Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

I crane my neck over the railing and watch the cars and feel them reflecting on the underside of my chin like I am water. “I don’t know how you would jump,” I say conversationally.

“What?”

“I’m just saying it would be hard. You’d have to really want it. You’d have to get down to the car level, or heave yourself far enough over the lane below.”

“Real nice, kid.”

“I need the painting.” I turn to face him. “Even if I’m playing right into their hands.”

There is a lull in foot traffic. Suddenly it’s just us.

“It’s too expensive. You said so yourself.” He tries to light up but the wind won’t let him.

“I know.”

He tilts his head back, looking at the nothing-blue sky like something is going to fall out of it any minute now. Avoiding my eyes at all cost. “If we do this,” he says, “you’ve got to be the one. I’ll organize everything, I’ll be there with you, but I can’t—” He throws his hands up as if to say he’s innocent. “I can’t do the actual deed. You got to know your limits. And I’ll be a suspect right off since I quit. I’ll have to be scarce after. But I can help get it to her.”

“To her?”

“To Claire. It’ll be a waiting game till it’s safe. Understand?”

“I thought we were giving it back to the artist.”

“And I thought we determined the person who deserves it is the nice lady in the painting. Am I wrong?”

“No.”

“So that’s the deal. You in or not?”

I look along the cables for cameras or microphones with wires leading somewhere unknown but I am not so stupid as to think they would leave loose wires for me to find. If they’re easy to see, I know they mean nothing. I look Jill right in the eyes and say, “Yes.” I meant to say it tough and low, but it’s more of a breathy, “I guess.”

And I did not feel the need to elaborate what parts of the deal I was saying yes to: no one’s getting the painting but me until it leads the way to Nicolette. Then I can help her. And she’ll see how much I love her.

Jill grins and slaps my back. “Who would’ve thought in a million years? What a pair.”

Of course, he’s lying.

Then Jill asks, low-voiced, “How much cash you got?”

“For what?”

“Occupational expenses. Like any job.”

I tell him I just got paid and could give him that but it wasn’t much. And then he says it will take a grand . He says this very confidently, like he’s done this before.

“Of course, a grand,” I say, and add, “I have to pay rent soon.”

“Takes capital to keep mouths shut. You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done. Plus storage. And if there’s trouble? I quit my job for this. I’m taking a lot of risks here.”

The word “liar” won’t leave my throat, so I tell him my landlord is usually okay if I’m a little late, and we walk east off the bridge, goodbye for now, bridge.

Thinking of the word “painting,” over and over, painting, painting, painting, stuck in my head like a song, and there’s this group of middle school kids coming toward us down the footpath, four of them, and just as they pass me, one of the kids says the word “painting” just like that. He says, “I took the painting,” or something like that. Most kids don’t walk around talking about paintings or taking paintings, do they? I put that word in his mouth. But at the same time, even though I know what I heard is true, I also know that truth is wrong. Something is wrong with me feeling that. I turn to look at him as he walks away and he looks right back at me and holds my eyes until he’s several feet away and then turns to his friends and starts laughing.

“So.” Jill laughs a little as we walk. “Guess you’re kind of different. What, um?” He fumbles his hands around in front of his mouth like he’s trying to catch a dropped bite of stroganoff, then leaves the question sitting there.

At the ATM, I take out five hundred, the most it will let me withdraw. Eight hundred seventy-six dollars left, which won’t cover rent, even before I give him the next five hundred, but fine, it will be fine. I hand it to him fast and glance around. But Jill doesn’t blink, like it isn’t strange at all for me to be handing him a wad of twenties. We must look like high-flying drug dealers. Sherlock Holmes did a lot of drugs — I wonder who his dealer was.

Only after I’ve given him my livelihood do I get up the nerve to say, “But you quit your job before we made this plan.” He doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe I spoke too quietly.

Jill is my Sherlock.

“Sunday, then. Bring the rest.”

I am his Watson.

“Six o’clock,” I say, and wonder if we should shake on it.

9 pills left, new regimen of 1/2 pill a day starting today, 157.5 lbs., 1 pair smudgy glasses on my nose, no time for lunch, 10,662,359 windows in Manhattan (+/- 50,000 to account for ongoing vandalism, construction, repair), 3 days until Sunday.

Winding my way east in the last of the light. My legs feel weak, like I’ve been walking for years. In the middle of the bridge, I wave to all the walkers and bikers, saying goodbye. One waves back — a nice old lady. She would never jump.

Buckminster Fuller’s story started the day he didn’t die. He was going to throw himself into Lake Michigan after his daughter died of meningitis because he blamed himself — his shabby apartment, his inability to provide for his family — but he had a spiritual moment. Some say he levitated. Same say it was the day he went mad. Others say that day didn’t happen at all.

I want to enter the bridge, and then I do. I become it. Feel the terrible everything people carry from one side to the other. I’ve been here before. The stories press flat on my cement. To my west, the piano keys of the city skyline, changing and decaying, growing up; to my east, the shrunken toughness of Brooklyn, industrial shapes like children’s blocks. Shoes tumble across me, their gum sticks to me, their cigarette butts and spit, I have no words, me looking like I’m hurrying the opposite way beneath them — But I don’t have room inside me for all of their sorrow. I can feel how big it is, this deep-ocean pain, how much space it would take if I let it in, barely leaving room for the guilt I feel for not having room. Barely leaving room for my mind.

I know what they need, New Yorkers on the bridge. Give them a tent lit from within. Give them a bucket of quiet.

Things will be fuzzy, changing my dosage, and that’s okay — worse before better, as they say. When the Zyprexa leaves my system, will I hear you, Idle Voices, banging to escape the trunk of my brain? Will I hear you whimper through your gag? It helps to talk to you, even if you can’t yet talk back. Helps me hold it all in my head. I’ll make a song up about it if I have to, or a mnemonic device. In the spider web of myself, I am searching. I want to seize my true form. I (the imperfect I) am floating just beneath it all the time, reaching up like a child for a lost balloon.

Moon lighting me, the bridge, like an ocean. Which I can hardly believe! — how it finds its way through the maze of buildings all the way to my feet. I can barely hold myself in my own form, I’m so moved and don’t know why, heartsick for moonlight. There is so much moon.

Along the dark moon bridge, I walk toward Manhattan, half expecting to see the Hasids marching at me. Staring, waiting, where bridge meets city.

But they aren’t there. Not even a sign of them. Not a stray hat.

“Here I am,” Claire said to Mary in the doorway. Her chest was full of fish and brine.