Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

“Sure.”

“You either keep it closed or you don’t. It’s a yes or no question.”

“Yes. I keep it closed.”

“Because sometimes you can be forgetful.”

“I keep it closed, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

His eyes are shadowy — I can’t tell whose eyes they really are. He waits for me to say something more. Now is the time to ask him about Nicolette and the painting. What would he do in my place? I know he wouldn’t take it back to the police.

“I need some help,” I start.

“Nope. Too old to ask for money. I draw the line.” He takes off his ball cap, studies it a second and bends the brim tighter. “You should get back to keep your mom company. You know how she gets lonely. Next time you’re out here we’ll find the time.”

“Sure.” I kick a hedge on the way to the car.

“West, listen.”

I stop and listen.

“You’re not a kid anymore. You have to get your shit together,” he says to my back. I keep walking. “Hey, you hear me?” I can’t believe I thought he’d actually say something nice. “And look out for your sister. She needs you.”

I turn in the middle of the street. That’s the first true thing he’s said. I can’t help saying, “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“Didn’t Jules tell you?” I give him my best fuck-you smile. “She’s pregnant.”

“What?” My dad takes a step toward me, but I walk fast across the street.

When I’m in the van and down the block I say, “Go shove it.”

It’s the best I can do.

My dad was a distraction, a setback — he’s against me. I have to get back on track. And the only place for that is the old fort. The place where Nicolette dies.

The long, narrow path up to the bluff hasn’t changed: a clue in itself. The neglected army fort with its network of tunnels is still a haunt for potheads and skinheads both. On the backside of the hill, where there used to be mortars, are big circles overgrown with weeds and wildflowers. The old gun battery on Artillery Hill, overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

With the painting rolled and tucked under my arm, I pass all the usual landmarks, breadcrumbs Nicolette must have left: used condoms chucked into bushes, tinsel; swastikas spray-painted on cement barrack walls; wasps’ nests; deer. The perfect tableau laid out for me. My cell lights the way through one of the windowless stretches of tunnel. There’s an old Indian canoe, and beyond it, where the tunnel opens into a room, there’s a couch, tattered and threadbare, an empty frame hanging above it, no painting — a living room from hell as a reminder: I’m running out of time. Young stalactites hang from the ceiling.

Back out in the bright fog, the weeds reach from between cement cracks, growing more rampant than I remember, fingers vibrating toward me.

I stop a few hundred yards from the bluff edge. The trees have grown since I was home last, and the view of the water is obscured. Is this the spot? No, ten feet to the left. I stand where Miles and I did acid together.

I creep between the trees, close to the drop-off. The sea goes wild on the rocks below. But I’m focused on the air straight in front of me, where Miles pointed out his death, where Nicolette jumped. The great space between the clouds and the sea — that is the nexus.

When I told Nicolette about the girl jumping from the bluff, she stared at her canvas and started laughing. She put her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes to hold in the laugh. She couldn’t stop. She was a lunatic, laughing to herself like that. She laughed hard enough for tears to spring from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not laughing at you,” she hiccupped, “I promise I’m not.” I sat there, on the edge of my chair, stunned into listening.

I wasn’t hurt by it. And the more I heard the laugh, the more it sounded like a bell signaling some turning point. I thought she might be laughing at some inside joke between her and her art, or from delight at the mere act of painting. The privilege of sitting there at all. But now I see! She was laughing because they never found the body!

It was Nicolette who jumped. But she doesn’t die here! Of course they never found the body. It landed in the future.

But why does everyone else remember her as the girl who jumped, as if it always happened, while all I have is a memory of the back of a girl’s head? What makes me special? Yes, Genius Voices! As soon as Nicolette traveled into my past, easy memories must have been inserted into the others’ minds. Time rippling through and changing their memories. But since I’m the only one who knows Nicolette in the future, the present, my memories couldn’t be changed because that would result in a paradox. Because how could I fall in love with her in the future if I knew her as the dead girl in the past? To suddenly have memories of past Nicolette wandering the halls of school in a daze, dropping her Hawking book that people teased her for reading, or asking the teacher if he was condoning underage sex by assigning Shakespeare.

Jump? Why would I jump, Dear Voices? No, I can’t. That’s way too dangerous. But you are right — why do you always have to be right? Her jumping from the bluff was a scene in an instructional video. A How-To Beginner’s Guide to Time Traveling! When she jumped off the cliff, she was showing me how to propel myself through time.

And what if you’re wrong? What if I jump and the portal doesn’t open and I’m just stuff on the rocks below? Then I’ll never find Nicolette. I can’t risk that.

But she risked everything. She came all the way to my past, to right here, to show me how to time travel, how to find her. Why else would she do that? How can I not trust her?

You’re right, I must jump. The logic is sound. Axiom 2. Or was it Axiom 4?

It’s beginner’s stuff, needing a running start and flying into the abyss, but I can admit to being a beginner. I back up a few feet and get into a lunge, trying to ready my mind — if I do this, I have to do it right. It’s not just jumping. It’s like doing a marathon while reaching nirvana. Nicolette showed me all the tableaux and it must be for this purpose, for this moment. I try to hold all the tableaux in my head: my childhood bedroom, cigarette burns with Ralph and Miles, pie with Mom, the fort and bluff — they’re lost paintings newly recovered, with sections of code written on them. All part of the complex of scenes I must know precisely, in true relation to one another. A pain chain. Don’t forget pulling Jules’s hair.

I wonder what Jules is doing right now. If she’s worried about me, what she’d say about this jumping business. I wonder if she’s safe.

But Jules is why I must do this. To time travel, to sidestep reality and slip through into elsewhen.

I close my eyes and hold tight to the painting. I feel the grass slicing along my ankles as I run, the air whipping the hairs on my face, the edge of the bluff on the ball of one foot and then the other. And then nothing. Nothing. I am in the air. I am the air. I am wildly open. I am heavy. All my organs are in my head. The weirdest part being I have time to think there is a weirdest part, that I am in the air, I am falling through it, this could be forever, I am scared.

I’m standing on the cliff, toes nearly cresting the ridge — again, or still? My face feels raw.

I traveled back in time twenty seconds to when I was first on the edge, about to jump. Or did I never jump at all?

I wonder if the wind would have carried my voice, the day I saw her jump. If I’d called out, if I’d tried to stop her.

The one smart thing my dad said was that I should be protecting Jules.

The trees are spilled paint when Mom and I get out of town and pick up speed. The only car on the road for tens of miles.