Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

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.