. I don’t know how long I searched for her on the street that night. I was certain she was lost in the grid of light. I must have walked eighty blocks. Maybe part of me knew I shouldn’t go home, would have died if I found her there packing her things. I am still on that street, looking.

She left books. When I finally returned to the apartment, I went through each one, dozens of them, and ripped out every page that contained the two words, and when I got tired of that, I ripped blindly. The reflection men told me to, and I happily agreed. After the doctor and his dictionary, those words fought back, angry I’d tried to destroy them. And so I officially extracted them from the English language by throwing out those books. Words like rotten teeth.

Paper cuts and raw palms. I carried the books like babies stolen from the hospital, like little porcelain clowns, then opened my arms and threw them out the window. The pages glistened in the faraway light, suspended momentarily in the air until they realized the pull and fall, and then disappeared into the dark tunnel of bricks. I never saw them hit the ground. I remember how the clock — which had been my sad soundtrack then and stayed with me like a taunting sibling — I remember how it seemed to pause as it rained Hawking, Kafka, Asimov, and Doyle on the alley off Broome.

I didn’t hear those two words again until she texted me after her landmine house.

When she left, she took all her paintings but forgot her paints. I would use one of her palettes and throw a few brushstrokes on an unstretched canvas tacked to the wall, not enough to see that I lacked her skill, then would leave the apartment. I don’t know where I went — for hours I was somewhere, because I could not have been nowhere — and when I returned home I saw the canvas and knew she’d been there while I was away, painting alone in the dark.

That-time collides with now-time. I get confused. And I don’t blame her, then or now. It wasn’t just the theater where the stage gaped like her mouth. Not being near her and remembering that night makes all the blood burst from my spine. I’m a park fountain. And the theater seats, all 922 of them, are stacked precariously on my nose. The phone rings and rings and I always think it will be her, but no one is on the other end of the line. The hollow ocean sound of the empty receiver, like holding a conch shell to my ear.

But I will remember her quaking bird hands. I will take those, those homing pigeons flapping in the theater, and send them out to find her.

That night, after the books, I remember a big breeze swept through the open window and all the loose pages I’d strewn about the floor lifted like leaves and clattered in chorus. Applauding the end of the scene.

Mr. Fox leaves before lunch for a meeting. Before he does, he’s all eyes. He waves an empty can of oranges and a plastic spoon in his left hand while he’s talking to us. He says he’s got spies in the vents and then adds just kidding, and there’s scattered laughter. He makes sure to tell me that he’s counting on me and then adds under his breath, “I’ll be watching you. Even when I’m gone, I have my ways. Not kidding.” The corners of the Fox’s smile stretch hideously up to his eyes — and then he’s gone. He doesn’t say when he’ll return, it could be any time. But I’m not scared.

The air conditioner gives a perfunctory hiccup.

Nicolette doesn’t pick up when I call her from the landline at work or when I route calls from various area codes via my computer. First try, it rings seven times then nothing. The other eight calls go straight to voice-mail. Of those eight, I leave three messages using different voices. One as me: “Nicolette, just calling to say hi, see if you want to reschedule, because, you know I get worried and I hope you didn’t not show the other day because something is wrong. Okay.” Stupid. Later, one as a gallery rep: “We’re really interested in talking to you, Ms. Bernhardt, very excited about your work. All of us here at Schmidt Wilson.” And one as her landlord: “You missed rent again, or did it get lost in the mail? Please call me to clear this up.”

I google Nicolette — on a thread some jerkwad posted an address for her, requesting she get an egging for stealing an idea of his, which I know absolutely is a lie. But he’s good for something: I write down the address in my notepad.

I realize all this sounds stalkerish, but what if she’s not merely avoiding me? I’m afraid her unanswered emails and calls from different people prove something far more sinister is going on. She’s avoiding everyone in the world? Even a potential solo show? I highly doubt that. Honestly, it would be great if she were avoiding only me. If she would call back thinking I was a gallery owner (in which case I’d hang up, satisfied she called at all), or even if she called to say, “West, leave me the hell alone or I’ll call the cops,” I would love that because it would mean she’s safe and here in the world where she’s supposed to be. But she’s not. See? She’s not. Because she’s gone.

The guys start throwing the Nerf ball over the cubicle walls, playing an increasingly complex game of H.O.R.S.E. Off the door, off the monitor, into the waste bin.

I google “1950s Nicolette artist.” Someone named Nicolette, who goes by just her first name, does pop up. But the record is spotty — it’s as if she were only there for a few months or a year. There are reviews and shows for a brief period — then nothing. Just like now.

The ball bounces off Fox’s door, off the cubicle wall, into the waste bin.

“You’re up!” Orange-Socks Dave says to me, juggling the ball.

I spin around to him in my chair. “I’m working.” When I spin back, my foot kicks my messenger bag and out flops Nicolette’s old copy of A Brief History of Time. Of course I pick it up. I wouldn’t be surprised if she left a clue in there.

“Come on. You’re not really working. What are you doing?” The way Orange-Socks Dave is pressuring me, it sounds like a test. Mr. Fox’s test, to see if I’ll screw around like they will. And hence lose my job. Or someone’s test, to sidetrack me from finding Nicolette.

“I’m working,” I say again. He makes as if to throw the ball at me but doesn’t.

Chapter ten, Wormholes and Time Travel, only takes me a couple minutes to read because that’s where most of the pages are ripped out. Hawking is smarter than I am but there are things he doesn’t even know he’s teaching. For instance: if there are societal laws and people who break those laws, it only follows that for the laws of the universe there may be atoms or even people who break those laws.

Let’s think about stars. We impose constellations on stars because of our perspective, when in fact they are so far away from each other, the connection is false — those stars aren’t even next to each other; they’re behind or in front, we can’t tell. We have no depth perception when viewing outer space. But we are very good at constructing patterns where none exist — especially patterns resembling ourselves: Orion, a monkey’s face on the surface of Mars, the Virgin Mary in a potato chip.

False pattern-making isn’t just spatial. Our word “time” is one way of denoting the linear movement through the events of the universe. One cannot experience two or more events simultaneously. But that doesn’t mean point A to point B is the only way to move. There are progressions more meaningful than that of second to second. But we must live as if time were linear.

To get at the truth of Nicolette, we must think like a scientist, employing formal logic and deductive reasoning.

PREMISE 1: NICOLETTE, THOUGH 26 YEARS OLD IN 2004, PAINTED “THE SUICIDE” IN THE LATE FIFTIES.

I know what you’re thinking: no way. And I can’t expect you to feel it the way I do. But stick with me for just a minute.

Where is Nicolette? I haven’t seen or talked to her in almost a year, except for texting the other day. At her big solo exhibition in Brooklyn this past winter, she never showed. I overheard the curator say they couldn’t get hold of her. And she didn’t come to the landmine house. And now I’ve called and sent her all variety of innocuous requests from a range of email addresses and phone numbers. No one knows where she is. Because she’s nowhere.

So and therefore:

PREMISE 2: NICOLETTE DISAPPEARS FOR LARGE BLOCKS OF TIME.

My cell vibrates — my mom.

Of course she would interrupt when I’m on the verge of discovery.

I have a phone voice for my mom, another for my girlfriends (real or hypothetical), another for the guys at work. I take the phone out into the hall.

“Honey, how are you, are you taking your meds…no, that’s not why I called, don’t get upset, I know you’re smart…yes, you are not stupid, you haven’t called in weeks, honey, honey, listen, your sister, listen, I need you to come home.”

I haven’t been home since before I was sick.

“Not sure that’s a good idea, Mom.”

She says it’s a great idea and that she has a surprise for me and not to come on one of her “mall days,” by which she means don’t come when she’s busy yelling at rich ladies in fur. “You can find a cheap last-minute flight. And don’t miss your plane.” That’s her attempt at a joke about when she missed her plane the one time she was supposed to visit me, which was when I got out of the hospital for the second time last year. She never rebooked. She’s always been afraid to fly. “What else? Are you seeing anyone?”

“How’s Dad?” I ask. “You talked to him lately?”

She answers by telling me about Cinder, her oldest foster cat. “She’s so sick, I don’t know what to do. Diarrhea all over the house.” When she starts crying I hang up, pretending the connection is bad. Cinder’s been with her a long time. But she can’t cry like that for every cat. She’s had at least fifty over the years. And anyway, Cinder might be okay.

But maybe she was helping me get on track with Nicolette, asking if I was seeing anyone. Maybe I’m on the right track. I go back to my desk. I can’t find Nicolette just by thinking hard, which is how it used to feel. She could be anywhere. Maybe she’s in India. Or Israel or Home Depot. If I’m right, clap twice. I try to think straight into her mind. Maybe she joined a band of Luddites in the desert and stopped using language. Maybe she made it into the space program and now she’s on the moon. But that can’t be right. The truth is that I’ve looked everywhere. But not everywhen.

Off the computer, off West’s head, into the wastebasket.

Smack in the face. The ball falls to the floor, not the bin. Dave, in his terrorist-threat-o-meter orange socks, starts laughing. “You in or not?” he asks me.

I don’t answer. I miss the time when Dave’s socks were yellow. But is that time gone or simply stuck in the blind spot of my brain?

The laws of the universe are indifferent to the direction of time. Because we’re unable to measure the universe completely at any given point, and are therefore unable to perceive everything at once, it seems as if time moves in one direction. But that’s as silly as saying space moves in one direction. The math clearly shows time as a continuum. Time doesn’t move at all. It just is; we’re the ones moving through it.

But even through is wrong. Through is only our perception; through wouldn’t exist if we weren’t here to perceive it as such.

Nicolette knew all this. She painted with it in her heart.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Dave says. But I have nothing to say to these jerkwads unless they want to hear what is finally so clear to me!

CONCLUSION 1 (FROM P1 & P2): NICOLETTE TRAVELS THROUGH TIME.

Don’t freak out, I’m just putting it out there. At the very least, it resonates.

“Nothing? Really?” he says. “You’re not going to stick up for yourself?” Then Dave doesn’t find this funny anymore and yells to the guys, “That’s enough.” He rubs the bridge of his nose. I watch him and take off my glasses to rub my nose, too. The game is over. I’ve passed the test.

13 pills left, 157 lbs., cup-of-noodles for lunch plus bodega ice cream sandwich, 23 rings on office phone, 3 guys asleep at desks, 1 dreaming he’s a dog.

The gallery-sitter taps his pencil like he’s keeping time, counting how long I’ll stay. He doesn’t seem to recognize me, which is ludicrous; I have a very memorable face.

The Hasidim are right outside the door and I try to be quick about it; the last thing I want is them finding me in here with Nicolette’s art. But I’m a senile Holmes, scanning the painting for clues. What am I missing?

Holding two warring truths in your brain can give you one hell of an ice cream headache. They — the truths — are pulsing and repelling magnets. How could Nicolette have time traveled in order to paint this? If I can just find out why she painted it. Or broader: why did she paint anything? Why did she paint me?

The gallery-sitter’s antsiness takes up most of the room and I can’t concentrate. Each time he looks up from his computer to the window behind him, wishing the sun into setting, his face adds or loses decades. He’s in his twenties; a second later he’s sixty-something. He doesn’t know much about what will happen to him. He doesn’t know that in forty-two years, he’ll die from his third heart attack just after he’s mugged on Pitt Street in the Lower East Side. He’ll have lived in New York, and Jersey that one regrettable year, for most of his life and never have been mugged. When he first moved here after high school, he’d cross his fingers with one hand and held his keyring in the other like claws, like his mother showed him — but he’d stopped doing that years ago. So when this happens, this final event of his life, his body retaliates in disbelief. And since the mugger has taken his personals, including his phone and wallet with ID, days pass before he’s identified and his children are contacted, followed by his ex-wife who left him for a woman after ten years of marriage. You see, no one was expecting him. He never received an identification chip everyone will have implanted by then, tucked into the cleft of the wrist or behind the ear. He never wanted to be known like that, and this is what he gets. He’s survived by two children and four grandchildren, all of whom received their implants as soon as they turned fourteen, the new statutory age. Three of those grandchildren will turn out to be unimpressive citizens and nearly as miserable as their grandfather, but one of them, a red-haired boy named Albert, will be one of the first men to live on a space station for more than five years. And he will be lonely, but also very fulfilled by his work testing soil samples in space, and he won’t have any children.

The gallery-sitter grimaces like he’s just heard his fortune. I don’t know for sure, I want to tell him. I’m just guessing. But I’m a very good guesser.

And I’m imagining the gallery sitter lying dead on the street as an old man, and that’s when I really see it…in the background of the painting, just below the falling woman’s ribcage, on the street she lands on from the bridge, there is something so familiar, so common, I can’t believe I missed it: cobblestone.

With this clue, I can find the location of the painting, which will lead me to Nicolette then and now. I touch the thick gold frame. I whisper to the painting: I will find you, falling woman.

The other first time I met Nicolette, I remember she wore a bright red sundress peeking out from under a blue patient’s robe. This was when she came to paint me in the hospital. Her black hair was cropped short and greasy with summer and she didn’t belong there. We were in the activity room, the half-dozen patients who volunteered to sit for a portrait. She was whispering something to the art therapist when her eyes caught mine. She chose me first, you see.

She set up her easel in the corner of the dayroom. As I sat, I tried to be graceful, a regular ballerina. She laughed. “You look like you have fishhooks in your shoulders. Sit normal. Go on.” Sitting normal, it turned out, takes a tremendous amount of energy. She said she was going to ask me some questions while she worked if that was all right with me and that she’d start with an easy one: “Do you want to be here?”

The others watched us from across the room while the art therapist tried to draw their attention back to their pre-cut paper and popsiclestick collages. “No,” I said, “but you knew that. So it’s my turn to ask a question?”

She pulled her chair an inch closer to her canvas then pushed it away again. “Okay, why not? Ask me.” That was the only time I ever saw her nervous.

“Why are you wearing that patient gown?”

“I wanted to see what it felt like. Probably in poor taste. But so is the gown.”

“We only wear those the first day,” I said.

“Good, since it’s my first day. My turn. Why did you volunteer to be my subject?”

“Because you’re beautiful.”

She smiled and hid a blush and said, “Thank you, but that’s not—”

So I asked, “Why do you want to paint us?”

“Same answer as the robe. I’m trying on an experience that’s not my own.” She talked like I thought her paints might talk if given the gift of speech. She sounded British without the accent, old-fashioned without old jargon. “The hospital rejected my proposal for years. It’s like a fancy nightclub — you have to wait in line forever to get in.” With her left hand, she pushed her hair behind her ear two and a half times until it fell back toward her cheek and she left it there. “I’m sorry. That was—” Her right hand was meanwhile moving deftly across the canvas, which I couldn’t see. “Do you have visitors who come around?”

“My sister Jules comes to see me every day. She’s Jewish now.”

“But you aren’t?”

I told her how my mother’s religion was cats and Nicolette asked what I meant by that and I said, “That’s three questions in a row.” But I told her anyway about how my mother helped start the first covert cells of the Animal Liberation Front of the Puget Sound. “Those people in shopping malls who spray fake blood on fur coats? That’s her.” And how, in our feline foster home, my mom used to call me by the cats’ names by accident. Once, I was Piper for a whole week.

As I spoke, Nicolette put down her brush and paints and closed her eyes and swayed a little in her chair. Which, to be one hundred percent truthful, gave me just enough wood that I had to cross my legs. She was hungry for my past. I saw that in her again and again. That’s when I first realized what fueled her: other people’s stories, unfortunate stories more often than not. Only I didn’t know then what exactly was being fueled.

So I told her about the girl who jumped off the bluff, or what little I could remember — because I had to keep Nicolette just the way she was, eyes closed, lip bit — how I watched her body swing into the abyss like a dandelion seed.

Later, when I got out of the hospital, she started coming to my apartment to continue our sessions. I would do anything she told me to. She had me naked a lot of the time. I was cold, sprawled on the kitchen floor, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t care what I looked like down there. She’d handle me, touch me, moving different body parts around as if adjusting objects for a still life. Sometimes she put me in women’s clothing. Or on all fours. There was a cat series — I was the cat. She said I fell asleep once, lying supine on the wood floor beneath my south-facing window, limbs in the air. I was her best model. And her most difficult. She said so.

Nicolette was always listening. She’d ask me questions to get me talking about my family or my job or my reflection men and before I knew it the sun had set and she’d finished another painting. There were therapists and social workers and doctors who asked me questions, too. But no one listened like Nicolette. There was anguish in her listening. There was fear.

And even though she told me very little about herself, I listened too. I knew more of what was going on in that head of hers than anyone. No one will remember my name. No one ever remembers the name of the model or subject. But with her, I was part of a greater whole. A very important link in the infinite chain of her. Without me, it would all fall apart.

In the hospital that day, as she painted my fish-hooked shoulders, she finally looked up and said apologetically, “I think I have to stop.”

“Why?” I said, standing so she’d see how tall I was. Which wasn’t much taller than her.

She stared up at me a long time like I’d spoken another language and she had to translate it into her own, and she swayed back and forth a little, between the two poles of some decision she was silently making. I swayed too. Finally, she said, “I’m afraid I’ll fail to paint you.”

I hold my precious clue in my head as I leave the gallery. The cobblestones can lead me straight to the setting of the painting if I can find out more details about them. And wherever the cobblestones are, there must be another clue to finding Nicolette.

In the hallway, a group of Hasidic men huddle together. They are whispering, heads bent low, prayer fringes swaying at their waists as if to music. They’re the same men I saw at the landmine house, but they don’t recognize me. One of them says, “Something and something we are disappearing.” Obviously, they didn’t say the “somethings.” They stop talking as I approach. But stoic me, I smile, friendly and polite as can be so they don’t guess I have any inkling that they’re in on “something” here. “Killer day out there,” I say to them. They nod and wait for me to pass.

I hurry down the stairs away from them and burst out the metal doors into the bright killer day, and who is there but Jill, the elevator man. Placed there to make me forget the cobblestones. I will not forget the cobblestones. There he is with his parenthetical mouth settling into a smile, leaning against the building with his knee bent up and his foot resting on the wall like a flamingo. Him and his old face smoking in the sun.

He sweeps a hand through his thick manly gray hair in a nervous gesture. It makes me want to say the word lightning! Luckily he talks first.

“Smells like shit out here.” And the air suddenly feels like a flooded basement.

“Worse,” I say.

“It’s rich people. Rich people shit smells the worst because of all the exotic things they get to eat. Little do they know,” he waggles a finger, “stomachs don’t accept major credit cards.”

“You remember me?” I ask.

“Sure I remember you. Kid with the painting.”

“Not really with it.”

“How about that article? Did you read it?” Jill frowns. “You didn’t read it.”

I don’t tell him I forgot all about the National Geographic he gave me, but somehow he knows. I say I’d been planning on reading it today, I swear, I’m really interested.

He says, “You should be. Those bees, man. Something weird is going on. Bees disappearing all over the world.”

It is weird, I have to admit, especially since the Hasidim were just talking all about disappearing. But then Jill isn’t talking, just smoking, and I want to keep him here, so I look around for something to talk about and point to the small security camera above the door and tell him how they’re filming me all the time. So they’ll have the specimen someday in the future, to study a life like mine, like Buckminster Fuller created a specimen of himself before they had cameras everywhere.

Jill says, “And what’s a life like yours?”

There’s always the moment when I have to decide if I should tell someone I’m sick or not. It’s usually best to play it safe. There’s danger but I don’t know how much or what color level and it all looks gray-scale, like his hair. “Just a normal life,” I say.

He thinks about this for a moment. “We’re all under surveillance, kiddo. Don’t go thinking you’re special.”

Smart, but false. “You think they’re watching now?”

“Not with that one.” He points to the camera above the door. “I know all the security in this building. Half the cameras are fakes. Floors two, four, and five — fakes. The three cameras on floor eight? All real. They got some honest treasures up there. And one real and one fakeroo on the ninth floor with your painting. It’s all up here.” He taps on his skull with his index finger. “What’s your name, kiddo?” When I don’t answer, he says, “I can keep calling you kiddo if you want.”

“West. West,” I tell him.

“West-West. What are your folks, a flock of geese?”

“Then I’d be named South.”

He likes that. Then he asks what’s the deal with me and my painting.

“Mine?” I say.

“You want it, don’t you?”

“No!” I say in my best abashed voice. “I can’t afford it.”

He leans forward. I can feel the heat coming off him. “You could always steal it.”

I laugh, but he stares at me steadily. Then I have a very good idea. “To tell the truth, the woman who painted it, actually, she told me she wants it back.”

He looks surprised. “Why doesn’t she come and get it?”

“Can’t.”

Jill opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but leaves it swinging there in the hot breeze.

“She doesn’t want people to know it’s hers,” I say. “She took her name off it. They won’t let her just have it now.”

If he knows I’m lying, he doesn’t show it. I can be a very good liar when I want to and I was wondering just the other day why I never pursued a career in acting. (Not that I would ever lie to you, because I promised you the truth. All truths.)

“So, if we all want the painting so bad…” he says.

“You want it?”

Jill grunts. “I don’t know what I want. Who does?” Then he stubs his cigarette out on the wall and grins at me. “You ever stole anything?”

I shield my eyes from the sun-charged windows across the street and tell him how once when I was little, I stole a baseball mitt from a neighbor kid, then gave it to my dad as a present.

“He know it was stolen property?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t make you give it back?”

I shake my head. “You ever steal anything?”

He licks his fingers, pinches off the end of his cigarette, then slips it into his shirt pocket.

“What I want to know,” he says to a space past my shoulder, “is who would paint something like that? Why would someone paint a person jumping from a bridge and dying? That would fuck a person up to have that painted of you.” He takes in a clunky, orange-level-threatening breath. “That artist must have been a real bitch.”

That’s when I ram my head into the wall. I say the word lightning to myself. Lightning. Lightning. Light-n-ing. This way I won’t smash his face into the wall.

AXIOM 1: NICOLETTE IS NOT A BITCH.

“Hey. Hey, are you crazi?” Jill grabs my shoulder and spins me to face him. “Are you nuts? What the hell are you doing?”

I can feel the stucco imprint on my forehead but from the look on his face I can tell I’m not bleeding. He lets go of my shoulder and says, “I’m sorri, man. I wasn’t thinking. You knowing her and all.” He sounds careful. I’ve scared him. “Hey, are we cool? I shouldn’t have said that. Are we cool, man? West?”

So he’s gotten hold of both words. He thinks he can just spit them out and everything will be okay. Well he’d better be careful.

But I don’t tell him that. The words won’t come, which is always or usually a sign that they shouldn’t. Nothing yet has fallen out of the sky. Now that these words are back in the language, they are neon arrows pointing to the mission. Pointing to my form above me.

“West,” he says slowly, rolling my name around with his tongue, examining it in there like an expensive piece of sushi. “That’s a real good name. Maybe your folks didn’t want the West to die.” Then he tells me about people in Africa who name their kids after the last names of American presidents. Everyone’s first name is Kennedy, he says. “And once I actually met a kid named Hitler, first name, but that was years ago. Well, I didn’t really meet him, but a friend did. Well, he wasn’t really a friend. More like a traveler.” And he says that now the Italian government is paying Italians to name their babies Benito, not in honor of Mussolini, but because it’s a nice historic name and they don’t want it to disappear. His wrinkles catch the sweat rolling down his face. “What if I’d been named Benito? History is full of dead names.” Bees, names, something disappearing. He scales the building with his eyes, searching for the sky. “I should get back to work.”

But I don’t want him to go just yet. “Have you always been a custodian?” I ask quickly. Then I try to roll my eyes up hard enough that they slap my brain.

“Used to be a lawyer,” he says. “Did some law work, anyway. Then I was sort of an art dealer for a while.” Jill nods towards the door. “But I needed more job security.”

He makes himself bigger, shoulders hunched yet tall, like a bear over his prey, and pushes through the big metal door. But then he looks back over his shoulder like he’s running from someone. I want to ask him: What are you hiding from? I want to tell him: You can stop running now.

The horse cop on the corner of Sullivan keeps squinting at me like I was joking with someone about stealing a painting not forty minutes ago. Up and down the block, old women emerge from narrow doorways where they’ve always lived, and I wonder if they knew Nicolette. Hating them and wanting to grab their ankles and beg them to give me answers. Maybe they saw her around when she painted here decades ago. I need someone to rub my ideas against. I need a Sancho Panza. A Watson. Or maybe I need a Sherlock Holmes and I’m the sidekick. If it weren’t for my meds, I could be both. I am following myself blindly.

At the library, I posted a cropped image of the cobblestones in the painting in a cobblestone forum. And this is where HstryNick04 led me. HstryNick04, facing his own glowing rectangle in New Jersey, or New Zealand, the New Jersey or New Zealand that exists only microseconds away, said that there were only two streets in the city where this kind of Belgium brick had been laid, and one was Sullivan. Somewhere HstryNick04 knows exactly where I am right now.

I stand where there were once Belgian bricks and hold up the image of the painting on my phone to compare. Sketch and write down all the numbers and signs and addresses that are visible from the angle the painting seems to have captured, and other angles just in case. If I can find the street in the painting, then I can find the falling woman, and if I find the falling woman who I feel in my bones is still alive and breathing, then she can lead me to Nicolette.

Have you ever noticed that if you stare at bricks too long, they begin to move? There’s something in the street that I can’t see. I look both ways then get down on my hands and knees in the middle of the road. Pressing my face to the grimy street, how the asphalt shoots off pinpricks of light and the whole city is vibrating against my cheek. Somewhere down here there is a clue.

During our sessions in my apartment, Nicolette painted picture after picture after picture of me. Dirty, grotesque images — empty crab shells and deer decaying on the side of the road. She said all of them were me. A rat in a sewer nibbling at a book. A pile of manure with a white chicken on top, pecking. The apartment was filled with me. Paintings of all the abject corners of my life. She spread my dirty face everywhere.

Of course Jill would think the painting was cruel, since he obviously senses the woman in the painting is alive, too, not just an object of Nicolette’s imagination. How hurt the woman must have been upon seeing her suicide. I would like to revise my first axiom.

AXIOM 1: NICOLETTE IS NOT A BITCH. BUT SOMETIMES SHE DOES THINGS THAT MIGHT SEEM HURTFUL TO THE UNINITIATED.

But over and over again she said she failed to paint me. That was her word — failed — not mine. I told her she never failed at anything, that it was all right. I had to remove the brush from her hand and say, stop, you’ll hurt yourself.

But why did she think she failed? Nicolette could only have thought herself a failure if she was trying to do something beyond the physical paint on canvas, because she certainly didn’t fail at the act of rendering. Perhaps she meant she failed to capture it all. To capture. Some think photographs capture a soul — why not paintings? And she couldn’t paint without a story — stories about my mom, hallucinations, the girl on the bluff. Sometimes stories I’d told her a thousand times already.

PREMISE 3: NICOLETTE LISTENED TO MY STORIES, PAINTED THE EVIL AND DISGUSTING SIDES OF ME, THEN SAID SHE’D FAILED.

She painted hurtful images, but because of Axiom 1, I know she wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to help me. So why would she paint the ugliness she saw to help? Maybe she was trying to paint it away. If she could just paint it, secure it to canvas, if she could transcribe me, maybe she could steal my disease.

CONCLUSION 2 (FROM A1 & P3): WHEN NICOLETTE PAINTS, SHE CAPTURES THE BAD ELEMENTS OF HER SUBJECTS’ LIVES — PAST, PRESENT, OR FUTURE — THUS REMOVING THEM FROM REALITY.

And of course! She painted that woman in order to save her, too! To keep her from jumping. She took away the possibility of suicide, plucked the event right out of her timeline! Like a common pickpocket, no, like a fruit picker — she yanked it like a grapefruit from a tree of possibilities and stuck it into her own timeless handbag of unfortunate events.

But if she does have this power, she could steal any potential event from the life of her subject. She could do unspeakable harm. But she doesn’t! She takes only the bad. Poor, poor Nicolette. What a burden to take on those evils. I have to tell Jill/Benito! The painting wasn’t an act of malice. It was an act of salvation.

But then how did Nicolette time travel to paint the woman in the first place? According to Hawking, you’d need to implode stars to get enough energy to create a wormhole. As we all know:

A2: ENERGY CAN NEITHER BE CREATED NOR DESTROYED.

So, and:

P4: TIME TRAVEL WOULD REQUIRE A MASSIVE AMOUNT OF ENERGY.

By painting that unfortunate event and trapping it in the image, Nicolette must have found a way to harness said event’s potential energy and use it as time-travel currency. Before it burned a hole in that sad but nifty purse of hers.

C3 (FROM C1, C2, A2, & P4): NICOLETTE USES THE ENERGY SHE CAPTURES FROM PAINTING TO TRAVEL THROUGH TIME.

I must find the falling woman, who is now most certainly alive — for the painting is keeping her from jumping. Because if one of those unfortunate events, for instance the suicide, were to actually occur — well, it’s impossible according to the logic, but if it did, it might, mightn’t it, rip a hole in something important.

With my glasses off, it is much easier to press my cheek firmly to the street Nicolette painted in the fifties. But the fifties mean something different to her than they do to the rest of us. They might, mightn’t they, be tomorrow from her perspective!

There is no reason to assume that the way we experience time and space says anything about the way it actually is — the math shows us as much and so does literature. Western stories rely on linearity, but some African storytellers will tell multiple stories simultaneously and one story will trip into another, entwining past and future. They’re on to something true and here’s that truth: there are many more dimensions than we can possibly imagine. Our inability to experience them only goes to show that our experience isn’t sufficient to say anything about anything!

A young couple passes me and points. From where I am, pressed to the ground, the bottom halves of them edge quickly around the corner. I feel terrible for them. They have no idea what a beautiful, magical world they live in.

The saddest part about all of this is that Nicolette will never experience her own end. She’ll never be her own old woman. She pops up here and there, reappearing and disappearing without a trace — which explains her absence this past year, and why her phone stopped working.

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.”

“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 Mary. 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.

They were near enough now that their knuckles touched. Claire felt grateful she had gotten to see Mary change, that there was beauty and life in her that she could still discover. She almost said this out loud.

“What about Leo’s father?”

Mary straightened her shoulders, shifting only slightly from Claire. “What about him?”

Claire didn’t know what about him. She took a slug of wine, the bottle already half gone.

“I still haven’t told him,” Mary said.

“But he would help, wouldn’t he?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“All right,” Claire said quietly.

“He’s married with two kids, for Christ’s sake. And the midterm election was just before Leo was born. I knew what he would have said and I didn’t want to hear it. Not again. The speech is always the same. That waiter years ago, or a congressman now, there’s no difference. They must all have subscriptions to some top-secret newsletter for chauvinists. I bet they rehearse it in the mirror.” Mary deepened her voice in her best impression of a man. “This is your decision and I support you, baby. Whatever you choose, baby. But it’s bad timing, there’s no money, it’s better for everyone including the baby, baby. Trust me, baby.”

Claire laughed, but stopped when she realized Mary wasn’t.

“The number of times I’ve heard that speech and had a hundred bucks shoved at me to get it over and done with.” She held up her fingers as if counting out the three men, then rested it on top of Claire’s.

“Did you love him?” Claire asked, her eyes on Mary’s unmoving hand.

“Love him? I don’t know. Yes? Maybe I still do.” Mary lifted the bottle halfway to her mouth then seemed to forget it and put it down. “I know him. I know him better than he knows himself. But I don’t want him to know. Leo’s father will never know he’s Leo’s father. I only have a few weeks to lose this pregnancy weight before the book party. A year and still I haven’t lost it all.”

Claire took the bottle from Mary and quickly downed another mouthful. “You’re going to see him there?”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘What weight?’” Mary shrugged. “It’ll probably be the last time I see him. Until Leo’s old enough to ask questions. He’ll probably get picked on in school and need an ego boost someday and I’ll tell him who his brilliant father is.”

So Mary thought he was brilliant. Claire hadn’t realized she’d been assuming, hoping, that Mary hated the man.

“The book was one of my best, though. Don’t you think?”

Claire nodded and drank again. She had the galley somewhere. She’d read most of Mary’s books, six in all, but she hadn’t wanted to pull this one off the shelf.

“I’m sorry I’m going on like this. I think I’m a little tipsy.” Mary took the bottle back and finished it off. “Remember when things were simpler?”

“No. When was that?” Claire smiled. “I do remember when your boyfriends were simpler.”

“Dumb as rocks is what they were.”

“What happened to the one who tried to make a film about the people in the sewers?”

“Him! He only lasted an hour down there and he ran out screaming that his camera was stolen!”

Mary cackled, her mouth wine-stained. Claire tried to ask about another, but only laughter escaped her. Then Mary hiccupped and they both doubled over. They fell back and their bellies burned. There were no words. Nothing was all that funny, but neither of them could stop. They laughed until they forgot they were people.

Then Mary kissed her on the mouth. Once. And they lay flat on their backs, beside each other in silence for a long time, no longer laughing but breathing hard and deeply serious in a way that was related to laughter, and their stomachs ached from the physical memory of it.

It was a first, but it wasn’t new. Claire’s heart raced in that familiar way. And not only because she had fantasized about Mary without realizing she was fantasizing about Mary — it was as if they had kissed before and were returning for more. She felt so grateful she could cry.

They moved closer to one another. Even after their bodies pressed, they did not stop moving closer. Here was the hollow above Mary’s collarbone. Here was Claire’s neck. Her elbow as it had never felt before, shimmying under Mary’s cheek. Kissing and pressing and kissing hard, until Claire closed her eyes, locking the moment inside her.

“What are we doing?” Claire whispered.

Mary answered silently. Her lips were chapped. Claire remembered that Mary’s lips always bled in winter. She felt the filaments of Mary’s lips on her own, the coarse parts of them. She felt Mary’s fingers moving down her body more than she felt her own body. Claire was rigid, nearly immobile for most of it, outside of herself looking down from above. She grazed Mary with her own hand. She had never touched another woman, Claire said again and again. Mary only laughed and took charge, undressing Claire as if she were undressing herself, fluid and natural. Claire was inadequate, prudish. But, in feigning knowledge, she felt more sexual than she ever had. She bit Mary’s lip hard. Their breasts pressed together. She kissed Mary’s arms all the way up and down, giggling. She sucked on her shoulder. Sucked on her knee, and upper thigh, and ribs, but nowhere too close. She moved so they were diagonal, so their smooth sides and hips could touch, so she could know what that felt like, too. She liked imagining the two of them from above, watching the film of their encounter. She felt as if she had never been touched by anyone.

In their excitement, they made such plans — Claire would move in not just for the month, and not only to help with Leo. Mary said she was afraid they would become a cliché, finding this in middle age — they’d be one of those couples that everyone envies, the kind whose happiness comes late and twice as big and here it is.

They both fell asleep on the floor, naked, wrapped only in each other. Claire dreamt that men broke in and shot them both clean in the forehead, and an older Leo found them dead. The neighbors came, and the coroners, and no one knew how the two women ended up there together, the tenderness between them. No one knew their story and it was as if their love hadn’t happened at all, and Claire woke with a dread that took the form of thick saliva. In a dream state, she rose to close the curtains. She stood above Mary, who lay unharmed and still curled around the empty space where Claire’s body had been.

Mary had had other women. But why me? Claire wondered. Why now? Perhaps she symbolized the stability Mary had never had. She was Mary’s oldest friend who was still alive. That meant something in this city, this neighborhood. Come to think of it, Mary didn’t have many friends — more often lovers whom she’d call friends in a pinch. Perhaps she made Mary feel sexy for the first time in a long while. Poor lonely, prudish Claire, Mary must be thinking. Claire was just there.

It was Sunday morning. Mary was long awake, working at the typewriter at the bedroom window. Claire watched her from the bed. The new spring sun made the paper gleam and Mary’s morning hair was caught up with light. She turned and smiled.

“It’s you,” Mary said tenderly, moving to the edge of the bed. She wiped the hair away from Claire’s forehead. “I know you.”

Claire pulled the sheets up to her shoulders, embarrassed.

“When did you get so modest?” Mary said, as if they’d woken up naked together on many occasions.

Claire gripped the hem of the sheet to her as she sat up. “I’m not.”

“You’re having second thoughts, aren’t you? I knew it. I made a mess of things again. Now you’re going act awkward around me. You’re going to want to leave.”

“I’m here,” Claire said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I know it’s new. And strange. But mostly—”

“Mostly it’s perfect,” Claire said. “The strange part is how normal it feels.”

“Ginsberg normal or Park Avenue normal?”

Claire lifted the sheet away and drew Mary in close.

As if on cue, Leo started crying in the next room. And in that moment, when Mary pulled away, Claire was grateful for the baby, and she hated him. Mary sighed and stood, but Claire stopped her. “I’ll get him,” she said, searching for her nightgown in the rubble.

In the blue-wallpapered nursery, it took a moment for the bundle of blankets in the crib to become a small human in her mind. She folded over the bars and lifted him up, his whole body one shape, irresistible and deeply frightening.

The warm body against her chest, the small breath. Tiny hands pulling her hair. And a face — a real face, chubby and red from crying — looking back at her. She could still feel last night’s red wine hiccup in her veins.

Bouncing Leo in circles around the nursery, she caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror with a carved giraffe frame. Did she look younger, like she felt yesterday? She had always wondered why one could not be seen as one felt. Or could she? She was momentarily afraid that strangers on the street would be able to tell she had been with a woman. But no, she assured herself, her appearance had not changed overnight. She was Claire; it was a fact outside of fact. And yet, she hardly knew herself. She hadn’t even known who she loved until now. If you are the thing, how can you know the thing?

Along with night windows, her grandmother had avoided mirrors; she was afraid, perhaps, that it wouldn’t be her own reflection staring back at her.

She wanted to look in the mirror just long enough to unknow herself, so she would know what it was like to know herself. Like tensing a muscle so you know what it is to relax. Or undoing a word by repeating it again and again until its meaning is lost. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry was the word she’d repeated as a fearful adolescent, until it was not-sorry, the word with which she realized all words were just a smash of sounds.

But all Claire could see was that her hair was a mess. She tried to believe it didn’t matter. She repeated the thought, it doesn’t matter, until it was a belief. Then she shifted Leo to one arm and used the other to pat down her hair. Leo, who had quieted down, was facing away from the mirror and it looked like she was holding a ball of white blanket, like she was merely playing at being a mother. There, staring back at her from the mirror, was a new woman.

From the nursery, she could hear Mary making coffee. The watery chuckle of the percolator. Silver spoon clinking porcelain. A woman waiting for her; it didn’t feel new at all. She had always been the woman she was in that moment, fast in love with Mary. It had never been otherwise. It would never be otherwise. Claire could not imagine not knowing Mary’s skin. Or her chapped lips, or the weight of Leo in her arms. The smell of black coffee being poured for her. That baby’s breath. That Mary air.

1968

The subway was stalled and humming in the dark. They’d been stuck for nearly half an hour and Claire was running late, but at least she had a seat. It was the first day of her new temp job — shuffling papers for the Democratic Party Office. She’d been at Mary’s for nearly a year, but this was the first morning she’d left when Mary was still asleep, curled on the chair in Leo’s nursery.

The man’s voice was slurring a plea. Claire’s eyes rested on his red shoes across the aisle, which were stepping on the tail of his big red coat, which was in turn covered in a layer of grime. He had only one arm; a plastic cup for money was tucked between his stump and his chest. He was begging for change. Claire was undecided whether she should reach into her purse. And then he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head.

The sound of it was the most interesting part. It was and was not connected to the movement of the train, which lurched forward again as if he shot it into motion. But there was another sound under it, which she heard with a different ear, a more fearless ear. The sound of skin.

There were distant screams, muted like they were underwater. An announcement came over the intercom, people started pushing into adjacent cars. She heard the screams, but didn’t see anyone with an open mouth. Blood garnished the windows and floor. She felt damp, but no blood had reached her. Her chest touched the back of the woman in front of her as they all pressed forward. Someone wept. A man was praying to Allah. A newspaper flapped up and down on a bench, but there was no breeze. It could be that easy.

Claire felt expanded. As if she herself had been shot and her arms and heart had spread out and splattered against the subway windows, touching every vein of the city — the witnesses on the train, Mary and Leo at home, her old apartment on Sullivan — spreading slowly, as a pool of blood, over her whole life.

Above ground. She was asked her name; she was processed. She was a witness. She was on Fourteenth Street. Where was it she’d been going? She turned south to Mary’s and then remembered her new job and turned north again on Seventh Avenue. It should have been a fifteen-block trek but then there she was, transported with no memory of walking, to the threshold of the new box-filled office, fluorescent light glaring off rows of filing cabinets that were hers to master.

“Did the agency teach you how to use our filing system? Do you have any questions?” a mousy woman was asking.

Claire shook her head no. Then she said, “Did someone kill himself on the subway?”

“What?” the woman asked.

The woman turned to a man in the corner, who Claire hadn’t noticed until then. “What did she say?”

The man said, “She means the guy who jumped in front of the train the other day. Is that what you mean?”

“No,” Claire said. Immediately, she knelt on the floor in front of a box and started working, organizing donors by date. She was to write thank-you cards to them in that order, and file them away forever. She heard the mousy woman attempt to whisper to the man, “Another weird one. Try a different agency next time?”

Watching the first pile of papers diminish and disappear into that gray metal grave was like watching a plant die. She pictured the man in the subway again, but this time filtered through the lens of a painting — a particular, fragmented style of painting: what the scene might have looked like if witnessed by Nicolette. What kind of grave would the man on the subway be buried in and would he have a funeral and who would attend? But then Claire was not sure whom she’d been thinking of. She worked efficiently and the mousy woman — whose name happened to be Claire as well — stood over her, humming her approval intermittently throughout the day. Claire found herself hoping that the other Claire would come by and tell her again how well she was doing, how much better she was than other temporary employees. When there was too long an interval between these interactions, Claire worried she was doing something wrong. The work, though not difficult, took enough of her concentration that she did not think of anything, really, except that the mouse’s skirt was frayed slightly at the hem and that there was something she wanted to tell Mary when she got home.

At Mary’s door, she struggled with the keys and dropped them twice. Mary must have heard, because when Claire rose from retrieving them, there was Mary’s face in the now open doorway. On it, she saw her own face reflected — a vague horror. Claire wished then that her first night with Mary had not yet happened, that she still had that to look forward to.

“What’s wrong?” Mary said looking past her, a silent “now” tagged to the end of the question.

Claire did not tell her what was wrong that day, or the next. She brushed her teeth, kissed Leo in his crib, crawled into bed like any other night. She went to work the next morning, and the morning after that, and almost enjoyed the monotonous task of thanking strangers and filing them away, garnering praise for a job well done. She was quieter than usual, but her coworkers didn’t know any different. And Mary didn’t seem to notice until Claire nearly dropped Leo while soaking him in the tub. Her mistake was apologizing too profusely.

“What is wrong with you lately?” Mary said, leaning into the bathroom. “You’re walking around like a zombie.”

“Yes,” Claire replied.

“Yes what? Did you even hear what I said?”

“Yes,” Claire said, finally making eye contact.

“What did I say?”

Claire looked up at her blankly. She searched Mary’s eyes for an answer, watched her face change strangely. It wasn’t until Mary kneeled down and touched Claire’s face that Claire realized she was crying.

“I’m crying,” Claire said matter-of-factly, as if she’d stated she were hungry.

“Why are you so private with me?” Mary pleaded. “You have to let me in. You have to.” It was so sincere and desperate, that plea — it reminded Claire of Nicolette attempting to explain the portrait.

But Claire shouldn’t have started at the beginning. She told Mary about the painting and about Nicolette, and about telling Nicolette about her grandmother locked in an asylum and slapping her mother, and the many interpretations of the word hereditary. She told her about Tomasz and the old man from the wine receptions and about Jill.

Mary listened and didn’t interject, not once. She was sitting cross-legged on the tile floor now, holding Leo in a towel, while Claire was perched rigidly on her knees. Finally, Claire got to the part about the man who shot himself in the subway.

Mary broke the silence before it settled. “Why didn’t you come home to me right away? You just went to work? What is wrong with you?”

Telling Mary did not make her feel better. It made her feel frail. It made her feel stupid and needy, stuck in her own story, validating it all by saying it out loud, breathing new life into it. With gnarled teeth the stories latched tighter to Claire’s ankle.

“Really, Claire. How could you have kept that to yourself? You need help.”

“Thank you,” Claire said, not as scornfully as she’d intended.

“Well, I don’t know what to say to fix it,” Mary said. “I can’t help you. You need someone who can.”

“You don’t have to fix anything. There’s nothing to fix. You sound like a man.”

Mary banged her head on the porcelain ledge of the tub and growled in frustration. Leo cried out at being jostled so. But when Mary lifted her face, it was with a smile and drawing toward Claire. “I do not sound like a man,” she said, burying her head in Claire’s neck, Leo between them. “You’re the one who saw someone die, and I’m acting like I need comforting.”

It would be nice to feel her own body again, particularly against Mary’s. To be in herself, not above herself. Claire let herself sink into Mary, let her skin feel Leo-skin and Mary-skin, the softly overwhelming smell of baby powder, the everything of Mary. She did need Mary. She needed Mary. She needed.

It was nearing April and there was still no sign of spring. After putting Leo down, Mary sat in the nursery chair, making herself comfortable.

“Aren’t you coming to bed?” Claire asked in the doorway.

“He’s getting ill, I can tell. I want to stay with him a while.”

“Come to bed with me. I need your body heat. It’s so cold.” Claire took Mary’s arms to lift her from the chair, but Mary didn’t rise.

“I’ll be in later.”

Claire dropped Mary’s hands and looked down at her. “I want you here with me,” she tried, which was more or less what she’d intended to say. Just as Mary could feel Leo’s sickness approaching, Claire could feel Mary drifting away. She’d seen Mary do this before, but she was never the one being strayed from.

“I am here,” Mary whispered. “You’re being paranoid. And you’re going to wake Leo.”

“But I want you.”

“Right now?”

She knew if she brought it up again, Mary would drift further, perhaps even say Claire was clingy — she knew that was how Mary saw her. But it would pass, and Mary would return. Claire was certain she would.

She turned to go to bed alone, but remembered at the last moment—“The stove’s been finicky lately, have you noticed?”

Mary didn’t respond.

“The gas isn’t catching. Should we worry about affixiation? At night — can you imagine? Maybe that’s why Leo’s sick.”

“Asphyxiation, not ‘affixiation,’” Mary said.

“You think it’s possible?”

“No. We don’t have to worry about that. Or anything. You’re always worrying about something.” Leo stirred, and though he didn’t cry, Mary stood and lifted him from his crib, his head on her shoulder. She bounced him up and down.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said, “I didn’t mean—”

“I know you didn’t mean.”

Claire stood in front of Mary and caressed the back of Leo’s new hair. “We should call someone though. Get it fixed.”

“Whatever you want. Call someone.” Mary turned her back to Claire so that Leo faced her. He let out a watery burp, then said something that sounded like, “No way.”

“Who should I call?” Claire asked.

“You’ve been here how long and you don’t know how to find a phone number? I can’t take care of everything. You’re exhausting!”

Claire stepped away from them both. She was suddenly so tired her eyes began to droop. She said, “I’m just talking about the stove.”

The day the postcard arrived, they brought the mail in together, and Claire did not have to make the decision of whether to read Mary’s private letter or not.

Claire stared at the front — a watercolor of a cactus almost touching the moon, arizona scrawled in neon pink across the sky — while Mary held it up, reading the back. It was brief, apparently, because Mary looked up after just a moment, with a confused expression.

“What does it say?” Claire asked.

Mary stared at her as if she hadn’t heard, then disappeared with it into the bedroom.

Claire imagined and reimagined that letter in so many different ways that she went to sleep with that man’s handwriting scrawling out her dreams. He wrote with a woman’s script, in her mind, and told Mary he loved her and would leave his family for her. That’s what Mary had always wanted, wasn’t it? Though she’d never said it out loud. Morning after morning, Claire woke up angry with Mary for something awful she had done to Claire in her dreams, though Claire could never remember the specifics. Only the feeling of dread remained.

Two weeks passed without mention of the postcard. The easiest, most uneventful two weeks they had spent together in many months. Over dinner together (flavorless casserole — one of Mary’s recent attempts at cooking), with Leo in his high chair talking up a storm of mostly nonsense, Mary asked Claire if she ever overheard insider information about the upcoming election at work in the Democratic Office.

“You know I only daydream,” Claire said. “Some spy I’d be.”

“What do you daydream about?” Mary asked with food in her mouth, no manners at all.

“You, silly. And getting a dog. Do you think we should someday? For Leo.”

“You daydream about getting a dog?”

“Maybe. If we ever move out of the city.”

Mary took a large bite and chewed slowly and silently. When she’d swallowed, she said, without much humor in her voice, “You want to move out of the city. Who are you and what planet have you taken the real Claire Bishop to?”

“I suppose I wouldn’t move. You’ve been watching too much Star Trek.”

“Only because you hate it.”

“I could be convinced to sit through one tonight. Is it on?”

But Mary lowered her gaze, suddenly flustered. “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll go to bed early.”

“Want me to fix some tea?”

“I’ll clean up,” Mary said.

“I won’t say no to that,” said Claire. Mary never cleaned.

While Mary cleared the table and began scrubbing the kitchen spotless, Claire turned on the set for Mary’s show and paused on the evening news. A woman was reporting about a rocket launch. In the middle of her report, she was handed an update on a small card. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot dead, she said.

Claire stood. “Mary,” she whispered. But Mary didn’t hear her over the running water.

“Can you put Leo down?” Mary called from the kitchen. “Bedtime.”

“Mary,” Claire said louder, still staring at the screen.

Mary turned the faucet off and came to stand beside Claire in the middle of the room. The reporter corrected herself. He was wounded, not dead. He was not shot in a car, but on the balcony of his hotel. He was being taken to the hospital. Then she introduced the weatherman.

Mary and Claire stood side by side, listening to the weather forecast. Mary’s hands dripped foamy water to the floor. From his high chair, Leo started crying over the prediction of icy sun all week. Mary held him and rocked him and cried with him.

Walter Cronkite, in color, reported there were already riots in Harlem. Mary and Claire looked out the window in the East Village. No one was on the street.

“I can’t believe it,” Claire said hoarsely. “I can’t. I can’t.”

Mary bounced Leo at the window, her back to Claire. “It’s not about you.”

“I know that,” Claire said faintly. “You have to make it fit in your mind.”

She edged closer to Mary, and Mary put her head on Claire’s shoulder, and Claire wiped tears from Mary’s cheek, and that was all.

Claire took Leo to his nursery. He wailed incessantly, which was not unusual but Claire thought perhaps it was because he felt the night’s sadness. She held him for a while and cried too, but when she’d finished he hadn’t yet. Then she left him to cry himself to sleep. She didn’t know it would be the last time she’d kiss his wet, red face goodnight.

Claire went to work the next day, answering calls, accepting donations for the Democratic Party in the wake of King’s death. She pretended to know the answers. She consoled a crying man on the phone, promised him they’d find justice in court and through legislation. She stayed on late in the office and took a cab home, afraid of the riots.

No one was home. Perhaps they’d gone on a walk. The bed was made, which was strange. No socks on the floor. Mary’s things were all put away. No — Mary’s things were gone.

Mary’s disappearance came at her straightforwardly, like a logic puzzle. Claire checked and rechecked the drawers and closets. The apartment was empty, the bureau empty. The Leo-sounds gone, along with all of his clothes and diapers. The stuffed lion Claire had bought him. Nothing was left but some old manuscript pages, the crib and the giraffe-framed mirror. The apartment was immaculate. Claire should have known when Mary started cleaning the night before. Wiping away all traces of herself.

Mary must have been upset about the news, wanted to get Leo away from the city and the riots. But no — Mary must have been planning this since the postcard arrived.

She sat in the middle of the couch, rigid, waiting for footsteps on the stairs, for the door to creak open. She thought about breathing — how easy it is to forget how to breathe if you think about how to breathe. New York pressed on her chest. She called out Mary’s name, once, when she heard a neighbor fumbling keys. She waited. She fell asleep for what felt like minutes, but when she woke, the morning sun was creeping through the blinds. For those few hours, she had escaped.

Still half asleep, she tiptoed around the apartment in a daze, then landed in the middle of the living room floor — where she and Mary had first been together. She got as low as she could, face to the floor, and sniffed.

Somehow, Claire managed to undress then dress herself, though she felt this task could easily escape her, too, if she thought about the mechanics. She hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, but she didn’t need food. Then she began to walk. East Tenth Street to the East River, then south and west, past the men in dirty frocks fishing in the slime. They smiled at her and she thought she smiled back but from the look on their faces she might have stuck out her tongue at them. She walked through the Financial District and Wall Street, veering around businessmen and tourists, through the narrow cobblestone streets, back again to the water. She looked for a communal reaction in people’s faces. She looked for huddled groups of mourners, but life went on as normal, unaltered; it did not pale in the face of tragedy. A train was down, and exasperated commuters waited for a bus near Battery Park. Men hailed taxis. Tough boys spit on the sidewalk, teetered on the curb, testing their distance from policemen on horseback.

A woman in a brightly colored pantsuit said to her friend, “And he said, ‘And that’s the way it is’ like he does for every news story. That’s not the way it is, people getting assassinated.”

“Yes it is,” the other said. “Good people die.”

Claire walked until her ankles throbbed, and then until they stopped. When she decided she ought to be hungry, she ate a slice of pizza on the corner, licking the orange grease off her fingers. She walked north along the Hudson, tucked behind factories where there was hardly a sidewalk. She was dusty all over. When the sun dropped and New Jersey lit up magenta then red, she was on West Tenth Street, looking south to where she’d been. Skyscrapers stacked one on top of the other, like a pile of toys swept to the side in a messy boy’s bedroom. They shot the sinking sun back east, all those hundreds of thousands of windows glinting a childish, sherbet orange.

After dark she found herself walking, quite by accident, to her old apartment. She pretended to pat her pockets for keys and did not have to wait long for someone to exit. The man hardly glanced at her, and she slipped inside easily — they’d gotten rid of any security, along with all other signs of dignity over the last years. The elevator was completely covered — floor, ceiling, and walls — in black tarp, apparently for renovation, but it was still functional. She rode to the top floor, then climbed the remaining steps to the roof.

Claire walked to the ledge and slipped out of her flats to flex her blistered feet. The clouds hung low, and every few moments a biting wind would reach her. The sky was starless. But there was her view: uptown, the buildings lit up the underside of the clouds. She’d forgotten to miss this.

She stepped unsteadily onto the low ledge, dizzy and terribly afraid. The wind blew her hair around her face. The air had a gelatinous quality, an underwater feel, so that she was seeing the seaweed-bound buildings through fish eyes, peering at drowned skyscrapers.

She would not be able to tell Mary about her day over dinner.

But she had said too much already. She should never have burdened Mary with all her anxieties, all those words. She was standing on the ledge not because of Mary, but because of Mary-leaving — its own proper noun. What else could she do but climb up to the roof where she had once smoked a cigarette with Nicolette? The artist who’d vanished with all the others to whom Claire had told her story.

From the ten-story roof, the treetops were a galaxy of bare branches with barely a hint of new leaves. Claire could almost touch them, she wanted to touch them. A world like this, where kisses like Mary’s were possible, where lips were dry and ready, where there was war and people who devoted their lives to stopping it and did so from Claire’s very own den — this was a world too beautiful for her. She didn’t belong in it, not for a moment.

To stand in love with the world, but to hate yourself in it to an equal degree — those two ends should not coexist. Yet they could, they did.

She closed her eyes and saw the painting. It was beautiful. She believed more strongly in the self trapped in the painting than she did in the self trapped in the world on this roof. The self in the painting could not die. Yet that woman was forever waiting to jump, was jumping, had jumped. Every moment of her life.

She lowered herself down and sat on the low wall, her back to the city but with most of her weight over the ledge. Her palms were sweaty. And if she let go—

Did part of her think herself extraordinary because she felt doomed? She felt a kind of losing kinship with the dead man in the subway. But he’d had witnesses. Claire would not.

Dr. King would have thought her silly and selfish, mourning herself instead of him, or others, not that he would have thought of her at all, an unextraordinary woman with a mortality problem. He knew neither death nor not-death were extraordinary. And he’d seemed to know death was coming. But Claire imagined even he must have been frightened, alone in that room. Both men — the anonymous man on the subway and the man whose name would never be forgotten — would have plaques on their gravestones of differing sizes, giving the dates of birth and death. Only a dash to sum up the in-between.

She closed her eyes. She let go of the ledge. Her hands found air. They stung with anticipation.

The door opened. And just as easily as she let go, she caught hold again.

She heard the big metal door slam shut. Who could it be? She did not open her eyes. Was it Mary? Perhaps Mary had come to save her after all.

A man cleared his throat. “Mrs. Bishop? Is that you?”

Tomasz.

Claire opened her eyes, gripping the ledge. He seemed not to notice or register the implication of her position. He said nothing about it. He didn’t run to her. He approached lazily and offered her a cigarette. They smoked urgently to fill the silence. He was always finding her in precarious situations. Or, perhaps, he simply came up to the roof for a smoke every evening of his life, and she was the one bumbling onto his stage.

“How’s your wife?” Claire said, something to say.

“Thank you for asking.”

The fact of his ignorance or indifference made her doubt what she had been about to do. Maybe she never tried, never flirted with death. And who would know? No witnesses, no one to record it for her. She didn’t have a scrape or bruise, no scar on the wrist, no emergency room, not one scrap of evidence; it may as well have not happened at all. Only the painting, the stolen painting, contained any knowledge of it — and Nicolette, wherever she was.

“Do you need help with—” Tomasz asked.

“Yes. No. There’s still a few things in storage. I don’t have much left.” She drew on her cigarette too hard and coughed. “Tomasz. Can I ask you, please. I’m not upset.” He looked at her suspiciously. She took a deep breath, tried not to seem intimidated. “Why didn’t you destroy the painting when I asked you? Years ago. I’m not upset.”

He gave a small shrug. “It was too beautiful.” He nodded and looked past her to the city. “Colder this time of year than usual.”

She leaned in closer to Tomasz, unsure if this was invited or not. “It is.”

She hated him, but Mary would find him handsome. If she were to sleep with Tomasz, might it make her feel better to pretend that Mary would be jealous? She tried to picture what Mary was doing at that moment. If she was sitting down to supper with her congressman lover. If she set the table and cooked for him and poured his wine. And then it occurred to her — Mary had only recently made forays in the kitchen. Was it in preparation of becoming that man’s housewife? Before last month, Mary had cooked nothing but overdone noodles; she called it a kitchen phobia. Had she been testing recipes for him on Claire?

She took another drag, shakily, then gagged, tried to reclaim control of her body. Her throat burned. She couldn’t swallow. Her stomach clamped. Then, holding her cigarette aloft, she vomited all over Tomasz’s shoes.

1969

Claire started with the phonebook but came up empty. The galleries were also a dead end. She went to the Black Kettle, the café where Nicolette and Freddie had first met, and asked around. She called upon other artists, people who might have considered Nicolette a colleague. She considered searching for Nicolette’s family but remembered she’d only had her father who’d died in the war. But which war, she didn’t know.

An art collector with one gold tooth and a lolling Southern accent looked at her askance in the lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, where he’d suggested they meet; he obviously didn’t have an office. They sat close on a plush red divan. “Why do you want to know?” he asked, not wasting any time. “You writing a book?”

“No,” Claire said, tilting her face away from his sour breath. “We used to be friends.”

“Well, all I can tell you is I haven’t spoken to her since, what? Before Christmas? That would be Christmas fifty-nine. I’d given her an advance on a piece I’d commissioned but it never came through. Ran off with my wad. If you find her… Hell, don’t look at me like that. I don’t care about the money. She was a dame. We had a thing for a while. Did she ever mention me? You being friends.”

“Fifty-nine? Are you sure?” Claire asked. She must have disappeared only a short time after Claire knew her.

“I never forget a transaction with a beautiful woman. But you won’t find her. I’ve seen it before and I’ll never learn — never give an advance to an artist. She’s probably dead. Overdosed on something white.”

“Don’t say that,” Claire said.

“You need hope. That’s sweet. Someone said she changed her name and moved to India. Working as a shaman now. Imagine that.” He leaned his face in closer to Claire. She held her breath. “But take it from me, if you ever write that book: heroin sells best.”

The collector put Claire in touch with another subject of Nicolette’s, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd to receive her call, to suddenly be a part of a community of Subjects.

They met at the oyster lounge in Grand Central. He was sitting alone at the long cedar bar in cedar-colored lighting. When she spotted him from the doorway, she was so surprised by his good looks that all the blood rushed to her face; she could taste the crimson shade of it through her cheeks. He waved and she managed to make her way to him steadily enough. She guessed he was, like her, in his mid-forties. He wore a pinstripe suit a size too small and chain-smoked. His blond, sweptback hair was not unlike Freddie’s. He kept looking at Claire’s ears and jaw and eyebrows as he spoke, never directly in her eyes. He bounced his knee up and down to some song in his head, and seemed so excited to talk about Nicolette and his portrait that Claire could hardly get a word in edgewise. Sometimes his bouncing leg touched hers.

“She was strange, but I’ve met stranger. Right, but she was the real thing. She could be as weird as she wanted. She did a really funky painting of me. I was all covered in boils and lesions and my hair was falling out. I looked disgusting,” he said proudly. “I still have it. Hanging above the radiator.”

“Quite the conversation piece,” said Claire.

His knee paused briefly. “What’s your portrait like?”

Claire coughed and took a sip of her drink. She wondered what disease he might have had that only Nicolette could see. Or perhaps the artist had simply wanted to preserve his beauty. Nonchalantly, she said, “I tried to jump off my roof but couldn’t manage it.”

“You want another drink? Gin and tonic?”

“Tom Collins.”

“That’s what she painted?” He lifted a finger and searched the bar with his eyes. To the bartender he said, “Two gin and tonics.” To Claire, “So you hang it above your radiator, too?”

“Tom Collins,” Claire said. Then, “I don’t have it anymore. I don’t know where it is.”

“You don’t know where it is! It’s priceless!”

“It was stolen. It’s a long story.”

“You’ll have to track it down. I know my way around the scene. And under it.” He clicked his fingertips together in front of his face like a movie villain and Claire laughed. “Assuming that’s why you found me. And you want it back.”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I want it.” The bartender set her drink in front of her; it splashed over the edge and he wiped it with a towel. She waited until he left. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from her at all? Since she painted you.”

“Not a word. Makes me sound like a chump, but to be honest I thought we were friends. We went out a few times. Never saw her after.”

“Did you try to find her?”

“No.” He shook his head, then turned it into a nod. “Yes, I tried.”

“You liked her.”

“How could I not?” He looked down at his glass and shook the ice around. “You kind of look like her.”

“She’s half my age!”

“What would you say to her? If you found her at the end of this quest.”

“I don’t know. It’s not a quest.” Claire took a dainty sip of her drink through the small straw, then downed half of it from the rim. She had rehearsed it many times over the years, but the speech had morphed from hatred and revenge into something not altogether dissimilar to gratitude. She took another sip. “I suppose I’d say, ‘Thank you, now duck, because I may hit you.’”

“Really.” He smiled at her ears. “Me too.” It seemed he could control the number and placement of his dimples if he chose. He noted her glass and raised an eyebrow. “Another?”

Over the next hour, he ordered her two more. He said he could see why Nicolette would want to paint her. Claire wasn’t sure if this was a comment on her looks, or the ugliness that Nicolette could pull out of a person. But she didn’t care. Claire eyed herself in the spotted mirror behind the bar. When he’d paid the bill he said, “Let’s go make fun of tourists.”

They went up the staircase overlooking the enormous, dirty lobby of Grand Central. He lifted a flask from his jacket.

Claire laughed. “Are we allowed?”

“We don’t care.” He pulled her by the arm to the banister and they leaned over, looking below. “I love looking down at the crowds. Makes me feel bigger than them.”

“Of course it does,” Claire said, surprised by the coolness of her tone.

“So, you know me now?”

Claire took a pull of whiskey from his flask and looked at him over the bottom of it.

His eyes panned the floor below, the bustle of beggars and lowlifes rubbing ankles with families heading to their summer homes. He pointed out one man sweating in a trench coat. “You can always spot a tourist. See the way he tries not to check the clock? They’re so lost. But why pretend they’re not? They’d be much happier. Someone might even help them.” Then he wet his fingers by tipping the flask and sprinkled whiskey down on the heads of unsuspecting passengers. Claire gasped. He did it again, until finally one woman felt the drops and looked skyward. They turned around quickly. Claire covered her mouth to hide her delight. “You try,” he said. “Make sure it’s a fat one.” But he didn’t give her the chance. Under that immense domed ceiling, he grabbed her waist and pulled her against him. He kissed her ear, her neck.

“Not here.” Claire glanced at the strangers who brushed past without taking notice.

He took her hand and darted with her down the stairs. She let him pull her. Her body was loopy. As they ran across the lobby, Claire called to him, “Can you imagine we almost lost this building last month? How could they tear it down! Is that why we met here?”

He smiled mischievously and shook his head. “I’m about to show you why.” He pulled her through a wide door and onto a train platform. A train was waiting there, not yet boarding. Only a few people milled about, a conductor some ways off. Stepping to the edge of the platform at the very front of the train, near the doors they’d just come through, he turned to her and said, “Come on then.”

He grinned. Then he jumped.

Claire watched in amazement. He stood five feet below, between the tracks. He bowed his head slightly and, as she was standing above him, peeked theatrically up her skirt. He held his arms up, apparently to help her down. “No,” she mouthed. She glanced down the platform and back through the doors. No one had any idea what she was about to do. She squatted low, took his hands, and jumped down beside him. Her head whirled in slow motion. He backed her into the alcove.

In the tunnel where the trains pull up, where thousands of passengers walk by every day and never look down, they groped one another. Claire wanted to be horrified. Or she wanted to be hungry for him. They were tucked in a corner, mostly in shadow, the wide train engine looming before them. Only the conductor might see, if he were to board and peer down at a precise angle. Their private, public space. Kids had been here before, the walls marked with graffiti and slogans:

BOREDOM IS ANTI-REVOLUTIONARY

OFF THA’ PIG

FREE HUEY

“We’re too old for this,” Claire said, helping him undo his belt. He kissed her mouth like he knew it well, had her lips sitting on his nightstand for years. “I feel old,” she moaned, “don’t you?” He mumbled something that sounded like “shut up” as he lifted her skirt. “You’ll help me find it? The painting?” she said, his blond hair in her mouth.

He ripped her stockings down and laughed insanely. He propped her up against the black, sooty wall. His shoulder hit her jaw. She kept her eyes open to keep from feeling like she was erasing Mary.

“Wild painter girl!” he laughed into her ear.

A single cold nail jutted from the wall close to her neck.

“I’m not her,” she said. It almost felt like a lie.

As he moved against her, she trained her eyes on the graffiti scratched on the adjacent wall:

BE CRUEL

PART VI: I WILL FIND YOU, FALLING WOMAN 2004

I’m on the roof of the gallery and they’re coming for me.

The din of the protest has faded away. The sun is nearly down now, hidden in a nook between two buildings, disguising itself like another window with another sun glinting off it. There’s a good breeze coming off the Hudson and I’m alone, waiting. I’m good at waiting.

Jill and the painting are gone. There’s a chance I’ll never see them again — but I don’t believe that thought. That’s a liar thought.

Footsteps sound in the stairwell. They’ll be here any minute. I can hear their numbers, the way they move in packs. The Hasidim. They’re finally here to take me like they took my sister. I wait for their canes against my back.

5.5 pills remaining, 4,313 surveillance cameras in the subway system (only 2,156 actually work), 250,000 war protestors reported, 500,000 actually gathered.

But you missed what happened. Sometimes you leave and I don’t know where you go. Let’s jump back in time half an hour. You’ll have to imagine your own whirling time-travel sounds.

When I found Jill — when I find Jill — he’s a flamingo in the alleyway off Twenty-Third, his usual stance, one leg bent up on the wall, smoking his cigarette — but the opposite of bright pink. In the shadow of the dumpster, he blends into the air and the building. There’s a big industrial garbage bag at his feet, like when I first met him. I guess I expected to see a whole entourage of paid-off thieves. I’m disappointed it’s only him. With his leather-gloved hands, he throws me a pair of cheap black knit gloves meant for kids and a salmon-colored ski mask.

“It’s salmon-colored,” I say.

“Is it salmon? I’d call it pink.” He shrugs. “Hard to find black. It’s summer.” I gesture with my eyes at his mask, which just so happens to be black. “Had mine a few seasons.”

“What if they catch me because of the color?”

He says there’s only one real camera on floor nine, where we’re heading, black and white — which he tells me I should have known from heist movies. He digs through the garbage bag and pulls out two Styrofoam bowls. “Put these on your shoulders. Under your shirt.”

I look at him as in, um…? He rolls his eyes like I should’ve known this, too. “On the off chance we’re actually recorded — which won’t happen because I know which cameras are fakes and which aren’t, and I’ve studied their directional and oscillational abilities — they won’t be able to recognize your body type. Get it?” He pushes them into my hands. “Trust me.”

I slip on the bowls and the gloves, which stretch just enough to fit over my hands, and am about to put on the pink mask, but Jill shakes his head and tells me to wait until we’re in the front door, that we don’t want to look suspicious to passersby.

“Did you bring the cash?” he asks.

I dig the five hundred bucks out of my front pocket and hand it over.

He shoves the money in an empty Marlboro pack. “Thanks,” he mumbles. He seems embarrassed. Then he pinches off the cherry of his cigarette, sticks it in his front pocket, and stands up straight. I take a breath so deep it hurt. He might have gotten me a girl’s mask, but at least he looks ready.

He nods. I nod back. The bricks are yellowing their faces in the early evening sun. Sure, there are words in me, like “What am I doing?” and “This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done I’ll rot in jail and get raped by big hairy men,” but cottony fear suffocates them out, my lunch ticking in my stomach like a bomb. I want to ask for water. We edge out of the alley, and Jill looks up and down the street, like in the movies. Then he unlocks the big metal door and we’re in, just like that, as if we’re doing nothing wrong.

It’s surprisingly loud in the quiet of the closed-up building. We slip on our masks and I hear the sound of a washing machine coming from somewhere else, or maybe the sound of a very gravelly female voice humming a Bulgarian song? There are the words out of control and dumbass lameboy tapping out of the walls.

Jill wraps himself around the stairwell like he’s a blanket of snow-melt, silent, dripping. He’s obviously had practice with this — there’s a secret strength in him. I bumble up after. There are our staccato footsteps arguing with the static of the building, an old snore and hum. There is the battle in the walls — rats and other long-toothed animals. A city centipede crawling faster than me up the stairs. It slips into a crack where I can’t follow.

“So you’ve done this before?” I ask, out of breath by the tenth step.

“Shh.”

“So you’ve done this before?” I whisper.

“No. Sort of. I’ve done this before, yes, all right. Never galleries. Only homes.”

“You’re an art thief?”

“I prefer to think of myself as part of the growing field of art valuation. Fell into it in my twenties.”

His voice is being broadcast by the metal handrail I’m holding. I’m afraid my voice would do the same so I keep my answer brief. “Hm.”

“Yeah, so, what’s your day job?”

“I predict ideas.”

“Quiet down.”

Quietly, I tell him I work for a predictive marketing firm.

“Fancy,” he grunts.

“I make spreadsheets,” I say. “Were you at the protest today?”

“What’s another face in the crowd?”

“What about Vietnam? I read how you helped those people.”

“How do you know about that?”

“Simple Google search,” I tell the old geezer. “You were in the Village Voice like five times, and once in the New York Times.”

“Twice in the Times, I think. I thought twice.”

Between flights three through nine, Jill whispers to me the story of the painting. He says it lingered on the black market for a long time, then it was sold in auction since it was never reported as a theft. Bought by a woman is all he knows. Then there was a twenty-year gap when no one knew where it was, until one day the painting ended up here, apparently donated. They probably had it in a storeroom for years. Then he tells me about his own heists.

“I follow all my own cases online,” he says. “Good to keep tabs on that sort of thing. The Interpol website’s pretty comprehensive. The FBI’s okay. I mean, not all the jobs I’ve done get flagged. But it means something if a painting you grabbed gets posted under Recent Thefts, right up there with The Scream. Which, have you been reading about this? Stolen in broad daylight. Just like us, hey. It means something, to be monitored. Means I’ve touched something important.”

“So how did our painting get on the black market in the first place?”

Jill is suddenly out of breath and says he guesses it was stolen from Claire Bishop’s home. He tells me how sometimes there’s a buyer before you do a job, and you don’t want to mess with those guys. And if it makes the five o’clock news, they usually report the value and hence your percentage of the market sale and how can you turn your back on those dollar signs? But he says our job here won’t make the nightly news, what with the GOP in town. And the authorities try their best to not let these things go public and show how easy it is to rip off fifty-thousand-dollar works of art.

We reach the ninth floor, me drinking my own linty sweat from my upper lip. Jill unlocks the gallery door and says he’ll keep a lookout and I nod solemnly because that was the deal — he wasn’t going to do the actual deed.

Inside the gallery, everything is ringed in salmon-colored fuzz — the hardwood floor, the walls, the desk-sans-gallery-sitter. There’s a siren in the distance. A clock that I never noticed before ticks so loudly my bones vibrate. The sounds of trying to be quiet. My own muscles berating me. It’s fine, I tell my muscles, I’m about to finally have something real to offer Nicolette. I’m helping her, taking it away from the Hasidim.

And there it is, waiting for me. The falling woman’s hair glows; I can almost feel it on my own scalp. Her arm drooping over the frame, glistening like she is sweating too. The whole thing shines out, its essence reaching for me, bright as lightning as I lift it from the wall.

Time falls around me. The gallery walls crumble brick by brick. Through the bouquets of mortar and dust, I see the ancient meadows of the city. They hover above the sidewalks, the traffic cones, running down to the estuary and the sea. I see the layered shinbones of our ancestors, and feel the soil between my toes, the wild marshes of the Manhattan. Beyond that is the liquid future, shimmering and proud. The high clouds. The satellites. All shot through with light.

Briefly, I crawl into the painting: the cobblestone street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the body of a woman falling. Every brushstroke an apology.

I am the little masked thief in the corner of the image, nearly invisible, walking down the painted street. I tap my foot on a cobblestone, smudge it.

This feels right, it doesn’t matter if it’s stealing. Me and the painting: forever.

The snap of a nail hitting the floor. A streak of lightning in my peripheral vision: the sound of the alarm. In the shape of a lightning bolt the gallery wall splits open. All of us, for a brief and infinite second, are sucked into the seam of the world. Slipped through the crack, disappeared like we never existed. And I don’t know who I am and no one will know us because there is no one to do the remembering but no one will forget us either, since there is nothing to be forgotten. The world is quiet because it is gone. In the end there is just me and the painting.

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.

“I don’t have bedbugs. The neighbors do,” I say. “It’s preventative. Just a couple days.”

They look at each other and pretend to communicate with their eyes but I know they’re speaking different languages.

Jules and Dan have already eaten but they sit at the kitchen table and watch me scarf down some bland veggie pasta. “Why didn’t you join us at the protest?” Jules says.

“You went?”

“Don’t look so surprised,” Dan says. “Jews are born protestors.”

“It’s in our nature to take issue with an indifferent leader,” Jules says. “We get mad at God if He’s unjust. Even though maybe He’s always unjust. Maybe humans are more moral than God. But he set the standard, and we have to let him know if He’s not living up to it.”

“Easier to let Bush know,” Dan says.

“But what good did it do?” I say.

“We’ll see,” Dan says. “But even if it looks like nothing, it’s not. Protesting is survival.”

I pour hot sauce over my pasta and take too big of a bite.

“Slow down,” Jules says to me. “You’ll choke.”

“Don’t tell him how to eat, he’s a grown animal.” Dan winks at me.

It’s true I feel hungrier than I’ve ever been and I can’t slow down. I am hungry! I could eat my own arm, I could eat the moon. This pasta will do nothing for me.

“We could watch a movie,” Jules says.

“We could watch the game,” Dan says.

“It’s my night to choose,” Jules says.

“Let’s let West choose. Why are you so quiet, West? You should take a cue from Jules and speak up more. Jews know how to talk. It’s why we’re so smart, isn’t it?” he sort of asks Jules. “It’s how we learn. You can’t form ideas with only you in your head.”

Is he insinuating he knows something about my mind? I want to tell him that it’s just as hard when it’s not just you in your head.

“Do you have any meat?” I ask.

“Yes!” Dan says, as if he’s won an argument.

And then I realize what I’ve been throwing down my gullet. His food, in his kitchen. Would Dan hurt me? How can I take the chance? I spit out the bite I just took into my napkin.

“What’s the matter?” Jules asks. “It’s good.”

I think I’m going to be sick.

“I’m not hungry anymore.”

After cleaning the dishes, I’m about to close my eyes on the couch when Jules comes out of the bedroom cradling a big book. She sits on the arm. Dan’s out of focus, reading the sports section at the table, eavesdropping.

She speaks quietly, looking at the coffee table. “I called your doctor. We think — Dan and I think — that you should go back to the hospital. Before things get worse.”

I sit up. “How’d you know I wasn’t sleeping? You might have woken me up just now.”

“And, West? Dan and I, we’re taking a…” She looks at Dan, who is no longer pretending to read. “A vacation.”

“Where are you going?”

She drums her fingers on her knees, stalling. “Well, nowhere. What I mean is, we need some time. From everything. We’re under a lot of stress. Dan thinks maybe—”

“We think,” Dan says.

“We think that you, your illness, might be causing me too much stress. And right now I don’t feel good and need to try resting. West. For me. Do you understand?”

“Because of the baby?” I ask. Jules just stares at me.

What if the baby ends up like me? That’s what they’re thinking.

“You told him?” Dan asks.

“No,” Jules says, still staring. “He just knows.” She looks at me the way she does. “Tomorrow — hospital. I’ll go with you. It’ll be better this time, shorter. To get you back on track.”

This is all Dan’s doing. He wants me out of the picture. I shake my head. “Tomorrow’s no good. Big project at work.”

“Is there?” Dan says, coming toward the couch.

“Why do you care?” I ask.

“West, please.” Jules touches her stomach lightly, looking down like she’s calling it West. “I’m sorri I upset you. But you can’t act like this. You’re lying to me again.”

“You’re the real liar,” I say, “keeping your big secret.”

“Do you hear yourself? You sound like a child. You sound like yourself. That’s how he always used to talk to me,” she says to Dan.

She’s right — but how can I help that my old child-self possesses me like a ghost?

“How did you know I was pregnant?” Jules asks. “You better not have told Mom yet.”

“I’m glad he knows,” Dan says. He grabs a blanket off an armchair and drapes it over Jules’s shoulders and says, “Now he and I can celebrate with some wine, and you can watch.” He throws me a grin, to throw me off. His teeth are too big.

Jules shoos Dan away, but her shoulders relax. “I want to show West something.” She opens the book she’s brought, pointing at a glossy group photo with both of us tucked in the middle. It’s a high school yearbook. “Key club, or whatever, remember? Mom made us join.”

“You look dumb,” I say and try to smile.

“You look dumb,” she says.

“Why do you have this out?”

“One of my old classmates just died. We weren’t really friends, but—”

The book on my lap, I flip to my class photos — it’s from my senior year and Jules’s freshman. All the kids look like jerks in their photos, even Miles and Ralph. Nicolette’s picture is the only one that doesn’t make her look jerky, she just looks like her — Nicolette.

Nicolette.

“What’s she doing in my yearbook?” There, right in the B’s, on the same page as me, is Nicolette’s face in a half smile, not quite prepared for the release of the shutter.

“Oh, that was so sad,” Jules says, looking over my shoulder at the picture. Dan’s looking too, and I try to shield her face from him.

“How did she get in there?” I ask again. Slowly so they understand.

“I thought she was gone by then, too, actually. They must have used an old photo.”

“You know her?” I ask. My words feel like they are coming from a memory. Not here and now.

“How could I forget? West saw the most horrible thing. Did I ever tell you about that, Dan? The girl on the cliff?”

Dan’s looking hard at Nicolette’s face. I slam the book shut.

“Huh.” Dan straightens himself up, suddenly uneasy. “Enough reminiscing. You’re supposed to go to bed early,” he says to Jules. “Did you take your medicine?”

Jules groans. “No. Of course I forgot to pick it up.”

“Something’s wrong.” I try to tamp down my smile. Something is beautifully wrong. How did she get into my yearbook? My past? Is that where she’s been hiding all this time?

“Nothing’s wrong,” Jules says. “Just some pain.”

“I’ll run down to the pharmacy,” Dan says.

“No, I will. I can do that.” I stand quickly and give them my politest smile. “Least I can do, showing up uninvited.” Nicolette found her way into my past. But why would Jules remember her while I don’t? Some sort of time-traveling ethos? I can’t even begin to think about all the implications while I’m trapped in here.

“Thanks?” Jules says, a little surprised. “I’m going to take it that this new attitude also means you’re okay with the hospital tomorrow?”

“If it will make you happy.” Obviously, there’s no time for hospitals.

“I’ll call the pharmacy and tell them you’re allowed to pick it up.”

Dan glares at me and Jules smiles. I grab the painting and open the door.

“You can leave that,” Jules says. “West? Leave it.”

“It’s a present, you’ll peek,” I say, ducking into the hallway before they can stop me.

Down in the lobby, there’s a camera pivoting toward me like a duck’s head, filming me as I slip out the front doors and cross the street. If I could piece together the footage of my personal surveillance, from all the storefronts and ATMs and museums I’ve ever walked by, I could make a film of my true self.

I couldn’t think in there, with their threats of hospitals and Dan’s razor smiles, but out here, on the night street, Nicolette is everywhere.

Nicolette is in my past. Do you see how brilliant it is? But why? All I can think is she’s trying to send me a message. What better way to contact me than traveling back and inserting herself in my timeline, my very own high school? Artfully, through a story I told her, about the girl on the cliff. That must be where she’s been since she disappeared last year: fourteen years in the past, dropping breadcrumbs for me to find throughout time. But she wouldn’t have jumped. Would she? It must be another clue.

The tube swings at my side as I walk west. Maybe Nicolette is trying to tell me something about the painting — how to get it to her, where to go in order to do so.

But something is off with Jules and it cannot be a coincidence it’s happening now. Is it about her baby? Could they be after it? I have to find a way to once and for all convince Jules she’s keeping dangerous company. But I can’t protect anyone from inside a psych ward.

I shield my face as I pass the pharmacy with Jules’s medicine. There’s a homeless man wearing a plastic halo from a bachelorette party.

The homeless man is right about one thing — Jules is an angel. She’s too good. She can’t see what’s going on in her very own home. The nerve to go through my sister to get to me!

There’s a red no-walk sign and I can’t go any further, the universe slowing me down.

The Jews know suffering — they know it in their blood and in their bones. Every generation, Jews have been forced to deny their identity, or sleep on ashes. Jews were considered the mad ones — they chose ashes over un-knowing themselves; that’s the story, over and over again — except for our great-grandmother. My heritage is pretending to be sane with the rest of society. And Jules, the martyr, believes that’s an offense she must repent for. Anyone stuck between two worlds like her is bound to be impressionable. Dan’s been feeding on that guilt.

P7: DAN ABDUCTED JULES INTO HASIDISM BY PLAYING ON THE VERY COMPASSION AND GUILT THAT LETS HER LOVE ME.

But I don’t care if it would save a whole people from vanishing. I don’t even care if Jules would choose to sacrifice herself to keep them from disappearing. I can’t lose Jules. And Dan knows that! He thinks I would do anything for her, even give up Nicolette. But he’s wrong — I’ll save them both from the cliff edge, and Dan doesn’t know that.

C6 (FROM C5, A3, & P7): JULES IS A PAWN; SHE IS BEING HELD AS RANSOM TO PERSUADE ME TO HELP THE HASIDIM USE NICOLETTE TO STOP THEIR DISAPPEARING.

Dan nearly found out where Nicolette is hiding, looking at the yearbook. If I don’t get Jules out, she’ll get hurt, and the baby, too. People will drop like anchors.

I won’t let that happen. I loop counter-clockwise back around the block, past the homeless man with the halo, past the pharmacy, back to Jules’s building.

And there they are. The same two cops, on cue, materialize on the opposite corner of First Avenue, walking straight toward her apartment.

Kennedy airport is a carnival of pissed-off people. Not a minute has passed in my mind and here I am, at a counter facing a woman with a double chin and mean eyes, booking the next red-eye west with my nearly maxed-out credit line.

This is the only way. And Jules knows it, too. It was like she was handing me a clue on a silver platter and I almost missed it. The yearbook was obvious, but did you catch that bit about me being my child-self? On a silver platter over a bed of lettuce with some gefilte fish. I’m supposed to start thinking like a time traveler.

The past: it’s the only place to escape the Hasidim and their agents, A.K.A. “the cops.” They know where I am, always, in the present, and I can’t fight them from here. Jules will be disappointed in me for not getting her medicine. She’ll never know I’m saving her life, and they might take advantage of her with me gone. But if this works, I’ll stop it before it even began.

And that is where I’ll find Nicolette. In my past, I’ll give her the painting, and she’ll remember how good I am. She’ll know me again.

But Watson, what of the physics? You’re thinking that only a pro time traveler can move through time and space, that a newbie like me would be lucky to travel a millisecond in the same geophysical position. But maybe, you’re thinking, just maybe, if I find the right nexus point in my past, I can stay in the same place but emerge at Nicolette’s exact time coordinates.

That’s what I’m thinking, too.

In order to paint and therefore time travel, Nicolette had to get at that point of original pain. She had to return to the origin — the nexus — of her subject.

Which is why I’m going to my place of origin — that moment when my true self diverged from my imperfect self. That’s the portal, and it just so happens to be in the dragon’s lair. Straight into the arms of a woman who has herself run from the law. She’ll help me hide the painting, she’ll understand. To get there, I must travel three hours into the past, EST to PST. There, the physics will become clear.

You, dedicated listeners, will never leave me. If you are in the trunk of my brain, it is by your own volition. Even when I’m an embarrassment, even when I break the law or run away into the past, you are with me every step of the way.

The airline clerk taps her screen and clucks at me. “Well? There’s a middle seat.”

I smile and say to the mountain-faced woman, “I’m going home.”

PART VII: THE THAW OVID, NEW YORK, 1982

1

She moved up there in winter so she never saw the ground. Covered in snow, December to May — the house she grew up in, and yet she couldn’t remember the land it stood on. There was a garden that must have been beautiful once, a low fence around it for the deer and pie tins tied there with twine, clacking in the wind. The woods behind and tracks from animals she never saw. Footprints, every morning a new pair circling the house and never once a glimpse of the thing they belonged to.

And above it all was a low, constant rumble, like something was always hungry. Snow slow-grinding into itself.

Her mother’s breasts seemed to have vanished. This was the first difference Claire noticed, a strange-looking man propped behind her mother in the doorway, his hand on her shoulder. She’d had such a nice body; Claire remembered being jealous of it once.

“Come inside, please,” the man said in a low voice. “You must be freezing.” He had a thin, graying beard that made Claire think of how snow looks dirty when it thaws.

Claire fingered her luggage on the porch a moment longer, finishing the count of her inhale, tricking herself into breathing — something she’d learned from her meditation teacher in the city. An icicle hung so low she had to crouch around it to get in. In the musty entranceway, she hugged her mother delicately. The old woman stayed stiff, not raising her arms in return.

“Come in,” her mother repeated in her slight German accent, though Claire was already in. The man nodded approvingly. “You look different.”

“I’m happy to see you too,” said Claire.

The nurse’s name was Michael. He could have been handsome if he weren’t so worn. There was no ring on his finger. If her mother was in her right mind — or her original mind, anyhow, it was never quite right — she might have tried to fix them up.

“Leave those where they are for now,” he said, gesturing to her luggage beside the door. “We have to stay on schedule.” It was evident he was annoyed that she’d arrived late, though it was still early evening. He’d made chicken stew and said he would stay for dinner and talk her through everything.

The eat-in kitchen was, of course, still down the hall, but Claire walked gingerly, as if the rooms might have shifted in her ten-year absence. She’d been up to Ovid for her father’s funeral the month prior but hadn’t come by the house; she couldn’t brave it then.

Once they’d begun to eat, Claire excused herself to search through the fridge, where she found a bottle of hot sauce, the cap dried on. Michael watched, waiting for her to sit before saying, “Elsa can’t have spicy food,” as if Claire planned to splash it in all their bowls.

Claire smiled into her stew. “I don’t see any butter beans. They’re her favorite.”

She felt her mother’s eyes on her and expected some comment about her recently dug wrinkles or the roots showing in her dyed-blond hair, which Claire couldn’t decide whether to keep a natural gray or not. Elsa was eyeing Claire like she was a child sitting at the adult’s table. She’d done something wrong already, it seemed.

“Am I wrong? Butter beans aren’t your favorite anymore?” Claire asked.

“Try to ask one question at a time,” said Michael.

Elsa cleared her throat. “Is it your birthday today?”

“No?” Claire said. “Why?”

“How old are you now?”

“That’s quite a question to ask in front of a stranger,” Claire said.

“Always answer her questions directly,” Michael said, “or you’ll confuse her.”

Claire thought he must be enjoying this. “Fifty-seven.”

“I’ll have to get you a blanket,” Elsa said, as if this followed logically. Her voice was scratchy with irritation, like an old recording. It still had that bite Claire remembered.

“A blanket? I’m not cold. Are you cold? Is she cold?”

“One question at a time,” Michael repeated. The nurse smiled at Elsa condescendingly and said to Claire, “She means napkin. Elsa, where are the napkins?”

Elsa glared at him, then turned to Claire.

“How long are you visiting?”

Claire ate a large spoonful of the bland stew. She didn’t know how long she’d be there, if this was temporary or permanent. Or at least as permanent as Elsa herself.

The nurse said, “This will be a very big change for her, you being here. She’s going to be on edge. I hope she eats.” He paused and looked at Elsa. “Eat your food.” He lifted his spoon dramatically to his lips. “Chew and swallow.”

“I don’t mean napkin,” Elsa said. “I said blanket, didn’t I? I haven’t made up Claire’s bed yet.”

“That’s right, good, this is Claire. I made the bed this morning, Elsa. Do you remember?” He turned his attention to Claire. “I’ve prepped her. Explained who you are, that you’re coming home.”

Claire stared at the man across from her, him and his loose, gray turtleneck. It was time he left. “That last visit we got in a fight. I don’t think she’ll soon forget that.”

The nurse coughed and looked for his napkin. “I’m afraid she’s progressed. Did you get the pamphlets we sent you? The ones about activities? Who to call if her behavior changes? I’ve written everything down and left instructions in two places, one on the fridge and one in the living room. By the towels she likes to fold. It’s your job to make things simple for her. You have to try to see the world the way she does. It’s a very confusing place. It’s difficult to even navigate the dinner table. She may throw things. Only plastic, see?” He lifted his bowl and set it back down and a little stew sputtered off the side. “There’s a lot to remember.”

As he spoke, Claire decided he’d become a caregiver because anyone with enough vitality would have run far away. Elsa laughed.

He gave her a tour of her own home. She might have been a child at a museum, the way he led her around the squat farmhouse, keeping her on the tight leash of his passive voice, which was so gentle she could, if she felt like it, snap it in half with one mean word.

Claire tried to feel her father in the bedrooms, the attic, an indentation in a couch, a fingered mirror, but the nurse did not let her linger long, which was just as well — she wouldn’t want to cry in front of him.

There was heating now, an upgrade from Claire’s childhood. She wondered who had convinced whom to get it first. Her father must have refused, insisting it was too expensive, when really it was that the radiator, or the need for it, was too big of a change — it meant they were getting old, and the world seemed to be getting younger, easier. Elsa must have gotten sick before he gave in.

“Elsa tends to come in here when you aren’t watching,” the nurse was saying. They were standing in Claire’s childhood bedroom. Now it was a nondescript guest room with garage-sale paintings on the wall. “Something draws her in here. Always keep the door open. Your idea of privacy — let’s just say it will shift.”

Michael walked to the far wall and fingered a nail at chest level. “I didn’t notice this before. Take it out tonight. I did my best, but there’s always something she could hurt herself on in this old house. You have to train yourself to see this type of thing.”

Claire didn’t want to see the house through his eyes, each corner symbolizing some part of Elsa’s disease, some danger. She had her own symbols to keep track of. Dusk had settled and she instinctively reached a hand up to draw the rough burlap-style curtains together. She ran her finger along the frame of the black screen leaning under the windowsill. Beneath each window in the house were screens like this, taken out so storm glass could be put in. Her father must have done that; maybe it was the last chore he ever did. In the spring, Claire would replace them, undo his work. But for now, they rested there — a second, darker window that looked out onto nothing.

Claire showed the nurse sleepily to the door. On the porch, Michael said he’d check in every three days. Claire hummed in agreement, too tired to make an enemy of him now.

“We can’t get a full medical history,” Michael said. “Your mother pretty thoroughly disposed of all her paperwork. I don’t understand it. And your grandmother’s records from the old psychiatric hospital are so incomprehensive it’s amazing they knew her name. Anything you know would be helpful.”

Claire could see her breath in the cold. She hugged herself in the doorway. Michael didn’t seem cold at all.

“All I was told is that it was a head trauma,” Claire said. “Not Huntington’s, if that’s what the paperwork says. She died of pneumonia.”

“There are resources at the clinic I work for,” he said, so soft that Claire had to lean in to hear. “It can be hard to reconcile the hereditary nature of it. I can bring you some brochures. Different methods of warding it off yourself for a time, and there’s a support group for caretakers. Coping with this news yourself, that’s a hard thing. You don’t have to do it alone.”

“You said the old psychiatric hospital. Has it closed?”

There was a pause, and his cheeks seemed to settle into place, as if he hadn’t known how to hold his facial muscles until then. “They’re fighting for landmark status.” Then he touched her shoulder. Something told her it was the same touch she’d seen him use with her mother. He smiled. “You’ll be fine.”

Pity. That was what that look was. He’d decided, even before she had the chance to prove him wrong, that she would fail at this. She watched him drive away.

Claire thought of going to get the one last item she’d left in her car. She felt, briefly, sorry for it, as if it were a sentient being she’d bound and gagged and locked away in her trunk. Glancing at the driveway, she half expected to see it propped against the car, an escaped prisoner. She dug her heels into the matted porch snow. No, she would not show her mother the painting. It would only upset her. What happened, Claire wondered, to canvas when it froze?

She fell, somehow, into the habit of calling her mother by her first name, as Michael did. Elsa. It felt appropriate — Elsa — since they hadn’t seen each other in a decade. And since her mother was a different person now, with a different mind.

Each day began with berries and sour, dry yogurt. Each morning, Claire carefully set the table, which Elsa had taken to calling the bed. The long wooden table her father had made — a reject commission he’d brought home from the shop. He was always disappointed by his work, which Claire could find no flaw in. She loved running her hand over the wood — bird’s eye maple — slick from touch, but old and deeply grooved, stories of meals buried in its wrinkles.

Each day the berries, every morning the sleeping trees in the yard. Trees so dead they were alive, with brittle twigs like bunches of blooming flowers. Their window reflections leaned over Claire as she prepared breakfast, reminding her of her own winter body. Claire saw her morning-self setting the table. She saw her dry winter hands, the stealthy veins beginning to rise from her skin like waves, the new texture of age, laying down the shallow bowl and thick plastic plate. It made a hollow noise on the wood.

It was getting late, but Claire padded slowly toward her mother’s bedroom, stopping at each window, breathing into a momentary quiet — another habit-cum-ritual she’d adopted — making a point, before seeing Elsa, to stand and watch the yard fill up with light.

As soon as she walked into Elsa’s room, she knew she’d taken too long. It was the second Tuesday in January. She’d been there two weeks and still she hadn’t learned.

Elsa was sitting up against the headboard, watching the door. Her legs were straight, wrapped and weighed with many blankets. They looked separated from her torso, like pieces of a child’s toy detached from its plastic body. She looked at Claire expectantly, waiting, it seemed, for Claire to make the first move. Claire inched timidly toward the lumps of Elsa’s covered feet; they made her think of animals under snow.

A hand moved. Claire saw it travel toward the nightstand, the alarm clock. She saw what was going to happen before it happened, and yet had no power to stop it, not even to lift an arm to shield herself. Elsa grabbed the clock and pulled her arm back, fluid as a ball player, as if the motion were practiced. The shining metal arced across the room. Hit Claire in the forearm hard. Clanged to the floor. The metal bell cried out once.

Slowly, Claire looked at her arm. A small scrape, no blood, but it would bruise. She wouldn’t yell. She walked to the bed and pulled the covers back. Throwing the clock seemed, to Claire, like something Elsa had always been capable of and would have done many times over if she’d ever given herself permission. The only difference now was that Elsa had stopped arguing with herself.

“You have good aim,” Claire said.

“I’m hungry,” Elsa said. “Stop dawdling.”

Elsa still knew Claire, but sometimes she only seemed to know her. And for the trust Elsa put in her — a trust that was evident despite the throwing of alarm clocks, even if Elsa had little choice in the matter — Claire felt grateful, privileged even. But, on occasions like this, when Elsa revealed her aggression, that trust felt manipulative, as if Elsa were only feigning obedience while planning her secret escape. The house was a prison, and Claire the warden.

The nurse had said not to take these acts personally, to find the immediate cause and change the focus. But what if the alarm clock was an act of revenge?

Now the focus was on dressing. Elsa’s nightgown rode up above her knees, which were pale and brittle. Elsa was all knees. Claire helped her slide to the edge of the bed, lower her legs, put on her slippers. She laid out two cotton shirts — one blue, one white — and asked, which one? After five minutes deliberating, Elsa chose “the blue, natürlich,” over the white. Claire set each item of clothing on the bed in the order that Elsa was to put them on, then pretended to be busy organizing the bureau while her mother dressed. It didn’t matter if something was on backward or if dressing took half an hour, Elsa was to do it herself.

In the kitchen, Elsa stared blankly into her floral-patterned bowl of yogurt and berries. Claire watched her dip her spoon gingerly into it, nearly coming up empty.

“What’s the matter? You don’t want it?”

Elsa scowled at her. “I am hungry. I said this already.”

“This is what you like. You like blueberries in the morning.”

“I cannot have this,” Elsa said, pushing it away.

“I’ll get you something else.” Claire tried not to sound exasperated. She was about to dump the food in the garbage when she saw she’d forgotten yet another rule: how difficult it was for Elsa to see food on any patterned bowl.

Elsa was too proud to admit, or simply couldn’t articulate, that she needed help understanding breakfast. Each day, Claire added a new item to her own list of failures.

Claire transferred the yogurt to a solid blue bowl, then sat beside Elsa, watching the slow procedure of spoon to mouth, wondering when her mother would forget how to swallow.

After breakfast, in front of the fire in the living room, Claire would read the local paper out loud if it seemed Elsa was interested. First the feature pieces, then the weather. Elsa would listen calmly, staring into the fire. Sometimes, in her more lucid moments, she would interject with criticism. In the middle of an article about the recession, Elsa said, “I don’t like this one. I prefer the one you read yesterday. Read it again.”

“It’s probably in the bin already,” said Claire.

“I liked it better when he talked about Reagan. I know you worked for Carter. You look guilty. Good thing they didn’t shoot Reagan with better bullets, otherwise we would have lost—” Elsa faltered, searching.

“Another president?” Claire tried.

“Otherwise, we would have lost a great man.”

Claire leaned over the arm of Elsa’s chair to show her a photo of Jeremy Wendell, a man of the community who was found in the late January snow, stuck under his garden fence where he’d had a stroke. Elsa laughed strangely. The same, awkward laugh she’d used at dinner that first night.

“That’s not nice,” Claire said, pulling the paper away. “He’s dying.”

Elsa nodded and laughed again.

Claire had assumed that by a month in she’d be jabbering to herself with cabin fever. Instead, she became more self-conscious of her language, second-guessing every verb and preposition she used with Elsa. Was it “than” or “then?” Did she pronounce the word “prerogative” correctly?

It was the prerogative of elected officials to propose cuts to the federal budget and announce a $91 billion deficit on Monday. On Wednesday, the “freeway killer” was convicted. Then, in a town just down the road, thousands of gallons of radioactive water were released into the drainage system and radioactive steam into the atmosphere when a tube burst at the local nuclear power plant, no danger to the public! There were stories of war veterans being mistreated or untreated, but not enough coverage in Claire’s opinion. She often thought of Bird and had an urge to tell Elsa about him. She’d looked him up years ago and found he’d come home wounded in ’68, but the details of his injury were confidential.

Again, Elsa laughed.

Midmorning, Claire would leave Elsa with the TV and the dying fire to go outside and chop wood. The ax — leaning against the house like some bent and broken man — was brought out to an upright log resting in the snow. Her father had taught her to chop wood when she was six years old.

She arched her lower back, tried to let the cold numb the ache crawling up from her femur. She bent her knees, touched the cold raw-metal tip with her bowed forefinger, swung up and around like the arc of the sun. That’s how he’d taught her — he said she was the earth and the ax head the sun. She’d corrected him — and was sorry for it later — saying that what he meant was the ax was our perception of the sun. That if he thought about it, the ax head was the earth and he was the sun, pulling it in orbit.

Breaking something to pieces, breaking through the wood, destroying its shape into usefulness. It was a muscle memory that had never left, not in the forty-some years since she’d last lifted an ax. Her hips ached — yet another joint she’d taken for granted until it troubled her. But for a moment, she felt strong. Falling on something with all her weight in one unified motion, every ounce of strength needed to get the clean cut. She hadn’t felt this sensation in years, hadn’t known it was something she missed, desired. This was it, this was all there was. Engaging with the world, fixing on a task, finishing it. She felt her father in the swing.

She brought the logs inside and put them by the fire, under the old bread oven, to dry. And she could smell him dripping and drying after he came in from the cold. Her father smelled like thawing wood. He must have sat here on the couch, where Claire sat now. He must have held her mother’s hands in both of his.

They said he called the ambulance himself while it was happening, his heart attack — he didn’t want to burden Elsa. He took care of her for more than a year before he passed two months ago, and he’d never told Claire about Elsa’s disease.

It was time for Elsa’s midday medicine but Claire didn’t feel like moving her body. She felt Elsa’s stare on the side of her face just as she felt the flames from the fireplace in front of her, indifferent and hot. Claire could tell Elsa was getting ready to speak from the rough word-searching noise she made with her jaw.

“I’ve got to get ready.”

Claire was surprised each time by the abrupt silence of the house, how it sat with them, in the space between words. The house-sounds and snow-sounds, the throat-sounds Elsa made, were bound up with the silence. The soft creaking of the old wood roof. The guttural sound of the pipes. It was so silent that when a car passed, it caused a shock. Then the massive silence retrieved itself, like a woman gathering up her big skirts before sitting back down.

“Ready for what?” Claire asked lazily.

There was a long pause. It seemed, for Elsa, that each word was a great search, always starting at the beginning of an internal dictionary. Elsa said slowly in her sand voice, “We’re going to celebrate. We’re going to the theater.”

The fire crackled and ticked, keeping time.

“We are?” Claire said, turning to her now.

“Not you. Me and Ernest.”

She said his name as if he were alive. “How old are you?” Claire asked calmly. Locate her in time, the nurse had said. Pull her back. Or not.

Elsa said, smiling, “Fifty-four. Ernest says I look thirty-nine.” She reached for the box of tissues on the arm of the chair and began pulling them out and ripping them in half, one by one. Paper dust floated around her.

Claire took the box away gently. “Why don’t you fold your towels?” she said, grabbing the stack of clean washcloths from the coffee table.

Elsa shook her head. “I don’t have time. I must get ready.” She still held half a tissue tightly in her hand.

What would her father have done? Had he fueled Elsa’s delusions and entered the past with her, or corrected her and said no, here we are, old and still in love? At fifty-four, what would they have been celebrating? Perhaps that was when Elsa and Claire’s father had finally bought the land they’d always rented. Thirty years ago — long after Claire had left. What had she been doing at that time? Something she was indifferent about, surely, in the city with Freddie.

“Were you celebrating the house?” Claire asked.

It made perfect sense that Elsa would not return to a year when Claire lived there, when they were struggling with money and her grandmother. Who would choose to go back to that? But it hurt, just a little, that she and Elsa would never choose to lob themselves back in time, do it over again.

“He’ll expect me to be ready at six,” Elsa said more confidently. “I must get dressed. The new production opens at the theater tonight.”

Still — there was a movement inside, some small, buried thrill. A lightness in Claire residing right beside the hurt. She wanted to indulge this delusion. She was almost giddy about it; they could do whatever they wanted. And they were going to have a good time at it if it killed them.

“Let’s get you ready then, hurry up,” Claire said. She helped her mother out of her chair and into the bedroom. A painful giddiness in her chest. Desperate, suddenly, to help Elsa stay inside that day she remembered so earnestly. Was there salvation there, if she could help her mother live in a pleasant memory?

She left Elsa standing in the center of the bedroom and went to the closet, which no longer had doors — another story of the house that she would never know. She knew just what dress, one she’d seen Elsa wear ages ago. And she knew it would still be there. Elsa never threw away clothes, preferring instead to alter and patch forever. Claire slipped it from its hanger. The navy-blue dress gave up soft buds of dust.

It was easy enough to slip off Elsa’s quilted bathrobe with the zipper down the front, but quite another to force her arms into the meshy fabric, a half tissue still wadded in her clenched fist. Elsa’s skin was clammy and the transparent sleeves clung to her shoulders. The back zipper got stuck on Elsa’s underwear. Claire thought she heard her whimper but she couldn’t be sure. This was what Elsa wanted, to time travel within her own life. Claire was only giving Elsa what she wanted.

She sat her mother down on the edge of the bed and brought a dusty makeup bag from the dresser. Elsa had been silent since the living room.

“Tell me what play you’re going to see,” Claire said.

“It’s a play,” she said.

It was harder than Claire thought to apply lipstick to someone else, clumpy where the skin was dry. It didn’t look good.

“I’ll put a blue-gray eye shadow on you. To go with your dress.” Claire showed her.

But Elsa wouldn’t keep her eyes closed and some powder got in them. She kept blinking and rubbing her eyes so the makeup smeared into her temples. Claire caught her hand before she could make more of a mess.

“Where are your dinner reservations?” Claire asked.

But Elsa was distracted by something over Claire’s shoulder. She touched Elsa’s face to focus her attention, but Elsa wouldn’t look her in the eyes.

Claire stood up and looked dramatically at her empty wrist. “Come on or you’ll be late. Don’t you know you look beautiful?” She smoothed Elsa’s coarse white curls down with her palm. Her hair was a handful of twigs.

But she did look beautiful, if a little haphazard. Claire stood her in front of the mirror. “See? You’re beautiful.” Claire used a thumb to wipe away the excess eyeshadow, then pried open Elsa’s fingers and placed the torn tissue between her lips. “Press down,” Claire said, and Elsa pressed down. Elsa would let her do anything. It was like dressing up a doll. Claire looked at her mother’s stooped body in the mirror, how much smaller it was than her own.

Elsa stood there, shivering in the warm bedroom. “Ernest will be underdressed as always,” she said, nodding at her reflection. “I’m ready.”

Elsa shuffled out to the living room and down the hall, slowly, each step as precarious and difficult to land on as words. She stopped at the front door. She did not open it.

Now what? “We’ll wait here?” Claire asked.

Elsa pressed her head to the high window in the door, which she just barely reached, swiveling her forehead left then right, following the snowy road. She tried lifting herself to be as tall as she actually was, but her body wouldn’t unbend.

And Claire did nothing. She stood behind her mother, watching her wait, waiting for her to forget what she was waiting for. What had she done? Fairly pushed Elsa into the past and for what? To watch her wait for a dead man? When would it hurt least to be pulled back?

But when Elsa answered these questions herself by saying, “Put on the Marlene Dietrich, please,” Claire found she did not want to. They hadn’t finished the memory yet. Claire wanted to know what happened next.

“Don’t you want to go to the theater?” Claire found herself saying.

Elsa tried to turn back toward the living room, but Claire spun her to face the door again. She shushed her, though Elsa hadn’t made a sound. Claire held Elsa upright, as if she couldn’t stand on her own. You try to keep a moment that’s not yours to keep.

“Let’s wait here a moment longer,” Claire said, “I think I hear a car coming.” Was she trying to conjure her father back from the dead? But Elsa wouldn’t give her a moment longer and in the struggle, with Claire pointing at the window with one hand and holding her mother up with the other, Elsa yelped and her knees buckled and she was suddenly on the floor, yelling in German in her navy-blue dress.

Claire tried to help her up, but Elsa was dead weight. “Stand up, please.”

She wouldn’t stand. Elsa looked like she was about to cry, but instead Claire found her own face was wet. She had missed the moment of release and there she was crying and she couldn’t stop. “I’m sorry. Please, Mom, you have to get up.”

To know her mother as she was now, the way she’d never know her father — to know how her knees locked together when she stood, how she shuffled her feet when she couldn’t find the words. How her far-off smile was slightly raised on the right side and how she wanted to hear the same song over and over again. And how they shared a loss of memory, sometimes: Claire couldn’t remember how her father took his coffee. Or how he’d said goodnight to her at bedtime. What stories he told, or didn’t.

“Put on the Dietrich,” Elsa said, calmly.

Lifting her slowly, Claire brought Elsa back to the living room, sat her in the big chair. She dropped the needle on the record Elsa wanted, which never left the turntable. The phonograph crackled then gave way to Marlene Dietrich’s voice singing in German, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

Without meaning to, she thought of the moment Nicolette arrived, that waiting-moment in her den. Perhaps, like Elsa, waiting was the only kind of moment she could return to. Perhaps Claire’s father was held late at the shop, or whatever job he had then, but had arrived home just in time — Claire imagined them rushing to their seats, the rain in their hair catching the light of the chandelier. Or maybe nothing happened next. Maybe Elsa was left waiting in her navy-blue dress, watching for him out the window, watching the cold move, and he failed to come home in time. Perhaps her mother was waiting for him still. The mind drifts to loss.

2

Claire put on her best caregiver-Claire face as she prepared to give Elsa her meds — she could build a fortress out of Elsa’s weekly pill regimen. From the kitchen, Claire could hear the soft murmurs of a talk show coming from the living room. She found Elsa’s favorite blue cup and turned on the tap. Nothing but the tortured, out-of-breath sound of empty pipes. She tried the hot water. Nothing. She looked under the sink, though she didn’t know what she was looking for. What had her father done when the pipes froze?

With a large pot, Claire went outside and only then realized that if it was cold enough for the pipes to freeze, she ought to have put on a coat and something other than slippers. But it would only be a minute, and there was a break in the snowfall. The sky was all white. This was a blackberry winter, the weatherman said. A dogwood winter. It was midmorning, but it could have been any time. No horizon today.

She knelt close to the side porch, away from the animal tracks, which had faded since early morning but weren’t covered completely. As she scooped a pile of fresh snow into the pot, Claire wondered what time she would she return to, if she could go back like Elsa. If she could fit her life into a moment.

Most people, Claire suspected, would choose moments revolving around a spouse or children, or art, something created. But Claire had never made anything. She’d thought living with Mary, helping to raise Leo, would be a pinnacle. Mary was supposed to have been the person and point that all other moments and encounters had been building towards. But she was just another bread crumb in a row of bread crumbs leading Claire to where? The moment wasn’t hers to keep. Leo would be a handful of a teenager by now.

Somewhere, Claire still had the postcard Mary had sent, saying she and Leo were living with the politician in Arizona. Arizona. It could have been some fantastical land with harpies and dragons. Claire had written often those first months. Mary had been apologetic at first, but later she implied she feared for Claire’s mental health. Mary told her not to write again. Claire used to invent scenarios in which she sent anonymous letters to the press full of ammunition against the congressman.

No, Claire did not have a singular, all-powerful moment. She was not, after all, a character from a romance movie forever bound to some sunset kiss decades prior, the man allegedly killed in war, his body never found.

Her fingers sang with cold as she scooped the snow and she watched them turn a bright red. Then her hand scraped against something not-snow. She put the pot aside and dug a little more. Fabric. White cotton wet through. Elsa’s dirty clothes were spread and buried in the snow. A nightgown, several pairs of underwear, a blue housedress, nylons. When had she done that?

Claire imagined Elsa sneaking outside in the middle of the night with an armload of laundry. In her moonlight escapade, Elsa was accompanied by strange shapes floating around her feet — Elsa’s disembodied memories, dropping right out of her mind, entities of their own. They weren’t like film projections of her life; outside of Elsa, they became mere blobs, unable to take form and survive. They walked lightly over the layer of snowice, fluid as bird shadows.

She tried to imagine her own grief in the same way. She stayed crouched and cold in her wet slippers, her knees pushed up against her bra-less chest, glancing at the footprints circling the house, part of some constellation she couldn’t see from inside it. She shouldn’t have let herself think of Mary like she had been. Now she missed her. She missed her badly, and what was she supposed to do with that? When she missed Mary, she was as functional as the broken, wheezing pipe. If she could just eject it from herself, if she could will her grief out of her mind, it might hover nearby, insisting by its mere presence near the porch that it had once existed inside. But it would have no power otherwise — a filmy reminder of something once felt. Her and her mother’s memories, trotting side by side, midnight sentinels leaving tracks in their wake. No wonder she’d never seen what creature left those prints.

“Claire? What are you doing out here? And dressed like that?”

For one bizarre, frightening moment, she thought it was her father. But she knew it was Michael before the thought was complete. As if he could smell trouble, he’d arrived to help.

“You’ll catch your death,” he said.

Claire laughed — what could she say, caught outside in her night-gown? — and handed him the potful of snow. She let him put his arm around her and lead her inside, looking around as if to avoid stepping on the shadow-shapes.

As Michael tied burlap bags around the pipe under the sink, she told him about Elsa’s delusion, or most of it. He listened — he was good at that — and said there was no right or wrong, she had to feel out each situation. She used a hairdryer to warm the pipe.

Claire had begun looking forward to Michael’s visits. They provided structure. She always had him stay for a meal, and he complimented her cooking. He told her stories about the other unfortunate people he took care of, always worse off, and made Claire promise not to repeat a word or he’d be toast. She laughed at those other patients, and it was good to laugh.

He found other chores to do that day, like cleaning out the fireplace. When he was done, he kissed Claire on the cheek as if he’d been doing so for years, and whispered, “City girl,” in her ear. His face turned a shiny red when he pulled away, as if he realized what he’d done only then. Claire could not hold back an expression of amusement. Elsa was fidgeting in her armchair. When they turned their attention to her, she threw the box of Kleenex and hit Michael in the shoulder. Tissues flew, the biggest snowflakes. Claire laughed. Michael didn’t react at all.

As Claire picked up the tissues she said, “Did you know my parents when they were younger?” He’d lived in Ovid most of his life.

Michael bent to help. “I met them a few times. They used to come into the bookstore where I worked. Your mother was, back then, she was…” He trailed off and stalked around looking for more fallen tissues though there were none. But Claire knew what he wanted to say — something true and mean. Elsa had always been callous, especially to strangers (reserving a different kind of awful for Claire and her father). It had always made Claire love her father more, the way he loved Elsa without flinching. It never made him seem weak.

Michael was not that type of strong. When he left, Claire threw a couch cushion hard down the hallway and it hit the front door. The little bells chimed. She felt foolish — for the cushion and for him. She would never apologize for Elsa.

The sky was vein gray. The day had shaken off all pretense of beauty; now it was only wet and frightening, an uneven snow falling. There was a low light. Not yet sunset. But cooped up as they were, fresh air sometimes took precedence over the cold.

On the front porch, Claire ducked Elsa around the low-hanging icicles and marveled at the slow-growth weapons. The top of one was thicker in diameter than Claire’s own torso. Eventually they would fall, when the thaw came. They would hurt someone.

Here was everything: the dark-white sky; the yellow kitchen light thrown on the snow so that it looked, briefly, like sand; the wiry trees; the sound of their weight making the snow ache out a low groan. Walking down the road, they passed other lonely homes, no people in the windows.

“If you want to marry that man,” Elsa interrupted the quiet, “it won’t be under my roof.”

“Excuse me? What man am I marrying?”

“The turtle man. He’d have the run of things. I can’t have that.”

“I’m not marrying Michael,” Claire said. “Where did you get an idea like that?”

“Well you better marry someone or the whole town will think you’re loose.”

“Thank you. I’ll get right on it,” Claire said. Elsa only snorted in retort. “What do you want for dinner? It can’t be anything that needs much water. The pipe is still thawing.”

“Swordfish,” Elsa sounded out slowly.

They stopped in front of a meadow they passed often on their walks but never dared to enter: the trespassing signs, the decayed hunting stands. Stretches of blank white land reached out blindly, heaped like goose down. The sun was ending and from the edges of the meadow, lean tree shadows stretched endlessly across the snow.

Elsa was shivering now, but she didn’t complain. All Claire had to do was provide a stable, supportive environment. That’s what Michael coached her to do. And yet both of them knew she would fail.

A dark something darted in the corner of her eye. There — a rabbit, the size of her head. It bounded along the edge of the meadow.

“I suppose it wouldn’t kill us to have leftovers again,” Claire said. Elsa stared back at her blankly, perhaps a little frightened.

The thought took hold of her now that Elsa could be anyone. She knew so little about her own mother for certain. She knew Elsa was a widow, a mother of one, a retired seamstress, a housewife, a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s. She liked butter beans best, put them in everything when Claire was growing up. She had always been curt with people, which had embarrassed Claire. She was a Republican, and a fan of German music. She loved, for some God-awful reason, neon signs — even threatened to buy a personalized one for the kitchen — and yet she hated New York City. She preferred abridged Bible stories to the real thing. She used to yell. And now she hardly spoke and was a stasher of clothes in snow. It was not much to go off of, tallied like that.

Yet it could also very well be that Elsa had been a general in a war. She had lost the battle, the nation, the universe, all that had been was no longer, those histories and lands and peoples all wiped away, and Claire had walked in only minutes after defeat and Elsa could not speak of it, could not bring herself to remember. She could have been a famous painter, or someone’s mistress. She could have been a butcher.

Claire suddenly felt guilty for these thoughts, as if by thinking them she were the one stripping away Elsa’s individuality.

The rabbit took one more leap then froze. Claire squinted to see its tracks. This was it, she knew — the animal that circled their house every morning before they woke. Why would it do that?

Claire’s voice cracked when she spoke again. “Leftovers it has to be.” Elsa’s face was rigid. Then she let out a tiny, confused laugh.

Claire knew that laugh. She’d thought that Elsa was laughing at her, but that wasn’t it at all. Elsa was trying to join in. She seemed aware she was unaware, knew she was missing something vital; when she laughed she was pretending to get the joke, even if there was none. Her mother was laughing along with Claire, no matter that Claire wasn’t laughing. Elsa wanted to fool her.

The rabbit was still in the middle of the meadow, staring at them with one eye in profile. This animal that made tracks around their home every day for no apparent reason now stood so still it could be dead. It must be so frightened of them. Too frightened to protect itself, to run.

Elsa coughed and mumbled at the meadow.

“I didn’t catch that,” Claire said.

“Did you make up Claire’s bed yet?” Elsa spoke so softly it was hard to hear. “I’m too tired to do it myself.”

“My bed?”

“The bed in Claire’s room,” Elsa said.

Claire took a step closer. “I’m Claire. It’s me.” Claire closed her eyes and nodded. This was bound to happen sooner or later, Michael had said. Elsa would only become more erased. Rather, Claire would. Eventually, Elsa would forget her completely. It was supposed to happen.

Claire didn’t know herself any better than Elsa did. At least Elsa and her father had had one another. In twenty years’ time, when Claire was old and sick like Elsa, who would take care of her?

“Yes,” Elsa said, and laughed that same disoriented laugh. Elsa, who had whole countries inside her. Burning empires.

She would like to live long enough to find out who would care for her. And to care back.

Without a sound, the rabbit dashed into the woods, out of sight forever, and the meadow was empty. She missed the rabbit then. The word vastly wrapped itself around Claire’s thoughts. I am vastly alone out here. Vastly. I could stretch out across the whole land and not disturb a thing. I am vast.

3

Life in the house was organized by Sunday-to-Saturday pill containers and the old oven clock.

They watched icicles form, watched with wonder the slow falling of the snow, the slow rise of the surface of the snow. It was constant. Only the midsections of trees were exposed, branches moving up like veins. They watched the snow-shapes of deck furniture, foreign objects, the summer gone out of them. The pie tins on the garden gate no longer clanged their innocent percussion. They were buried now too. There were no more animal tracks.

In the bath, Elsa’s body was so small. She seemed to take up less and less space in the world, the house. And the house, after a snowbound week, seemed to shrink along with her mother. She could swear the walk from Elsa’s bedroom to the toilet took fewer steps.

They had enough wood to last the week, but the fire wasn’t keeping them warm enough. The heater wasn’t working, or it was functioning but not penetrating their skin. Elsa was crying. Claire got down every blanket they had from every closet in the house and piled them all on Elsa and herself. On the couch, Claire held her under the heavy pile, the heaviness like another body on top of them. Elsa laughed through her tears, thought it was a game. She shivered in Claire’s arms.

The cold snap. Black shapes brimmed from tree trunks, spying on them. The women rubbed their eyes until they were raw.

Michael came to check on them the fifth day of the storm, walking all the way from town in high-tech snowshoes. His visits were no longer an indication of time; he’d been stopping by less, and she suspected it wasn’t due only to the weather.

“We have a handle on things here,” she said. He stood there in the cold on the porch, the wind roughing up his hair. He wouldn’t budge. “Come in, please,” Claire said, more warmly.

“No, I better say what I have to say right here.” Behind him was a blank white canvas of sky, no trees or neighbors’ fences were visible, no depth at all.

She put on a stern voice. “I won’t let the heat out like this. You can stand there and talk to me through a closed door, or you can come inside.”

He stepped in scornfully, tracking snow into the house. He barely moved out of the way enough for Claire to close the door, which put up a fight against the wind. When she turned, he was very close, and they stood together in silence. His features cast shadows over his face, and the light was too dim to understand what his mouth was doing.

“Are you all right?” Claire said.

He looked down at his open palms. “I’m taking on — patients,” half his words also swallowed by his shadow.

“What?” she said, leaning in closer.

He looked into her face. “I’m taking on too many patients. I’m going to have to quit you. I’m sorry. Another respite nurse will take my place.”

“Oh.” Claire looked toward the kitchen. “Would you like to stay for dinner?”

“Unless you want me.”

“What?”

“Unless you want me to stay on.”

Claire kept her eyes on the kitchen. “I understand,” she said, nodding. “Maybe it’s…” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. Maybe it’s for the best? Maybe it’s a terrible idea, I need you, please don’t go? “Please stay for dinner,” Claire said.

He shook his head, ironed out his posture and said, “You’ll be fine.” Then he slipped out into the cold as if it were not cold to him at all, walking always through a different weather system than she.

——

Elsa was not the only one outside of time. The days fell into one another. Claire wasn’t sure if Michael’s visit was the same day Elsa messed the bed or the day before. There was nothing to look forward to and Claire accepted this with something like relief.

Sometimes Claire stared out the window at the snow for so long she lost herself, her mind burrowed into the snow, and she’d forget to give Elsa her medication on time. All this snow made it possible to feel that many things and nothing were happening all at once. That somewhere, right now, even right here, people were coming and going, falling in love or dying. When she retrieved herself, she didn’t know where the time had gone. What was she thinking of for so many hours? It frightened her not to know.

Marlene Dietrich sang softly even when the record had stopped. On the quietest days, Claire heard music in machines. In the washer, there was a soothing sequence of minor notes. Her mind felt loose. At times, she felt she was looking for her madness in the house, that she’d find it like a long-lost wedding ring under the cushions or held tight in Elsa’s clenched fist. At times she thought, stupidly, and for the briefest of moments, that she had caught Elsa’s dementia. And then she’d laugh the thought away. If she could question it, she told herself, it was not so.

Elsa was born in 1904. She was made an adult at sixteen, when her mother was hurt on the boat coming to America, 1920. Other than these dates, Elsa’s tracks had been covered up. Papers buried under snow.

Claire rummaged through the attic. She found diaries written in German and a few in English, a set of old watercolors (Claire never knew her mother had an artistic bone in her body), and boxes of photographs, warped and yellowed. She brought the best-preserved of the photos downstairs to show Elsa, tried to get her to reminisce, though it was hard to find a time Elsa was alert for long enough. She kept her eyes closed most of the day, drew a curtain, shut out the world, and Claire.

Claire began teaching herself German from an old beginner’s reader she found in the attic. She paced around the living room with the book held up in front of her face. Elsa listened to her practice, eyes closed, nodding as if in agreement to Claire’s butchered request to please pass the salt, or her overly formal greetings to imaginary Felix. Eventually, Elsa might revert back to her childhood language, Michael had said. Studying made the nights go by more quickly, anyway, when she stayed awake to stop Elsa from wandering.

She used her mother’s diaries to practice German as well. The few pages she could translate weren’t how Claire remembered things at all. One entry, written when Claire returned home for a visit, seemed a blatant lie, as if Elsa had wished to warp her future memory. It made Claire worry some for her own.

She read about the hospital in the local paper. A feature piece about the closure and dispute over landmark status. For now, it was closed for safety renovations. She read the article to Elsa once, and to herself twice more: the asylum where her grandmother had lived was being shut down.

Claire asked if Elsa remembered her mother.

“Of course I do,” Elsa said angrily. “She was mean and pompous and never home, always out at the opera. She slapped me.”

“She slapped you? Why?”

“When I was fifteen. For being with a sailor. I never told you about him? Very handsome. Your grandmother was jealous more than anything. That was long before I met your father.”

It was the most expressive Elsa had been in weeks. Claire wanted to encourage her on. “Do you remember visiting her in the hospital with me?” Claire asked.

“She was never in any hospital,” Elsa said in an accusatory tone.

Claire nodded. “All right,” she said.

She read the article again, standing alone in the kitchen. Then she threw it in the bin. It wasn’t as if she’d expected them to consult her first. But hadn’t she always planned to go back? To see it once more?

She lifted the paper from the bin.

She’d never asked her mother questions when she could have, always so self-absorbed. Now their history was lost. Now Elsa’s organs were tittering away, having a laugh with one another. Calling out who will go first, glistening at the ends of the snipped gold threads that had once connected her body to her mind.

It didn’t matter if what her mother had said was true or not, the sailor or the slap or the hospital. If that’s what was in her mind, if that was what tormented her, then it was true enough.

That night, Claire went out to her car and brought the painting inside. She hammered two nails into her bedroom wall, but she couldn’t bring herself to hang it.

She’d located the painting with the help of that man, Nicolette’s subject. It was being sold at auction, too much to bid on. The only person she knew who could afford to help was Freddie. And he did so quite willingly, a gesture of peace — after which he’d tried to sleep with Claire as compensation, his new wife at home all the while, unsuspecting.

Here she was, standing in the living room, the painting propped up against her so her mother could see.

The last time she’d shown the painting in confidence, it had been stolen from her. This time, Claire didn’t give an explanation. But, for a moment, when her mother’s eyes fluttered then steadied, Elsa seemed to understand the weight of it. That in front of her were two possibilities of Claire. Briefly, Elsa’s eyes contained all those missing years. And Claire saw that Elsa had also stood on a roof, or a bridge, and made a decision.

It is important to be known.

Elsa raised her hand in a strange gesture, above her lap, waiting. Claire laid the painting on the floor, then kneeled and rested her head in her mother’s lap. Elsa’s hand was warm and weightless on Claire’s head.

“I have a question,” Elsa said.

Claire held back her tears. “What is it?”

“I have a question,” Elsa said again, more slowly.

“Ask me.”

And Elsa said, “I have decided it’s time. I would like you to help me.”

Claire sat up and looked into Elsa’s face. Her mother’s eyes were fixed and present. “What do you mean?” Claire asked, though she knew very well what she meant.

“I would like you to help me—”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Claire interrupted her. “You aren’t making any sense.”

Elsa paused. “This is not right,” she said. “We can stop it.”

Still kneeling, Claire took her mother’s shoulders in her hands. If she were looking at herself, she would have begged someone to shoot that woman.

Elsa attempted to turn away but Claire held on. “No,” she said.

Elsa closed her eyes in acceptance or defiance, Claire didn’t know which. Once again, Claire rested her head on her mother’s lap, and Elsa replaced her hand on Claire’s hair.

“You have plenty of good years left,” Claire said.

“How long are you staying?” Elsa said after a moment.

“As long as you need me.”

When Claire was out, only briefly, returning the painting to the trunk of the car, Elsa spread all the food from the refrigerator across the living room floor. Claire gaped speechlessly at the mess. Elsa looked up at her and asked, “How long are you staying?”

She would not, or could not, stop asking the question. Three times a day, five times, Elsa asked, “How long are you staying?” And Claire replied, “As long as you need me.”

Then one day, Elsa didn’t want berries and yogurt anymore. If she spoke at all, she found new names for everyday objects. Books were stacks. Linens became rubber. The new nurse, a frumpy woman with a tattoo of a kitten on her neck, said, “Each day is the new normal.”

Claire took the nurse aside and asked what kind of options one had in the later stages of Alzheimer’s.

“What do you mean?” the nurse asked.

“I only mean, are there any options to,” Claire coughed. “Opt out?”

“You mean suicide.”

“I mean options.”

“Not in this state. People do it, but people also steal and cheat. It’s illegal.”

“So you’re saying her only choice is to rot away for decades?” Claire said.

“Did Elsa say something to you?”

“No.”

“I can help you talk to her. It’s hard to discuss what happens next.”

“I was only curious,” Claire said.

The nurse gave her an aggrieved glance, but at least she never mentioned nails protruding from the bedroom walls.

Blackberry winter. Dogwood winter. The snow wouldn’t let up. Nothing was thawing like it was supposed to.

Elsa was listening to Marlene Dietrich on the record player again. Sag’ mir, wo die Blumen sind. Dozing beneath a mountain of blankets. Elsa the volcano, hibernating. In the kitchen, Claire was sweeping up another dinnertime spill when she noticed something was missing and hurried to the living room: the record had stopped and was spinning static. Claire had hardly heard the song at all until it was gone. Elsa sat stiff and pale, no longer shuffling her feet as she often did. Did a shadow pass over her then?

“Who’s talking?” Elsa said. “Is that Ernest?” She was staring to her left, just below the window at the dark screen. “What’s that he said? That’s not Ernest. There’s a man there. Make him stop. Make him go away.”

Claire moved to the record player and replaced the needle. She turned on the small lamp beside it. “Did it stop?” she asked.

Elsa’s gaze froze on her. “You dirty devil! Dirty gay! Nazi!”

Claire walked across the room, opened the door to the side porch, and stepped out into the snow, shivering uncontrollably. The snow was everywhere. The snow was snow. It was her mother. It was the sea.

It was the disease talking, not Elsa. This was the mantra Michael taught her. It was the disease, not the person, that Claire was hurt by, angry at. Unless, of course, Elsa knew Claire better than ever now; unless Elsa saw her as the devil for keeping her alive.

The snow rushed in as Claire closed the door. The house was a mad snow globe. Claire sat down on the couch, beside Elsa in her armchair. She touched Elsa’s arm, her rubbery skin. Her mother flinched. “I know it’s scary,” she said. Claire handed her the stack of towels to fold, and Elsa seemed to forget what frightened her.

4

Just one more thing to do.

The snow cover sparkled in the thaw, the microscopic mountains and valleys of its surface catching every movement of light. It grimaced and buckled with anticipation. Claire could never get used to the fantastic roar the thaw made, a great, unending yawn that accompanied the day. And there were other new sounds: at first she thought someone was breaking in, but it was only a falling icicle. The tips of old meadow grass began to show, and the low stone wall along the property line. A buried bucket appeared, dirty and swollen-looking; it had been there all along. Soon they would see the ground.

Rain coming down in beats. Long fingers of rain shooting through the surface of the snow, leaving pockmarks among the wreckage of lawn chairs, reaching for the earth. Snow that had been the height of a man, that could have swallowed a man whole, so powerful and seemingly solid, could be erased by a little rain.

During these changes, Elsa rarely spoke, yet she seemed more at ease. So Claire felt not altogether horrible about taking her on a field trip.

They drove slowly up to the large iron gates, which did not open for them, padlocked and far too large to scale. She hadn’t planned on that. She hadn’t really thought it through at all.

She got back in the car and drove clockwise around the perimeter of the complex. It was utterly Gothic, with a few cement one-story additions that stuck out sorely. Stone walls and spires beyond, like great, gnarled fingers jutting up from the earth.

Toward the back of the hospital, there was another, lower stone ledge that looked in ruins, police tape draped haphazardly. She drove past this and parked some twenty feet from the broken wall.

“I’ll be back soon,” she said. “I’m going for a look around.” Elsa only smiled. Claire left her mother in the car, the doors locked and window rolled down a crack. Like a dog. But bringing her in seemed worse.

Stepping cautiously on the slushy, muddy grass in her thin flats — why hadn’t she worn more sensible shoes? — Claire noticed graffiti and imagined prowlers waiting for her, gangs of skinheads and escaped hospital inmates. She glanced back toward the car and her mother and, hiking up her slacks, stepped over the low wall.

The lawn was freshly manicured, which was peculiar. Upkeep had been part of the patients’ regimen, but there were no patients now. She passed the man-made lake to the left of the path, which she regained as if she’d walked in through the main gate, not like a thief through the side door. It was perfectly sunny in all Claire’s memories of the place, the weather never once reflecting the misery inside. But now it began to drizzle, covering everything equally; rain did not play favorites. The lake dimpled, and Claire walked swiftly toward the entrance.

The front doors were not old and grand like the walls around them. They were the double doors you’d find on a gymnasium, and they were unlocked, like someone had broken in ahead of her — her fears of prowlers again substantiated. Had she locked the car doors? She imagined inmates clawing at the car windows, their fingers scraping, her mother wide-eyed and alone. But Elsa was safe, she was fine, the doors were locked.

Inside resembled a sixties high school. The halls were yellowed like teeth. The linoleum floor was full of air pockets, years of dust in the seams. There was a sense of people having left in a rush, but there was something arbitrary about it, as if they hadn’t known why they hurried.

Claire held her breath. Every window was covered with fingerprints. Through them, the gray daylight seemed to swing away from her as she stepped farther in. Her footsteps, echoing, ran ahead of her. Down one hall, bed frames were scattered like bones. Sheets of plastic, shredded at the ends in big angry tears, were thrown over them.

On one visit, when she was a child, Claire had stood in the hall waiting for Elsa to finish talking, when Claire’s grandmother grabbed her by the wrist and led her into a room and said, with one finger over her lips, “Get under the bed or they’ll find you.” When she pushed Claire down and under, it was gentle, prompting. Claire did as she was told, concerned that it would be impolite to refuse. From under the bedframe, she saw her grandmother’s feet shuffle into the hallway. She heard her say, “I found my daughter. At last I found my daughter.”

Claire crawled out and dusted off her knees. “I’m not your daughter,” she said. In the doorway, her grandmother turned to her and let out a wail so wild and so sad, Claire began to cry.

The rain was coming down harder now. A wooden wheelchair sitting beside a door caught Claire’s eye. It seemed to be waiting for someone. In front of the chair were two parallel depressions in the floor, heel-shaped; someone had shuffled their feet for decades.

Her grandmother had been tied into one of those wheelchairs when she’d started singing and wouldn’t stop. Her wail had become a grotesque aria. But Claire had thought it was beautiful. The nurses tried to stop her. She was so loud. They put their sweaty hands over her mouth. They tied her down and wheeled her away and Claire could hear her voice ringing down the halls.

Through the door beside the wheelchair was a treatment room — just a tub and a reclining chair like at a dentist’s office. She’d heard the words “hydrotherapy” and “cold packs” on her visits. But she hadn’t known back then how the nurses would wrap her grandmother up in wet sheets, then submerge her in a tub full of ice.

The weather echoed. Rain pounded on loose windows. Claire walked into what appeared to be a gymnasium or theater or both, a small wooden stage at the front and rafters in the back. Handwriting was scribbled all over the walls, huge looping letters. Names. So many names.

The patients here hadn’t quietly given themselves over to institutional life. They hadn’t faded away. They came in with numbers on their sleeves and gave themselves new names. They organized and rallied, insisted on payment for their labor. Claire’s grandmother had sent her fair share of letters to the president of the hospital, demanding to be discharged. Every letter went unanswered. But it didn’t matter. Their numbers didn’t stick, and their names still covered these walls. Her grandmother had been part of this community.

Claire had once been resigned to the fact that she would one day go mad. Was she disappointed, as Nicolette had long ago suggested? Could the act of going mad be a form of rebellion? Her grandmother’s singing or poetry — was that defiance? There was a thin line between rebellion and resignation.

A rustle as a rat skimmed the length of the wall. Elsa was out in the car. How long had she been in here? The rusty light gave no clue; there were no clocks. Time inside these grounds happened like the weather happened, or the erosion of the earth.

But she knew: It had been too long. And the first time she’d left Elsa alone. Perhaps she should panic, she thought calmly. Elsa wanted to die. What if she found a way? And if her mother were to die—

She raced back the way she’d come, from the gymnasium, down the hall, out the doors to the main path. Within seconds, she was drenched, hair flattened to her forehead and stinging her eyes. And if her mother wasn’t in the car? If she’d walked off to the woods like an escaped inmate? Claire flung herself through puddles, past the lake quaking with rain, slashing through the grass. Why had she left her in the car? Why had she taken so long inside? Did a part of her want her mother to escape? It was the most horrendous gift she could think to give and no, no that was not what she wanted. If all that was left of Elsa were fingerprints on the car window, what then?

But if her mother was still safe in the car, if Claire was given this gift despite her carelessness — then it would mean she’d made the right choice for Elsa, to not let her go yet. She raced down the path toward the stone wall. She believed in the stones and the path. She believed in her mother and the person she had become. She believed in loving this woman whom she wouldn’t let die. She would do anything to be right this one time. She would be good. She might even believe in God. She would live. She would love life. She would do everything.

Through the downpour, the rain in her eyes, she glimpsed the stone wall and beyond it, there was Elsa, rising out of the car and turning away from Claire. Elsa hadn’t seen her. As Claire attempted to cross the wall, her shoe caught in a stone and she tried to pry it loose. When she looked up again, Elsa was walking steadily into the woods. Claire ran, one-shoed, calling out her mother’s name, straining to catch up to her.

May 19, 1946, Ovid, New York

Claire finally visited yesterday. We were expecting her weeks ago. We were, in fact, expecting her for years, but that is another matter. She gave me a kiss on either cheek, because that is what the French do, she said. She must have read this in a magazine. She did not embrace me. I was so upset I went to my room and said I did not feel well. Later, she wanted to go to the grocer, to get some exotic ingredients she had learned to cook from her new city friends, though she assures me she does not live in the city. She and Ernest made a plan for the three of us, though they didn’t consult me, to have a fancy dinner and pretend we were at a restaurant on the Riviera or somewhere. But I put my foot down and said I did not want her going to the store with me.

She wrote me a grocery list: artichoke, hearts of palm, mango, avocado, swordfish. We were alone in the kitchen. I said I did not think they would have those items. She asked me about her grandmother. I told her she had died of pneumonia several months ago and if she’d come home a little sooner, she might have said goodbye. I only told her the truth. She made as if to hit me. But I caught her arm before she could, and I slapped her face. It hurt my palm, I was surprised at that. I had never hit her before. She ran from the room crying. I thought, yes she is acting her age now, rather than the age she thinks she is.

A woman at the store, she is Italian, has always had eyes for Ernest. She asked after him. I called her a whore under my breath but she did not hear me. I am afraid I have it in me to kill a person who would take something that is mine. But Ernest has eyes for no one aside from me and Marlene Dietrich. And even for her, only ears. She is good company to keep, and I tell him that I would leave me for her as well if I had the chance. I bought the foods Claire has always liked. I made her favorite dinner — breaded schnitzel and cheese noodles. She ate as if it pained her. Only then did I think to ask about her husband. I had forgotten him. He was busy with work, she said, and could not visit but sent his love. I thought: he is afraid of us. She refused to speak of her house or new town, when Ernest asked. I was glad. I did not want to hear those stories.

I have made up my mind to not be kind to Claire as Ernest is. She must know how much she has hurt us, and he will never tell her. He is too kind. He opens his arms and his heart and she throws rocks and spits at him. I think of when Ernest bought me a box of watercolor paints for my birthday. I asked for them, but I believe he would have known to buy them anyway. Claire was a baby then. I was stupid and left them on the floor for only a minute while I went to the toilet. Claire got her fingers in them and ate them. She smiled and laughed. She did not think they tasted bad. I was tempted to taste them myself, her pleasure was so great. Then I thought perhaps she was poisoned and it was having a stupefying affect on her, so I stuck my finger in her mouth and it came up blue and she thought this was very funny until she started to cry. I did not know what I was doing. I remember thinking, what if Ernest were to come home and find Claire poisoned by paint? I was sure he would leave me. That was what I thought. I did not think, what if my baby dies? I did not know what I was doing with a baby. Perhaps I also thought: if she does die, maybe we will have enough money to survive. I was only twenty years old. I was unqualified. Still, I am unqualified yet cannot be fired or quit.

PART VIII: WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO HATE YOURSELF 2004

My mom is hard to miss, even in the crowd at the airport. Her frizzy hair is pulled back in a low ponytail and catches the light, little frills haloing her face. She’s wearing a T-shirt with an abstract drawing of a woman’s privates that says, BUSH GET OUT OF MY BUSH. My mother: never changing, or changing as imperceptibly as our evergreens.

“Look how long you let your hair get,” she says. My hair is not long at all. “It’s so stringy. I’ll have to cut it while you’re here. Let me look at you.” She does, and I’m afraid she’ll walk right out of the airport and into the street and get run over by a truck. Anything to get away from me.

We haven’t seen each other since before I was diagnosed.

Then she hugs me. And she keeps hugging me, moving slightly to catch her footing or maybe she’s crying. “You’re too handsome,” she says. Wisps of her hair get in my eyes and make them water. “Am I embarrassing you yet?”

Over her head, I scan the crowd for any sign of the Hasidim. One security officer is eyeing me funny, like he’s hypnotized, but he makes no move for his walkie-talkie. Here, with her, for a moment, I’m safe.

“Not yet,” I say. She’s three inches shorter than me and in that moment, looking down at the top of her head, I’m watching a painting of her and she doesn’t know I’m seeing how beautiful she is.

“Is that for me?” she asks about the Christmas-wrapped tube.

“No.”

“Oh, of course. What was I thinking? You come on a surprise visit to see me and the present you bring is for someone else.”

“It’s not for anyone.”

She doesn’t ask me why I’ve come, and so last minute. It’s enough that I’m here. Maybe she’s talked to Jules. Maybe she’s afraid I’ll leave if she presses.

We drive west in quiet in her beat-up van, around the southern end of the Puget Sound then up toward Port Townsend, our little logging vs. hippie town on the Olympic Peninsula.

“How have you been feeling lately?” she asks without looking at me. It’s the closest she’ll get to asking about my brain, which is just as well.

“I guess Jules called you,” I say.

“You disappeared on her, and now you show up here with hardly any warning—”

“Now I’m in trouble for visiting you?”

“No one’s in trouble. But you can’t blame her for worrying.” She glances at me then away. “She made me promise to take you to the hospital in Seattle.”

“But you’re not going to, right? You know how hospitals are. They make a zombie out of you.” These are my mom’s own words. I give her my most winning smile. “I have some things to do, and I want to spend time with you.”

An undercover police car drives slowly by. I shield my face with both hands.

“You’re a cheese ball. You didn’t get that from me.” She sighs dramatically. “We’ll see. I never know what’s going on with you two. All I have is my imagination. It’s not fun to think of all the horrible things that can happen to your children.” She smiles at the road. “But it’s my turn for surprises. I have something for you.”

I’ve never liked her surprises. Insects suicide into the windshield. One swerves around inside the van, looking for a feast. I swat my arms and legs in anticipation of a bite.

But at least it’s not dangerous — the insect or my mom. Of all the people in my life, she poses the least threat. She’s bottomed out the dangerlevel chart, paler than the palest, safest green. How much she annoys me demands its own color-coded system.

“So Jules didn’t tell you any news?” I ask.

“About what?”

“Nothing.” I curl both lips between my teeth and bite — I will not tell her that Jules is in trouble. Or pregnant. There’s no point in worrying her. “You think Dad’s around?”

“Something is different with Jules though,” Mom says. “She used to call at least once a week.”

Just as I’m thinking of my dad, we whiz by the dairy he worked at when I was a kid. He used to pack me lunch-boxfuls of those black cookies they use for ice cream sandwiches, sans ice cream, when he could snatch a few pounds of them from the processing room. When Mom was depressed or too busy with her protests, that’s what I’d get for lunch. But every kid in school wanted to trade, so sometimes I ate two sandwiches if I got a good deal.

The roadside forests whip by unblinking. She says, “You can talk to me about stuff, you know. I’m seeing a therapist. She says you have the tools to talk to me and you choose not to.”

We pass the paper mill where my dad works now, close to town. You can’t see it from the road, but we get a big whiff of it — the wind is just right. The smell fills our part of town, piling up in the air on humid days, blanketing everyone, no matter how thick your windows.

“Smells like home,” I say.

“So talk to me. You’ve been feeling good? Everything’s okay?”

“I’m fine. Jesus.” I cross my arms. She thinks I’m lying.

I’ve been worrying about seeing my old friends, but hadn’t thought my mom would be one of the people who would look at me differently, a specimen. Now she’s searching for some change in my face. Waiting for me to do something psycho. To her dismay, I sit here like any normal person swatting at imaginary bugs. But she doesn’t need to worry — she’s never believed in medication, and now I’m almost off.

We veer onto a gravel street, abandoned toys sprawled across and bikes with tires stolen in years prior, tied to chicken-wire fences.

“It’s not the greatest, but it’s home,” she says, pulling into the driveway of a small yellow shack just as a Volvo drives by. I squat low in my seat so I can’t be seen. But not every car is an undercover police officer working for the Hasids, not here anyway. I’m one step ahead of them.

It’s Mom’s third rental since Jules and I left. I hadn’t thought of that — how will I return to my origin if I can’t go to my childhood home? But calm down, Nicolette is calling out to me through time. She wants to be found! The house is edged with unkempt shrubs, tying its sides in the shadow-sleeves of a straitjacket.

“Don’t you want your surprise?” she says.

I really don’t. We climb out; she struggles with the house keys, drops them twice and laughs. “I guess I’m nervous.” When she finally gets the front door open, I step ahead into a small, barely furnished living/dining room connected to a grimy kitchen. There’s cat hair billowing along the edges of the floor. It reminds me of fake snow used for storefront Christmas decorations. So much fur but no cats in sight.

“How many do you have now?” I ask.

“Only four. Scaredy-cats, all of them. Come on.”

The landline lets out a whiny ring.

“Don’t answer it,” I say.

“Why would I? Someone trying to sell me something. Don’t they know I’m broke?”

“Might be the cops.”

“Very funny.” She throws my messenger bag on the couch — I swear I see a plume of dust rise up around it — and I set the painting tube carefully on top. Then she leads me down the hall to the second door. She takes her time, attempting to be dramatic. “Ta-da,” she sings as she swings it open.

And there is my childhood bedroom. I’ve stepped back in time, just like that. My old desk is against the wall, the top covered with messages I’d carved out to my future self when I was young. I tiptoe to it and run my hand over the rough markings, all the scissor stabs and whirlpools. My old comic books are in their plastic sleeves and special filing case. And I used to have a bin of — there it is, right where I left it — broken electronics. Machine parts I’d taken apart and tried to put back together — a broken telephone, a lamp skeleton. Even my toy cars are crammed in a box with my sister’s shabby dolls, which I always preferred over the cars. The only difference is a poster with a large dove reaching its wings around the world — my mother’s touch.

Like a museum installation, or a crypt, here is my childhood, replicated inch by farcical inch. The room could be one of Nicolette’s installations. It’s something she would do. And this time, that’s not just a whimsy-lovey thought. She had a hand in this.

It must be the portal. This is how I find her.

“Look.” My mom almost hops to the desk chair where she’s draped my old jean jacket. “I found it in a box in storage with the rest of this stuff.” On the back are hand-painted cows standing in a field. Over them, in bubbly cloud-letters, are the words, Not until the cows come home. “You wanted to be a cowboy, remember that?”

Is that the point of original pain? The object ascribed to it? I remember the jacket as the prop for my first act of independence. I remember my sticky elementary school like an extraneous organ. Third grade — my teacher told me to put on my coat for recess and I said, No. It was probably freezing outside but that wasn’t the point. It was the moment when you realize you’re not so powerless to mother or teacher as you previously thought. I will not be put up for adoption or tossed to the side of the road like an unwanted cat if I say no.

“I hated that jacket,” I say, and immediately regret it. Mom looks like she’s about to cry. She’s so sensitive I want to twist her nose for it. Is causing her pain getting me closer to time traveling? It’s how I sometimes acted back then. But, no, I’ve always appreciated her sensitivity.

Is that act of independence when we first begin to know ourselves? Is that first knowing the original pain?

My mother folds the coat with her eyes closed, trying not to cry.

Or do we not know ourselves until later, when defiance runs deeper, when we’re aware we’re happiest when that spell of dependency is severed completely? At sleep-away camp or the second day of high school. Or is it when we dissolve our dependency to something more abstract, like reality? Is it when we learn to lie?

A cat slinks in and rubs against my ankle. Her gray fur has a hundred vortexes swirling in it. But when I reach down to pet her, she runs away.

“Mom.” Say something nice. Why is it so hard to say something nice to her? “Thanks for this.” I gesture around the room. “I like it.”

My mom smiles at me sadly. “You stay here as long as you need, honey. No one’s making you go to the hospital.”

And when did I start unknowing myself?

2 pills left, 112 species of wildflowers in the state of Washington, all fashion trends 2 years behind on the West Coast, 2 hours of indigestion, 4 dying cats, 1 dial-up Internet connection.

As soon as I can get away from my mom after dinner, I lock myself in the bedroom. My bare toes fold over the end of the mattress and my head touches the wall. Some kind of animal is screaming outside my window, being murdered. I wait. And wait. But the portal hasn’t been activated. Why? My stomach curls from Mom’s “famous” tuna noodle casserole. Is that what’s blocking the portal? No, it’s exactly right. My body is replicating a physical state from my childhood, struggling to digest this particular form of horrible: Mom’s cooking.

I could not be nearer to finding my origin. This room, a replica of my childhood, it has to be the portal. It cannot be a coincidence that my mother did this at this moment in time. But it’s locked. Fragments of my past are spread around me — my old jacket and toys, feeling the same old frustrations with my mother. Could they all be part of it? A code of sorts.

But maybe the items of the code aren’t laid out properly. Like the comic books — they were hardly ever in their sleeves. I get up and spread them across the desk. And the box of cars and dolls was to the right of the electronics, not left. I move the bins just so. Still, nothing happens. I try to imagine I’m already in the past. I’m watching Dallas and Matlock while I wait for my mom to come home from her animal-rights “activities.” “Honey, I’m home,” she calls in a Ricky Ricardo voice. In my room, she tells me some version of what she did that night — targeting a pet shop chain in Tacoma, spray-painting figures of dead cats and dogs with X’s for eyes, breaking into an animal-testing center, firebombing a car in a lab parking lot. She’d go on weekend raids to mink farms around the state, freeing tens of thousands of animals. It is a fairy tale in the dark, imagining those furry friends dancing around her, their princess, in dewy midnight fields, silk tails sparkling with moonlight. After one raid in Snohomish County, there was a reward out for her, which was exciting.

The portal still isn’t working. It’s like I’m at the station doors to my past but they won’t let me on the train. Where’s your ticket, sir, you need a ticket! But I have a ticket! I unroll the painting and drape it over me like a blanket.

Some nights, during the divorce, she’d talk about how much she missed my dad. Scratching my back absentmindedly, her fingernails jagged from biting, she told me how handsome he was when she first saw him fight at the local dojo, but he’d swept her off her feet only when he promised to give up his black-belt training for her — she didn’t believe in fighting. Other nights she’d tell me what a motherfucker he was: he couldn’t do any better than her, just let him try, and he was a terrible father and she was sad she even brought me into the world with his DNA.

I’d listen with eyes half closed as my mother sat on my bed in the near dark, always a cat on her lap, and that nightlight in the hall, and the wispy top of her hair lit from behind like the frazzled ends of comets. Her voice would fall on my dreams, pebbles of information would turn into skipping stones in a creek, or rain, or an army of robots marching to destroy the world.

“It’s ten o’clock, come on,” she says. But I can’t move. I’m paralyzed. “Your dad would throw a soaking wet towel on you to get you up for school. Should I do that?”

I sit up straight in bed, breathing hard. I’m in my childhood room. The real deal.

“I was just joking,” Mom says.

“What day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“No, what date? What year?”

“Don’t be silly. Get up now, I’m starving.” She picks up the loose canvas from the bed and studies it. “What’s this?” She touches the woman’s face closest to the bottom.

In the mirror above the broken dresser, my face is the same as in 2004, except with dark circles under the eyes. But maybe that’s only my own perception. I wouldn’t look different to myself when I time travel, would I? Only to other people?

“Where did you get this?” she asks about the painting. “It’s creepy.”

“Mom? How old do I look?”

“It’s creepy, but it’s not. You know? I think I like it.”

“Mom.”

“You’ve always looked younger than you are, nothing wrong with that.” Then she walks out, calling behind her, “Get dressed already.”

I don’t want to freak her out. Timeline wise, we must be after the divorce, since she talked about my dad like that. But there’s no other clue in her face. She looks young and old.

My enemies are catching up to me and I’m making no progress! I didn’t time travel, which is evident when we leave the new house. Mom drags me to a late breakfast at the airport café, a little diner on the landing field where Cessnas fly in and out. We sit on the porch and watch the green, matted ground send up sparks of insects. The sky is gray and I can just make out the peaks buried in the thick cloud cover — the Olympic Mountains like stones under a blanket. Mom and I both order the same thing and smile at the tired waitress: two eggs over easy with home fries and a piece of pie. It’s the best marionberry pie in the world. It’s what I think of when I’m eating street falafel in the city and I miss home.

A man in a black suit is sitting at the table next to us behind my mom, facing me. Did you see him sit down and not tell me? He folds his chubby hands together under his chin and sits very still. Not many people in this town wear suits like that, especially at the airport.

I have to think quicker. Of course I didn’t time travel because she would never leave such a simple clue for just anyone to find. But I’m on the right track. Nicolette has been meddling with my past — slipping herself into my yearbook, reassembling my room. But the bedroom alone is too easy. Remember it’s all about the image with her. Maybe my room is just one of many scenes she left for me to find here. Maybe there isn’t just one moment of original pain, maybe there are many puzzle pieces that make it up. I have to collect the other tableaux. I have one — but how do I know how many more there are and where to find them?

A plane rumbles from the overcast and lands shakily on the runway. The gnats and bees are out in full bloom. Bees everywhere, even though they’re supposed to be disappearing. The waitress brings our food. I can’t take that first bite of pie quick enough, mouth runny with expectation. The man in black is reading the menu but looks over at me every now and then.

“As good as you remember?” my mom asks.

It is not. A little dry, a little fake-sweet. I nod. “So where’s Dad living now?”

She looks down at her pie. “Is yours warm? Mine doesn’t seem warm.”

“You haven’t tried it yet. Does he want to see me?”

She takes a bite. “It’s warm.” I give her a look. “Of course your father wants to see you. I’m just not sure he’s in town this week. Always something. Fishing. Don’t worry about him. I’ll give him a call and see if he can’t come by tomorrow. I thought you two were writing again.”

The waitress comes by with coffee and whispers something about biting off my head, but my mom doesn’t hear. When the screen door slams behind her, I ask the big question: “Mom?”

“Yeah, honey? You like the potatoes?”

I lower my voice to nearly a whisper. “Have you been contacted by anyone from New York? The cops? Or any Hasid people, Mom? Besides Jules? Think carefully. Has anyone talked to you about a painting? Did you ever go out there without me knowing?”

Her eyes pucker and she’s shaking her head. “I wanted to see you, honey. But I couldn’t. I go crazi on airplanes. You know that. I’m sorri I never came out. Please don’t be mad at me. Not about that. Be mad for other reasons.” Her breath quickens and her face turns a very pretty shade of red.

“I’m not mad at you. Calm down.” She has the words too. “I was never mad.”

She cries into her marionberry pie.

“I said I wasn’t mad. Don’t cry here.” I glance over her shoulder at the man. He’s pretending to look at the planes.

“I’m not crying,” she says through her tears. She wipes her runny nose with her hands and then wipes her eyes, which is gross. “I’m not crying, see?” She sniffles and smiles at me.

“Just be careful of strangers is all I’m saying. You can’t trust them. I mean it.”

“Don’t be silly. There are no strangers here,” my mom says. “Are you seeing Miles tonight?”

“Did you tell him about me being sick?”

In slow motion, her face starts to scrunch and morph again, invisible fingers pushing her flesh around.

“It’s fine,” I say. “I just want to know before I see him.”

Her face relaxes. “Was I not supposed to? He asked how you were and I didn’t want to lie. Should I have lied?” She looks at me intensely then, trying to read my thoughts. But I know she can’t.

Both Miles and Ralph are working at the mill these days. They’ll probably always work there, but who am I to say they should get out of town? They’re in a different department than my dad, though; he’s not trapped in the same way.

Outside Ralph’s crappy prefab, I can see their silhouettes in the window. They look like they’re doing the monkey dance with their arms, but probably not. I watch, missing the guys for the first time, even though I’m right here.

The door swings open and it’s Miles shouting, “Hey, buddy. What are you doing? Come inside.”

It’s me and Miles and Ralph at Ralph’s house. We drink homebrew from water glasses around a smudgy glass coffee table — Ralph and Miles in chairs on one side, legs splayed open the same, and me alone on the lumpy futon opposite them, smack in the middle. They look at me carefully, like I’m an extraterrestrial and they’re FBI agents who have to pretend they don’t know what I really am, and the whole scenario of this visit, them being so-called friends and this beer, is made up for my benefit. But the couch is safe enough. Yellow-level.

Miles asks what New York is like and jokes that I must be clubbing a lot, and I tell him I about my job. “But I’m not allowed to talk about it. Lots of big corporate secrets.”

“Yeah, like what?” Ralph asks.

Ralph was always the one getting in fights and Miles was always the one getting him out of them. Nothing much has changed, I don’t think.

I tell them everything. About and Mr. Fox and his oranges. Miles laughs at that. Even some more secret stuff about trends and the future of skinny jeans and orchids, which I’m not necessarily supposed to tell even though there’s no written contract. Three and a half beers later, I’m no longer pushing heavy stones around just to say a sentence.

“You should come visit sometime. I have an apartment in the city. It’s not that big, but—”

“Might have some vacation days.” Miles shrugs and tips back his beer. “Money’s tight.”

“I’d never live there,” Ralph says. “People are assholes.”

“And what the hell,” Miles says. “You’d have to be half-crazi to stay in the center of the Muslim bullseye.”

He turns bright red when he notices his word choice. But I don’t make any indication that it bothers me, because it doesn’t, just because that word is back and I don’t like it. And then I know: this room with Miles and Ralph — it’s another Rosetta stone to finding and unlocking the portal.

“Want another beer?” Miles asks. “Next I’ll try to make cherry flavor. For the girls.” He looks at my still-full glass. “You don’t like it? You think it’s too bitter.”

“No, I like it a lot.” I take another sip to prove it. “What girls?”

“Are you even supposed to drink?” Ralph asks. “With your meds.”

Miles slaps him on the shoulder, then looks at me sheepishly. “We heard,” he says. “You know, but your mom said you’re doing good.”

Before Ralph was my friend, Miles helped me beat him up. That was back in middle school, when Ralph stole my stick. We each had sticks that we took good care of, weapons that we used in epic recess battles against one another. Mine was curved at the end with a sharp hook. Ralph never let on where he’d hid it. I never saw it again.

I tell them to chill and that I’m totally fine to drink but can’t go nuts or anything. “I’m still me. You can ask me stuff.”

“Yeah, we know. That’s why we were wanting to ask you,” Ralph says, all serious. “Because you’re the expert. But if you’re not comfortable answering, that’s cool…how are those East Coast chicks?” He grins like

he’s so pleased with himself.

Miles says, “I heard they put out more.”

I decide to go invisible while they compare the girls they fucked since high school. I think of asking them about Nicolette, to see if they remember her like Jules does. If she inserted herself into everyone’s memory but mine. But I’m afraid they’d take her away from me if I do. Take away anything sacred about her.

Instead I ask them about Helen Morgan, the first girl I ever slept with, and they laugh until they remember something and then they say she got postpartum depression pretty bad, like as bad as you can get it after her third kid, and she tried to kill her baby but didn’t manage to and now she’s in jail in Seattle. And since we have someone with even bigger problems to talk about, they start to act like they know me again. They get comfortable, maybe too comfortable, and they’re on their sixth beer when they start trying to figure things out.

“So, are you sick like right now?” Miles says. “Right this second?”

I say no, but that “sick” isn’t really the right word.

“What is the right word?”

“‘Sick’ is just kind of loaded,” I say.

“What word then?”

“I mean ‘sick’ makes it sound like I have a cold and it’ll go away in a day.”

“So? What word?”

“I don’t know.”

Ralph is looking out the window, and it’s really dark outside, so he’s looking at nothing. “Were you sick when we were young and just didn’t know it yet?”

“He only got sick a year ago,” Miles says, then adds, “dumbass.”

But I don’t need Miles’s protection. Maybe Ralph is on to something.

I’m thinking about the time I pulled Jules’s hair. “Was that because I was sick?” I ask Ralph. He and Miles look back at me, too drunk to understand what I’m saying. We were fighting over a toy, I think, so I scribbled on a drawing Jules had made, and she got so mad she said I deserved to die. I pleaded with her, Jules take it back, say I’m not going to die. But she wouldn’t take it back. I tried to reason with her that if she didn’t, it might come true and wouldn’t she feel bad and she said, I want it to come true and I won’t take it back. And I pulled her hair so hard it came out in my hands.

I was just a kid then, but when I look back and remember that day, I’m standing inside the memory, and I look like I do now, hunched shoulders and glasses and scruff. A grown man pulling the hair of an eight-yearold girl.

Is that the moment of original pain? One of the tableaux? They made us go to family therapy after the hair-pulling day, and right after that, Jules moved out because they thought she’d be safer with my dad. Jules has said that isn’t true. She said we went to counseling because of their marriage trouble, and it was at least a year before she moved — a custody issue, nothing to do with me. Jules said, “You think I moved because I was afraid of you? Did Mom tell you that? You’re always trying to protect her.” Jules has always wanted me to be the good guy. But I’m not. She’s never gotten that through her thick skull.

I feel like hurting her again. “Jules is a religious nut now,” I tell Ralph and Miles. “She cut her hair off and wears wigs.”

“That sounds badass. Like G.I. Jane,” Ralph says.

“No,” I say.

“She was always Demi Moore hot,” Miles slurs.

I say, “But that’s not the worst part.”

“Hey.” Ralph sits up straight like a brilliant idea knocked him sober. “So what kind of drugs do they got you on? Do they make you better?”

“Yeah, totally. They did,” I say.

“Would it do anything, you know, to someone like us?” Ralph asks.

I reach in my jacket pocket and pull out the pill bottle and rattle it for effect. “Ho-ho-ho. A Zyprexa for you, and a Zyprexa for you, ho-ho-ho,” I say, one hand on my belly, handing them each a pill. My last two.

“You sure it’s okay?” Miles asks.

“Probably illegal,” I say.

They down the pills with beer. “I mean do you have enough? You aren’t going to run out?”

“Nope.” I don’t tell them which question I was answering. “Anyway, I barely need them anymore. Today I didn’t take one. Or yesterday.”

“But what if?” Miles says.

“I just feel super awake. More awake-awake than I’ve felt all year.”

“I don’t feel anything,” Ralph says.

Miles says, “It’s not in your bloodstream yet.”

Ralph grabs two bottles from the fridge. Out of homebrew and onto High Life.

“That’s your number eight,” I say to Miles.

“So?” Ralph says. He bends over the stereo on the floor and puts on Pink Floyd.

“So I was saying,” I say, “the most awful part about the Hasid thing is that they’re worse than the mafia. The Hasids have their own mafia and they have spies all over the place and do all sorts of covert stuff. Not bad stuff like the Italian mafia. Good stuff, usually.”

“Are you serious? There’s a Jewish mafia?” Miles hiccups.

“Yeah, they followed me here.”

“Who’s their arch nemesis? The German mafia?” Miles whoops and slaps his knee.

Ralph sits back down and laughs loudly. “You’re fucking batshit,” Ralph says.

Then I say, “Do you think it’s my fault? About what happened to Helen Morgan?”

Ralph stops laughing. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

“I know, but what if?”

“Because you fucked her once?”

I’m about to say, what if I gave her my disease somehow, but something red-level dangerous is throbbing behind Ralph’s eyelid.

“Hey, let’s see the scars,” Miles says, sticking out the top of his left hand to us. We examine each other’s cigarette burns and then our own.

We burned twice before, back in high school. All that’s left of our past “brotherhood” ritual is an embossment of spongy skin.

“They’ve faded,” Ralph says, grinning. “Let’s do it again.” It was Ralph’s idea years ago, too. But he’s always burning himself on purpose anyway.

I laugh. “We’re too old for that now, right?”

“Hell, no,” Miles says. “We can’t ever be too old. Okay?”

We each light a cigarette and stand in a circle. Miles holds his hand out to me, I hold mine to Ralph, and Ralph holds his to Miles. I wonder, if aliens came to Earth right now and observed this, what would they think? This thought isn’t so weird that it won’t make them laugh, so I say, “I wonder if aliens came to Earth right now and observed this, what would they think?”

“They’d think we’re shitheads,” Ralph says. “Ready?”

Pain works the way empathy works, the same neurons shooting around in my brain now as they did the first time, or when witnessing someone else’s pain. My inner clock is off time. Something shifts. This scene, this moment — it’s another key to open the portal. The pain causes a schism. In the circle, three hands violate and three are victims. One hand and one part of my brain is focusing on causing pain and the other on receiving it and the two parts are having trouble coexisting and I’m not sure which hands are which. When you hurt someone you feel bad, but not as bad as getting hurt, but here all that’s transferred and overlapping because the searing pain I’m receiving on my left hand feels like the pain of causing pain with my right. How much time passes for the aliens watching us? Time slows. Am I controlling time? This is part of the original physical pain and my brain fires the same pink and blue lights as before because I’m physically experiencing the same event, physically going back in time. I am a slow-burning gnarl of tobacco leaf.

Miles flinches first, drops his hand away from mine, which causes his hand to lift off Ralph’s which causes his to lift off mine.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” we yell and laugh. “That fucking hurts!” Miles looks close to tears but instead of crying he punches a wall with his unburnt hand. “You’re such a weirdo,” he says and lunges in to give me a noogie. I slip out of his grip and go to the bathroom. All of this could have happened any year of our lives, but we haven’t time traveled.

I run my hand under cold water and look for burn cream but Ralph doesn’t have anything like that. The mirrored medicine cabinet door is off its hinges and leaning against the wall on the floor like in a shoe store, so I look at my feet. Through the door, I hear Ralph ask, “Shouldn’t I be seeing shit with these pills?” and Miles replies, “It’s an antipsychotic, dumbass.”

When I come back out, Ralph is switching from Pink Floyd to the Doors and Miles is passed out on the futon. I sit next to his feet.

“What year is it?” I ask Ralph.

“The year is twenty-fifty-one and we are all computer simulations.”

I try to laugh. It’s now or never. “Do you remember that girl Nicolette?” I say, all casual. “From school. I think.”

Miles leans up to say, “Yeah, that sucked.”

Miles remembers her. Everyone remembers but me.

“That’s the girl who killed herself?” says Ralph.

“No,” I say.

“What are you talking about?” says Miles. “You’re the one who saw it happen.”

“No I didn’t.” I stand up and look down at him. “That was a different girl.” Did I really cause Nicolette to go back in time and jump by telling her about seeing a girl who jumped? Is that the place she dies? If I caused Nicolette to die—

“Why are you bringing this shit up anyway?” Miles says, closing his eyes again.

Of course they’re wrong. I saw someone jump. But no Nicolette I knew ever threw herself off a cliff. And they never found the body. Just because a father said his daughter had gone missing didn’t mean anything. How could they be sure it was Nicolette?

“You know what I just realized?” Ralph says. “You never asked what we’re up to.”

“What?”

“I mean, you got me thinking. We’ve been talking about you all night, and Helen and some dead girl. I know you’re sick and all, so you should get some attention. But it’s like, don’t you want to know how we are?”

Miles lifts his head up from the couch, eyes closed. “Leave him alone,” he says, then plops back down.

Once, Miles and I tried acid together, at the old army fort, facing the water for hours. He said something really wise — life-changing wise — that we both forgot immediately after. I tried for weeks to get him to repeat it. He took acid again and I was the babysitter that time and had my pen and paper ready. But when we got back to the bluff above the water, all he said was that he knew he’d die here. And since death was the only thing we owned and could control, he said, he was going to have his way with it, was planning a date and time, but he wouldn’t tell me when, and then he pointed straight out in front of him, toward the watery horizon. I had him stay the night with me and he let me hold him until morning.

I place my hand lightly on Miles’s feet. He doesn’t notice.

Ralph goes to the window, almost knocking over a full beer in his path. “Forget it. I didn’t mean anything. I got work in the morning, so.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Don’t worry about it. You gave us your pills, that’s cool of you. Not that it did anything.”

Miles wakes up enough to say, “Cool seeing you, though.”

I pick up some bottles and take them to the kitchen but can’t find the trashcan and don’t want to ask, so I slip out the door with them and throw them into the woods behind the house. I wait to hear the crash of glass, but there’s nothing.

Time is running out. This Thursday could have caused last Thursday. Don’t forget. Four days since we stole the painting. Still haven’t found Nicolette.

Eight thirty-seven in the morning now. My dad was supposed to come at seven. Hours waiting at the dingy window from the couch. Watching the street, watching the linoleum peel up from the floor. I guess I fell asleep at some point but I stayed up most of the night on the Web: the easiest form of time travel. But my mom still has dial-up, so it was slow going. Someone removed the information about the landmine house from Nicolette’s website, which has to be a clue for me, not to mention an easy way to deter the Hasidim from going there.

My mom is outside washing her van. The window looks out on the driveway and I jump at every crush of gravel. An undercover police car rolls by, peering at the house. The cop looks familiar and I duck behind the wall. No sign of my dad’s pickup.

That shape there in the corner, do you see that? Rubbing my eyes doesn’t make it go away. Then a shadow of a man. Dad? I stand up and he goes to the coat rack in the hallway and rifles through pockets like he used to do, looking for his loose-leaf tobacco. He puts on a shadow of a big-brimmed hat like the Hasidim wear. Then he goes behind me to the kitchen where I can’t see him. I hear him peek in the fridge. I hear him crack a beer. I hear him open the oven and stick his head inside. You really shouldn’t do that, Dad. I turn around just in time to see the back door close, the dirty slatted blinds still shaking.

My mom comes in at nine. In the doorway, she stands watching me. “Looks like he’s not coming.” She breathes in deeply. “Sorri, honey.”

“Whatever,” I say.

“I have a message for you, before I forget. From, let me see.” She hunts through a stack of receipts and notes on the kitchen counter. “You left your cell here last night and someone kept calling.”

“You answered my phone? That’s private property.”

“I couldn’t figure out how to turn the ringer off. What was I supposed to do?” she says. “Here it is. A man named Jill. Isn’t that funny? Jill.”

I jump up and stand close, so nothing in her face can get past me. “What did he say? Where is he?”

“He was very nice. We talked for some time. He said it was very important that you meet him tomorrow at 101st Street and Fifth Avenue at six. But doesn’t he know you’re here? He said it was business, or something, a business deal you were in on together. What could be so urgent?”

“What else? What else did he say?”

“I think that’s it. He said not to call that number back, he’d call you soon. And something about your third business partner, let me see. I wrote it down exactly. He talked very fast.”

“What third business partner?”

“Yes, here, he says your third business partner will be there, too, that it all worked out. He sounds older. Who is he? Is he handsome?”

He must mean Claire. There’s no way I’ll let the painting go to her and not Nicolette. Not when I’m so close to figuring it out.

“I can’t believe you kept him on the phone that long,” I say. “What if the police traced the call? What if they’re coming right this second?”

She squints at me for a moment. “I’m sure no one is coming, honey. Maybe it just feels that way.”

“Of course it feels that way when there are people coming.”

“Who is that man? Are you selling drugs for him?” My mom grabs my shoulders and makes me look at her. “Tell me the truth. Right now.”

But how can I tell her the truth? All I can do is show her.

She follows me to the bedroom where I’ve let the painting frivolously lie on the mattress. I gesture to it.

“What is it?” she asks.

But my throat has stopped working.

“Is this why you’re worried about the police?”

I nod.

She stands very close to me. “Did you steal this, West?”

I nod again.

“Why?”

Before I can nod or shake anything she slaps my cheek. It shocks me more than it hurts. Then it hurts. It burns.

“I had to steal it. It was stolen from someone else and I’m giving it back to the rightful owner.”

“I don’t want to hear it. You go back right now and hand it over to the authorities.”

“The authorities are crooks! You’ve broken the law for a good cause. You’re supposed to understand.”

“That’s different. I was young. And I was me. You’ll give it back or I’ll take it to the police here myself.”

This, I decide, is a good moment to grab the painting and storm from the room dramatically, swiping the car keys from the kitchen counter on my way out.

I don’t know where I’m going, driving wherever the van wants to take me. If you’d just tell me who I can trust, Dear Listeners. Why can’t you speak more clearly? It’s as if we’re addressing each other, but in two different conversations. You’re replying to something I’ll say years from now.

Where do I end up but my dad’s old girlfriend’s place and she tells me that he has a new girlfriend and by all means go bug him there, it’s at the end of Jackson Street by the bluff with a great view, you won’t miss his truck.

My dad is hunched over in the side yard, ripping up roots, as I park across the street. Weeding at a house that’s not even his.

I slam the car door. He stands and turns at the sound, squints at me walking toward him.

“West? What are you doing here?” His face is mostly shaded by his sun-bleached ball cap, so he can hide that he’s eyeing me all over for signs of disease. He takes a step back.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“I was real bummed I couldn’t make it this morning. Got caught up here, you know how it is.”

“Yeah.”

He brushes his hands on his pants, leaving swipes of soil, and leans against the siding. “Beth tells me you’re doing all right.” He says my mom’s name like he’s saying another b-word.

“Yeah.”

“Good. And city living? Is that good? You see your sister?”

“Sometimes.” I shield my eyes for something to do, but the sun isn’t in them.

He frowns at me very seriously and says, “You keep the toilet seat down?”

“What?”

“The toilet seat. You have to keep it down in the city. I’ve heard about the rats out there. It’s in the news. Rats coming up from the sewers through the pipes. Not as rare as you think.”

“Sure.”

“You either keep it closed or you don’t. It’s a yes or no question.”

“Yes. I keep it closed.”

“Because sometimes you can be forgetful.”

“I keep it closed, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

His eyes are shadowy — I can’t tell whose eyes they really are. He waits for me to say something more. Now is the time to ask him about Nicolette and the painting. What would he do in my place? I know he wouldn’t take it back to the police.

“I need some help,” I start.

“Nope. Too old to ask for money. I draw the line.” He takes off his ball cap, studies it a second and bends the brim tighter. “You should get back to keep your mom company. You know how she gets lonely. Next time you’re out here we’ll find the time.”

“Sure.” I kick a hedge on the way to the car.

“West, listen.”

I stop and listen.

“You’re not a kid anymore. You have to get your shit together,” he says to my back. I keep walking. “Hey, you hear me?” I can’t believe I thought he’d actually say something nice. “And look out for your sister. She needs you.”

I turn in the middle of the street. That’s the first true thing he’s said. I can’t help saying, “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Didn’t Jules tell you?” I give him my best fuck-you smile. “She’s pregnant.”

“What?” My dad takes a step toward me, but I walk fast across the street.

When I’m in the van and down the block I say, “Go shove it.”

It’s the best I can do.

My dad was a distraction, a setback — he’s against me. I have to get back on track. And the only place for that is the old fort. The place where Nicolette dies.

The long, narrow path up to the bluff hasn’t changed: a clue in itself. The neglected army fort with its network of tunnels is still a haunt for potheads and skinheads both. On the backside of the hill, where there used to be mortars, are big circles overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. The old gun battery on Artillery Hill, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

With the painting rolled and tucked under my arm, I pass all the usual landmarks, breadcrumbs Nicolette must have left: used condoms chucked into bushes, tinsel; swastikas spray-painted on cement barrack walls; wasps’ nests; deer. The perfect tableau laid out for me. My cell lights the way through one of the windowless stretches of tunnel. There’s an old Indian canoe, and beyond it, where the tunnel opens into a room, there’s a couch, tattered and threadbare, an empty frame hanging above it, no painting — a living room from hell as a reminder: I’m running out of time. Young stalactites hang from the ceiling.

Back out in the bright fog, the weeds reach from between cement cracks, growing more rampant than I remember, fingers vibrating toward me.

I stop a few hundred yards from the bluff edge. The trees have grown since I was home last, and the view of the water is obscured. Is this the spot? No, ten feet to the left. I stand where Miles and I did acid together.

I creep between the trees, close to the drop-off. The sea goes wild on the rocks below. But I’m focused on the air straight in front of me, where Miles pointed out his death, where Nicolette jumped. The great space between the clouds and the sea — that is the nexus.

When I told Nicolette about the girl jumping from the bluff, she stared at her canvas and started laughing. She put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes to hold in the laugh. She couldn’t stop. She was a lunatic, laughing to herself like that. She laughed hard enough for tears to spring from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not laughing at you,” she hiccupped, “I promise I’m not.” I sat there, on the edge of my chair, stunned into listening.

I wasn’t hurt by it. And the more I heard the laugh, the more it sounded like a bell signaling some turning point. I thought she might be laughing at some inside joke between her and her art, or from delight at the mere act of painting. The privilege of sitting there at all. But now I see! She was laughing because they never found the body!

It was Nicolette who jumped. But she doesn’t die here! Of course they never found the body. It landed in the future.

But why does everyone else remember her as the girl who jumped, as if it always happened, while all I have is a memory of the back of a girl’s head? What makes me special? Yes, Genius Voices! As soon as Nicolette traveled into my past, easy memories must have been inserted into the others’ minds. Time rippling through and changing their memories. But since I’m the only one who knows Nicolette in the future, the present, my memories couldn’t be changed because that would result in a paradox. Because how could I fall in love with her in the future if I knew her as the dead girl in the past? To suddenly have memories of past Nicolette wandering the halls of school in a daze, dropping her Hawking book that people teased her for reading, or asking the teacher if he was condoning underage sex by assigning Shakespeare.

Jump? Why would I jump, Dear Voices? No, I can’t. That’s way too dangerous. But you are right — why do you always have to be right? Her jumping from the bluff was a scene in an instructional video. A How-To Beginner’s Guide to Time Traveling! When she jumped off the cliff, she was showing me how to propel myself through time.

And what if you’re wrong? What if I jump and the portal doesn’t open and I’m just stuff on the rocks below? Then I’ll never find Nicolette. I can’t risk that.

But she risked everything. She came all the way to my past, to right here, to show me how to time travel, how to find her. Why else would she do that? How can I not trust her?

You’re right, I must jump. The logic is sound. Axiom 2. Or was it Axiom 4?

It’s beginner’s stuff, needing a running start and flying into the abyss, but I can admit to being a beginner. I back up a few feet and get into a lunge, trying to ready my mind — if I do this, I have to do it right. It’s not just jumping. It’s like doing a marathon while reaching nirvana. Nicolette showed me all the tableaux and it must be for this purpose, for this moment. I try to hold all the tableaux in my head: my childhood bedroom, cigarette burns with Ralph and Miles, pie with Mom, the fort and bluff — they’re lost paintings newly recovered, with sections of code written on them. All part of the complex of scenes I must know precisely, in true relation to one another. A pain chain. Don’t forget pulling Jules’s hair.

I wonder what Jules is doing right now. If she’s worried about me, what she’d say about this jumping business. I wonder if she’s safe.

But Jules is why I must do this. To time travel, to sidestep reality and slip through into elsewhen.

I close my eyes and hold tight to the painting. I feel the grass slicing along my ankles as I run, the air whipping the hairs on my face, the edge of the bluff on the ball of one foot and then the other. And then nothing. Nothing. I am in the air. I am the air. I am wildly open. I am heavy. All my organs are in my head. The weirdest part being I have time to think there is a weirdest part, that I am in the air, I am falling through it, this could be forever, I am scared.

I’m standing on the cliff, toes nearly cresting the ridge — again, or still? My face feels raw.

I traveled back in time twenty seconds to when I was first on the edge, about to jump. Or did I never jump at all?

I wonder if the wind would have carried my voice, the day I saw her jump. If I’d called out, if I’d tried to stop her.

The one smart thing my dad said was that I should be protecting Jules.

The trees are spilled paint when Mom and I get out of town and pick up speed. The only car on the road for tens of miles.

The jump only carried me back twenty seconds. It was, like you said, an instructional video — training for a much bigger jump. A bigger risk. But where and when?

A bee is crawling across my window. How did you get in here? You’re supposed to have disappeared, bee, you’re one of the disappeared — for what are you following me around? Don’t buzz at me, I know your pain. But perhaps the bee is on to something.

“I wish you weren’t going back so soon,” my mom says for the one-hundredth time.

“You’re the one who’s making me!”

Which isn’t true — I don’t know where next to go, but the portal isn’t here. I must head east, back towards my future Nicolette.

“You’ll find a way to give that thing back without getting in trouble, right? West?”

I tap the window with my knuckle near the bee. “So, Dad’s seeing someone new? What happened to Kathy?”

“Who knows?”

“I think Dad must be unhappy.”

She cackles like it’s a joke. “You’re right, he must be. But it’s no excuse for the way he acts.”

“But he hasn’t seen me since before.”

“What about me? You think it’s not hard on me?”

Her cell vibrates in the cup holder. It’s him — I can tell from the way her nostrils flare. He’s listening in and doesn’t want us talking about him behind his back. His voice is muffled, squashed between the phone and her ear, he’s speaking from deep inside my pocket. By this point, my dad’s probably saying, “What’s this about Jules being pregnant? I can’t believe she told you and not me.”

My mom gapes at me. “What? Jules is pregnant?”

I take the phone from her hand and hang it up.

“Honey, what?” My mom keeps turning her whole body toward me but tries to keep her eyes on the road. “Jules is what?”

“She’s not pregnant. I was lying. I don’t know why. I was mad.” I watch her face scrunch, thinking about this.

“That’s not very nice, even if your dad is a jerk.” She hits the top of the steering wheel. “You shouldn’t have seen him. I knew it would upset you.”

“It’s fine. We talked about the toilet seat.”

“Not the rats again.”

Along the road the forests are swallowed by farmland. I try to smile at her. She pulls down her windshield visor. “Let’s talk about something more pleasant. Are you seeing anyone? I’m sure there are plenty of fish in the big concrete sea.” Her smile takes forever to spread across her face. I watch the origin of it, each fold of skin and segment of lip stretching almost to breaking, all these movements affecting the next but also the prior, the slow pull of face.

“No,” I say. “I was, but not now.” The bee is a professional eavesdropper. I open my window until it flies out.

“You were? You never told me that.”

“Why would I?”

“Because we tell each other things. Don’t we? What’s her name? What was her name?”

Suddenly every cloud in the sky morphs into Nicolette’s face. If it wasn’t real and therefore scary, it might be romantic. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it. “Nicolette,” I say.

Nicolette has taken the place of my hazy reflection in the partly rolled-down passenger window. If I tell my mom about Nicolette would we all vanish? Beside me, Nicolette nods, telling me it’s all right. “I’m trying to find her again,” I say.

“Where is she?”

“Disappeared.”

“You know what your father used to do to win me over in a fight? He’d show up at my door just like we were old friends. I had no choice but to invite him in, and things were right back how they always were. Maybe she’d think that’s romantic.” My mom is bobbing her head like we’re listening to music. “Nicolette. That name sounds familiar.”

The birds are on the wires. Wires stretching out before us — strings on a guitar and the road is the fret board.

The phone starts vibrating again. “It’s him,” she says.

“Don’t answer it.”

“I want to tell him you were kidding. What if he calls Jules?”

“Let him then. Don’t answer. Answer is the key. And keys open or lock.” She squints at the road but doesn’t touch the phone.

I feel strong. Just like I always felt with Nicolette. Like she’s holding my hand again and we’re running across a big freeway, laughing. I don’t know where to go, but she is guiding me.

Instead of speaking to my mom, I try to think to her. I tell her to veer left, and she does. I tell the trees to give us shade, and they do. I tell the wind to whistle a tune from my childhood and it picks up “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I feel an overwhelming sorrow for the birds on the wires — for all birds. I pity them so much I could cry.

You say, Fly, bird. “That’s funny,” I say.

“What is?”

How the trees listen but aren’t silent.

How the road is a song beneath us.

How there’s a man with a shadow for a face sitting outside my window.

I say this: “What would you say if I ran out of pills? Ran away from home.”

“Did you forget them? Should we turn around?” Her mouth moves even after she finishes speaking, a dubbed-over kung fu movie.

“They’re waiting for me in New York. Waiting happens all the time. We’re always waiting. It’s not hard.” For tomorrow will be new again. That’s good. I can’t wait, really. I will hit my cheek on concrete. Just to feel it. I will rub my cheek on New York bubblegummed cobblestone. I’m there now already, as I’m here in the car. I can feel it right now, thrown out of my seat in an accident, the cement on my face. The sting of those darts of light in stone. The beautiful light inside asphalt: bees. Hundreds of bees. Swarming underground, waiting for their moment.

Causation is reversed. Things yet to happen upset moments in the past. I feel so close to Nicolette. Can you feel her too? She’s near, telling me to follow the sound of her voice. But not too close. To touch her would be to evaporate. To hold onto her would be to hold onto the infinity between moments.

The world is opening its locked doors. Secrets are being revealed.

“What do you do if you miss a pill? What does your doctor say?” My mother is looking at me and the road both. She has two faces, one for each direction. “Stop looking at me like that,” she says.

Here’s the truth: we’re all connected, but not in a straight line. More like constellations, or islands. My thoughts fill the gaps like water; each movement of hers is connected to mine.

The man with the shadow for a face is sitting in my window. Is that you taking over my reflection? Nicolette got evicted. You, shadow face, are telling me to fly.

So I do. I unbuckle my seatbelt and leave myself behind. But, you remind me, I didn’t need to unbuckle because seatbelts don’t hold in essences.

Below me, I’m sitting by my mother in the van. The shadow fills me up. It’s you, filling me up. I see that frail, encumbered body, the top of a head — you have dandruff! My mother keeps glancing at that body sitting next to her, thinking it’s me. That’s not me, that’s just West, that’s just the empty vessel, the frame that holds the work of art. But it’s not necessary anymore. From up here, I hear someone say, What word then? Let’s see the scars. Rats coming up from the sewers. Honey, what’s wrong?

“Should I pull over? Tell me now.”

“I’m fine, Mom. Just drive,” vessel-me says.

“You’re scaring me. You scared me there for a second.”

It’s blinding, the cracks in the universe, the golden thread stretching on the verge of breaking. The blinding light. Underneath the light is shadow. Something is breaking apart.

“Buckle your seatbelt,” she says.

“Just drive,” you say.

You try to tell her. You try to tell her everything. You know about hollering.

You know about being quiet, too. You have to know about hollering to know about being quiet.

You board the plane, bag slung over your shoulder. In first class they glare at you and gnash their teeth, you can see their breath filling the cabin, turning into microscopic bees, making it hard to breathe. An older woman in a fur shawl, which your mother would spray with fake blood if she were here, takes a good look at you then whispers to the woman next to her: That one’s dangerous.

Down the aisle, toward your seat. Someone growls behind you. You aren’t prepared for that and stop short and the man runs right into you and yells, Hey! It echoes off the cabin walls and the overhead bins and returns to you as, Go away!

Seat 23C, aisle on the port side. You stow your bag above the noise along with the painting — the tube now adorned in new birthday wrapping paper from your mom’s — and you wish you could crawl up there, too. You look up and down the aisle for good measure. In the rear of the plane, a wide-brimmed black hat arcs above a seat, the face obscured. Next to him, a cop’s cap. You duck into your seat before they see you. The sun has nearly set.

The little wool flap with the airline logo covers the headrest. Because of the lice and gnats and bees, you try to pull it off, but it won’t give. You try to blow away all possible bees. You try to relax. You try to ignore the voice-pollution that fills up the place: You don’t belong here, get off the plane, jump out while you still can, off the plane.

The row in front of you is an exit row. That’s good. You can be one of the first off in case the sides of the plane rip free — you read about that happening somewhere. The people in the row ahead are too short but you can see their fat arms in the cracks between the seats. The two people in your row to your left are fat also but they are already pretending to sleep. To your right, across the aisle, is not a fat person but a young girl maybe fifteen. Alone. Really and fully alone. You look around but can’t see anyone who might belong to this girl with sky-blue fingernails. Looking at her makes the rest go still — she is safe and good to you. She wears blue wire-framed glasses and is reading The Great Gatsby. The plane pulls back from the gate and starts to taxi. The paint on the girl’s nails is chipped away in mountain shapes from biting, which means that she has eaten that paint, which worries you. You take out your headphones and listen to Charles Mingus in case the voices of the passengers start up again, in case the girl should say you ought to get out of here. You can tell yourself it isn’t real, that you are making it up, but it is equally plausible that the 193 people on this plane are right now unbuckling their just-buckled seat-belts in order to grab you and throw you off or kill you with a travel-size toothbrush. But they’re only pawns; it isn’t their fault they were chosen to off you because of how much you know. Now you’ve pissed off Charles Mingus, he sounds angry, so you switch to Bach’s Goldberg Variations because you feel that is triumphant music and the songs are short like pop songs.

The plane is still taxiing. In front of the girl are two very large Indian women and one skinny man between them. The two women lean over the man and speak so loudly to each other that you can hear a murmur over the music. They gesticulate wildly, their hands flinging the compressed cabin air like water. The woman on the aisle seat keeps turning around as she speaks so her voice rises and falls as she eyeballs the people around her. Her gaze falls on you and you look away. Small TVs descend from the cabin ceiling. A spokeswoman shows you how to breathe. You cannot hear the words but know she is saying, “Have you or any of your belongings been out of your sight? If so, you must report yourself to the proper authorities.” Yes, yes, you want to say, you have been out of your own sight. You slept too much, why did you do that? You must have been drugged, a bomb placed under your eyelids. You are at red-level danger.

Out of the corner of your eye you see the girl put down The Great Gatsby and lean forward in her seat, staring at the screen with her head tilted back. You take off your earphones and look at her smooth, flawless girl-cheek. Then, in one motion, she flicks her head to stare at you and raises her hand to push a button with the tip of a blue fingernail. You follow the finger’s path — the flight attendant call button. Now they are most certainly coming for you. You shouldn’t have been staring at her like that. You are helpless, nowhere to go. You are such an idiot. You gulp at the stale air, cotton-mouthed.

“Water,” you say out loud.

The stewardess has come into profile. She says, curtly, “Sir, you’ll have to wait.” She leans down and the girl whispers something but her mouth is pointing more at the stewardess’s sloped breasts than at her ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” the stewardess says.

“I was told,” says the girl, loud enough for you to hear, but still quiet, “to report anything suspicious to an airline employee.”

The airline employee stands up stick straight. Her voice descends a note. “Yes, go on.”

You close your eyes, waiting for your execution.

“They,” the girl says, and you open your eyes to see her pointing not at you, but directly in front of her, “have been talking about starting a fire on the plane.”

The cabin is an ocean-roar of whispers. You catch the words “slaughter” and “pregnant.”

The Indian woman on the aisle has turned around in one of her curious swivels and has been listening in. “What?” comes the deep growl. “Are you talking about us?”

“I overheard you,” the girl says. “I’m sorry.”

There it is, small and naked, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry,” you say in the same voice as the girl.

All the players turn to you and stare.

“Did you hear this as well? Sir? Speak up if you did,” the stewardess demands.

“I’m sorry,” you say again, trying to be quieter, but it comes out amplified. You shake your head and hold your earphones up for her to see.

The other woman-in-question sticks her head above the window seat to say, “This is ridiculous.”

The aisle woman says, “She has no clue what she’s talking about. She’s just a little girl. We were talking about how this exit row is actually not ideal if there is a fire in the cabin because only the front exit can be used. We were arguing whether or not we were in the safest part of the plane and my sister said not if we have to help everyone else off first, didn’t you say that.” But the sister only glares.

The stewardess says, “I’m going to have to ask you—”

The man between the sisters takes off his seatbelt and stands calmly in a half-bend under the overhead bins. “You’re aware this is racial profiling,” he says in a mild accent.

“Sir, you must sit down.”

The man straightens his shoulders instead, his head still tilted to fit. “This girl has been watching Fox News far past her bedtime. That is what I’m saying. She has been brainwashed and we are brown. Do you know we’re not even Muslim, little girl? I’m Hindu. And my sister-in-law here is Christian. This is crazy talk.” The man’s voice has raised an octave. “Not that it should matter, but I’m a professor at Rutgers University. In New Jersey. Did you know that when you pushed that button?”

The captain or someone in a different outfit appears. The stewardess whispers to him and the captain-or-someone says to the man, “I’m terribly sorry but this is protocol. When something like this occurs, we must follow protocol. You’ll have to step off the plane. I’m sure it’s just a little miscommunication.”

“We’ll continue this miscommunication in court,” the man says.

They grab their carry-ons and are escorted off. After the three leave, the stewardess helps the girl with the blue nails to get her things. “Is this yours?” she asks, reaching above for a bag with Girl Scout badges and a tube with birthday wrap.

“Not the birthday one,” she says. She looks around tearfully and her eyes finally land on you, sitting with your mouth open, staring. “I’m sorry,” she says to you, and walks down the aisle after the woman. Don’t go, you want to say. You would give her the birthday painting if it would stop her tears.

Over the intercom comes an announcement. “We’re sorry for the delay folks, just a routine safety check and we’ll be on our way. Nothing at all to worry about.” Over the speakers, another announcement, “The man in seat 23C is highly dangerous. We will perform a routine safety check on him, too. Do not attempt to probe him. We must get him off the plane. Off—” You open your mouth very wide.

The engines whir and the whispering bares its teeth. You can hear them all, every word. You can hear Jill talking about following himself on the FBI site, and Mr. Fox about his vacation, and the Indian family and the white girl arguing in an office inside the airport; they stop and stare together out the window when they see the plane leaving them behind. You can hear your mother crying in the car, and your sister crying over the baby in her belly, your father berating himself as he divides daylilies, showering soil around his feet. Some of it catches inside the cuff of his sock. You can hear strangers screech their tires and roll their eyes and yell at their children. Thousands of voices, a tower of them stacked and teetering, calling for help and blaming. It is too much to take in all at once, all those demands like prayers and none directed to a god. It’s surprising so many people get up in the morning.

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 MANIFESTO^1

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 Neel^2

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 long 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.

“And in the same neighborhood, no less,” he went on. “Just down the block. Do you miss it? Your old apartment? You should think about getting a ground-floor place, not that it’s my business. So you don’t have to walk up the stairs by yourself.” He shook his head. “You remember what a mess we made of the den? Me and the guys sleeping on the floor.”

“Yes. Unbelievable,” she agreed emphatically.

“All these years,” he mumbled.

“Yes, it has been years, I was going to say that. You took the words plumb out of my mouth.” She wondered if she’d known him before or after Mary passed.

He laughed again at something she didn’t catch. What a nice man, with a nice laugh, who had apparently slept on her floor? With other men? Claire found that hard to believe, but she often felt like she’d been cast at the end of a play, an understudy to the real actress who’d been reported suddenly missing, and she hadn’t had the chance to read the script and catch up with the other players. At other times, she was aware of the prior scenes, having watched the first three acts from the wings before being thrust on stage, the script ripped from her trembling fingers — but she was never the original actor.

“I loved that apartment,” the man was saying. “Even after…”

They had reached her door. Claire dug into the pockets of her long purple cardigan for her key ring. “And I enjoyed having you there, of course. Those were good times,” Claire said. She thought herself very convincing. She was about to lift her key to the lock, but then the man stepped between her and the door. He peered too closely at her face, frowning, wrinkling up his forehead. Then he leaned back and let out a quick, cold laugh.

“What is it? Let me by,” she said.

“As soon as you’re honest with me.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Come on, you don’t remember me. Do you? You don’t remember a thing.”

“Don’t take it personally. My mind’s not quite what it used to be. The condition.”

“The condition. And what would that be?”

“A memory condition.”

“Oh.” He hesitated and stepped aside.

Claire fumbled with the keyring enough that he steadied her hand, sorted through the half-dozen keys, and lifted out the correct one.

“How did you know?” Claire demanded.

But he only held the key out to her.

“I can do it,” she said curtly. He let her. And as she opened the door to her apartment, she knew all at once. She was not walking into her shameful one-room box of mold, the only place she could afford in the neighborhood — she was walking into her and Freddie’s old hallway, sans Freddie, those beautiful white moldings around the doorframes, the den with the double doors and sleeping bags spread across the carpet where Jill and the boys were snoring well past noon.

“Jill,” she whispered. She turned to him in the doorway and dropped her keys at his feet, but did not bend down to pick them up. The door banged open against the adjacent wall, where there was a dent the shape of a knob that deepened each time she came home.

Jill grinned sheepishly.

Claire tried to laugh. “I’m sorry. It’s what happens when you get old.”

“Is it?”

“To some of us.”

They stood there, pressed close together on the threshold, and she tried to hurry her shock along to catch up to his. But she was too late. The look on his face was no longer surprise. It was pity.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “So what if I can’t recognize my neighbors half the time? They’re dimwits anyway. But I recognize you. Only a few minutes off.”

He reached his hand toward her face, but seemed to change his mind. He looked down at the keys on the ground.

“Look at me making you stand here like a dummy,” Claire said. “Come inside.” He bent down and picked up her keys without a word. “Would you like some tea? Or? I don’t know what I have, but you can look. I’m going to sit down for a minute. I just need a minute.”

He helped her to her chair and she didn’t grumble about it. His hand on her arm felt comforting. A thief’s hands touching her skin. How could she forget that part?

Jill sat in the old wicker chair across from her and set his gas mask on the coffee table, beside the newspaper and the letter to the editor she’d been composing all week about how lately the weather hadn’t seemed to change as it should and the bees were getting confused. The daybed, unmade, was behind him in the corner. None of her furniture matched, most of it she’d found on the sidewalk — people were always leaving perfectly good couches and bureaus right in her way so she paid the gutter boys a few dollars to carry them upstairs. It was all very embarrassing, but only until she forgot that it was embarrassing. And Jill didn’t seem to notice anyway; he was only looking at her.

He clapped his hands on his knees. She glanced at his fingers — no ring. “Thirty years,” he said. “Christ. Thirty-three? Thirty-five. I’m not a math guy.”

“You’re asking me?” she said. “Go get yourself some tea.”

“Do you want some?”

“Not now.”

“I don’t want any, either.” He kept staring at her so severely the wrinkles around his eyes seemed to vanish. His expression was no longer pity. It had moved into some other place and it was making her blush.

“What’s that sound?” he asked, glancing toward the window; he must have known she needed a respite from that look.

“I hardly hear it anymore.” She opened her ears and listened to the buzzing. The sound came and went to her like the ticking of a clock; a sound that vanishes when not thought of. “I’ll show you.”

“You don’t have to get up.”

“I want to.” She was steadier on her feet now, but even so, he kept his hand on her lower back as they walked to the window. She felt his warmth through her cardigan — because it was covered in little moth holes. How embarrassing. Why couldn’t she throw something away when it was worn out? Did she think she would never again run into someone whose opinion mattered to her? They hadn’t all died off like her bees.

Claire loosed the window screen and tapped gently on the hive that lived on her fire escape. “These are my honeybees. It’s a top-bar hive. Only the best.”

Jill took a step back and grinned. “You? A beekeeper?”

“Why not? No reason to be scared. They won’t sting you. And if they do, you’ll live. You just need a little baking soda and water.”

“I’m not scared,” Jill said. He sounded as young as when she’d seen him last.

“Thirty-five years,” Claire whispered.

“You’ve had them thirty-five years?”

She closed the screen. “No, two. But I had the first hive for four years before I lost them. A young man was moving out and couldn’t keep them anymore so he asked if I wanted them. He was very handsome. I couldn’t say no. It’s not difficult to harvest the honey. One of the kids from the green market comes by and helps me once a month. They all know me as the old bee lady. And you should see me in my beekeeper’s veil.” She laughed quietly. “I spoil these ones. They don’t need much attention, but I like to give it to them anyway.”

“You sell your honey at the market?” Jill asked, surprised.

“I mostly give it away. I could make a profit, but it’s more fun to see people’s faces when you throw a jar of honey at them. I bet you’ve never had honey thrown at you before. Put it in your tea. Or just have a spoonful. It’s the best you’ve had, I guarantee.”

“Is it legal?”

“No. But it’s organic.”

“I think I will have that tea now.”

Claire let him put the kettle on while she sat in the rocker and rested her eyes, having some fun with the flickering blues and yellows on the insides of her lids. Jill stayed behind her in the kitchen while the water boiled. Perhaps he needed a moment to process. It’s not every day you see an old friend and find out they’ve turned into a disappearing beekeeper.

Claire had fallen. It was a year ago, on Sullivan Street, or so she thought, and when she looked behind her, she saw there was nothing she could have tripped on. At the hospital, she received four stitches on her left knee. She was not afraid, and the young man stitching her up smelled of a sweet, women’s soap. He checked her ears for any infection or swelling that could have impacted her balance. As he scanned her chart, he said, “I see your mother had—”

“Well it’s not that,” Claire interjected. “It certainly is not that. It will happen, you can bet. But not yet.”

“All the same, I think we’ll get you set up with a few appointments. Some basic tests, memory and skill sets,” he said nonchalantly. “Do you live alone, Claire?”

“I do.”

“Do you have someone who might go with you to these tests? This is all a just-in-case.”

“My memory is fine. It must be vertigo. Have you thought of that?”

“Knowing early on — there will be more options for you.”

“Something must be wrong with your ear contraption.”

He tapped his papers straight, scanned her chart. “What street did you say you fell on?”

“Sullivan.”

“I see. But the ambulance picked you up on Mercer.”

“It was Sullivan. I know. I used to live there.”

The doctor shifted but his white coat seemed to stay perfectly still. He smiled pitifully and lit up her ears again with his instrument. “I’ll take another look. Could be an infection, yet.”

When the kettle whistled, Claire called out behind her, “What have you been doing all these years?”

“Stealing art,” Jill called back.

“Very funny.”

He brought their tea on a tray with a jar of the good stuff, and set it on the coffee table beside his gas mask. Quite the still life.

“I like three big spoonfuls,” she said, spilling them into her cup slowly and watching the honey dissolve. “But I’m partial. Plus, I don’t have to watch my figure anymore.” He sat directly facing her and watched her pour the honey into his cup, pity smudging his features. She refused herself permission to ask what was wrong. “Have you kept in touch with your old friends?” she asked. “What happened to Lawrence?”

“How long do you have…?” he said, his voice deeper.

“How long do I have for what?”

“You’re as tough as I remember, Claire. You’re going to make me say it? How long do you have? Until the Alzheimer’s—”

“Could carry on a few years like this. It’s manageable. Or who knows, they might find me in the gutter next week, lost on my way to the hair salon.”

“That’s not funny.”

“No, it isn’t. It will only get worse. That’s what they keep repeating at these Monday night groups. In case I dragged in some hope stuck to the bottom of my shoe.”

Jill blew on his tea in response, watching her above the rim of his mug.

“Stop looking at me like that. It’s not as bad as I make it sound. I feel very lucky. The doctors say I should feel very lucky.”

“You don’t have to feel what they tell you to.”

“So you’re still the anarchist. Well, thank you. But you should try it sometime, feeling lucky.”

“Do you have someone? Who takes care of you?” Jill asked, glancing at his big hands holding his little mug.

“I still know how to use the toilet.”

“I mean if things get worse. You know what I mean.”

“My bees will take care of me.” Claire grimaced.

“I’m being serious.”

“So am I. Everything will fall into place.” Claire turned her face toward the hive. “My first colony ran away, those ingrates. Two winters ago. I’d had them for four good years, and then they just disappeared. Isn’t that strange? I was hurt by it. It felt like they’d run away from me.”

Jill blew on his tea.

“Drink your tea,” Claire said.

He took a sip and tried, but not very hard, to smile at her.

She sighed. “A few years, I’ll be like my mother. I took care of her at her worst. Or right before.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Why would you? It got so I couldn’t do it anymore. She needed a nurse around all the time. I wasn’t strong enough.”

“I bet you were plenty strong,” Jill said.

“I mean I couldn’t physically lift her in order to clean her off when she messed the bed. She wanted to die. And she figured out how. She starved herself.”

With his cup to his lips, Jill said, barely audibly, “Don’t get any funny ideas now.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Like what? Like finally offing myself?”

“Don’t say that.”

“My mother said it. She made it very clear she wanted to die and I wouldn’t let her. She asked for help and I pretended not to hear. And it was the one desire of hers I respected. What do you think of that? What would you do if someone asked you to help them die?”

Jill stared out the window. “Where do you think the bees went when they disappeared?”

But Claire wasn’t about to let up. He’d put himself in this position, showing up without warning, wanting to make amends. Revealing himself as her last best hope.

“I wasn’t brave enough when my mother asked,” Claire said.

“Could they have just move into another hive?”

“You might have been brave enough, if it was your mother.”

“They probably died in the cold,” Jill said.

“Look at me.”

Jill looked at her. “What are we talking about here? Brave enough for what? This is nonsense.”

Claire tried to stand. But the stupid chair was too saggy to provide her any leverage and she stumbled back down to sitting in the process. “I’m very tired. It’s time you go.”

“Already? Can I come by again?” He stood up, then sat back down. “We could talk more. There’s still a ton we didn’t talk about.” He scanned the mostly empty walls as if for a topic. He wouldn’t find the painting here, if that’s what he was looking for. “Like Lawrence. And the boys. Guess they’re not boys anymore.”

How much money did you get for it, Claire didn’t ask. Did it go to the cause?

“Lawrence and — oh, man, did I really forget his name?” Jill kept on.

“Carlos.”

“Now I’m being corrected by a woman with Alzheimer’s. Or, sorry, too soon to joke.” He nodded. “I lost touch with them.”

“And Bird?”

“Bird — he died. Didn’t you hear? After he got back.”

“How?” Claire probed, but she knew the answer.

Jill stood again, tossing his gas mask up and down. “He was in a lot of pain, mentally, so. It wasn’t that long ago. I hadn’t seen him in years. I had to read about it in the paper.”

He couldn’t even say the word suicide. What good was he to her?

“I wish I’d seen him,” he said, meeting her eyes.

“It’s all right,” Claire said. She didn’t blame him, not for anything.

He shrugged. “I should let you rest. But I’ll call you. I’ll stop by. If that’s okay.”

She said only, softly, “Let yourself out.”

When the door shut behind him, the bees buzzed loudly in her defense. She thought about sending them after, to keep an eye on him.

Jill came by again. And again, Claire did not recognize him until they were in her doorway.

As they stood at her window admiring the top-bar hive, again for the first time, Jill asked, “Do you want some tea? Are you hungry?”

“Oh, yes,” Claire said. “For one thing, I don’t have to cook for myself anymore. They bring food to my door. Isn’t that nice?”

Jill laughed. “What program treats you like a queen like that?”

He had a nice laugh. Claire stared at him, and laughed, too. “Yes.”

“No,” Jill said. “Who brings food to your door?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

Jill waddled around with his hands in his pockets, not looking at her. “I’m not much of a cook. But I make an edible pasta. Do you like pasta?”

Claire frowned, then laughed again, unsure of what he wanted her to say.

“I want to help,” Jill said. “I can. Money, or whatever.”

Claire tried to think about this a moment, but there was a cloud in the way. She couldn’t see around it, or through it. She could not kill it. Finally, she landed on a simple phrase that might satisfy him. It was such work to satisfy him. “Good for you,” she said with a smile.

PART X: WE LAUGHED UNTIL WE WERE NO LONGER PEOPLE 2004

There is a black raincloud inside the car. I am a dog being driven out to the country only to be ditched on the side of the road — except that we’re in Friday morning rush hour heading into the city from the airport. I don’t dare look Dan in the eye when he swings his head toward me in the backseat of his new sedan where I’m huddled up wet. His rainy beard rubs against the headrest. Keep your eyes on the road, I want to tell him, even though he’s in the passenger seat. The road is barely visible through the veil of rain around us. Jules says nothing, her hands on the wheel at ten and two. I bet she offered to drive so she wouldn’t have the chance to hit me. They called her number on my emergency card from the airplane. What a shock that must have been. A privilege, really, to get a telephone call from thirty thousand feet in the air. She might have cried. But I already apologized, I think. I’m not going to say it again.

I realize that I got overwhelmed on the plane and that jumping would have been nuts. It would not have gotten me closer to Nicolette. Because it would have killed me. I’m getting distracted from the logic. I have to find a quiet place to read over my mathematical proof, starting back at Premise 1.

“So you’re off your meds, I take it?” Jules asks the road whizzing under us.

Isn’t that funny — we talk about being off or on meds like it’s a trampoline, when really they are in you, undoing you. “I’m a little too soaked to talk right now,” I say. Which is true, after standing outside with that Homeland Security guard — a Hasid — waiting at the airport. We stood in the rain like it wasn’t raining at all. I’d hidden the painting tube the best I could under my shirt. One of those big New York summer rains, but not warm. As if a whole season passed since I was here last, which is wrong because that was only three days ago.

You were just testing back there, Tricky Voices. Is that what it was, a test? You knew the plane door was not the right door. But what is the right door? I must get out from under Dan’s gaze in order find it.

Dan turns to face me as much as his bulk will let him. “The least you could do is treat your sister with respect and answer her question.”

“I don’t like the tone of her question,” I say calmly, one hand on the tube beside me.

“He’s a shoteh,” he says, turning back to Jules.

“Dan!” Jules looks at him sharply. “I don’t know what that means, but don’t say that.”

“It means he’s an imbecile. He thinks he’s not responsible for his actions.”

“It’s normal,” Jules says to him, “if you do a stupid thing like getting off your meds.”

“I left my prescription at home,” I say. “I would have filled it when I went to visit Mom.”

“You should have filled it days ago! And let’s not even start about how you ran off to Mom’s. I can’t believe she dropped you at the airport like this. She must have noticed. She just didn’t want to deal with you herself.” Jules glances at me in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t mean that. She probably didn’t know. How could she? She hasn’t been here.”

“She cried. When she drove me,” I say.

“I knew it,” Jules says. “Just once, she could have acted responsibly.”

“Your mom always cries,” Dan offers.

“That’s true, she always cries.” Jules looks back at me. “We’re going to the hospital.”

I use my low and serious voice. “I can’t go today. There’s too much to do. Right, Dan?”

“You’re asking me?”

What a bad liar, I think loudly. “Please, Jules, just — we’ll swing by my apartment and get my prescription. Then we’ll go to your place so you can keep an eye on me like you’ve done before and it’ll be fine.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know they aren’t my own. Dan inserted the idea of going to my place. He thinks Nicolette is there, or a clue to her. Taking thoughts out of my head and replacing them with his. “I feel totally great right now, anyway. I just had a bad moment is all.”

But it wasn’t all bad. That little slip on the airplane has put me closer to Nicolette and the portal. To loosen my mind, to rid myself of fear. It was all preparation for the right door. Just tell me where is the door!

“You’re going to the hospital today,” Jules says. “No arguments.”

My cell vibrates in my pocket, but Dan is watching so I can’t look at it. “Jules, you don’t know what you’re doing to me. I need a day, at least. There’s this guy. I have to find him. He owes me a bunch of money and if I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it. A lot of money. It’ll help with the hospital bills.”

It’s the only thing I can think of to stall. I know it isn’t over. It can’t be over. I will find the portal.

“What guy? Why does he owe you money?”

I zip my lips, afraid they’ll know if I lie again.

“You can have a few hours,” she breathes.

“We didn’t discuss that,” Dan says. He’s too obviously annoyed for his annoyance to be true — he’s happy to have a close watch over me and get some answers before locking me away.

“A few hours,” Jules says, “and then I’m taking you this afternoon. Six at the latest. All right?”

“Not all right,” I say. It isn’t enough time to decipher Nicolette’s tableaux code, get her the painting, and save Jules, all with Dan around me every second.

Dan’s facing front again and I peek at my phone. There’s a voicemail from a number I don’t know, which has to be Jill. I can’t risk listening now.

“That’s my best offer,” Jules says. “Hospital right now, or hospital at six. Up to you.”

The rain has let up and there’s a hint of sun. We peel around Bowery and onto Broome, then slam into a free space directly across from my apartment, below the psychic’s neon sign.

“Did you feel that?” Dan asks. “I think we ran over something.”

A man is running up to the car, flailing his arms, screaming at us in Chinese. Jules locks the car doors and stares.

“That’s Tachi,” I say.

“What does he want?” Dan asks.

“How would I know?”

Tachi pounds on my sister’s window and then mine. I roll mine down.

“Hi, Tachi,” I say, and then remember that’s not his real name. But he doesn’t notice.

“My car, man. My car,” he says, close to tears.

“This is not your car, this is our car,” Jules says, tilting her face toward my open window.

He ducks and thrashes his arms around under our car. I lean out the window a little to get a better view as he lifts his crushed remote-controlled monster truck.

The corners of his eyes turn a bright, wet red. “You must apologize,” he says to me.

“But,” I say. I fumble for the words. I do want to say them. But the words won’t come. “I didn’t run over it,” I say. I put my hand to my neck and shake my head. If I told them I’d like very much to say it but can’t, they wouldn’t believe me.

Jules rolls down her window. “I didn’t see it. I feel awful. Oh, West, apologize.”

My throat is tight and dry and I think I’m choking. “I apologize!” I yell.

Dan leans back toward my open window. “How much?” he asks Tachi.

Jules digs in her purse and hands Tachi a twenty-dollar bill.

“Are you nuts? This is a hundred fifty at least,” Tachi says, still choked up.

“One-fifty?” Jules says. “I don’t have that. You shouldn’t have been driving your toy in the middle of the street. It was bound to happen. Dan? West? Do you have any money?”

“That’s plenty. It was an accident,” Dan says.

Tachi scoffs. “It was not a toy.” Leaving the money, he sulks off to his stoop a few feet away, cradling his truck, and stares at us.

This is a sign: every victory comes with a price. I am still on track.

“I’ll run up,” Dan says, opening his door. “You two stay here.” He reaches between the front seats and holds his hand toward me, palm open. I stare at it. “Keys?”

“Thanks a lot,” I say to Jules. “I can never show my face in this neighborhood again.” I dig into my jeans pocket and place the keys in Dan’s palm a little too hard. “It’s probably on the kitchen counter,” I tell him. “Or the nightstand. Or the windowsill.”

“I’ll find it.” Dan sprints across the street, agile for such a burly guy.

This is my chance to talk to Jules alone but it’s hard to figure out where to begin without wasting time. Do I tell her about the painting? Or about Dan and the Hasidim at the landmine house? Or Nicolette and time travel? But it’s a terrible thought that makes me ram my head into the back of Jules’s headrest — I just let Dan go up to the apartment. Alone. As in without me. He could be doing anything. He could be bugging the walls and mirrors. He’s probably looking in my closet for Nicolette. Ransacking for clues.

I don’t bother shutting the car door behind me. I dash across the street and punch a bunch of numbers until someone buzzes me in. My legs are Jell-O, running up the stairs. I pull them by the knees to make them go. Jules must have caught the front door before it shut because I hear her padding up behind me. Catch my breath on the landing between the third and fourth floors. But Jules is only a flight below, huffing up, faster than me. I climb the last flight and a half — and there’s Dan, coming out of my apartment with my prescription and my messenger bag.

“When was the last time you cleaned up in there, bud? Whewee.” He waves his hand in front of his face.

Jules comes running up after me. “West, what are you doing?”

“I forgot — I need—”

“I grabbed you a few pairs of clean underwear and some shirts just in case, hope you don’t mind,” Dan says, smiling away. “Don’t know how long your stay at the hospital will be.”

The stairs pulse. There’s a hissing, someone left the gas on and then you, in an ugly, hissing voice: shove him, just shove him, you idiot. The top stair I’m teetering on is lighting up orange, I have to move now.

Jules grabs my arm and pulls me down.

At Jules and Dan’s sink, they watch to see my meds, prescription newly filled, land solidly in my stomach, when Jules’s cell rings on the counter. She looks at it askance. “It’s Dad,” she says. “What does he want?”

“Don’t answer,” I say.

She answers. I flop down on the couch.

“Hi, Dad,” Jules says. “Guess who’s with me now. There was a little trouble on the plane. He’s going back to the hospital.… Yes, he’s fine, pretending to be asleep…he said what?”

“He’s just now calling you about that? Jesus,” I say. She shoots me a look.

“He told you that? Are you sure? Because he’s mistaken. Yes. I’m not anything of the sort…I would tell you. You know how he is. He says things.… Yes, we’re all fine here. Don’t worry. Thanks for checking in.… Okay, I’ll let you go now…okay. You too.”

Jules puts the phone down calmly, walks to the couch, picks up a pillow as if to fluff it, then smacks me with it across the head. A fair punishment. Dan and I watch her huff away into the bedroom. I want to ask Dan why she didn’t tell Dad the truth, but I know everything out of his mouth will be a lie.

“You should get some sleep,” Dan says.

“I don’t need sleep. It’s ten a.m.”

“You were on a red-eye. We’ve all had a long morning.”

“Don’t you need to go to work or something?”

Dan says, “I’m trying to help.”

“I don’t remember asking for it.”

He stands over me, trying to be intimidating. His skin is from a black-and-white movie. “I don’t really care what you think of me or what your problem is, but you need to shape up your attitude with your sister.”

“You need—”

Then Jules comes out with a blanket and throws it at me on the couch before turning back into her bedroom and slamming the door.

When I wake a little later, Dan’s watching a tennis match with the volume low and Jules is reading at the kitchen table and the rain has restarted.

“Should I turn it off?” Dan asks me.

“No,” I say.

“You like tennis?”

“No,” I say. “I’m asleep.”

“Tennis is a disappearing American pastime.”

Dan turns it off anyway. I sneak a peek at the painting tube, which I slipped under the couch when Dan wasn’t watching. Dan goes over to where Jules is sitting. She stiffens. I close my eyes and listen to them talking when they think I’ve gone back to sleep.

“Why don’t you just tell him?” Dan asks quietly.

“Because. It’ll make him worse.”

“You should try thinking about yourself sometime. You should’ve told your dad.”

“There’s nothing to tell. I told him West was wrong and he was, technically. I don’t want my dad’s phony sympathy anyway. It’s not like he cares.”

“He’d want to know that his daughter had a miscarriage.”

“Dan! He can hear you.”

There’s a pause and I lie perfectly still.

“He’s asleep,” Dan says. “Anyway, he should know. He’s your older brother. He’s supposed to support you.”

One of them taps their fingers on the table to rhythm of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

“I don’t know how West knew,” Jules says. “He always knows things he shouldn’t.”

There’s some shuffling and murmuring, and I peek ever so slightly to see Dan on his knees with his head in Jules’s lap and a hand on her belly. He only touches her because he thinks I’m not watching. His back is shaking and I think he’s crying. Jules leaves her hands on the arms of her chair, looking down at his head without touching him back.

“I’m sorry, baby,” he says in nearly a whimper. “My ba’al teshuva.”

“It happens to many women,” Jules says formally. “It’s God’s whatever. Not something we should break down about.” Then she lifts her eyes and looks straight into my squinted ones, or seems to. I don’t wait to find out. I shut my eyes hard and don’t open them until noon.

One time, when Nicolette had me lying supine on the hardwood floor, and it was getting cold, she put down her paints and came to lie with me. I had just finished telling her about pulling Jules’s hair and wanting her to take back what she said about me dying. She led my hand down her blouse, guided my fingers to untie it, then lift it off her. And it was as if I had lost all motor control; I would not have been able to tell my hands what to do if she wasn’t helping. I could not tell my hands from hers.

I never told her that I had a vision when I came inside her. A minor episode. It might have made me stay away from her if she hadn’t held me after like she knew. In the vision, I saw Nicolette disappearing under me. She was a ghost. And then she had never existed, sucked away from me, before and after and forever, all because I’d touched her. But when it was over, she was there, and her flesh was sweaty, and she was smiling, and she held me so tight I thought she’d break my ribs. We gripped and pulled our bodies together. Shoulders to shoulders, hips to hips. We couldn’t get close enough to each other. We couldn’t become the other.

You are absolutely right: her miscarriage was my fault. I left Jules behind and something terrible happened, just like we thought it would. I am selfish and cruel. No better than them. I couldn’t solve it in time. This is my punishment. And the cost.

But I can stop it. If I take Jules back in time with me.

The apartment is quiet. I stare out at the gray streets from the enemy’s camp. The storm’s let up, and there’s a light drizzle. I don’t like that I can’t see the rain until it hits the ground. A shadow of a man has snuck in through the front door but I don’t see Dan.

This whole apartment is oozing with red-level danger. But this is my only chance to listen to that voicemail. It’s Jill reminding me to meet him at 101st Street and Fifth Avenue at six p.m. and to bring all my meds, whatever I can scrounge up. He doesn’t say why. I’m tempted to call him back and say: this is what’s called a double-cross. But I don’t know yet what the double-cross is.

“What are you doing?” a voice behind me asks. It’s Dan, standing by the front door, the shadow hovering near him, apart from him. I have to get out of here. I’ll say anything to get out of here. I focus on his black-suited shoulders. Seems there’s a little dandruff problem there. “Just do what your sister asks today, please,” he says. “She’s had a hard few days.”

“What’s she doing now?”

“Reading. Let her rest a bit.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“It’s not my place to talk about it.” His voice is thicker and his eyes moisten. “The doctor said it might have been stress. Who knows? It couldn’t have been prevented.”

Couldn’t it have? But it seems I’m not the only one being punished.

“Why was she stressed?”

“It’s hard to say, West.”

“Maybe she doesn’t like it here.”

“She’s very happy here. Just because you’re not—” He straightens his shoulders. “I have to go. Please be gracious. Go to the hospital when Jules says it’s time. If you won’t do it for yourself, at least do it for her. It’s no good for anyone, her having to take care of you like this.”

“She doesn’t need to take care of me. I need to take care of her.”

He grabs an umbrella from beside the door. The morning’s rain falls from the metal tip.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“Not that it’s your business, but I’m going to Chelsea for a lunch meeting with some colleagues, then to work.”

“Fuck,” I say. Chelsea. The gallery. The Hasidim. I rest my head on the window to cool it. It’s too late. Is it too late?

He shakes his head. “Try to think what you can offer to deserve the loving-kindness your sister gives you.”

Then his face starts coming apart. I don’t know who I’ve been talking to. And then it’s Dan again.

“Don’t hurt Jules,” I say.

“I never would. I believe you know that.” He sounds so weak and tired, I almost believe him. Pathetic, rather than suspicious like usual. I laugh at him so he knows I’m not fooled. But he must know it’s my fault she lost the baby.

“I’m sorry, West,” Dan says. And then he leaves.

This is the mouth of the cave and Dan is the throbbing, prickling tongue of the dragon, angered by what I’ve cost him. I need to get Jules far away from here before Dan comes home. To another year or decade. I have to find the portal now.

Jules is startled to see me standing over her when she wakes. “What are you doing?”

She fell asleep with a book open on her chest: The Best of Jewish Parenting. She pulls the sheets up to her neck, even though she’s totally covered and her head in a scarf.

“We have to leave,” I say. “Now.”

“Then let me get ready.” She shakes her head at herself. “Letting you drag me around.”

While I’m waiting, the rain stops. I think through all the clues, everything that happened in the last week, moving backwards through time. The plane, the bluff, visiting Mom and Ralph and Miles, stealing the painting, planning with Jill, meeting Jill, going to the gallery for the first time, talking with Jules, seeing the landmine house.

The landmine house. My mom said it, she said it so clearly in the car — about what my dad did to win her back after a fight: I have to knock on Nicolette’s door. I have to go back to the landmine house.

Jules finally opens her door. She has on a short black wig that makes her look like she fell out of a beatnik film. She’s wearing all black — black slacks and a black long-sleeve T-shirt. She looks so pretty. It’s something Nicolette would wear, except tighter and nicer. She looks so much like Nicolette right now.

“What time is it? You’ve got three hours and then the hospital.”

“You look pretty,” I say.

She sighs. “Where to?”

And I say, “The Bronx.”

Today everyone in the subway looks familiar. Everyone I pass is someone from my past. Two people in this car are connected to my future. But they’re all pretending not to know me.

“I don’t think it’s safe here,” Jules says, looking around us. I look around, too, try to quantify the danger level, but what she means is: we’re the only white people on the train. I don’t bother telling her she’s racist or that she ought to look a lot closer to home to know who she should really be fearful of.

There is one Hasid on the train and I don’t know who could be undercover. But they can’t stop us. We’re going to the point at which it all started. The place where Nicolette left the last clue, which is the first clue, where the tableaux will unlock the secret to time traveling. The secret to finding her.

The train breaches ground on the other side of the river. There’s the waxy-looking water, and the water-streaked storefront windows. Nicolette has been hiding the answers here all along, the code to sequencing the tableaux — a time traveler’s manual. It’s so obvious now. She hid it in plain sight, those dangerous words: the script along the trim of the landmine house.

We get off at 231st Street. There’s a church half a block south of us, looming and harboring obvious danger. And look at that sleepy-eyed man standing at the bus stop a few feet away who keeps nodding north.

“Why can’t I ever say ‘no’ to you?” Jules whispers, eyeing him suspiciously.

I have a sieve or net in my brain, weeding out the irrelevancies and keeping the bounty. But something’s not right. Do you feel that? There’s a rip in my net, letting too much through — stitch that up if you get the chance. All the streets look like the right street. I’m not seeing straight.

“I’m not seeing straight,” I say to confirm. “Straight to the words before it falls away.”

“West, please focus. Where does your friend live? Let’s do this fast. No dawdling.”

I grab Jules with one hand, the birthday-wrapped painting in the other, messenger bag strapped across my shoulder, and lead her under the overpass, cars pressing on my brain, traffic mixing with river sounds. Then, out of the corner of my eye, just behind us, a black fedora, a Hasid’s mean mug. I don’t waste time getting a good look. I pull Jules faster.

“What are we doing?” Jules shouts.

There’s an empty shopping cart blocking the sidewalk and we scuttle around it. The sidewalk trees whisper insults. Slut! Fuck-up! I don’t have time to stick up for her.

“This way, quickly.” I hold her forearm and pull her after me. They must know I have the painting with me. They must know I’ve finally found my way to Nicolette.

You’re right. To get to the landmine house we have to cross Broadway. Jules and I teeter on the curb. Four lanes of heavy traffic.

“Let’s go to the crosswalk,” she says, trying to pull her arm away.

“We’re not safe, we have to get to the other side.” And then I pull her into the street. Quickly through the first two lanes, three car horns in a row. I hold her wrist in the air so she won’t stumble. We wait between the yellow lines of the turning lane. Cars on both sides of us going sixty miles an hour. They come up fast and blue. She’s flipping her head wildly at each passing car. She tries to squirm away from me but I squeeze hard.

“West, stop! Let’s just make it to that street lamp,” she pleads, pointing back to where we came from. “See? It’s close. That’s our goal.”

I see the street lamp. It’s glinting red. Danger. “This way,” I say.

She glares at me. She’s hiding her terror inside her lips. But I know she won’t let me cross by myself. To her I’m the monster under the bed. But I can’t stop now, they’re gaining on us. She’ll thank me later.

“Motherfucker,” a man yells out his car window. From above we are wild stars, wobbling in a dead sky. Or maybe we are road kill. Failure! Fuck-up, you’re going to die. Jules already thought I was a failure. The incessant honking, like flatlining. Yet I can hear her heart beating louder even than the traffic. I hate you. It’s Jules, under her breath. I hate you. I hate you. It’s you, screaming in my ear as we dash across the last two lanes.

“Let go of me,” Jules says quietly, panting at my side.

I swing her arm and the painting tube in either hand, propelling us down the sidewalk, my messenger bag swinging too. Tibbet Road, we’ve made it. I smile at Jules to let her know it’s all right, I’m going to keep us safe. She tries to yank her arm away, but I keep hold.

“Just wait,” I snap at her. I don’t mean to snap.

Finally, the landmine house. It’s quiet. The eye of the storm. I have all my tableaux on file: the bluff, the tunnel, cigarette burns, the café and marionberry pie, my childhood bedroom. On tiptoe we approach until we’re standing hand in hand on the sidewalk in front of the lawn. And then I want to rip my eyes out.

The green trim around the house has been painted over.

Where are the words? No, I’m ready. I’m finally ready to read them and they’re gone!

Could I have been wrong? No, I could not have been wrong. The deductive logic must stand. Did they change the language on me because I got too close? Maybe the words have moved inside. There’s no more landmine sign or barbed wire, but there’s still a divot in the grass from an explosion. The shadows and the houses are spaced too evenly, fake. A little boy placed these houses here in a miniature train scene and we’re just little plastic people, stalled in time.

In the window, a movement.

Nicolette.

Of course. She’s inside. She’s been inside the entire time, waiting to explain those words. That first day, she was there, too, watching me through the window.

I squeeze Jules’s hand — then pull her forward into the minefield and wait to explode.

“I’m calling Dan,” Jules says, using a mean woman’s voice. “He’ll pick us up. After he says ‘I told you so.’”

But Nicolette couldn’t come out of the house that first day because the Hasidim arrived.

Two more giant steps.

“Stop,” Jules says. “I said stop.”

I stop and open my eyes. We’ve reached the front door. I grab the knob. It’s locked.

Three kicks to the door. The stone flowerpot beside it hadn’t been there last time. I lean the tube and my bag against the siding and grab the pot. It’s heavier than I thought, the perfect heaviness. A bud is starting to sprout.

Quickly along the perimeter where house meets lawn, to the first window. But she’s no longer in sight. All I can see in the dusty glass is myself. A little-boy version of me.

A running start and I smash the bottom of the pot into the window. The glass doesn’t break and there’s soil all over my chest. I do it again and the window cracks and splinters, and the third time I have to shake Jules off me and the glass sprays everywhere and almost gets her. I knock the rest of the broken window away with my hand. Jules screams at the same time as my fingers start to bleed and her screams are coming out of my wounds. I turn back to Jules to help her up on the sill. She’s crying up a storm. There’s a storm brewing, big clouds on their way, flying over the roof of the house, coming out of the chimney, they’re coming to drown this whole place, to make an ocean, and the Hasidim are on their way to get me. I have to get in, I have to get in the house, and Jules doesn’t understand. They will take her away from me again if I can’t find the words to go back in time before the first time.

A man is standing in front of me on the other side of the broken window. He’s covered in shadow.

“Let me inside,” I demand of him. “Where is she? Werewolf. Give me the words. Words are for babies.”

“They’re on their way, asshole,” he says.

I turn to Jules for help. Her face is wet with sweat and tears and soot and she is made of plastic. She’s going to run away from me now, and that will be the last I see of her.

But there are her hands on my shoulders and she’s shaking me and yelling and she pulls my head onto her shoulder and I’m crying, too, which I didn’t mean to do.

When I pull away, her snot sticks to my shirt and her tears are everywhere.

“The police are on their way,” she says. “They’ll take you to the hospital.”

But the cops are working for the Hasidim. She must know this.

I don’t believe her. She wouldn’t turn me in. “You don’t understand, understand this,” I say. She wouldn’t have done that to me. I don’t believe her.

“What am I supposed to do?” she says.

“Why don’t you let me help you? Help is on its way and the way is flat from here. Now Dan and his people will hurt you. You might die and I can’t stop it and it’s all your fault.”

Doesn’t she see that I can take her back in time so she won’t have a miscarriage?

She digs her face into my hands and cries harder. “Listen to what you’re saying, West. You know it’s not true.”

And there she is — lost to me.

I’ve never blamed her before, but she’s never betrayed me before. You don’t know betrayal like this. Who’s ever left you? Your own sister fouling up your plans to save her, right before you solve everything. Which you should have seen coming. It’s you. It’s your fault.

Or maybe it’s my fault. Or maybe Jules is right. Maybe I want her to be right. That would mean I’m just sick. That would mean she’s not in danger. It would be so much easier if I didn’t have to protect her.

But I know I’m not wrong. I can’t be. Unless I messed up somewhere at the very beginning of the logical argument.

I grab my painting and bag. I can’t force her to let me take care of her forever. She will have to fend for herself. I pat Jules’s dark wig. She doesn’t feel it. “Do you miss your hair, Jules?”

She doesn’t look at me. “No, I don’t miss my hair.”

What do I say after that? Nothing. I will run.

But first I leap at her to scare her away for good.

She really shouldn’t love me.

I am completely alone in the world. Completely and utterly and finally alone except for one man:

Jill is waiting for me on the corner of West 101st Street and Fifth Avenue, like his voicemail said. I’m twenty minutes late but still he waited. He is a giant in his leather jacket.

From the corner, I think he might be make-believe. The words and the landmine house have disappeared, and with it Nicolette’s code-key, and I’m afraid everything else will start disappearing, too, Jill included. Vanished through the ripped seam in the universe.

“You’re late.” He’s real, all right. “Didn’t I tell you I’d find you? And her?” He grins at me. He’s real and safe. Thank goodness for green-level safe. He doesn’t know that after Jules, he and Claire are all I have left.

We walk half a block east. He looks at my wounded hand, which I wrapped in one of the extra T-shirts Dan put in my bag, but he doesn’t ask about it. At a don’t-walk sign, Jill digs into his pocket. “Here, I got something that belongs to you.”

He slips me a half-sized crumpled manila envelope. I let him hold the painting while I open it. Inside are rectangular clippings of naked girls. Not the kind you’re thinking — this man is an art thief, not a pervert. It’s an envelope stuffed with dozens of Renaissance nudey cut-outs.

He leans toward me. “Look closer.”

I look closer. Between the clippings are many twenty-dollar bills.

“Can’t be too careful,” Jill says.

“What’s this for?”

“What do you think? I’m paying you back. I shouldn’t have taken it in the first place.”

I unwrap my hand and drape the bloody T-shirt over my shoulder so I can count it, keeping it in the envelope. “It’s missing three hundred!”

“Four hundred.”

Something else is jiggling around in the bottom of the envelope. “What else is in here?” Peering through, it looks like pills.

“Don’t lose those. She’ll want them. I know she will. Did you bring your meds? You got Xanax?” I nod and pat my messenger bag. Jill leads us to a private-enough alcove by the entrance of a massive stone building I don’t recognize.

“Where are we?” I ask. Gargoyles leer down at us, but the bird poop on their faces make them less threatening. I could kiss them.

“The hospital.”

Has he been talking to Jules? He couldn’t have been. I’ll have to make a run for it again, that’s all there is to it. Goodbye to Jill, goodbye to everything.

“Guess who’s right inside these walls,” Jill says.

“Who?”

“Claire, for Christ’s sake,” he says as if I should have known. “Claire Bishop.”

So I’m going to the hospital after all, just like my Jules wanted. But for another reason.

“What’s wrong with her?”

He lowers his eyes and tosses the painting tube lightly up and down. The birthday paper is torn in places. “We have to act fast. There’s not much time.”

“Why? Did we get caught?”

“No. No one’s getting caught at anything. I know the guards here, if you know what I mean.”

I slip the envelope in my bag and take the painting back from him.

“You don’t know what I mean.” He tells me that the missing four hundred went to the guard he’d paid off, who he told I was Claire’s son, but that I was a bastard kid, and you know how family is, her other kids were always visiting and didn’t want me near, and that’s why we had no choice but to visit at night when everyone else was gone. “I don’t know how long she’s got. Up here,” Jill says tapping his head. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. How long she’s going to be herself. She’s not totally gone yet. But they said she stopped eating. Why would she do that?”

“You don’t have to worry. She can’t die,” I say with as much certainty as I can muster. “The painting won’t let her.”

In the hospital lobby, the fluorescent lights spill on us, chlorinated pool water. I hold my breath. Jill is beside me, eyeing everyone suspiciously. There’s a doctor talking with a security guard at the reception desk, the words SORRY and CRAZY scrolling on the LCD screen above. It’s evening now. Visiting hours are over. But we stay on a bench in the corner like we know what we’re doing.

“The cops are after me,” I say to Jill, keeping my eyes on the guard and doc.

“What happened now?”

“I smashed a guy’s window.”

He just looks up at the vast skylight.

“And I hurt my sister. She’s never going to speak to me again.”

“Sisters are good at forgiving,” Jill says.

“Do you have a sister?”

“Not exactly. But I know.”

While we’re waiting, I get out my notebook, though I have little to work with now. This is why I stay away from hospitals. They’re outside any Homeland Security threat-advisory system with different rules. I don’t know what’s dangerous and what’s not anymore, what kind of connection to the Hasidim. The clues are a fuzzed-up carpet too tread upon.

And you, Lousy Voices — why are you in such a nasty mood? Telling me I’m wrong all the time, that I should give it up, that my time travel theories come from the movies. I know I’m a failure; tell me something new. Stop with the shadow-chorus of whispers! And turn off those red eyes. I’ve had enough of eyes. You may only remain if you have nice things to say.

But no matter how mean you are to me, I will not stop telling you the truth.

After everything else is gone, there’s still Nicolette’s painting in the tube on my lap. And couldn’t this all be orchestrated by her? This whole thing, the whole mystery, could be one of her installations. And where is she? Laughing in the wings, watching me flit about, ready to jump on stage when I’ve solved the thing?

But there’s only one way to know for sure. I flip to the front of my notebook. It all hinges on Premise 1:

NICOLETTE, THOUGH 26 YEARS OLD IN 2004, PAINTED “THE SUICIDE” IN THE LATE FIFTIES.

Everything follows from there. I add one last link to end the proof:

P8: ONLY TWO PEOPLE CAN VERIFY WHETHER P1 IS TRUE: NICOLETTE AND CLAIRE.

But Nicolette is gone.

Could she have wanted me to give the painting to Claire all along?

Now that the doctor has left, Jill walks up all smooth to have a word with the security guard. Some of the overhead lights have been turned off, and the nurses are switching shifts. The guard points to the elevator bank at the back of the lobby.

Jill waves me over and I follow him there. He and the guard whisper and the guard hands him a plastic badge with a string looped through and Jill hands it to me — a visitor’s pass, photocopied and forged.

“End of the line for me, kiddo,” Jill says, and swoops his hand through his silver hair. It doesn’t light up. It doesn’t do anything. The guard pushes the elevator UP button.

“What do you mean? We’re right here,” I say.

“Nope. Can’t go in. The boss here says only one of us. And you’re it.”

I look at the guard who’s picking his nose nearby, pretending not to pay attention. “I’m sure he’d be happy to take more money for you to come, too,” I offer. “I have the envelope.”

Jill rubs his face with his big hands and I think for a second he’s moved his features around, nose replacing forehead, but I’m mistaken. He just looks tired. The near-ultimate kind.

“I’m asking you for a favor, kid. I need you to make sure she gets it. And that she knows what it is and who it’s from. Got it?”

The elevator door opens, and we look at it, but we don’t move. It closes again.

“You’ll do great. You’re a smart guy. One of the smartest, seriously.” Nothing about his face spins dangerously. He’s telling the truth. Or at least what he thinks is the truth.

“Don’t you want to see her?” I ask.

“It’s my thing. Call it a weakness. Just tell her — tell her hi for me.”

“That’s it? Just ‘hi’?”

“Jesus. Then say — say I couldn’t help her, but I know someone who can. No, don’t say that, I don’t like that. Tell her — nah, nothing. It doesn’t matter anyway. She won’t know the difference.”

Jill shrugs his big, sad shoulders.

PART XI: THE SUICIDE

I am still talking to you about truth and love. There is no other way than this way. So that’s the way I go, into the elevator with the guard. He thinks he’s dangerous, but there is no way I can’t find her. There is nothing between us now except one bright thread. No Hasidim here. It’s as if there never were.

“I could get in a lot of trouble for this,” the guard whispers at me. “No funny business.”

“Like what?”

He huffs in response as we climb floors. The tube is under my arm. The glowing button hovers for floor nine. This is the part where I don’t know what happens next. What would happen if I ignored the thread? Last time I was in an elevator, Jill was with me. “Have you read about the disappearing bees?” I ask the guard.

“No.”

The metal mouth opens again, onto a sign that says ALZHEIMER’S RESEARCH CENTER. The center is closed and dim as if it’s always night here.

“Shit or get off the pot,” the guard says. Then, apologetically, “It’s a good ward.” He really thinks I’m her son. “One of the best in the country.”

Jill didn’t mention anything about Alzheimer’s.

There’s less security than in the main hospital; it’s its own wing and entity. I step out of the elevator. We pass the empty nurse’s station framed with Plexiglas so loaded with patients’ fingerprints it could topple over. The fingerprints reach for me but can’t peel themselves off. The guard unlocks the first door and holds it open. Past the blood lab, through double swinging doors, down another hallway haunted by light.

“Is it her birthday?” the guard asks about the wrapped painting.

“Yes,” I say.

The corridors surprise me. They don’t exist until I step into them. I feel like a rat building a maze. Doors open and close as I pass them, swashed by the wind of my walk. There are one hundred and three beds in the research center. I can feel every one of them, all stacked on my nose for a circus trick. It hurts my back. A night nurse doing paperwork at a counter glances up at us tiredly. The guard flashes his badge and she doesn’t say a word.

“Here we are,” the guard says. “Room 919.”

He makes as if to follow me in.

“That wasn’t part of the deal,” I say. “You wait here. Thank you for your help.”

“Fifteen minutes,” the big oaf says.

“Twenty.”

“Ten.”

“Okay, fifteen.”

I knock softly as I enter, shut the door behind me. And my heart nearly falls onto the clean hospital sheets. The bed is empty and freshly made, and the privacy curtain is half open on its ceiling track. Did I miss her? I edge around the first curtain, and find another slightly parted.

“Hello?” I say. The window lets in a sepia tone. The sun has set but is still throwing in light. Under a beige blanket are the shapes of feet. I step through the parted curtain.

She is lying on her back, a bouquet of gray hair splayed out on the pillow. Asleep, but not restful, frowning at her dream. I unwrap the tube then pull the painting out and unroll it. I peer at the faces of the women on the canvas, then up again at the woman in bed. Her face is the face in the painting. It is her exactly, all the women falling. There is Claire Bishop.

Her eyes flutter open. I think she smiles at me.

“It’s you,” she says hoarsely. “I thought you’d come.”

How does she know me? I’ve never been recognized like this.

“You know who I am?” I ask.

Did Nicolette somehow pull everyone together in the past? Perhaps this will all make sense. But for now, no matter the reason, I like being recognized.

“Of course I know her.” She hesitates. “Isn’t your mother Mary?”

The strange certainty of her voice coming from the uncertainty of her body. A body nearly entwined with the cotton of the hospital sheets. IV bags hang from metal hooks, caught fish.

I move closer to her so she can hear me. “My mother’s name is Beth.”

“Mary.” She says this so matter-of-factly that for a moment I believe her. But she doesn’t know me after all. I shouldn’t be disappointed. Why should she know me?

I hold the painting out to her.

And there she is, twice. Lying on the bed and lying in my arms.

She looks at it, unsurprised, her face unchanging. “Do you like it?” she asks.

“Yes, very much.”

“Then you keep it. I don’t need it anymore.”

“But—” That’s very rude, I want to say. I drape the painting over the chair beside the bed and sit down on the edge of the mattress. “May I ask you a question?” I use my politest voice.

“I must look awful like this,” she says.

“Not really, considering.”

“I must get ready for the sitting. But who wants a portrait of a bad woman?”

“A portrait?”

“She’s coming to paint me. I have to make the sandwiches and change into something nice. Lay down a sheet for the easel, will you? The blue cloth we don’t care about.”

I don’t know what else to do so I say, “Okay.” I wonder if I should pretend to lay a sheet.

She tries to sit up. “My hair is a mess. Can she change it in the painting? I will ask her to change my hair.” She looks around, bewildered. “I hope they can swim.”

“Who? Who’s painting your hair?”

She doesn’t answer. She looks at me with sad, wet eyes.

“I think they can swim,” I say. “I need to ask you.”

“That nurse is sleeping with Freddie. She doesn’t know I know. She’s a dumb cunt.”

She coughs for a while and I hold up a small waxy cup of water that she waves off. A thread of pain slithers down her throat and falls in her stomach, nowhere else to go, the spool winding and winding in on itself. I can see it shimmer, like she can.

“So Jill sent you in his place?” she finally asks. “Because he’s too chicken to do it himself. But you’ll help me.”

“I need to ask you. What is the name of the artist who painted this? Is her name Nicolette? I know it is, but I need you to tell me. What did she look like? How old is she? Have you seen her lately?”

“Nicolette,” she says. “Nicolette.” She lifts a gaunt finger. “I can’t seem to die. I’d like to,” she says nonchalantly, as if she needs help crossing the street, “but it won’t let me.”

“It was Nicolette. I knew it was. And the painting won’t let you die, that’s it exactly. You do understand. Nicolette didn’t want you to die.” As if on cue, distant footsteps echo in the hall, recognizable and many. The Hasidim. I lower my voice. “Now you’re ready to go and you can’t.” Her soft moan pushes me to touch the canvas and my fingers feel burnt. There’s only one way. “I have to destroy it.”

“No.” She tries to sit up again but doesn’t get far. “This damn body won’t let me. Besides,” she strains her voice so I can hear, “I want to see the painting there. It took me decades to see it.” She puts her hand on mine. “Did Jill leave you anything else to give to me?”

He said she’d want the pills at the bottom of the envelope.

I shake my head. I have to make her understand. “But the painting won’t let you do that. The suicide belongs to it. It’s keeping you alive.” The footsteps are louder now. The guard must have given me away.

She coughs in response. I bunch her pillow so she can raise her head.

“I’ll get better soon,” she says.

“When did you last see Nicolette? Please tell me,” I whisper. “Don’t you hear them coming?”

She squeezes my shoulder as much as she can. “I don’t want to get better.”

I see her face coming apart and the bed around her, and there’s you telling me to do her in. I will not listen to your selfish voice, your need for drama. I will focus only on Claire.

“Are you afraid to talk about Nicolette? Is that it?” If the painting is preventing Claire’s suicide, then Nicolette did time travel. Which means I can give her the pills and no one will die. Everything holds. It’s an act of verification. No one dies. This is the risk Nicolette’s been preparing me for.

She nods in answer to my thoughts, and moans softly. “They’ll be here soon. Be quick about it,” she says. She knows, too — the Hasidim.

No one dies. I pace around her bed, then back the other way. The walls are beginning to crack and the bees want to come back, but I won’t let them. I’ll make it right. “Let’s think about this here. Let’s take it slow. This is a big thing what you’re asking me. Even though it won’t work. I just met you, and maybe I don’t want to do it. What if I get in trouble? I probably definitely would get in trouble. Wouldn’t I?”

She reaches out a wobbly hand and I stop pacing. “There’s no one else,” she says.

In my hand, her fingers are brittle twigs. I could crush them if I squeezed any tighter.

The windows are giant microphones listening in. The windows are not listening in.

“I’m telling you it won’t work.” It can’t work. I’m not wrong. I’m not wrong after all.

I peek out the curtain to hear the footsteps better, but they’re still just as far. How many minutes since I left the guard? If I’m so certain I needn’t hesitate any longer. Simply an act of verification to prove Premise 1 is true. The heart monitor and alarm is only a simple star network topology — I disable it easily. I unhook the oxygen vine from her nose, unwind it from around her ears. From the envelope, I shake out the three pills Jill put in there, and two from the bottle of Xanax in my bag. This is me giving her medicine for her pain because it can’t kill her because it can’t.

The cup of water at her lips is a cup from another dimension where small people live and live. The footsteps are kicking in my eardrums. She takes the pills. She swallows them.

I sit on the edge of her bed and take her hand again. It feels good in mine. Her skin is alive and wired, a dried-up and rotting apple. She smiles at me. She’s not dying at all, see?

She talks about the spiders and flies she sees in the corners of her eyes. Black shapes on the edge of things. Another set of eyes comes to life behind her own. Real eyes. True eyes. She says, “I know I’m seeing things that aren’t there. How strange. I can say: the things I’m seeing are not there, but that doesn’t make them go away.”

I begin quietly, “Jill says—”

“My bees flew off again when the Towers fell. Twice they ran away.”

I tell her that’s sad, because it is.

“Things disappear all the time. It’s not a mystery.” She falls deeper into her pillow. “I’m not going yet. Why not?”

“I told you,” I say. “The painting.”

“Unplug the damn thing to make sure.” She’s not plugged into anything. There’s the mechanical bed and a desk lamp. I pull both from their sockets to appease her.

“Jill wanted me to tell you—” I say.

“That’s it. The boy left me chocolates on my windowsill. And drool down his chin. Tell Mary that boy drooled all over me.”

She says, “Chicken. Chickens in the field.”

She says, “I never lost anything. Was that cheating? It feels like cheating.” Her breath is low, barely filling her lungs. She sighs. And her hospital gown, and her old lady skin, and her aches and pains, they seem to sigh off her, too.

I’m sitting beside her. I say, “He’s sorry.”

“Don’t you worry,” she whispers. “I’ve been making this decision every day of my life.”

Her hand tightens around mine. It stays tight, until it’s not.

That can’t be right. How can her hand not be tight? Her eyes are closed.

Her eyes are too closed. I hover over. I shake her tiny shoulders. I call out her name. Claire. I call out for Nicolette. She is not dying. This dying woman is not dying. I can’t be wrong. If I’m wrong—“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

Where is Nicolette? She has to jump out from the shadows now.

I check under the bed. I check out the window. The window is black and cracking. Where is she? Has she ever been here? I am sitting on my heart. I’ve killed myself.

The walls are pulsing. On the verge of breaking. You chatter away, how wrong I am, how stupid and inconsequential. How no one was hurting Jules but me. No one.

No. I didn’t mean to. But she wanted. Have I killed her? I can’t help it, I’m crying — for the loss of it? Because I’ll miss this woman I’ve only just met? This good woman. As if she feels it too, I can see her last breath inside her, a torch lighting up everything. Time leaving her.

Premise 1 is false.

I open my mouth and a ticking sound escapes. A bomb I planted in myself, when I was away from myself. This is what it is to not trust your own brain. A foreign roar rings up the building and through my legs. The walls will crumble. The ocean is coming.

Three Nicolettes.

One left me long ago.

One I let fall.

The other led me here, to help her old friend.

When she painted me, when we laid together stomach to stomach, my Nicolette asked what it was like to be me. But how can you tell someone something like that, especially the person you love? Wouldn’t the truth drive them away? “I just want to be part of you,” she said. “Your arm, maybe. Preferably your heart. But,” she admitted, “not your brain.”

There are not only three Nicolettes. There is a fourth — inside me.

It’s her I’ve been looking for.

A truth has come unlocked. I am a million contradictions being juggled in real time.

Closer now. The sky will soon be all around us; the hospital will fall back to the sea. All the sad things in me are lit-up spheres. I have hardly begun.

Holding her hand, I start humming. Just so she knows. So she knows someone is here to sound out her life.

There are no more footsteps. No band of Hasidim. Just West and Claire. A woman who is dying. And the painting, just a painting. Not any painting — ours.

PREMISE 1: I AM MY TRUE SELF.

EPILOGUE

First the water sloshes down the corridors of the hospital. Roaring past the blood lab and the nurse’s station and the Alzheimer’s Research Center and the staff lounge where a med student tries to take the bra off another med student, and you feel it rip through the cancer ward and the hospital cafeteria. You hear it beat and rush like a heart, around the corner and down the tile hall, and you hear the door strike open as it pounds into the room. The doctors and nurses are carried off in a rush. The walls fall and float away. You are on the bed and rolling with the waves.

You are flooding the hospital, you are flooding up the street. You see the flower-heads of strangers bobbing down the current, off to work, off to drop their noses in a tonic, off to indulge or trade or slack, to city-live, completely unaware they are underwater, strewn like kelp. The sudden spray of ocean on your skin. You’re riding toward it, into it low and hard. You leave them all behind. This is all you need: the cloud shadows cast on water. Weird light falling on your eyes. Light dripping and bouncing, as if the sun had nothing better to do than show you beauty. Beside you, the painting is bobbing like a life raft. You see the clouds span the new gulf and seagulls mouth off at the wind and the underbelly of bridges.

Above is a bridge: it is your whole life. You could, if you felt like it, with just a short leap from your floating bed, climb on at any point. You could jump onto the bridge when your father is alive and smell the collar of his flannel coat, the one that is later eaten through by moths because you steal the mothballs to play with as a child. You can live before the diagnosis, before you pulled your sister’s hair, before you hurt her again. You can fling yourself to where your mother is healthy, or when you carry that slap in your hand, or when Mary is near, or the day you first met Nicolette. Moments shift and shimmer like flecks of light on water.

You are alone now, under the bridge, in the middle of nothing and the water’s warm. You are in the water and you are the water. And the hospital bed bobs up and down on the waves, catching and tossing fingers of light. What a thrill, what a thrill to be suspended in time like this. What a way to finally see the ocean, the terrible, indifferent, beautiful ocean you were once so afraid of. You stand up, body acting as it did before it was sick. But it is the memory of a body, standing on the edge of the memory of a bed, toes tucked around the lip, feeling the starchy sheet fold under them. As the wave swells, you grab hold of the underside of the bridge. You climb onto it.

There is someone waiting, always waiting for you. A woman with cropped dark hair and welling eyes. She is waving you onward.

Here, the sky is forever in front of you. Away and away it goes, the dim firmament splashed with gulls, and crows like paint splotches on the horizon. Here you are so alive. You are alive, you are alive, you are ready.

Dive in.

Content

Carmiel Banasky
The Suicide of Claire Bishop

~ ~ ~

PART I: THE ESCAPE 1959

1

2

3

4

5

6

PART II: THE FUTURE IS FIXED, THE PAST AMBIGUOUS 2004

PART III: THE PROTEST MARCH 26, 1966

1

2

3

4

PART IV: THE TIMELESS HANDBAG OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS 2004

PART V: THE BRIDGE 1967

~ ~ ~

1968

1969

PART VI: I WILL FIND YOU, FALLING WOMAN 2004

PART VII: THE THAW OVID, NEW YORK, 1982

1

2

3

4

PART VIII: WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO HATE YOURSELF 2004

PART IX: NO WEATHER LASTS FOREVER 2001

PART X: WE LAUGHED UNTIL WE WERE NO LONGER PEOPLE 2004

PART XI: THE SUICIDE

EPILOGUE