Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

They take my fingerprints and eye my emergency card with numbers for my doctor and Jules, but they don’t call. When they question me, I say the door was open, maybe left that way by the thief. You have my true remorse. I’ve never done anything of the sort before and I never will again, Officer, it was such a nice sunset, and I have a thing for sunsets over the Hudson.

They can’t hold me for anything, and they’re mobbed anyway. All these kids from the protest in booking, yelling “pigs” at the cops. Can’t even bear to fine me. You got lucky, the pigs tell me. They roll their eyes at me and say, tell us if you go out of town.

Halfway out the double doors, I hear the Buddy Holly cop say behind me, “Found a set of fingerprints, boss.”

Another dagger of a day. Some people call it Monday.

All I can do at my desk is look at police beats. You know Jill’s been fingering the painting. Probably he’s groping it like it’s her naked body. Could he be licking it? He might be licking it. There’s nothing online about if he’s been picked up or not. The only thing I found was a message in a Disappearing Bees forum that said I should “keep my ears open for any change.”

“Hey, Westeroo.” Orange-Socks Dave is calling to me from the front door to our offices. “Some weirdo left a package for you.”

I trip over a chair leg on my sprint over to him and nearly ram Orange-Socks Dave in the gut with my head. “Where is he?”

“Left already.” He holds out a cardboard tube. “Guess he didn’t want to see your pretty face.”

I shove past him into the hallway — no sign of Jill. I open the door to the stairwell.

“Hey, where you going?” Dave says. “You won’t catch him. Don’t you have to work?”

I stomp back over to Orange-Socks Dave and snatch the tube from his hand and that’s when I catch a glimpse of his feet. I ask slowly, “Why’d you change your socks?”

“They raised the terrorist threat level. You didn’t see?”

Walking backwards, not taking my eyes off Red-Socks Dave, I go back to my desk. He’s seen Jill’s face. All it would take is a little bribe and the Hasids would pull him too.

With more care than I’ve ever used with anything ever, I open the plastic top of the tube. There’s the canvas. I close it tight again.

Mr. Fox has closed himself in his office, blinds slightly parted like many lips. Did he see me get the package? What’s he doing in there? His office is sort of not really on the way to the lounge, so, with the tube, I creep along the wall with the pretense of getting a Vitamin Water. As I pass his door, I hear my own voice. The voice is on speakerphone. “It’s too much,” I hear myself saying. Then I hear another voice, “I guess you’re kind of different.” And I hear, “They don’t deserve it.” Snippets of my conversation with Jill on the bridge. There must have been a microphone after all and I’m not surprised I didn’t find it because I am inadequate.

And then a new voice I don’t recognize. “He’s falling behind. He hurt someone.”

The door flies open and there’s Mr. Fox in his pleated pants, mandarin orange can in hand. I hide the tube behind my back.

“West. Good. I’m off. Taking my wife to the Bahamas tomorrow.” His mouth is full of canned oranges. “Promotional thing. Put some color on this gut. You won’t recognize me Monday.”

But Mr. Fox hates beaches. I remember him saying so. He’s lying so I won’t think he’s gone in pursuit of Nicolette.

“One day there won’t be computers, Mr. Fox.” It’s the first thing that comes to mind. I have to throw him off. “Zero, zilch-o. No chips in brains, no consoles hidden under the earth’s crust.”

“And why’s that? Let me have it,” Mr. Fox says.

“It’ll all happen after a century-long cold war tech race during which we’ll be forced to consolidate then rid ourselves of technologies to prevent intellectual leakage. I’d like to be around to see that. Companies like this will be long gone.”

“Yes. Well. Me going on vacation doesn’t mean you are. You’re still on thin ice.” He heads to the lounge.

How did he get those tapes? It’s nonsense, thinking that Mr. Fox could know anything about the painting — except that it makes perfect sense. Mr. Fox knows the Hasids well, he and my brother-in-law being old playfellows, which is how I got the job to begin with. And Mr. Fox’s superiors? Well, I’ve never met them. Fishy, isn’t it?

Shaking and sans Vitamin Water, I turn around, walk straight past my desk and out the front door and down the stairs. It’s only three o’clock and who does it matter to? Not me.

I should have been fired long ago. So why haven’t they? Because they’re waiting for something. Waiting on me to do something. Now that they no longer have the painting to help them find Nicolette, they’re after me. I’m supposed to make a great discovery — I’ve always felt that — but about what? About the painting, and Nicolette, and maybe the bees and the missing words and maybe the Hasidim and maybe Mussolini? The data patterns have been coming more easily now, too easily, as if I’m creating them as I see them, projecting patterns from my movie-reel forehead. Have I been plotting out the physics of Nicolette’s power for them? Is that the reason I’ve been kept around? My deduction itself is leading them straight to her. All my searches and charts of Nicolette, all the activity I’ve snuck into the boring workday: it was all for them and I didn’t see it. Idiot! Lameboy! And Mr. Fox, that two-timer, has access to all my files.

But here it stops. No more digital footprints. Or fingerprints. From now on it’s the old-fashioned notepad. I will shed technology like I warned Mr. Fox about.

This is bigger than the next consumer trend. Forging the future as well as the past, that’s what I’m doing. The bosses upstairs would have a field day with that data.

Outside, the sun blasts. For a moment I can’t see anything but the gray-green memory-shapes of buildings in my eyes, superimposed over the real buildings. And when that clears away I see, so clearly, ten floors up and huddled around a long table in an ill-lit room, maybe wearing little green visors over their wide-brimmed black hats: the Hasidim. They’ve been the bosses all along. I see that now. My bosses.

——

2 pills left, none ingested for 22 hours; 1,000 police cameras in dragnet over 5-mile Iraq War protest; 972 hours of surveillance footage; 1 Republican National Convention.

At home on my laptop, the sun pastes my reflection squarely on Nicolette’s website in front of me. But reflection-me in the screen keeps grimacing at the me sitting outside it. The me in the screen is moving his lips like he’s trying to talk, but there isn’t any sound. I’m trying to tell me something. But the me outside isn’t grimacing or talking back — which is wrong, a reflection doing what it wants.

The tube is on my lap, never more than two inches from my body. Now I pull the painting all the way out and unroll it. A sticky note flutters to the floor:

KEEP SAFE UNTIL WE CAN GET IT TO HER.

That’s all he says. Not how to reach him, or where to meet, or what the hell to do if my boss is working for the Hasidim and knows everything and we’re all doomed!

I spread the painting on the wood floor then lie down next it. At least now I can try to get it straight to Nicolette without Jill tagging along and making me feel bad for lying to him about giving it to Claire.

I feel hungry in different parts of me. My arms are hungry. My hands flop on my chest like dropped food. My legs ache to kick out like my skin isn’t big enough for me anymore. I want to punch the wall. I’m not angry, it’s only that my bones are anxious. My friend Miles back home, he used to punch walls. There were holes all over his mom’s house from when he got drunk. His dad was an alcoholic who left him and his mom when he was little. I remember he punched two holes in his closet doors that he said were his dad’s eyes watching him.