Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

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.