Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

Briefly, I crawl into the painting: the cobblestone street, the Brooklyn Bridge, the body of a woman falling. Every brushstroke an apology.

I am the little masked thief in the corner of the image, nearly invisible, walking down the painted street. I tap my foot on a cobblestone, smudge it.

This feels right, it doesn’t matter if it’s stealing. Me and the painting: forever.

The snap of a nail hitting the floor. A streak of lightning in my peripheral vision: the sound of the alarm. In the shape of a lightning bolt the gallery wall splits open. All of us, for a brief and infinite second, are sucked into the seam of the world. Slipped through the crack, disappeared like we never existed. And I don’t know who I am and no one will know us because there is no one to do the remembering but no one will forget us either, since there is nothing to be forgotten. The world is quiet because it is gone. In the end there is just me and the painting.

Jill’s beside me, he grabs the painting. We run up, up. I swear he’s grinning. My cell phone flies out of my pocket and knocks against the wall when I trip over a step. I snatch it up.

We burst up to the open tar roof. “They’re coming,” he says. “What took you so long?”

“They’re coming,” I say.

He digs out a box cutter and cuts the canvas from the frame, smooth and precise, like he’s done it a hundred times. He’s done before I can react and by then what’s the point of punching him in the nose. He hands me the wood frame. “Break it up,” he says. I smash and pry and stomp the frame against the roof until it’s in pieces while he rolls the canvas neatly. He whips out the garbage bag. It puffs up with wind and he stuffs the painting into the bag with the frame like so much waste. “Give me your mask.” Without looking at me, he flutters his hand about for it. “And the bowls.” I remove the damp bowls and the mask and he throws them in the garbage bag, too. We lean against the roof ledge, the bag between us. “You tripped an alarm in the gallery. A motion detector or something. It’ll be fine. We got a couple minutes. It’s almost over.” He looks a little pale and his eyes flick every which way. “You’re red as a rose, kiddo. Are you ready for this? You’re the diversion. They got nothing on you. You slipped in because you saw the door was open. You might be stupid, but you’re no criminal.” Then he adds, “To them you might be stupid, I mean. Not to me.”

It will be fine. Why wouldn’t it be fine? I paddle my collar open and closed, trying to cool off. “What if they question the gallery-sitter and he recognizes me?”

He says to stop freaking out, and even if they do question the guy, visiting a painting’s not a crime. “Too late for doubts.” Jill peeks inside his Marlboro pack at the money. “But our crime is not victimless. You got to understand the outcome of your decisions. These old widows crying to a newscaster over some heirloom portrait of a duke — it hurts me to see that. And you know me, I don’t give a rat’s ass about rich bastards who can go out and buy another blasted portrait of a duke. But I tell you we are hurting someone, no way around it, even if it’s just that gallery-sitting jerkoff.”

Then I turn to him fast and grip the garbage bag, stretching the plastic. “But you planned this. You knew I was coming. You planned all of this. Didn’t you?”

He’s quiet a moment. “I didn’t plan it to happen like this. Maybe I got the job here because of the painting. I shouldn’t have lied about that. I thought about stealing it, but I couldn’t. For personal reasons. Then you came along. I knew you’d do it. But we’re on the same side. Okay? We’re a team. You’re all right.”

He waits for me to say something, but I can’t.

“Anyway. You saw me through my last lift. This was it.”

He turns his ear to the street. The siren grows louder, then stagnant for a moment, stuck in city traffic. Why does the police siren get dibs on that word, when the original siren was the sweet sound of fatal desire? But the Doppler effect sometimes sounds like longing.

Then we see a police car pull up near the building, the slamming of doors.

“That’s our cue,” Jill says.

I let go of the bag.

“You remember what I said? You can handle it from here. They’ll try to bullshit you and say you’re trespassing, but you’ll get around that. Play it cool.”

“I didn’t like the gallery-sitter anyway,” I say.

“That’s the spirit.” He backs away to the fire escape on the adjacent ledge.

“Jill. Watch out for the Hasids.”

“Why? They can’t fire me. I already quit.”

“Just watch out for them.”

For the first time, Jill seems scared. “All you got to do is nothing. Don’t try to find me. I’ll find you. Okay?” He nods at me, and as if with gratitude says, “Take off your gloves.”

And I watch him disappear over the far side of the building, garbage bag full of beauty slung over his shoulder.

3 pills dropped, accidentally, from roof, lost sight of after 6.5 feet; 2.5 pills remaining; 2 helicopters, 1 police blimp over my head.

——

“Okay!” I yell at no one, then pull my gloves off and throw them into the alley below. They flutter down like two black birds. One lands in an old crate. I lose sight of the other.

Straddling the ledge, half of me is on the brink of falling, the other half is not. I could fall, if I wanted, just tip the scale a microscopic amount. But I know I will go another way.

The men are coming up the stairs. I try to stay calm, like you. Maybe there’s still enough time to get away.

The blast of the roof door banging open and shut. At least a hundred pairs of feet readying their attack. The Hasidim, on me in hordes.

Every time I think of doing something but don’t, there is an echo. A hologram of myself that did do that thing or make that decision, and that self disperses into the ether, winking away into some other dimension. That’s what I’m hoping happened this time, that this me will disperse. But no, the me who did not break the law and steal a painting is hanging out in the ether, relaxing on my ether-stoop, maybe with some Chinese dumplings, safe and out of trouble. Everything’s fine over there. Maybe over there, I’m a famous underground hacker, and maybe I’m not sick. Or maybe I never met Nicolette or maybe my sister dies giving birth.

There are only two of them in blue uniforms, not much older than me.

“Hey, buddy,” one says. The other stretches his rubbery neck to see behind me, looking for the painting. “This building’s closed. How’d you get up here?”

“The door was open, so I just—”

“The door was open, huh? See anyone else when you came in?”

They’re close enough to push me off the ledge. “Anyone else? No.”

“You realize you’re trespassing. We’ll have to take you in.”

“No, I didn’t realize. The door—”

“The door was open. Got it.” The first one has me turn around and pats me down. It makes me feel like I am, in fact, hiding something under my shirt.

He says, “I don’t suppose you know anything about a stolen—”

“Stolen?”

“A stolen painting.”

I shake my head no. And the second one says, “We could charge you for trespassing and hold you ’til you remember.”

“Okay,” I say.

The first one stays with me, lighting a cigarette while his partner looks around the roof. Out across the city, bouquets of smoke escape from buildings. And here on the roof, bouquets of smoke escape his mouth — but this guy can’t see the beauty in it.

“How’s the sunset, lover boy?”

“Average,” I say.

They lean over the edge, peering into the alleys, talking on their radio to someone scanning the area. One of them bends over and picks up a nail from the tar roof. I try to think if I touched the nails on the wood frame. Jill’s voice is coming from the radio telling me to run, but that can’t be right. Then one of the men slaps me on the shoulder and laughs. “Come on, lover boy. Look, he looks ready to cry. Why the long face?” He throws his cigarette and leaves it on the roof. The three of us walk down the stairs together, since Jill isn’t here to operate the elevator. The second cop hums Buddy Holly and by the time they put me into the back of the police car, he’s hummed it through, Peggy Sue, three times. One of them says, “Nothing on him, we’re bringing him in.” From the back, I can see the web of their skin through the dividing grate, the heat radiating off of them at the sad end of the sizzling day.