Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

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.