Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

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.