Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

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.